Runner Page 2

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” Telvas replied. “Thank you for delivering the box. And thank you for the advice. Feva will see you to the gate.”

  Rebo stood. “Is there a rear entrance?”

  Telvas nodded understandingly. “Yes, there is. Tell Feva, and she will take you there.”

  Rebo withdrew after that, discovered that Feva had appeared in the hall, and glanced back over his shoulder as she closed the door. The box remained on the surface of the desk, and Telvas continued to stare at it.

  The runner slipped out through the back gate ten minutes later, was pleased when none of the watchmen stationed there showed the least bit of interest in him, and started down the street. Rebo had walked about a hundred feet, and was just about to cross a street, when he heard a dull thumpand looked back in time to see a puff of smoke shoot out of a window. The study? Yes, he thought so. There were cries of alarm, followed by hysterical screams, and Rebo knew that Telvas was dead.

  The runner paused to take a long slow look around. Was there another runner lurking in the area? A man or woman hired to confirm the merchant’s death and carry a message back to his brother? There wasn’t any sign of one, but that didn’t mean much, so Rebo sauntered away. It was a nice day, a profitable day, but one that left him with an unfathomable question: How could such an apparently smart man be so stupid?

  Even though Lanni Norr was a stranger to the city, the marketplace was easy to find. First, because at least half of the traffic flowing into Seros was headed there, and second, because once the sensitive drew close enough she could smell the rich amalgam of spices, fried food, and angen feces that scented the air around it.

  Then, as she entered the market, even more senses came into play. There were racks of colorful fabrics, bins filled with vegetables, tables covered with jewelry, booths hung with amulets, racks of handmade clothing, piles of woven baskets, bags filled with white nuts, reels of hand-twisted rope, trays loaded with fragrant candles, display boards covered with wicked-looking knives and so much more that one couldn’t hope to see all of it in a single day. And there were sounds, too. The rumble of a thousand haggling voices was punctuated by the squawks, snorts, and squeals of caged angens, the incessant shouts of vendors who never stopped hawking their wares, the ring of hammers on metal, the wail of a lost child, and occasional snatches of music.

  But there was more, much more, for Norr at least, who unlike 99 percent of the people swirling about her could see the separate energy fields that each individual emitted, catch glimpses of the discarnate spirits who flitted through the area intent on errands of their own, and was constantly buffeted by waves of projected emotion. Not because she sought to experience such things, but because her ancestors had been genetically engineered to pick up on other people’s emotions, manipulate small objects from a distance, heal the sick, and communicate with the dead.

  As Norr made her way through the market, she was exposed to continual bursts of love, hate, greed, fear, lust, and happiness as those about her wrestled with what fellow sensitives referred to as the holy trinity: money, sex, and power—the basic drives behind most human activity, including hers. Because it took money to survive, which was why the sensitive had been forced to emerge from hiding and make the long, uncomfortable trek into Seros.

  So, unpleasant though the task was, Norr wandered the long, tight aisles until she spotted the sign she’d been looking for. Most of the city’s population were functionally illiterate, so a large replica of a quill had been hung over the booth, and therefore over the scribe who sat on a stool beneath it.

  Like most of his ilk, the bespectacled clerk was a member of the so called A-strain, meaning the 80 percent of humans also referred to as norms. Most had black hair, olive-colored skin, and long, slender bodies. There were exceptions, of course, genetic throwbacks to the days hundreds of thousands of years before, when people came in a rainbow of colors. Such individuals were rare however.

  This specimen sported a bowl cut, a pair of thick hand-ground lenses that were perched on the very tip of his nose, and radiated smug superiority. His aura flickered and morphed into something like apprehension as Norr approached the counter. Because even though the young woman with the pack, the long wooden staff, and the knee-high boots looked innocent enough, she had the large dark eyes, high cheekbones, and narrow face of a sensitive. A breed that the scribe, like many others, had reason to fear. Not because of a personal experience with one, but because they were said to read minds, and the wordsmith had things to hide. Like his tendency to mentally undress almost every woman he encountered. In fact he had already stripped Norr, noting that her breasts were too small for his taste, when she arrived in front of his counter. The clerk swallowed the lump that threatened to fill his throat and struggled to speak. “Yes?” he croaked. “Can I help you?”

