144 - Gaining height, reaching heights of myself

The Lefaetas Inodem was built to replace one of the old style about eighty years ago. It has two platforms, each of which has a massive water-tank under it. At the top, the tank is filled, and at the bottom, emptied; it is the difference in weight that powers the motion. They are controlled at the top, by levers which tighten a clamp on the great steel cable from which they hang, each attached to one end. The lefaetas master sits in a little roofed booth at the end of a catwalk that extends about four man-lengths out from the edge of the cliff, so he has a good view down.

This and the lefaetas dock is walled around on three sides by walls a good three man-lengths high. At that time, it was guarded during the day by ten guards, at night by four, two sitting in each of two booths on either side of the gate. The booths were not at all well-defended from the cliff side of the walls, since the only way there known to anyone but A-niah and one Yeoli, was the lefaetas. The bottom was guarded by ten during the day, but none at night, since both platforms of the lift were left in the middle position, side-by-side, half-way up the cliff.

All this I knew from surreptitiously studying it at the University library. In the woods, the three of us met to make our plan final.

It was more complex than I liked, in truth. The more facets a plan has, the more things can go wrong and so the likelier one will. But with only three of us, and the limitations imposed by the secrecy about the moyawa, there was no way to make it simpler. At least Niku need not worry about hiding it from me as I lit the fire.

“Maybe it should be me who lights the fire, so that Cheng’s closer to the egress,” Mana said. “Say, if I promise not to look anywhere else?”

“But I can run faster than you, which means I’ll have a better chance if someone chases me,” I said, giving him a look that, between us, always meant, there’s more to this than I’m saying, but trust me.

“It’s best we assume that our time is limited,” I said, “in case Niku doesn’t get a silent kill on all four and one gets away to run for help.” So much better if I were doing that part; but only she had the skill to get there. “You know there’s that tower that chimes the beads at night on Alacrity Street, between the Mezem and the Inodem? Let’s calculate out how fast it would take them to come, and make our move so that the bell will go a little before they could get there.” A half-bead before third bead, we decided, late enough that there’d be no one in the streets but drunks and herb-heads, who see little and aren’t inclined to report what they do see. “And if Mana and I are not there by third, Niku, you go, or just one of us isn’t, the other and Niku, go.”

“What?” said Mana. “You’d have me go back to Yeola-e and say, ‘I left our semanakraseye behind because he didn’t make the bell’?”

“It’s your heart saying that, not your mind,” I said. “Think about it. If I don’t make the bell, it will be because something’s happened from which you cannot rescue me. You may be sure of that.”

“What if you just tripped when you were running and twisted your ankle?”

“I’m not going to do that! Look, this is a very ornate plan, and we will not be all be in speaking range through much of it, so we have to be ruthless in how we execute it—no emotion. If one of us gets caught, no point in the others getting caught as well. In fact…” I knew how it was with them. I was his semanakraseye and heart’s brother; I was the other half of her heart, and perhaps her people’s hope. Far too much play for emotion here. “We should all swear to this.”

“Chevenga… you know…” She flashed her eyes for an instant at Mana; we hadn’t told him I had her people’s secret. If I were captured, I’d be truth-drugged, she meant, and the Arkans would have it.

“Pardon us, Mana.” I got up, and Niku with me, and we went a little way away from him. “So that’s reason for you to come back and get captured, too?” I said. “If they truth-drug me, they find out that your people have the moyawa, and a slight inkling of how to fly it; if they truth-drug you, they learn how to fly one, build one, how many of them your people have, where you keep them, all the strategies your people have, and all the other things you know about moyawal, I mean, a-moyawa, that I have no clue of. How would you ever extricate me if you came back down, even with Mana? Yes, you’re a magnificent two, elite of elite, but you’re still only two against every Sereniteer and Mahid in the city, and even if you did, where would we then run?”

Her lithe brown shoulders heaved with her chest, as she took a deep breath and then blew it out again, sharply. “Fine, but for this concession: if I do get a silent kill on all of them, fahk the bell, I’m waiting, either for you or Mana, or both.”

“Of course.”

“Until false dawn.”

“No, fourth bead! In daylight, people will see you fly out.”

“False dawn isn’t daylight, and even if anyone did see me, they’d think I was a giant bird anyway. Look, I know what I’m doing with the flying part, so you leave that to me.” I heaved out my breath then, and signed chalk.

