by Jaine Fenn
Jemulf strode into the yard, saw Sorne, and waved. A raised finger to Ramek to order his usual and his friend ambled over, then half sat, half collapsed onto the matting. Being a foreigner himself, albeit from Faro rather than Shen, Jemulf shared Sorne’s dislike of sitting on the ground.
“No flutes today,” said Sorne by way of greeting.
“Makes a nice change.”
They agreed to disagree on the ubiquitous pipe and flute musicians in public spaces here: Jemulf said it put his teeth on edge while Sorne rather liked it. He had some musical talent himself and had wondered, when he’d returned to the city, whether he might play the pipes for a living. But the standard was high and musicians were, like every other legitimate profession not relegated to slaves, either locals or outsiders with proper identity papers and references.
“How’s your boy?”
Sorne both liked and disliked it when Jemulf called Tamak his. “His joints hurt pretty much all the time now, he says.”
“You want to try becen-root. I told you about my aunt.”
“He hasn’t broken a bone, this is an ongoing thing.”
“It’s amazing stuff.”
“But not easy to get.” Or cheap.
“I still have contacts.”
“I’m sure you do.” Sorne saluted Jemulf with his tea to show he meant no offence.
The other man took a pull on his own drink; he actually liked the local brew.
Putting down his cup, Sorne said, “Sharrey won seats to watch the regatta from the stands.”
“Good for her. Not making you go is she?”
“Not if I can help it. In fact, you could help there. Or rather Breta could.”
Jemulf raised a pencilled eyebrow. He kept to the Faroese habit of shearing, shaving or even plucking any actual hair that had the temerity to grow on him. “How so?”
“Sharrey wants to go with her friend, the one with the loopy ma. But loopy ma needs babysitting.”
“I’m sure Breta would love an afternoon mopping up piss and talking nonsense. Make her wish we’d had children after all.”
“Nishet’s mum isn’t that far gone. But she doesn’t like men. I’ll teach an extra session for free.” He didn’t say “I’ll owe you” because Sharrey was right: he already owed Jemulf and Breta too much.
“About that. We may have to move the training-rooms.”
“Again?” Although it was legit to run what in Shen would have been called a gym, even though Jemulf had proper, or at least wellforged, paperwork, the additional fight-training that Breta and Sorne offered to selected clientele was borderline illegal. They’d already had to relocate once.
“Palms will be greased, the rooms will be seen to close; it’ll be fine. But not much work for you for the next few weeks I’m afraid. Although…”
Sorne knew that look. “You’ve got something ‘interesting’ coming up.”
“We have. And it’s a real easy one this time.”
“You know I don’t like that sort of work.” Not after he’d spent most of his life trying to put a stop to it. “A little rule-bending’s fine, but nothing dodgy enough to risk getting collared.”
Jemulf put a finger to his chin. “You know, I’d give a week’s takings to know why you’re so obsessed with staying on the right side of the law.” He held to the common assumption that most foreigners on the strangers’ isle were in hiding, or at least had run away from their own shadowland for good reason.
Sorne ran his finger across his lips, miming sealing them, then shook his head.
His friend smiled back. “Of course. We all have our little secrets. But this job is a peach. Obviously we’ll sort your domestic problem – if not Breta then we’ll find someone suitable – and I’ll waive three months’ rent on your lock-up. And that’s just for showing up. If the job comes off you’ll get a hefty bonus. And the joy of it is, you won’t even have to hit anyone!”
Sorne sighed. “All right. Tell me more.” He had to at least play along.
“I heard about this house on Pahnec that’s been deserted for months. Likely to remain so too. An unexpected early death led to a long-running family dispute over the inheritance.”
“On Pahnec?”
“Uh-huh. So it’ll be crammed with all sorts of goodies. They were parfumiers, and dealt in fine cloth too.”
“And you intend to just walk in and take whatever’s lying around?”
“Break in, to be precise.”
“I’m not a thief, Jem. And that’s not me coming over all moral. It’s just not my area of expertise.”
“Which is why you won’t be coming in with us. We need you to act as a look-out.”
“A look-out?”
“Yes, just… loiter outside with a punt.”
“So actually a look-out and getaway man?”
“Strictly speaking, yes. We trust you. And it can’t be Breta or me.” He held up a hand; even in the relatively dim daylight under the awning, his skin was several tones darker than Sorne’s. “You could pass for a local. Didn’t you say you had a Zekti disguise amongst the bits and pieces you’re so keen to keep out of sight of your good lady?”
“I’m not a puntsman.”
“Punting’s easy enough to learn.”
Jemulf wasn’t wrong: one of Sorne’s men had picked the skill up quickly enough the last time he’d done something like this.
Jemulf continued, “It’s a prime waterfront property, empty and waiting for a good going-over.”
