Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  “Don’t be!” Areau snapped, standing up straighter and walking closer. He glared at Dorjan from blazing eyes. “Don’t be sorry. You were hurt too. You were in pain, and you pulled yourself together to get me out, and that’s good. But now… here we are. I want it… I want the pain. I want to shiver with it, climax with it! And I know… I know you’re too squeamish. I know you don’t want to hurt me. I know you still desire me—use it, Dori. Hurt me and then fuck me and let me….” Areau’s voice broke a little, and Dorjan closed his eyes. “Let me feel joy again. Bimuit. Let me feel joy.”

  “I love you, Ari,” Dorjan muttered, still not looking at him. “I’d rather find you a woman who can show you how to love softly than fuck you because you crave the hurt.”

  Areau turned and spat blood. “I’ll go get ice for your knuckles. That girl you paid last week stopped by. We have an address in the stews, Dori. You can kill that festering turd of hexashite tonight if you’ve got the stones for it. Do you?”

  Dorjan shuddered hard. “Yes, Ari. That I’ve got the stones to do.”

  Ari turned and stalked toward kitchen entrance before looking over his shoulder. “I’ll get you a dressing and ice for your wound, precious. Wouldn’t do to bleed on the dead man.”

  Dorjan winced as Areau turned the doorknob. The bitterness hadn’t been there when they were children. The fierce intelligence, the contagious enthusiasm—that had been Areau. Tonight… yes, tonight, they would kill Kyon’s murderer. But their job wasn’t done. The Triari was cowed and the Forum ineffectual, but Alum Septra and the criminals he’d paid to take over the city while he was trying to conquer Kiamath and the rest of the known world had yet to pay. Even then, before that first step in their plan, Dorjan knew. Dorjan knew that they were far, far away from the end.

  HE’D been sprinting through the city for a month. He was good at it. And Areau’s armor was everything he’d promised—lightweight, mimicking his body contours, and filled with little gifts from Areau’s still fine, if twisted, mind.

  He knew his way around the stews by now. In fact, he wore ragged clothes, clean but frayed, under his Forum robes, and had spent an hour nearly every day wandering around the winding, jumbled paths of the pasteboards and tents and storied tenement buildings until he knew which gang ruled where.

  He knew where the children huddled to escape the brothels, and he knew where the growing boys hid to escape being pressed into service. If it wasn’t the gangs, it was the military, and if it wasn’t the military, it was the pickpocket with an eye for easy cash or easy brothel meat. The stews of Thenis were no place to grow up. Very few of its children did.

  So he ran, a shadow in gray/black armor, his dark hair caught in a queue and hidden under a helmet, his dark eyes hidden by the giant hexagonal glasses Areau had fashioned to help him see in the dark. He had formfitting gauntlets on his hands and boots that would grip tight, even to the side of a building, but which allowed him to run as quickly as a rubber gum-soled boot like boys in boarding schools used during athletics.

  He had a belt with things, gadgets, gizmos, things. Areau had been shoving them at him for months: “Here, Dori—aim this at a wall and shoot, and the hook will help you haul yourself up and scale a wall!” “Here, Dori—a knife that slides right out of your gauntlet and stays attached, in case you lose your grip during a fight!” “Look… Dori, can you see this? Throw it at the ground—you’ll have enough smoke to hide an escape.” “Be careful with this one, Dori. The smoke from this bright lemon-colored one will cause everyone to sleep. You’ll need to breathe through your cowl for this one.”

  The list went on, and Dorjan had concentrated hard and studied, training with the gadgets through Areau’s increasingly detailed obstacle courses until he could reach for a gizmo easily at any given time.

  He already had a mental map for when he’d need them.

