Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  Septra wasn’t stupid. His eyes widened and he gaped. “Areau? Dorjan’s little pet? I ordered them to break you!”

  Areau grinned unpleasantly, suddenly knowing what he was going to do. Well, he’d been planning murder, hadn’t he? Wasn’t this just so much more personal a plan? The thing that had made him a bloody bastard hadn’t died when his addiction to pain had been broken. He’d just been able to make better choices for the people around him. Well, he didn’t want another choice for this rank fucker. He wanted the wrong choice for him. Areau owed Septra the wrong bloody choice, and he didn’t think even Dorjan would deny him that.

  “You did order them to do that,” he said gruffly, sliding the knife out of his pocket. He and Septra were eye to eye now, and Septra didn’t even blink. “You broke me and then turned me loose on the person I loved the most, and I almost broke him. But every drop of blood I tapped from his heart, he tapped from your streets. Haven’t you wondered, Triari Alum Septra, why the Nyx was so hell-bent on destroying your income?”

  Septra’s eyes bulged. “You?” he hissed, and Areau rolled his eyes.

  “I don’t have that much class, guv’nor.” He laid the accent on thick, channeling the lokogos who had made himself so free with his and Dorjan’s home. “In fact, I’m just a common street murderer, myself!”

  And with that, he thrust the blade he’d been toying with so deeply into Septra’s chest that the haft ground up against his ribs.

  He’d aimed carefully—he punctured a lung as well as Septra’s heart. The man didn’t even get out a cry for help as he fell, spasming, at the base of the mine he never lived to claim. Areau looked detachedly at Septra as he vomited blood and blinked stupidly, his last breaths rattling in his chest, and wondered if there shouldn’t be more hoopla around this man’s death. But then, wasn’t that a beautiful thing about death? Everybody got one, right? The difference was, nobody would mourn this one. For all he’d been trying to rule the world—and destroy it too—the fact was, at the end, he was just a cooling body in the snow. Areau thought there was a bit of beauty to that idea. He knew for certain that when he died, people, good people, would mourn him. When his beloved friend died, the entire province would fall to its knees and grieve.

  But not this git. This git was a carcass on the ground. Areau kicked him hard in the ribs, and while the body yielded, it didn’t move. Yup. A carcass. Exactly as it should be.

  Areau hopped on the cricket then to get Dorjan, calling the niskets as he did. They came, appearing in a whirling metallic rainbow cloud, hovering right at the mouth of the umbilical, which was about man high. As the cricket launched, he heard the last Forum Master up the umbilical call down, “I say, Septra, are you coming? Oh my—what in Bimuit’s name is that?”

  “Dorjan!” Areau called, landing at the foot of the mine.

  Dorjan slid down just like they had as kids, holding on to the handrails as he landed, and walked out from under the tube canopy. “Hells, Ari—you’re covered in blood!”

  “Not mine!” Areau grinned fiercely. “I had a little conversation with Alum Septra before he climbed up. I’m afraid he won’t make it to see the secret of Kyon’s Keep.”

  Dorjan staggered a little as he reached out to grab the strap of the cricket. “You what?”

  “I stepped up, Dori,” Areau said, keeping his eyes level with his friend’s. “All this time, you’ve been going out and getting the blood on your hands. Well, I’ve got some myself. And I’m not sorry. Not this time.”

  Dorjan’s smile wasn’t condemning. “I’m not either. Was it horrible, the way he died?”

  Areau nodded. “I stabbed him with a lower-class accent,” he said, the thought making him giggle, and Dorjan squinted at him.

  “A what?”

  “’Ave a knife in the ribs, guv’nor?” Areau mimicked. “Aye, wot’s all yer fancy gennelmens need!”

  Dorjan laughed a little, looking bemused. “Well, Ari, I’m pleased that you’re pleased with yourself,” he said, shaking his head. He grasped the strap and gave a painful haul, his body sagging a bit once he was aboard.

  “Oh, I am,” Areau said, nodding. “What’s the use in being a bloody git bastard if you can’t take out the villain when you’ve got the chance!”

  Dorjan was laughing as they leapt.

