Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 96
Sanais stumbled back.
Amber leapt back onto her feet and faced her. She looked fierce and pale in the garish light of the two flickering braziers.
Amber struck first; a thrust, jab, feint from the second phase of the riae.
Sanais parried. Struck, Midnight Bloom to Night flower to --
But Amber lunged right through the motion, broke apart Sanais’s smooth concentration, and landed a heavy blow to Sanais’s lower rib cage that made Sanais gasp and stumble back.
Sanais leapt away from Amber’s second attack.
Dilen struck.
Sanais had not seen him approach. Some part of her still thought he was behind her. He came from behind Amber and took her off her feet with a blow to the small of her back.
Dilen did not wait for Amber to get up, but moved for Dakarai, who was already fighting Hanif and Gahiji. Hanif, Sanais saw, was still sore and wounded from the clan battle the day before, and minced his steps. He did more defending than striking. Gahiji had put in two good jabs to Dakarai’s torso, but they only seemed to inspire Dakarai’s stength.
Dilen kicked out Dakarai’s feet from under him. When he fell, Dilen came down on top of him.
Amber struggled up from her sprawl and turned to kick out at Dilen, but Sanais kicked her in the jaw, a solid hit that sent Amber reeling back against the floor.
“Hanif!” Dilen yelled. He had brought his arm up under Dakarai’s chin and yanked the big man’s head back, baring the throat.
Sanais scrambled toward Amber.
Hanif sliced deep into Dakarai’s throat. Dakarai gurgled at him. Blood spilled down his naked torso.
Dilen held him until the shine left his eyes.
Sanais found a place squatting next to Amber. Amber still had not moved after her fall.
Dakarai’s dark blood pooled across the floor, coalesced around Amber’s cheek. Only then did she raise her head. Amber looked once at the body, then the blood. She tried to sit up; Sanais had to catch her before she fell again.
Dilen sat down behind Dakarai’s huge body. Hanif knelt down in front of his dead brother’s head. Gahiji stood behind him.
The silence stretched out.
Amber broke it. “I need a dagger,” she said.
“No you don’t,” Sanais said.
“You don’t,” Amber spat, “I do.”
“Don’t be a fool, Amber,” Hanif said. His hands were stained in his brother’s blood. “I’ll take your bond.”
“It’s a matter of honor,” Amber said. “I am honor bound. He died in my service. I am a spider, Hanif.” She gazed up at Sanais. “As are you,” she murmured. “You to the end. So you know what I speak of when I say I am honor bound. Give me a dagger.”
“You nearly killed me,” Dilen said. “Leave the dagger.”
Amber stood, swayed slightly on her feet. She walked to Hanif, jerked the bloody dagger from his hand.
“Amber,” Hanif said.
Sanais stood up and reached for her. “Amber -“
“You would have killed me if you could,” Amber said to her. She smiled, and the smile this time crinkled the edges of her eyes, the corners of her mouth. She looked old. Far older than Sanais had ever guessed her to be.
Sanais put her hand around Amber’s. “This is not the ocean. We aren’t bound by those rules. We’re oath breakers. None of us has any honor.”
Amber pulled her hand away. “No,” she said. “I still have honor. These ocean brothers do not, perhaps, but I am not an ocean man, and I live by my word and my oaths.”
She went to the dark bedroom.
Sanais did not follow her. Dilen rubbed his forehead. Gahiji sat down next to Hanif on the dusty floor and put his arm around his living brother.
Hanif began to cry. He tried to wipe away the tears with his bloody hands, smeared his face in tears and blood.
Amber made no noise.
Sanais saw the blood trickle past the threshold of the bedroom door, saw the pale outline of Amber’s arm just inside the doorframe.
And Sanais looked away.
#
Sanais left the brothers without asking for tomorrow’s answers. She found the young girls, Shani and Akila, in Gahiji’s study finishing the last dregs of the wine from the jug.
“I’m tired,” Shani said.
Akila had found one of Gahiji’s daggers, and was cutting up a blank sheet of parchment with it.
