Skeen's Return Read Free Page A

YOUR BACK. OF COURSE, NO ONE CELEBRATING THESE EPIC JOURNEYS PUTS IN ANY OF THAT—TOO DISILLUSIONING AND WORSE, TOO BORING. SO LET’S SKIP THAT TRIP DOWNRIVER. TAKE AS READ THE UNRELENTING HOSTILITY OF THE PLAINS MIN CREW AND THE DISCOMFORT OF THE RIVERBOAT.
    NO AMBUSHES, NO THREATS TO LIFE AND LIMB, JUST DAY AFTER DAY OF COLD WET JOLTING.
    or
    ARRIVING BROKE IN CIDA FENNAKIN.
    Cida Fennakin was a rambling city of interlocking compounds whose walls were an elaborate play of textures and colors climbing the small steep hills above the ragtag working port. The higher the compound, the more elaborate the stone dressing of the walls, the more power the Funor inside had over the days and nights, the lives and loves and general subsistence of those who lived outside those walls. The Port itself was a conglomeration of elbow to elbow structures. Warehouses, taverns, half-ruined compounds turned into shelter for the flotsam off the ships that were continually arriving and departing—abandoned or runaway sailors, escaped slaves, servants who had lost their usefulness from age or disease or crippling accident, ruined gamblers, thieves, whores of both sexes and assorted kinds, beggars, street players, the mad and half-mad, druggers and drugged, hardboys collecting the sub-taxes for local thuglords, small traders, rag and bone men, cookshop owners, tailors, cobblers—a thousand other small enterprises that brought in enough coin to feed and clothe the families who ran them. A noisy, stinking, lively port, the streets so filled with folk that walking was like swimming in a powerful river. Cida Fennakin, the most important port on the western end of the Halijara sea, the last stop of most trading ships, the gateway to goods from the interior.
    The Patjen brought the riverboat past the rubble at the outskirts of the port as the tip of the sun pushed over the highest of the compounds, a sprawling mass of stone whose broad towers were boldly black against the gray-pink sky. He nosed the boat up to a tottery wharf, the first in the long line of wharves that followed the bulge of the river, a dusty unstable structure long abandoned, its piles loosened by the working of spring floods and winter ice. Without ceremony, he put them ashore and dumped their goods onto the groaning planks, then took his ship back into the main current and hastened toward more propitious surroundings.
    Skeen frowned at the ruins around her. Not a soul in sight. Nothing happening here. Silence, cool and damp. Almost no breeze, shadows with edges sharp enough to cut, the river a dull, sub-audible yet pervasive sound. Trickles of sand and eroded brick rattling down here and there. A hint of voices, far off, broken tones rising and falling, punctuated by an occasional shout. Smell of urine and excrement, of something dead not so far away, of rotten food and the dry rot in the planks of the wharf. The remains of a warehouse that had burnt out a decade ago, battered by the seasons, crumbling back to the soil it was built on, eaten at by fungi and weeds. And deserted. Even the worst off of Fennakin beggars found better shelter elsewhere. “Lovely,” she said.
    Pegwai stumped over to the pile of gear and rooted out his pack. He straightened with it dangling from one hand. “No point hanging about here.”
    â€œNoooh.” Skeen clasped her hands behind her, turned her head side to side, scanning the draggled wrecks collapsing onto rotting planks. “Let’s wait a while.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œSomething I’m remembering.”
    â€œWhat?” He took a step toward her, leaped back as the plank started to collapse under his weight, dry rot turning the wood to dust under the lightest pressure. He glared at the plank, transferred the glare to Skeen. “Hardly the time to indulge in nostalgia, woman.”
    Skeen clicked her fingers impatiently. “Nostalgia? Nonsense. Listen, the place where I grew up was on a river like