  Exit his house through the stables, patting the bronze rabbit on the nose for luck. Run silently in the shadows, through the alleyways, until the pale concrete and clean façades of the Forum member quarters faded into the streets behind him and the screams and raucous laughter of the pub sector of Thenis loomed in front. He knew this way too, alley to the left, to the right, straight ahead, step-step-up, and he was running on the tin roof of a narrow set of back-alley businesses, his footsteps so light they didn’t even resonate. Running, running, running, until he came to the place his informant had indicated. It was a tenement and not a tent, so the assassin’s business must have been good, and it had a back entrance. Even better, it had wooden walls, so Dorjan’s specially designed boot bottoms and gauntlets stuck to the wall, allowing him to climb up the side of the building like an arachnid.

  He slid in through a second-story window and caught his breath, knowing he’d feared this and not sure what to do about it.

  The tenement was a flophouse, three men to a room. Dorjan supposed most of the men or women who slept there would engage in their sexual activity in a brothel or a bathroom or against a wall—but not in a room with two roommates. Not even here in the stews.

  No. These rooms had one purpose only: to be slept in. There were still day labor jobs, honest or not, to be held in Thenis, and these were the folk who did them.

  Dorjan didn’t hesitate before he reached for the last of his weapons, the one Areau hadn’t given him—the last legacy of his father. He wore it always. It was in the shape of a nisket flower, which was only fitting because that’s what dwelled inside.

  He held the little pendant in his palm and thought carefully about what he wanted, and felt the thrumming in his blood. It was an exciting feeling, for something his father had told him meant that somewhere in his family tree was a criminal, and nothing more. It was a fact his peers on the Forum had been quick to exploit—the family of Kyon’s Gate was on the Forum because they controlled the mines and for no other reason. Sometime back in his history, before the Forum’s demands that the asteroids be depleted too quickly caused the gravity rolls to afflict the continent, someone in Dorjan’s family tree had been harnessed to the nisket mines. Back then, before the full danger of unregulated resourcing was known, criminals were attached by a tube to the umbilical, sharing the same power source that they were mining, the same metals that the metallurgists enhanced with ambulatory properties and more. At some point, the original miners must have also shared the heartblood of the tiny creatures who were ever so excited to have the big lumbering humans help them in their natural tendency to burrow into the asteroids until there was no asteroid left.

  The miners who had come to own the land had guarded that secret so jealously that the niskets were only a child’s story in every other keep and province on the planet.

  No one knew how long they lived, but their memories—either race or individual—were very, very long. Dorjan’s father had treated the niskets exceptionally well, as had his father, and his father before him, and so, Dorjan assumed, had they all, right back to the criminal who had probably figured out without help that life in the mines was far easier with the niskets to help than without.

  For one thing, the little metal creatures were extraordinarily good at ferreting out whatever their masters needed, be it copper, tin, or lumium. Whatever the asteroids were being mined for, the niskets could help, and they had a few other benefits. The humans they bonded with—and in the past few generations, it had been the entire adult population of the keep—were easily healed and, in fact, had better immune systems than the non-nisket bound. They also had the uncanny knack of knowing when an asteroid should be cut free or whether it could be mined some more without gravity repercussions. They were the only ones capable of attaching umbilicals to the asteroids and keeping the number balanced so that the gravity stayed as steady as it could—which was a necessary thing. And they had a weakness for the gas byproduct of mining lumium, which meant they were as eager as the humans to find it. Lumium powered the steam for everything—the armor, the crickets, the rabbits, everything.

  So the niske
t that lived contentedly in Dorjan’s pendant had been in Dorjan’s blood for time immemorial, and as Dorjan set her free, he could feel the hot exultation singing between the two of them.

  She had loved Kyon too, and they were both parched for the taste of a vengeful death.

  She disappeared, her glow masked by her understanding that she needed to hide, and Dorjan followed closely. It was a room-to-room search, and he clung to the shadows, moved silently in his clever armor, padded like a wraith in the wake of the nisket. She knew what they were hunting, and she held to their purpose with the surety of her kind. Burrow burrow burrow, a tiny metal flower with insect-like appendages, she burrowed through the sleeping strangers to the heart of their quest in this rank stew that smelled of sweat and piss pots and too much sex in dark corners where no one could see.

