Guile Page 2

  Yonie glanced at the window-cloth, which no longer glowed with even the embers of sunset light. “Hours ago.” She felt a ripple of unease, like the trace a water moccasin might leave in a still pond.

  Chapter Two

  THERE ISN’T much meat on a bat. Yonie’s stomach gurgled and growled the next morning as she untied the Dragonfly and threaded her way through the water-alley out into the open canal.

  The air was already steamy, and the water was dark jade under the shade of the gum trees that lined the sides of the Petty. Traffic slid past: rowboats frog-kicking along, slim canoes darting and weaving, low-riding water carriers and wood barges nudging in to the banks.

  “I don’t think well of this man for breaking his appointment,” LaRue grumbled from her usual perch atop the bow seat. “I wish there were some easier way of getting this unsightly relic off our hands.”

  “You don’t have to come along, LaRue.”

  The cat looked regretfully upward into the tree branches, the aerial roadways to her best hunting grounds. Then she glanced down at the ugly swaddled lump on the canoe bottom below her.

  “I’d better come, child. I don’t trust that gong.”

  Yonie sent the Dragonfly down the canal with an expert twist of her paddle. Splashes of sunlight fell onto her wiry shoulders as she pulled the canoe under tangles of branches and flowering vines. The Dragonfly had been a gift from her father when she was barely big enough to paddle it. It was quite old, and its inkwood sides had darkened over the years to a satiny black.

  “LaRue,” Yonie said softly, “we’re coming up on the Ford.”

  “Oh, yes—thank you.” LaRue stepped down to the bottom of the canoe, avoiding the trickle of bilge, and nosed her way behind Yonie’s skirt until she was concealed from view. They would have to slow to cross the Ford, and plenty of people thought it was funny to throw water on a cat.

  As the water got shallower, the boat traffic thinned. A sheet of sky-mirroring water spread out, stitched down the middle with a straggling line of wagons, horsemen, and travelers on foot. Harness jangled and drivers sang. Walkers, spattered by wheels or hooves, cursed and told passing carts to go to Under Town.

  Barefoot peddlers of cool drinks, sugared pastries, and cheap handicrafts flocked around the richer carriages as they slowed to cross the water. The spicy smells of barbecue and skewered crawfish drifted from the roadside booths on the far shore.

  The water in the Ford reached barely higher than a knee-boot or a horse’s hock. Yet the slow, clumsy ferries did a brisk business. Many foreigners were too wary of swamp-guile to wet their feet in bayou water, or even to risk a splash from a carriage wheel.

  Yonie sent the Dragonfly skimming neatly between a brewer’s cart and a mail coach. She dug in her paddle and soon had left the gabble of the Ford behind.

  The Damnables lay well within the Circle of Commerce, that area of the Delta in which a person could travel to the city and return home the same day. In less than an hour, with only two stops for directions, Yonie had reached Damnable Swamp.

  The village was a scattering of stilt-houses, gathered under the shade of looming cypresses whose trunks flared in wooden folds. The houses were no more than huts with wraparound porches, much like the one where Yonie and LaRue had grown up. Children scooted around the knobs of cypress knees in coracles, and old folks mended nets under porch awnings.

  “Andry Gerard? You’re not the first one to wonder where ’e’s got to,” said one sun-weathered old woman.

  Yonie’s stomach felt hollow, and not just from the woman’s ominous tone. She had been looking forward to the sand crabs Gerard had promised her.

  “Don’t know where ’e is exactly, but I’ll tell you one thing,” the woman said dourly. “’E’s tracking ’is wife. She left yesterday, up and left ’im with a four-year-old to look after! I always told ’im, you never can trust a foreigner, but would ’e listen? ’E would not.”

  The old woman aimed her brown twig of a finger across the inlet. “I reckon you should speak with ’is sister. Michelle Fontaine. She’s got charge of ’is boy, poor little lamb.”

  Gerard’s sister was a tall, grave woman with a current of gray running through her dark hair. She gave Yonie tea on the shaded balcony of her house, and even set down fresh rainwater for LaRue.

