Age of Ash, page 5
Alys’s rage glowed brighter than the flames.
Alys stepped into the circle of light. Linnet rose, opening her arms as if for an embrace. “Oh, Woodmouse!” Alys recoiled.
“Where is she?” Alys asked. “Where’s my fucking mother?”
“Linly?” Grey Linnet said as she pulled back and glanced over her shoulder to the darkness of the thin house. Alys heard someone calling her name like the echo across the river.
Her mother sat in the darkness by her little cot: grey, greasy hair, permanently reddened eyes, and a bottle of beer in one hand. She looked up as Alys stepped in, and her gaze swam a little trying to find focus. She was drunk.
In the corner, an old man sat shaking his head at nothing. One of her mother’s sometimes men. Alys didn’t know him and didn’t care about him.
“Daughter.” Her voice was slurred. “We’re all that’s left, you and I. Come here. Come to your ma.”
“Partial rites?” Alys said, and her mother’s bloodshot eyes snapped closed. Her lips pressed thin, and she turned away. The rage in Alys’s chest redoubled. “They found him in the water. He died in the river!”
The voices from the street went quiet, listening. The reed flute wheezed and lost its song.
“He was dead before they put him in,” her mother said. “A strike like that one, and my boy was gone before he touched the ground. You could see that by looking.”
“Do you know that? Were you there?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
Her mother’s lover rose, his wide, greyish fingers fluttering in distress like moths. Alys ignored him. “Were you there?”
“No, I wasn’t. Nobody was.”
“Then you don’t know!” Alys shouted.
“The rites are a pull,” her mother’s lover said. His voice was as dusty and insubstantial as the rest of him. “I was a priest for a few years down on the river towns. Anyone lost to the water, we’d charge double. It was just part of the pull.”
A thin tear sheeted down her mother’s cheek, and it felt like an insult.
“It’s because you don’t have the money, isn’t it?” Alys said. “You drank away everything you had, and now you can’t pay for his rites?” The lover tried to step in, and Alys prodded his thin, chicken-ribbed chest. “If you come between us, I will break you. Do you understand?”
Fear bloomed in the old man’s face, but he stood his ground. A hand took Alys’s shoulder. Grey Linnet. The woman’s soft-featured face was red at the eyes and nose. Her mouth made a tiny “o” as she shook her head. “It’s the grief, Woodmouse. Don’t let the grief talk.”
Alys pulled herself away, but Linnet stepped toward her, still talking. No no no. It’s all right. Pain makes us bite. You don’t have to bite. Alys made a fist, placed her knuckles between Linnet’s breasts, and shoved her back.
“Do not ever fucking touch me,” she said. To her horror, there was a thickness in her voice. She turned back to her mother. “If you can’t take care of Darro, I will, and—”
Sobs choked off whatever else she would have said. She turned, wiping her streaming eyes with a sleeve, and stalked out into the darkness, trembling like the city was shaking with her.
The night was warm, even with the sun gone. The sound of the mourning party faded away behind her. Only her hitching, hurt breath stayed with her, tenacious as a dog. She walked west, toward the river, head down and jaw clenched. At first, she didn’t know where she was going.
Then she did.
The edge of Longhill by moonlight was a darkness with greater darknesses folded in it. Even the fullest moon had to fight down to the narrow, curving streets. Other parts of Kithamar might have public lanterns or bluecloak guards patrolling with torchbearers. The wooden buildings of Longhill left little appetite for open flame, and if the guard came here after sunset, it was with violence in mind.
The echoes of her footsteps told her how open the street was. The texture of the cobbles in the road gave her some sense of where she was. A dog ran past her, its nails ticking against the stone. A man called out, but not so close that he was a threat.
If, as the builders said, houses learned by how they were used, the one where Darro kept his private room had learned to keep secrets: black under the stars and mazy within. For a moment, looking up at the looming shadow and the stars behind it, she almost changed her mind. There would be other places she could sleep tonight. She’d bite her own hand off before she went to her mother, but one of her friends would take pity. The only reason to go to Darro’s room was that it was still Darro’s, and nothing else was.