“That’s expensive,” Sanais said. “Don’t do that. Come, I’ll take you to bed.”
She took Shani’s hand. Akila walked next to her.
Akila regarded Sanais from the corner of her eye. “You have blood on your cheek. Did you kill him? The man?”
“Yes,” Sanais said.
“Why?” Akila asked.
“He was a bad man,” Sanais said.
“Did he make you do things you didn’t want to do?” Akila said.
Sanais gazed down at her, and saw the girl looking back with the dark eyes of a trained lady. “He was a bad man,” Sanais said. Because weren’t they all, in this blighted desert?
“Then it’s good you killed him,” Akila said.
They walked the rest of the way back to the garrison in silence. Hanif had wanted Sanais to stay, but Gahiji had summoned more soldiers from the second outer wall to keep Hanif safe during the night, in case Dakarai’s loyal men rebelled. Sanais, Gahiji said, needed to stay with the girls.
The more Sanais talked to these girls, the more she believed that was true.
Sanais put them to bed. Shani fell to sleep at once. The wine had been too much. Akila tossed and turned on the mattress and finally sat up and looked at Sanais where she lay on the bench by the doorway.
“Why aren’t there doors here?” Akila said. “I don’t like not having doors.”
“You’re not the only one.”
Akila sat up, gripped the green swath of the sheets in her little hands. “Do you remember your mother?” she asked.
Sanais leaned her head back against the wall. She was too tired to sleep, too full of thoughts. She yawned.
“Not really,” Sanais said.
“I do,” Akila said. “My mother was very pale, and she wore all white, like a ghost.”
“How do you know she wasn’t a ghost, then?” said Sanais.
“I don’t,” Akila said. Sanais could not see her expression in the wan light of the double moon slipping through the high window.
“I don’t think mothers are of any importance,” Sanais said. “The only person who will be with you to the end is you, Akila. You. Alone. Shani will die or abandon you. And I’ll die, and the brothers, eventually. Then there’s just you.”
“I don’t know,” Akila said. “I think there’s always someone there, the same person, with different faces. I think they’re all here to help me.”
“Then you’re a fool of a lady,” Sanais said, and yawned again. She lay back down on the bench, gazed up at the ceiling.
“I’m not a lady,” Akila said. “I’m a woman.”
“There’s no difference,” Sanais said. “We’re all without honor. Walkers and outcasts.” She realized she was starting to cry, but she didn’t know why. It was just death and blood and, sand. Why did she cry about it? Another dead man for this desert sea. He wasn’t even a good man.
“Go to sleep, Akila,” Sanais said.
She heard Akila move around in the bed. The light of the double moon grew wan, then blackened.
“I’m lonely,” Akila said.
“We will always be lonely,” Sanais said, and she thought of Amber. “But tonight we have each other.”
THE PLAGUE HUNTERS
DAWN CREPT OVER the balmy marshland surrounding the Nether Dund Estate, a sprawling swath of acreage just outside the limits of the village called Lickford Peace. While the village kept that moniker, it was, by rights, a city proper, buzzing with a hundred thousand souls, most of them descendants of the ensorcelled laborers that had once toiled on the estate, supplying the Contagion College in the capital with truffled salt, night buzz pollen, and the shimmering souls of swamp dogs and plesiosaurs for powering spirit lamps. The damp, heavy air throbbed with the day’s heat, suffused with the blue-green strobe from the Plague Hunter lorries that had wended through the gnarly cypresses and cattails when news of a plague-wracked body found in the manor had reached the city, nine days after its expiration.
The Arl of the property lived alone, without heirs or issue. The assumption – as yet unverified – was that the body was his, and he had, until the bitter end, gone down railing against the communal holding of his ancestral property, which would pass on to the village of Lickford Peace upon his expiration. What remained of the body had been found (finally) by the estate’s longtime gardener, a pan by the name of Sid, who vomited so profusely that per bodily fluids could be found from the steps of the residence all the way up onto the second-floor balcony.
Plague-death was a novelty, this far from the contaminated cities.
