Califia's Daughters by Leigh Richards

Author:Leigh Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553900378
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

“TELL THEM A FOREIGN DAMSEL WISHES TO SEE THEM;

AND ASK THEM IF THEY WANT TO SEE ME

INSIDE OR HERE WHERE I AM.”

SIXTEEN

ALL AFTERNOON THE FOG HAD BEEN SPILLING OVER THE tops of the hills from the sea, soft waves that dissipated before they reached the ground. Now, however, the sun’s heat was no longer enough to keep it at bay, and it was tumbling over the top of Meijing’s walls like an immensely slow tidal wave.

The wave broke over the travelers a mile from the city gates, and the world closed in, clammy and dim. In the half-light the city walls lost their glow and were only gray and very solid. At the city’s gates, streamers of fog blew across the huge archway and gave for a brief instant the impression that the city itself was sailing briskly through a stationary cloud.

Dian rode through the gates and dismounted inside the courtyard, which was even more enormous than she remembered, its farthest reaches only a series of glowing lights through the damp. The courtyard functioned as between territory, separated from the interior by the same sheer, high, windowless walls that the city presented to the rest of the world. A person in the Court of Traders might be technically within Meijing’s walls, but she was emphatically not within the city.

The courtyard was emptying rapidly in the early dusk; most of the smaller stalls were already boarded and padlocked. The Approvals building here was the great-grandmother of the individual units along the Road, an eight-hundred-foot line of interconnected cubicles, no more than twenty feet deep and studded by dozens of evenly spaced doors alternating with windows. Both ends of the building were dark, but toward the middle quite a few of the cubicles were still fully lit and bustling with desperate energy as the soon-to-be-benighted traders hurried to have their last-minute purchases weighed, tested, and analyzed by the technicians and their gleaming, mysterious array of equipment.

The courtyard had not actually changed much in fourteen years, Dian saw. At the far right end of the Approvals building was the same stretch of unmarked wall with its insignificant door, which according to her mother was one of less than a dozen points of access to the city. She pulled the waterproof neck pouch from under her shirt, took out the letter from Ling, and made for the doorway.

Before she had covered half the distance, a tall Chinese woman in the dark green uniform of the Meijing guard intercepted her. The woman was everything Meijing represented: sleek and strong, her belt strung with compact devices whose purposes Dian couldn’t even begin to guess, although all of them looked scary.

“That door is not open to visitors,” the guard said firmly but politely; out of the corner of her eye, Dian saw a figure atop the long building shift her attention as well.

Dian signaled the dogs to relax and, careful to make no rapid movements, held the letter out to the woman. The guard did not reach for it but instead, unfailingly polite, asked Dian to open it.

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