Age of Ash, page 3
The guard licked his lips. His gaze flickered. Darro expected him to turn or back away, but he’d judged the man poorly. The rush came with no more warning than a shift at the man’s ankle. The sword curved in a tight arc toward Darro’s neck, the guard’s full weight behind it, and Darro pulled his club up to block before he knew he’d done it. The metal cut a bright notch into the wood.
The guard pushed past him, then turned. Alys and the steps up to Ibdish’s gate were behind Darro now, and the guard stood between him and the free streets. It might seem like the attack had failed, but Darro knew he’d been outmaneuvered.
The guard knew it too.
“I don’t give half a fuck about you, friend,” the guard said, spit blowing from his lips. “But that bitch is—”
Whatever words he’d meant to say were interrupted by a wet splat. A stain as brown as mud drew itself down the guard’s side, and he reared back from the stink. Someone had emptied a night pot into the street. Someone with good aim.
“Who did that?” the guard shouted up at the windows. A single tittering laugh set off a cascade of others. Darro kept his club ready. His knuckles were bleeding and raw. He didn’t know how that had happened. The man shouted again, “Who insults the city guard?”
A long, amber arc of liquid came from a high window, splashing down near the guard without hitting him. Another followed from a different angle.
After that, the street became the wrong side of a turd pit. Alys and Darro pulled back against the iron bars at the top of the stairs while faceless Longhill showed the lone guard what it thought of him and the men he served. Driven back, the guard looked at Darro one last time, then turned and strode away before the impulse to rain filth on him could spread past the cul-de-sac. The stench was terrible, but Darro couldn’t help laughing as he gagged. As Ibdish’s rolling howl began behind them, crying out to know which of the half-dead bastards was going to wash his street, Darro turned to his only living sister.
“What was that about?” he asked.
She paused as if searching for words, then started bawling.
He daubed stinging ointment on his knuckles and leaned out his window, watching for trouble that hadn’t come. Not yet. In the back of his mind, he was planning out how they’d escape if the city guard came around the corner with blades and flame. But maybe they wouldn’t.
“I can’t believe I cried,” Alys said. She was sitting at the blackwood table, batting at the wallet the pale woman had left like a cat playing with a dead insect. “Right out where everyone was watching.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Darro said. “You could have bled out on the stones. Would have, if someone hadn’t thought of something funnier. Anyone would be shaken.”
“I was fine once you came. You’d have beaten him.”
“Maybe.”
“You would have,” Alys said. She’d been like this from the day she was born. Ready to assert that the world was the way she wished it could be, and then insist she was right until the gods relented. It frightened Darro to his bones, because she hadn’t grown out of it. The day she did would be painful.
“At the very least, will you stop working with Orrel?” he asked.
“He’s a good cutter.”
“He’s a skilled cutter. A good one wouldn’t have gone cocky and put his flea across the city guard.”
“It was my mistake. I’ll carry it.”
“Then you’re smarter than he is already. Tell me you’re not rubbing on him.”
Her flash of disgust was more reassuring than a denial would have been.
“Good,” Darro said. “You’re too young.”
“You don’t get to say that.”
“I’m your brother.”
“You’re not me. I’m the only one that gets to say.”
“I’m the one rushing out to the street to keep you from being gutted like a trout.”
“No one made you.”
Darro closed the bowl of ointment and considered his wounds in the light of the coming sunset. The red of the sky and his angered flesh blended together. As long as the pus didn’t bring heat with it, he’d be healed and the scabs forgotten by the week’s end. He balled his hands into a fist to judge the pain, and then put it aside. “That’s true. But I’ll do the same again next time, and I’d rather not die.”
She shifted, coming to sit next to him. Her eyes were solemn. They’d been that way since she was born, but in the last year, they’d gained a depth. She’d be a grown woman soon. He hoped she’d be a wise one, but he didn’t expect it. “I’ll try harder.”
“No. Will is less than wind,” Darro said. “You can’t just decide to do the same thing as always, only better. It doesn’t mean anything. Find what you did wrong, then make a rule to keep it from happening again. Something you can do. Like this: When you’ve made a pull, you keep your eyes down and forward for fifty steps. Just that, and you won’t have to struggle to keep from looking back.”
“All right.”
“Count fifty,” Darro said.
“Fifty steps,” Alys agreed.
He wondered whether she would actually do it. If she did, it would help. It might save her life one day. But the more he said it now, the less she’d hear.
Outside his window, a thin sliver far to the north showed where the river entered the city. The water glowed gold with the falling light. Darro had meant to find food somewhere. The bakers would be selling their stale bread right now at two bronze a loaf. There would still be festival tents up all through Riverport and Green Hill. The priests at the Temple might even be doling out little sacks of wheat and rye from the granary. He had some dried meat in his safe cache, though, and there were other things that needed doing.
Alys leaned back, tracing a flock of starlings with her fingers as they whirled over the water, preparing to settle until the next day’s dawn. When she spoke, her voice was low. “It won’t be safe for me at the common house tonight.”
It was good that she knew it. “Go to Mother’s.”
“They’ll look for me there. Let me stay here. No one knows where your room is. You change it all the time.”