Neither looked happy, but they swore their oaths as I swore mine. “It’s only contingency anyway, don’t forget,” I said. “With any luck, and the die of chance owes us some after last time, all will go well.”

We ran over it all carefully again: the lift levers (that’s in the library, too, if you dig deeply enough), the torch-signals that would mean “we have only until third” and “raise me” and so forth, and all the other fine points. Then we did a three-hug for luck, and went back our separate ways into the city.

The night was clear again, and moonless. I left a note in Skorsas’s make-up box, where he’d find it in the morning, apologizing for my abrupt leaving, signing over all of my fortune to him, and asking him to pass on my farewell to Persahis. “I love you in my way,” I wrote at the end, my ritual words to him now. I left one for Iska too, with a line for Koree. Iliakaj would understand, without words; likewise Norii. Minis, I didn’t know how to get a letter to. There was no one else in Arko I cared to wish farewell.

Into our pouches and belts and boots, Mana, Niku and I slipped goodly amounts of jewels and gold. We all took our breastplates, fine Arkan work, telling the Weapons Trust we were going to rough taverns. Niku and I went together; no need for pretense, now. Koree always tells fighters that a night on the town before a fight is a way to end up in the lion-trench, but he said nothing to us.

A little after first bead we all went to check that all was well with the lefaetas Inodem—no one was doing midnight repair work on it, for instance, as is sometimes done so as to keep them running during the day—then went back to near the lefaetas Patthine, and gathered and piled a high enough heap of dead-stick brush and trees, by Niku’s reckoning, in the place she’d set out. Then we ran over the plan, making the last slight refinements, and it was time, so we three-hugged again for luck, and went our ways.

Now, as Niku and I fetched the moyawa out of its hiding place, my heart began racing. I am griumed; I’ve begun noticing it; let me find the God-in-Me so as to be sharp enough for this.

I helped her up the slope at the foot of the cliff, where talus and footholds make it possible to get a good twelve man-heights up before one comes to the polished stone. We slicked the wing and her down with water, to protect both from sparks, and she wrapped a wet cloth around her face, the last expression on those beautiful dark lips before we kissed for blessing and she covered them, a flashing grin.

Then I went to start the fire. Arko being in a pit, where air and thus smoke lies trapped by the wind, it has strict laws on how much smoke may be made. Everyone, even the poor, cooks using spirits distilled enough to burn, blackrock, charcoal or wood that has been cured outside; arson is forbidden on pain of death. We’d hid a goodly number of jars of spirits and lamp oil, nearby, so I poured and flung all that over the sticks, lamp oil first, since the spirits would dry off fast, until it was all nicely drenched. This should make a fine fire, quite quickly, that should spread well to the tinder-dry trees all around.

It came clearest to me now, as I was kindling my torch, how all our hopes rested on one toss of the die, and what a dangerous toss. The fire had to be big enough to send heat the full height of the cliffs, but flames too close might melt the silk; the smoke would choke Niku’s breathing and blind her eyes; spiralling in and out, as she must, she might hit the cliff, or get too low to return to the column of heat, and come down among trees and rocks, breaking the wing if not her; even if she landed safely, the woods would be full of Arkans by then, as they waste no time fighting fires.

I must trust her knowledge. Remembering that smile, so free of fear, I tossed the torch into the middle of it.

If you’ve ever lit such a fire, you might gather that I never had before, from how I didn’t turn and run the moment the torch had left my hand. (Arson was not in the non-curriculum of the school I didn’t go to.) It went up so fast it threw out a wave of air and a thump that knocked me off my feet; when I’d come back to myself enough to look, flames were shooting three or four man-lengths into the sky, their roar deafening, then seizing the branches of the trees around, and leaping into them. It was almost above me, and the heat burned my skin. I scrambled to my feet and staggered back, trying to look up through the trees to see her fly.

I couldn’t, for smoke and trees and darkness, but I heard the cry, from straight above me, “Meh ish manwia! Go, omores!” Inodem… get to Inodem… I’d barely run twenty steps through the brush, when a wave of running Arkan men with wood-axes and the odd knife were coming at me. All-Spirit, how so fast? I dove under a bush, to hide while they passed.

