by R A Fisher
“Ranat Trotz,” the second man intoned, gaze bored as if reading the words off Ranat’s face. “You have been tried, sentenced, and convicted of murder, and struck from the Books of Heaven. Your execution will take place by the will of the Grace of Fom. Until such time, or until dead, you are to be held in the Pit for public viewing. Have you any statements?”
Ranat craned his neck to look up at the faces of the two men staring down on him, and of the mob of onlookers who turned away. The smell of the muddy stone was cool and soothed his lungs, which still burned for air. One word bounced around his head, tightening the knot of panic that was building deep in his stomach—one word that fell out of his mouth before he knew he’d uttered it. “Murder?”
Chapter Four
Images of Ranat’s future flashed through his mind as the two men escorted him through the streets. Scenes laced with terror. He knew of the Pit, even if he’d never been the sort that enjoyed that particular brand of entertainment. A drained cistern near the arenas, it imprisoned the worst the Church had to offer, or at least the worst as far as they were concerned. No cells, no guards. Just a hole, open to the sky, where the citizens of Fom could jeer at the condemned two-hundred hands below. The only food in the Pit was whatever onlookers tossed down, rotting and poisoned more often than not, and competition for what few scraps remained was legendary. People called it the Peasant’s Arena because the fighting in the Pit could be as good as what the professionals did, and it was free.
Ranat pictured himself at the bottom of that hole, fighting with the others for a few bits of toxic meat or rotting vegetables, of starving to death or dying in the slow, painful convulsions brought about by poison, cast down by a victim’s vindictive relative or a bored merchant’s son. He imagined surviving long enough to be escorted to the surface again only to be hung in public shame, his name blacked from the Books of Heaven.
Murder. Murder! His mind spat the word. All his life, he’d gone by what was right. Maybe not right to everyone, but right to him. He only ever stole what the dead didn’t need. He never asked anything from the living. Bargained, but never asked. The thought of murder sickened him, but the thought of being called a murderer filled him with rage. He’d grown up a runaway on the streets of Fom. More than once, it would have made his life easier if he’d killed someone, but he’d always taken the high road. The harder road.
And not out of fear of punishment. Had they convicted him of grave-robbing, the sentence would have been the same, but it would have been a fate he could be at peace with. His own fault. He could come to terms with the consequences of his life’s actions—he’d long ago accepted that his life might end that way. It would be an honest execution, at least.
This, though, for his name to be condemned forever for an action that wasn’t his, was too much to bear.
He said nothing to his captors. He knew there’d be no point. They were either faithful to Heaven or else well-compensated for the work they did for the Church. Or both. They wouldn’t listen to him. They had a job, and they would do it.
Ranat hadn’t been paying attention to where they were taking him, but he noticed now. The streets were growing wider, packed with people. Kiosks lined both sides of the boulevard and ahead loomed one of the smaller arenas. People milled in front of the red stone edifice like ants teeming in front of their kicked hill, waiting for the gates to open. They were taking him straight to the Pit.
He knew this shouldn’t surprise him. They had told him his trial and sentence had taken place without him. Still, he’d envisioned … something. A holding cell. A guardhouse. A torture chamber, even. Anything that would delay the inevitable.
Anything.
Ranat, who until now had allowed the pair to lead him along, leaped backward into the man behind him, who had been guiding the broken old man with only a hand resting on his shoulder.
The guard stumbled, tripped over his own heel, and fell. Ranat tumbled down on top of him. Adrenaline surged, and Ranat twisted to his feet, hands still bound behind him, and ducked his second captor’s tackle.
I’m an old man, Ranat thought. They’re young, and I’m old. They can take me any time they want.
But they didn’t. Instead, the second man’s missed tackle made him trip over the first guard before he could get to his feet, and again they both ended up on the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.
Ranat ran.
They can catch me, he thought. I’m an old man. My hands are tied. Everyone will point out whichever way I go, and they’ll catch me. If I’m lucky, they’ll decide I’m not worth the bother, and they’ll kill me in the street.