“I don’t change this one, and you can’t stay here.”
“Please.”
His sister, who he’d carried on his back when she was too young to walk, took his bruised hand. The heaviness in Darro’s chest could have been impatience or love or both. He took the wallet from her.
“Go to Aunt Thorn,” he said. “She’ll keep you hidden until this all goes downstream.”
Alys coughed out a laugh. “Why would she do that?”
He counted out his ten pieces of silver and put half of them in Alys’s hand. “I’m keeping the rest. I have to eat too.”
She started to ask how he’d come by so much, and he shook his head before she could. He thought he saw shame in her expression, and he wanted to smooth it away with his thumbs. He wanted her to be the laughing child she’d been when he was her age. He wanted the world to corrupt everything, only not her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Be careful,” he said instead of farewell.
He sat alone for a time after she’d gone. The building popped and shifted as the daylight went from gold to grey. The summer heat loosened its grip on Kithamar, and a soft breeze from the north brought the smell of distant pine trees to cut the stink of horseshit and dogshit and manshit. Below him, an old woman who rode a beggar’s bowl at the river came home, muttering to herself the way she always did. Above him, the two girls who’d bought the right to sleep on the open roof for a bronze a week climbed into their places. His ceiling creaked under their weight. Voices rose from the streets. Some were laughing, some were shouting. Anything softer didn’t reach as far as his window. His hand only hurt a little.
This was all he had. All he could hope for, so long as he played by other people’s rules. The pale woman and the scarred man, the actor with the spider on his hand, the bluecloaks and the red: all any of them would see when they looked at him was a hired knife from the guts of Longhill lucky and strong enough to keep himself and his family alive. Until he caught a bad bounce or lived long enough for age to weaken him. Any path besides that, he’d have to cut for himself.
Reluctantly, he went back to his safe cache. He plucked up a stub of black, rotten-looking candle and went back to his little table. He closed the shutters against the glittering of torchlight below him and the glittering of stars above.
It took him a few strikes at the flint before a spark struck the black wick. Whatever the string was made from, it burned easily. The tiny yellow flame stretched up, then bounced down, going round as an eyeball. The stinking smoke thickened into ribbons, and the ribbons swirled, one into the other, riding draughts of something besides air. Slowly, the darkness congealed. It wasn’t the pale woman this time; this time it was the scarred man.
For a moment, they were silent. The scarred man smiled without pleasure. “You dismissed her.”
“I apologize for that. There was an emergency. Family.”
“We have other concerns than you. We have a hundred people in our compound as we speak, and each of them is more important than you are. We don’t simply come whenever you summon us.”
For a moment, Darro thought he would be turned away for the impertinence of going to Alys or for lighting the candle. That would make things interesting. He halfway hoped that it would go that way.
“I’m sorry,” Darro said, as if he wasn’t betraying anybody. “I wouldn’t bother you now, except we had open business when I was called away. She said something about a Bronze Coast woman who was also looking for this knife, yeah?”
The scarred man narrowed his eyes, and Darro waited, his heart picking up speed. He wondered if he’d already been caught out in his almost-lie.
After a moment, the scarred man said, “That’s right. And she’s dangerous.”
Aren’t we all? Darro thought, but didn’t say.
Aunt Thorn was a children’s story first. In the old version, her mother was a woman from when the Inlisc had been a rootless people following the herds, and her father was the god of mischief. There were a hundred stories about her. How Aunt Thorn stole fire from the sun. The time Aunt Thorn turned into a horsefly and killed the son of a rival tribe. How Aunt Thorn hid Baroth’s hunting dogs behind the moon. Alys had heard them all in one version or another, seen them turned into short and comic plays at the stage near the university in Seepwater, sung them herself sometimes when she’d been little.
No one knew the real name of the woman who’d taken the name for herself and her web of thugs. No one needed to. Aunt Thorn was the secret mayor of Longhill. If you were desperate, there was a door at the back of a particular alley that any Inlisc of Longhill could go to. Knock there, ask what you need, and pass money through the crack between door and stone. Sometimes a man would arrive with what you needed. Sometimes he’d bring you back your coin and tell you not to come to Aunt Thorn again. Sometimes something else would happen. Longhill could ask help from Aunt Thorn, so long as the one doing the asking was willing to risk being answered. Aunt Thorn might champion Longhill against the Hansch, but she was unpredictable. Having her attention was a throw of the dice, and anyone who crossed her ended ugly.
Once she’d explained her situation to the closed door, Alys pushed one of Darro’s silver coins under it with a twig she found in the street, then stood waiting. For a long moment, she thought nothing would happen. She was trying to think where she could go to stay safe until Aunt Thorn’s men came to find her when a deep scraping sound came, and the door swung open.
The man who waved her in was almost shorter than she was, but broad as a horse across the shoulders. A scar snaked across his neck and vanished under his collar.
“Come with me,” he said. Alys looked down the street, not sure what she was hoping to see, then followed him. The stairs were dark, the steps old stone worn smooth by use. With Longhill above them, they passed through a maze of brick halls. Twice, the small man greeted others—empty-faced men who Alys would have turned back from if she’d seen them in the streets. Here, she nodded at them. It seemed wise to be polite.
