Age of ash, p.14
Age of Ash, page 14
But that hadn’t worked out.
“I don’t care,” Darro said, putting down his leather bag. “That’s not what I’m here for.”
“Please. I’d never put my own crew in threat. It wouldn’t be good for me, for one thing. Even if you think I’m the worst shit in the world, there’s no call for me to—”
Darro looked around the little room. It was in the heart of Longhill, and less a house than a shack cobbled together where two other buildings hadn’t quite met. When winter came, it would be too cold to live in, but until then, it was cheap and easy to overlook. Darro found a block of wood that Orrel had used for a table, turned it on its side, and sat on it like a stool. Orrel tried to crawl back farther into his sleeping shelf, but Darro reached out a hand and hauled him by the ankle.
When Darro spoke, he spoke carefully. “That’s not why I’m here.”
Orrel slowed, then stopped. Darro’s expression edged on contempt, but he sat on the block and spoke in calm, friendly tones, like a man trying to gentle a spooked dog. “There’s something I need to do. And you are in a position to help me.”
“A pull?”
Darro’s expression clouded, and his eyes seemed to take in something more than the room contained. “A killing.”
Orrel swore under his breath, and it brought the older man back to himself. His smile was apologetic, though Orrel couldn’t have said who he was apologizing to. “It’s also a pull, but this is the dangerous part. I’m going to have to end someone, and I’m going to have to do it in the street where I can be seen. I’d rather not be stopped, and I think you can arrange that for me.”
“The fuck am I? A wizard?” Orrel said. “What are you into, Darro?”
“I have an opportunity is all. Someone stole a thing, and I recovered it. Now I have two people who want it. I’ve pledged to give it to both of them. One of them’s paid me. The other one is too dangerous to cross. So I’m keeping the coin and knife, and making very certain that no one is around to suggest I had any but the most loyal intentions.”
“But killing someone?”
“No one will miss her. And people die for money every day. Just the coin usually goes up to the palace instead of rolling down to Longhill. If anything, this is more justice than the city usually sees.”
Orrel’s panic had thinned and burned away. He sat with his back to the wall, his legs crossed under him. He didn’t even think about fleeing. Not now. “Is it a lot of money?”
“It could keep me for years,” Darro said, and there was no boast in his voice. There might even have been dread. “She knows the risk of it. It’s why she won’t meet me in private. Which means I have to end this in public. And I have to do it so that no one whistles up the bluecloaks.”
“How—” Orrel began, and in answer Darro leaned down and pulled a length of blue cloth from the bag at his feet.
“I understand you have a badge of office. No one calls the guard when the guard’s doing the killing.”
Orrel felt his eyes go wide. “That’s brilliant.”
Darro pushed the cloth back into his sack. “Let’s not get too happy yet. I haven’t managed it. Now. The badge.”
Orrel scrambled to his feet, and Darro let him. A part of him wanted to take the chance and run. It was a reflex. His safe cache was under a board in the corner of the sleeping shelf, and the bluecloak’s belt was in it. He held it out to Darro like a man putting offering bread on an altar.
“Do you…” Orrel began, and faltered.
Darro took the badge and fitted it to his own belt. It looked wrong there, but to other eyes, it might pass. With the cloth around it, Darro might look less like a Longhill knife in a costume and more like an actual guard. Orrel swallowed to loosen his throat and tried again to speak.
“Do you think you’d want a fish? Someone to watch the crowd and raise an alarm if you needed one?”
“Are you offering?”
“Are you paying?”
“I am,” Darro said. “Spin this wrong for me, and I’ll kill you before the guards do.”
Orrel grinned. He remembered clearly that in that cursed moment when he should by right have run, he’d grinned.
The next day had been hot, but the river had the deep smell of rotting leaves that it got when the turn of seasons was close. The meeting was in a square by the northern wall, beside the bridge that crossed to Green Hill. Orrel didn’t wear the blue, because he had no badge to justify it. Instead he wore his good shirt in hopes of passing for the son of a merchant house or a worker at the store yards. The sky had been white with summer haze. Darro had stationed himself at a corner, sweating himself thin under the guardsman’s blues and a darker cloak to hide them until the moment. Orrel had gone ahead.