  When they landed, Areau scrambled down and sprinted to the mouth of the umbilical, where the nisket swarm had grown in proportion to their combined call. He could hear the exclamations of the Forum Masters over the clatter of the niskets’ wings; they were looking down from the portal in the asteroid to the cloud of the niskets, and they seemed enchanted. They were still enchanted when they began to cough as the niskets discharged the gases they absorbed while mining into the umbilical leading to the asteroid. Even as Areau ducked beneath them and tied off the fuse at the bottom of the rope ladder, more niskets joined the original number. Dorjan continued his inward call to the creatures who had shared their blood since they were children. Areau cleared the nisket cloud and ran the fuse as far as he could—a scant twenty yards—before stopping.

  Dorjan came to meet him there, shaking his head. “Oh, Ari—I don’t know—that doesn’t look safe at all. Septra’s dead—”

  “We need them gone,” Areau said, conviction in his voice. “It needs to happen. They cheerfully aided and abetted in the destruction of their entire province, and they did it for what? Greed? Lumium? I have no idea. All of this, and I still don’t. Our families will do anything to help a family in need, and these people waged war against innocent lives for no reason but their own ends. If they didn’t want to go out this way, they shouldn’t have created us. If you create monsters, Dori, you die by them. Remember all those books we read as kids? The adventure ones? Those books knew this was the truth—if these old men don’t know it, it’s about time someone taught them!”

  “But not at the expense of your life!”

  Areau shrugged and grinned, feeling free and happy and strong. “I may live!” he said. “You start running first, and I’ll light it!”

  Dorjan’s jaw got stony. “We’ll light it together,” he said, and Areau nodded. Dorjan was still gripping the cricket’s strap like it was bearing him up.

  “Right,” Areau said and then held out his arms. Dorjan looked surprised, but he accepted the embrace.

  “I lied,” Areau whispered in his ear.

  “About what?”

  “Two things. One—your touch never disgusted me, my friend. Even if it wasn’t from who I wanted, it was never anything but human, and I craved it as much as I craved the pain.”

  Dorjan’s embrace tightened around his shoulders, and Dorjan whispered, “What was the other thing?”

  “You’re going to be far away when I light that fuse.” And with a few swift movements, Areau shoved Dorjan onboard the cricket and tightened the strap around his waist before hitting the button for a short jump. He never could have done it if Dorjan hadn’t been weakened. He probably couldn’t have done it if Dorjan had had even an hour’s more rest, or perhaps even a dinner to replace some of the blood he’d given. But Dorjan had given everything to Taern, and that was as it should be, and Areau, for once, was the strongest one.

  “I love you, my friend,” he murmured, stepping back as the cricket launched, and then he turned to the fuse.

  First he asked the niskets about the gas content and got a rather happy affirmative from them—they’d apparently had the nisket fart of the century over by the umbilical, and all of that lovely gas was making the Forum Masters loopy, coughing and unhappy, but too disoriented to climb back down the ladder. Excellent.

  Areau went to the fuse as it lay in the snow and pulled out his little portable flame and lit it.

  And nothing happened. Oh hells. Areau walked down a yard and tried again, and again, and again. The nisket cloud was clearing, and Areau looked up to see a number of men with their heads shoved in the umbilical opening, trying to breathe fresh air. The umbilical itself was buckling as the
compressed gases did what he’d told Dorjan they’d do: weighed the thing down instead of bearing it up. Oh hells, the fuse wasn’t working. The only thing that would work was—

  Areau ran toward the umbilical, thinking about pain. He still craved it. Krissa had only broken its thrall over him and replaced it with a fully consensual one that bowed to her. He didn’t just crave her, he loved her, and she loved him. She was going to have his child.

  But that didn’t mean that pain didn’t still have a fascination for him. He still remembered the dark ecstasy he’d given himself when he’d stripped the skin from his arms, or when he’d goaded and pled with Dorjan enough to be taken roughly, screaming for Dorjan to hurt him more, hurt him better.

  Pain had been his first real lover, but as he looked up into the umbilical and saw that one of the Forum Masters was making a halfhearted attempt to climb back down, he didn’t feel disloyal to Krissa at all. This was pain for her sake, and pain for the sake of their baby. This was pain for his father and his mother and his sisters and their children. This was pain for Dorjan, to whom he owed so much and could only pay but a little.

