hair.
“Did
you
cook dinner, Cheba?” the boy asked.
“Yes, I did,
mi rey
.”
“Okay, we’re ready!” his sister said.
“Show me your hands,
reynita
. I thought so. Go and wash,” she said, giving them a little shove towards the front doors.
Her English was much more fluent now, but still a little slow, and had been developing a tendency to a bookish, Worf-like lack of contractions. Eric gave the surroundings a long last look. The house that Adrian Brézé had built northeast of Santa Fe was long and low, built of fieldstone covered with stucco for the most part. The surroundings turned imperceptibly from a xeroscape garden of native plants into shaggy, rocky hills. The sky was turning dark purple to the east, with the first stars just starting to glitter in the high-desert air. The west was still an implausible striation of clouds turning to cream and hot gold and molten copper, fading to teal green and blue above; the snow on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains westward was blush-pink for a moment.
He’d grown up around here, albeit in far more modest circumstances, and he’d never tired of looking at it. Why leave the best part of it all for the tourists? Outsiders thought the paintings of Santa Fe sunsets were garish kitsch; you had to live here a while to realize that no paint palette could rival the real thing, or the clarity of the air. You had to go away and come back to really appreciate it if you’d been born here.
They went through the big copper-plated doors; the copper had silver sheathing within and the walls had silver thread. The central block of the house was open-plan with eighteen-foot ceilings of exposed viga beams; the southeast-facing wall was mostly tall windows, a narrow tile-paved terrace and planters outside it dropping off several thousand feet in a jagged steepness of cliff and arroyo. The view was spectacular, and there was nothing human in it except the lights of a tiny hamlet twinkling inthe middle distance and a freight-train drawing away. Off to the left was a large kitchen full of European equipment separated by a stone island from a dining area centered on a massive cast-glass table. It was a big house, not a mansion that couldn’t function without a huge staff of servants, though it was also certainly not like anything he’d lived in before.
“
¡Dios! ¡Huele ’re sabroso, niña!
” he said, sniffing with appreciation at the cooking odors. “God, that smells good!”
He cleared the chambers of the double-barrel as he sniffed and hung it and the bandolier on a wall rack. It still seemed odd to carry a weapon so primitive, but even the five moving parts in this relic needed to be protected with glyphs if they were to function at all when an adept was around and trying to screw things up. They made his palms buzz a little. He’d always had a nose for danger, which was why he hadn’t come back from the rockpile in a plastic bag—it had been close even so.
The Albermann test the Brotherhood used said that he was just barely capable of doing simple Wreaking, though it still seemed a lot like magic to him. The down-side of that capacity was that without training it made you
even more
vulnerable to Shadowspawn thinkery-fuckery than ordinary people. He was absorbing the techniques as fast as he could.
“
¡Inglés!”
Cheba said. “I need the practice. And this country is
freezing
. Freezing, dry, rocky. Why did anyone from Mexico ever come here?”
He carefully didn’t say: You’re beautiful when you’re angry, though it was true. Though you spend a lot of time being angry. Understandable, I suppose.
She was a dime and some younger than him, with more
indio
and less Spanish, plus a dash of African, originally from a little corn-and-beans ejido called Coetzala in the hills of upcountry Veracruz, a place so backward every third inhabitant still spoke Nahuatl. She had a full-lipped heart-shaped face, curly black hair, skin the color of cinnamonand a
“Did
you
cook dinner, Cheba?” the boy asked.
“Yes, I did,
mi rey
.”
“Okay, we’re ready!” his sister said.
“Show me your hands,
reynita
. I thought so. Go and wash,” she said, giving them a little shove towards the front doors.
Her English was much more fluent now, but still a little slow, and had been developing a tendency to a bookish, Worf-like lack of contractions. Eric gave the surroundings a long last look. The house that Adrian Brézé had built northeast of Santa Fe was long and low, built of fieldstone covered with stucco for the most part. The surroundings turned imperceptibly from a xeroscape garden of native plants into shaggy, rocky hills. The sky was turning dark purple to the east, with the first stars just starting to glitter in the high-desert air. The west was still an implausible striation of clouds turning to cream and hot gold and molten copper, fading to teal green and blue above; the snow on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains westward was blush-pink for a moment.
He’d grown up around here, albeit in far more modest circumstances, and he’d never tired of looking at it. Why leave the best part of it all for the tourists? Outsiders thought the paintings of Santa Fe sunsets were garish kitsch; you had to live here a while to realize that no paint palette could rival the real thing, or the clarity of the air. You had to go away and come back to really appreciate it if you’d been born here.
They went through the big copper-plated doors; the copper had silver sheathing within and the walls had silver thread. The central block of the house was open-plan with eighteen-foot ceilings of exposed viga beams; the southeast-facing wall was mostly tall windows, a narrow tile-paved terrace and planters outside it dropping off several thousand feet in a jagged steepness of cliff and arroyo. The view was spectacular, and there was nothing human in it except the lights of a tiny hamlet twinkling inthe middle distance and a freight-train drawing away. Off to the left was a large kitchen full of European equipment separated by a stone island from a dining area centered on a massive cast-glass table. It was a big house, not a mansion that couldn’t function without a huge staff of servants, though it was also certainly not like anything he’d lived in before.
“
¡Dios! ¡Huele ’re sabroso, niña!
” he said, sniffing with appreciation at the cooking odors. “God, that smells good!”
He cleared the chambers of the double-barrel as he sniffed and hung it and the bandolier on a wall rack. It still seemed odd to carry a weapon so primitive, but even the five moving parts in this relic needed to be protected with glyphs if they were to function at all when an adept was around and trying to screw things up. They made his palms buzz a little. He’d always had a nose for danger, which was why he hadn’t come back from the rockpile in a plastic bag—it had been close even so.
The Albermann test the Brotherhood used said that he was just barely capable of doing simple Wreaking, though it still seemed a lot like magic to him. The down-side of that capacity was that without training it made you
even more
vulnerable to Shadowspawn thinkery-fuckery than ordinary people. He was absorbing the techniques as fast as he could.
“
¡Inglés!”
Cheba said. “I need the practice. And this country is
freezing
. Freezing, dry, rocky. Why did anyone from Mexico ever come here?”
He carefully didn’t say: You’re beautiful when you’re angry, though it was true. Though you spend a lot of time being angry. Understandable, I suppose.
She was a dime and some younger than him, with more
indio
and less Spanish, plus a dash of African, originally from a little corn-and-beans ejido called Coetzala in the hills of upcountry Veracruz, a place so backward every third inhabitant still spoke Nahuatl. She had a full-lipped heart-shaped face, curly black hair, skin the color of cinnamonand a
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