Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  Eaumond’s argument drew to a close, the majority of the room applauding his speech, and Keely got deliberately to his feet. He turned to the Forum Master next to him and said, “Juame, could you possibly read this aloud for me?”

  The details of a human slavery transaction took the assembly by surprise, and Dorjan watched with great pleasure as Eaumond’s complexion—normally ruddy under his thick mustache and the fall of curls across his brow—waned until his lips were a cold, shocky blue.

  “What exactly are you implying?” Eaumond asked at the end after a moment of stunned silence.

  “I’m simply asking the assembly if they want to put the decision as to whether or not to auction off our country’s sons to warfare into the hands of a man who thinks of humans as no more than hexacows as it is.”

  The vote wasn’t held until the next day—and it was almost overwhelmingly against.

  IN THE interim, Nyx and Cricket visited the Forum Master whose name had been on the receipt. The man had laid waste to his entire household with a butcher knife before his servants had overwhelmed him, killed him, and fled. Grimly Nyx and Cricket noted three young girls in a small, carefully made boudoir. They’d apparently been the man’s first victims.

  The two of them surveyed the blood, the vicious carnage, and retreated to the kitchen, shuddering.

  “What are you doing?” Taern asked as Dorjan started rooting around for the kerosene for the emergency lamps.

  Dorjan didn’t reply, but he came back with two tin drums of kerosene and looked grimly at Taern through the goggles of his mask.

  “They’re going to blame it on us anyway,” he said quietly. “Wouldn’t you rather not have their families know about this?”

  Taern paused for a moment. “Right,” he said roughly.

  They were long down the block before the tocsin for the fire sounded. They would have gone home and bathed to get the stench of kerosene out of their clothes, but there was a sale of dust pending that evening, and they had other things to do before they slept.

  THERE were three hundred Forum Masters, two Triari, and Alum Septra, who was nominally a Triari but whom everyone acknowledged as the country’s figurehead. In order to overturn the rulings of the Triari, the Forum needed a two-thirds majority vote.

  Nyx and Cricket had discredited six Forum members, broken up two protection rackets, and stolen three loads of dust by the time solstice threatened to plunge them into deepest winter, and they were still two votes short of overturning the Triari in their stand to continue to expand the army for the next year. That might have been encouraging—in a previous year it would have been an embarrassment of victory—but one month after they’d broken into Eaumond’s home and hit the mother lode of discovery and blackmail, Dorjan was called into the Forum for a special vote.

  Septra introduced the bill, and Dorjan paid special attention to the things he introduced personally. It didn’t matter—this announcement would have hauled him from the grave by the armpits.

  “I regret to pose this to the Forum,” Septra said, looking appropriately regretful. It was the same expression he’d worn when he announced the death of the eight thousand good men, and those carefully arched brows and compressed lips made Dorjan fantasize about sitting on the man’s chest in armor and beating him until he heard his jaw crunch and his cheekbones shatter beneath gauntleted fists.

  “I have, alas, spoken to the Forum Master in charge of this venture, and he is reluctant to listen to reason and increase the revenue of this important resource. I find his reasons noble but his refusal to bow to practicality to be ignorant in the extreme, and that is why I am here asking the Forum to seize Kyon’s Keep from its heir and to appropriate the mines for our province’s use.”

  “Excuse me,” Dorjan said into the shocked silence, “did you just call me ignorant? You’re offering to exploit a natural resource to the point where our planet self-destructs, and you called me ignorant?”

  “I… we find your concerns to be the overwrought rantings of a man too close to his own land to draw rational conclusions,” Septra said, his voice not even rising in pitch.

  Dorjan grinned then, angry and aware that his guise of cheerful, simple git was not going to get him through this next challenge. “It’s interesting that you mention how close my father was to the mines,” Dorjan said, keeping the politeness there out of habit. “He worked the mines when he was young. In fact, we all worked the mines as children. Not in as extreme a state as the convicts who originally harnessed the asteroids to the planet and worked them, but we all spent a fortnight a year getting to know the ins and the outs, investing our sweat and our blood to those mines.”

