Age of Ash, page 13
After the cold of the street, the interior felt hot and close. The air was wet and warm as a bathhouse, and dark mold dotted the walls at the ceiling. The woman let them through a hall past half a dozen doors with thick bars across them but no locks. They weren’t made to be opened from within. Whatever lived behind those doors lived in a cage.
The center of the house was like a roofed courtyard: an open space lit by half a dozen lanterns and paved with baked tile. A stairway led to balconies on three sides, looking down over the lit space where the woman motioned them to wait. Dark wooden beams high above them took the place of the clouds. The late one squinted up into the gloom, and Alys understood. They were in the light. Anyone in the shadows above them would see them like they were actors on a stage but stay invisible themselves.
“This seems a promising place to die,” the late one said.
“Dying’s not the worst thing happens here,” the laborer said.
The coachman scowled back at them and spoke in a calm, conversational voice. “Both of you shut the fuck up.”
The footsteps came first, hard and sharp with nails in the soles. Then the sound of a door opening, and a short, harsh laugh. A tall man stepped into the courtyard, grinning, his arms wide as if he might embrace them all. Two men came after him. They wore straight, short, brutal swords at their hips and steel mesh gauntlets like animal handlers used to keep bites from cutting.
“This,” the tall man said, “has been a long time coming.” He had a mark inked into the skin of his cheek: two long lines crossed by a shorter third one. Alys had never seen anyone with the mark before, but she knew what it meant all the same. It was a Bronze Coast judgment mark. It was the kind they used when they caught a slaver. The tall man traded in the freedom of others. Alys remembered the barred doors and understood better what might be behind them.
“Sorry for that,” the coachman said, and then waited.
The tall man tilted his head. “That’s all? No explanation? No excuses?”
“None,” the coachman said. “We meant to come before, but then there was a complication. Now we’re here. You have the boy?”
The boy? Alys thought. She glanced at the late one and the laborer, but neither of them was looking at her. She couldn’t say if they knew better than she did what was happening here or if they were only better at keeping their confusion hidden.
“I do,” the tall man said. “You have the price?”
“There’s a formality.”
“All this time and worry because you wouldn’t take my word?”
“Not my call,” the coachman said. “You know that.”
The tall man raised a hand, and a soft shuffling sound came from the darkness behind him. It wasn’t only bowmen above them that the dark concealed. She had no way of knowing how many people were there, or how badly she and the others were outnumbered. The late one licked his lips, and she suspected he’d had the same thought.
A woman stepped out of the gloom with a boy at her side. He was younger than Alys by two or three years. His head was shaved, with only a rough stubble to cover his shining scalp. Long-faced and dark-eyed, he stared at the tiles. Dumb as a sheep, Alys thought, and then remembered the long rows of animals led on ropes to the harvest slaughterhouses. They had the same calm, incurious gaze. Exhaustion and fear that has lived past ripeness. The tall man stepped over to the boy and put a wide hand on the back of his neck, laying claim to him.
“This is the one.”
“And still,” the coachman said.
“Fine. Check for yourself.”
The tall man shoved the boy forward, out into the space between the two groups. He stumbled on thin legs, almost falling. He didn’t have ropes or chains, but red marks at his wrists and ankles showed where they’d rubbed wounds into him. He was too young to have a beard, but soft fuzz darkened his upper lip. If he’d been on a Longhill corner, no one would have looked at him twice.
The coachman stepped forward, and the silver knife—Darro’s knife—was in his hand. For a moment, Alys thought he was going to kill the boy, but the coachman only steadied him with his left and gestured with the blade in his right. The boy didn’t respond.
“Hold your hand out, son,” the coachman said. The boy looked at him blankly. The laborer barked a half dozen syllables in a language Alys didn’t know, and the boy shook his head. The coachman slapped him smartly across the cheek, and the boy lifted his hand.
The coachman steadied the boy’s open palm with his hand and cut across it. The boy moaned and twitched, but he didn’t try to pull away. Alys wasn’t looking at him any longer. She was looking at the blade.
She’d spent hours in her cell in Oldgate considering it, tracing the arcane letters on its flat. She could have drawn them again from memory, she was sure of it. But the dark markings on the bloody silver now weren’t those. The air around the knife shifted like the heat off a forge, and there was something like light but without the brightness that made it hurt to look at. She caught her breath.
Across the tiles, the tall man stepped back, his expression grave. Only the coachman wasn’t unnerved. He knelt and sketched a symbol on the floor. It looked like a deathmark, but not for anyone she knew. The air thickened, and a sense of presence filled the room as if something vast was considering them all. The boy moaned and the mark began to blacken and smoke until the coachman rubbed it to nothing with his foot.
“Fair enough,” he said. “He has the blood we’re looking for. I accept him. Give him a cloak so he doesn’t die in the cold, and I’ll take him now.”
“And I’ll take the rest of my payment.”
The coachman went still, and the late one at Alys’s right made a small sound like he’d been stung by something small.
“That’s not how it is.”
“It’s how it’s become, though. I held this one for weeks more than we agreed.”