The corner of Riverside nearest the docks meant good money, but low blood. The people there were healthy and washed, but their clothes had a tradesman’s cut, and there were no silks or fine linens. Orrel’s attention skipped to the best marks—a boy with a basket of food he kept putting down, a girl with a belt that hung slack enough that a deft hand could lift out her wallet, an old man sleeping in the shade with his mouth open. But they weren’t the job. First, he saw that there weren’t any bluecloaks nearer than the bridge, and those just a pair of men collecting tolls for the prince. Once that was clear, there was only finding the woman.
It wasn’t hard, since he knew to look. She had a hard face with crow’s-feet at the eyes and a mole as black as tar on her cheek. Her braid was as thick as his arm, wiry hair that was black where the first frost of age hadn’t touched it. Her clothes were well made, but subtly wrong. She held her body for a different outfit, even if Orrel couldn’t guess what it was. She was in costume as much as he was. As much as Darro. They were players in a little drama put on for an unsuspecting crowd. Orrel made his way back through the streets quickly, trying to reach Darro before any patrol bumbled into the square and took the whole thing down.
When Darro met his eyes, Orrel nodded. Darro didn’t smile, just shrugged off the brown cloak from above the blue, put his hand on the grip of his club, and strode into the square like a man who owned the place, the way the guardsmen did. The costume wasn’t bad. The only thing that spoiled it was the dark stripe of sweat down the back. The badge of office glittering at his hip more than made up for that. Orrel followed a few paces behind, his heart tapping at his chest. The promise of violence was sharper than wine. More intoxicating.
The woman didn’t recognize Darro as he walked across the square. Her gaze didn’t shift to him until he was almost on her. He spoke then in a loud, booming voice, “You there! Put your knife down! I said down.”
She didn’t have a weapon drawn, but Orrel knew the pull. If Darro said it for enough people to hear, they would remember a blade into her hand. Darro raised his club and brought it down hard. The sound was like a butcher’s meat hammer. The woman spilled out across the filthy stones of the street.
Orrel thought she would cry out, or scream and try to run. Darro shifted his club in his hand and struck her twice more in the ribs and once, aiming for the killing blow to her head, on the shoulder. The girl with the loose belt squeaked and danced away. The boy with the basket turned, confused by the shouting.
Orrel saw something in Darro’s eyes. A horror, perhaps, at what he was doing. A fear that it was taking too long to finish his prey. Maybe sorrow that he had come to this as his best choice. Darro swung his club up with both hands, aiming at the back of the woman’s head, and the dark woman lifted herself toward him. She had the grace of a dancer, an economy of movement that made everything she did seem like she was only being carried along by a soft breeze.
She ducked inside Darro’s swing and punched him once in the chest as she did it. Only afterward, Orrel saw that she did have a knife in her hand after all. And it hadn’t been a punch. She walked briskly away, the speed of running without the effort of it.
“You! Stop!” Darro shouted, and went after her. She didn’t look back, but made her way along the riverbank, swimming between the men and women and children at their business like a fish through river weeds. Darro ran after her, and Orrel followed. Because he was behind, he didn’t see the blood on Darro’s chest until the older boy stopped and sat on a low stone wall that overlooked the water. The woman was almost lost in the crowd.
“She pinked me,” Darro said, but his cloak was soaking red. He lost his grip on the wooden club, and it fell into the water. He didn’t try to catch it back. “I just… I have to catch my breath.”
When he slumped to the side, Orrel tried to catch him, but Darro was already dead weight.
Was already dead.
Someone shouted, and Orrel stood. His hands were covered in Darro’s blood. The two bluecloaks from the bridge, too far off to know what had happened, were looking toward the river wall. With a clarity that mimicked calm, Orrel realized how much trouble he was about to be in.
“Get a healer!” he shouted. “This poor man’s been hurt!”