  Norr couldn’t read minds, but she could sense the emotions that surrounded the man and was willing to take advantage of them. “You are a very naughty man,” she said experimentally, and knew she had scored when the scribe’s face turned bright red.

  “I-I-I’m sorry,” the wordsmith stuttered. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Good,” Norr replied soothingly. “Apology accepted. Perhaps you can help me.”

  “I’ll certainly try,” the clerk replied eagerly, pleased to get off the hook so easily. “What do you need? A letter perhaps?”

  “No,” Norr replied deliberately. “I could write that myself. What I need is some advertising.”

  “Ah,” the scribe responded happily, “a flyer should do it! I’ll write one up, send it over to the guild’s workshop, and you’ll have five hundred copies by noon tomorrow. The press is broken again, but the apprentices can copy it by hand. The practice will do them good.”

  “Thanks,” Norr said cautiously. “But how much would that cost?”

  “Oh, about a hundred and fifty gunars,” the wordsmith replied airily, “but well worth the price.”

  “Perhaps,” Norr said agreeably, conscious of the fact that she had only a hundred gunars in her purse. “However I’m looking for something a bit more economical.”

  The bright red money lust that surrounded the scribe flickered and started to fade. “Yes, well, I suppose we could use graffiti instead. For seventy-five gunars our specialists could paint one-line messages onto two hundred and fifty highly visible walls throughout the city.”

  Norr looked surprised. “You mean people pay for that stuff?”

  “Of course,” the wordsmith said matter-of-factly. “We run into freelancers from time to time, or lose messages when a citizen slaps a fresh coat of paint over our work, but it doesn’t take long for them to see the error of their ways. Especially after a couple of heavies drop by to say ‘hello.’ ”

  “Okay,” Norr agreed reluctantly. “Two hundred and fifty locations sounds good. But how many words to a line?”

  “Ten,” the scribe replied succinctly.

  “I need more,” Norr insisted, as she counted them in her head. “Seventeen to be precise.”

  “That’s going to cost you five gunars,” the clerk warned primly.

  “Not necessarily,” the sensitive countered as she leaned forward. “Remember that apology? What if your superiors were aware of what you’ve been up to?”

  The clerk’s supervisor happened to be a woman, and he could imagine what would happen if she knew that he had undressed her hundreds of times. There were worse assignments than the market, much worse, and he had no desire to receive one. Ink-stained fingers reached for a hand-sharpened quill, which the scribe dipped into a disreputable-looking bottle, and held poised above a blank sheet of paper. “Okay, seventeen. What are they?”

  Norr looked off into space as she recited them. “Come see the famous sensitive Lanni Norr communicate with the dead Friday at eight, in the actor’s guild.”

  “That’s eighteen words.”

  “Okay,” Norr said nonchalantly. “Make it eighteen then.”

  The sc
ribe’s pen made a scritching sound as he transferred the words to a piece of tan parchment. The sensitive noticed that each letter was formed with the perfection of an ancient printing machine and marveled at how precise the man was. It was evident that he enjoyed his work because as he wrote the color of his aura changed from red to a harmonious blue. “That will be seventy-five gunars,” the wordsmith said as he blotted the paper. “Payable in advance.”

  “I’ll give you forty up front, and the rest when the messages actually appear,” Norr replied.

  The scribe swore under his breath. “All right . . . But a heavy will show up Friday to collect, so you’d better be ready to pay.”

  “I will be,” Norr replied confidently and counted gunars out onto the surface of the counter. “By the way, this will be a demonstration of psychic phenomena rather than some sort of show. I think you should come.”

  “Thank you,” the wordsmith answered politely. “But I’m busy that night.”

