by Amy Lane
“What about us here?” Krissa asked, and Areau pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. Watching him, Taern realized that injured or not, Areau was not the person who gave orders. He and Dorjan must have worked so well because Dorjan did.
“You need to go too,” Areau muttered. “You, Mrs. Wrinkle, the girls, whoever they are—Dre’s keep. Within the hour. Clear out. Pack lightly, move quickly. They’ll be back.” He looked up, thinking hard. “They will be back. That lout at the door practically warned me.”
“What are you going to do?” Krissa asked, all concern. Taern had to admit he was worried himself—Dorjan cared for this git. It was best he didn’t put himself at too much risk.
“That thing I’ve been working on,” Areau muttered. “My workshop. It’s an antidote, mind you. Something serious. They make their money on dust. I know how to stop dust from working. There goes their money, there goes the addicts, the pain—a gift, as Dorjan would say. A thing to help Thenis, to help Biemansland.”
Taern took a breath and reevaluated Areau altogether. “Good job, Areau—you are capable of thinking outside yourself. I’m impressed.”
Areau scowled at him. “They addicted me to pain by addicting me to watered-down dust first, brat. It’s revenge, not philanthropy! Now run! Run if you don’t want your friend to be hurt! I’ll meet you at the brothel and travel with you and Dorjan. I’ll have silver too, so we can take the trains. Run!”
Taern didn’t even take his leave. He turned on his heel and darted through the hallway and then out of the stables, sprinting like he was being pursued by a magnesium fire.
OH HELLS. Areau had fucked up. He had. He knew how small his world had become, how small it had to have been over the last few years, but he’d never realized how destructive that sort of smallness could be. Krissa—he’d threatened someone close to Krissa, and Krissa had become all that was good in Areau’s world. The pain giver, the pleasure giver, the civilized voice in his head.
Areau had to fix it. Taern disappeared and Areau took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said, half panicked that she’d forget she’d forgiven him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you or someone you loved. It’s such a mess, you see? I was trying to protect you, trying to—”
“I forgive you,” she said firmly, and Areau nodded, swallowing.
“Look, I’m sorry—I… I know you probably don’t feel the same way for me. It’s… I’m a miserable pain in the arse, I’m an addict, and I wasn’t that nice a man in the first place, but, you know. Should we not meet again, I just think you should know.”
Krissa had been about to bustle out of the kitchen—ah, gods, she was so efficient! Had such purpose. Was that the youth? The profession? Or maybe it was just her. But now she turned to him, her efficiency draining from her in a cloud.
“Areau?” She came forward and put her hand on his cheek. “Areau.” She tried one of her crisp smiles, but it faded, became bitterly sweet. “Do you think… these weeks, working by your side, helping you in your workshop”—she blushed faintly—“sharing your bed consensually… do you think all of that was for my contract?”
Areau swallowed hard and felt, to his shame, a rather watery smile stretching his cheeks. “I hoped not,” he said, feeling like a child. “I truly hoped not.”
She framed his scarred face in her soft hands and stood on her toes to press her lips to hers. She came back down flat-footed and whispered into his ear.
He jerked back, startled, and she kissed him on the cheek again.
“You have no idea how much I care about you,” she whispered, and he closed his eyes and held her close.
“If I can, for just a moment, be worthy of that,” he whispered back, “I shall count myself the luckiest man in the world.” He buried his nose in her hair then and lingered a moment, and one moment more, and then they separated.
“Here,” she said, assuming that efficient grace he’d come to know as hers and taking the short way to the study under the stairs. “I’m writing the address and basic directions to M’s.” She finished scratching an address and a brief map on a piece of parchment she found on Dorjan’s desk, and then thrust it into his hand. He kissed her then, in the way he hadn’t dared to before, possessive, needy, and open. They broke apart, and she wiped her lipstick from his lips and smiled. “Be safe, Areau.”
“You too,” he murmured and placed a tentative hand on her flat stomach.