“Aaiigh, kaina minugh miniren, this is some fikken arsonist!” they were yelling, in thick okas accents. “Fik the water—save it—cut firebreaks! Fikken fast…this far back, any closer and it will beat us, go go go!” They set to work, chopping and slashing frantically, all around me.

Oh, shit, shit shit… I couldn’t move—there was no way around me that didn’t have either a man in it or clear space close enough to him that he’d see me. Yet I couldn’t stay here until they cut my cover away, or down on top of me. Yet if I tried to fight my way out, that would set up a chase, and if I went flat out with a hundred Arkans behind me to Inodem, Mana and I would be captured for sure if I got there before Niku was ready to raise the lefaetas—if she could even take the guards, alerted as they might be by the commotion.

As blades whacked through wood barely an arms-length from my ear, I thought of turning myself in, or leading them on a chase all the way to the Mezem gate; I’d be caught for arson, then, but at least Mana and Niku would be out. But I’d get truth-drugged, and then the Niah secret would be betrayed. I decided on that as a last resort, though a terrible one; there wasn’t another cursed thing I could do. In the meantime, I waited for a chance to move. I lay there for what I imagine was about the time it takes to soft-boil an egg, that seemed a century, before one man turned his back enough for me to crawl like a spider to another bush.

Then I waited again, my body screaming just to spring up and run and slash. From when we’d started, I’d had five tenths to get to Inodem. Anyone who knows me well will tell you: I have a bead-clock in my mind. I knew for a fact that at least three and a half of them were gone.

Finally the next man turned away so I could crawl like a worm behind a heap of branches that they had not carried away yet… but the fire-fighters were thick as far out as my weapon-sense extended. At least they were making so much noise, swearing and hurrying each other on top of their axe-blows, that they’d never hear me snapping twigs as I crept; it was their torch-light that was my danger.

All-Spirit, it’s got to be four tenths now… Could I even make it to Inodem in one, going flat out? I have to trust that she killed all four silently... die of chance, let that be so. I kept on picking my way out, one by one. I was four or five away from the edge of them, and knowing the tower chime would sound third bead any moment now, even as my heart tried to force me to think it wouldn’t, when it did.

All-Spirit, All-Spirit, All-Spirit… it depended entirely on Niku having killed them all silently, now. Once I was out of the torchlight, I dashed the whole distance anyway, gasping and cursing my weakness, through deserted streets with the odd drunk staggering or furtive shadow slipping into an alleyway.

One platform of the lefaetas was down. I saw it shining blue-grey in the faint light, where it should never be at night by Arkan law. “Mana! Mana!” I called. No answer; he was nowhere. She’s already raised him—good—and left the other down for me, also good. I backed up again, to try to see the top; there was torchlight, but no yelling or clanging of weapons. I could light my second torch and signal; but what if it were Arkans controlling it?

Then the wrist-thick cable creaked and tightened, and the lefaetas began to rise.

I never doubted, for the shade of an instant, what I should choose. If it were Arkans, I’d be no worse off than I was down here; I’d have a chance to fight through them. So I ran, flung myself into the air and barely caught one of the under-struts, swinging up to grab onto it with arms and legs. I should not climb onto the platform, I saw; if it were Arkans, and they saw me before I was at the top, they could easily keep me from having a chance at them by halting the lefaetas. So I stayed where I was, clinging like an ape to a branch, thankful I’d kept Chirel clipped.

It was as if my heart lifted, with every fingerwidth my body did; as if the air changed as my ears popped, and I breathed what I had forgotten breathing, the cleanness of freedom from that reeking pit. As the wheels of the lefaetas, which turn on wooden rails up the cliff, made their gentle, patient grinding sound, it was as if I found myself again with my gaining height, reaching heights of myself that had atrophied, changing from a ring-fighter into a semanakraseye at every man-length. The air changed, from the piss-and-sausage stink of Arko to the sweet scent of pure wind and fields. These things around my neck were no longer the marks of deaths by my hand, but plain money. I felt myself raised back into the sane world, which, since I could not see it from Arko I’d feared no longer existed, but now, with swelling heart, I felt claiming me. I wept, letting my tears fall that fast-widening distance, back into Arko, where they belonged.

Then, at what seemed about half-way up, with a stomach-wrenching lurch and the trace of a bounce, the lefaetas came to a halt.