Of course, any number of excellent Plague Hunters could have been deployed to the scene to investigate the untimely demise by contagion. Marjori Shalom, an expert shoman with the nose of a swamp rat; Hofaz Zim, who brought in six Plague Givers before per thirtieth year; or mayhap Sujamis Fayl, the local favorite, who had dispatched a rogue Plague Giver the year before in just ten hours.
But the Contagion College sent none of these exceptional Hunters to the forlorn Nether Dund Estate and its tiny village of nattering twits and twats.
Instead, they sent Nizola Swarl, who had been assigned to her desk for nearly thirteen years, and had not even come tangentially close to touching anything to do with a case of death-by-plague for ten years.
She was as surprised as anyone.
#
Nizola Swarl ticked through the notes on her beaten up black case notebook, licking at her pen to loosen the ink. Her hand trembled. She had to squint at the paper. Tried to untangle her own notes. The date? The time? She pushed her smoked glasses up onto her head and peered again at her own writing, confounded. In the distance, the call of a giant croc-shark. A school of them pursued an ageing plesiosaur in the marshy surrounds; the plesiosaur’s feathered head just crested the surface of the water, feather bent to one side, occasionally dragging behind it.
Nizola could relate.
“Where do you want the salt circle, sera?”
Nizola started, nearly dropping her pad. Two young situation officers bent toward her, their faces eager, intent. This was all very new to them, she supposed, and she should not pretend these new procedures were all quite new to her as well. Perhaps they were excited. Certainly not agitated, as she had been since dawn when her scrying mirror lit up with her assignment, something it had not done for a very long time.
She said, “I’m not… the captain should –“
“That new captain from the city isn’t here yet,” the younger one said. “You’re senior officer on scene.”
Nizola pulled her glasses back on. She enjoyed the illusion of armor it gave her, as if she could become mysterious and therefore unknowable behind the smoked glass. She supposed it was akin to burying one’s head in the sand while a cat gnawed at your bottom, but it soothed her, nonetheless. “Oh, um….then, put them wherever they normally go?”
The officers exchanged a look. “And the osteomancer’s lorry?”
“Osteomancer? Are they… they are here for what, again?” Nizola rubbed the space between her eyes, confounded. When had they started calling in osteomancer for plague deaths? This was all too much.
“Ah, this must be the new Captain!”
Nizola sighed, relieved, and turned to see a top-heavy young pan barreling past the salt-dusters and aimless sea of investigative techs and hunter apprentices and petty situation officers and specialists as if they were all just so much flotsam. The pan wore a smart, form-fitting leather vest lined in luxurious faux-fur, and a pair of wide-legged trousers that billowed as per walked. The pan’s hair had some stylish cut from the city; Nizola would not know, but it was called “the Kutiz” after the popular theater actor who started the trend. Nizola did not generally like entertainment involving people, and preferred to keep to her books and dog breeding.
“I’m Sarzhen Nedhia, the Captain of this inquiry,” the pan said, then “You!” – per pointed at one of the younger situation officers, “what is this, a graduation dance? I need this salt circle three paces to the west. West! Toward the setting sun! And get that osteomancer’s lorry the fuck away from the house! You want a legion of undead crawling up from the crypt? Get it back to the main road! Go! Go!” When the two were in motion, the pan rounded on the rest of them, sizing them up. “Right. Which of you is Swarl? The Imperial said Swarl was assigned as my second on this one?”
“Oh, that’s me,” Nizola said, relieved to hear a question for which she knew the answer.
Sarzhen cocked per head, raising that bushy black eyebrow again. “Give me the rundown, then. What have we got?”
“Oh,” Nizola said, paging through the scribbling in her notebook, pushing up her smoked glasses again. “It’s a dead body. Very, very dead.”
“Really?”
“Sorry, sera,” Nizola said. “It’s been some time since I’ve been in the field.”
Sarzhen’s raised a brow did not waver.
“Ten…,” Nizola said, “thirteen… some years, you know. I’m usually stuck in the back of the south tower, between the radiator and the break room.”
