The Dew of Flesh

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 27

  “I want to go,” Abass said, following Maq toward the stairs. “I’ve done nothing for the last two days but sit in this house. If you’re sending Eyl on a job, and Fadhra is watching me, then you’re short two hands. Take me with you.”

  Maq shook his head. “Not tonight,” he said. “You’ll only be in the way.”

  “But—”

  “No,” Maq said. “You’ll have to settle for that. Soon, I promise. The High Harvest is still weeks away. There is time yet.”

  “Not if she’s starving to death, or killed by the others in the pit, or sick,” Abass said.

  “Qatal is looking for her as well,” Maq said. Instead of his usual plain robe, the tun-esis wore a black shirt and trousers. “We are doing what we can. In any case, your sister is a secondary concern; remember that the price for sarkomancy is your obedience.”

  Abass bit back an angry reply; he needed the old fool for now, but that would change soon enough. With one curt nod, he turned and made his way back to his small bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

  Father take them all, he thought. The bastards had done this for the past two nights, leaving Serhan the first time and Eyl the second, purportedly for his safety, but mostly to keep him from leaving the house. Serhan had all but locked Abass in his room. Eyl had just grinned and told Abass he was not yet well enough to wander Old Truth. So Abass lay on the bed and fumed. He did not want to think of what Fadhra would do if he tried to leave; the woman, in her own way, seemed the hardest of the three, but he imagined her idea of punishment might be quite different from the men’s.

  A knock at his door brought him to his feet. “Come in,” he said.

  Fadhra stepped into the room, her straight brown hair hanging down. It was not much longer than Abass’s and came barely past her ears. She wore all black, and the tight clothes revealed her body in a way Abass found more than distracting. Fadhra looked at him with those eyes that were far too pretty for a traitor.

  “Mind?” she asked, pointing to the chair.

  Abass shook his head and sat back on the bed. “What? I’m not allowed to leave the room now?”

  She smiled. “I hated it too. Being kept in my room. Serhan is not good company even when he is not angry, which is rare enough.”

  He stared at her. There had been nothing flirtatious in that comment. What was she playing at? “Why am I still here?”

  “I imagine because Maq is afraid that you still want to kill Qatal, and, Renewed or not, I think the poor bastard would have a hard time dealing with you. You’ve got a lot of anger, and he’s just too depressed. Might even thank you if you slit his throat. I almost feel bad for him; to hear him tell it, he kind of just got stuck with you when he married her.”

  “Hm.” Let them think what they wanted. He would kill Qatal. Preferably sooner than later. “What do you want?”

  “I thought I’d give you your first taste of the dew.”

  “Dew?”

  “You wanted to be a sarkomancer, right?”

  “That’s how it works? I just get to choose to have the power of a god poured into me.” Abass asked.

  “Power of a god,” Fadhra said. “That’s temple nonsense. There’s nothing divine about it; I’d rather slit the tair’s throat than worship him, and the brachal works fine for me. It’s just magic, plain and simple. The magic of the Thirteen Paths.”

  “But the eses—” He cut off at her raised eyebrow. “And Renewed?”

  “Oh, Renewed are completely different,” Fadhra said. She smiled, her dark eyes distant. “Nasty business. They use a special blade, a disi, to drain the life from one person and pour it into another. They do it one by one. I’d guess Maq has hundreds of stolen lives inside him; Qatal probably has near as many. But only the tair have disi, so Renewal is limited to his elite. Not even the su-eses are Renewed; just the tair’s select soldiers.

  “But, sarkomancy, on the other hand—well, anyone can be a sarkomancer, with the right tools.” She held up a small black pouch tied to her waist. “Kings would kill for these, if we had kings. The rebellion, certainly, would kill for them. But you—you’re just a lucky bastard, and Eyl convinced Maq to bring you on. So you get to choose, I suppose, if choosing is even the right word. Do you have a choice, anymore? Could you walk away from this, knowing it will give you what you a chance at revenge?”

  “No,” Abass said.

  “Neither could I,” Fadhra said with a sad smile. She tossed him the pouch.

  Abass caught it and felt something hard and round inside. He tugged loose the drawstring and emptied the pouch into his hand. Out fell a broad ring of something that looked like ivory—smooth and white, its edge flat and carved with something indecipherable. He held it up and looked at Fadhra through the opening; it was wider than his wrist and perhaps a finger’s length deep.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” he said, flipping the ring to slide his hand through it.

  “Wait,” Fadhra said. “A moment, before you put it on—there are consequences.”

  He eyed her, balancing the ring with one finger.

