Read Online Wayfarer: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (Tales of Beauty and Madness) by Lili St. Crow - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lili St. Crow
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couldn’t quite get
everything
on Southking, not the way you could in Shake’s Alley or nearer the core where the Twists and black charmers, half-Twisted themselves, sold nasty, expensive, brutal charms for poison, death, curse.
But you could get a lot.
No formal or informal apprenticeship or she’d be producing in a workroom and selling in an atelier. No membership in a charm-clan, producing work under a clan’s sigil even if she wasn’t powerful enough to have a personal one. She obviously didn’t have any sort of license either, or she’d be in a tent over on Rampion or in the Market District proper. It was clear she was too young to have her Potential settled, so any charm she gave might have an unpredictable side-effect, but it was likely to be cheap as well as powerful. There were some valuable things unsettled Potential could do, even if some of the High Charm Calculus equations went into a tangle of weird inconstant values as soon as someone whose Potential wasn’t settled enough worked at them. The intersection of math and magic was never static; it kept responding to every breath of chance and Potential.
Still, you had to at least have been exposed to Calc before your Potential settled. It inoculated you a little bit against Twisting.
A lean, short jack, bone spurs on his cheeks slicing out through the suppurating, too-thin skin on his stretched face, grinned and slunk a little closer. His laboriously multicolored jacket marked him as one of the Simmerside Tops; that particular jack gang was pushing into Southking on weekends to take a cut from those too weak to resist—or those who didn’t want trouble.
The edge of Ellie’s Potential sparked, a hard sharp dart of light describing the arc of her personal space.
Back off, bottom-feeder.
“Cryboy.”
“Bluegirl.” The weeping fluid on his cheeks, where the bone rubbed through, glistened. He’d called her a number of things, trying to make her twitch, before finally settling. Now on Southking, she was slightly known. “You been gone a while.”
“Busy.”
And you’re not getting any protection money from me. Mithrus, you’re a sucking hole.
“This is a nice spot. Really nice.” Another smirk. What would it be like to have your cheekbones cut that way, to feel the proof of mutation on your face? Every time you looked in the mirror, to be reminded of a difference you couldn’t hide?
Not like the Strep. Nobody saw through
her
, at least nobody over eighteen.
Ellie’s fingers tensed. The rest of her stayed loose, her heart skipping along a little too quickly, but that was okay. It wouldn’t show. Not to
him
, anyway. She’d popped a dartcharm at him the first time he tried to squeeze her for a credit or two, and proved she had enough Potential to give him serious trouble if he pushed harder. Since then he’d just hung around, like a jackal.
As long as Ellie kept him where she could see him, in the middle of a daylight crowd, there wasn’t much he would do. If he caught her near dark, or alone in a lonely place, well, that would be different. “Thanks for the compliment. Now run along, jack. You’re blocking my sunshine.”
“Sure thing,
charmer girl
.” He spat it like the jack insult it was, all hot air and halfway to Twist. Ellie restrained the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she just watched him drift away along the tideline of the crowd.
Business picked up after that. A steady stream of memorycharms to kids her age, two credits a pop. System flushes inscribed on cheap brass discs to get feyhemp or milqueweed out of their bodies before the public schools did another round of quick-release blister testing, five credits. One skinny, rumple-haired, middle-aged woman who handed over a fistful of crumpled paper credits and walked away with a small colorless glass vial of charged sylph-ether Ellie had taken the risk of stealing. The woman’s hurrying became an almost-drunken stagger as she vanished, probably running back to her doss
everything
on Southking, not the way you could in Shake’s Alley or nearer the core where the Twists and black charmers, half-Twisted themselves, sold nasty, expensive, brutal charms for poison, death, curse.
But you could get a lot.
No formal or informal apprenticeship or she’d be producing in a workroom and selling in an atelier. No membership in a charm-clan, producing work under a clan’s sigil even if she wasn’t powerful enough to have a personal one. She obviously didn’t have any sort of license either, or she’d be in a tent over on Rampion or in the Market District proper. It was clear she was too young to have her Potential settled, so any charm she gave might have an unpredictable side-effect, but it was likely to be cheap as well as powerful. There were some valuable things unsettled Potential could do, even if some of the High Charm Calculus equations went into a tangle of weird inconstant values as soon as someone whose Potential wasn’t settled enough worked at them. The intersection of math and magic was never static; it kept responding to every breath of chance and Potential.
Still, you had to at least have been exposed to Calc before your Potential settled. It inoculated you a little bit against Twisting.
A lean, short jack, bone spurs on his cheeks slicing out through the suppurating, too-thin skin on his stretched face, grinned and slunk a little closer. His laboriously multicolored jacket marked him as one of the Simmerside Tops; that particular jack gang was pushing into Southking on weekends to take a cut from those too weak to resist—or those who didn’t want trouble.
The edge of Ellie’s Potential sparked, a hard sharp dart of light describing the arc of her personal space.
Back off, bottom-feeder.
“Cryboy.”
“Bluegirl.” The weeping fluid on his cheeks, where the bone rubbed through, glistened. He’d called her a number of things, trying to make her twitch, before finally settling. Now on Southking, she was slightly known. “You been gone a while.”
“Busy.”
And you’re not getting any protection money from me. Mithrus, you’re a sucking hole.
“This is a nice spot. Really nice.” Another smirk. What would it be like to have your cheekbones cut that way, to feel the proof of mutation on your face? Every time you looked in the mirror, to be reminded of a difference you couldn’t hide?
Not like the Strep. Nobody saw through
her
, at least nobody over eighteen.
Ellie’s fingers tensed. The rest of her stayed loose, her heart skipping along a little too quickly, but that was okay. It wouldn’t show. Not to
him
, anyway. She’d popped a dartcharm at him the first time he tried to squeeze her for a credit or two, and proved she had enough Potential to give him serious trouble if he pushed harder. Since then he’d just hung around, like a jackal.
As long as Ellie kept him where she could see him, in the middle of a daylight crowd, there wasn’t much he would do. If he caught her near dark, or alone in a lonely place, well, that would be different. “Thanks for the compliment. Now run along, jack. You’re blocking my sunshine.”
“Sure thing,
charmer girl
.” He spat it like the jack insult it was, all hot air and halfway to Twist. Ellie restrained the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she just watched him drift away along the tideline of the crowd.
Business picked up after that. A steady stream of memorycharms to kids her age, two credits a pop. System flushes inscribed on cheap brass discs to get feyhemp or milqueweed out of their bodies before the public schools did another round of quick-release blister testing, five credits. One skinny, rumple-haired, middle-aged woman who handed over a fistful of crumpled paper credits and walked away with a small colorless glass vial of charged sylph-ether Ellie had taken the risk of stealing. The woman’s hurrying became an almost-drunken stagger as she vanished, probably running back to her doss
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