She pressed it there for a moment and then firmed up her shoulders and jaw with purpose, and they broke apart.
He ran past her to his workshop and gathered his work, and then went to the stables, where he threw all of Dorjan’s armor in a satchel over his back. He took a good look around the stables and one more after he walked out of them. Ten years they’d lived in the city. Dorjan had taken him to the train station via the rabbit twice a year, and three times he’d run away to the stews to find someone who would beat and fuck him when Dorjan refused.
Lately he’d been venturing to the market with Mrs. Wrinkle and Krissa.
Not once had he left the grounds alone in his right mind, and here he was, possibly leaving forever. He looked behind him once—at the great two-story mansion, a forbidding façade, the sloped gray slate roof, the dark-gray paint and white trim—and thought that he might miss his workshop, the careful, painstaking mobiles he’d hung when he’d been his most desperate, and that he would miss knowing where every last beaker and chemical sat.
But really, of all of it, the only things he’d really miss, should he never see them again, were his mistress and his friend, and he had the sudden shattering notion that those two things could never, ever be replaced.
Krissa’s directions were concise and clear, and it was a damned good thing, because Areau wouldn’t have been able to make it otherwise. Still, he recognized the graceful, freshly painted white town house she’d described from down the block—and he recognized the panicked flood of people running from it too. He started to hurry through them, hesitating when he saw the bodies—big muscular ones lying unconscious in the streets. There was a tortured scream—a man’s, from the sound of it—and then Taern’s unmistakable shriek.
“No, you fucker!” followed by more sounds of violence issuing from the front door.
Areau approached the house carefully, stepping gingerly over a man who looked like his skull had been caved in, probably by Taern’s armored fist.
Areau had a hand on the doorframe, embarrassed by how uncertain he was. Go inside? Break Taern’s concentration? He had no weapon, only Dorjan’s armor in a satchel. What was he supposed to do in that room?
Dorjan whispered by him so quickly, Areau wasn’t even aware that his friend—dressed in his black underclothes—had come up behind him, no mask, no armor, no hesitation.
Areau was emboldened enough to follow him in. What he saw there froze his blood.
A woman—a tall, broad-shouldered woman with red hair and no breasts—was splayed on the ground, her arms akimbo and the wound at her throat still bleeding. Dorjan had just felled the man who had slit her throat, judging by the knife that went clattering to the ground when the man went down, and he was going after one of the men behind Taern. Taern was outfitted in full armor, struggling to get to the woman on the ground. Even his augmented strength wasn’t enough to fight off the three men holding his arms and propping his legs. The one in the middle had an arm wrapped around Taern’s neck.
“Hold him!” the man barked. He was fumbling with something in his pocket, and what he held up gingerly made the world spin. He had in his hand a syringe with a corked needle.
Taern was strengthened by the armor and determined, and he threw back an arm and caught one man in the jaw. The man went down, and Taern almost had the upper hand again. Dorjan was rushing in to his side when the man with the syringe flicked the cork off the end and held it against Taern’s throat.
“Stop!” he roared, and Areau’s heart froze and Dorjan became a solid form instead of the batt
ling shadow.
“What is that?” Dorjan asked. Considering what was at stake, his voice was calm, pleasant, almost innocent.
“It’s dust, guv’nor. You take one step closer and it’ll be in him.”
“Why are you here?” Dorjan asked, and again, Areau looked at his friend, at his amazing self-possession, and marveled.
“We had orders to rough up the place. This one”—and he jerked his arm cruelly around Taern’s throat—“’e got in the way.”
Taern’s face was angled up, and Areau wondered distantly how much he could even see of Areau and Dorjan from that angle. Was it important?
“Well, you have him under control now, don’t you?” Dorjan asked, managing to make his voice flip and charming. Areau watched him clench his fist by his side and then unclench it, and wondered if he was the only one who could see how much danger these three men really were in.
“We do!” snarled the man. He wasn’t tall but he was brawny, and he’d shaved his head. Areau detected a pattern of long scars on his scalp and realized that this one had taken ripping to a whole new level.
