Age of Ash, page 4
“You didn’t see any of that, now, did you?”
“Nothing,” Alys said.
Erja closed her lacquered box with a snap. “Good choice.”
The broken woman came to the river at night.
She walked unsteadily through the thin young trees, pulling herself forward with every step. The pain in her shoulder and side had gone from sharp to a deep ache as the injured muscles tightened and set. Her wounds hurt less than the betrayal. The betrayal hurt less than the guttering of her hopes. She fought to breathe, and knew that she was losing the fight.
Above her, beyond the trees, the vast wall of a hillside they called Oldgate glimmered. At its top, her enemy’s house. If she died here, the beast might never know that her bones rested at its feet. How odd to be so vast that your victories went unnoticed.
She chanted as she went, the rhythm of the words complicated by her hitching breath and the rushing of the river. They echoed in her mind, the syllables growing deeper, calling forth a space that was not space. The spiritual flesh of the city was not as thin as it had been on the night after Ausai died, but it wasn’t as thick as when he had lived. That was a sign in itself, and she tried to take comfort in it.
Moonlight flickered from between a hundred thousand late summer leaves. Her feet sank into the thin, spongy litter of old rot. The day’s heat was gone, and the cold that seemed to run through Kithamar’s veins caressed her. She swallowed to loosen her throat and returned to her chanting and her walk.
She didn’t hear him approach. He was simply there, looking like an old man with wiry hair sitting on a wide, wild stone. She nodded her respect, and thought she saw amusement in his eyes.
“Looks like you’re having a shitty day,” the old man said. “What happened to you?”
“I seek shelter,” she gasped. The words hurt deep in her chest.
The old man tilted his head like a dog hearing a distant whistle. “Your accent’s… Endil? Or, nah. Bronze Coast.”
“I am priest of the six, and sworn of the spirit house.”
“Long way from home, you.”
“I know what you are, lord. Will you grant me this?”
The old man spread his hands, palms open. There were calluses on his fingers, and his nails were thick and poorly trimmed. “I’m just some asshole out enjoying the moonlight. Same as you.”
“We have the same enemies. Will you grant me this?”
He sobered and went silent. She waited until she was sure he was not going to speak, and then she waited longer. She had no place else she could go.
At last, he shook his head. “No. This city is on fire, except nobody sees it. Risks are too high. There’s no good reason for me to put my head out of my shell now, and a hundred good reasons not to.”
“Help me, bury me, or watch me rot; I don’t have the strength to leave here.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t, do you?”
“Will you grant me this?”
It was the third time. The one that commanded an answer. The thing that looked like an old man chuckled, and then sighed. “Fine. Come with me. We’ll see what we can do.”
He turned and began to walk. When she tried to follow, her legs failed and she sank to the earth. The forest floor smelled of rot and new growth. It ticked with the movement of insects. Discovering that her eyes had closed, she tried to open them. Then tried again.
Strong arms reached under her knees and across her shoulders. When the thing that looked like an old man lifted her, pain shrieked across her body, but as it walked—its rolling gait like the shifting of a horse or a boat on choppy water—she leaned her head against its shoulder and the discomfort faded to something bearable.
“My thanks, Lord—”
“Yeah, don’t use that name here,” he said. “Call me Goro.”
Eight long days after the coronation of Byrn a Sal, Grey Linnet woke before dawn. She had been Harld’s Linnet when her husband had been alive, and Little Linnet and Red Linnet and Linnet Maganschild before that. Longhill had seen every incarnation of her from girl to woman to elder of the street.
When she rose from her small cot, she shooed out the rats with no great violence. She’d known rats her whole life. They held no terror for her. She ate a little of yesterday’s bread, took her sack over her shoulder, and started her morning rounds gathering up the children: Dark Aman whose mother was Danna, Averith’s girl; Big Salla and Little Salla, who lived across the street from each other and liked to hold hands when they walked; Elbrith Thin-as-a-Reed with his shock of white hair like an old man’s though he was only seven. Some days, Grey Linnet got better than a dozen of Longhill’s young. Other times, she might only find three or four.