  He looked carefully to see if Septra understood what he was up against, and saw a careful consideration in the older man’s eyes. Septra didn’t know, Dorjan concluded. He did not have concrete information of how the families of Kyon’s Keep had tied themselves to the indigenous population of their planet, but he had heard some of the stories of the niskets and their appetites.

  “As interesting as that is—”

  “It’s more than interesting, Triari Septra. It’s crucial. Do you understand how the asteroids are mined?”

  Septra tried a thin smile. “It’s hardly nece—”

  “No, sir. It’s very necessary. The asteroids are blood locked to my family and to the people loyal to my keep. Not only would it be immoral to compel us to deepen the mines, it would be impossible.”

  There was a collective gasp from the assembly, and Dorjan kept his cheerful smile in place.

  “Explain, please,” Septra demanded, a muscle twitching in his cheek.

  Dorjan’s smile was all teeth. “No,” he said with a happy grin. “I’m afraid that is a secret bound to my keep and my keep alone.” He’d told Taern that one night over dinner, because he trusted the boy with his life. He had from the first. It wasn’t until this moment, in front of the assembly of his peers, the cream of his province, that he realized how deeply that trust truly ran.

  “Well I’m sure somebody at your keep—”

  “Can be compelled, blackmailed, threatened, or tortured into doing your bidding?” Dorjan asked, not allowing his voice to harden. He didn’t need to: the Triari flinched from the baldness of the words as it was.

  “I’m sorry you think so ill of us,” Septra said with a faint smile.

  “Well, you can hardly blame me for thinking otherwise,” Dorjan said, feeling as predatory as a hieter. “You just threatened to take my family home by force. Given how many of your supporters have been lately found to have moral compasses that are either broken, warped, or absent, you can’t blame me for doubting that any action so counter to our province’s charter is either misguided or sinister.”

  Septra’s face washed red and then white, leaving two high spots of color on his cheeks. “Those instances are regrettable—”

  “And proof that perhaps we here in Thenis need to improve our province’s moral center instead of seeking to make war on our neighbors. Make no mistake about it, Triari, making war on your own keeps would be as regrettable a move, both in cost and consequence, as making an unjust, unsolicited war upon the innocent souls on this planet.”

  “I will have those resources!” Septra barked, out of patience and apparently out of words. “If I have to set the might of every soldier in the province upon you and yours like a comet on a crash course!”

  “Except you can’t do that alone, can you, Triari?” Dorjan asked. His heart was thundering and he was sweating like a man in battle, but he kept his voice light, never thinking how much courage it took to pretend they weren’t arguing total global destruction in a room full of old men so foolish they couldn’t see how wrongly they’d been led. “You need two-thirds of the Forum to slaughter the people of my keep, and even if you did, you still wouldn’t have the secret to mining the asteroids. You. Couldn’t. Do. It.”

  The niskets would never allow it. The bond that had existed at Kyon’s Keep since the first Kyon
, over twelve generations before, had been fostered of love and respect. The nisket Dorjan wore at his throat had been Kyon’s, and his father’s before him. Dorjan felt its fear and its exultation—the night they’d avenged Dorjan’s father, it had been all triumph. Right now, humming inside the locket at Dorjan’s throat, what Dorjan was feeling was fury. Flox had been angry enough at Kyon’s death. This threat against all of the humans in Kyon’s Keep? Was enough to make the locket grow red and hot against Dorjan’s skin, and Dorjan was so angry himself, he hoped it scarred and burnt there, the pain a reminder of why he’d sacrificed ten years of his life to stop this man.

  Dorjan was barely aware that a space around him had opened up as the Forum Masters around him sensed the danger in either affiliating with him or opposing him. He didn’t care. He stood alone on the floor and kept on the idiot smile that had sustained him for ten years, and wondered if maybe his peers were starting to wonder how much of an idiot he really was.

  Septra swallowed, and for a moment he looked cowed. Then he gave a particular cavalier shake of his head and his own insouciant smile. “Try. And. Stop. Me.”