  When she found their target, Dorjan felt the shock of it thrilling him to the pit of his stomach and up his spine, enough like an orgasm to make him long for one, and he padded through the next two rooms toward his victim. In the second room, before the tiny glow of the nisket, he saw a woman’s eyes open, and he clapped his hand over her mouth before she could scream.

  “I’m not here for you, little sister,” he murmured, although she was probably twice his size. “Live a good life, and I’m sure I never will be.”

  He faded out of the room, relieved when she didn’t give alarm. He risked a look back and saw that she had rolled over and was huddling, the blanket pulled around her chin, probably praying she never knew what happened next.

  Erskin Nenk was a small man with almond-shaped eyes and sallow skin. Dorjan had gotten a few glimpses of him as he’d followed the man through the stews and pretended not to notice him in the courtyard of the Forum. He paid the flophouse to sleep there full time but only stayed one out of three or four nights at the most. The flophouse was the final address Dorjan had for the man; the other three were in brothels or gambling hells or behind a fish market. The flophouse, his one place of peace—this was the most likely place for a hit.

  Dorjan recognized his sleeping face as the nisket hovered over him, humming somnolently, guaranteeing that he would sleep through much. Dorjan didn’t want him to sleep through this. He wrapped a length of black linen over his mouth and shoved a wad of it inside before securing it with the rest of the length. Then he looked at the nisket and nodded.

  Nenk opened his eyes and started to thrash, then stilled as Dorjan flicked his hand and palmed the knife that slid from his gauntlet straight into his grasp.

  Dorjan held the knife to Nenk’s throat and murmured in his ear. “All men leave a hole in the world when they’re torn out,” he said softly. “But sometimes the hole is like a lance through festered flesh. When you are dead, the world will ooze pus, Erskin, and then, perhaps it will heal.”

  And with that he dragged the knife hard across Nenk’s jugular, and stayed there for the count of ten, twenty, fifty, ninety, before his breathing stopped and the man who had murdered his father was no more.

  The nisket, not to be deprived of the rewards of a job well done, sipped at the blood as it spilled hot and thick across Nenk’s chest and face. When the man was dead, Dorjan took a shuddery, triumph-filled breath and readied himself. Getting out undetected was going to be slightly more work than getting in.

  HE SLID into the stable a few hours before dawn, breathless, exultant, and dripping blood, some of it his own. On his way back, he’d run into a press-gang invading an orphanage (it had supposedly been hidden, but if Dorjan had known about it, everybody had) for recruits.

  Dorjan hadn’t cared why. He had been shaking with unrealized fire after escaping the tenement, his blood thundering so fiercely he hadn’t heard the sobs of the children until he was almost upon the press-gang itself.

  He was only too happy to engage.

  It was visceral—stab, punch, kick, crack, rip, maim, and when he was done, the children huddled in a knot, staring at his masked, shadowy figure in horror. He’d looked around at the bodies—some still moving—panting for breath, and felt… alive. Oh, Bimuit! He was alive, and he could hurt, and he could defend and do all the things he’d wanted to do as an officer in service of his land. He was not even disturbed by the change in his own heart. He used to think violence was a necessary evil. Now it was simply necessary. Deeply, deeply necessary.

  He’d noticed the children at that point, huddled in the corner, looking at him in fear. He tried to get himself under control, running a shaking hand over his mouth, which was barely exposed by his cowl.

  “Go back into hiding, little ones,” he growled. “They will be waking soon.”

  Some of them. Some of them would never wake up.

  “They killed our guardian,” one of the bravest said.

  Dorjan had to close his eyes and breathe deeply some more before he could stop thinking like an animal.

  He knew the stews—knew the brothels, knew women who whored because they needed to feed their families, or whored because they were afraid of their pimps, or whored because…

  Because they’d lost their families and had no one to care for and empty, aching hearts.

  “Go back inside,” he murmured. “I shall find you a new one.”

  She’d propositioned him many a time as he’d wandered the stews, and he’d always put her off gently and firmly. Finally, at the end, he’d told her that he was sly, but he’d give her money for information.