She took them to the little wilderness in the center of Kithamar where the living river put down sand and soil carved away from under the docks and port. The river had too many moods for making a home on the Silt to be anything but foolish, but things washed up there that had value. Even if the hunt brought her nothing, their parents would give her a bronze now and then for keeping the little ones out from underfoot.
In the rose-and-grey before dawn, Linnet passed by Aunt Thorn’s door and saw Linly’s girl Alys coming out. It didn’t seem so long since the girl had been one of her little ones. Now, here she was with a face and body more like a woman than a girl. Linnet cooed the way she did with the children, clapped her hands together, and felt her own death a little closer than before.
“Look at you! My little Alys Woodmouse, all changed. You look so lovely, child. So lovely.”
“You haven’t changed at all,” Alys said, and suffered Linnet to take her arm and pull her a little way along the street.
“Working for Aunt Thorn now? I would never have guessed it.”
“I’m not,” Alys said. “I had some trouble. I’ve been buying safety.”
Linnet nodded, tugging the girl along. “Good, and good. Pay them like Aunt Thorn what they’re owed, but never give them power over you. I’ve seen so many go that way, you know. So many. You were always a good, honest child.”
“I should let you go,” Alys said. She didn’t quite keep the pity out of her voice, but she kissed Grey Linnet’s cheek before she turned and walked away. She hadn’t had to do that. Linnet watched her go, thinking about who she’d been when her hips had moved like Alys’s.
It proved a good day. She had a half dozen pairs of small, willing hands and sharp, childish eyes to add to her own before the sun rose up as high as the Temple’s crown. They went through Seepwater with the morning sun on their backs, skipping together and singing the song about the little dog that bit off her own tail.
Linnet’s eyes weren’t what they had been, and her feet and hands ached at the end of the day. If the children ever stopped coming with her, she’d starve, so she danced and capered and kept them happy, no matter how she felt. There were worse ways for a woman her age to live.
At the trade bridge between Seepwater and the Smoke—yellow brick and black mortar—a pole stood with bits of cloth nailed to it: a little blue dress, a little yellow blouse, and a soft white cap that might have fit a child of five or six years. They’d been taken from a drowned body and put here for the parents to identify.
Elbrith Thin-as-a-Reed tugged her sleeve. “What are you thinking, Grandmother?”
I am thinking that children are like elm seeds on the river: some manage to set roots, but most rot in the flow.
“I am wondering what treasures the good river brought us today,” she said, then rubbed her hands together. “And I am just gid-gid-giddy as a pony to find out!”
The children shrieked and ran across the wide bridge. Grey Linnet laughed because she always laughed and followed as if she didn’t dread the clamber down the stones.
If she had known then what she would find, she’d have turned back.
“What was it like?” Sammish asked.
Alys shrugged. “They put me in a tunnel, took my money, and gave me food and water and places to sleep and shit, and a half dozen whores to play cards with when they weren’t sleeping or working. It was fine.”
“You’re back, then?” Sammish asked.
“I am,” Alys said. “I have to be. I’m out of money, no thanks to Orrel. Need to talk to him.”
It wasn’t entirely true, but it was nearly so. She still had one of Darro’s silver coins. It would have bought her another day or two, but after a week underground, she’d been hungry for sunlight.
“Haven’t seen Orrel since the day,” Sammish said, and her tone made it commiseration.
“He owes you too?”
Sammish shrugged. Alys sat next to her on the thin wooden bench, plucked up a clod of maybe-mud, maybe-manure, and tossed it at a flock of pigeons that rose into the air: black bodies against the white haze.
“Your brother was looking for him,” Sammish said.
“If Darro found him, that may be where our money is. What have I missed while I was gone?”