“So, you have two choices,” Dorjan said, his voice still even. “You can drop him now, and let him go, and leave here. We’ve got bigger game to hunt today, and you may even escape our wrath.”
“Who the hell’re you?” the man snarled, his hand suddenly not nearly as steady on the syringe at Taern’s neck as Areau would have liked.
“I am of no consequence,” Dorjan murmured. “But I will tell you that should you inject that substance or hurt him in any way, who I am will be the last question you ever ask, and the one that will never be answered.”
“It’s no good,” Taern muttered, his body deceptively limp in the grasp of his enemies. He wasn’t wearing his voice distorter, and Areau was grateful. “Nyx, one way or the other, I’m going to kill the fuckers who killed Madame M.”
Areau actually heard Dorjan swallow, and the tension in the room became an electric current, lifting the hairs on Areau’s arms and causing him to shiver uncontrollably.
“Nyx?” said the man with the syringe. “Nyx?”
And Dorjan shouted, “No!” as the man plunged the syringe into Taern’s neck and pushed.
Areau was never certain of what happened next, even though he saw it with his own eyes. Taern slid limply to the floor, but he went unnoticed, because at the same time Dorjan crouched, rolled, and came up throwing the knife lying by the dead woman’s throat. It hit the man who’d been holding Taern square in the throat. While the two men on either side were gaping at him, Dorjan drove his palm squarely into one’s nose, shoving it up into his brain and spattering blood everywhere. The other man watched his friends fall in horror, and was begging, taking a step back, when Dorjan grasped the knife from the dead man’s throat, yanked it, and threw it again. It caught the last man squarely in the eye.
He went down and was then forgotten as Dorjan sank to the ground and pulled Taern’s head into his lap. Taern was murmuring, delirious, happy, eternally happy, as long as in a couple of hours, he could get just one more hit.
Dorjan ripped off Taern’s mask and slapped his cheeks, trying to get the boy to look him in the eyes. “Taern? Taern? Boy, you’ve got to look at me. Can you look at me? Just look… just look….”
But Taern was murmuring, the wordless sounds of a man trapped deeply inside his skull.
Dorjan looked up then, his self-possession gone, his eyes moving wildly until they locked with Areau’s.
“Ari?” he asked helplessly. “Ari—can you help him? Please, Ari. Please. Ari… they’re going to ride on our home! They’re going to ride on Kyon’s Keep, and the world can shake itself to powder if he’s not here with me. Please, Ari. I can’t… I can’t keep fighting them, not without him. I can’t… I have no strength, not without him.”
Areau found himself nodding, grasping at straws, spewing hope and half-formed thoughts he never knew he’d had.
“Here,” he said, sinking to the floor. It was bloody, he thought, but he managed to find the one clean space in the room. He rooted through the satchel and pulled out the kit he’d brought from his lab. “In about five hours—before you get to the keep by train—he’s going to want more. Give him this instead.” He tucked a corked syringe, much like the one that had been thrust into Taern’s neck, into Dorjan’s hand. “I don’t have much. It’s ten hours by train to the station, you know that, another two hours on foot to the keep. Give him half in five hours, half when you get there. He’ll be hurting, but it won’t be horrible, not yet.”
“And then what?” Dorjan asked, his voice cracking in desperation. “Then what? Ari, that’s ten hours. You and I both know you were months away from—”
“I should be dead,” Areau said clearly. It was something he’d never told Dorjan before, something personal and almost shameful. “I should be dead. Why do you think they didn’t kill me in the asylum, Dori? They thought I should be dead—they rubbed dust in my wounds, you see?”
“I thought it was weakened,” Dorjan said, his words tripping over themselves, and Areau shook his head.
“No. No, I mean, it was, but dust is dust, right? That’s why we’ve had such trouble with it. But I’m alive. Why is that?”
Dorjan shook his head, looking lost. All those years of killing each other inside, and Dorjan had always had a purpose, had a way. Finally, finally, Areau could give him something. Areau could give him a way.