He continued to run, weaving through throngs of people, dodging down this street and that alley, falling, scrabbling to his feet, and running again. Shouts and general discord welled behind him, but grew further away, until they faded into the mumbling voice of the city.
Eventually, his burning lungs and rubbery legs forced him to stop. Fighting for breath, he slumped to the ground next to a copper grate, green with verdigris and billowing warm, humid air. He was in an alley. The flagstones—they were flagstones and not cobbles here—were clean and puddled with rainwater. There was no one else around, though somewhere nearby, he could hear carriages and wagons trundle along. He had no idea where he was. The clouds had lifted high again, giving the false promise of sun.
He looked around for a piece of glass or something he could use to cut the bonds from his hands. No glass, but a jagged copper pipe jutted up from the alley floor two hands high, as if it had been cut off not long ago. The edge of it still gleamed in the grey light, untouched by corrosion.
Ranat scooted over and scraped his bonds over the pipe until they loosened and broke, praying the whole time the valve connected to it wouldn’t start belching white-hot steam onto his back. He couldn’t believe he’d escaped, and the thought of doing so only to be scalded to disfigurement and death in an alley didn’t sit well.
Hands free, he slumped against the wall, thinking. His left wrist was bleeding. The cut looked too clean to have happened on the pipe, but he didn’t know where else he might have gotten it. Blood dribbled onto the cuff of his white coat and added a new stain. Ignoring the chill draft that wafted onto his chest, he tore a strip from his shirt and bound the slash as best he could with his free hand.
He needed to get out of the city, but he wasn’t sure where. Except by sea, Fom was isolated, and he’d never be able to sneak through customs to the docks. Past the vineyards, the coast to the south was empty. The city of Maresg lay to the north, but he wasn’t sure how far, and he knew enough to know the roads had been abandoned centuries ago after it had declared itself free from the Church, and no one had bothered to stop it. Dirigibles went that way sometimes, up the coast, but he had no way of boarding one. The mountains that backed Fom to the east had only one pass, and there was nothing but wasteland on the other side.
South would be best. There’d be fishing villages, anyway. From there, he could spend the rest of his tin—which the Church thugs hadn’t bothered to take from him—on passage to Maresg. He’d be safe there.
He’d never see Gessa again. That thought brought a bigger pang of regret than he’d expected, but he reminded himself if he left, she’d be safer too.
Ranat wandered with the ebb and flow of the crowd until he figured out where he was. After a few blocks, he got his bearings and felt a slight pang of relief to find he’d already been going south. It was mid-afternoon, maybe later. The buildings along either side had facades of marble, and some of the larger structures sported green copper domes more prevalent around Wise Hall, which lay to the east and south.
To be on the safe side, he left the main avenue again, keeping further west until he came to where warehouses and kiosks of fruit vendors and fishmongers lined the streets. And bars.
He licked his lips and looked up at the narrow belt of sky slashed between buildings as if he could discern the position of the sun. The clouds had come down again, and rain h
ad started falling in earnest. It was darker than it had been, but he’d lost all track of time and didn’t know if it was dusk or the clouds had just gotten thicker. At least, he thought, he’d be able to see the sun once in a while after he left Fom.
A brass vent began to whistle steam from the ground behind him.
He told himself there was a risk that it wasn’t yet dusk, and he’d have an easier time leaving the city after dark. To be safe, he’d just pop in somewhere for a drink or two. Until it was night.
It had been dark for over three hours, but it took four for Ranat to notice. The inn he’d chosen, which had a sign depicting what looked like a duck sitting on a bed, but for some reason, customers called The Leaky Barrel, had a guestbook resting on one corner of the bar. No one seemed to have any interest in signing it, nor had they, it appeared, in years. Ranat spent the time sipping a heinous concoction of glogg while he paged through it. Names and dates spanned twenty years and more. Ranat wondered who they were, where they’d come from, why in the Heavens they’d ended up in The Leaky Barrel, or had the urge to sign the worn leather guestbook. Or, for that matter, why they didn’t anymore. He’d thought about trying to take it with him, but it was too big to carry around, and it could never join his collection anyway, which now lay abandoned.
