Free The Sea Thy Mistress by Elizabeth Bear Page A

his life, he slid the blade back into her sheath and hooked the sheath on his belt, where the sword would hang beside his thigh. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some charity done.”
    *   *   *
    Within its walls, Eiledon hunched on both banks of a wide, slow, mud-colored river. From his vantage point on a hilltop, Cathmar watched a caravan roll up the road toward it, and a flying taxi glittering in the sun as it described an arc over the city. The walls were brave with banners, and the same stiff breeze they floated on blew the river water cascading from the floating island of the University into rainbow arcs, veils like silk scarves in all seven colors. The river Naglfar seemed not to notice the perpendicular bend in its path as it leapt the empty gulf that bisected its broken bed, flowing directly upward hundreds of feet, crossing the University campus, and then plunging down again to wear a rocky cauldron deep into the bedrock under the city. Many—if not all—Eiledain must live within the sound of its thunder, though from this distant vantage Cathmar could hear only a faint rumble and so it seemed dreamlike, unreal.
    From this height, Eiledon behind its veils seemed like a city made of patchworks of several other cities. A squat medieval town with close-leaned roofs and walls of stone and timber huddled at the feet of soaring arcologies, their glass and metal towers maintained by the technomancers and engineers still trained at that unearthed University. Stone and brick masonry high-rises and factories lined up martially along the riverfront, and Cathmar could make out the erratic leaning roofs and walls of a shantytown in the shadow of the University.
    Though it was yet early, the valley road below was crowded. In addition to the caravan with its drakes and dogs and outriders, there were mule-carts, hovers and horsemen, solar trolleys ticking along at their incremental, inexorable pace. And people on foot, dozens into hundreds, arriving for the winter carnival.
    The day was still new when Cathmar and his father arrived amid the crush of people seeking entrance at the gates. The bottleneck ate up a few moments, but the gate guards with their automatic weapons weren’t searching anyone today and Cathoair was a known face. The two of them were passed inside without questions.
    The walls were ancient, once crumbling and tumbledown but now patched with construction less than fifty years old. Those walls described the same arc as the shimmering curtain of light—the Defile—that circumscribed the city. Cathmar might have flinched from the green incandescence, but he had passed through it before with his father and knew it would not harm him.
    Inside, he spent a few happy moments listening to his bootheels click on the cobblestones of the paved city streets, while beside him his father hauled the handcart, wheels rattling. Cathmar bounced on the balls of his feet and swung his arms.
    Finally. Something different for a change.
    *   *   *
    Helios the moreau, black-maned and golden-eyed, met them just inside the Wolf Gate, an irony not wasted on Cahey. They were expected, and approximately four hundred pounds of former Black Silk saw them through the winter carnival crowds jamming the streets without misadventure. The lion topped Cahey by a head, and was easily twice as wide; people just seemed to melt away in front of him. They had no trouble bringing the cart through at all.
    “Thank you,” Cahey said.
    “Easier when you loom,” Helios answered. “It’s harder to claim they didn’t see you coming. And if they really don’t see you coming”—his grin bared chipped yellow canines as thick as Cahey’s fingers—“they’re awfully apologetic.”
    The chuckle was a profound bass chuffing, deep enough to make the space inside Cahey’s lungs feel strange.
    Inside, Helios guarded them through the Wolf Gate neighborhood as far as the Riverside Market, where Borje the bull met them and admitted them