The marketplace of Durakesh was located on the edge of the lake so that members of the most prestigious of the noble houses, those whose homes were carved out of the pillars of rock that jutted up from the smooth black waters of Durak, were able to trade with the lesser houses and the houseless organizations directly from their barges if they wished.
Among some of those families, how little time one spent ashore was a point of pride. The eccentric House Delos had not had so much as a single servant set foot outside the boundaries of the great lake in the memory of any but the very oldest of the city’s ageless inhabitants. They paid exorbitant fees to other houses, for them to cover their military obligations, and as a result even their matriarch lived a life of ascetic deprivation. They were the smallest and least protected house on the lake, but they had little to steal and the house that attacked them would win shame rather than glory.
Such eccentric extremes aside, there were good reasons for the lake houses to avoid walking too much in the marketplace.
Open fighting among the houses was a rare thing, as it was seen as wasteful and destructive, and also dangerous to the city as a whole as it distracted from outside threats and decreased readiness. But every house had its pride… pride in one’s family was considered as much of a virtue as pride in oneself was considered a flaw… and in a city where nearly every inhabitant was trained in the arts of war, simmering conflicts could boil over at any time.
Elaborate rituals of manners had been constructed over the millennia in order to minimize the provocations to such a conflict, but they hadn’t eliminated them entirely so much as channeled them into a select few socially sanctioned… or at least excused… forms.
Men, women who had birthed at least one daughter and had no dependent children, and ornamental persons were all valid opponents for duels and… assuming tacit justification could be given… targets for assassination.
This did not happen very often. The rate at which one sentient being deliberately ended the life of another wasn’t much higher than that in most major cities on the surface, and killing someone for direct gain… to steal their possessions or assume their position… was not sanctioned.
Killings did occur, though, and while they were officially labeled as the actions of individuals, the truth was that they were simply a way for the established houses to poke at one another. The houseless were told that they were lucky to not be a part of this world. However, if there were fewer reasons for anyone to kill a houseless elf, there were fewer reasons not to… fewer binding social conventions protected them from violence.
This was a fact of which Alea, the priestess of no house, was acutely aware as she moved through the marketplace, past the stalls with crafted goods, the displays of imported foods and exotic materials sold by the merchant houses that controlled such trade, the prostitutes and the workers for hire.
She felt exposed. Her head was completely smooth as she’d just shaved it again, but it itched all the same… itched with the feeling of eyes upon it. It made her stood out and it marked her as certainly houseless and possibly even disgraced , and if some housed male decided to test his skills by sending a female to the goddess, she would be a tempting target.
There were few reasons to kill a houseless elf, but being a once-in-a-very-long-lifetime experience might have been enough for some to make up their mind to do it, and in the end it would only take one.
But Alea did not pull up her cowl. For eight times eight times eight shifts, she would keep her head bare… completely bare. She would not hide her face, not even with the veil of false modesty the halfkind wore when they were on display in public.
Caped, cloaked, and robed figures surrounded her. The housed kept their faces covered, less some stray expression or uncontrolled reaction reflect poorly on the family they represented. The merchants all had their hoods pulled back to some degree, revealing at least their mouths so that all present could, in theory, gauge their sincerity. Some of the houseless were hooded or masked, but some were not… they had the “freedom” of choosing to go naked in public, the “privilege of the Polloi“, as it was called… but none of them were as bare as Alea, and that was not entirely her choice.
Yes, it was, she thought to herself. You choose to leave the d’Wyri. You chose this.
She was in the midst of a cleansing cycle, and she could neither hide her head nor grow out her hair until she had finished it. It wasn’t meant to be an act of penance, for it was linked to no sin that required expiation, but it felt like one to her. It felt like she was being punished for leaving Dee… leaving Delia Daella.
She left me. No, she left all of us… but it felt like she was leaving me.
Until she was considered cleansed of her time in the chapel of House d’Wyr, she could not enter into the service of another house’s chapel. Until then, she still needed to make a living, and that meant the marketplace. As a priestess, she was trained in music. The elves had a strictly vocal tradition, which had grown from a scarcity of materials from which to fashion instruments, and the voice she had once used to praise the goddess’s infinite complexity was now employed in singing the virtues of expensive fruit wines and reptile skin pouches as she wound her way through the market.
