Read The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps for Free Online Page B

off—hung down—like a flag with no wind to lift it? Hadn’t the Sorcerer bathed that terrible wound, dressed it soft-handedly; slathered all manner of things over it, some cool, some that cut the nightmarish pain? Now it hardly hurt! No, the Sorcerer’s assurances did not make sense, but Messed Up would offer him this leap of faith anyhow. A gift.)
    They went in. Messed Up surrendered his spear.
    “Bet be RIGHT HERE, too, when I come tamara!” Messed Up shouted at the soldier who stowed the spear in the armory with the rest. Xho Xho and Walead hustled their brother out.
    A fo-so turned to Demane. “That’s all you brought with you?” He gestured to the little bag hanging at Demane’s left hip. “Where’s your gear at, your weapons?”
    A soldier beside the first leaned over to his friend, whispering (a baseline human could never have overheard): “Naked-ass bush savages. Shouldn’t even let they ass up
in
here!”
    A number of petty miracles lay within Demane’s power. His reflexes, his strength, were rather better than even the most gifted of athletes’; and his sense of sight and smell, and so on, could wax exceedingly keen at times. But the blood of TSIMtsoa ran thin in him, and it seemed he could not manage the metamorphosis into great power. Even so, provoke him enough, and the provoker
would
catch a glimpse—radiant, dark—of the stormbird. Demane spread his empty hands.
    “What you see,” he said, “is what I got.”
    A peaceable gesture: and yet one fo-so ducked his head, shuffling, while the other grinned with all his teeth, and said, “’Joy your stay at Mother of Waters!”
    With a bob of the chin, Demane accepted the greeting.

    Wilfredo wandered off into the westbound traffic on the Mainway.
    Teef, Barkeem, T-Jawn, and a couple others were headed to the Fighthouse. Cumalo told them the way.
    Faedou limped off north, into labyrinthine alleys.
    The remaining brothers either took roost on the split-rail fence or else leaned against the posts of the garrison paddock just round back the tower. “What
ever
you looking for, y’all can find it up in the piazza,” Xho Xho was telling these first-timers. At nightfall, daytime commerce cleared from the piazza “and they kimmel 2 a greatorch right in the middle.” Hundreds would dance and dozens drum until dawn . . .
    It came to Demane that someone should spare a thought for where brothers would have to meet the caravan tomorrow. Human bustle and metallic bits, however—countless and reflective—were flickering nauseously in the corners of Demane’s eyes. Dense aerosols clogged his nose and tongue, smell and taste inundated with clamorous trivia. Loud, low, soft, shrill: the Station was a high tide of talk, a stormy sea of noise, wave after wave swamping him.
    Xho Xho’s disquisition began to cover local outlets for black market and sin. Here as elsewhere, a silver penny was the going rate; but niggas should not sleep on the fact that, up in the piazza after midnight, there would be mad hoes out, offering
deep
discounts . . . Demane lay a pastoral hand on the boy’s shoulder.
    “Oh, right, my man. Sorry!” Xho Xho shifted his restless gaze over the Mainway’s traffic. “You
had
said you wasn’t trying to get into nothing nasty.” The boy, though, was, for bitter, and yet ineffably saccharine, was the aroma of mischief. And Xho Xho stank of it.
    A wise man would grab hold of this boy, and get honest answers to hard questions.
But Demane let the intuition go by. Squinting, his teeth achy from gritting, he hadn’t yet moderated his senses for city extremes. “Just tell me, Xho,” Demane said, “where at, tomorrow, we suppose to meet up with the caravan?”
    Following the boy’s vague gesture, Demane looked across the teeming Mainway. Master Suresh and merchants could not be seen unloading over at that first complex of stables, corrals, and warehouses. “
Where
, Xho? Someplace on the south side of the Station, you mean?”
    “Yeah,