by R A Fisher
She smiled a little. “Yeah. I know. Let’s go.”
They made their way through the narrow, winding streets of Fom. After a block, two- and three-story buildings of limestone and narrow cobbled streets gave way to single-story shanties of driftwood and even narrower alleys of mud. Here and there, hidden valves to the Tidal Works opened with soft clicks, and excess steam whistled from vents and copper pipes jutting from the bases of the walls. These gave out, too, when they crossed into the Lip, and guttering torches and the greasy, faint light of oil lanterns replaced the yellow glow lamps.
The Lip was what everyone called the northwestern quadrant of Fom—a dense collection of shacks and lean-tos massed along the cliffs and riding the rotting platforms that lined the limestone face, down to the high-tide line and thrashing waves. The bulk of the Lip was under their feet now, in the warren of tunnels, caverns, quarries, and tombs carved out of the rock that, elsewhere in Fom, were filled with the machines of the Tidal Works that powered the city.
Gessa was a native of The Lip, born and raised, and Ranat knew she was more than capable of navigating the three-dimensional maze that lay below them. He suspected that, like language, it took a childhood knowledge to become fluent. He’d come here fifty years ago and still dreaded descending into the tunnels without a guide.
Ranat’s home was on the surface, in the basement of a squat single-story tenement close enough to hear the constant churning of the sea. A stack of moldering wooden beams that seemed to serve no other purpose concealed the entrance to his single room, the door held closed by a simple ceramic lock.
He entered first and made Gessa wait outside while he tiptoed through the stacks of books, letters, and scraps of paper to the oil lamp mounted on the wall, which he lit with a flint hanging next to it on a bit of twine. The high pane-less windows along the ceiling, only a hand’s width thick, didn’t let in any real light, even during the day, and draped with heavy, mildewed, camel-hair blankets to keep out some of the damp.
Gessa hovered in the doorway, looking around the room in the faint, flickering light. Floor and walls carved from limestone, cut from the bedrock Fom hunkered on. The ceiling was wood, brown and unfinished, warped from relentless moisture. Naked support beams sprouted from the walls and shouldered the load of the sinking floor above.
In one corner, beneath the lamp, a wad of blankets and rags denoted Ranat’s bed. Makeshift shelves of driftwood and brick lined the rest of the room, crammed with old books, letters, and stacks of paper. More books and documents lay heaped about the room. Despite the randomness, she suspected there was an organization to the place that made perfect sense in the mind of Ranat Totz.
“In or out,” he stated. “I want to close the door.”
Gessa stepped in and shut the door behind her. “I see you haven’t changed things much since last time I was here,” she quipped, looking around for a place to sit. Her eyes rested on a lopsided stool, and she moved the stack of paper that occupied it before sitting down, resting the pile among the others scattered across the floor.
“What’s there to change?” He removed the letter he’d found on the body from his coat, took another glance at it, and filed it on one of the shelves.
“Why you have all this stuff, anyway? Shit, can you even read?”
Ranat sat down onto his pile of rags with a groan. “Didn’t you ask me that last time you were here?”
“Yeah.”
“And what did I say?”
“You said it was a story for another day.”
He grumbled with laughter. “Did I? That’s a shit answer. Sounds like something I’d say, though.”
Gessa didn’t bother responding.
“So,” Ranat continued. “You want to know, or what? And to answer your question, yeah, I can read.”
“Raised in a temple, were you?”
He shot her a glance, but he could tell she was being sincere. “Fair enough question, I suppose. No, I wasn’t a temple boy. Grew up on a vineyard.”
“Your parents were vintners?”
“Pah! That’s a good one. You think I’d live like this? No. Indentured servants. I’d still be there if I hadn’t run away. Be there or dead.”
“Didn’t that just grow your parents’ debt, their kid leaving like that?”
Ranat shrugged, looked away from her, focused on nothing. “I was young.” His voice was soft.