Sammish leaned back, laced her hands behind her head, and recounted the gossip. The prince had called a council of the high families—“everyone of noble blood,” they said—and then canceled it before they could meet. There had been a fight in Riverport and a bluecloak had been killed, but no one was sure who exactly had been involved, and no one from Longhill seemed to have had a blade in it. Someone had stolen a bolt of Gaddivan silk from a house in Newmarket, and Sammish had taken work from a pawnbroker trying to find who’d taken it and offer prices. So far, it hadn’t turned up.
Sammish warmed as she spoke, and the color in her cheeks almost made her pretty. When she shrugged to say that was all she could think of, Alys pulled the last silver coin from her belt. Sammish looked hopeful, and Alys wondered how long it had been since the other girl had eaten.
“Pay me back when Orrel shows his face?” Alys asked.
Sammish grinned.
At the south gate, street traffic was thicker than usual with carts and mules hauling in crops from the farmlands: beets piled up as high as a standing man, smelling of fresh dirt and bruised leaves; peas and beans by the sackful, bouncing against the shoulders of haulers; even a few green-black melons, skins shining like they’d been polished, in the bed of a rough wooden cart.
The greater crop would come soon, and Kithamar would celebrate with pies and cakes and the slaughter of animals. Everyone would try to get fat enough to live through spring.
The wide lands outside the city tempted Alys, but guards stood by the gates, counting the carts and charging the tax. They wore blue, and while she didn’t recognize any of them as the man who’d chased her to Ibdish’s doorway, she wasn’t sure enough to risk it. They went to Seepwater and the university instead.
Tuns of beer cooled and bumped against each other in the sluggish water of the canal. Strips of spiced meat cooked on a street kitchen’s iron grate, the fat sizzling and calling up little bursts of flame. They sat at the canal and listened to young men with clipped, affected accents argue about whether nature could intend anything. None of the words meant much to Alys, but the boys who spoke them were pretty.
Alys had meant to keep back half the coin’s value, but the sun hadn’t touched the top of Palace Hill when the money ran out.
“Glad you’re back,” Sammish said with a slightly boozy, slightly overfed grin.
“Where else would I go?” Alys said with a smile only a little soured by the money she’d let herself waste.
“Good,” Sammish said, leaned forward, and hugged her like they were sisters, then tottered back north, vanishing into the street before she had gone a dozen steps. Alys sat alone at the canal for a time, trying to enjoy it by herself, but without someone to look up to her and be grateful for her brother’s money, the afternoon lost its salt.
Early as it was, her mind turned to where she’d be sleeping when the night came. She’d been gone long enough that her place at the common house would have gone to someone else, and it was late in the day to put her name in the queue. She couldn’t go back to Darro without him asking why she wasn’t still with Aunt Thorn. It was warm enough that she could pick a corner and sleep in the open, but if rain didn’t soak her, dew would. Her mother’s room meant Alys would have to put up with her mother’s musky tea and her sometime-lovers. It seemed the least unpleasant of her options.
Since last winter, her mother’s place was in a canyon of buildings, each sharing walls with those at its side. A rat could run across the street from corner to corner and never come closer than twelve feet from the ground. She walked there with the slow step of someone lost in her own daydreams and speculations.
Where the narrow street made its last curve, her mother was standing outside the thin, red-washed door, her mouth as slack and dismayed as a fish. Grey Linnet stood beside her, eyes red from crying. Alys felt her footsteps slow. Her mother saw her, and Linnet turned, pressed a palm to her old, worm-lipped mouth, and cried out.
“Alys! Oh, Woodmouse. I’m so sorry. We found him by the water. I’m so, so sorry, child. I am.”
In death, Darro didn’t look like he was sleeping. He didn’t even look like Darro.
His skin was paler than it should have been; his lips and his skin were the same shade of colorless, like they’d been carved from a single block of wax. His arms and legs, water-swollen, were thick and less defined than the ones she remembered. Only his hair looked right, even if it grew from the wrong head. Like a child’s clay doll, the corpse only resembled her brother.
The river did that.