The thought made him sad, prompting him to turn away from the guestbook and look out the window. Night covered Fom.
He swilled what was left in his cup and rose, wobbly, to his feet. The bar had grown busier while he’d sat there lost in the list of names, and a mix of warehouse workers and well-dressed professionals ignored him as he staggered out the door.
It was late enough that the streets in this part of town were empty. The rain had lifted, but fog had rolled in. The intermittent glow lamps created isolated pools of pallid radiance. Ranat stumbled, first from one side of the street, then to the other, as he traversed from one island of light to the next.
The events of that day were hazy—like a dream he’d been convinced was real, but was now a fractured, confused memory. More than once, he checked his wrist, half expecting there to be no cut or, if there was, to remember where he’d gotten it. But every time it was there, and only one harsh memory stood out.
Murder.
The street became first a gentle slope, then a hill, then a mountain. Fog turned back to rain, then to fog again as he climbed towards the ridge that drew the edge of the city. The road grew wider, the buildings spread out until they evolved into separate estates, complete with gatehouses and wooded gardens.
He continued. Above the fog, the hill still rose another two-hundred paces before ending at a black ridgeline, above which a few stars twinkled. His legs ached, his heart pounded, and cold sweat trickled down his back. He couldn’t stop, wouldn’t look back.
And then, there he was. Below and in front, the hated vineyards. Long, neat rows of vines, green with leaves but still bare of fruit, marched like ranks of drunken soldiers down to the cliffs, broken only by the occasional farmhouse or servant dorm. Beyond, the sea shone—an endless void, even the whitecaps rendered invisible by distance and the blackness of night.
He hadn’t been here in years. He used to come, a long time ago, sneaking through the vines every year to see his sisters and brother. He never risked speaking to them or even let them see him, but he’d come. Just to watch. First every year, then every few, until now. He didn’t remember the last time he’d come up this ridge, but he’d been younger then. Younger by far.
He hated them back then. Blamed his parents for his life planting vines and picking grapes. Blamed his siblings for the guilt he’d felt after he left.
Ranat looked down at the dark shapes of the farmhouses, silhouettes in the gloom, but he could still see them as a nine-year-old boy, cursing their existence. Red-tile roofs and rough stone walls. Lacquered shutters painted green or orange. He was a stupid child back then, blind to all but himself, ignorant.
And now he was a stupid old man.
Behind him, Fom, the biggest city in the world, lay blanketed by its eternal fog, all its splendor reduced to a fuzzy mass of yellow. A bed of spoors coughed from the lungs of some luminous troglodyte.
He flopped down onto a flat boulder squatting at the side of the road and looked over the city. The mass of fog wasn’t quite featureless. There, in the distance, just at the edge of his sight, the Customs Towers that lined the harbor poked up through the mist, their bronze tops glittering in the diffused amber light spread below them.
The ghosts of his past haunted him. On one side, the vineyards. Parents he’d abandoned to slavery. Siblings, now as dead as his mother and father, who’d stayed on despite their suffering, lest they lose the petty Heaven of Stone they’d earned after a lifetime of misery.
On the other side, Fom. The life he’d chosen, Heaven and his family be damned. He realized that what he’d always feared most was an obscure death—passing on in solitude, a nameless body for a beggar to loot in some trash-strewn alley.
Now, they’d taken even that. Obscurity was lonely, but it was better than infamy. A few weeks ago, no one knew who Ranat Totz was. Now his name was stricken from the Books of Heaven. Ranat Totz was a murderer. And not a murderer with a misguided, noble cause, but a petty thug who’d stabbed a man in the heart for his money.
