The Throne of Amenkor

by Joshua Palmatier

  The baker smiled and nodded, the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes more pronounced. “You’re welcome.”

  I hesitated, felt the wash of heat and the smell of baking bread against my face, then turned and walked away.

  I headed back to my niche. I squeezed through the opening, felt the mud-brick scrape my back, my hips, as it always did now. I sat, drew my knees up tight to my chest, the baker’s bundle set aside, and dropped my head.

  I did not cry. Instead, after a long moment of silence, I simply sighed, raised my head, and reached for the bread.

  * * *

  Erick found me in my niche a few days later.

  “Varis?”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to speak to him, didn’t want to see him.

  But I still needed him.

  “I have another mark for you and Bloodmark.”

  My eyes narrowed. He knew about the mercenary.

  I moved to the edge of the niche, crawled out into the sunlight, then stood.

  Erick stood on the far side of the narrow, back against the wall, arms crossed on his chest. He watched me carefully.

  “I’ve searched for you on the Dredge,” he said. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Bloodmark hasn’t seen you there either.”

  At Bloodmark’s name, I tensed. “I haven’t been to the Dredge.” I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice.

  Erick hesitated, asked carefully, “Why not?”

  I caught Erick’s gaze. “Does it matter?”

  Erick stiffened, and his eyes hardened. His hands dropped to his sides. “No. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”

  I flinched inside.

  “I have a new mark—two, actually,” Erick said shortly, angry now, too. “A man and a woman, Rec Terrell and Mari Locke. The man is thick-shouldered, husky, bald. He had a pierced ear, but the stud he wore was torn out on the left side. All that’s left is a mangled lobe. The woman, Mari, has short black hair, a rounded face, broad hips. There’s a scar on her forearm, almost healed, very faint. Someone sliced her up. The Mistress wants them both.”

  Erick turned, began walking away.

  “Wait.”

  Erick paused but did not look back.

  I bit my lower lip, thought of the white-dusty man, thought of telling Erick about him. But then I thought of Bloodmark, of the mercenary, of Erick saying nothing, doing nothing, and the anger returned.

  Instead, I asked, “Why?”

  Erick turned, enough so I could see the confusion in his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  I didn’t know. Why are you still using Bloodmark? Why did you walk away the night I killed Tomas? Why did you let Bloodmark win?

  “Why do you do this? Why are you a Seeker?”

  His forehead creased as he frowned. “It’s . . . what I know how to do, what I was trained to do. It’s what I’ve always done.”

  He hesitated, as if uncertain he’d answered my question, or uncertain of his own answer. Then he turned and left.

  I should have asked him something else.

  * * *

  I never would have spotted Mari if she hadn’t reached for the cabbage.

  I was standing near the wagon, the ebb and flow of the Dredge washing unnoticed around me. I’d come out of habit, having nowhere else to go. I didn’t need food. I had enough in my niche for a few days. And I wasn’t looking for Rec or Mari. Let Bloodmark have them. Erick didn’t seem to mind.

  And so, when a woman reached for the cabbage and I saw the faint scar tracing down the length of her forearm, it didn’t register. Not at first.

  I glanced up at her. Rounded face. Short black hair. Brown eyes. A lighter brown than I’d seen on the Dredge before, streaked with yellow.

  She met my gaze, smiled tightly, nodded, then turned. I nodded back, belatedly. I thought, vaguely, that she reminded me of someone. Of the woman the man had strangled, the one with the basket of potatoes?

  I frowned.

  Then it struck. Mari. My mark.

  I jerked away from the wall, glanced sharply in the direction Mari had moved. The world slid to gray and wind and red, and I began searching the washes of red to find her.

  She wasn’t there.

  I frowned, let the world return to normal. I stared down the Dredge—

  And saw her. She’d halted before another wagon, this one loaded with carrots. She was talking to the wagon’s owner, a bunch of carrots gripped in one hand.