His wounds were only little changes in texture. There was no blood. A few pale ovals marked where fish had bitten him. The cut that had killed him was easy to overlook, even though it was on his chest. A thin line where the skin had pulled back and not as long as the first knuckle of her thumb just to the left of his breastbone. Alys had seen sword wounds before, but they had been live ones, with blood still spilling out or mangled by clots and bandaging. This one looked too clean to be real and too small to let a man’s life out. She had the perverse urge to put her finger into it and see how deep it went.
They killed him, she thought, but with a distance, as if she were only trying the idea on for fit. She didn’t have a they, but that was small. Hardly an annoyance. Killed him was the part that was too wide, too airy, too empty somehow to fit inside her. It was like They unmade the color green, or They murdered shoestrings. It was nonsense.
They killed Darro.
The priests had laid him out in a small temple near the river. The doors were red cloth stretched over frames of thin pine. Incense by the handful tried to cover the smell of death. The clove-and-rose smoke was so thick it was a taste. Candles and butter lamps filled the room with a soft yellow light and a pressing heat. The icons of the gods were all bronze or carved wood, and they came from every tradition: the Three Mothers, the blind god Adrohin, Lord Kauth and Lady Er, a dozen more. The priests had arranged them to look toward the altar, as if the great powers of this world and the worlds beyond were all sharing in the grief. Only Shau, the two-bodied Hansch god who guarded the gate between justice and mercy, looked away out the window as if to say What you are seeking is not here.
A trickle of sweat ran down Alys’s face and stung her eye. Even with that, she didn’t weep. She only looked at the body in the soft, steady light. She began to understand that something precious was gone. She waited to see how she would react.
“I’m very sorry,” the priest said. “Death is a great mystery.”
Darro didn’t breathe. His eyes didn’t move. They had killed him.
“Your mother said he kept the Mattin rites?”
“If she says so. I don’t know.”
The priest lowered his head. For a moment, neither of them spoke. When he did, his tone was an apology. “She asked for the partial rite. I understand if that’s—”
“Full rites,” Alys said.
“Yes. Yes, that would be better, but it would require—”
“I’ll find a way to pay for it. Full rites. Everyone knows the river’s hungry. His soul’s not safe unless it’s full rites.”
“As you say, little sister.”
He stepped back. The candle flames bowed as one, pulled by the same breeze. She moved closer to the altar. A sudden storm woke in her belly—rage or grief or something else—and she wondered whether she was getting ill. She thought about vomiting, but it seemed childish and overdramatic. Darro, who had sung her songs when their mother was too drunk to care for them, looked up at nothing from half-closed eyes. She took his hand, and it felt cold. She wanted to say something. She didn’t know what.
In the twilight, Kithamar seemed like a place she’d never been before. Like she’d woken from a dream into a city that was too real to bear.
The stars were coming out, just a few at first with more appearing with every minute. Summer ivy traced its way up the mortar in the low stone walls. The flatboats floated on the canals with men calling to each other as they negotiated their ways across the water and into the warehouses and boathouses for the night. A small flock of finches, bright as festival kerchiefs, sped past her, fleeing some enemy she couldn’t see. The stink of temple slowly left her nose, and the stink of the canal took its place. The storm in her grew wider, louder, more viciously angry as she walked.
The mourning group milling in the street outside her mother’s house were mostly older men and women, but she recognized some of Darro’s friends among them. Little Coop, who worked as a cutter some days, stood at the edge of the group, neither with it nor apart from it. Lurrie, who’d had eyes for Darro when they were both Alys’s age, wept quietly. A grey-haired man sat with his back against the raw wood wall and played a mournful song on a reed flute.
Someone had set up a pot on the street and started a little fire under it, held in place by stones, with a jug of water beside it in case it had to be quenched quickly. Aunt Daidan sat beside it while Grey Linnet served out watery stew to all who came. There would be music and crying and stories tonight. Her mother would be fed on beer and sympathy. And when the morning came, there would be a soot mark on the street where the cookfire had been. It might stay there until the next hard rain.
