by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 30
They stood on the edge of the roof outside Abass’s room. Night had almost fallen; only the thinnest disc of light blue marked where the sun had fallen below the horizon. No breeze stirred, and voices filled the air—Truthers returning from the farms they worked, or from the forest, and men and women alike going to the tavern, or the theater, or the Walk. A normal night, with yellow lamplight flooding the streets, darkening the vibrant colors of the painted wood buildings.
Night, but with lamplight and stars and a waning crescent moon like a silver bow, Abass could see as though it were midday. Purple-white light, dew-light, filled the night. Energy pounded through him, as though he had slept for hours and now needed nothing but to run. He stood on the edge of the slate roof barefoot, amazed at how easily he could lean out over the narrow alley without falling, knowing just how far he could lean with perfect balance.
“Show off,” Fadhra said with another small smile. She stood next to him, a good bit further back than he was, watching. “What do you want to do?”
Abass’s heart raced, as though he were running while standing still, and blood pounded in his ears. He leaned out further, the alley swimming before him, and felt nothing but exhilaration. Further. Further still. He fell, face to the ground, the air whistling around him, and somehow it all seemed so slow—impossibly slow, ridiculously slow. He smiled and twisted.
He landed on one knee. The force of his landing sent a thud echoing through the alley and packed earth beneath him, but Abass felt nothing but his pounding heart.
Fadhra landed lightly beside him, making no more noise than a cat. “Tair around us,” she said. “Not even Eyl was that loud when he started. Come on, someone’s bound to investigate.” In a breath she was gone, but now Abass could see her movement—so fast that a normal man would have felt nothing but the air move around him, but Abass saw her crouch and then launch herself into the air, clearing the roof of the next building to land on the gabled peak.
He pushed off from the ground and found himself flying into the air—past the edge of the roof, past the gable, past Fadhra, who watched him fly into the air with a single, slow shake of her head.
The city fell away beneath him, a world of light and color and movement, the murals on distant buildings visible to him in spite of space and shadow. Then he began to fall, and the world rushed back to meet him.
Fadhra caught him and grunted. She staggered and the slate tiles cracked and slid away beneath her for a good foot before they came to a stop. With another shake of her head, Fadhra set him down.
“Looks like they were right not to take you,” she said. “A Renewed would have you for supper.”
“Well,” Abass said, flushing again, “I’m still getting used to it. Maybe you should do some teaching instead of just criticizing.”
Fadhra smiled; her smile was as pretty as her eyes, Abass realized. “A soft jump,” she said, “is all you need to move around the city. Almost a hop, really. It’s all about gauging the force of your movement and the distance. Let’s try for that building over there,” she indicated a large, ramshackle building painted a brilliant yellow and covered with obscene murals.
“I like your taste,” Abass said.
Fadhra grinned and jumped. The air rippled around her, and she was gone. Abass was already following her, pushing off the loose slate tiles, and then he was soaring through the air again. He hit the roof hard, tiles spraying into the night air as he skidded across the roof. Shouts of surprise told him he had been heard; the sounds of love-making told him some people did not care.
“You’re going to ruin their night,” Fadhra said.
“Not at all,” Abass said. “I think they’d be happy to have me join them.”
Fadhra opened her mouth, but a panicked cry reached them over the noise of the foot-traffic below. Abass whirled around, seeking the source. It came again, filled with pain this time. East.
He leapt from the building. His momentum carried him across two buildings, and he landed lightly on an active chimney. The smoke seemed a hundred times thicker, a hundred times stronger than he remembered, and the heat from below felt like it would make cinders of him. He launched himself again, seeking the cry, ignoring Fadhra’s shout.
With a grace that surprised even him, Abass landed on a gabled roof one-footed. He spun. Shouts sounded from the next street over—excited shouts. Eager shouts. Cries for blood.
A harvest. Abass felt sick to his stomach, even as the harvest-passion kindled within him. It was stronger, bloodlust that resounded to the pulse of the dew, and it took all his years of practice to resist the call of the street harvest.
“Come on,” Fadhra said as she landed next to him, her arrival quiet as smoke. “If we get involved, the eses will start looking. We’re not out for a fight tonight; Maq would skin me alive.”
“Have you seen a street harvest before?” Abass asked.
“No,” Fadhra said after a moment. “I grew up . . . somewhere else, before Maq found me.”
“We all see them,” Abass said, barely hearing her. “During harvest season, we all see the street harvests, and we don’t know what to do. So we watch. A woman on her way home from market; a man tending his shop; children going to school. And one of those self-appointed harvest-masters will take one, and that randomness, that possibility that it could be anyone, is the worst part. Some are truly excited by the blood, by the ecstasy of it. Some of us scream and shout and pray that we won’t be the victim next time. Some just run and hide. And the harvest-madness is always there, making us something that we don’t want to be.”
“What did you do?” Fadhra said, her voice subdued. “When you felt it?”
“Me?” Abass asked. “I stole.”
She reached out to grab him, but he was already gone, flying through the darkness that, to him, was darkness no longer. Below him he could see the ring of people shouting and screaming, the men holding up tarps to keep the blood from touching stone, the harvest-master—a fat, balding man with a long pony-tail—pinning a blonde woman underneath him. The knife was like a star to Abass’s eyes, glittering with the reflected torchlight from the mob.
