2
- = -
Great Bazaar Inland Salt Sea, Third month of Grey Skies, 314 APW (After the Precursor War)
The bazaar had organized itself like an organism. The bazaar had a mouth, through which it took in new meat. The bazaar had a stomach, the dark underbelly where new meat was digested. And the bazaar had an anus through which the waste was expelled.
The south side of the bazaar was the anus, and there parasitic scavenging gangs squatted, clinging to the bazaar and picking off meat from among the waste expelled. Here, the Cinder Scales had pitched their umber red tents and raised their serpent skull banners.
In walking through the bazaar, Cyri had turned down the offers of three roach mongers, two prostitutes, six junk merchants, three slave traders, and one skinny man painting portraits using charcoal made from human bones. During the walk through the center of the bazaar, Cyri had felt forced to divert through three food stalls when she smelled roasted cinnamon in the air. She had stepped into three sales booths when she heard the clack of a hand counting out a meditation on a knuckle bone set of rosary beads. Twice even she had briefly engaged in bidding at slave auctions, sliding into the crowds as she smelled the expensive scent of amber, frankincense and vanilla incense. And once she felt it necessary to pay for a rent boy's brief attention when she smelled the distinctive smell of dragon's oil pipe smoke, using the scantily clad young man to block her own silhouette as she leaned into the shadows between two yurts. She knew that there was a better than average chance that her mother's hunters had not been fooled and knew exactly where she now stood. She felt there was at least an even chance that they watched her now, as she stood before the umber red tents of this scavenger gang. She could do nothing about this, and so discounted it in large part as she listened to the sounds inside, which suggested that goats should not leave their drinks unattended in this part of the bazaar.
If she were watched by her mother's hunters, then she would make use of that.
She listened again to the tents, as great gasping and huffing sounds radiated out in waves from the tents from the tents, punctuated by cheers as regular as drum beats- regular that is if the drummers were very drunk. She counted at least seven different voices, all male, within the tents. Nodding to herself, Cyri reached into one of her hip bags and drew forth a flint and steel tied together on a cat gut thong. She dropped to one knee and removed a small ball wrapped in paper with a twisted wick protruding from one end. Pulling a small pile of lint impregnated with mealybug wax from the bag, she struck the flint and steel together, catching a spark in the lint. She dropped the flint and steel back into her pouch and gently held the burning lint to the wick until the wick caught and began to shriek and burn like a panicking city man in a siege. She stood, and lightly tossed the ball into the main tent. And then she waited.
"It's a dragon pie! Run!" somebody inside the tent yelled, the voice higher pitched that it probably would have sounded under ordinary circumstances.
Men in various states of undress scrambled from the tent, climbing and charging over each other, pushing and clawing and biting in frantic looking motions. The paper ball burst into streams of spiraling trails of light with an ear popping series of miniature thunder claps. Several of the streaking bits of light burnt holes in the tent. They launched skyward before fizzling to bits of nothing, leaving sulfurous smelling trails of smoke marking their passage. Cyri waited until everything was still. The men of the Cinder Scale gang lay in a surprised exhausted heap before her, and looked up at her in varying levels of comprehension.
"I'm looking for information again." Cyri said, "And this time, you're going to provide it for free. Or I'm going to tell the Butcher's hunters what information you provided me last time." She crossed her arms as she spoke and stared at the thin, muscular and entirely naked albino who lay sprawling at the top of the pile. He was handsome, and Cyri enjoyed the view briefly, not a touch of fat on him, and well-muscled without looking like an over packed mule bag. He had a slender face and long platinum blonde hair that flowed far too perfectly for the bazaar or for a ganger of any sort. She noted that he wore eye shadow as well. She waited, leaving her face as blank as possible as she did while they absorbed her words.
One of the gangers near the bottom of the pile found his voice, "We ain't never given you nothing. Cinder Scales ain't no snitches, ain't never selling no secrets."
Cyri snorted and then pointed at the albino, "Speak for yourself and not for pretty boy there. He sells secrets; he sells more if he's short of hair care products. I wasn't asking you for information. You don't have anything to offer. I'm doing repeat business with pretty little butt cheeks here."