“Because I grew up in Kyon’s Keep,” Areau whispered, his voice ringing with conviction. It hadn’t occurred to him until they’d talked about returning home the night they went after Colny. Areau had gone back for a good visit after his stay in the asylum, and he’d returned addicted to the pain he’d been given with the dust, but not the dust.
“The niskets—they clean us out, Dori. They take our blood in great quantities when we’re in the mines, and we drink nectar to recover. The nectar is our blood, isn’t it? Cleaned? The dust, it’s their element—blood and chemicals. They can live with it. So my blood, it was different to begin with, which is why it didn’t kill me. And then they cleaned me out—”
Dorjan’s eyes brightened, tracked, registered. “So the addiction didn’t stick,” he breathed.
Areau nodded and then began to empty the satchel. “You’re going to need the armor,” he said apologetically. “You’re going to need to run, and I think you’ll have to stow away on the millipede and….”
Dorjan stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Ari. I understand that I need the armor. But I cannot thank you enough for the hope.”
Oh… oh… Areau wanted to cry then, because Dorjan was thanking him, was blessing him for hope, for giving something that only Areau could, and for a bright, shining moment, Areau saw himself through his friend’s eyes like he had in their childhood, and he was perfect and good. But Areau had been selfish enough already, and Dorjan had things he needed to attend to.
“Did you mean what you said?” he asked. “About them riding toward our home?”
Dorjan nodded. He kissed Taern on the forehead and lowered him gently to the floor. Then he stood up and started fitting his armor over his legs, greaves first as Areau had showed him when he’d first made the stuff.
“The Forum Masters—the Triari, Septra included, and his particular friends—are taking a special conveyance to Kyon’s Keep.” He looked around the brothel, and his eyes fell on the woman in the dress, sprawled out on the floor. “They were trying to find reasons to stop me, I think,” he said sadly. In spite of their press for time, he walked toward the woman and lowered her hands toward her flat, broad chest, then closed her open eyes. “I’m sorry, M,” he said softly and then bent and kissed her forehead. “When this is over, I’ll try to see that we take care of yours.”
He stood up and turned away from her reluctantly, but Areau could see tears in his eyes, and he cursed himself again. “It’s my fault,” he confessed, hoping Dorjan could forgive him. “I clued the lokogos in o
n where to go. I didn’t realize he—she—was a friend.”
“She was,” Dorjan said. “But this—this was set in motion without you, Ari. Don’t take this for yours.”
“What are we going to do?” Areau asked, accepting Dorjan’s forgiveness as he’d always accepted his love. “About them coming to Kyon’s Keep?”
Dorjan girded his loins then and fastened the attached breastplate. “You’re going to take the first train out,” Dorjan said, his hands moving quickly in accustomed paths. “When they arrive—it’ll be close, make no mistake. I’ll be sending a cricket out for you to get you there—when they arrive, you’re going to tell them you know the secret to the mines, the ones I refused to tell them.”
Areau’s eyes widened. “You’re not going to tell them—”
“I’m only unhinged, Ari, not deranged!” Dorjan snapped. “No. You’re going to tell them they have to go into a mine and see. Then you’re going to take them to the northernmost asteroid and let them all go inside.”
Areau scowled at him. “And what’s that going to—”
“The niskets, Ari. The niskets control the gas mixture so we can breathe in the mines, remember?”
Areau blinked. “Yes….”
“Do you remember anything about how we tether the things to the earth?”
“From north to south—I grew up there too!”
“Right. Which means the asteroid to the north….” Dorjan trailed off, and Areau suddenly found his way.
“Has the thinnest hull,” Areau said, understanding completely.
“And is the most susceptible to volatile gases,” Dorjan finished for him. He was almost done with the armor—all he had left was the knit mask and then the metal one. He grimaced then and went to put it down.
“Dori—”
“Why do I need it?” Dorjan asked, his voice gruff. “All the Nyx fought for, it came to nothing—”