  “Okay,” Norr said as she prepared to leave. “But your wife is there by your side. She says that her death wasn’t the least bit painful, she’s happy on the spirit plane, and you should stop grieving for her.”

  No one knew about the true extent to which the scribe missed his wife, and he hadn’t mentioned her death to the young woman, so how did she know? Tears welled up in the clerk’s eyes, and he used a tattered sleeve to wipe them away. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask Norr what his wife looked like now, but the sensitive was gone.

  Because the monastery had been built hundreds of years before, back when Seros was little more than a settlement, it occupied a piece of prime real estate atop one of the hills marking the city’s eastern boundary. The complex was surrounded by high walls, which the brotherhood said had been built to keep ignorance at bay, but had practical value as well, for hardly a month passed without an attempt to break in and steal the gold that was rumored to be kept there. There wasn’t any gold, of course, but the monastery did contain some precious artifacts, which was one of the reasons why the Dib Wa (iron men) patrolled the walls. The other reason, the person each of the warriors was sworn to protect with his life, threw a door open and bounded onto the surface of a large flat roof.

  The guards smiled indulgently as the ten-year-old boy ran in circles, waved his arms, and sent a flock of white wings flapping into the air. It was a daily ritual and one of the few unstructured moments of the youngster’s day. He wore a pillbox-shaped red hat like those favored by the adult members of his sect, a matching knee-length jacket, and black trousers. And, because Tra Lee was widely believed to be the reincarnated spirit of Nom Maa, a much-revered teacher who had entered the spirit realms a dozen years earlier, all the Dib Wa bowed. Not to the boy, but to the man they believed he would become, and the role that “the Divine Wind” was destined to play in the future.

  Because, assuming that the reading of Nom Maa’s death poem was correct, the time had come for a heavenly rebirth, meaning the reemergence of the Saa or “Way,” which would serve as an important counterbalance against what the monks saw as a steady slide into barbarity. The only problem being that the competing black hat sect claimed that Tra Lee was an imposter, and insisted that a lad raised under their control was the real Nom Maa. But if such matters were of concern to Tra Lee, the little boy showed no sign of it as he ran along the top of the walls, played games of his own devising, and shouted orders to imaginary friends.

  The period of freedom was all too brief, however, and it wasn’t long before Lee’s spiritual tutor, an avuncular monk named Suu Qwa, rang a tiny bell. Lee ignored the tinkling sound at first, hoping for one of the rare occasions on which Qwa might grant him some extra time, but the noise continued. Finally, shoulders slumped in defeat, the boy walked across the roof to the point where his tutor waited. “So, little one,” the monk said softly, “where will we meet today?”

  It was a game that the two of them played every day and Lee brightened at the prospect of it. Although he had to take part in the lesson, he could choose where it would be taught, and delighted in forcing Qwa to teach in all manner of unlikely locations. The only problem was that it was getting hard to come up with new venues. The youngster looked around, spotted the coop where the specially bred carrier flits were kept, and pointed a grubby finger in that direction. “Up there . . . On the roof.”

  Qwa bowed deeply. “The roof it will be. Would your majesty like me to boost you up there? Or will you climb?”

  Lee eyed the structure but couldn’t see any way to scale the walls. “It appears that I will need a boost.”

  “Yes,” Qwa said as he accompanied the youngster to the coop. “All of us need help from time to time. Many are willing—but how to choose?”

  Lee knew that the lesson was under way and responded accordingly. “The correct individual will not only have the desire to help, but motivations consistent with key goals, and possess the skills or tools required to complete the task.”

  “Excellent,” Qwa said approvingly as he boosted the boy up onto the roof. “In spite of the abundant evidence to the contrary, it appears that you pay attention once in a while.”

  There was a momentary disturbance as the birds fluttered around their cage and cooed to each other. Most had settled down by the time the tutor hoisted himself up onto the gradually slanting surface. It was covered with droppings, and Lee had already claimed the cleanest spot. He grinned knowingly.