“We didn’t have the knife,” the coachman said. “If we couldn’t be sure he was the right one, you’d have thrown us one of your castoffs. We both know that’s true.”
“Might or might not. That’s a world that didn’t happen. The one that did had the boy with us longer than we agreed. Had to move and move and move to keep his people from putting hands on him. Now you want to take him and dance away, and I ask myself why I should think the payment will come on time when the collection was so, so late. I’m not asking for more than we agreed. But I’m asking for it now. And you, old friend, changed our arrangement before I did.”
Alys saw something shift in the shadows. She kept her focus there, not glancing at the lantern flames and willing her eyes to adapt to the darkness.
“I don’t have that option,” the coachman said. He put the silver blade back in its sheath, but as he did, he looked back. The laborer nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say he’d seen where the blade was, if he should need to grab it up and run. The tall man crossed his arms and scowled. Alys felt her breath coming faster.
She tried to imagine Darro, the way he’d been outside Ibdish’s iron grate. The smile in his voice as he taunted the guardsman. His fearlessness. The late one at Alys’s side made a small, almost contented-sounding noise and murmured to her, “Get ready. This may go poorly.”
“I’ll hold the boy a little longer,” the tall man said.
“I don’t have that option either,” the coachman said, and Alys stepped forward, drawing her blade as she did. She took two long strides, casual and loose, as if she were confident. She took the thin boy by the shoulder, lifted her sword, and put its tip against the notch of his collarbone. Everyone in the room went still and silent.
“What… are you doing?” the coachman said in a voice that was calm and gentle, given the situation. Alys made her answer to the tall man.
“Here’s a counter-offer,” she said, picking her inflection to match someone she’d heard before. She couldn’t recall quite who. “I kill this one. Everyone starts killing everyone else, and nobody gets paid for any of it.”
“The fuck is this?” the tall man said, and the coachman shook his head.
“This is what my mother does when the children are squabbling,” Alys said. “We came here in good faith, and now the both of you are barking at each other like two pit bitches with one bone. So here’s your option. I kill him now and we all have a bad night, or else we leave with the boy. We do it now. And you get paid the usual way.”
Whatever the usual way might be, Alys thought. The gods knew what those details were.
The tall man didn’t speak, but his toughs didn’t rush her either. Alys turned the boy to face the slaver, her sword never leaving his neck. His body pressed against her own felt weirdly intimate. His skin was warm. She put her blade across his throat and took a step backward, drawing him along.
The late one and the laborer shifted, falling in behind her as if this had always been the plan. A breath later, the coachman started back as well, his eyes on the tall man. The coachman was whispering a sewer’s worth of obscenities, his gaze darting around the room. He didn’t tell her to stop, though.
“You’ll be paid,” he said as he moved back. “We will keep our word to you.”
“Fucking better had,” the tall man said. His face was dark with rage. It made the ink on his cheek look angrier somehow. The laborer and the late one went slowly and carefully, clearing the way. The coachman walked backward, his face toward the enemy, and slowly pulled out a thick iron club as long as his forearm with a spiked hammer at the end from his cloak.
“It’s going to be all right,” Alys said in the boy’s ear. So close to him, she could smell the muskiness of his skin and the oil of his body. The stubble on his scalp tickled her neck where it touched her. What he made of all this, she couldn’t imagine.
“Door,” the late one said.
“Head east,” the coachman said.
The laborer’s voice was a wheeze. “They’ll come after us.”
“They won’t,” Alys said because it fit the role she’d given herself. She didn’t know if it was the truth.
The open air hit like a slap after the heat of the slave house. The wind was ice and malice. She felt the boy start to shiver against her almost as soon as they reached the street. Alys turned east, walking fast to leave the slavemaster and his blades behind, but also to get the boy wherever they were going. The night was fully dark. The stars spilled across the sky, brighter than the windows of Kithamar. Voices came behind them, but not, as far as she could make out, into the streets. With every step she took, the enemy receded.
“Put your sword away,” the coachman said. “Unless you actually mean to kill the poor fuck.”
Alys took her blade from the boy’s neck and sheathed it as they walked. She felt the boy look back at her, but he was only a shadow among shadows. If he was smiling or afraid or still blank as a stone wall, she had no way to know. She didn’t even see the carriage until she’d almost walked into it. It was under the eaves of a weaver’s workshop, and if it had colors to it, she couldn’t make them out. She was almost surprised when the one she thought of as the coachman actually hauled himself up to take the reins. She’d guessed him right.
The thick-faced laborer opened the carriage door, took the boy by the elbow, and lifted him up into the deeper darkness within it. He turned back, peering down the way they had come.
“No one and nothing,” he said. “I think we got away with that.”
“I’m not staying to find out,” the coachman said, lighting his lantern. There were two horses in the team. They were huge black animals with blinders on. The coachman leaned over and pointed a long finger at Alys. “And if I see you again, I will gut you like a fucking trout. Do you understand me?”
“Then you should pay me before you leave,” Alys said. “That was the deal, wasn’t it?”
The late one laughed. “She might threaten to kill someone if you don’t. She’s wild that way.”