Ranat felt anger again well like bile. He’d always believed an honest life, at least honest to himself, was worth living. Now, he thought, what do all those years of honesty mean, if for an eternity afterward, he would only be remembered for a crime that wasn’t his?
He looked again down at the vineyards, willing himself to continue his exile, but it was a hollow thing now, his will. What’s within a name? Nothing and everything. Nothing, because as long as you’re alive, a name is just what people call you. Everything, because after you’re gone, it’s all that’s left.
The name Ranat Totz was tainted now, all so some smuggler or black-market thug could live his life in peace after a deal gone bad.
He scrubbed at the tears that soaked his face and dripped from his gnarled beard. His whole life, he now saw, had been pointless, selfish. A quest for easy money. One drink after another. Every moment of his life had existed only for the next. Fearing obscurity while doing nothing to avoid it, until just his name remained. And now, that was gone, too.
Well, he thought. Fuck that. His whole life had been an easy way out, and now there was nothing left. But it wasn’t too late.
He wiped his eyes again, scoured his face with his hands, took a deep breath. The night air smelled of rain and salt water.
Ranat Totz began walking towards Fom.
Chapter Five
The hawker fell to his knees, weeping. “Forgive me! Heaven, forgive me,” he burbled. “Please. I didn’t have a choice.”
Ranat looked around, uncomfortable. It was mid-morning; he hadn’t slept in two days and was beginning to regret his decision to come to the hawker first. He was glad there were no other customers around to see this display, but he worried about what might happen if one came in.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not—”
“They made me tell them who I got the belt from. They said—”
“Wait. Just hold on. I—”
“—raising my Salvation Taxes again, and—”
“Stop, listen to—”
“—going to kill me—”
“Shut up!” Ranat whipped out his left hand, which connected with the hawker’s round face. The hawker fell back with a shriek, clutching his nose but, to his credit, stopped talking. Ranat looked down at his left wrist, which had started bleeding again with the impact. He swore to himself and looked around for something to wrap it in. He was shaking. Need a drink, he thought. Just one, so he could think.
The hawker cowered, lowering his face and whimpering.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ranat said as calm as he could. “Er, again.”
“What do you want?” The hawker’s voice was nasal and muffled around the ha
nd, still holding his nose. Indignant irritation had replaced the fear in his voice.
“Tell me what happened. Slowly.”
The hawker took a deep breath. “Two Church men showed up here the day after you came in. I hadn’t even had a chance to take apart the damn belt. They found it, asked where I’d got it from. I told them the truth: you were a guy I’d never done business with before and didn’t know who you were. But they pressed.”
Ranat froze. “What did you tell them?”
“That you were a friend of Gessa’s.”
“You got Gessa involved?” Ranat’s voice was icy.
“No, no, no. Well, yeah, but she’s fine.” The hawker drew in a shuddering breath and swallowed when he saw Ranat’s face grow darker. “I swear. She’s fine. She just helped me with something yesterday. They just watched her until they found you. I thought they … how did you …?” He swallowed again.
“If you’re lying …”
“Fine, fine. I’m not lying.”
“So, what about the belt?” Ranat demanded. “Who did it belong to?”
“What do you mean? I didn’t not tell you anything. Someone high up. Beyond that, how the hell should I know? There’s three-thousand personal seals floating around the Church. You think I can name three of them?”
Ranat sighed and leaned back, grasping his shaking hands. “Yeah. Okay. Alright. You’re right. Sorry. Sorry about your nose.” He sighed again. “Sorry.”
Then he turned away and disappeared into the crowded street.
It was late afternoon before Ranat found Gessa, idling in front of the alehouse. He watched her from the mouth of an alley not much wider than his shoulders, a little way further down the road, and ducked his head back into the shadows every time she looked in his direction.
He wanted to talk to her—hadn’t known how much he’d wanted to talk to her until he saw her standing there, but he knew they must still be watching her. She was how they had found him the first time. They were looking for him now, and she was the only connection they had. Her, and he’d realized too late, the hawker.