He fell in time with the knife, faster than he had ever moved before, and somehow too slow. Abass landed on one knee again, in the heart of the circle. The force of his landing shook the ground, sending the people closest to him stumbling back as their shouts for blood changed to surprise. His heart beat like an Istbyan war-drum.
The harvest-master turned, fat red face full of wonder. Two lines of blood, purple against his puffy skin, ran across one cheek and the bridge of his nose. He climbed off the woman, knife in one hand.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he screamed. To the people in the ring he shouted, “Grab him! He’ll be next, and may the tair bless us all.”
Once Abass would have run from the harvest-master. Abass did not know the man, but he knew others like him—cruel and twisted, who used the harvests as an excuse to take life, who turned the sacred to their own pleasure. Abass rose to his feet. He was not afraid of men any longer.
Face darkening, the harvest-master stepped toward Abass, knife coming up toward Abass’s stomach. Time seemed to slow for Abass; the drum-beat of his heart fell quiet. He knocked the harvest-master’s hand with the knife away casually, like batting a fly, and heard the sound of bones breaking like dry twigs. Abass stepped forward and slammed one fist into the man’s ribs, intending to knock him down.
The man’s chest caved in beneath the force of the blow, bones splintering and springing back to tear through the man’s skin, sending a mist of blood into the air, staining Abass’s face. The harvest-master flew backward, his ruined body striking a group of men holding one of the tarps before it fell to the ground.
For a moment, everything was silent. Then screams began—screams of terror, this time, not exultation. Men dropped their tarps and ran, while women gathered up children as fast as they could to flee the monster who had dropped into
their midst.
Monster. Abass looked at his hand, then at the harvest-master’s shattered body. It was no wonder that Eyl had not known how to explain what he was. More than man should be. A god.
Abass’s heart returned to its hummingbird pace, and the world spun around him. Suddenly the night was too bright, stars and torches surrounded by a nimbus of refracted light, like a candle seen through gauze. He moved toward the woman on the ground and staggered. Slowly he made his way to her side, trying to keep from falling as everything continued to slide around him.
She lay on the ground, eyes open, unmoving except for the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. A deep gash ran along her neck, and blood still poured from the wound. Other smaller cuts marked her arms, but none looked serious.
Abass ripped cloth from the hem of her dress and wadded it against her neck.
“Are you alright?” he asked. The words rang in his ears like temple bells.
She did not respond.
A breeze brushed Abass’s cheek. “We need to go,” Fadhra said behind him, the words crashing together so that he could barely understand. “They’ll have gone for an esis.”
Abass put his arms under the woman and tried to lift her. Dizziness gripped him, and he fell forward.
Fadhra caught him. “You already used up your dew. No wonder you split that poor bastard in half. Quick, take some more before you crash all the way.”
Still holding the woman, Abass tried to find the pouch tied to his waist.
“Give her to me,” Fadhra said and took the woman. “Quick!”
Hands shaking as though he were caught in a foreign winter, Abass clawed open the pouch and managed to put a piece of dew in his mouth. For a moment it clung to his tongue, rich and thick and heavy, and then fire and heat blazed to life inside him. His heart slowed; light returned to normal; the sounds of screams reached him again, mixed now with angry shouts.
“They’re coming,” Abass said.
Fadhra nodded. “Let’s go.”
Abass turned at the sound of metal on metal. A squad of eses had reached the street. Chain shirts covered their green robes, and each held a shortsword and a buckler. Eses. The bastards had taken Isola from him. They had killed Scribe and Segi. They would have killed him, too, if he hadn’t escaped. Rage boiled up inside Abass—white-hot, animal rage. He had never felt the like before. He wanted to taste their blood, rip them to shreds so that nothing remained.
“Go,” he said.
“If one of them has a salt-blade, it will cancel the brachal. You’ll be slow, vulnerable--” Fadhra said.
“Go,” Abass said again, cutting her off. He dashed forward, the world falling into slow motion around him. It was not like being carried by a sarkomancer; when Fadhra had taken him to find Scribe and Segi, the world had blurred around him, dizzying him with its fluidity. With the dew in him, however, Abass could see every loose clump of dirt on the street, the imperfections in the murals, the strips of neglected paint under the eaves of the wooden homes. He could see the shocked looks on the eses’ faces when, as far as they were concerned, he vanished.
He hit the first one as lightly as he could, trying to balance his rage and the need to conserve his dew. Abass struck with the flat of his hand, almost a tap, across the guard’s throat. He felt cartilage crumple, and then bone. Abass was already past him when the guard’s knees buckled.
Abass had to move slower among the men, or his speed would carry him past them, and he heard a shout of surprise as the three remaining eses stumbled in their advance and turned toward him.
The closest esis, a red-cheeked young man no older than Scribe, swung low and fast. He was dangerous. Abass let his dew-enhanced speed carry him beyond the blow and turned.