  From inside the house came the stubborn sobbing of a small child. “I’m ’oping ’e’ll settle down and take a nap. I’ve told ’im ’is folks’ll be back soon, but I don’t know if ’e believed me. Don’t know if I believe it myself.”

  Fontaine shook her head slowly. “I was the last one to see ’er, you know. She wasn’t ’erself, anyone could tell. Katja’s got a good ’ead on ’er shoulders, and she wouldn’t just leave like that without a good reason. ‘I must to go ’ome,’ she kept saying in that sweet little voice of ’ers, like something terrible would ’appen if she didn’t. She didn’t ’ave supplies in the boat, no water, nothing. Barely took the time to drop ’er child off ’ere. I just can’t understand it. She’s told me time and again, there was nothing left for ’er in the North after the war.”

  Yonie lifted the gong out of the canoe onto the balcony and flipped back the cloth, holding the dished metal so it couldn’t ring. “Did your brother ever show you this?”

  “Nay. But I knew ’e must ’ave ’ad something like. Yesterday afternoon I ’eard a sound ringing out over the water, like what this ought to make.” She started to flick it with her fingernail, but Yonie caught her hand.

  “Sorry, ma’am, but I think you’d best not.” Yonie could feel her voice slipping into the same groove as Fontaine’s, the musical, softly slurred bayou speech she had always used with her father. “I don’t know what might ’appen. Your brother brought it to me for a Seeing, and I found out it’s a very cunning thing.”

  “Are you a pearly, then? And you so young?”

  Yonie nodded uncomfortably. “Can you tell me what it sounded like? ’Ow did it make you feel?”

  Gerard’s sister twisted her hands in her lap. “It was nothing but lovely,” she said. “Melancholy, though. Made me glad to be ’ere in my own good ’ome, where I was born and raised.”

  “But your sister-in-law, Katja—she grew up in the North?”

  The other woman’s hands grew still. “Up in Hark, in the Icejaws.” She looked down at the gong as if it were a cottonmouth that had reared up in her path. “I tried to stop ’er,” she said. “But it was like she didn’t ’ear me at all. It was this gong, wasn’t it? The sound of it’s beguiled ’er, and it’s making ’er go ’ome.”

  A few minutes later, Yonie and LaRue were alone again, drifting among reeds near the empty cottage Fontaine had pointed out as the Gerards’. The wrapped gong lay in the bottom of the canoe, surrounded by green bilge water. Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s sister had not wanted it in her home.

  “That poor family,” Yonie burst out. “We can’t just leave the gong on their doorstep. It’s a public danger! I say we drop it in the Hellbog, and good riddance.” She picked up the dipper and began absently to bail.

  “Wait.” LaRue stopped her. “The thing’s been stewing in that water all day. Let’s see what more I can see.” The cat gazed down into the threads and specks of green that floated around the bundle.

  “I think I understand now,” she said at last. “This gong, as we know, was designed to get people safely home. It must consider that an obligation.”

  Yonie had never been able to find any useful books about guile. Apparently it was not considered a fit subject for respectable research. Even historical volumes on the ancient Northern nations of C’thova and Gry (now known as the Shunned Lands) did not discuss guile. Authors marveled at the wondrous “chiridou” artifacts those ancients had created, while they scrupulously ignored the troublesome guile that seeped down from the headwaters of the River Skulk.

  The writings about guile that did exist were usually designed to appeal to prurient interests, and were scooped up quickly by private collectors
. Yonie had tried reading The Wily Bedknob, but after three pages had thrown it into the Petty Canal.

  From sheer personal experience, though, most bayou residents knew the main characteristic of guile: it liked to work.

  “But, LaRue, the North isn’t that poor woman’s home anymore. Why would the gong send her there?”

  “I’m not saying it did right, but I think it’s trying to help. Give a thing enough guile, and there’s no telling what lengths it’ll go to to do its job. That’s why we get expert swimmers with gills or canoes that sometimes balk at crossing the Ford because they hate to scrape their bottom.” She gave the Dragonfly a reproving glance.

  Or pet cats, thought Yonie, who learn to speak so they can be better companions for lonely little girls.

  “But of course you’re right, dear, there’s more to it than that.” LaRue gave a pink-tongued yawn. “What else does guile do, besides try to work?”