  He felt almost serene as he pushed the portable flame up into the umbilical, although that could be the gases affecting his judgment too. It didn’t matter, because the flame whooshed up and over him, through the tube, where he could dimly hear the Forum Master’s scream over his own. The flame engulfed him, the pain agonizing, destroying every nerve in his body before the flames charred his lungs, burnt him blood and brains and bones.

  It was glorious.

  THE cricket landed, and Dorjan tried to turn the damned thing around, but it refused to go. Areau had wrought better than he knew when he’d slammed his hand on the jump button, because he’d jammed the steering gears too. Dorjan hammered at them futilely, and when that didn’t work, he feverishly unhooked the belt from around his waist and untangled his hand from the hold strap on the side, then slid down the damned contraption and turned to run toward the last asteroid.

  He turned just in time to watch the flame whoosh up the tube, and even from where he stood, half a league away, he could hear Areau screaming—but not for long.

  As soon as the flame traveled up, he heard a terrible rumbling sound and then a roaring explosion, but a deeply muffled one, as the walls of the asteroid held and then fractured, black and orange seams appearing as the gas inside ignited. The sheet of flame escaped the fractures and then the walls began to collapse in on themselves, even as the great floating cavern toppled slowly to earth.

  Dorjan knelt in the snow, weeping, until Taern came out and wrapped arms around his shoulders.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and Dorjan turned into him and buried his face against Taern’s bare stomach and sobbed, until it occurred to him to bring Taern in from the cold.

  Not Quite a Year

  Two Days Later

  “WHAT do you mean you have to go?” Taern demanded, looking at Dorjan in worry.

  Dorjan hadn’t slept in two days. He’d had to reassure the keep, that was part of it, and he’d had to deliver his condolences to Areau’s family. Krissa had arrived the next day, and Dorjan had met her as the cricket touched down. Taern had seen their exchange through the window from his bed in Dorjan’s room, and he didn’t think Dorjan even had to say anything. She simply read the expression on his face and crumpled to the ground.

  Dorjan had caught her, of course, and carried her in. He ensconced her in Areau’s room and sicced his mother and Areau’s mother on her. True to the predictions made in a winter sitting room, the two women waited on her hand and foot, as though royalty was a thing on this planet and Krissa was it.

  The treatment got even more intense when they discovered she was carrying Areau’s child, and at one point she snuck into Taern’s room so she could talk to somebody who didn’t treat her as though she was bathed in the blood of Biemansland’s newest martyr.

  Taern talked to her like she was a human being—that seemed to be all she wanted—and then, when she was ready, he held her when she fell apart.

  Dorjan came in bearing a tray for Taern and found Krissa asleep on his side of the bed.

  Taern glared at him. “Oh, of course you’re happy to see this. Her asleep here means you have an excuse not to go to sleep, doesn’t it?”

  Dorjan graced him with one of those bitter excuses for smiles Taern remembered from their first meeting. “Haven’t I been weak enough already?”

  He bowed faintly and left, and Taern was stuck setting the tray down and stumbling after him. His sojourn in the snow had left him sick as well as weakened, but that didn’t stop him from coughing and weaving his way down the corridor of Dorjan’s bloody great and confusing house, and yelling at him before he disappeared down the stairs.

  “Nyx, you bloody great nisket shite, his death was not your fault, and if you don’t get your stupid arse back here in this bed and get some bloody sleep, I’m going to climb in the first mine I can find with some big lummox who thinks I’ve got tits!”

  This threat was followed by a bout of coughing, of course, and Dorjan strode down the corridor, swinging Taern into his arms as he passed. He deposited Taern, furious and weak and trying to keep helpless, frustrated tears from running down his cheeks, back in what was supposed to be their bed.

  “That was entertaining,” Dorjan said, pulling the blankets up around Taern’s chin with stern intent. “Would you like to do it again before breakfast? My mother needs a good laugh—she’s so busy trying to parse out the food we’ve got stored so the keeps, at least, don’t go hungry that she’s forgotten how.”

