Age of Ash, page 23
“Anything you can say so I know she’s the right one?”
“She’s Hansch,” Tregarro said shortly, and pushed a wallet across the table. It was warm, and solid, and the coins in it clinked nicely. “You did well. Keep going.”
“Am I paying Ullin out of this?”
“I don’t care,” Tregarro said. He stood and, walking away, unwove. The black candle spat, and she lit a normal wax one from the flame before she blew it out. In the less eerie light, she counted out her pay. Across the room, the box of Darro’s ashes sat on its shelf. It had grown dusty over the weeks.
She wanted to feel the victory of the job. She’d won the pull, but something about it chafed. She kept imagining Darro going up to the house, asking after the missing son. She didn’t know how he’d have done it, but it wouldn’t have been by pretending he was pregnant. She was glad enough that she’d done the work Andomaka needed of her, but she hadn’t done it the way her brother would have, and that tainted something.
She looked over at the box, and the deathmark stood out in the darkness. A few lines, straight and curved, that in the dark seemed like a strange and unblinking eye considering her. She went to it and rubbed the dust off with her sleeve until the wood was clean. She put Darro back in his place.
“Sorry,” she said. “I won’t do that again. It was… I don’t know. Sorry.”
Darro, of course, didn’t answer. She made a little dinner of a bit of bread, cheese, and mustard, then wrapped herself in a blanket against the cold and blew her candle out. Through the wall, she heard a man and woman talking seriously to each other, but she couldn’t make out the words. As she faded into sleep, the voices became her and Darro. Hovering between the world and dreams, she listened to herself and her brother, the conversation becoming more nearly comprehensible and less connected to the living voices in her ears.
In the dream, they were walking side by side down a hallway that was also a street. She was bragging to Darro, telling him how well it was all going, how she’d managed her pulls and taken up his work. She was desperate that he understand how it was all going to be well, and that he say it back to her so that she could know it too. Instead, the dream-brother answered her with indulgence and amusement, but never the approval she needed. Her frustration grew.
There were no actual words in the dream, but the sense of talking was immediate and powerful. She found herself having to shout, and realized that there was a roaring sound that came from above them, and that their pathway had led them underneath the river. The great, dark flow of the Khahon was above them, and she couldn’t make herself heard. She had to convince Darro that things were going well, that it would all come out right because of her. The sense of being thwarted was deep, and she found herself growing angry with her brother and the way he treated everything she did so lightly.
When he spoke, his words were perfectly clear and crisp, as if his mouth were almost against her ear: Why won’t you look at my face?
Alys’s scream woke her. Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she was sweating though she felt terribly cold. She sat in the darkness, her blanket pulled tight around her, and waited for a terror that she didn’t understand to pass.
The quarantined section of Stonemarket was a rough triangle not far from the western gate. At its most, it was three streets wide, almost twice that long, and narrowed to a stone-paved common that was hardly more than a wide place in the road. It was marked by thick rope with yellow rags tied to it every few feet. The guards who walked its perimeter had whistles and swords and the badges of office that hung from their belts. Their cloaks were not blue, but red. The prince of the city had closed these streets, and the palace guard enforced his ban. It was a measure of how dangerous the illness was, though Sammish hadn’t yet been able to get a clear description of what had raised the alarm.
The most reliable story she’d heard—which only meant that more than one person had repeated it before her—was that it was a fever that turned into thickening, greying skin. She had also heard that it was a cough that rattled the ill so badly they couldn’t sleep or a bleeding in the mouth and asshole that wouldn’t heal. Whatever the details, it was the source of fear and dread, and the people of Stonemarket kept their distance from the plague quarter, even if they only lived across the street.
Sammish walked the whole rope, looking down the forbidden streets as she passed. In more than one, the bodies of dogs and cats lay lifeless on the stone paving where the palace guard had thrown them. In one, there was the corpse of an old man among them. Sammish couldn’t say if illness or a redcloak had ended him, only that he was dead in the street, and no one had come to carry him away. The story was that water was hungry, and whoever died in the river could lose their soul to it. That might have been true, but Kithamar had more than one hunger in it, and the stones of Stonemarket carried a death of their own and would until the palace said otherwise. Now and then, she caught sight of someone farther down the street, inside the quarantine. Sammish didn’t call to them, and they didn’t come forward.
She carried her cloth sack over one shoulder, the weight of it bumping against her back as she walked. It had food in it, along with fresh water and incense she’d bought from the hospital. All she had to do was duck under the rope. It should have been easy.
“You,” a man’s voice said. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for my grandmother,” she said, the lie coming easily to her lips. She turned to see a group of three redcloaks on their patrol. They were large men, all three of them Hansch, and one carried his sword unsheathed. She tried not to look them straight in the eye.
“Your grandmother?” the bare-bladed man said. It was his voice that had spoken before. “If she’s in there, she stays in there.”
“I have things for her. To help. She knows to meet me here, but she hasn’t come.”
The redcloak stepped close to her. He had scars on his knuckles and an unnerving kindness in his voice. “She may not know anything anymore. So you listen here, yeah? Toss the bag over and go home. If you cross in looking for your old grandmother, we will let you, but you won’t come back out. Not unless the order comes.”