  And the most divisive Forum argument in history began.

  “WE NEED Colny,” Taern said for the millionth time.

  Dorjan stalked the sitting room where they all sat—even Mrs. Wrinkle—and looked at the cards and notes Dorjan had meticulously kept on his fellow Forum members.

  “No,” Dorjan said for the millionth time in response. “He knew you, Taern. He knew where you’d worked. Hitting him would be putting all of you in danger—you, Krissa, Madame M. There’s got to be somebody else—”

  “No,” Krissa said quietly. “Nobody else. We’ve looked, Dorjan. You’ve looked hardest of all. None of the other Forum members has enough heft to get the other six Masters to swing our way. Colny—discredited or changing his mind—would be enough to do it, but nobody else. Not with the vote coming next week.”

  Dorjan sank to the couch and scrubbed at his face with his hands. “You two could leave,” he said hollowly. “I’d send you to my keep, but obviously that’s dangerous. I can send you to the one with Taern’s sisters—Areau too.”

  “Why Areau?” Taern asked, and Dorjan and Areau met wry glances.

  “Do you think anybody at the Forum knows he’s alive and living here?” Dorjan asked him. “We rescued him from the asylum and my father died. The asylum never advertised his loss, and I never advertised his gain. As far as they’re concerned he’s either dead or—”

  “Crazier than a nisket’s shite,” Areau said dryly, and Dorjan managed a small smile. Oh, the past month had been fraught with danger and worry, with violence and the eternal heart-pounding, palm-sweating fear of getting caught.

  But it had also been the first time in nearly ten years a secret part of Dorjan hadn’t yearned to do just that, to surrender to execution or fall on a guard’s sword because anything, anything, would be better than what he’d been living.

  These past weeks with Taern, with Ari and Krissa, had been as close to happy as he’d been since he was a child, and he was reluctant to put any part of that in danger.

  Selfishly reluctant, as the people in his life were reminding him now.

  “I just found you all,” he said softly, feeling foolish and afraid. “How am I supposed to risk you?”

  Taern suddenly stood at his side, and Dorjan looked down into his midnight-blue eyes. “You’re so short,” he said absurdly. “I just always expect there to be so much more of you.”

  Taern smirked. “You’re looking in the wrong place!” He waggled his sleek black eyebrows, and Dorjan blushed.

  “Maybe I am!”

  “Of a certainty, your balls are made of solid rock.”

  This from Areau, and Taern and Dorjan both looked up and groaned. “Please don’t think about my balls!” Taern begged, and there was reluctant laughter.

  “We have to,” Krissa said softly. “And I don’t mean think about your balls, Taern. Dorjan, I’ve only been here a short time, but even I can see what you and Taern and Areau—”

  “And you,” Areau said, his voice ringing with sincerity. “You have done this too!”

  Krissa’s look was so liquid it hurt. She reached out and touched his cheek—his scarred cheek—with tenderness, and Dorjan swallowed. He had wrought so much better than he’d known. “The most important thing I did was help you become well enough to participate,” she said firmly, and then, because she was Krissa and stayed straight to her purpose, she continued. “This is important. That night we saw you take care of the man killing girls—I thought that was impressive. The scope of what you’ve truly been doing here—it’s terrifying, and very necessary. I’ve lived on the streets—I can survive again. I am more than willing to risk my identity or my sweet little place here to see this through.”

  “You don’t have to ask me,” Taern said, looking at him seriously. “You never do, but I’d be furious if you bollixed this up because you were worried about one person. My parents died for this. So did your father. It needs to be done.”

  Dorjan nodded and then looked helplessly at Areau.

  “How long has it been since we’ve been home, Dori?”

  Dorjan looked away. “Half a year,” he said quietly. “We usually go back at each solstice.”

