The corridor stops at a broad, flat space. The angels stop, too, blocking the way back, but no longer pushing us forward. The crew mills around, voices rising. I push my way through, glaring at the angels.
“All right, we’re rotting here,” I tell them. “Now what?”
Blue crystal eyes stare back at me. Then, with a groan like a dying whale, the skin of the ship starts to open. A huge flap of bow folds down, turning itself into a ramp. It strikes the dock with a sharp clang, and the groan stops. I take a deep breath—the salt-and-rust smell of the ship is cut by something else, the earthy scent of trees and soil.
The angels shuffle forward. An arm comes down and pushes me, very gently.
Meroe catches my eye, her arms full of telescope. She gives me a brave smile. “I think we get off.”
3
TORI
Kahnzoka rises out of the sea, as Isoka once put it, like the enormous corpse of some great fish washed ashore. That might not be exactly how I would describe it, but the broad shape of the city is something like a fish head, narrowest at the top and widest at the base. The peak, set on the crown of the hill, is the Royal Ward, with the palaces of the First Ward just below it. The Second and Third Wards sit side by side below that, across the military road from one another, and so on as the city approaches the harbor. The farther down the hill you go, the poorer the people are, and the more tightly they’re packed within the constricting ward walls.
This doesn’t mean all the lower wards are the same, though. There are shades to poverty. The Sixteenth Ward, where my sister and I lived before she fought her way out, is unique, a broad strip encompassing the entire shoreline, where all activity is focused on the docks. The constant comings and goings of ships and sailors mean the Ward Guard barely cares about anyone who isn’t actually trying to burn the place down, and what order there is comes from criminal bosses and their enforcers, like my sister.
(She doesn’t think I know about that. I’m glad to keep it that way if it makes her happy.)
The Eleventh Ward, where I’m going, is only one tier above the Sixteenth, but it’s a very different sort of place. Where the Sixteenth is messy, the Eleventh is tidy. Families might be packed two or three to a tiny tenement room, but they maintain a scrupulously polite air as they squeeze into their tiny nooks and take turns at the communal water pump.
It’s a different sort of people who live here, too. Instead of sailors and dockworkers, the Eleventh Ward and its sisters in the second tier are home to servants and small craftsmen. Every morning, great tides of people flow upward, weavers and potters and ivory-cutters and smith’s boys and every other sort of artisan, all those too poor to own their own shops and businesses.
They have a strange pride, these people. They may be poor, but they can look down on the Sixteenth Ward and say, at least we’re not thieves or streetwalkers like them. Isoka would find that infuriating, their need to stand on their tiny shred of higher ground. It’s not that there isn’t crime here, it just goes on behind closed doors, protection rackets and smuggling. You can walk down an alley at night without being robbed, or raped, or murdered.
Usually. I carry a long knife thrust crosswise through the back of my belt, although in truth my best defense is the fact that I’d feel the mind of anyone with bad intentions in time to run away.
The cab drops me off at the ward gate. Inside the Eleventh, there are no carriages—the streets are too narrow, and filled with a tide of humanity, regardless of the hour. I take a deep breath, adjust my cap, and plunge into the chaos. Just past the gate is the High Market, packed solid with people returning from their labors in the higher wards and doing their shopping before going home. I can only make progress with liberal use of my elbows, jabbing my way forward.
The sounds and smells of the market are enough to overcome even the babble and stink of the crowd. Vendors shout at the top of their lungs from small wooden stalls, simple repetitive chants overlapping like raucous birdsong. The calls are singsong nonsense, unless you know the patterns—car car car for carrots, a high two-tone whistle for pork, low barks for the fat dumplings they call dogheads.
I home in on a woman making a trilling riii riii, and burst out of the crowd in front of a stall hung with ropes of dough. I manage to work a copper bit out of my pocket, and the woman tucks it into the bandanna tying back her hair. She tears off a length of dough, dunks it in a simmering pot of oil with a pair of wooden tongs, then swishes it through a bowl of honey before handing it over. It’s almost too hot to touch, dripping and sticky. I’ve already had dinner, but I can’t resist.
The next stall over is wider, serving noodles to customers crammed shoulder to shoulder on a narrow bench. As I devour the fried dough, I get snatches of conversation.
“—the Bonira boy, and Vana Kujan’s son.”
“Terrible, rotting terrible.”
“—say it’s a death sentence if you get sent to the oars—”
“—better to volunteer. Might get into the Legions—”
“—can find a set of papers. I know a guy—”
I finish the dough, licking honey off my fingers, and push back into the crowd. Heading south, I soon reach the bottom of the market, where it narrows into Orchard Street, high tenements rising on either side. Ordinarily, I would expect the press to ease beyond this point, but the street is just as crowded as the square, a mass of people pressed cheek by jowl. I can hear angry muttering.
“—rotscum, it shouldn’t be allowed—”
“—His Imperial Majesty, Blessed preserve him, wouldn’t stand for it if he knew—”
“—Mommy, I have to pee—”
I’m close to the edge of the street, where the wood-and-plaster façade of the nearest tenement rises beside me, patched and stained from years of abuse. I fit my fingers into the cracks and climb up a foot or two, just enough to get a view over the mass of heads. A couple of people around me laugh, and a young boy shouts encouragement.
Up ahead, where Orchard Street meets Fishmonger Row, wooden partitions block the road. Two dozen men in Ward Guard uniforms man the barricades. They split the incoming traffic in two: women, children, and the elderly one way, men the other, and each man has a conversation with a stern-faced sergeant and shows a paper.
I can’t make out the documents from here, but I can guess. The talk of the city (though not of my house, as Ofalo’s made clear) has been Jyashtani aggression down in the islands. His Imperial Majesty, through his servant Kuon Naga, has proclaimed that the Empire must be ready to resist the infidels. That means finding soldiers for the Legions and, more importantly, oarsmen to bring the Imperial Navy up to strength. Since most people would rather stew in jail than row in the fleet—as the joke goes, the only difference is that you’re less likely to drown in prison—that means a draft.
Any likely-looking young man has to produce papers to prove that his family has already contributed a son to the cause. I can see a dozen sullen boys whose documentation was apparently insufficiently convincing standing between two burly guardsmen. Some of them will probably be rescued by friends and family with better paperwork or more bribe money, but the rest will be shipped out to power the Emperor’s war machine.
There are no draft checkpoints in the Second Ward, of course. If the families there send a son or daughter to the war, it would be as a mage-blood in the Legions, or at least as an officer. Watching the crowd here shuffle forward, like pigs in a butcher’s pen, tears at something in my chest.