Jo Clayton - Hallah's Choice

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2024-11-24 0 0 42.57KB 20 页 5.9玖币
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Hallah’s Choice
By: Jo Clayton
* * * *
From the Drytowns to Leigh Brackett Hamilton’s Mars, mercenaries and assassins
stride or skulk through exotic desert towns. They are violent and sinister, and, no
doubt, each one of them has a history that we would wonder at—when we’re not
taking cover.
Hallah, Jo Clayton’s protagonist, has a history more painful than most. Is she
bent on revenge? Yes, but this is one assassin you can imagine singing a lullaby.
* * * *
1
Into the web
Languorous late afternoon.
Heatwaves and a haze of yellow dust.
The Shiza’heyh of Yaanosin ride to the Betrothal Feast and Fealty Jubilee with
their guards and dependents, their wives and daughters and their eldest sons, their
equerries and orderlies and grooms, their harriers and farriers, their agents and their
clerks, their stooges and their sycophants, their bath girls and bed-warmers, their
tailors, their valets, their wardrobemasters, their cooks and their cupbearers, their
food tasters and wine tasters, their scullions and slaveys.
The Shiza’heyh Kihyayti’an rides to the Betrothal Feast and Fealty Jubilee
with all this and his unmatched pair of matchless assassins.
Zisgade Neisser the Shadowsnake, unfeeling as the polished ivory blades he
wears up each sleeve—he is a thin gray man, yellow with dust, riding at his master’s
side.
Hallah Myur, with no epithet allowed—such things are a foolishness she is
content to live without—a thin gray woman riding near the tail of the procession, a
little woman yellow with the rolling dust, dark eyes narrowed to cracks. Sweat
runnels cut through the dust plastered on her brow, baring streaks of lined light
brown skin. Wisps of hair straggle from under her loosely wound headbands. She
rides easily, slumped in the saddle of a dust-yellowed gelding, a long-legged,
rough-gaited, slab-sided beast with enough energy and humor left to white his eyes at
clots in the dust and shy at skittering shadows.
She is tired, hot, and bored, with no end of boredom in sight. For the next
week or so she’ll be nothing more than an attendant, a body to dress up the
Shiza’heyh’s entourage. Katiang the Boar-rider and the other cursemen deal hardly
with folk who break the Curse Truce, with the hand and the one-behind who hires
the hand. Even Shiza’heyh Kihyayti’an in his maddest moods would not chance
bringing the Curse on his head.
She expects to sleep a lot. She detests crowds, is bored by tumblers, street
mimes, magicians, and their like. She seldom gambles, doesn’t trust luck, only skill.
Clothes are to cover her body, food is for fueling it. She prefers the tablewipe she
buys for herself in hedge taverns to the delicate vintages the Shiza’heyh provides for
his favored hirelings. Beyond the highs of her work—which are fewer with every
year that passes—her only real pleasure is a hard-fought game of stonechess. Since
Atwarima is a busy riverport and the Jubilee/Betrothal should bring a flood of
visitors from many realms, she hopes to locate an adequate opponent.
2
The first shock
In the Bath of the Toyaytay GuestHouse Hallah Myur stripped and stretched,
sucking in the steamy air. She shook her head, her hair tumbling loose, fine long hair
kinking into frizzy curls. Her body was limber as a child’s but terribly scarred,
nodules of keloid with streaks of white and pink running through the soft brown skin
where her breasts had been; her back was laced with whip marks.
She sat on damp sacking bound over the bench beside the tub and combed
the tangles and dust from her hair, singing softly to herself, clicking her tongue at
how gray she was getting. When she was finished, she set the comb aside, twisted
her hair into a knot atop her head, and slid with a soft purr of pleasure into the water.
Clean and relaxed, she pulled on her second-best tunic and trousers, tied on
the gray silk formveil that masked her face eye to chin, bound her hair with gray silk
bands, covering it completely. She gathered her dusty riding gear, paid the attendant,
left the Bath and strolled toward the rooms assigned to the Shiza’heyh Kihyayti’an’s
entourage, humming a song she’d picked up somewhere, enjoying the warmth of her
body, the easy shift of her muscles.
Though sunset was still half an hour off, in that maze of corridors and galleries
within the massive walls of the GuestHouse, alabaster lamps were already lit, and
their painted oils spread perfume on the drafts that coiled about her shoulders. She
turned a corner.
A man walked toward her; his face and shoulders leapt at her as he passed a
lamp.
She stopped walking. Stopped breathing.
His eyes passed over her, dismissed her. Under the Curse Truce, assassin’s
fangs were pulled. She was nothing to interest him. Nothing.
His footsteps faded.
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分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：20 页 大小：42.57KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-24

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