The albino pulled himself upright, and snatched a cloth from inside the tent to wrap around his waist as he rose, "I've not sold you anything. I've never seen you before."
"Technically true," Cyri said, "You were bent forward in front of me when we spoke." She forced a smirk as she said it. The other gangers were staring at the albino in a kind of twisted fascination.
"That true Mel?" another ganger asked
"I've never turned no rent boy tricks." the albino named Mel insisted. Cyri observed that the expressions of his fellow gangers suggested that they did not believe him.
"It doesn't matter, you know." Cyri said," Do you know who you I am now?"
The gangers looked at Cyri, appraising her as they extracted themselves from the human pile they had formed. Cyri noted the recognition as it began to form in their collective gaze.
"You're the Raven. You're the daughter of the Butcher; the Butcher of Brinebarrow." One of the gangers whispered.
Cyri nodded, "And her four best Hunter Trackers are hunting the bazaar right now. And do you think they'll listen to your screams of denial, if they hear that you betrayed the Butcher to her own traitorous daughter? Do think they'll stop to consider that you might be telling the truth. You think Cinnamon Girl is going to give up a tasty little morsel like pretty little butt cheeks here, because he might claim he doesn't know anything?"
Slowly, she watched as the gangers began to add up the collected bits of information she had scattered before them. Slowly, she saw them lose color as blood drained from their faces. She watched dawning horror express itself upon albino Mel's face.
"Unless you've got some big bad magic sword, you aren't going to like how that adds up." Cyri said.
She watched as Mel's face scrunched and contorted as he stared at Cyri silently. She said nothing, and watched as he flexed muscles through his back and shoulders, rolling his shoulders as though loosening them for a fight. She smiled and shook her head. When the albino finally lunged at her, Cyri had shifted her weight back to rest up her left leg. As he closed with her, she brought her right knee up sharply into the young man's pale chin. Crimson spit sprayed from his mouth like an exploding mosquito. He screamed a muffled humming sound without vowels as he bit down upon his tongue.
"Not as pleasant to have me at your front instead of your back, is it pretty boy?" Cyri asked.
"Never had you behind me," Mel muttered as he spat blood from chalk white lips.
Cyri smiled, "Doesn't matter. Does it? It only matters what my mother's hunters hear. I'll tell you a secret. I have such a fierce reputation. And yet I can't beat any of my mother's four hunters in single combat. But they're all here, and all looking- probably for me. And the longer we stand here talking, the more they will assume was said. And thus, the more they will feel obliged to beat, slice and carve out of your pretty little pearly skin."
"You're bluffing." Another of the Cinder Scale gangers said, pulling on a loin cloth made of at three dead raccoons.
"Maybe," Cyri shifted balance and pushed Mel the albino backwards to regain some distnace, "but that doesn't matter- because you can't handle me on my own. I could carve the information out of you myself."
She let a hand drift to side as though moving for a weapon, drawing attention to the fact that she hadn't needed one yet, "If I'm lying, then I have as much time as I want to beat the information that I want out of you at my leisure. But if I'm telling the truth, then I'm on a schedule. And if you don't talk soon enough, I'll have to flee to escape my mother's hunters. And I'll have to feed you to those hunters to make my escape. And if you haven't told me anything, you'll have nothing to tell them to make the pain stop. So what do you prefer? Either way, you staying silent means more pain for you."
The gangers shifted uncomfortably, and looked at each other with concern as Cyri continued.
"And a better question for the rest of you cinder boys, is whether you're willing to stake that much potential pain on Mel's modesty about how he earns his walking around money."
"I didn't do nothing with you!" Mel spat, "They know me! They trust me!"
"But do they trust you enough to endure unwarranted torture at the hands of the hunters, the hunters of the Butcher?" She looked at each other ganger in turn, "Well? Is he worth losing a few fingers over? Is he worth losing a testicle or two over? Is he worth losing chunks out of your eyelids? You better chose fast. Because I have to go, and then you'll have new guests to host."
