LUDIC LOG

The city was built into the side of a mountain. That would have thrilled her at one time but now it seemed only another thing to worry abut. She felt a sink of regret that she had lost so soon the capacity for wonder: just past twenty and it wasn't until she was seventeen that she even saw a mountain. Now here was one with a city of six hundred thousands carved from its rock, and she did not wonder. But she was too tired to worry for too long, too tired and with too far to go. There was too much still to learn before there would be any time for regrets.

She had walked twelve miles already this day, having crossed the border around midday, and the city was at least another twenty miles. Still, she hoped to reach it by midnight. She had surprised herself anew each day since making her escape; she could cover more ground on foot than she would have thought possible. It would have been no surprise if she could have spared more time to think about it, though: anyone could cover a lot of ground if it meant their life. The ugly, squat doom of the word "slave" leapt again, an awful toad of a thought, across her brain. She banished it with a long look at the horizon: easy terrain, grassy and smooth with only a few rises and falls right up to the base of the mountains. It was a good time in her life to have taken up walking; anyone venturing twenty miles, no matter the direction, in the desert of her childhood would have made easy dinner for the jackals ­ dead of exposure, heatstroke or thirst before the sun set in the east.

The city of Kurtana bullied the view. The capital city of the kingdom of Ronomo, a much-storied metropolis split into a Lower Half (in the foothills and surrounding countryside) and an Upper Half (carved into the mountain itself). A tremendous place, she had head and spared herself a desperate hope, buzzing a roiling, peopled with men and women from all over the world. She didn't know if the company were dead, but if they weren't those that lived would be hard behind her. She needed a huge, impenetrable maze of a city in which to hide. More than this, she needed it to be the international nexus she had been led to believe it was, a city where her appearance would attract minimal attention. Only in a cultural crossroads would her mud-brown skin and snagged-wool hair not make her an immediate attraction. The external signs of her desert origin had already caused too many problems in the three weeks since her escape; if Captain Albert's men wanted to find her trail, all they needed to do was follow the bodies of half a dozen provincials who had tried to own her, burn her, fuck her. The great city, she thought, would cause her less problems of that kind, but would no doubt pose many difficulties all its own.

Her left foot hurt badly; although she had traded her riding boots for some decent sandals a few days after leaving the company to what she hoped was certain death, she still wasn't shod in anything that was meant to walk across country. It was hideously cold; never had she felt such a raging chill. Since leaving home four years earlier, she had encountered her share of climates colder than beloved Keddrias, a vast desert split down its axis by the rich silt-and-silver thread of the Dargh'ash River, but the further north she came the worse things got. North was where she must go, to put as many miles as could be made between her and the hell of slavery, but the weather might kill her as dead as swords or toil. She watched as great gouts of smoky breath spewed from her lips to the rhythm of walking.

Kurtana was close now, and closer: maybe not midnight, she thought, but tonight. The great city would still be at a rolling boil well into the early morning hours. A handful of crows sulked lazily on a pitiful, lightning-crooked tree near the edge of the main road, their presence a kind of arcane signal that it was time to return to the highway. The King's Highway: she was ever amused that the northlanders felt a need to affix their ruler's name to every work of man. Was it not enough he owned their lands, commanded armies, governed all their daily lives ­ was he some insecure boy, that he needed his name attached to everything as well, lest his graceless subjects forget they have a king? She hiked steadfastly up the embankment and onto His Majesty King Quincy's very highway. Until now she had stayed off the main roads, so as to be seen as little as possible. It had made the going slower and more unpredictable but as yet her head and body remained joyfully joined. Now, though, it was time to enter the great city on the King's Highway, like a respectable citizen or at least a well-meaning tourist. She shouldered her pack into the least uncomfortable position and her dark long hand touched the hilt of her sword, smooth fingers scuttling along the ridges as she thought a hope, not really a prayer. Let them be dead. Mother Atati, mother my own, all you divine ladies: let them all be dead. In the world she approached, a genteel world of guilders and housemaids and shopkeeps, this would seem a cruel mad wish, but she was not from this world, and a warrior too. This wish for the death of others was for her no vile bubbling to the surface of some stealthy hidden violence, heretofore undetected; it was an expression of quite practical hope. It was like someone wishing for rain to stop whose house is about to flood. Wishing others dead, in her bloody profession, was simply a more roundabout way of wishing yourself to stay alive.

