Hellspark by Janet Kagan Page B

to his brow, he gave Tocohl a delighted smile. “Ish shan always was an ass-biter,” he said in his own tongue. “Unless I
    miss my guess, Edge-of-Dark will not be seen until she is once again in fashion—and the fashion will include shoes.”
    “Boots,” corrected Tocohl and grinned impishly in response, pleased that she could accomplish that much at least.
    Om im made a deep bow. “You shall have fair payment, Ish shan, that I promise you!”
    Maggy’s arachne pricked its way through the crowd just as Tocohl bent to return the bow.
    Mistaking her intent, the arachne leapt into the crook of her arm, to settle itself there like a Gaian cat. Tocohl laughed once as she straightened but, again face-to-face with swift-Kalat, she said soberly, “Now, swift-Kalat, you and I will have a word or two.”
    Swift-Kalat found it hard to withdraw his attention from the behavior of the arachne; the ethologist in him was fascinated. No adult could have mistaken Tocohl’s bow for an invitation—its controller was evidently a child.
    But Tocohl was correct, the two of them had business, and the glance the Hellspark gave van Zoveel made it clear that simply speaking in Jenji would not be sufficient privacy.
    “Of course,” he said. Reluctantly, he released Alfvaen’s hand, and gestured Tocohl to follow him.
    Privacy was difficult to arrange on Lassti or, perhaps, that was only his perception, after three years with the same forty people in the same small compound. He did not even think of his cabin as private in that sense, it was too familiar. Too many of those people had been within its Page 42

    door. So he drew aside the membrane and looked out. It was still raining, but the storm had passed, the danger from lightning with it.
    He led her out into the rain, his boots squelching in the mud at every step, taking her only a few feet around the side of the common room building. Lightning still played above the stand of lightning rods beyond camp; his ears rang with it. He tapped the wall behind him. “If we speak quietly,” he said, “we are alone. All of the buildings were heavily soundproofed the second week of our stay.”
    Tocohl twisted her head, agreeing to the place. Swift-Kalat breathed a sigh of relief; with the one gesture, she had somehow become someone he could talk easily to.
    “We will discuss your fee,” he said. That was another area where he lacked expertise, never having dealt financially with a Hellspark.
    She lifted a finger no. “Alfvaen and I have done so,” she said. “The fee we agreed upon is 2,000
    G, contingent of course on my being permitted to stay.”
    That was singularly low for an open-ended task the like of this, of that much swift-Kalat was sure.
    “It was clever of you to send a Siveyn,” she went on before he could protest, “whether the cleverness was intentional or not. It’s impossible to dicker with someone who takes one’s first price as fixed. I don’t rob babes.” She snapped her wrist with such authority that he almost heard the weight of her status on this subject.
    “It was not intentional,” he said.
    “
    Never tell a trader that!” She countered with a smile—and again snapped her wrist to give ring to the command. “In fact, the next time you call a liar”—he jerked at the unexpectedness of the obscenity—“put him to work: let him deal with the traders.”
    She phrased it so adroitly that he could object to neither the words nor the suggestion. And in that moment he would have risked his status on the statement that Alfvaen had found him the one person who could tell him without fail whether or not the sprookjes had a language. He smiled. “I accept your fee and your contingency. And I shall consider your suggestion.”
    “I see I pass,” she said, smiling back. “To business then: when you sent your message to Alfvaen requesting the services of a Hellspark glossi, did you tell anyone of your intention?”
    That seemed an irrelevancy but, from her