A long pause hung in the air like a dandelion blossom on the breeze and then one ganger broke, "I ain't losing no balls for you Mel. What you want from us, you Raven?"
"You know where the Forgotten Dead roost. I want that information."
One ganger giggled, "You don't want nothing to do with Dead you know. They all in withdrawal. Run out of their zombie butterfly powder. You go there now, their minds ain't all good, they ain't all human. They all zombie brain and animal hunger.”
Cyri considered this, "Zombie butterfly is a drug? Or an apothecary's potion?"
Mel wiped blood from his lips, streaking rusty drying blood across his forearm, "It's both. You're going to die if you go up there now."
"Well then, doesn't that strike you as exactly what you want to happen to me?" She asked.
The gangers considered this and then nodded to each other. Mel pointed further south, "They camp in the Camel Spine mountains, on the north end up in the cliffs. They can't hide their fires at night, cause they're either tripping or in withdrawal. Easy to find if you know where to look."
A deep honeyed voice full of stingers spoke behind Cyri, "Then they share that trait with the daughter of my lady." Cyri sniffed, they were downwind of her, but she caught the faintest trace of dragon's oil pipe smoke and Seraphim's overly dramatic incense.
"Where's Cinnamon?" Cyri asked without turning around.
"Guarding your escape route." The dry crackling voice of the Bone man answered from the north, from the route she'd taken into this section of the Bazaar. She mentally calculated. Seraphim and Dragon stood behind her along the western walk. The Bone Man had positioned himself on the northern walk. Two other trails headed east and south. Which was the one that Cinnamon expected Cyri to use?
"You think you have this figured?" Cyri said, "Don't you?"
"I do, as it turns out." Dragon answered, "You have never beaten us, not one on one, not as a unit. How ever will you escape?"
"I could slit both wrists and then fall on my spear." She said without emotion.
The Dragon Man didn't respond, no smug reply.
"So mother wants me alive? And probably doesn't want you to deliver me in a pile of broken bones either. You need me alive and you need me at least mostly intact."
"You still cannot defeat us." The Bone Man said, clicking his knuckle bone beads in a steady rhythm.
"No, but I can make you lose." Cyri answered.
"You ran away," Seraphim said, his high register lyrical voice coming just to the left of the Dragon Man, "You didn't fall on your sword in honorable fashion when you objected to your mother's orders. You won't do it now. You'll run away again. And we know you. Everything you know, you learnt from us or old Myrddhin. We know you. We know where you'll go."
"You didn't know I'd run away," Cyri countered, "You didn't know I'd have a problem with mother's orders. How will you know what I will do backed into a corner?"
Mel the albino tipped his chin up and called out in the direction of Seraphim and the Dragon Man, "There a reward for catching this broad for her mum?"
"Oh yes," Dragon answered, "The War lady Vanora will be disposed to shower such people with her gratitude."
A moment passed, and Cyri assessed her options. Then the moment was over, and the gangers charged at Cyri in a shrieking howling flailing mass of arms and legs. Cyri scrambled and struggled, trying to maintain a defensible position in the mob of limbs when she heard the unmistakable bass drum hissing thrum of a cassowary bird. She looked to the north and saw a great draft beast Cassowary with its blue feathers shimmering as it sprinted past the Bone Man. The beast was harnessed to Ashton's rickshaw, which clambered along empty behind the cassowary. And the whole assembly thundered past, Cyri reached out and grasped hold of the frame of the rickshaw and the weight and momentum of the nine foot tall bird and its cargo yanked Cyri free of the struggling mob of flesh. The bird and its cargo continued to blaze a trail due south and Cyri saw Cinnamon watching, mouth open and eyes wide as Cyri plowed by mere hand widths from her position. Cyri grinned as she was dragged out of the Bazaar in a cloud of churned up dust and sand lice. Chitin and silica flew in her wake both marking her trail and obscuring her personally. She climbed up from to sit in the rickshaw, and after a few moments spent retrieving the reins, Cyri took control of the rickshaw and steered the cassowary towards the Camel Spine Mountains.
