Beasts of the Walking City Read Free

all, do you know that?” she said in our High Tongue. “If you’d done ANYTHING to anger that Bakarh ,” she spat the unfamiliar word out between her sharp teeth, “then we would be homeless once again, and sooner or later the hunters will find us. And when they find us, they will surely kill us.”
    She growled, spit at me and kicked me repeatedly where I’d fallen to the floor. I wrapped myself tightly around the book to protect it. “You are a stupid, ugly child,” she said. “You are a worthless little beast. You should have died alongside your fathers and my sister, and my own son should now be standing here in your place. You are lower than a pile of shit. Even that Bakarh heretic is better than you deserve.”
    I stayed where I was, pigmenting all of my hair to something like the color of the floor and trying not to move or cry out, knowing that if I gave her something, anything to react to, it would only make it worse. She cursed me awhile longer, hit me across the sides and back.  And then finally she went off and sat by the fire, where she sat and smoked her clay pipe of leaf until the thick smell filled up the kiva.
    When I was sure she wouldn’t notice me, I rose and crept off to my dirtnest in the far corner of the room. I cleaned myself, and there in the dark, with only the flickering light of the fire to light the pages, I opened the book carefully. I stared at the glowing illustrations. The fire’s light made them dance. In particular, I studied the picture of the great armored Hulgliev, and the flower, Te’loria. How thrilling it would be to hold such power, such respect.
    A mage, I thought. A mage!
    And despite the bruises that I felt across my sides and back, I remember that I smiled into that smoky darkness. 

2.
    T hat was then. This is now.
    There’s a clap of thunder and a flash of white light as the battered podship I’m riding in cuts down through the clouds. I’m strapped in the back, the place they use for cargo. I’m starving and frozen, and if there was anything left in my stomach it’d be all over the rusting metal floors, the walls, the roof by now.
    Most of my team doesn’t look any better. Josik is a bright shade of green. I’ve never seen a human go quite that color before, and against his bright red hair it makes him look like some strange, undead version of himself. His eyes are closed, his lips are moving soundlessly. He hangs on to the frayed straps that hold us all in with a death grip. Pirrosh grins back at me. He’s a Solingi, I get that. They’re mostly human, but they live in the air, and apparently they like this shit, but despite that I can tell this is a lot even for him. I can see it in the tight skin at his jaw, the whites around his eyes. This isn’t a lazy blimp ride. This is a nightmare. The Buhr we hired is curled into a ball of fur up in the corner. There’s so much noise from the rattling of the ship, the storm outside, that if it’s making any sounds I sure can’t hear it.
    And then there’s the girl with the tattoos. She’s staring out the window at the ocean below us. She’s new, and I haven’t worked with her, though Josik swears she’s got a lot of potential. Matthais, the kid we’d originally trained up, got himself cut up over an orange he’d bought in the market. Some withered old thing, not good enough to get  shipped up to the mansions on the cliffs where all the real money in Tamaranth is. It probably didn’t have any juice left in it. Some thugs had jumped him, deep in the Warrens.  We’d bandaged him up as best we could and left him with a friend to heal.
    The girl is a mystery to me. She senses me watching her, looks over in my direction, and nods. I can see in her eyes: she’s been through a lot of crap, and this is just another day of it in a long string of bad days.
    I can relate to that. I can respect it, too.
    Below us is nothing but the southern ocean, and now it seems we’re falling into it. I can hear the pilots