The pan briefly closed per eyes, sighed, and pulled out a scrying mirror. “Let’s get to it then, Swarl. Follow me. Yes, like that.”
Sarzhen dusted per hands in the neutralizing agent offered by a novice hunter at the door of the great estate, trusting that Swarl, scuttling behind her, would do the same. Why the Imperial had the idea of pairing Sarzhen with this puttering old relic, per had no idea, but as ever, would take it in stride. A year was all Sarzhen needed to build per reputation here in this backwater and move on to greater things back in the capital. A year and per would be on per way to Imperial, herself. Per’s career had been carefully calculated, each position just a bit more senior than the last; perhaps Sarzhen had a reputation as a career climber, but what self-respecting Plague Hunter didn’t?
Sarzhen cast a glance at Nizola. The question fairly answered itself.
Inside, massive columns carved with grotesque, feral faces lined the foyer, all eyes turned toward the doorway. The tin ceiling gave off a faint blue aurora, lit by a spirit lamp. A grand stairway faced the main entrance – a sure invitation to bad luck; Sarzhen clucked at that. The body spilled at the bottom of the stairs. The smell was not the worst Sarzhen had encountered; the house was cool and large, with a faint current of spectral air that moved through it; Sarzhen felt it tingling the small hairs at the back of her neck. Certainly, much about the scene could have been worse. Per did appreciate the air flow.
Per noted the details of the room; no footprints, no blood splatter or smearing. The death was contained, quite restrained; if the body had been better handled after death, Sarzhen might have considered this a professional hit. Leaving it so exposed meant either an amateur or a killing meant to send a message. But if a message, to whom was it meant?
“We’ve confirmed if this is the Arl, or no?” Sazhen said, crouching before the body.
One of the junior hunters answered, “We had a member of the help come over for identification. Definitely not his. He’s on holiday. Been gone ten days, at least a day before the body expired. At least, according to the preliminary -”
“When was the Arl due back?” Sarzhen said, looking pointedly at Nizola.
Nizola licked her thumb and went through her notes. “Ah…. Not for another eight days. Of course, they have been notified and are on the way back now.”
“I notified them, sera!” the young officer said, and Sarzhen scowled. “Good for you, you want a biscuit?”
The officer shrank back.
Sarzhen said, “Where have they been?”
“I think, ahh….” Nizola said, “the south. Sixton Perry Way?”
“You know or you don’t, Swarl.”
Nizola squinted at her notes. “I know. sera. That is, it’s in the notes.”
“Unbelievable,” Sarzhen muttered.
“It’s just… you’re speaking very fast, sera,” Nizola said.
“Then keep up, Swarl.”
Sarzhen regarded the body. Barring an ensorcelled curse or intervention, the internal organs would have begun to decompose in the first two or three days. Sarzhen noted traces of bloody foam around the nose and mouth which would occur as soon as two or three days out in the heat, but here inside the unnaturally cold house, it could have occurred at day five or even six. The body had a greenish cast, bloated, as the blood decomposed and the abdomen continued to fill with gas. Sarzhen was relieved per would not be moving this body. Just behind per, Nizola made a gagging sound. Sarzhen pushed the ear back, gently, looking for tattoos or markings.
“No identification?” per said.
“No, sera,” Nizola coughed. Furrowed her brows. “Strange, sera.”
“What’s that?” Sarzhen continued to poke about the fleshy body, looking for identifying marks.
“There’s no insect activity. Even in a house like this, sera, you’d expect a few creepy-crawlies.”
“So you would.”
Sarzhen pushed up the sleeve covering the body’s left arm. While the flesh was bloated and turning green, there was still a tattoo just visible: the double ivy circle of the Order of the Tree of the Gracious Death. And one triangle, signifying a Plague Giver brought to justice.
“This is indeed not the Arl,” Sarzhen said, pushing up to per feet, “unless the Arl was a Plague Hunter and none of us knew about it. These are the tattoos of a Hunter who has taken in a Plague Giver. What fool thought it was anything but?”
“Oh no,” Nizola said. “A Plague Hunter. One of our own?”