These things and more she thought, now wrapped well up in the hypnotic reverie borne of a walker's constant jostling motion. Matters of language, she considered, would be of tantamount importance once she reached Kurtana, and she once again chided herself for not taking enough time to learn the local language. Her vocabulary was somewhat limited and her accent was pronounced. More that that, though, she had noted among northlanders a troubling tendency to couch their meaning in inappropriate metaphor, pointless discursion, a frustrating indirectness. Her military training left her at a loss in these situations. She was accustomed to terse communication, clarity, plain speaking. There was no time in her words for self-serving exaggeration or for the pity-me, heed-me talk of the cities. She had to be careful, because more than her skin and voice could give her away.

It was with the sharp eyes and ears of prey that she noticed a horse trotting fast up the highway towards her, a huge impressive animal bred for war but bearing no sign that it had seen war. On its back, this excellent palomino bore what appeared to be a uniformed functionary, a guardsman or courier or the like, dressed in the grotesque multi-colored clothes preferred in the north. She watched him come from far afield and slowed, hoping to wear in her gait a just-folks air that wouldn't birth questions. It wasn't long, though, before she saw that he wasn't going to pass. Her slowing was matched and finally he stopped, spurring the horse aside so it stood crossways on King Quincy's fine highway. He was armed, she saw, with a light cavalryman's sword, but was unarmored and not a hard man from the looks of him. She knew she could kill him with ease, but this would make him multiply in the dozens and hundreds when his body was found. The last thing she needed was another bunch of armed men on her trail. She slowed further, and with no better ideas to be found, finally stopped some six feet away from him. She looked up at him on his handsome steed with what she meant to be an unthreatening air.

"Good evening." The man spoke in a kind and low voice and favored her with a gentle nod, but with the hard clip and sharp edges to his voice that military service engendered. His skin was very pale, even for a northerner and he had a neat tiny mustache that smelled as if it had been treated with something. The men of her homeland were always clean-shaven, and the betrayers who pursued her were possessed of wild, raging, matted beards, so the delicate, prissy mustache of the solder was an amusing novelty.

"Good evening," she replied, unsure of the phrase and what her swirling, wispy accent did to it. The horseman reached down into a large brown leather case at his side; she fought the light-quick urge to draw her blade. He snappily withdrew a folded parchment which he placed in his maroon tunic and fetched from the case a small pointed stick of charcoal. His movements were comically sharp and exaggerated, a caricature of a real soldier ­ no doubt he was a court functionary. He plucked the parchment from his tunic and unfolded it into a large and unwieldy rectangle.

"What is your name?" It was half demand, half inquiry.

She saw no reason to lie at this point. "Akatisha Kashatka." She said it in the slow and laborious way that foreigners always talked to her, and left off the sighing accents of the Tugan tongue. He paused for a moment, cocked an angular eyebrow that looked painted on, and scrawled with a rude hand on the parchment, steadying it with his hand and pressing hard enough that he almost drove the charcoal stick through it. He somewhat awkwardly but with as much faux-military precision as he could muster folded it back into its initial shape and handed it down to her.

"Thank you," she said, not really knowing what else to say. The horseman repeated his friendly nod and without another word, heeled his mount back and rode north to the city of Kurtana. Too late she noticed the two men, mounted too, waiting for him up ahead. She cursed aloud; she could ill afford to miss such details.

She watched three palominos recede into the distance, consumed by the mountain-city; for a long while she watched before finally unfolding the parchment. She could read and write but her command of the local language was even shakier with writing than with speaking; she tried as best she could to make out what it said. Confounding her further was the florid calligraphy; she was uncertain of many of the letters.

It is the honour of Lord Ruther Basham, Mayor of the City of Kurtana, to invite ACATISCHE CASCHATKER (here was her own name, horribly misspelled in large moronic letters of black charcoal) to the 131st Annual Winter Harvet Fetival. To be held at the Fathers Hall in the Upper Half. Firt day of (something) month. At night of the night watch. A gift of flowers is requeted. Yourelf and guest. The highet (something) to attend. With this invitation only, bearing the Lord's Own Seal.

Below this, a large waxen seal, bearing an officious escutcheon and other frills. It said no more, and held no clue as to why it was given out at all, let alone to a hunted stranger on the edge of the city. The remainder of the parchment was taken up by an elaborate drawing of bundled stacks of wheat surrounded by various flowers.

He could have offered me a bloody ride at least, she thought, and walked, nonplussed, into night and the city.