Gessa cleared her throat and gestured around. “So, how does that explain all this?”
He looked back at her. “I was—hell, I don’t know—nine, maybe. Ten. Realized I couldn’t fathom picking grapes for the rest of my life. Had this idea to teach myself to read, so I started stealing books from the wine master. Whatever I could get my hands on. Manifests, accounting stuff. Some Church scriptures. Law. Didn’t matter. The words were what fascinated me. That those scratches on the page all meant something, and when I put them all together, they meant something else. I couldn’t get over it. Think I taught myself how to read through sheer force of will. I needed to know how all those symbols worked together.
“It came easy enough after a while. Eavesdropping on conversations between the master and his bookkeepers helped me get over bumps. After I left and came to the city, I discovered there were other languages out there. N’naradin I’d mastered on the vineyard. Now, I had Skald, Valez. Other puzzles to figure out.” He trailed off, looked around his home. “I guess it stuck.”
“You can read Skald and Valez, too?” Her voice was incredulous.
Ranat chuckled, but the sound was sad. “Nah, that was my plan, though. Then I found the bottle. Kind of lost my motivation after that.”
“And the grave-robbing?” Gessa asked.
Ranat winced but, again, detected no malice or disgust in her voice. Just curiosity. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. “Burials are public domain,” he stated as if that settled things. “Easy enough to find where they inter high-ups, if you can read.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
He sighed, looking at her again. She doesn’t look that old, he thought. He wondered how he’d gotten the impression that she was. “Doesn’t it? Well, life is hard for a kid new to the city. Whether or not he can read. I was too proud to beg like those poor bastards on the Grace’s Walk. Too good to steal.”
“You steal from the dead.” Once again, no malice rode her voice. It was just an observation. She was oblivious to how it might cut.
It was an argument he’d won within himself long ago, in any case. “Can’t steal from those that need nothing, Gessa.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
He studied her. It was her turn to avoid his gaze, and her eyes wandered the room, looking at everything that wasn’t him. No, he thought. Not old by a long shot. Just… weathered. Like he could complain about that.
“Anyway, you can spend the night here. If you want.”
For an answer, she crossed the room toward him and turned down the lamp.
Chapter Two
His pounding head woke him. He tried to open his eyes, found them too crusted with sleep, rubbed them, and tried again. They peeled back to reveal cracked, harsh light bleeding in from around the camelhair curtains. Even in the basement’s twilight, fire burned through his eyes to the back of his head. He groaned and sat up. Hammers struck into his skull.
He closed his eyes, and after a few minutes, tried again. Better this time. His room was blurry, but less washed out than it had been before.
Gessa was gone. He swallowed his disappointment at that. The one other time she’d spent the night, she’d pulled the same thing. He realized he’d been hoping that it would be different, now, after he’d opened up like that. Still, what did he expect? He was an old man with missing teeth and a damn grave robber to boot. Should be glad she spent the night in the first place.
And she’d come through on her side of the bargain, he saw as rose, unsteady. On the stool where she’d sat the night before was a scrap of
paper. She’d drawn on the back of one of his letters—a page from a twelve-year-old shipping manifest from a boat called the Immortal, he noted with a scowl. A scratched-out map of the part of Fom around Wise Hall, the cathedral itself marked with a lopsided sketch of a sun-and-crescent moon, and a spot a block to the north marked with a little “x” that he presumed was the hawker.
Well, he’d see her again when she came around to get paid, anyway.
He sighed. Even with Wise Hall marked for reference, it would take forever to find the guy he was looking for. He grimaced at the chicken scratches of the map. He didn’t even know the hawker’s name. Ranat hoped his would be the only merchant on the block. He didn’t savor the consequences of asking the wrong person to buy a belt looted from a dead man.
He rummaged through the room, looking for clothes that didn’t stink of sweat and booze and, failing that, donned the same ragged linen shirt and tatty pants he’d worn the night before. At least his coat was nice, except for the stains.