A narrow arch led to tightly winding, steep, lightless stairs. The scratching in the walls as she passed might have been rats or insects or the other tenants. She knew the trick of opening his lock, and slid into his room as quietly as she could. From the roof above her, a girl’s voice muttered. When Alys opened the shutters, moonlight spilled into the room like milk water. She sat at Darro’s blackwood table. The last place she had seen him. Her breath was calm now, but shallow. And it hurt.
She was empty. The small, dark rooms were empty. All the wide sky was empty. Sitting alone here, where no one would see her, she could feel the hollowness in her body. The anger was gone. And the grief. She’d fallen into a kind of numbness.
“Darro?” she whispered, and for a moment she could almost convince herself that there was someone there to answer back. The silence seemed to offer comfort or promise, but then it went on, and the silence was empty too.
She rose and went toward his pallet. She didn’t see the opened cache drawer under the slats until her ankle hit it. The pain was like being bitten. She jumped back, cursing, and then, when the sting began to fade, moved forward on her knees, feeling ahead of her in the dark.
The safe cache was a board made to fit into a section of wall. The latch was cunning. If it hadn’t stood open, she wouldn’t have found it. The moonlight barely came back this far. Alys pulled out Darro’s last, secret things: a cloth wallet, a lump of something black and waxy, a dagger in a leather sheath. She took them to the table and the light.
The wax stump was just a bit of candle with a prickly, dark wick. The blade was something more. The leather of the sheath was well made, with thick thongs to tie it to a belt, and an oval showed where a stone had been set in it and then pried off. When she drew it, the knife seemed to grab the light. The workmanship was good, and letters and symbols she couldn’t read had been worked into the flat. The cloth wallet was soiled. She saw hundreds like it folded over belts every day. It rang when she weighed it in her hands. The coins that spilled out on the table were smaller than she was used to seeing. Some had the crest and likeness of Ausai a Sal. Others were marked with the flowing script of the Bronze Coast and images of a mountain she didn’t know. But even the coins stamped in Kithamar were uncanny. Unfamiliar. Alys’s mind rebelled. They were too dark for silver, too bright for bronze.
Fingers trembling, she counted gold coins: one dozen, and then another. Enough money to buy every building on the street three times over. It was more pure wealth than she had ever seen in her life. Her heartbeat went fast, like she’d been running.
They killed him. As shocked and hurt as she’d been, she hadn’t asked herself until now who they were or why they’d done it. This was why. This had to be why. Her heart had ached. Now fear filled it like dark water.
She looked out the window at the street. Were there shapes in the shadows? Was someone there? If they weren’t yet, they would be.
Darro, she thought, what were you caught in?
She made a little pocket of her shirt’s hem, put it all—bag, blade, and candle—into the fold. Holding it closed, she went down into the night, vanishing before anybody could find her.
Orrel was missing, and apart from some lost money, Sammish didn’t care. Alys was missing, and about that, Sammish cared very much.
She understood in a vague, abstract way that there had been a time she hadn’t been in love with Alys. That she hadn’t dreamed about her and gone to the taprooms Alys liked and worked any pull Alys would have her on. After all, Sammish had been born a baby like anyone else, and on that day she hadn’t known the dark-haired girl with the sly smile and the broad shoulders. It stood to reason that Sammish had learned about Alys along with every other unchanging thing: the sky was blue, the river was cold, and she would lay her heart on Alys’s altar if the older girl only gave her a sign. Alys didn’t know because Sammish never said it, and because she was good at not being seen.
So while Orrel could live or die on his own schedule and not mean much to Sammish, Alys hadn’t been seen in Longhill since the day they’d found Darro’s corpse, and that mattered to her deeply.
“Any knives for me this week?” Sammish asked.
The alley was behind a row of stalls in Newmarket. The thin stretched-cloth door of the butcher’s stood open before her. A pile of cracked bones and gristle seethed with flies, and blood was soaking up into her shoes, but the old butcher’s smile was kindly.
