by Ben Galley
She found Anoish some shelter under a stable of tarpaulin and timber at the rear of the tavern. After tying him up next to a covered barrel of fresh peelings and scrub roots, and stashing the body in the corner, she made her way inside with her ears full of Anoish’s contented munching. It almost rivalled the roar of the storm and violent flapping of fabric.
Farazar was hovering in the doorway, holding it ajar. Nilith closed it behind her and shook herself. A shower of sand cascaded on the packed floor.
‘My apologies,’ she said, before she looked up. As she stared about at the small congregation of benches and tables, the bar, and caught the whiff of roast meat, a great weight descended from her. It might have just been the sand she emptied from her leather coat, but to her, it was the first time she’d felt remotely safe in days.
The old man had gone to his spot by a clay hearth and a table strewn with earthenware pots. A large set of scales sat before him. It was the woman who answered, standing behind the bar, hands spread wide.
‘None necessary,’ she said.
‘You speak Common?’
‘I do. It’s necessary. Get all sorts in here. Traders of all sorts. Souls mostly. Welcome to the Parched Parrot.’
‘Do you have food? Water?’
‘What we can spare. The summer has been hotter than usual. More caravans dyin’ in the Duneplains.’
Nilith didn’t need to be told that. She found a seat at the bar while Farazar meandered through the benches. He still clutched his ragged cloth around him.
‘What about a bed?’ Nilith asked.
‘Ah! Up!’ the woman snapped at Farazar the moment his glowing arse touched the bench.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘His kind aren’t usually welcome in town, let alone inside my tavern. But, seein’ as you aren’t from around here, I’ll leave him be. He says a word, causes a fuss, and he’s outside in the storm.’
Nilith bowed her head, glad for the rules. ‘Kind and fair terms.’
‘No it’s not. I expect you to be payin’.’ The woman put her hands on her hips, eying Nilith’s dishevelled and wounded appearance. ‘Do I recognise him?’
‘Who? The shade?’
‘He looks familiar in some way.’
Nilith watched Farazar raising his chin. ‘No, he’s just got one of those faces. My idiot husband. Fell down a cliff.’ After a moment of condolent humming, Nilith patted her ripped smock. ‘Would you accept trade?’
‘Depends.’
‘Well, you could have my…’ Her hand froze at her neck, finding it bereft of chain and copper coin. She remembered last seeing it around Krona’s neck and inwardly swore.
The woman raised a finger to the scimitar sat on the bar-top. ‘How about this sword?’
‘It’s, er… my great grandfather’s sword,’ Nilith explained. ‘I need it.’
Farazar cleared his throat behind her. Both she and the woman turned on him, shushing him glares.
Nilith had an idea, and pasted a look of resignation on her face. ‘It would be a shame to part with it, but throw in a bath and you’ve got a deal.’
The woman looked as though she had just witnessed a murder. ‘A bath? Are you fucking sun-cracked? What a waste of water.’
‘No, madam. I’m completely serious, and I also saw a well outside. There’s nothing that can make a person feel human again like steaming themselves in a bath.’
The woman shook her head. ‘Bath’s worth ten silvers easy. At least fifty gems.’
‘So’s the sword. More, even.’
The old man snorted over his pots of dust and silt.
‘Give us the horse.’
‘I can’t part with him.’
‘The shade, then.’
‘I thought you didn’t like shades around here?’
The woman wrinkled her nose. ‘We could sell him.’
‘I’m telling you: sword’s worth more than both. Sell this instead. Don’t trade in indentured.’
The woman picked up the blade, her brow joining her nose as she caught some foul whiff on it. Even so, she noted the black beads of obsidian around its rim, and the snakeskin handle. The blade was notch-free, and the edge still sharp… in fact, the more Nilith’s gaze followed hers, the more she convinced herself the sword probably could have actually got forty silvers. At the right bazaar, of course. She just doubted it was anywhere around here.
‘You really want a bath, girl?’ rumbled the old man in Commontongue. ‘Sure you’re not sun-cracked, eh?’
‘No. I simply feel more grit and sweat than person at the moment, sir. Besides I have wounds to clean.’ Nilith gestured broadly to her forehead.
