In the morning I woke to find Glee standing over me with a mixture of confusion and contempt on her face. But she offered me a hand to help me up from the floor.
A new little sister. And Ahad was a new sibling, too. I vowed to try and be a better brother to them both.
Dekarta’s procession was spotted on the outskirts of the city around midmorning. At the rate they were wending their way through the streets—passing through South Root, of all things; Hymn’s parents would make a killing—they would reach the Avenue of Nobles at twilight.
Auspicious timing, I decided. Then I followed Glee out of the inn and we slipped into the crowd to try and keep Shahar and Dekarta alive for a few paltry years more.
15
The soldiers go a-marching
pomp pomp pomp
The catapults are flinging
whomp whomp whomp
The horses come a-trotting
clomp clomp clomp
And down falls the enemy
stomp stomp stomp!
THE STEPS OF THE SALON were impressive on their own: white marble, wide and colonnaded, gently curving around the building’s girth. Clearly they were not impressive enough for Arameri tastes, however, and so the steps had been embellished. Two additional stairwells—immense and unsupported—curved off the Salon’s steps to the left and right like wings poised in flight. They were made of daystone so that they glowed faintly; only a scrivener could have built them. They were magnificent even against the looming backdrop of the Tree, which tended to diminish any mortal effort at grandeur to pointlessness. In fact, the twin stairwells seemed to come from the Tree itself, suggesting a divine connection for the people who descended them. Which was probably the point.
I could not see the platforms at the tops of the daystone stairways, but it was not hard to guess that the scriveners had etched gates into each. Shahar, Remath, and perhaps a few others of the Central Family would arrive by this means, then descend to the Salon’s actual steps. Revoltingly predictable, but they were Itempans; I couldn’t expect better.
Sighing, I craned my neck again from my vantage point: the lid of a muckbin at the corner of a dead-end street, about a block away from the Salon building. The Avenue of Nobles was a sea of mortal heads, thousands of people standing about or walking, laughing, talking, the aura of excitement wafting off them like a warm summer breeze. The city’s street artists had taken shameless advantage of the opportunity to make festive ribbon pennants, dancing puppets with the faces of famous folk, and small contraptions that blatted out a few flakes of sparkling white confetti when blown hard. Already the air was thick with the glittering motes, which did a marvelous job of capturing the thin, dappled light that passed for daytime in Shadow. Adults and children alike seemed to love the things. I shivered now and again as their pleasure in the toys stirred whatever was left of the god in me.
Hard to focus, amid so many distractions. (My hands itched to play with one of the puppets. It had been so long since I’d had a new toy.) But I had a job to do, so I kept scanning the crowd, holding on to a gutter pipe as I leaned this way and that. I would know when I found what I was looking for. It was only a matter of time.
Then, just as I had begun to worry, I spotted my quarry. Moving past a tightly packed group of middle-aged women who looked both thrilled and terrified to be among such a crowd: a boy of nine or ten years old. Amn, wearing old clothing that had the look of garments taken from a White Hall tithe pile, with unkempt hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days. He passed one of the women and stumbled, bracing one hand on her back to right himself and apologizing quickly. It was nicely done; he had bowed himself away and into the current of foot traffic almost before the woman realized he’d touched her.
I grinned, delighted. Then I hopped down from the bin lid (another man immediately claimed my place atop it, throwing a belligerent look at my back) and hurried after him.
Took half a block to catch up with him; he was small and wove among the members of the crowd as deftly as a river snake among reeds. I was a grown-up and had to be polite. But I’d guessed his destination—a pack of children milling about a stall that sold tamarind-lime juice—and that made it easy to head him off a few feet before he reached them. I caught his thin, wiry arm and stayed ready, because boys his age were not defenseless. They had no compunctions against biting, and they tended to run in packs.
The boy swore at me in polyglot profanity, immediately trying to pull free. “Leggo!”
“What’d you take?” I asked, genuinely curious. The woman hadn’t had a purse visible, probably fearing exactly what had happened to her, but there could have been one beneath her clothing. “Jewelry? A shawl or something? Or did you actually manage to get into her pocket?” If the latter, he was a master of his craft and would be perfect for my needs.