The Traitor's Daughter Read Online Free

rooflights, polishing all to a high luster. Many of the amphibians were sashed in the colors of their owners—the emerald and azure of Jiorro, the rust and sage of Unavio, the black and canary of D’agli, and others—but always Taerleezi colors and names, for few if any of the original Faerlonnish residents remained in this desirable neighborhood.
    The carriage rattled over the worn cobbles, swinging west at Denenzi Battle Monument, commemorating the great Taerleezi victory of the late wars, to continue on along Harbor Way. The surrounding architecture diminished in magnificence as mansions furnished with private underground water-grottoes gave way to lesser dwellings, and the first commercial wallows appeared. Most of these were roofed and walled, but the cheapest among them were fully revealed to public view, and the somnolent foam-sheathed figures of the Sishmindris undergoing final metamorphosis were clearly visible. One such pool contained a female who—alteration recently complete—squatted in the water and cleaned herself while a clump of human spectators gawked and giggled. And it occurred to the magnifico to wonder, not for the first time, whether such merciless personal exposure pained or angered the amphibians. Impossible to know what, if anything, went on behind those blank greenish faces, those expressionless golden eyes; and in any case, it was a matter of no importance.
    The dwellings dwindled, and the cleanliness of the street did likewise. Garbage strewed the cobbles, the rotten foodstuffs attracting flocks of the broad-billed Scarlet Gluttons so famously prevalent in Vitrisi. The impassioned cackling of the red scavenger birds rose above the grumble and creak of wheeled traffic, the clop of hooves on stone, the babble of conversation, and the relentless entreaties of the street vendors.
    Warehouses stood along this stretch of Harbor Way, and largest among them loomed the Box, built to accommodate newly arrived Sishmindris awaiting sale. The auction block beside the Box, so often the site of feverish commerce, stood quiet and empty today. Behind the warehouses spread the waterfront. A gap between buildings afforded a passing glimpse of the wharves, and beyond them the green-grey waters of the harbor, above which rose the titanic figure of the Searcher. Sculpted in the likeness of Lost Zorius, mythical founder of the city, the colossus lifted his gigantic lantern, whose light—piercing the persistent mists of the Veiled Isles—was visible to ships miles out at sea. That same light had guided the Taerleezi war galleys straight into Vitrisi harbor, some twenty-five years earlier.
    Turning north onto the White Incline, the carriage ascended a grade, making its way to the summit of a steep bluff overlooking the sea. This neighborhood, accounted the best in Vitrisi and known as the Clouds, contained the oldest and finest of the city’s private dwellings—porticoed, arch-windowed mansions of dove-colored stone, topped with tall rooflights of the most elaborate and fanciful design. Some were meticulously tended, their perfection revealing Taerleezi habitation. Those great houses remaining in Faerlonnish hands, however, were shabby and deteriorating, their formerly wealthy owners reduced to poverty by the huge financial penalties imposed upon the city after the wars.
    But the Magnifico Belandor had suffered no such reversal of fortune.
    On through the Clouds rolled the carriage, past gardens and fountains, circling wide to skirt a deep gouge where a gang of convicts labored at road repair. Aureste cast an incurious glance at them in passing; underfed, dull-eyed wretches, all of them. Probably not a proper criminal in the lot. In all likelihood these men had come straight from debtors’ prison, whose inmates—unable to pay their taxes and Reparation fees—furnished Taerleezi authorities with an inexhaustible supply of unpaid labor. Since the advent of the Convict Service program, Taerleezi acquisition of the