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city on the far side of the river where groves of maka and thile trees hid
them and the Brothers of God who cared for them from the dreaming gaze of the
Gajullery.
She scanned and swore at what she saw. The streets and pocket parks around the
radio tower were the busiest in the whole city. The tower itself was twice as
tall as the one in Linojin. It was a mass of metal rising from four el-egantly
curved legs, with the station itself laid like a square egg between those
legs. There was no way she could slip in as she had in Icisel, not without
announcing to a few hundred
Nightplayers and prowling street guards that something odd was happening.
With a sigh of frustration she left the city and followed the river until she
found a thile brake nestled in a wide sweeping bend; it was deserted except
for birds and a scatter of small beasts.
She made camp, fixed a quick supper, and rolled up in blankets to catch some
sleep before she tried again.
About three hours after midnight, she was over the city again. Gajul was
quieter around the edges, but in the cen-ter where the station was, some
street musicians had set up in a small park and were playing for Gajullery
who d taken a notion to dance under the stars, at least what stars were
visible. It
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was a lovely summer night, just cool enough to be pleasant, a wandering breeze
to lift and flut-ter ribbons and set heart-shaped maka leaves to shivering,
and the dance showed every sign of lasting till dawn. The streets themselves
had gained another group, no hairpaint on mal, fern, or anya, sober clothing
in dark colors with long sleeves visitors from the farms and the lesser
mer-chants out for a night on the town.
Brothers of God moved through the mix, white motes in Brownian motion.
Shadith sighed.
If ever I wanted rain ....
She landed the miniskip in the fringe of the thile trees along the city side
of the riverbank, hid it high up in an-cient thile, strapped into a threeway
crotch, invisible from the ground. Despite that, she set the shocker to stun
any-one trying to steal it, checked the stunrod strapped to her arm, clipped
the rifle to her belt so it hung along her leg where the robe would conceal it
most of the time. Too bad she had to fool with the rifle, but the locals would
snicker and ignore the rod, and she d waste too much time waiting for them to
wake up.
She slung the. Brother-robe over her shoulder and dropped from limb to limb,
landing with a scrape of booted feet on the knotty roots. Wrinkling her nose
with disgust, she shook out the robe. It was stained and smelled of
sweat, the hem she d ripped out to get more length was stiff with dirt. She
pulled it on anyway and started walking into the city.
Getting through the streets undiscovered was easier than she d
expected. Intent on their conversations or per-formances, Nightplayers
glided around her as if she were a post in the street something in
the corner of the eye that they avoided without having to take note of it.
Street guards leaned from their kiosks and shouted quips at the Players or
slumped against the back wall and drowsed; they, too, ignored her.
A silence in the center of waves of noise, she walked on and on, the radio
tower her only cue in that maze of curving streets where straight lines of any
length were rare and the only cues were names that meant nothing to her.
The Players, pickpockets, and cutpurses grew thicker as she got closer to the
station, the guards had moved out of their kiosks and on occasion marched off
a cutpurse clumsy enough to raise a howl from the victim. Except when she
stepped out into the street to check direction, Shadith kept as close to the
walls as she could, walked with eyes on the pavement, hands carefully tucked
into the long sleeves.
She swore under her breath when she rounded a bend and saw the station
ahead and something she hadn t no-ticed in her overflights, a wrought iron
fence set in the spaces between the tower legs, at least six feet high with
sharpened spear points on the pales.
She leaned against a garden wall and contemplated that fence, wondering once
again if she should have simply coerced the tech in the Yaqshowal station
into duplicating the master for her onto wire spools. She hadn t
trusted his skill all that much and, from the little she d heard,
the quality of the recordings on those spools diminished rap-idly with the
mounting generations of copies, but she was tired and sweaty from all that
walking and trying to sing after climbing over those spear points was not an
appeal-ing thought.
Why don t I forget the whole thing? Yseyl is probably still in Linojin anyway.
She followed with her eyes the upward curve of the nearest leg and the soaring
spindle of the tower.
This sta-tion was the most powerful on Impixol with the widest range and the
biggest audience.
I should have come here first, she told herself.
Still ....
She pushed away from the wall and began walking around the square,
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hunting for a gate. Picking a lock would be a lot easier than trying to haul
herself over that fence. A lot more exposed, though .... She glanced at her
ringchron. Around two hours till dawn.
Didn t leave a lot of time.
As she walked around the second leg, a band of anyas danced past, big eyed and
silent, hands busy with the flow of gesture talk like five-finger dances; they
wore wide bronze neck collars with bronze chains linking them to-gether. A
one-eyed mal with a scattergun and a spiked knucklebar walked beside them,
looking warily about, his single eye narrowing to an ominous slit when other
Nightplayers got too close.
As she watched the group move on, she realized sud-denly that she d seen very
few anyas among the Gajullery Nightplayers. There d been two or three
tribonds, but none of the flowing partner exchange. She remembered
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