The hawker was easier to find than Ranat had expected. Gessa’s map had been faithful to the twist of Fom’s streets, and the hawker’s place was indeed the only store of its kind, squeezed between a row of accounting offices and law firms.
The clouds had been high when he’d left his home late that morning; he’d almost dared hope for a rare glimpse of the sun to boil off the rest of his hangover but, as he walked, the overcast had lowered again until the sky seemed to brush the tops of the copper domes that marked the neighborhoods around Wise Hall. Rain pattered the streets, which were well-groomed here, clean of mud. Simple copper vents that blasted steam in other parts of Fom were stylized here into the faces of cherubs and demons, the mist blasting from their mouths and noses before vanishing in the chilly, foggy air. Citizens in this quarter were clean-cut and gave sidelong looks at Ranat as he half-staggered along, courtesy of the hangover.
The ink on Gessa’s map began to run in the rain, and he needed to stop in doorways every few blocks to peer at it, trying to make out the shape of the streets.
But this must be the place. A broad, worn stairway, made from the same melting limestone most of the city was built from, led up three small steps to a wide door. Both steps and door squatted beneath a wide awning, clogged with clothes on hangers and shelves crammed with pottery. Within was more of the same and, behind the long counter, thick logs lined the wall with bronze and ceramic swords, axes, and knives lodged into it without obvious organization.
Ranat studied the map again, told himself he was just stalling, and approached the counter.
The man that greeted him with a nod was young despite his bald head, which he’d attempted to disguise with a few wisps of black hair tugged over from the side. He wasn’t quite fat, but “portly” didn’t do him justice, either.
Ranat had never done business with a merchant who remained bound by the laws of the Church, and he wasn’t sure of etiquette, if there was any. He glanced around, but there were no other customers. He cleared his throat.
The hawker scowled. “Out with it. Or, if you’re just going to stand there, tell me now so I can get back to work.”
Ranat cleared his throat again. “I’m a friend of Gessa’s.” His voice was quiet.
“And?”
“She said you might be interested …” He trailed off and reached into his sack to pull out the belt. Gessa had scraped off most of the mud the night before, and it glittered in the muted light wafting from the door.
The hawker arched bushy eyebrows and, after hesitating a second, picked it up. “This looks like Veshari’s work. Where’d you get it?”
“Found it,” Ranat said. “And that’s the truth, too, so don’t look at me like that. I don’t know who Veshari is.”
The hawker eyed him a moment more, then nodded. “Alright, alright. Veshari was an Artisan –that’s Artisan with a capital ‘A’—one of the lords of Valez’Mui before he converted to the Church. Now he does custom stuff for the high-ups over in Tyrsh. They love making up their personal emblems over there.”
Ranat grunted. “Here, too.”
The hawker grinned. “Ain’t that the truth? Anyway, don’t know who this used to belong to. Definitely someone high ranking.”
“So,” Ranat said. “How much will you give me for it?”
The merchant looked at the buckle again, frowning in thought. For a while, the only sounds were the murmurs of passersby and the soft dribble of rain drifting in from the open doorway.
“Problem is,” the hawker mused with a sideways look at Ranat. “It’s more valuable intact. A lot more. Priceless work of art and all that. I could never sell it as is, though. Not something unique like this. That type of thing could come back and haunt me. And damn, would it be heartbreaking to take it apart—like taking a prize camel and turning it into meat.” Another sideways look. “I could give you thirty Three-Sides for it, I suppose. For the raw materials.”
Ranat reached over and plucked the belt from the man’s hands. “The iron alone is worth twice that, at least, and you know it. Gessa didn’t tell me you were a schemer.”
“Fine, fine. You know what you’re doing. Fair enough. Can’t blame me for trying. Sixty, then.”
“A hundred.” Ranat’s voice was flat.
“Eighty.”
“Ninety.”
The hawker chewed his lip, eyeing the belt dangling in Ranat’s hand. “Fine,” he said again after a minute. “Ninety. Anything else?”
