Last First Snow Read Free

and heard screams, and men weeping.
    As they passed the wreck, Batac lifted the curtain with one finger and peered out, blinking against the pure light or what he saw. He released the curtain, and falling velvet blocked light and tragedy alike.
    â€œAgreed,” Kopil said.
    Tan Batac nodded. “Fine.”
    Not a ringing endorsement, but it would serve. “Send me what you know about these people,” Elayne said. “Tomorrow, I’ll go.”

 
    2
    The next day before dawn Elayne hailed a driverless carriage and rode south to the Skittersill, to Chakal Square.
    Glass towers and hulking repurposed pyramids gave way to squat strip malls, palm trees, and tiny bungalows. Optera buzzed and airbuses floated through a bluing sky. Road signs advertised sandwich shops, carriage mechanics, pawnbrokers, and lawn care. A few tall art deco posters of the King in Red, pasted in storefront windows, urged citizens to beware of fires.
    Near the Skittersill the buildings changed again—adobe and plaster gave way to clapboard row houses painted in pastel green and pink. Streets narrowed and sidewalks widened; uneven cobblestones pitched the carriage from side to side. At last she dismounted, paid the fare from her expense account, and continued on foot.
    Two blocks away she heard the protest. Not shouts, not chants, not so early—just movement. How many bodies? Hundreds if not thousands, breathing, rolling in sleep or grumbling to new unsteady wakefulness. Mumbled conversation melded to a rush of surf. Mixed together, all tongues sounded the same. She smelled bread frying, and eggs, and mostly she smelled people.
    Then Bloodletter’s Street crossed Crow, and Chakal Square opened to the south and east.
    Chakal Square was not a square per se: a deep rectangle rather, five hundred feet long and three hundred wide, with a fountain in the center dedicated to Chakal himself—a Quechal deity killed early in the God Wars, a casualty in the southern Oxulhat skirmishes. Defaced, the statue, and dead, the god, but the name endured, attached to a stone expanse between wooden buildings, an open-air market most days, a space for festivals and concerts. Red King Consolidated’s local office brooded to the east.
    People thronged Chakal Square. Camp stove smoke curled above circled tents. Flags and protest signs in Kathic and Low Quechal studded the crowd near the fountain where a ramshackle stage stood. No one had taken the stage yet. Speeches would come later.
    A loose line of mostly men sat or stood around the crowd’s edge, facing out. They bore no weapons Elayne could see, and many dozed, but they maintained a ragged sentry air.
    Elayne looked both ways down empty Crow, and crossed the road. The guard in front of her was sleeping, but a handful of others shook themselves alert and ran to intercept her, assembling into a loose arc. A thick young man with a broken, crooked-set nose spoke first. “You don’t belong here.”
    â€œI do not,” she said. “I am a messenger.”
    â€œYou look like a Craftswoman.”
    She remembered that tone of voice—an echo of the time before the Wars, before her Wars anyway, when she’d still been weak, when at age twelve she fled from men with torches and pitchforks and hid from them in a muddy pond, breathing through a reed while leeches gorged on her blood. Memories only, the past long past yet present. Since that night of torches and pitchforks and teeth, she’d learned the ways of power. She had nothing to fear from this broken-nosed child or from the crowd at his back. “My name is Elayne Kevarian. The King in Red has sent me to speak with your leaders.”
    â€œTo arrest them.”
    â€œTo talk.”
    â€œCrafty talk has chains in it.”
    â€œNot this time. I’ve come to hear your demands.”
    â€œDemands,” Broken-Nose said, and from his tone Elayne thought this might be a short meeting after all.