An older esis with that rare, southland dark hair, turned and stepped toward Abass, shortsword driving toward Abass’s chest. Abass stepped to one side and let the blade pierce the air where he had stood a heartbeat before. As the dark-haired esis’s momentum carried him forward, Abass rapped the man on the jaw with the back of his hand. The smooth, economical move snapped the man’s head to one side, and the crack of bone was followed a moment later by a thud as the man’s body hit the dust.
Two left. Abass’s rage scorched him inside; the cool, careful deaths did nothing to appease it. These were the men who tortured and killed the people he loved—or, if not these eses themselves, then others like them. He wanted blood; he wanted suffering; he wanted them to beg for death.
The red-cheeked esis slashed at Abass, but Abass slid past the blade toward the other man—blond, like most people of the Paths, and face full of fear. Dew flooded Abass’s body, but he could sense the way it ebbed every time he sped up, every time he struck. Even as it ebbed, though, it suffused him, an ocean of power. He had enough for a lifetime, and so he toyed with the eses.
He slid the dagger from the blond man’s belt and, light as spring rain, cut the man’s hamstring. The blond man’s cry of pain as he fell was like music. Abass ignored the red-cheeked boy for the time being. The dagger fell again, sped by dew and hate, cutting through chain and cloth to leave a long wound across the esis’s back. Another cut, deep into the shoulder, so that Abass had to wrench the narrow blade free again, and the man’s howl echoed Abass’s own pain. Again and again, cuts and nicks as the blond man tried to drag himself away, tried to defend himself from the phantom that spun around him.
And then steel caught Abass in the side, just above the hip, biting deep. Abass stumbled, and his dew-enhanced momentum sent him flying across the street. He struck the painted boards of a building and crashed halfway through them. Pain flared in his back and legs as his speed drove deep splinters into him.
The dew kept him from blacking out, but the world spun around him for a moment. Abass pushed himself forward and fell onto the packed dirt. The pain faded as the dew did its work.
Shortsword held high, the red-cheeked esis moved toward Abass, his young face filled with hate. Abass, on hands and knees, watched him advance. Pain made him angry, made the rage reach its peak. Abass launched himself forward.
He hit the boy so hard that he heard the boy’s neck snap, and the red-cheeked esis’s head flopped back. Two more dew-enhanced steps and he reached the blond, crippled esis who had collapsed in a pool of blood-damp earth. Abass grabbed the dagger and drove it into the blond man’s eye. The force of the blow crumpled the left half of the esis’s face.
Dew still pulsed within him; he had been wiser this time, had paid more attention. Pain echoed in him, but Abass pushed it away. He looked at the four men he had butchered. The one who must have been Scribe’s age stared at him, his head at an impossible angle as it rested against his back. Three of the four had died somewhat cleanly. The fourth, though—the blond man . . . he looked as though a wild animal had savaged his corpse. Disgust welled in Abass’s throat. He turned and sprang away into the night.
He leapt from rooftop to rooftop, running lightly along gables, the slate cold and rough under his bare feet, and that roughness felt like the only thing that kept him human, in touch with himself. The dew continued to pulse and ebb.
Ahead, great pools of yellow light against the purple dew-light announced the Ladies’ Walk, the vast, many-pathed garden at the foot of the temple. Abass threw himself from the last roof, sailing over trees and shrubs and flowerbeds, until he broke through the brittle branches of an old maple and hit the ground. Starlight filtered through the gap Abass had opened in the roof of branches, but to a man without dew, the woods would be darkness. He crawled between the roots of the maple and drew his knees up to his chest, lips clamped shut, shaking. Dew still pounded through him with every hummingbird beat of his heart, but he shook like a man with foreign cold.
The light rustle of leaves stirred by the wind was the only announcement of Fadhra’s arrival. She landed like a doe at the base of the maple, slender and graceful and somehow still deadly with each step. She turned around the clearing and stopped when she locked eyes with Abass
. Those dark, pretty eyes were pools of shared suffering.
“I killed them,” Abass said through chattering teeth. “I’ve never killed anyone before, and I killed them, I butchered—”
He stopped because Fadhra, sped by dew, was at his side then, and she cupped his jaw in one soft, small hand, pressing her thumb over his lips.
Abass grabbed her wrist with one hand. They were gone. Scribe was dead, butchered. Segi too. Isola was lost in the darkness of the pits, and he had no way of finding her. For the second time since that his first night on the streets, the light and warmth and love of home lost to him forever because of his own stupidity, Abass let himself cry, his body wracked by great, silent sobs. Fadhra slid down beside him, nestled between him and the roots of the ancient maple, and rested her head on his shoulder.
When the grief had run its course, Abass leaned his head back against the rough bark. Fadhra’s hand found his jaw again and pulled him toward her. She kissed him, and she tasted of shadow and sweat and dew.
“What was that for?” Abass said when she let him go.
“Because you saved that woman when no one else would,” Fadhra said, her dark eyes distant, as though somewhere else. “Because I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”
She stepped away from him. A rack of dry coughing shook her like a leaf in the wind, and she wiped one hand on her black trousers. Then she was gone, flying up through the opening in the branches, leaving Abass’s head spinning, the taste of her on his lips, the feel of her body—warm and soft against him—fading like a bruise.