‘Seen trouble?’
‘Bandits. Stole almost everything.’
‘Mmm.’ That apparently satisfied the old gentleman, and he went back to tinkering with his metal tube.
The pale woman led her to a corridor with honeycomb-like rooms. ‘Third one along. Simple latch. I’ll bring water, food after the… bath. I don’t know how much water we can spare for it, mind.’
Nilith already had one foot in her room. ‘Anything will be fine.’
With the door closed, she found her sand-stuffed mattress and collapsed into it. The room was barely a large cupboard, but to her it was a palace; somewhere away from the vengeful fists of the storm. She could hear it moaning through the shutters on the far, or rather not so far, wall. It yanked at their hinges with every gust.
The woman returned swiftly with a pitcher of water and a cup, both made out of toughened camel hide. Nilith thanked her before proceeding to drink the entire pitcher in one go. She felt the silt washing around her mouth, but she didn’t care. She had swallowed enough sand already; a little more was worth slaking her powerful thirst.
While she was waiting for her bath to be drawn, she returned to the main room. Farazar now lurked in a corner, arms folded. He still wore his makeshift cloak, looking like a stubborn child with the last candied fruit being asked to share. His eyes were slitted and jealous, and she decided to leave him be. He knew better than to interfere.
The woman poured her a glug of dark liquid, and slid the cup along the bar. ‘On the house.’
Nilith sniffed it, and it burned between her eyes. ‘What is that?’
‘Shame-juice, Old Fen calls it. It’s ammita. Distilled from beer, and other things.’
Despite the dubious explanation, Nilith wasn’t one to be a bad guest, and so she knocked the viscous stuff back in one go. It felt like swallowing a sword. The taste was aniseed and bitter salt. It clawed its way into her head and dizzied her within moments.
‘Dead gods’ piss, that’s strong.’
Old Fen chuckled to himself over on the table, and she grew curious of his tinkering.
‘What is that thing, old man?’
‘This?’ He held up the tube, then knocked a bowl with a bone ring. ‘Or this?’
‘Any of it.’
He looked like the sort of man who enjoyed an audience. Nilith had found that people who owned inns, or those that frequented them more than their own homes, were only ever there to tell their own stories, not to listen to others’.
‘Ahem, well. It’s all rather complicated,’ he began.
‘Don’t let ’im fool you. It’s not witchcraft or wizardry. What did you call it? “Science”, is it?’
‘Don’t ruin it, Eber, let me talk.’ Fen bobbed his head. ‘That’s what the Chamber of Thinking used to call it. Sahr,’ he said in Arctian.
‘Science? Sounds like the word for magic.’
‘Same thing to those that don’t know better. What looks like magic is just science we don’t understand yet.’
Eber rolled her eyes and poured herself her own shot of ammita. Nilith took a seat across from the old man and began to sniff the small earthenware dishes. They were a spectrum of colours, from pitch to lavender, mustard to crimson. Some smelled like salt. Others sulphur.
‘You can make all sorts of magic with these. For insta
nce, pinch of this and that over a flame, stretch out a wineskin into a balloon over it, and the skin’ll fly on its own.’
‘No.’
‘Surely. It’s all from thousands of years ago. The ancestors, you know them?’
‘We all have ancestors. Mine were likely different.’
‘Well, here’s another example. They didn’t fight with swords, see. Not just with swords. They had something else.’ Fen went to work, taking an empty dish and sprinkling small amounts into it. Yellow, black, grey. With his leathery fingers he mixed up the powders, doing so with utmost care. Nilith saw Eber watching, bored as though she’d seen this a score of times.
A quick flick, and Fen dashed the powders into the hearth. The small flame that had been burning there flashed into life, burning bright white and reaching up to put fresh scorches on the adobe wall.
Nilith had been expecting some salt-trick of a beldam, not an explosion. She was shocked. ‘What in the Reaches?’
Fen rubbed his blackened fingertips together. It was only then she noticed half the fingers on his right hand were missing; just puckered nubs. ‘Makes you think, don’t it? Possibilities. The oldest nomad songs say they had great machines called caloms. Could shoot chunks of rock, tear a man in half.’