The short man came to a hall with an iron chain strung across its mouth. He took down the chain, motioned Alys through, and put it back up behind them. There were voices ahead—women’s voices in conversation. The short man scooted past Alys, opened a door she hadn’t seen, and led her into a long, low room. Half a dozen girls only a few years older than her and three women considerably older sat or lay on wooden bunks. Three candles in tin holders were the only light.
The short man put a hand on Alys’s shoulder.
“She’s a guest, not a worker,” he said. “Treat her like one of yours, but no clients.”
One of the older women nodded. The short man patted Alys like she was a friendly enough dog.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said to her. “Safer than outside, yeah? There are gods in the streets these days.”
Somewhere between her second night and her third day in the secret maze under the city, the bloodied man came. She’d lost track of sunset and sunrise, much less the more changeable aspects of the weather—rain or wind or the haze that sometimes rose from the river. The other girls and women talked and slept, coming and going on a schedule that Alys couldn’t fathom and didn’t inquire about. They didn’t call each other by name, not even the pet names that anyone would have for the people they spent time with. Alys had to think it was because she was there, and petty intimacies like that weren’t something that belonged in front of strangers. She respected the message they were giving her and kept herself to herself. No one asked about her, and she learned nothing about them until he came in.
She was on a bunk, braiding and unbraiding a length of her hair for something to do, when his voice came. It was low and masculine and raw with distress. At first, she couldn’t make out what he was saying, and she assumed that whatever was going on was Aunt Thorn’s business and none of her own. But he kept getting louder and closer. He was shouting something like Arja or Erja, and one of the other younger girls spat out an obscenity and ran out of the room. Alys sat up.
He was a stone wall of a man, broad across the shoulders and thick with muscle. His hair was black and greasy, and his shirt and trousers were dark with blood. He fumbled with the chain until it dropped and he staggered in, a wineskin in one meaty fist, and looked around. When his gaze landed on her, Alys realized she was the only other person in the room.
“Erja,” he said. “Where’s Erja?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
A look of vast annoyance narrowed his mouth just as the younger girl came back, one of the older women close behind her.
“Fuck’s sake, Gosling,” the older woman said, and the man smiled.
“Erja!” he said. “I knew you’d be here.”
“Lie back,” the older woman—Erja, apparently—said, then gestured to the girl. Together, they stripped the man of his shirt and cut his trousers free with a small knife. Alys sat, stunned by the vision of this vast, utterly naked man, sitting on the floor and drinking like it was all perfectly normal. There was a long cut along his chest and two more deep in his left arm. Every breath seemed to push a fresh stream of blood out. His gaze never left Erja.
The younger girl brought a green lacquered box from someplace deep in the brick halls and set it by Erja’s knees.
“What were you thinking?” the older woman said as she pulled a spool of black thread and a hooked bone needle from the box. “You should have gone to the hospital. Not brought this here.”
“They’d look for me there,” the bloodied man said with a grin. “It’s bad luck going outside the city walls anyway. You know that.”
“It’s bad luck bleeding on my fucking floor,” she said, but a hint of friendliness had crept into her voice. She took out a stone bowl filled with a thick grey paste. “This is going to sting.”
“You’d never hurt me,” the man said. Still, he hissed when she rubbed it into his wounds and cried out when she took the bone needle and started sewing him closed.
“Tell me what happened,” she said. “It’ll take your mind off the pain.”
“Was getting the load from Witter, only he was holding out. Had the cart right there on the bridge and said he wouldn’t let it go unless we paid him double. Mirril was backing him too.”
Erja made a little encouraging sound in the back of her throat. Alys shifted forward on her bunk to get a better look. The gaping cut was almost half closed already, the older woman’s hands weaving thread and skin with the speed of long practice. The grey paste, whatever it was, had stopped the bleeding. The man grinned and closed his eyes. Alys had never seen a man so clearly fashioned for violence and also so utterly vulnerable. He was magnificent in a frightening way.
“So,” he said, “I told him ‘Here’s a counter-offer. I throw it in the river, everyone starts killing everyone else, and nobody gets paid for any of it.’”
Erja laughed, and Alys found herself smiling too. The young woman came back with a bucket of water and a clean rag. Alys hadn’t noticed her leaving.
“Oh, Gosling.”
“It’s what my mother did when my brothers started fighting over something. Take it away from all of us, yeah?”
“So Mirril and Witter did this?”
“Them? No. But we were shouting, and the bluecloaks noticed us.”
“The guard cut you?” The bloodied man nodded, and the older woman shook her head. “Maybe it’s best you didn’t go to the hospital after all.”
“I knew you’d see to me. I just need a little rest,” the bloodied man said, and squeezed the dregs out from his wineskin. The younger woman cleaned the blood off him as his gaze moved back to Alys.
“Who’s this one?” he asked with a leer.
“Guest of the house,” Erja said, and the big man scowled, disappointed. When he was clean, he stood and walked, still naked, back out into the brick tunnels. The younger woman put the iron chain up behind him after he left. When Alys looked up, the older woman locked eyes with her.