  Taern scowled. “I know you have big important things happening, you arse. But your heart is screaming, and the only reason nobody here can hear it is that they’ve got other things to drown it out.”

  “So do you.” Dorjan’s voice dropped, and he raised his hand to smooth Taern’s black curls off his forehead.

  “Name one thing I’m responsible for here,” Taern snapped—but he did rub his face up to meet more of Dorjan’s hand.

  “Getting well,” Dorjan whispered. “You need to get well. I cannot do the responsible hero thing without you.”

  “Well, you can’t do it if you make yourself sick either.”

  Dorjan nodded. “Point taken.” He stood and kissed Taern’s forehead and then turned to leave. “I’ll make it a point to rest as soon as I can.”

  But he hadn’t. He’d had meeting after meeting with Coreau and his mother (who was a swimmingly lovely person, actually, and who couldn’t spoil Taern enough) and with the widow who was running Dre’s keep. And in the middle of this, he’d said loudly and often that someone needed to go back and alert the Forum that 12 percent of its ruling body had just exploded in a ball of flame.

  So now, two days after Areau, who had been the center of his entire world before Taern came along, had died with that 12 percent, Dorjan was leaving Taern bedridden and helpless.

  “You know, you’re damned close to needing to be sedated!” Taern snapped—and then sniffled. Dammit! Dorjan had bags under his eyes that could be shipped to Kiamath Keep, but Taern couldn’t seem to kick a lousy head cold.

  “Five minutes on the millipede and I’ll be out like a light,” Dorjan confessed. He sat in the stuffed chair he’d put next to the bed just so they could have these little chats, and Taern smacked his knee and snarled.

  “When do you leave, prat!”

  “Two hours,” Dorjan said, and Taern could tell he was fighting to keep his eyes open.

  “Then lie down next to me and sleep for one of them, and I’ll consider not being such a colossal pain in the arse.”

  Dorjan had sighed then, and since Krissa had gone back to her bed and back to being spoiled by everybody’s mother (well, the really pregnant woman with the thick, curly blonde hair might have been Areau’s sister, but she was obviously somebody’s mother), Taern could scoot over and make room for him.

  Taern tucked himself into Dorjan’s arms and nestle
d his head against Dorjan’s chest.

  “I love you, you dumb git,” Taern muttered irritably. Dorjan’s response was a long-drawn-out snore.

  Taern fell asleep against him, and when he awakened, Dorjan was gone.

  One month later

  “ARE you sure he won’t object to us being here?” Mrs. Wrinkle asked for what must have been the hundredth time. She’d asked when he’d proposed the trip to her, writing her from Kyon’s Keep to Dre’s, and she’d asked when they’d met to board the train, and then she’d asked every hour on the hour on their way back. He’d managed to keep his temper and his perspective for most of that and had managed to lie his skinny, still recovering arse off.

  But now that they were faced with their home, dusty and disused, with only a few dishes in the sink and some of Dorjan’s smallclothes hanging on the line in the laundry room, Taern allowed his real opinion to show.

  “He’ll be furious with me,” he said honestly, “but he’s never mad at you. And look at this place. He needs us, Mrs. Wrinkle, don’t you think so?”

  Their housekeeper looked around, and Taern watched a ripple of grief cross her weathered face.

  “Are you sure Lady Krissa won’t come until after the baby?” Mrs. Wrinkle asked, and Taern moved to help her sweep open the drapes.

  “I think she’d love to come here before that,” he said, speaking the truth. “But Areau’s mother—well….”

  “Aye,” Mrs. Wrinkle said. “Mrs. Coreau, she needed someone to fret over. But….” She looked around unhappily. “Oh, Master Taern. It’s so sad in here,” she confessed, and Taern had known it was coming. He wrapped his arms around her plump, comfortable figure and let her cry on him.

  Mrs. Wrinkle was tough, though—you wouldn’t think it, but she had been serving Nyx and his mad scientist albatross for ten years, and she was accordingly strong. In a moment she straightened up. “This place is a mess,” she said briskly, and then she fought against crumpling again. “I hate to think of Master Dorjan here alone. For a while he was surrounded by family, that’s all.”