“She needs to eat, though,” Sammish said.
“I hope she does. But she may not. Don’t go in.”
Sammish nodded, staring at the man’s boots.
The redcloak sighed. “Or if you do, keep some of the medicine in a sleeve or in your shoe. They’re desperate in there. They’d kill you and drink your blood if they thought it would help them.”
“I know.”
The redcloak sighed. “Be careful. And don’t try to come back out. I don’t want to be the one that kills you.”
“Thank you,” Sammish said, and ducked under the rope.
“Well. Look who lost her milk teeth,” Goro had said. “All right, then. Let’s talk.”
Back in the Silt, Sammish had followed him with her heart in her throat. The cold had pressed itself so deeply into her feet that she couldn’t feel the ground she walked over. The old man led her along pathways she didn’t recognize. They passed a huge carved stone statue of a Hansch god that had cracked through at the chest and been abandoned. She was certain she’d have remembered it if she had seen it before, and yet only a few yards more and he was at the door to his little cabin, and waving her inside.
The little stove popped and snapped; the cheerful sounds of fire. Sammish sat beside it. Her cheeks hurt. Her ears hurt. She found herself weeping not from sorrow or distress, but the terrible awareness of how nearly frozen she had been now that the first bits of feeling were coming back. The old man closed the door.
“You can stay long enough to get warm,” the wild man said. “Then you have to go. I have business today you’ve got no part in.”
“Get a lot of custom here, do you?” Sammish joked, but Goro didn’t laugh.
“People find me who need me. Sometimes I expect them. Sometimes I don’t. You… you’re a hard one to see. What does that come from?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The wild man sat on a little stool and hauled off his boots. His feet were pale as ice. “Never mind it, then,” he said. “Let’s try this instead. Why in the name of all gods together do you think I’m going to help you find Saffa now that she’s gone?”
“I’m going to help her,” Sammish said. And then, “If I can.”
“You said that, but what’s that to me?”
“She’s your friend,” Sammish said, but there was a sense of confusion growing in her. “You gave her shelter. You were trying to keep her safe.”
Goro shrugged. “I did what I did. That doesn’t say what I’m going to do. Saffa paid for everything she got here. Not in coin, maybe, but there was a price for it.”
Sammish felt a sinking in her stomach. She was suddenly very aware of being a girl alone in a man’s home. Goro must have seen the thought in her eyes. He barked out a laugh.
“No,” he said. “I don’t trade in that. But I do trade. You want my help, I’ll want something back. A dream, maybe. Or a memory. Your best day, if you want. Or your worst.”
“Are you serious?”
Goro shrugged. Sammish remembered the illusion of raw meat when he’d bitten into the stale bread the last time she’d been here. She liked magic better when it was fortune-tellers’ pulls and the empty piety of priests.
“One memory’s not too much,” he said. “You forget things every day, and then forget that you forgot them. Everyone does. Feed me one, and you won’t even notice it’s gone.”
Sammish leaned forward. Her feet ached now, which was better than feeling nothing. “I’ll bring you bread for a week. It won’t be fresh, but it’ll keep you fed.”
The wild man’s smile seemed both feral and inexplicably affectionate. “You drive a hard bargain, but I’ll take it if I can ask you a question. I won’t eat it.”
“You won’t eat a question?”
“I promise. But, no offense, you’re a Longhill street rat. I’ve known ones like you since I was young, and I’m older than you think. People like you live on the edge of not living at all. Three things go wrong, and the prison cart will be hauling your frozen corpse away with the horseshit. What are you doing this for?”
Sammish felt her jaw move, but she didn’t know what she was going to say. If she was going to say anything. It seemed like something she should already know. She thought that she did, but now that someone—anyone—cared enough to ask, it was hard to find words for it. Only that it was bound up with Andomaka and Darro and Alys. And a little apartment that she’d imagined so many times that she could walk through it in her mind even though it didn’t exist.
“I want to,” she said. “I’m doing it because I want to.”
“Best reason I’ve heard all day,” Goro said. His feet were getting some color back in them, and he flexed and curled his toes half a dozen times before he hauled his boots back on. “All right. I’ll help. But I’m not leaving the cabin, much less the Silt. It’s my place here, and I like it. Also, I don’t know where she is.”
“So how are you going to help?”
“Why did Saffa come here?”
“To the city?”
“To the Silt.”
It might only have been lack of sleep, but Sammish thought it was a stupid thing to ask. “Because Darro tried to kill her.”
“That’s what came before, true. But maybe there’s a relationship, maybe there isn’t. What makes you think that your boy Darro acting poorly would make her come here?”
“Someone’s trying to kill you, you go where they can’t.”
“Seems wise, yeah? The way your friend holed up with Aunt Thorn when that bluecloak was looking to open her skull for her. Only Aunt Thorn has iron doors and guards. I don’t. Did I lock you out?”
“She was just being hard to find,” Sammish said. “The Silt’s no place.”
