said nothing. “Aren’t you going to ask me how he was?”
“How was he?”
“Satisfactory.”
“Which college?”
This was enough to move Rafe to lift his arm from his face and open his eyes—in a squint, to be sure; there was, after all, only so much light the human body was designed to take in at this unfortunate hour. Through strands of hair so black it was almost blue, he saw his roommate standing over his bed far more judgmentally than was at all called for.
“You’ve gotten into the Delight again, haven’t you?” said Rafe. “I’ve already had everybody in the other colleges worth having, and the few times I’ve been with anybody from Physical Sciences it’s made me long for the disastrous night you and I spent together lo these many years ago.”
“Good Gods. How awful for you.”
“You have no idea.” Rafe attempted to raise himself from the lumpy bed and had to close his eyes against the pain that blossomed in his head. “No, I’ve been going down to the docks for months. Do keep up.” He opened his eyes again and sat up much more carefully.
“Pigeon,” said Joshua, prim as new lace, “I gave up trying long ago. I can’t count that high. Now get up, put on your robe, and let’s go. Sausages. And chocolate. Then de Bertel.”
“And what do you think either one of us could possibly have to learn from His Excrescence of the Swine?”
“Look, whether or not you’ve outstripped him in understanding as far as you’ve outstripped the rest of us—”
“Oh, much farther.”
“You don’t go to de Bertel’s lectures to learn; you go because if you miss any more of them you’ll offend the entire faculty so deeply they won’t even let you sit your exams, much less pass them, and you’ll never found your school.”
Rafe assumed the expression he had developed to madden his father, his lips pressed tightly to one side. Joshua sighed and pushed back his hair, the color of good beer. Oh, gods, beer. Even the thought of it—
“Ah,” said Joshua. “Your ‘I’m-unwilling-to-admit-you’re-right’ face. I’ll take one step more, then, and tell you not only to come to the lecture but also to keep your mouth shut while de Bertel is talking. After your performance last night you don’t need to push him any further.”
Oh, dear. “What did I do last night?” Rafe’s forehead creased helplessly, though it was a pose; any actual effort to remember would be doomed to failure.
Joshua’s face was incredulous. “You can’t be serious.” He grinned. “I’m sorry to say, love, but you were in splendid fettle. He walked in just as you were reaching the climax of a woefully accurate impression of him. I sent Anselm over to stop you, but you bit him, so we left you be. Then, when you finally saw de Bertel, you called him a blind, mentally defective sloth who mistook shit for information and flung both at his students indiscriminately, which, you said, was an issue with most of the professors at the University, but the problem with de Bertel was that his aim was so much more accurate with the shit.”
Rafe sighed mournfully. “If only I weren’t such a perceptive drunk.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But please don’t alienate him further, pigeon. You never know which way the Board of Governors is going to vote on the committee question.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; we’ve got weeks left before the vote, and with enough protests like last week’s they’ll have no choice but to vote it down.”
“Oh, in the same way that de Bertel had no choice but to change his mind and agree with you about the movement of the heavenly bodies once you showed him your calculations?” Rafe did not dignify this with a response. “Come on, pigeon. Besides, I meant it about the sausages, so we’ll need time to stop by the Eagle. Cheer up; we can get extra and throw them at de Bertel.”
“How will we tell which is de Bertel and which the sausage?” With great effort and greater care, Rafe finally stepped out of bed, poured half a pitcher of cold water over his head, drank the rest, and toweled off with the edge of the bedsheet. He reached unsteadily for the robe hanging on the wall, black and clean enough for even the most respectable of scholars.
As he bent to dig for clean breeches, he felt Joshua’s hand on his arm. “Your revolutionary school is a splendid idea, pigeon. But you’ll need that Doctor’s robe if you want to acquire any students. Be careful. You tend to ruin things for yourself.”
Rafe was silent for a moment and then nodded. “You needn’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Good.”
“Micah! Thad!” he called into the next room. By now Rafe was able to speak at a reasonable volume without fearing his head would split open. Sausages, too, would help. “You’d better hurry, or we’ll be lucky enough to miss de Bertel’s lecture entirely.”
• • •
Xamanek’s light, it was cold! If this was the spring, Kaab shuddered to think what the winters were like.
Are you ill, little bee? Her mother’s voice in her head gave no quarter, cold or no. Or have turkeys been coming in the night to peck at your head? Because otherwise I cannot think of a single reason you would consider doing again exactly what you did in Tultenco, heading into the worst part of town seeking out trouble. The voice was as melodious as the River Ulua flowing into the sea, which only made the criticism sting the more sharply. You have said you wish to work in the service. Why, then, are you risking everything on a whim? Make a mistake this time, and you will compel your father to choose between making your banishment permanent or calling you back home where you will be tossed out of the service for good.
It would not help to object. Even from the houses beneath the earth, Ixmoe’s spirit would have no patience with Kaab’s protestations that this city would not see her repeat the errors she had made across the sea.
Kaab meant things to go well here. But she was coming to realize that it was one thing to learn about the natives of this Land among the shining temples and plazas of Binkiinha thousands of miles away; quite another to come east across an ocean and be surrounded by them.
Oh, but if only Ixmoe could have seen them—the beautiful Local women with their strange, exotic skin the color of ant eggs, their thousand and one fascinating shades of hair—then, then she would have understood. Especially in Riverside, where Kaab stood now under the decaying houses bedecked with peeling paint and crumbling gaud. These women, unbound by the rules even of this city, behaved in ways that would shock her modest friends walking the white paved sacbeob ways of her homeland.
A clatter to the southeast. Kaab’s hand flew to the hilt of her dagger, dark, reassuring obsidian in the hidden pouch she had sewn into the insufferable Local gown without which Auntie Saabim refused to allow her to leave the house. When she looked around for the source of the sound, she saw only a pair of young men, remarkably similar in face and dress, arms entwined, sauntering through the narrow streets of cracked and broken cobblestone, stepping lightly over murky brown puddles, paying no heed to anyone but each other.
She kept her hand on her dagger as they passed. A third man was coming down the street; when he was closer, she recognized him, a gold-headed wonder of lace and red velvet, as the man who had pinked her in her first duel last week, the day she arrived. What was his bizarre name again? Pem . . . no, Ben.
Kaab stepped quickly into the shadow of a narrow, twisted alley, lest he spot her. She needn’t have worried; his mind was obviously on other matters as he ambled by, whistling something that he apparently thought of as a tune.
Curious, she followed him, watched him enter a tavern and leave again soon after, a black cloth tied around his arm. There was no harm in going in, was there?
Kaab opened the tavern door and breathed in the lingering perfume of stale alcohol. Other than the few scattered,