A crowd was starting to form, and getting out under its cover before the guard found him was his best chance. He grabbed a girl who came near, pressing her toward the corpse with a terse Do what you can for him, and then began weaving his way south, touching as many sleeves and backs as he could. A single bloody man stood out, so better that there be twenty people with stains on their clothes.
As he slipped from the edge of the crowd, a man shouted and a woman shrieked. A splash came as Darro’s body fell into the Khahon. Orrel paused for a moment to look: dead skin pale against the tea-dark water, blue cloak billowing as the ripples from the bridge folded Darro into themselves and pulled him down. A sorrow found its way through the fear: maybe for Darro, maybe for the gold he’d promised that would never come.
When he looked back up, the woman was watching him.
She was at the corner of a stall where a boy was selling wheatcakes and honey, her braid pulled over her shoulder like a huge snake. She gasped for air like a fish hauled up from the water, and her face was striped with blood. Darro’s or her own, he couldn’t say. It might have been only the distance and his fear, but the whites of her eyes seemed black.
Her lips moved, and he swore he could hear her whispered words cutting through the roar of the crowd and the rush of the river as if her lips were against his ear. Weird, oily syllables that made his head spin. She turned and walked away, vanishing like a flame when the candle’s snuffed.
Orrel took another half dozen steps, his legs unsteady, and vomited on the street.
“That’s why you came here?” Sammish asked. “Because you got sick?”
“I came because I have a cousin who tends their medicine garden,” Orrel said with a thin laugh. “I thought it was just… I thought it would pass. And no one’s looking for you in a plague house. It wasn’t you and Alys I was dodging. It was her. Darro’s fucking witch. Only I kept puking. It didn’t stop.”
He lapsed into silence. Sammish moved her stool a few inches closer and took his hand. Her fingers felt cool in his, which probably meant the fever was coming back.
“When they found him,” Orrel said, “did he have the badge still?”
“No,” Sammish said. “The river took it or the guards did.”
“Good. That thing was bad luck from the start. If I could live it over, I’d have stayed in bed that whole day, and never mind Byrn a Sal and his coronation parties.”
“Yeah,” Sammish said. And then she laughed. “It was a good pull, though. I mean, a guardsman’s badge right off of him? Who’d even try that? We did it, though. The three of us. Not even a fish to help.”
Orrel let himself smile and remember being that boy in the sunlight, more drunk on his own daring than on wine. It seemed like a memory from someone else’s life. He sobbed, and Sammish squeezed his hand. She was crying with him.
“She cursed me,” Orrel said. “We tried to kill her and she cursed me.”
“You’re living in a sick house,” Sammish said. “Someone passed their illness to you. It happens all the time. You’ll get better.”
“It started when she spoke. You don’t know what it was like. I haven’t been right since then.”
“You will be,” Sammish said, but she said it with pity. She saw him as clearly as he saw himself.
He could dream of taking a boat south when the spring came or riding with a team of towing oxen, but it wouldn’t happen. Before thaw came, he’d be in the ground or in the river. Whatever else he’d imagined or expected for his life—half-noticed ambitions for love or sex or comfortable old age—this was what he’d have instead: a few more days or weeks in a cold stucco room with floors that stank of lye and vinegar and the herbs the benefacts burned to cover the stink of corruption. Soon, he wouldn’t even have the will left to be horrified at the thought. He let Sammish’s fingers go. He felt too weak to hold them.
“Did…” Sammish began, then let it trail away. She squared her shoulders and tried again. “Did he say why she wanted the knife so badly? Or what it was that made it special?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It’s important,” she said. Then, “You didn’t pay me for that pull. You owe me. Just try to remember.”
Orrel opened his eyes. He didn’t remember closing them. “Something about a rite? It was supposed to be some sort of religious thing like they do in Bronze Coast. Ancestor worship.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“No,” he said, and let his eyes close. They felt very comfortable closed. He heard Sammish’s stool clatter against the stone floor. Her footsteps hushed toward the door of his cell.