  “It lets wily things share their thoughts, a little bit. That’s how you do Seeings.”

  “Yes. Well, sweet, I was not quite right before, when I said the gong was lonely. It’s homesick. It wants very badly to go home, and evidently its home is the first place it remembers. And it’s sharing that thought rather strongly indeed.”

  “Then we’ll take it home!” Yonie gestured with the dipper, accidentally flinging drops of water onto LaRue. “That might even break the beguilement on M’dam Gerard! We can figure out where the gong came from and put it back.”

  The cat flicked droplets off her ears. “That’s one way to get rid of the wretched thing,” she conceded. “We can inquire with M’dam Fontaine, I suppose. And I do believe, with all the trouble we’ve gone to already, she might consider paying us.”

  The sand crabs were still in their cage on the porch of the Gerards’ deserted home. Yonie took them back over to Michelle Fontaine, who steamed them and served them with some leftover marsh-rice. Yonie remembered her own mother preparing the same dish, telling her that no grand High Town household served anything better.

  “Your brother never told me where ’e found the gong. Well, actually, ’e said ’e found it in a fish.” Yonie spread her hands.

  Fontaine laughed sharply. “’E would. Andry’s a good enough fisherman, but whenever the water gets low, ’e just can’t keep away from the ruins. ’E’s always ’oping to strike it rich.”

  The trade in ancient artifacts was widespread around Wicked Ford. Most visitors returned home with at least one dinner plate or necklace in the ancient style, some even bearing nicks or dents testifying to their antiquity. These had generally been crafted by artisans in the Cloudy Canal manufactories a few days earlier and purchased at the water market or the stands at Road-end.

  Genuine relics fetched a higher price but came with risks, which was why professional relic hunters typically consulted a pearly about their finds. Amateurs like Andry Gerard, however, were often ill-prepared for the wiles an object might carry.

  Yonie fingered the end of her braid, clicking her thumbnail against the wooden bobbles. “Do you ’ave any idea where ’e’s been looking lately?”

  “I’d say Vile Basin. I’ve seen ’im coming ’ome with ’is boat all streaked in white mud.” Fontaine gave Yonie a sober look. “M’dam Watereye—if you can bring them ’ome safe, I’ll never forget it.”

  Yonie pressed the other woman’s hand in hers. “I’ll do everything I can,” she promised.

  Chapter Three

  VILE BASIN was a fetid body of water blanketed in dense green slime. Its edges merged gradually into pale, gluey mud, and only the most sluggish of currents eddied through the reeds. Mosquitoes snarled and droned over the water.

  Yonie guided the canoe around decomposing logs and through stands of swamp plants that lured their insect prey with the odor of rotting meat. She was glad to have LaRue along. In spots like these, you never could tell how wily the plants might be, and human skeletons had been found stuck to the sundews.

  “Look, LaRue! I’m sure this mud’s been churned up by someone’s feet.”

  The Dragonfly slid into the shade of great, gnarled inktrees shaggy with moss. Roots and damp earth rose up until Yonie was paddling through a narrow sunken channel.

  In the gloom under the trees, LaRue’s pupils were enormous. “Yonie, look! Up ahead.”

  The boulder jutting into the waterway was curiously angular. As Yonie drew level with it, she saw that it was ancient masonry, the top of an archway leading into wet darkness. A heavy stone door-slab, bearing the very fresh marks of a crowbar, leaned against hairy tree roots nearby.

  “You found it, LaRue!”

  “Not so loud, dear. Give respect. This may well be a tomb.”

  The entrance was mostly submerged, with barely a head’s height of clearance above the water. Yonie ran her hand along the layers of blackened grime that striped the doorway’s arch. Under the waterline, strings of soft algae trailed from the stone.

  “This must be below water most of the time.” Yonie laid down her paddle. “Are there alligators around, LaRue?”

  The cat communed briefly with the channel. “None close enough to concern us.”

  Yonie slipped off her skirt and blouse, leaving on her undervest and drawers to protect her from leeches, and let herself down into the tepid, waist-high water. With slow-motion steps, she walked over squashy mud and ducked to pass under the stone arch.