  My frown deepened. Keeping her in sight, I slid beneath the river again, slowly. Everything slid to gray except Mari.

  I let my focus on Mari relax . . . and she slid to gray as well.

  I bit my lower lip.

  All of my marks had been red before, dangerous and deadly. Some had had smells, but all had been red in the end.

  Mari was gray, and smelled of nothing but sweat and the Dredge.

  She finished with the carrot monger and began moving away.

  I hesitated, chewed on my lower lip a moment more, then followed.

  The depths beyond the Dredge began to shift, as they’d done when I’d followed the hawk-faced man. Except now, five years after the Fire, the decay had crept closer to the Dredge itself, like a blight on the city and its streets. Mud-brick slipped to crumbling granite. Streets narrowed to alleys, then narrows, shortened and filled with heaps of decaying filth. Mildew thickened to slime, streams to sludge. The reek of the Dredge deepened, stank of piss and shit and rot. The light darkened, as if the depths of the Dredge were sucking it away, swallowing it as it swallowed everything that lingered too long, that hesitated. Soon, everything north of the River would be subsumed. I could see it happening, could feel the blight of the city on my skin.

  Mari began to slow, and the sun began to set, the gray of dusk seeping between the stone. I fell back, crouched behind mounds of filth, behind heaps of fallen stone.

  Then Mari turned into an empty doorway.

  I glanced up at the sky. The light was fading swiftly, darkness descending like cloth, smothering and complete. In moments, the depths swallowed the last of the sunlight and stars pricked the sky.

  I moved forward, edged up to the doorway where Mari had vanished. I stared into the blackness, focused.

  An empty room, small, with three doors opening onto their own darknesses.

  I stepped inside. Dust covered the floor, disturbed by tracks leading toward the central door straight ahead. Beneath the dust, a mosaic of colored clay tiles could be seen, most cracked, a few missing altogether.

  I moved to the central doorway, noticed the flicker of firelight off to one side, through another doorway.

  I halted at the edge of the second door.

  Mari stood near the fire in the center of the room, the cabbage and carrots laid out on the floor beside her. She shifted a pot over the flames, face already sweating from the heat, then squatted down and began chopping the carrots.

  Someone grunted.

  Mari froze, the knife in her hand trembling. Her eyes were wide in the firelight.

  In the corner, a heap of blankets moved, were thrown aside. A man propped himself onto one elbow. His ear was mangled, like a piece of gristle someone had chewed on and spat out.

  His gaze wandered, bleary with sleep, then settled on Mari.

  He stilled, grew suddenly focused. The bleariness faded, hardened into something terrible, something cruel.

  “Where have you been?”

  I drew back from the doorway, sweat prickling the back of my neck. His voice was dark—soft and fluid and dark.

  Like Bloodmark’s voice.

  I no longer wanted to be here.

  I heard a rustle of movement, then drew in a deep breath to steady myself and glanced back through the door.

  Mari had turned back to the carrots. But her knife was no longer steady as she cut. “The
Dredge,” she said. Her voice shook.

  Rec shifted, stood.

  “And what were you doing on the Dredge?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He moved behind her. His hands fell onto her shoulders and she drew in a sharp breath, her shoulders tightening, her body going rigid. She held the knife before her, pointed down, the blade halfway through a slicing of the carrot.

  But the carrot was forgotten. Her eyes were locked straight ahead, strangely terrified and blank at the same time. Her lips were pressed tight together, trembling.

  Rec leaned forward, one hand moving to her neck, to her shortened hair. His fingers closed into a fist in the tresses, pulled back sharply.

  Mari gasped, sobbed, her chest heaving. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes.

  “What were you doing on the Dredge?” Rec whispered into her ear.

  Mari choked on her own words, her head pulled back, her neck exposed. “Food.” Rec jerked her hair hard. “I got us food!”

  Rec leaned back, but didn’t release her hair. He knelt. His free hand shifted from her shoulder, reached down the length of her arm for the knife.