Alea’s business matron had told her that her distinctive appearance during her time of cleansing would be an asset, but she was not compensated any better than the other singers doing the same work, and she didn’t believe the attention she attracted was all that flattering. Beautiful boy whores in high-cut tunic-style robes that exposed much of their thighs tittered at her as she passed by them. A crowd of giggling halfkind bowed ironically at her. One of them imitated her, substituting the names of what Alea assumed were former lovers for the products she was advertising.
Even the ornaments are laughing at me… but what am I talking about? I am an ornament. I have no usefulness, except through my visibility.
The elves of the houses were fond of saying that even the very powerful must find a way to be useful, but they did not understand what it was to have a cracked stalactite hanging over one’s head. They didn’t understand the difference between the voluntary fasts they undertook… fasts that had a set beginning and an end… and simply going hungry because there was no alternative.
Dee—Delia Daella—had even told her once that she believed her religious fasts to be more difficult an experience than the hunger of those who had no food.
“I must overcome not only hunger, but temptation… knowing that food is available to me, I must choose to continue to suffer” she had said.
Dehsah had clicked cer tongue at Delia Daella and told her that she couldn’t talk out of her ears and listen with them at the same time. Alea might have been grateful for the support, but she had seen the halfkind nurse throw half a pear from the roof because ce was too full to eat it.
When Alea pointed out to Dee that the temptation to take food when one was hungry did not disappear when one had none legally available, the highborn woman had said that the harsh penalties for theft should have weakened that temptation almost to nothing, and so there was still no comparison.
The rest of the family praised Dee’s modesty and humility, her ability to not let her rank go to her head, but she was a child of privilege after all. Alea had loved Dee… still loved Dee… but the woman really did have no idea what life was like outside the houses.
And Darek, who stole fruit on a regular basis in order to keep Dehsah fat and happy and therefore on his side, had laughed and said something about how the law prohibited both the great and small from stealing. Dee had played on Alea’s nerves sometimes, and Dehsah grated on her, but Alea couldn’t stand Darek. His ambition and selfishness were supposed to be the counterpoints and complements to Dee’s self-effacing modesty, but Alea looked at him and saw nothing but a hungry smile and a grasping hand.
“You will learn to stretch out every part of yourself except your palm,” the exercise mistress of the children’s home had told her, and it had been true. They had stretched Alea’s mind, body, and spirit to the breaking point there, and she learned many useful things… but not how to beg.
If she had, she might have begged to Dee to stay, or to let her come along to the surface.
Would Dee have listened?
Delia Daella, she reminded herself. I must think of her as Delia Daella.
House d’Wyr had many mentalists, and while Alea believed Dee harbored no animosity towards her, Alea had never been greatly favored within the house and it was entirely possible that one of them would seize upon a pretext to teach her a lesson.
Such was the privilege of the Polloi.
A halfkind in a gauzy robe, breasts and cock both bound up in leather rings that made them stick out absurdly, sauntered over towards her. Ce held up a purse of coins.
“How much?” the silly creature asked, and Alea launched into a recitation of the prices of the products in her song. “No,” ce said. Cer friends… hanging back and watching… all laughed. “How much for you?”
Alea kicked cer in the balls. She had barely time to regret it when she was surrounded by house guards wearing the same insignia… a circle of eight dancing flames… on their robes as the halfkind bore on jewelry, tattoos, and brands. They had appeared from out of the crowd, where they’d no doubt been discreetly watching over their house’s living jewels.
There were eight of them: four men and four women. Each was armed with a small spear.
“Should have stuck to hawking fish oil,” one of the women said.
Alea took a breath and composed herself. This was it… the end she’d brought herself to. Her thoughts… which she assumed would be her last ones… were of Dee.
Forgive me… if I had been more patient with you, you might have learned…
“Excuse me,” said the last voice she expected… or wanted… to hear. Ignoring the spears pointed at her, she whirled around to see Darek, holding his sword in one hand and a basket of apples in the other. “That’s a rather intimate friend of mine that you’re threatening there.”
