The Burning City

One could watch and try to learn.

Unattached women without kin to protect them were hard to find, and they wanted big men to be with . .. except on Mother's Day. The Lords didn't give then- gifts to women who had men. Women went to Peacegiven Square alone, and one need only listen to learn who had a man waiting.

Most girls wanted to marry. Most men didn't, but they wanted their sisters married. One or two of Whandall's sisters' friends might be ready to marry, but that was too big a bite for Whandall at thirteen.

Not that he'd reasoned any of this out, exactly. But every Lordkin knew that there was a time when a man need not ask. Whandall remembered a high optimism, a firelight feast for eyes grown bored with daylight, frenzy and excitement, couples pairing off, when he was seven years old....

"Shig, when will the Burning come?"

Wanshig laughed. "You're a looker now?"

They were at di

Wanshig was eighteen now. He'd watched Whandall practicing with his; knife and twice had joined him on the roof, not ashamed to learn from his younger brother. Whandall liked him best of all his kin.

Now Wanshig set his spoon down and said, "Nobody knows. Long ago it was once a year. Now, every four or five. Even when Mother was a little girl, they couldn't tell anymore. Maybe gods sleep, like your Uncle Cartry after a Lordsman whacked his head. Maybe Yangin-Atep isn't dead-he just Dover wakes up."

"Did Yangin-Atep take you?"

Wanshig laughed again. "No! I was only... twelve, I think."

"Someone, then."

"They say Yangin-Atep possessed Alferth and Tarnisos. You don't know them, Whandall. They're crazy enough without help. All I know is, we see fires south of us, smoke blowing our way. Resalet whoops and dives into Carraland's Fine Clothes, and we all follow. Carraland runs away shouting out looker gibberish-"

"What happened to Pothefit?"

That snapped Wanshig out of his wistful nostalgia. "Whandall, do you remember when they came in with the cook pot?"

"Yes, Shig."

Pothefit and Resalet were shadows against the dancing blaze from the granary, carrying the cauldron through Placehold's main door while Wanshig and another brother pretended to help.

"We gathered it out of a wizard's shop on Market Round. We piled stuff in the cook pot too, but we went back for more, and to burn the place. An Atlantis wizard, a stranger, he didn't know any better than to come back to his shop during the Burning. He found us. Pothefit was trying to set the shelves alight. The wizard waved his hand and said something, and Pothefit just fell over. Rest of us got away."

Lord Samorty's courtyard ... "I saw him. Morth of Atlantis."

"Me too. That shop on Market Round, he built it again after the Burning."

"No, Shig, Morth of Atlantis was too old for that. He was almost dead."

"Right, and cook fires burn inside. Whandall, that is Morth of Atlantis, the shop on Market Round."

"Where does he go at night?"

Wanshig cuffed him hard enough to make the point. "Don't even think it. Never remember a killing after the Burning."

Whandall rubbed his ear. "Shig, you've killed."

"Barbarians, lookers, kinless, uglies, anyone who's insulted you... you can kill. But that's only during the Burning, Whandall, and it's not a big part of it. It's only... it's bad to hold your anger locked in your belly for too long. You have to let it go."

Something in the conversation had attracted Resalet's attention. "Whandall, how do you reckon we keep the Placehold when everybody wants it?"

"We watch. We can fight-"

"We can fight," Resalet said. "But we couldn't fight everyone."

"Serpent's Walk," Whandall said.

Resalet nodded gravely. "But Serpent's Walk can't fight Bull Pizzle and, Owl Beak and Maze Walkers all together. And what happens if Lord Pelzed wants to live here?"

Whandall had never thought of that.

Resalet gri

"Lords do that too." They'd done it to Whandall. "What if you can't win?"

Resalet's grin widened. "You never think about that once it's started." I le went back to his soup.

Whandall was about to say something, but Wanshig put his bowl aside and stood up. "Show you something."

"What?"

"Come on." Wanshig pulled a burning stick from the cook fire and ran, whirling it round his head.

He was through the courtyard's narrow entrance with Whandall just behind him. The flame gleamed pale in the dusk. Wanshig skidded around another corner, crossed the street diagonally, and...

Whandall, ru

And the flame snuffed out.

Wanshig kept ru

"See? If the Burning isn't on us, indoor fires just go out. Then maybe you get laughed at and maybe you get beat up, depending. So don't be the one to start the Burning. Let someone else do it." Wanshig gri

"I just wanted to know-"

"You wanted to know what happens if so many come after us that we can't win," Wanshig said. "Whandall, you know what would happen. We'd run away. But Resalet can't say that! Not even inside the Placehold. If the story got out that you could take the Placehold without killing every one of us, that any of us even thinks that way-we're gone."

Chapter 14

One day a fire began in the brush behind a kinless house just outside Serpent's Walk territory. All the kinless in that area turned out. They brought a big wagon pulled by the small kinless ponies. It had a tank on it, and kinless men dipped water from it and threw it on the fire until it was out.

Whandall watched from behind a flowering hedge. On the way home he gathered an apple to give Resalet.

"Why do they bother? The fire would go out. Wouldn't it?" Whandall asked.

Resalet was in a mellow mood. "Kinless don't believe in Yangin-Atep," he said. "So Yangin-Atep doesn't always protect them. Against us, yes, unless there's a Burning. Sometimes against accidents. Not always, and the kinless don't wait to find out."

"Those wagons-"

"They keep them in the stable area," Resalet said.

"What if the fire is too far away?"

Resalet shrugged. "I've seen them turn out with buckets when there's water in the River of Spirits."

The River of Spirits flowed out of the forest and down through Lordkin territory before it reached the kinless area. It stank. Whandall thought he'd rather see Placehold burn than have a fire put out with what was in that river.

There was much to learn about Yangin-Atep, and one could ask. Mother's Mother told him some. When she was a girl she had heard a tale that the kinless had once been warriors with a god of their own, before Yangin-Atep and the Lords brought the Lordkin to Tep's Town. She couldn't remember who had told her the story, and she thought the days were hotter than they used to be.