  Her body jerked. “No,” she gasped. So low I could barely hear it. “No. You said never again,” she sobbed, eyes closing. “Never again.” Tears coursed down her face.

  “Shhh,” Rec said. His hand closed about hers.

  “No,” she breathed, shaking her head.

  “Shhh. Give me the knife.”

  I gripped the dagger in my hand hard, hunched forward, my free hand holding the edge of the doorway. But Rec was too far away, was faced toward me.

  He’d see me the moment I moved into the light.

  I clenched my jaw as the muscles in Mari’s arm—muscles so tensed they seemed like cords beneath her skin—relaxed.

  The knife began to slip, but Rec caught it.

  Mari let out a sob—of pain, of despair, of weakness—and her arms dropped to her sides.

  Rec drew the knife up to her face, let the blade touch the skin of her cheek.

  Mari drew in another hitching sob, but her arms stayed lax at her sides. All of the tension had left her body. She lay slumped, head back, neck exposed, supported by Rec’s body.

  “Next time,” Rec began, then casually stroked the knife down Mari’s cheek, drawing a thin line of blood, “tell me where you’re going before you leave.”

  Mari sucked in breath through her teeth as the knife cut.

  Rec stood, let her hair free with a sudden shove forward. He dropped the knife to the ground beside her, the blade clattering on the stone floor. “What’s for dinner?” he asked as he moved away.

  Mari stayed hunched over, her shoulders shuddering, her face hidden.

  After a long moment, her shoulders stilled. She sat back up, cheeks wet with tears but drying, and reached for the knife. She cleaned it, her eyes vacant and empty, drawn inward, the muscles of her face set. “Stew,” she said.

  Her voice had changed, had hardened.

  Rec grunted. “Best get at it, then,” he added, crawling beneath the blankets again. “Wake me when it’s done.”

  My grip on my blade tightened, relaxed, then tightened again. But I shifted back away from the doorway.

  I couldn’t take them both.

  And Mari was gray.

  I sat back on my heels a long moment.

  I needed Erick. Needed to talk to Erick.

  I glanced into the room once more before heading toward Cobbler’s Fountain. Rec was still wrapped in the blankets in the far corner. Mari knelt near the fire, staring down at the knife, blood and sweat dripping from her jaw.

  * * *

  Erick was not there.

  I glanced at the night sky, at the stars. It was past dusk. I’d moved fast, but apparently not fast enough. Erick had already gone.

  I sat back against the alley wall, stared out at the fountain.

  The woman with the broken-off arm stared down at me, one arm still clutching the urn. I stared at her face as Erick had done weeks before, looked into its time-worn features.

  I heard water, heard laughter, felt the warmth of sunlight against my face.

  At the mouth of the alley, I stood, began slowly moving forward. Until I stood at the edge of the empty pool, looking down at its cracked bottom.

  Except the pool was no longer empty. Not in my memory. It was full. Sunlight on water glared into my eyes and I blinked, felt warm hands catch me up under my armpits, lift me high and naked over the pool’s edge. Cool water shocked through my feet, up through my legs, as I was dipped into the fountain. I screamed. A childish scream of delight. A six-year-old’s scream. I kicked before my feet touched bottom, splashed water into my mother’s face.

  She had soft features, blurred somehow with the sunlight off the water, with the haze of memory. But I could see her eyes. Dark eyes, brown, almost black, with tiny flecks of green. They reminded me of the strangled woman’s eyes, the one with the potatoes.

  She jerked back from the spray, laughed with a slightly scolding tone, then set me firmly on my feet on the pool’s stone bottom and released me.

  I immediately knelt and began splashing with my hands, shrieking as she splashed back. I slogged away, stumbled on the uneven bottom, fell—

  And submerged beneath the water. It closed over my head, enveloped me, cool and fluid, filling up my ears, my nose. The noises of the fountain’s circle, of people talking, of children shrieking, of my mother’s laughter, dropped away to a dull roar, like wind. The bright glare of the sunlight grayed. I’d clamped my mouth shut instinctively, but I’d kept my eyes wide.