“Wasteland,” Goro agreed. “Hard to find anyone out here, because there’s no one here to find. No good way to get here. No reason to stay once you do. So there you are.”
“Where I am?”
“Now you know how her mind works. Glad I could help. Now warm your hands up and get the fuck out of here. I told you, I have business. And don’t think for a moment I’ll let you off bringing me that bread. You agreed.”
And in fact, Sammish had brought the bread. With all that and knowing what had happened to Orrel, it still took her days to understand where the Bronze Coast woman was hiding.
On the other side of the rope, the streets stank. No prison carts had made their way down these streets in weeks, and the shit and trash were piled on the paving stones. If it had been summer, the reek would have been terrible. With the winter still in its depths, the bodies of dogs and the turds and the sacks left on the ground after the food and water had been taken from them all had a white coating of frost. With no one leaving the quarantine, the people unlucky enough to live in these houses survived on a grain and water allotment from the Temple tossed in by the guards and whatever their friends and family could spare them. For someone whose neighbors disliked them, who had no one to help with their survival, plague was the second most likely thing to kill them.
Sammish turned a corner. The harsh, clean sunlight pushed through between the buildings on a little widening in the street where a dry cistern stood, its pipes capped by the city. The shutters around it were closed, but Sammish had the sense of people behind them. There were eyes on her, she was sure of it. If she’d been wrong in coming here, she’d been very, very wrong. She walked to the cistern, clambered onto its low stone wall, and tried for once to be seen.
“I’ve got medicine! Herbs from the hospital! And fresh water!” The white steam of her breath caught the sunlight, swirled, and vanished.
A set of brown, cracked shutters opened behind her. A girl no more than seven years old looked out. Sammish lifted a hand in welcome, but the girl didn’t react. There was some movement at the doorway of a house, and then another a little farther down the street. Sammish dug through her bag and pulled out a little water jug. She held it up.
“I don’t need money! I just want to talk!”
And find a foreign wizard woman who doesn’t want me to find her. And get out of here without getting sick. And not have anyone put a knife in me so they can take all my things. Weirdly, the unspoken thoughts made her smile.
A thin man leaned out of a doorway. He might have been sick. He might only have been hungry. His hair was filthy, and he wore a tunic that might have been yellow or white or green once. Sammish smiled to him and held out the jug. He walked with a hitch in his step, like something had gone wrong with one leg. He made his way to the cistern and looked up at her. For a long moment, she wasn’t sure he was going to speak.
“I’m Dannid.”
“Sammish.”
“I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve never seen you before. You don’t have people here.”
“I don’t. And I’m looking for someone else who doesn’t. She’s older than me, and she’d have come just before the quarantine came up.”
“Did she bring the plague?”
“I don’t think so,” Sammish lied. “She’s older than me. Not from Kithamar. She has a mole on her face.”
Dannid looked at the water jug, then back at Sammish’s eyes. She saw the calculation going on in his mind. As tired and weak as he was, if it came to a fight, she thought she’d win. As long as no one came to join him. But there were more shutters opening now. Another door, farther down the street.
Sammish held out the water jug. “Ask your friends if they’ve seen her. I’ll be here.”
Dannid took it like he’d been given something precious, and not a double handful of baked mud around four swallows of water. “I’ll ask,” he said. It didn’t matter much if he did. Another man came out into the street, and a thin woman behind him. Sammish wished she’d brought more to trade with, but she had what she could get. Wishing the world were different was a luxury.
The woman came forward next. She hadn’t seen Saffa either, but her child had the fever. Sammish gave her some of the herbs. And then a young boy came from another building. And then an older man. Sammish handed out something to each of them with a growing sense of fear. Every time her sack grew lighter, she was that much closer to failure.
She was giving a jar of nettle tea to a grey-haired man when she noticed another figure in the street. She hadn’t seen what door the woman had come from or seen her step out around a corner. The woman no one had seen was simply there.
“Wait,” Sammish said, grabbing the grey-haired man by the shoulder. When he turned back, she took a jar of water and some salt pork from the sack and handed him the rest. “You give it out, yeah? You know this place better than I do.”
“Bless you,” the old man said. “Thank you for this kindness.”
Sammish hopped off the cistern wall and trotted toward Saffa. The attention of the street stayed with the sack and whatever might still be in it. Saffa turned her back and began to walk away, but not so quickly that Sammish couldn’t catch up. She fell into step beside the Bronze Coast woman as she turned down a side street. The boundary rope cut across the next intersection like a line inked in the air.
She had thought so much about how to reach this moment, and now that it was here, she wasn’t sure what to say. Saffa didn’t seem inclined to help her either. At a narrow wooden doorway with a chain across it, she stopped, pulled at one of the boards, and the chain went slack enough to open. Saffa ducked inside, and Sammish followed before the door was closed against her.
Inside was a tiny room with a mattress of old straw, a night pot, and little else. Prisoners lived better than this. Saffa sat on the mattress with her legs crossed under her. Sammish stood. The silence between them was unbearable.
“Did you do this? The fever? I mean, did you make that happen?”
“I used what I found. Why are you following me?” Saffa said, and her voice was hard as stone.