  Suddenly she was treading water, spitting swamp scum out of her mouth. “I’m fine,” she called, splashing back to the canoe. “The bottom drops away under the arch.”

  “Then it was only recently opened. Otherwise the floor would be silted up to the level of the channel bottom.” LaRue switched her tail. “It’s highly likely this is the right place. M’dam Fontaine should be able to find it with no trouble.”

  “What do you mean? She won’t need to come out here at all after I put the boat-gong back.”

  “Yonie, you’re not thinking of going in there? You’ve done more than enough for these people already.”

  “But she can’t do it. She’s got that little boy to look after. And what about M’dam Gerard? She’s beguiled, and she’s all alone!”

  LaRue sniffed. “Honestly, my dear, I never will understand humans. The lengths you’ll go to for someone who’s not even family! And from what I’ve seen, you’re worse than most.”

  “It’ll be easy for me. I’m a good swimmer—you saw to that.” Yonie waved a wet hand at the stone doorway. “And don’t you want to know what’s inside?”

  “Curiosity. Now that’s something I do understand.” LaRue began to wash, as she always did when she was pleased. “Huh! Most children your age wouldn’t dare go into a place like that.”

  “I’m sixteen,” Yonie said, somewhat irked. “Hardly a child.”

  “Of course, dear. All right, you may put the gong back yourself, if you’re not afraid to go in alone.”

  Yonie eyed the opening. Now that she thought about it, it was obvious that LaRue couldn’t go in with her. “It should be safe, shouldn’t it?”

  “I would think so. That stonework looks sturdy enough that nothing short of an earthquake could shake it loose. As for the snakes—don’t bother them, and they won’t bother you.”

  Yonie was silent a moment. “LaRue, can you light my way?”

  “Let me see what I can do.” The small cat raised her head alertly. In the shadow of the doorway, a bubble wavered upward, burped through the surface of the water, and blossomed into a blue glow that lasted several seconds. “Well, there’s not much mud inside, but there should be enough swamp gas for light, if we’re sparing.”

  Calling the bluefire was not common in the city, where pearlies had long since squeezed every sizable pocket of gas from the mud. Seeing LaRue summon light reminded Yonie of earlier days, sneaking out past her parents’ room late at night, paddling with LaRue out behind Evil Island so the cat could practice her skills. Yonie had always wondered if, on that last night, her parents had had time to see
that she was gone.

  Yonie picked up the gong and tied the corners of its wrapping around her waist. More gingerly than before, she waded toward the archway and sank down inside until she was swimming in place.

  The air was cooler under the stone ceiling, and though the water around her kicking legs was lukewarm, it was free of the streamers of pondweed that lined the channel. The dank scent of moss and dead leaves faded as she swam along the passage, leaving only the sterile smell of wet stone.

  The gong was heavy, and the sweat on Yonie’s face began to turn clammy.

  “Light please, LaRue!” Yonie’s voice bounced hollowly between the roof and the surface of the water. She could hear the sound spread out into a larger space ahead. A moment later, she felt a tickle as a bubble of swamp gas swept by her. It exploded into a soft blue flare.

  The chamber ahead was not much larger than the garret she shared with LaRue. Nothing showed above the water except for a curious structure in the center of the space.

  “I’m in a room,” she called back down the passage in a low voice. “There’s something in the middle—kind of like a gondola, but with a closed top.” She swam forward until her hands rested on smooth stone.

  “LaRue, I think I’m in a burial chamber, and this is a coffin boat. I’ve read about them—the ancients thought they could carry the soul to the next world.”

  Yonie backed away, treading water again. Every tiny splash she made was magnified in the half-drowned room. “Now I just have to figure out where to put the gong.”

  Another swamp bubble flamed blue, and Yonie spotted a rectangular indentation on the coffin boat’s stern, just where her history book had said these gongs belonged. She worked her way around the carved stone side until she reached the place.

  Awkwardly, she felt for the knots that tied the gong around her waist. She couldn’t manage them one-handed, and it would be extremely difficult to do while treading water. And what if she dropped the gong? At the thought of diving blind into the black water under her feet, Yonie found herself clambering up to crouch on the coffin lid.