Nilith pointed to the thin tube, made of battered lead and twine. ‘Is that what that is?’
‘A small one.’ The old man held it up. It had a latch on one end, and a hole nearby with a lamp wick curled over it. ‘Put the powder in, then a little pebble.’
‘Or a gem. That was a waste, wasn’t it, Fen?’
He ignored Eber, continuing with his lesson. ‘Then you can stuff a bit of cotton down it, stop it coming out. The hole means you can light it. Push the wick down and boom.’
‘What happens to the pebble?’
Eber cleared her throat, tapping the edge of the bar. Below her long fingers, there was a splintered hole the size of a coin.
‘Dangerous.’
‘Ain’t it just?’ Fen wiggled his stumps. ‘That was the first try. Wood don’t work for caloms. If I can just show it to somebody in the city – somebody rich, with an eye for science – I could make my coins, be a tor in a tower before I die.’
Nilith ignored the dry cough coming from the corner of the room. She could see the hope running through Old Fen’s eyes, like sand through the waist of an hourglass.
‘If I had the gems…’ But the Ghouls had taken them all.
‘Ha!’ Fen snorted. ‘All the travellers say that.’
Nilith leaned forwards, fixing him with a stare. ‘I know a few people. When I’m done with my business, I’ll try to come back here. I’d say come with me, but it’s dangerous. Too many have died already.’
‘Connected, I suppose? Know all the right people? Heh, you traders spin some yarns.’
‘I’m no trader.’ Nilith paused, wondering what was worth sacrificing to gain the man’s trust. Both the fighter and the opportunist in her saw the potential of this fire powder, and it had ignited her intrigue. It could change the world. ‘I know Araxes inside and out. I know great minds that would boggle at this. Traders with hundreds of ships. People who would lick their lips at such a demonstration.’
‘And criminals? Terrorists? Soulstealers? Warlords? Who’s to say which hands should hold this powder?’ He grabbed a handful and let it sift through his remaining fingers.
Nilith had to smile. She leaned back. ‘You make a fine point, sir. Perhaps such things aren’t worth the silver or gems.’
Fen’s reply didn’t make it out of his mouth. Eber rapped her knuckles on the bar. ‘Bath’s done.’
Nilith could have kissed the woman. Perhaps the ammita had gone to her head after all.
After stowing Farazar in her room, she followed Eber to a small hollowed-out chamber with a door to the outside, where a large trough lay steaming. A fire heated the room, and over it pots and pans of dirty water. Eber poured a few in before she vacated. Nilith caught her murmuring before she shut the door.
‘Sword better be worth it.’
The first dip into a bath was always the most special, followed closely by complete immersion. Nilith didn’t waste any time achieving both, disrobing and then quickly plunging herself in.
She found baths to be odd things; so luxurious and innocent, and yet all it took was a mere duck of the chin, a few long moments, and they could drown a woman. Pleasure seemed always so intertwined with danger.
The hot water put all of that out of Nilith’s mind. It made her sweat, but the warm embrace dissolved the tension in her limbs, calmed her heart, and made her head loll against her chest.
Whether it was the release, how sweet peace could feel, or the stress finally catching up with her, but she began to shake. Her eyes stung. The water splashed as she scratched the sand from her arms and neck, tearing at her hair to rid her scalp of grit. Half-formed words streamed from her mouth.
When finally her breath ran out, she fell still, heaving to the rapid beat of her heart. Under the shadow of her tangled, raven hair, she stared down at her face in the rippled water. The stiller she was, the clearer it became. The Nyxwater had sealed her face wounds. The bruises and great bags under her emerald eyes remained. A tooth was missing in the corner of her mouth. One eye was still intent on staying bloodshot.
Nilith lay back with a shaking sigh. She knew any moment the waters would start their inevitable turn to cold, and so she lapped up every scrap of heat. She did not care about the scratch of silt and wood under her spine, nor the flinches of pain coming from every blister on her sun-roasted shoulders, nor the fact she was in a trough, nor the fervent rattling of the outside door… all that occupied her was the stillness of the water wrapping her. No trot of a horse. No ache from looking over her shoulder constantly. No sharp wind pushing her onwards. Just stillness.