“Is everything all right?” he asked. And when she didn’t answer, “You seem anxious.”
Today, the priest was saying the final rites for Darro, and if Alys wasn’t there, Sammish didn’t know where she would ever find her. But Sammish smiled the way she thought he’d find charming and shook her head. If he didn’t believe her, he didn’t press.
“Wait there,” he said, then trundled back into the cool and dark of his shop. Sammish shifted her weight from one leg to the other, keeping her mouth closed and waving away the insects that tried to drink from her eyes. The leather sack at her hip wasn’t hers. It belonged to a whetstone man who lent it to her once each week. For every five knives she brought him to sharpen, he paid her enough to buy a meal or a night’s shelter. Other days, she did other work: sweeping the street outside a merchant’s stall in Seepwater, wrapping twine for a weaver east by the Temple, hunting rats for the magistrate at a bronze coin for a dozen.
No one of her jobs would keep her from being streetbound, but all of them together were enough to eke out rent on a little room by a baker’s kiln and enough food to live on. She liked the knife work best, even if it meant the most running. The merchant family couldn’t hide their contempt and sometimes forgot to pay, the twine left her fingers raw, and she felt sorry for the rats. The money was just to keep her alive until she could reap the greater harvest later.
The whetstone man—Arnal his name was—had a brother who managed a brewery in Seepwater. He didn’t own it—some rich family in Riverport did that—but he had the day-to-day running of it, including the choice of who sat behind the iron grates and marked wagers. Sammish was learning the numbers and letters they used there.
A few months of showing up for Arnal and his knives to prove she was reliable, and also teaching herself how to run the wagers, and then she planned to push for a job at the brewer’s. She went about it like it was a pull, even though it broke no laws. Something about wanting it that badly felt like crime.
Steady indoor work with enough coin in a week to afford a few rooms where she could eat bread that wasn’t two days stale and cheese that wasn’t half rind. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she would imagine her way into that future with the scent of lavender fresh cut from the herb gardens outside the hospital south of the city and a mattress of fresh straw sighing under their bodies as they shifted in languorous sleep.
In her dream, it was always the both of them. Her and Alys.
The old butcher trundled back toward her, a long, curved blade in his fist. She smiled as he cracked open the door and handed it through. She didn’t know why he bothered with the cloth. There were as many flies in the shop as out of it.
“Take good care of my boy there,” the butcher said.
“Always,” Sammish said as she folded the blade into a sheet of leather the way Arnal had taught her and put it in her satchel with the others. “I’ll have him back to you by sundown.”
“Bring it before the market closes, and there’ll be something in it for you.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sammish said with a little bow, then turned back down the alley and left the blood and rot and flies behind. Her shoes were dark and sticky, and for a moment a fly was trapped in her hair. She’d never seen war, but she imagined it was like the alley behind a butcher’s shop, only better because she liked animals more than she liked people. On a battlefield, the flies all danced on bodies that had had the chance to fight back.
She made her way in a loop, moving through Newmarket and east to the outskirts around the Temple where the gods of the city were worshipped and the grain stored against emergency, moving fast, but also looking through every crowd at every corner on the off chance she’d see Alys in it.
She passed through streets and alleys, thin private yards and streets that had been closed off and forgotten, all to avoid the bluecloaks who might stop her and ask for proof she’d paid the city’s tax on her work. She hadn’t.
Riverport, Newmarket, the Temple, Seepwater: there was no place east of the Khahon that Sammish didn’t know, but she didn’t brag about it. Pride was the poison of Longhill. To want better than life and death in the narrow, winding alleys was disloyalty. To try for even so small an escape as work in Seepwater seemed complicit in the city’s contempt for Longhill and the Inlisc who lived there. She knew to keep her ambitions to herself.
She came to the whetstone man’s shed just before midday. The heat was climbing, and the air had a thick humidity that stuck her tunic against her back. The afternoon would be as hot as midsummer, even if the night came a little sooner. The shed had no windows, and the air inside it was sluggish.
