Patios, sun-blasted and riotous with some flowering crimson creeper whose name you never did learn to pronounce right. Ornate ironwork on windows and doors, narrow white-walled streets that tricked away the sun’s assault. Cunningly crafted meeting nooks and warm stone benches set in deep pools of shade, the music of falling water somewhere beyond a screen.
Market stalls heaped high with brightly colored fruit you could smell at a dozen paces. Philosophers and verse-makers declaiming from their pitches in the less pricey corners of each square, teahouses spilling out with the noisy back-and-forth quarrel of voices disputing everything under the sun: the advisability of trade with the western lands, the existence or not of evil spirits, the urban horse tax.
Books—the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart-jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much-visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine—and you thought, guiltily, that you’d broken it.
The lines and lines and lines and lines of squiggling black text, and Imrana’s long-nailed finger leading him along them.
The stir and billow of translucent window drapes as a sea breeze wandered in from the balcony and carried away some of the midday heat, cooled some of the sweat on your skin and hers.
The ebbing bustle of the day, the cries of street sellers growing somehow ever more mournful as the light thickened and a yellow-glow sprinkle of windows lit up across the city.
The aching, dusk skyline lament of the call to prayer—and ignoring it in slim, dark, orange-blossom-perfumed arms.
The riding lights of fishercraft out on the evening swell.
“Yeah, well,” he said.
Marnak concentrated on the grasslands ahead for a while. Maybe he could feel some of what was smoking off Egar.
“In the south, they paid me to kill other men,” he said tonelessly. “That’s well and good when you’re young. It seasons you, and it wins honor for your name, for your forefathers in the Sky Home. It brings you to the Dwellers’ notice.”
“It gets you laid.”
A chuckle. “It gets you laid. But the time comes you’re not a young man anymore. You start to lose the pleasure in it all. Truth is, I would have gone home long before I did, if the Scaled Folk hadn’t come.”
“Humanity’s finest hour, eh?”
The quote didn’t come out quite as sour as Egar intended. Despite everything, the clarion ring that Akal the Great had given to it still clung in faint echo. Marnak nodded to himself, so slightly it might have been the motion of the horse that caused it.
“For a while, it was.”
“Yeah, until you end up facing your own fucking people across a line of lances.”