Nilith must have stayed in those waters until they were cold.
Chapter 21
Hypothetically Speaking
The scrutinisers were a Chamber initiative that started several hundred years ago. They were torturers and interrogators originally, and only the Chamber knows truly if they still are. A force of law and order, they call themselves. I’d call them a waste of air. A show of authority for the sake of fulfilling authority’s need to show authority. Cyclical lies, friends! Pomp and trivialities!
From a speech by condemned soulstealer and anarchist Winson Dank in 870
Sisine paced. She was fond of pacing. It quelled what lesser folk might have described as nerves. Hers was a higher plane of fidgeting; a necessary sprightliness. She had the weight of an empire on her back, after all.
‘Where is he, Etane?’
The shade sprawling on a velvet bench wore a weary look. Sisine was glad that for once he was dressed in the manner his position dictated: a long robe, charcoal grey and adorned with the royal colours of turquoise and sandy yellow.
‘He should be here soon. He said he’d come.’
‘Soon is not a time. And as of now, soon is late. I cannot abide—’
Etane cut across her. ‘Lateness. I will remind him when he gets here.’
Sisine swung past him to prod him with a finger, and the sharp copper thimble on its tip. ‘You’ve grown sullen of late. More recalcitrant than usual. What is wrong with you? Should I be concerned? Must I have you sold?’
Etane scrunched up his face. His blue vapours etched faint wrinkles. He had been around fifty when he died, but to Sisine he looked much older. Perhaps shades did age on some level, through toil and time. The years will always leave their marks on souls.
She halted and crossed her arms with a crackle of silk. ‘Spit it out.’
‘It’s this business with Temsa and his shade. They can’t be trusted, and yet you seem to be barrelling towards friendship.’
‘I do not “barrel”, shade. I manoeuvre. I sidestep. I parry. And it is not friendship I seek, but a temporary ally. One I can control as long as I need him. One who can graciously take a fall if t
he need arises.’
‘And this Danib—’
‘The mute you say has sold his coin back into indenturement.’
‘Him. I never trusted him. He was with the Cult of Sesh for hundreds of years. You don’t just leave the Cult after that long.’
‘Is that so?’ Sisine raised an eyebrow.
Etane shook his head, chewing over his words. Before he could give them voice, a timid knock sounded at the great door in the next room. He practically flew from the bench to answer it.
‘What is it?’ he hollered through a peephole.
The voice was muffled behind the wood, steel and ivory. ‘There’s a visitor for Her Highness! Won’t give us his name. Middle-aged, short. Beard. Cane and… eagle foot. Got a big shade and a guard with him. Looks suspi—’
‘Admit them!’
‘You serious?’
‘Admit them, man. On the empress-in-waiting’s orders!’
‘Right away!’
When Etane came ambling back, she prodded him again, in the centre of the forehead. He winced, and she saw the pale flash of anger in his eyes.
‘You’re a fool if you think I can’t see it, old shade. I’ve spent years watching the tics and shrugs of sereks who think silence is a shield from their lies. You doubt me, your own master, and I find that intensely disturbing. You do not get to doubt me; you simply follow orders,’ Sisine told him. ‘I will not have your foul mood interfering with this evening. Understand?’
Etane tried a bland smile. ‘As you wish.’
‘Good. Now fetch me this man.’
The shade went into the next chamber and laid hands on the door’s locks. After a glance through the peephole, he cranked them. Six sharp metallic twangs sounded before the door swung open with a hiss. The clank of armour spilled through the gap, and moments later, a score of guards filed into the opulent parlour and took their places around the walls. They were dressed from scalp to sole in silver and blue steel, with their shortswords already half-drawn, in true royal tradition.
Sisine took her place on a long couch, slightly reclined, but still straight as a spear. One elbow up, hand against her face, and the other idly waving a thin silver flute of spiced wine. The Arc lived off beer, and that was what made it common. She was better than that.