Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01] - D'Shai by Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01]

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4
Highwire

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    O F ALL THINGS acrobatic, I hate high wire the most. I’d much rather juggle knives, and somebody as clumsy as me has no business juggling knives.
    It’s not just that it’s not forgiving. Flying is every bit as merciless—even more so—and I’ve never disliked flying as much as highwire. If you come out of a flying double roll wrongly and miss, you have to grab control of your center in order to be able to hit the net right. When you fall from the wire, you’re usually not rolling. It’s hard to hurt yourself, but it’s dreadfully easy to embarrass yourself.
    Part of it, of course, is that when you’re on the wire, you’re always at the bottom of the pyramid. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, if you do it wrong, you fall—and if you’re doing it with somebody else, they fall, too.
    I hate that. In this world of Nythrea, in this country of D’Shai, it’s always been more than hard enough for me to keep my own balance; I don’t want to be responsible for somebody else’s.
    We were going to be doing our standard first-night show. It’s important that each of the nights of our appearance builds on the previous evening, but it’s also important that those who only attend the first night, or even the preview we do upon arrival, understand that they have been honored by the presence of the Troupe of Gray Khuzud. So we hold back, but only a little, and whittle away at that holding back until our final show.
    The troupe had been given access to two rooms: one below, a small room that opened on the courtyard, and a suite above, on the top floor of the donjon. Large Egda, Sala and Evrem were preparing themselves in the dressing room downstairs; the rest of us were readying our entrances on the wire, anchored in the far wall, that stretched out to the trap-platform outside.
    The Eresthais had set up the anchor, and Gray Khuzud had checked it, but checking the anchor was my job, and while I wasn’t a particularly good acrobat, I wanted to be reliable.
    It was typical Eresthai work: they had selected a huge mounting staple that was just a little too large, then worked it thoroughly over the edge of the doorframe, and pulled open the legs far enough to slip some ingawood slabs down inside. Then they had clamped the whole thing down tightly, so that it was supported by seven of the massive stones of the wall, before they had tightened up the turnbuckles tightly enough to make the taut wire sing at the tap of a fingernail.
    Good, solid work. It’s not my favorite anchor—I much prefer the security you get from proper redundant staking—but it was typical of the Eresthais: reliable, competent, unimaginative. My only complaint is that they’d set everything, including the platform out in the courtyard, fractionally too high; I’d be forced to duck as I walked out through the open window.
    â€œGood enough for you?â€

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5
Sore Points

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    H E JUMPED ME two blocks short of the Widow Rupon’s house.
    I hadn’t been paying attention—or rather, I had been paying attention, but not to the right things.
    What I had been doing was walking home alone, after. Something I was not unfamiliar with; it comes with the lack of territory, so to speak. I’ve walked home alone, after, many times.
    Above me, the night was full of winking stars, a silver crescent of moon high in the sky,- below, the street seemed a bit softer, easier beneath my feet than it had been before.
    It was late, well past the hour of the bear and into the hour of the lion, and the streets were quiet and empty, save for the whistling of the wind through the jimsum trees, the clicking of fidgetbugs in the eaves and gutters, and the far-off taroo of a hairy owl. I had passed a cloaked nightwatcher in Ironway, and had returned his. raised hand of greeting, but I