  But it was difficult if not impossible to get a rise out of the monk, who squatted on his haunches and eyed his student with the same calm gaze that he always manifested. “Today I would tell you of a village and the monk who lived there. One night there was a loud disturbance outside his hut. He got up and opened the door to find that a man and the local midwife were standing on his stoop. Both individuals poured out their hearts to the monk, and it wasn’t long before the situation became clear. The man’s wife was pregnant, but the baby was in a poor position, and the midwife believed that while she could save one of the two, there was very little chance that both would survive. The man favored his wife, but the midwife argued for the infant, both calling upon the monk to render a decision. Which view was correct?”

  Lee considered the problem for a moment. “The man was correct.”

  Qwa raised an eyebrow. “Why? The midwife argued that while sad, a new life must always take precedence over an old life, for such is the natural order of things.”

  “That is true,” Lee answered, “so far as it goes. But the monk had a responsibility to look beyond natural cycles to the greater good. If the woman were to die not only would the man lose his wife, but her other children would lose their mother, and all she might have taught them.”

  Qwa nodded approvingly. “That was well said, Excellency. You are both an excellent student and a teacher. Please allow me to take this opportunity to thank you for all I have learned from my contact with you and to say a reluctant good-bye. There are many paths, and now ours must part.”

  Lee felt something heavy drop into the bottom of his stomach. The youth had only the vaguest memories of his real family and had come to regard Qwa and his other instructors as a group of uncles. Each brought something unique to his life, and if he lost one of them, it would be difficult to fill the gap. He frowned. “Why do you say that? Are you leaving?”

  “No,” Qwa answered, “but you are. The final test awaits. The time has come for you to travel to the holy city of CaCanth.”

  Lee felt fear mixed with a sense of excitement. He didn’t want to part company with Qwa, or the rest of his tutors, but not a day went by that he didn’t look out over the city of Seros and wish that he could walk its dusty streets. And CaCanth was on the planet Thara, everyone knew that, which meant he would get to ride in a spaceship! The very thought of it made his pulse pound. “You must accompany me, Master Qwa! I command it.”

  “It is true that you command many things,” the monk answered gently, “but this is not one of them. It will be a long, dangerous journe
y, and special arrangements must be made to ensure your safe arrival. My place is here.”

  “But what if I’m not Nom Maa?” the boy demanded heatedly. “I’ll fail the test, the black hats will control the Saa, and your efforts will be for naught.”

  “Ah, but you are the Divine Wind,” Qwa answered serenely, “and therefore have nothing to fear.”

  A cloud chose that moment to pass in front of the sun, a momentary darkness fell over the land, and Lee felt a chill run down his spine.

  The tattoo parlor was a small dingy little shop with two workstations. Rebo sat in one of them, his back to the frowsy artist, as she added a new image to the map that already occupied the upper portion of his back. Most of the interstellar runners wore them, not because they had to, but because they wanted to, as a way of memorializing successful runs. Some even went so far as to will their skins to the guild, which typically had sections of the artwork removed, and fashioned into lampshades or other decorative objects. They were the exceptions of course, since most of the star runners died obscure deaths on remote planets, where they were stripped of their valuables before being unceremoniously dumped into a ravine, bog, or unmarked grave. Until that final moment they lived in the hope that they would make it back to whatever world they called home before making the run from which no one could return. Not in the flesh at any rate—which was what the tattoo artist was focused on.

  The pain was intense, but rather than attempt to push it away, Rebo had learned to accept it. More than that to go beyond it, to a place where he was only dimly aware of the discomfort as the relentless needle pushed ink in under the surface of his skin. During moments like that the runner entered the equivalent of a reverie, reliving moments from the past, or entering a fantasy world where there was no such thing as pain. And that was why Rebo was slow to respond when a voice called his name. “Citizen Rebo? My name is Suu Qwa. Brother Qwa. The people at the runner’s guild told me I could find you here.”