Ranat turned to look out the cluttered doorway, into the rain and the bustling street. “Yeah. Where’s an alehouse near here?”
The hawker paused where he’d begun counting out coins. “There’s a wine bar a block over,” he gestured with his head.
“Anywhere else?”
The hawker shrugged and went back to counting. “I don’t know. Probably. People like their wine over here.”
Ranat made a face and clutched at his hand; it had begun to tremble. “Never mind. Can’t abide wine. I’ll walk back to the Lip.”
Chapter Three
A week later, Ranat’s tin was almost spent. He’d given Gessa twenty Three-Sides—twice what he owed her, but he’d felt some undefinable, misplaced guilt, and giving her less hadn’t seemed right.
He’d pretty much moved into the nameless bar where he’d met Gessa. What had followed was a blur of long nights, forgotten conversations, and painful mornings, until he’d found himself with enough tin to keep the shakes at bay, but not enough to continue down the spiral he’d started on.
Ale and beer, he thought. Too expensive. He should have switched to glogg long before he did. Always the connoisseur.
And now he was being followed.
He hadn’t been sure, not at first, but now there was no doubt. He’d started going to different bars, just to check. The same two straight-backed men, looking uncomfortable in their peasants’ clothes, their messy hair and carefully layered grime unable to mask the air of confidence they exuded towards the poverty around them. An invisible wall of pride. They didn’t look like the Church, but they smelled like it.
Ranat cursed at himself and finished the last swill of glogg. Who knows how long they’d been trailing him. It’d been a week since he’d been sober enough to notice anything.
He glanced down at the silk pouch cradled in his lap. Five, maybe six Three-Sides, a few disks, and a handful of copper balls. Enough to drink for the next few days if he paced himself, but now he had to deal with those two before he could enjoy it.
He pushed his way into the street and headed north. The Lip was maybe a span away, and he could lose them there if they tried to follow him that far. He took a roundabout way, sticking to the most crowded avenues. Boxlike, two-story tenements of limestone leered on either side.
It was the tombs, he repeated to himself. It must be. He’d been getting greedy. A few years ago, he’d found a burial list of some of the founding families. Generations of top Church officials. Old money. He’d hit a few, then try to convince himse
lf to wait a while, but it had been too easy. Easy tin. Easy booze. And every time, he’d think, “This time I’ll stretch it out. This time the haul will last a month, maybe two.”
But his hauls never lasted that long.
Now, he’d pissed off the wrong family. Someone had found their ancestor’s treasures missing and started looking into it. Ranat had always wanted to ask someone: if the highest levels of Heaven were so great that people would pay tens of thousands of Three-Sides in Salvation Taxes every year to get into one, why would they need to be buried with sacks of money? Was there one final tax once you got there?
He glanced over his shoulder, back down the crowded street. If he didn’t lose the pair following him, he thought he might get the chance to find out.
Neither were in sight. It was nearing midday, and the clouds were sinking lower, the drizzle thinning to fog. He slowed his pace a little.
Something slammed him from the side, so hard it knocked the wind out of him before he hit the ground. He had no idea where they’d come from. The man that had tackled him got to his feet. Another one stood behind, looking down at Ranat, who lay curled on the wet flagstones, gasping for air.
The first one brushed himself off, muttering curses. “Next time you can be the one that jumps into the goddamn mud,” he said to his companion. He was large under the rough, wool peasant garb, with a sand-colored mustache that hid his mouth. Ranat, through his painful gasps, suspected he was sneering.
The second man, clean-shaven and black-haired, with a forgettable face, said, “Stop complaining. It’s not like they’re your clothes. If you don’t like getting wet, you should’ve went into a different line of work. Tie him.”
He turned to address Ranat as his partner rolled him over and bound his hands. Ranat was faintly aware of a hundred sets of eyes as people gathered around the unfolding spectacle, slowing their pace as they passed, pretending they weren’t watching.