The Adorned Read Free Page B

mirror.
    Our eyes were all we had in common, though; he seemed inexpertly hewn from heavy stone, muscles bulging and twisting under his clothes. When he spoke it was in Gaelte; I barely understood him. “Boy, what happened to you?’
    “They took everything,” I responded in Kered. The words came out in a rush; I felt dizzy and blurred. “Everything.”
    A rickshaw had come to a halt beside us on the street, like a rock dropped in the river of the crowd. People moved around it, uncaring. A Keredy man peered down at us from up in the rickshaw, frowning. I realized the Gaelta man had been his driver. “What’s this, Gren?”
    The Gaelta man looked over his shoulder. “There’s a boy. He’s been hurt.” He gazed back at me. “He doesn’t look so good.”
    The Keredy man rolled his eyes and sighed. “Well, get him up here, by the Sun Queen. I’ve business to attend to, and it won’t do to leave him in the street.”
    Gren hefted me up on the rickshaw, beside his employer. Then he took the poles in his great hands and we were moving. I looked back. The stain of my blood on the ground had already been trampled into a brownish smear. Soon nothing of it would remain, scuffed away by a thousand footsteps.

Chapter Three
    The man in the rickshaw was called Maxen Udred. He was impeccably dressed in a suit of purple silk, with a dark coat. His high collar only half disguised a short, bullish neck; his hair was slicked back from his forehead in a way that made it look almost carved, like a statue’s.
    The rickshaw was old, of Surammer style. War booty, perhaps, though it would have had to have been dragged many miles from the front to the Grey City. The paint was peeling from its left side, but its wheels were sturdy still. Gren pulled it through the streets, muscles straining, not uttering one grunt of complaint at my added weight. The rickshaw was barely large enough to fit us both. I was pressed up chafingly close against Maxen, feeling the heat of him from beneath his thin suit. He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. His smell was sharp, a presence of its own. I didn’t know how he could sweat like that, in the wintry chill of the city.
    He looked at me, at my bruises, with a kind of chilly interest. “So. What happened?”
    I told him as we rattled through the streets. Where we were going, I could not tell. He nodded at the appropriate points, but said nothing, his mouth thin. Finally, he sighed. “Where do you live, then?”
    I half laughed, and pressed the back of my hand to my throbbing mouth to stop it.
    “Nowhere near here, if I am right. Well, have you somewhere to stay?”
    I shook my head. The ral I would have used to purchase my stay, wherever I might have settled for the night, were gone. The rucksack with my clothes, gone. If the nights turned cold—and they would, despite the mildness of the winter weather—I had barely enough on my back to keep myself from freezing.
    Maxen heaved another sigh and tugged at his high collar. “There is a boarding house I have...some small stake in. You may stay there a few days.”
    Charity, I thought. My eyes were hot. “Thank you,” I murmured.
    “After that, mind, you’ll have to find work.” His eyes narrowed. “I don’t suppose you have something arranged in the city?”
    “No.”
    “Well, we’ll get you looked at first. Gren? On to the holding house, please.”
    We wove down the roads, descending on a slow, gentle slope. There was a sharp smell in the air, coating the back of my throat: the tanneries, I thought, below the bulk of the city, downhill and downwind. Dark smoke rose from their chimneys, smelling of meat and lye.
    In between two hulking buildings squatted a low, narrow house. The door was unmarked and the windows were thick and smoke-stained. “Here we are,” Maxen said. He shifted in the seat, and I pressed myself against the edges of the rickshaw.
    Gren cleared his throat. “Shall I wait outside, sir?”
    “Yes, Gren. I’ll