“What do we have today?” Arnal asked. He was older with white hair in tight curls that stood away from his scalp like they were trying to get away from him. She liked his voice. He always seemed like he was on the edge of laughing at something that wasn’t her.
Sammish sat on the floor at his feet and undid the satchel’s ties. “Shears from the tailor’s shop under the chandlers’ guild hall. She said to tell you these were for wool, not cotton. This hooked one here is from the cobbler’s by the temple gate.”
“Hard leather or soft?”
“This one’s for hard. I’ve got another one here for soft. Soft has the red handle. There’s the usual from the Newmarket butcher.”
Arnal nodded, then pointed to the last remaining blade. “That?”
Sammish held up the ritual dagger with its false runes and glass gemstones. “Fortune-teller.”
“Why do they need an edge on it?”
“Sometimes they bleed a chicken.”
Arnal opened the little water sluice that kept his stone wet. Sammish stood, brushing the dust off her legs, and turned toward the door.
“You’re not staying to run them home?” Arnal asked.
“I’ll be back. I have to check something first.”
“Death is division,” the priest said. “Not only for the dying who passes from this world to the coming cycle, but within each of us. We are trapped between the life we had when our friend, our lover, our parent, our child was with us, and this diminished world without them. We are split in two, and bringing ourselves back to wholeness is the spiritual work of mourning.”
Darro’s body was already gone. The priests had burned it to ashes over the course of three days, chanting and praying over the kiln as it worked. What had been a man now fit in a box of stained scrap oak no longer than her forearm.
The pews in the little common temple had half a dozen people in them. Alys’s mother was there. One of Darro’s old lovers sat apart, her eyes shining and bloodshot. A few others from the quarter who had known the man and either liked him better than Sammish guessed or enjoyed the ritual for its own sake sat together gossiping quietly.
Alys wasn’t there.
“In the name of all the gods of Kithamar,” the priest intoned, “and in the name of the man we knew as Darro, and in the names of those who remain in this world to carry his memory on, we now sing his soul to safety.”
The death song was a single melody; the priest’s voice was hoarse and low. The words were old Inlisc. Sammish had heard them before, but she didn’t know what they meant. She lowered her head and pretended to pray to gods she didn’t believe in on behalf of a soul she didn’t care about. All she really meant was Please let Alys be all right.
At the end, the priest took a blade and carved a mark in the box. As Darro had been the name of his life, his deathmark would be the name of his absence from the world. The priest rubbed bright yellow wax to fill the new-carved grooves, and the full rites were complete. Neither the water nor the sky nor any spirit had claim on Darro’s soul now. To Sammish’s mind, that put him ahead of everyone else in the room.
Alys’s mother went up to claim her son’s ashes, but the priest only took her hand, murmuring soft words in a kind voice. He didn’t pass the box over. Sammish saw a flash of humiliation in the old woman’s face and felt something like joy leap up in her chest. The only reason Sammish could think that he wouldn’t give the box to Darro’s mother was that the old woman hadn’t paid for the rites. Which meant that even though Alys wasn’t here now, she would be. Alys would come for Darro’s ashes, and when she did, Sammish would be there.
The others left, and the priests cleared ceremonial tools away. Sammish stayed. She’d take the knives back to their right places in the morning if she had to. The priest looked at her, a question in his slow, heavy eyes. She said nothing and waited before the empty altar with a hundred different gods and no one.
It was dark before she came.
The public door scraped, and Alys came in like a thief. The cloak over her head might have hidden her from someone who didn’t know her, hadn’t watched her from the corners of their eyes, wasn’t hoping to see her there, but Sammish’s heart tightened and relaxed in the same moment before Alys had taken three steps toward the altar. The priest came forward to meet her, the box of Darro’s ashes in his hand. Alys took it, spoke a few words too softly to be heard, and let the priest return to his duties. She traced the deathmark with her fingertips and let the hood fall back a few inches. In the warm light, the darkness under her eyes looked like bruises, but they were likely only sleeplessness.
