Shadowplay

"He not go," she said over and over, but clearly he had.

"No, we have to find Olin, King Olin," Pelaya told her. "I'll ask my fa¬ther to send someone to help you find your brother."

The Xandian girl looked shocked, as though she could not have imag¬ined anyone would say no to her request.

"Haven't we had enough of this, Kuraion?" said Eril. "You have dragged me across the city for nothing, risking both our lives. Are we now going to have to search for a runaway child as well?"

"No, of course not, but…" Before Pelaya could finish, someone else joined the small crowd of women that had gathered around the brown-haired girl and her round friend. This new arrival was considerably older than the others, her face disfigured by what looked like a bad burn.

"Oh, thank the Great Mother!" this old woman said when she saw them all, then leaned against the wall, gasping hoarsely for breath. "I… I… was frightened I wouldn't… find you." She looked at Pelaya, surprised. "Your Ladyship. Forgive me."

Pelaya just barely nodded a greeting, irritated by yet another interrup¬tion. Eril was right-they needed to get back to Landsman's Market.

"What is it, Losa?" asked the round-faced girl, Yazi.

"The boy who can't talk, the little brother! He is up in the counting house tower and very…" She waved her hands, trying to find the words. "Angry, sad, I don't know. He won't come down."

"Pigeon?" Qi

"I don't think hurt, no," said Losa. "He is just hiding in that tower, the old broken one near the seawall. I think the… ca

"We'll come, too," said Yazi. "He likes me."

"No!" said Losa. "He is very scared, the boy. He almost falls when I come. Up very high. If he sees people he doesn't know so well…" She shook her head, unable or unwilling to come up with the words for such a dire prospect. "Just his sister."

The dark-haired laundry girl did not appear to grasp everything said, but she smiled-it did little to hide the anxiousness in her face-and said something in her own tongue to the girl Yazi. For a moment Pelaya won¬dered if she should go with them to help-Olin had taken an interest in this girl, after all-but she could think of too many reasons why she should not let herself get further involved.

After the old, scarred woman had led the brown-haired girl out, Pelaya began to move toward the front of Kossope House. "It's good she's found her brother," she said, smiling at the other laundry women. "Family is so important. Now I must go back to mine. May the gods protect you all."

The faces of the servants turned toward her as she reached the door. They watched her, silent as cats.

"I'm sure everything will be well," Pelaya called to them, then had to hurry to catch up with Eril, who was already striding off in a determined way in the general direction of Landsman's Market.

Old Losa led Qi

"Why would he run away like this?" Qi

The old woman spread her palms. "I think the ca

"Calling?" Qi

Losa shook her head in disgust. "There you go. I don't know whether I'm coming or going, all this has me in such a muddle. I heard him cry¬ing-moaning, that's the word I meant. Here, go down this passage."

"But you said he was in the old countinghouse lower isn't it that way?"

"You see? I can't think straight at all." Losa pointed a dirty finger at the low bulk of the almshouse where it hugged the inside of the seawall, [In¬arched doorway of its single squat tower showing dark among the vines like a missing tooth in a bearded mouth."Not the countinghouse tower but the almshouse tower, the old almshouse. There. He's there, I promise you."

Losa guided her into the shadowed antechamber of the building, which had been abandoned and all its poor relocated a few years before the siege. The mosaics on the floor were chipped and scratched so that other than the hammer-shaped object in one's hands, it was impossible to tell which of the Trigon brothers was which. Qi

"Pigeon?" Something was wrong, or at least odd: she couldn't see his arms. As she moved closer she saw that they were behind him, as though he had something hidden for her there. A few more steps and she could see that they were tied at the wrists, and the cord looped through the latch of the heavy stairwell door. She reached him, felt him trembling with terror beneath her hands, and turned toward Losa. "What…?"

The old woman was pulling off her face.

As Qi

Qi

"Who doesn't matter," the man said in perfect Xixian. Underneath the waxy remnants of false flesh his skin was nearly as pale as King Olin's had been, but unlike Olin, this man had not a flicker of kindness in his eyes, nor a flicker of anything else: for all the expression he wore, his face might have been carved on a statue. "The autarch sent me." He straightened up, shred¬ding the shapeless dress he had worn to reveal man's clothing beneath. "Don't scream or I'll slit the child's throat. By the way, if you decide to sac¬rifice the boy and make a run for it, you should know that I can hit a rab¬bit with this," — he lifted his hand and a long, sharp dagger appeared in it

like a conjurors trick-"from a hundred paces away. I can put it in the hack of your knee and you'll never walk without a crutch, or I can put it be¬tween two of your chines and you'll never walk again at all. But I would prefer not to carry you all the way to the Golden One, so if you do as 1 ask, you'll keep your health." He kicked away the remnants of the dress, then used the knife blade to cut away a sack he had tied to his waist with rags to give him an old woman's sagging belly.

Qi

"I won't hurt him if he does nothing stupid. But he is the autarch's prop¬erty, so he goes back, too.".

"He's not property, he's a child! He did nothing wrong."

The merest hint of a smile stole across the stranger's cold face, as if he had finally heard something worth his getting out of bed that morning. "Sit down and put your legs out."

She started to argue, but he had closed the distance between them in an astonishingly swift step or two, and now stood over her, the knife only inches from her eye. She sat back on the stairs and extended her feet. He put the end of the knife gently against her throat and held it there with his thumb on the other side of her windpipe, then looped a piece of cord around one ankle. When he had tied the other end, a length of the cord about the distance from her wrist to elbow stretched between her two legs, leaving her neatly hobbled. He took a long dress out of the sack-it was something she had seen some of the chambermaids wearing-and dropped it over her head, then yanked her to her feet. When she stood, the hem of the dress almost touched the dusty tiles, hiding the cord completely.