“Fuck you too,” the coachman said, but he took a pouch from his pocket and threw it on the ground beside them. Alys had to jump out of the way as the horses stepped out to the road and moved off into the night. Their hooves clattered against the stone, growing slowly quieter. It took her a moment to find the pouch. When she did, it jingled.
“Come on,” the late man said, taking her by the hand.
“I don’t think so,” she said, pulling back, but the late man held his grip.
“My share’s in there with yours, but we should get away from here before we start counting anything out. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t cross you. I’ve seen what that looks like.” As much as anything, the merriment in his voice convinced her to follow him. The merriment and the fact that he’d known her brother’s name.
The Temple was to her left now, and whatever glimmer of light had been in it was gone. To the east, the moon, almost at its half, began to rise. Kithamar at night was a different city, and in the cold of winter doubly so. The bustle and traffic of the day was gone, and the small sounds seemed louder. Rats scurried. Houses ticked as they cooled. The wind hissed across stones and over rooftops, a susurration that despite its randomness verged on music. Even when the moonlight was enough to cast little shadows and they didn’t need touch to keep track of each other, the late one didn’t let go of her hand. She didn’t fight him. He seemed to have some destination in mind, and Alys felt warm and soft inside. It was like she’d finished a bottle of wine all by herself but without the muzziness. She was drunk on something better.
“I’m Alys,” she said as they turned right toward the distant river.
“We’re not supposed to share names,” the late man said. “Mine’s Ullin.”
“Ullin. Good to know you.”
“I’m best on first acquaintance. I don’t age well. That, by the way, was the most awe-inspiring piece of not caring whether anyone around you lived or died that I have ever seen.”
“It worked.”
“Only makes it more astounding. They will tell stories of it forever, or they would anyway if we talked about any of this. Which we don’t.”
They walked in silence for another street. He let her hand go, and she found she was a bit sorry for the loss. He’d been warm.
“Who was the boy?” she asked. “Why is he important?”
“I don’t know. We needed the knife to know we had the right boy, and we didn’t have the knife. Then we got the knife, and so they sent for the boy, wherever he was being kept, and we came to see that he was the right one and gather him up. I don’t ask where he came from or where he’s going next.”
“Just someone Andomaka wanted, then,” Alys said.
“Is that her name?” Ullin said. “She must like you. She’s never told it to me.”
You seem all right,” Sammish said, but her gaze was fixed somewhere off to his left when she said it.
“No,” Orrel said. “I don’t.”
He’d never been a large man. His body ran toward lean. People said his father had been the same before age caught up with him and thickened his gut. Orrel had never seen himself in the man who he’d called Papi. He looked even less like him now. Where he had been lean before, he was skeletal now, and his skin had taken on a greyish undertone except where the sores made an obscene pinkness. His hair hadn’t fallen out, though the leech men said it might. The room had a small mirror made of beaten tin by the washstand, but he didn’t look at himself in it.
The plague house stood in the forest south of Kithamar. In summer, the view from his little window would have been filled by a vast greenness of leaves. Now it was all black trunks and bare branches that rose toward the sky like a shriek. The only sounds were the soft settling of ashes in the brazier and the coughing of the woman at the end of the little hall. The pale stucco walls had glyphs and sigils that promised health and balance painted on them in bright blues and yellows. He couldn’t tell if they worked. Maybe without them, he would have died by now.
Maybe that would have been better.
Sammish sat on the three-legged stool that the benefact used when she washed him. It was stained by the splashes of vinegar and lime that had dripped from her washcloth. If the room smelled of anything, his nose had grown accustomed to it long before. To judge from Sammish’s expression, it stank of something.
“I looked for you and Alys both,” Orrel said to fill the quiet with something. “After coronation day, I tried to find you. I wanted to give you your cut, yeah?”
“I know,” Sammish said. She glanced at him, and then away. “I trust you.”
It was a lie, and they both knew it. Just as they knew that anything he owed her had been spent weeks before. She didn’t even ask for it. If she had, he’d have been angry. Don’t you see how ill I am? And you come here to squeeze my last coins out of me? Since she didn’t, he had nothing to push back against. That made it worse.
“I looked for you,” he said again, gamely.
“What happened to you?” Sammish asked. And then, “Was it Darro?”
Orrel managed to get up some energy now, if only for the moment. “Fucking Darro.”
“You heard what happened?”
Orrel didn’t answer. His gut hurt, and his heart was racing. He couldn’t tell if it was the anger and fear or the first sign of the fever coming back. The world narrowed until his skin was the horizon. It startled him when Sammish put her hand on his knee and pulled his attention back to her and the room.
“Do you know what happened?” she asked.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Orrel said.
It was the third day of Prince Bryn a Sal’s reign, and pretty much everyone Orrel knew was waiting to see whether he made it to the fourth.
The story about Alys getting chased down by the guardsman was the first thing anyone who saw him talked about. The story ended with the guardsman running away from a rain of shit, or Alys getting a night pot dropped on her and the guard leaving in disgust. Or her brother Darro being caught in it. Or all three. What had actually happened, Orrel didn’t know except that Alys was underground with Aunt Thorn, her brother had paid for it, and Orrel was very interested in not getting found by anyone involved.