  She’d laughed bitterly. “Of course you’re sly,” she murmured. “Why do you think I’ve been hounding you? I wanted company, sly boy, nothing more!”

  She’d been helpful since, and he had spent company, stolen minutes in the crowded corner room that was her boudoir. He was sure she was not prepared for him to come bursting into her bedroom in the small hours of the night, covered in blood and violence and about to send her life into upheaval.

  She was with somebody, a man who stared up from what he was doing with the slack-jawed look of a drunkard and whose eyes widened theatrically when he saw Dorjan, masked and hooded, covered in blood, standing over her bed.

  Dorjan didn’t have time for him. “You,” he said shortly, “out. Now.” He must have looked serious, because the man fled, pulling his pants up around his waist and juggling his shoes as he went. Then Dorjan turned to Jely.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “I can give you things you crave, right here and now. I can give you children to care for and a safe place to do it, but you need to dress, and you need to be ready to abandon this place, and you need to follow me.”

  She had dark hair, dark eyes, and a pale oval of a face that glowed luminously in the light of the two moons that shone through the window.

  “Sly boy?” she asked, her voice shaking, and Dorjan held his fingers to his lips.

  “Can you do it?” he asked. “If not, I need to make other provisions.”

  She nodded.

  Later, he thought it was as if she’d been waiting for rescue, because she took one gauzy silken scarf and filled it with a heartbreaking clutter of treasures—her dead husband’s ring, her dead son’s carved wooden cricket, her dead daughter’s hand-sewn poppet—and, without shame for her nakedness, threw on a plain handspun dress and bound her hair behind her in a braid.

  He must have made a sound of impatience because she looked at him sharply. “I won’t care for children as a whore,” she said. “Give me this.”

  And he had no choice.

  They made their way through the city streets quickly, and when they arrived back at the orphanage, some of the bodies were gone, leaving bloody trails in their wake. Some of the bodies would need someone else to make them bodies and not people. Dorjan had no moment to linger over his handiwork, to ask himself if the violence was as glorious now as the bodies cooled—the children still needed a guardian, and the guardian still needed a plan.

  After that it was easier than he would have thought possible. He had gold—his mines produced far more than his government knew about, mostly becaus
e Kyon hadn’t trusted them either. Dorjan poured a handful of gold credits into Jely’s hand after purchasing the tickets via millipede himself. He sent them to Dre’s keep with instructions that if Dre couldn’t house them, he was to send them to Kyon’s Gate. What was important (and he told Jely this specifically) was that they couldn’t be immediately tracked to Dorjan himself. Jely was not stupid—she’d managed to survive on the streets of Thenis, after all.

  And at last it was done, and dawn was barely creeping over the horizon, and Dorjan stumbled into the stables of home.

  Areau was waiting for him that first morning—in fact, would be waiting for him all of the mornings that followed. His eyes were wicked bright, his face was pale, and the faint sheen of sweat shone in the glare of lumium-powered electric lamps.

  “Is it done?” he asked, his voice a bizarre mixture of giggles and harsh question. “Is it done? Did you kill the bastard, spill his blood, rip his skin….” He rubbed his hand over his face and across his mouth repeatedly, chattering and gibbering into it, and for the first time, in the sad aftermath of adrenaline and murder, Dorjan looked at him through clear eyes.

  This hadn’t made him better.

  Dorjan had hoped…. He’d endured the obstacle course, fixed the vengeance firmly in his head, and followed that course like a nisket homing in on blood and metal, hoping without ever framing the thought, that revenge, this one revenge, would make Areau… better. Just better.

  It had seemed to. It had given him purpose for the four months leading up to this moment, and he’s spoken clearly, made decisions, planned, even looked forward to the coming day with something akin to expectation.

  Dorjan hadn’t seen him like this since his final bandages had first come off in the month after Kyon’s death.

  “It’s done,” he said, swallowing, hoping the move would soothe the boy who had used to laugh so infectiously. “It’s done, and more besides. I think,” he said—and it was reluctantly, because he knew what he was committing to, even then—“I think this is not going to be the last time I venture out into the stews of Thenis.”