  “You kept the visits short, I know.” Areau nodded. “Because I was a git, and because you didn’t want anyone at home to know what… what I’d made of us. We spent part of that time in the mines so the niskets would stay bonded.” He smiled then, a sort of ecstasy, and Dorjan remembered too. The niskets swarmed them, saying hello, sampling their blood, and the sensation was… sensual. It was called nisket madness, and everyone was susceptible. Women conceived children with men who weren’t their husbands; men rutted with anyone nearby, regardless of gender. Dorjan and Areau, locked inside their painful dance, were twice as vulnerable to it, but nobody thought twice about the two of them, friends almost since birth, lost inside the spell of those tiny mouths, lapping away at their blood. Those trancelike times inside the mines had been for the two of them, perhaps the only times they’d ever touched each other without recrimination.

  Dorjan looked away. “I offered to have us go in separate,” he said apologetically, and Areau shook his head.

  “I shan’t bore you with why I wouldn’t take you up on that. But for all of that, home is a good place, a kind place, and frankly, I miss my sisters and their children and our mum. For that alone, I’d be willing to risk my life. But it’s more than that—it’s the key to the health of the province, of the whole planet. That’s the one thing I never lost track of in all my insanity—that we were fighting for something more. Colny, Dorjan. You have to hit him.”

  “He’s not in the handy little folder we discovered at Eaumond’s,” Dorjan reminded him. “I shall have to leave notes to tip off Keely and anyone else who cares to listen.”

  “Excellent,” said Areau, winking. “Turns out, you’re not the only one here who can read and write. We could possibly help you with that.”

  “Bimuit, you’re a pain in the arse!” Dorjan muttered, falling back into the davenport. He felt a breath at his ear, and when he looked up, Taern was right there, close enough to kiss, but his eyes were open and too sober for that at the moment.

  “How’s it feel, Nyx, knowing other people are taking risks for you?”

  “Shut up,” Dorjan snapped, because his stomach was upset and his chest was tight and his hands were sweating, all in reaction to the potential disaster he could practically smell in the air.

  “Yes, my liege. Any time, my liege. At your leisure, my—”

  Dorjan grabbed the cravat from his natty suit and hauled him in for a half-angry kiss. Taern melted into him, boneless and fluid, and Dorjan pulled the boy against his chest and wrapped him up in powerful arms, then simply sat there while Areau and Krissa carefully worded the blackmail note.

  When they were done, Dorjan pushed Taern away to stand over their sho
ulders. He read the letter, gnawing his lip. “I hate this,” he said. “You do realize that in this matter, I’m no better than he is, right?”

  Taern sat abruptly on the davenport. “Dorjan,” he said sweetly, “come over here.”

  Dorjan eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

  “So I can kick your arse. You’re nothing like he is!”

  “Taern?” he said reasonably.

  “What?”

  “You’re full of shite. I am as sly as Colny, and I have actively led the world to believe otherwise—”

  “Have you voted against that thing we do every night?”

  Dorjan cleared his throat, embarrassed, and looked at Taern significantly and then to where Krissa, Areau, and Mrs. Wrinkle sat, watching with great interest.

  “Almost every night,” Taern amended, and Dorjan squeezed his eyes shut.

  “No, Taern, I have not voted against what happens in our bedroom almost every night—”

  “Did you hear that?” Taern said, pleased. “Our bedroom. Two months ago, I was hard-pressed to get him to let me sleep innocently in his bed.”

  It was Mrs. Wrinkle who broke his momentum. “Upon my word, Master Taern, you may have been naked as a newborn baby, but you were as far from innocent as a nisket is from a hexacow. Now stop embarrassing him!”

  Dorjan gaped at her in surprise, and she stood up and started to clear up the detritus of tea and cookies she’d brought to them as they’d discussed strategy.

  “Master Dorjan, you’re a good man. Keeping your family lands isn’t just good for the people on them, it’s good for all the people here. You’re right. What you or the other Forum Masters do on your own time, that should be yours to own up to—but you’re not the one who made it impossible to do that, are you? You’ve fought for the rights of people to be human. If you need to expose this man for doing what he’s telling other people not to, well, that’s a child’s lesson right there.” Her eyes twinkled for a moment. “That man ought not be making pies he can’t eat, am I right?”