  The whole world grayed, grew muted.

  Something inside me slipped. In the terror of the moment—a child’s terror, riddled with exhilaration as well as fear—something deep inside . . . tore.

  And something was released, surged forward. . . .

  And then my mother’s hands grabbed me, lifted me free of the water. I spluttered, felt water draining from my ears, from my nose. I blew out a rushed breath, water sheeting down my face, my hair plastered to my scalp, to my neck. I gasped in a breath too quickly, coughed hoarsely.

  My mother pounded my back. Are you all right? Breathe, baby, breathe. Come on. Breathe.

  Her voice sounded muted, unnaturally calm, yet edged with suppressed hysteria.

  I gasped again, drew in another breath, then another. The spasms in my chest eased.

  My mother lifted me from the pool, tucked me to her side so that my head rested against her shoulder, so I could see behind her.

  The world was still gray, the sounds of the fountain still muted, as if I were still underwater, submerged.

  Come on, my mother said. The edge of hysteria had left her voice, but now it sounded exhausted. You’ve had enough fun for today. Time to head home.

  I clutched at her shoulder as she began moving away, trembling slightly, face pressed tight against her shoulder. But something in the gray of the world caught my eye, held my attention.

  I lifted my head, and into her shoulder murmured, Look, Mommy. Look at the red men.

  At the edge of the empty fountain, someone grabbed my shoulder and I spun with a snarl, the harshness of the sunlight, of the water, of the gray and wind and red men, jerking back to darkness and stars and damp, night air.

  “It’s me!” Erick barked, stepping back out of my dagger’s range swiftly, one hand held out before him to stop me.

  I halted, breathing hard, heart thudding. Then I blinked.

  I’d dragged the grayness of the memory back with me. And beneath the river, Erick was a swirl of gray and red mixed together.

  The sight was shocking. I’d never seen someone with mixed colors before, didn’t know what it meant.

  “I thought you heard me coming up behind you,” he said, relaxing his stance. His hand dr
opped to his side.

  Our eyes met, and something he saw in mine made him take another step back. “No,” I said, then drew in a deep breath and pulled myself together. “No, I didn’t hear you.”

  He hesitated at the anger in my voice, at its harshness. After a long considered moment, he said, “So you’ve found them.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Take me to them.”

  He turned, began heading toward the depths.

  I straightened. “No.”

  Erick halted.

  When he turned back, his eyes had gone blank, expressionless. “What do you mean?”

  I narrowed my eyes, shifted uncertainly. “Not until we talk.”

  A flicker of surprise crossed his face. But then it blanked again. “Why now?”

  “Because things have changed,” I said without thought, and then realized what I’d said was true. Not because of the sense of betrayal that still burned inside me; and not because of the mixed gray and red of the river.

  I drew in a steadying breath. “I’m not the girl you found vomiting over the dead body of that man.”

  Erick smiled tightly. Then the smile faded and shifted, and he seemed to really look at me, to see me standing there at the edge of Cobbler’s Fountain in clothes he had given me—still worn, still tattered here and there, but not rags. I no longer crouched, no longer flinched away when someone reached toward me, no longer stayed in the alleys and narrows as much as possible when hunting. My head reached up to his shoulders, not his chest. And I walked the middle of the alleys and narrows now, walked the middle of the Dredge.

  “No,” he said, “you’re not that little girl anymore.”

  We stared at each other a long moment, and somehow in the silence the heat of my anger faded away.

  “So,” Erick said, turning fully toward me, “what do you want to talk about?”

  “The Mistress.”

  Erick frowned. “What about her?”

  “You said that she picks the marks, that you only find them and kill them. That’s what you do, what you were trained to do.”

  Erick’s frown deepened. “Yes.”