“I tried to find you,” he said, or else dreamed that he was saying. “You and Alys both.”
In her rooms at the Daris Brotherhood, Andomaka neither woke nor slept. Her mind did something else entirely, feeling the world as if it were a part of her body. The same act of will that lifted her finger and arched her foot might squeeze snow from the clouds or shift deep-buried stone. It was a beautiful way of being, and she had practiced it since she was a girl. Her uncle the prince had taught her. Prince Ausai a Sal, who had dreamed once as she did now. He had shown her that Andomaka was an illusion. What they called her self was a series of impulses as wild as a rainstorm, and as transitory. She had practiced letting go, just as all those of royal blood did when they were inducted into the Daris Brotherhood.
Her cousin Byrn a Sal had not, because his father, Tallis—brother to both Prince Ausai and her own long-dead mother—had turned away from the rites. Ausai had told her that it would make no difference. The unprepared vessel of Byrn a Sal would carry what it had to carry just as well. The only price was that the invocation would be more uncomfortable for Byrn, more frightening, less beautiful. The thread of Kithamar, Ausai had promised her, would be unbroken. But that was before Prince Ausai’s final illness, before the discovery of the blade’s disappearance, before the rite had failed and Byrn a Sal ascended to the prince’s house unhallowed. Unsanctified. Wrong.
The thread of Kithamar was broken. It was hers to repair it.
She felt him there, in the room with her. Ausai, and more than Ausai. The spirit that had dwelled within him and within his city. She felt its fear and its rage. She felt its distance. It was like hearing the desperate pounding from the wrong side of the ice. She reached out her focus, pulling her will past her skin and into the dry water in which the whole world swam. I am here she thought to the spirit of Kithamar. I am faithful. I will find you. And perhaps the rage lessened.
She opened her eyes, and Tregarro was there. For a moment, she was too broad and diffuse for her own body, and she couldn’t keep from drifting into his. His banked lust and the complex knot of self-hatred and pride at his core were unpleasant, and she pulled back quickly.
He held out a goblet of hot mulled wine, and she accepted it.
“Well?” he asked.
“No. Not yet.”
His impatience was palpable even when she was wholly back within her own flesh. “We have the boy and the blade. We could perform the ceremony tonight. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s not like we’re keeping the bastard once it’s over.”
“Not now. There’s a reason we do this after the funeral and before the coronation when everything is thinnest,” she said, and didn’t add And what if we do it all correctly and it still fails? The memory of Ausai’s last days—his desperate struggle to recover or remake the lost blade, his death, and the failure of the rite—haunted her to the degree that she could be haunted. Her dread was another illusion, and she was aware of its impotence. “Longest Night, maybe. Or first thaw. Thaw might be better.”
“The first thaw is too far,” Tregarro said. “Longest Night. It has to be.”
She rose from her couch. The candles around her, thick and dark and smoking with perfumes, were low and guttering. Her room went darker as the small fires failed.
“Are you advising me of that?” she asked. “Or was it an order?”
“I don’t order you.”
She tightened the sash at her waist. The wine was thick and rich, and her belly warmed with it. A shudder passed through her, as it sometimes did in these moments.
“Longest Night, then,” she said.
Ullin slept in Stonemarket, west of the river. He shared a common barracks with twelve other men his age. They paid a bronze a day to keep claim to a sleeping shelf, a box the size of two balled fists for their things, and the protection of the landlord. Alys didn’t want to take him back to the room that had been Darro’s before it became hers, and there was more than one reason for that. First was that it was Darro’s and it was hers and she didn’t want too many other people in that communion. Also, it felt like bragging to have a place all to herself when Ullin was breathing in the dreams of a dozen strangers.
And though it never quite rose to the surface of her mind, there was a flavor to Ullin’s friendship that could have turned to sex if the opportunity had presented itself. While she found herself hungry for his company, what she needed from him wasn’t that. Rubbing up against him would have ruined it. So instead, the Longhill knife made her long way through Seepwater and the Smoke to Stonemarket.