  “The first time you put on the brachal,” Fadhra, “it takes a piece of you—something to give it life.”

  “What does it take?” Abass asked.

  Fadhra shifted and looked him in the eye. “You’ll never be able to quicken a woman,” she said. “You’ll never have children. It will burn the seed out of you.”

  Abass let the brachal rest for a long heartbeat on his finger. Empty hazel eyes floated in front of him. One more person Abass had loved dead. With a quick twist of his wrist, he let his hand slide through the brachal. He pushed it up his arm until it would go no further and found that the brachal rested comfortably, without sliding, when he let it go.

  “Done?” he asked.

  “It activates when you take the dew the first time,” Fadhra said. “Although I suppose for you, when they healed you . . . In any case, I hear it’s not pleasant.”

  “What, it didn’t happen to you?” Abass asked.

  “Woman are a bit different from men down there,” Fadhra said. “You’ll find that out someday. Don’t worry though,” her face took on an angry cast. “Women still pay a heavy price to use sarkomancy.”

  “Let’s get going, then,” he said. “What is this dew? Where is it?”

  She untied another bag at her waist and set it on the edge of the bed. “Keep a bag with you all the time,” she said. “It’s hard to predict when the dew will run out, and you’ll crash hard if you don’t have anymore. Or if, like Eyl, you let yourself crash so that the magic can run its course.”

  He remembered the stout man’s drastic change after they had left the caves; it made more sense, but Abass still did not understand completely. “Why does he let himself crash?”

  “Ask him yourself,” Fadhra said. “I think you’ll have a pretty good idea after tonight.”

  With one hand he opened the bag and pulled out a small, amber cube. It gave slightly between his fingers like old, hardened honey, or soft wax. “Not going to spill, I guess,” Abass said. “Why call it dew?”

  Fadhra shrugged and leaned back in the chair. “Maq said they used to drink it, before they figured out how to stabilize it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Fat,” she said with a smile. “Lard, tallow, suet.”

  “From what?” Abass asked, freezing with the soft cube between his fingers.

  “Animals,” Fadhra said with a laugh. “Pigs and cows, mostly. Don’t worry, most of it comes from butchers; not much point in killing an animal just for its fat. Maq prepares it here; he has a small lab downstairs. Not much to it, actually; you could eat it straight from the animal if you like, but it’s a lot cleaner this way.”

  “Fat. Divine power channeled through a butcher’s leftovers? What am I going to be? Some sort of magical tallow candle?”

  “Nothing divine about it. But yeah, something like that. Think about it—all that life, all that energ
y, stored up in creatures of flesh. Sarkomancy allows you to access it, to make that energy your own. And besides, Maq pays good money for that fat. Nothing leftover about it.”

  “You’re sure it’s not . . . you know?”

  “Human flesh?”

  He gave a shrug; those were stories people told children, that wights gained their strength from feeding on human flesh, that evil men could do the same. Voramancers, they were called. What Fadhra was describing sounded suspiciously similar to those stories.

  Fadhra shook her head. “Voramancy is real, from what Maq has told me. It requires a different sort of brachal, though, and it has crippling side-effects—primarily madness. But it is much stronger; as much stronger than sarkomancy as sarkomancy is to a normal man’s strength.”

  Abass stared at her. “Madness? And incredible strength? Those stories are true?”

  “True enough, it seems,” Fadhra said. “Pray you never meet a voramancer.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that.

  “When you’re ready,” Fadhra said, “take the dew. It’s going to hurt, though. And remember—no more than one cube of dew at a time; more than that and your heart will stop when it runs out.”

  Mad. Eating fat from an animal to give them strength. And it might kill him anyway. For a moment he thought it was a joke, to see if he would eat the fat. Scribe would have thought up something like that and would have laughed for days about it after. Abass eyed Fadhra, though, and saw nothing to betray a hidden motive. She leaned back, watching.

  He popped the cube in his mouth. It melted almost instantly, collapsing in on itself like the frost that Abass had once stolen from a merchant’s ice-house. Liquid—thick, rich—coated his tongue, clung to his mouth even as he swallowed to keep from choking. It had almost no taste, just the sensation of incredible depth, and it caught fire as it reached his stomach.

  But no pain. The brachal was cool as ivory.

  “Tair around us,” he said. “I feel . . . great.”

  “Really?” Fadhra said. “No pain? Nothing?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then when you were healing . . .” Fadhra said. “I guess we made the decision for you; Eyl was pretty sure that’s what would happen. Well, that’s interesting. Why don’t we see what you can do?” She popped a square of dew into her mouth and grinned at him.