“Waterfront?” Waterfront on Pahnec; near the Eternal Isle. Now that was interesting. “It would make the getaway easier,” he conceded.
“It’s right on the grand channel.”
“And that would make us more likely to be spotted.” But location-wise… it couldn’t be better.
“Which is why you need to make like a local, just hanging around, not attracting attention. When we leave we’ll just be another bunch of late-night revellers out on the water.
“There’ll be more activity round there coming up to the regatta.”
“We’re planning on going in a couple of days after; still plenty of people partying to give our local punstman the excuse for a late fare, but the militia will’ve relaxed a bit.” Jemulf leaned across the table. “So, you in?”
He didn’t want to appear too eager. “I’ll think about it.”
Tamak was back from school when he returned to Sharrey’s; sent home early, and now confined to bed. Sorne resisted the urge to check on him. It wasn’t as though the boy was his own flesh and blood. He only felt this way because Sharrey’s son was eight years old, halfway between the ages of his two boys when the rain-fever took them. That had been over a decade ago. But still his foolish old heart softened for the boy, damnit.
He needed to get a grip. Because if the duke’s last note was anything to go by, then one day soon those feelings were going to be a problem.
CHAPTER 17
Dej stumbled in the failing light. Her reactions saved her from a bad fall but she still came down onto her knees. The heavy backpack pulled her off-balance. She flopped onto her side to lie half curled amongst the pebbles next to the mountain beck she’d been following.
She’d walked without stopping all day; a hard, mindless march, not thinking about anything beyond where her foot would come down next.
But now her body wouldn’t take her any further. And that left her mind free to acknowledge the pain. It tore through her like cold lightning. How could he do that? How could she be stupid enough to fall in love with someone capable of doing that?
She couldn’t even name him, couldn’t think directly of him. She drew a long deep breath and sobbed. Breathed again. Sobbed again, her body shaking and convulsing, the jagged throb of her injured ribs adding a physical note to her silent song of pain. She curled tighter, against the pain, but kept sobbing. Dry, quivering sobs. Skykin can’t cry.
Suddenly the pain flared into anger. She put her hand to her forehead, grinding the heel of her pal
m into the point between her eyes where her animus had entered her. “You,” she ground out, “you took all I had! I can’t sing. I can’t even cry!”
She’d once thought that the emptiness inside would be filled by her animus. Instead she’d just become a vessel to extend its life.
She realised she was humming. She’d stopped sobbing, at least. And she’d found something else to be angry at, besides him.
She hummed louder. The stronger her voice got the less musical it sounded, and she knew from bitter experience that any attempt to sing would sound like a pig being strangled, but fighting her body to make something like music gave her something to focus on. When her voice cracked and died she opened her eyes. Stars had come out overhead.
She crawled free of the backpack then pulled the cloak out the top of it. She wrapped herself up, then put her arms around her pack, pulling it close. It was all she had, and she clung to it, taking simple comfort from its heavy, neutral physicality, humming herself to sleep.
Someone was nearby. Dej opened her eyes. Still dark. A darker shape moved on the far side of the stream, between her and that glowing patch of vegetation.
She came fully awake, her skykin senses singing as her voice never could. She shrugged free of the cloak like a cat edging back before striking, paused for a moment, then jumped to her feet, snatching up her stolen sword. Diamond sparked in the moonlight as she leapt over her pack, sword whirling. An unearthly scream erupted from her throat.
The skykin who’d been sneaking up on her froze for a heartbeat, then turned and ran upstream. He had a short-stave but showed no sign of stopping to use it. Dej ran after him, splashing through the stream, screaming incoherently. He sped up. She kept running, kept screaming. Only when the intruder disappeared over the brow of the hill did she stop and look around, her chest sore and throbbing.
She was alone. She neither saw nor sensed any other threat. Shame: she was spoiling for a fight. She held herself in a combat crouch, shoulders heaving, hands twitching, while the urge to do violence drained away.
Still no one nearby. She sighed. No more sleep tonight.
She cast around until she found her pack, then shouldered it and started walking, fast and determined, down the gulley. With a low Greymoon and the skyland stars the only light, she had to keep half an eye on the terrain, but she also extended her senses farther afield, in case the attacker came back, with friends.
He had to be a clanless. She’d sensed, in the split second between waking and attacking, his gender, his race and that he was not in good health. There’d been nothing familiar about him but that was no surprise; she hadn’t got to know the clanless well before inadvertently leading most of them to their doom.
The survivors would not be pleased to see her.
She upped her pace. When the gulley turned north she paused. She’d been heading northwest because that was the direction the terrain took her but the clanless settlement was north and a little west of the red valley. She needed to avoid that.
She climbed the gulley side and cut southwest. When, towards the end of the day, she came across a mountain bog she took the easier detour, due west.
As the Sun grew lower, the land opened out into a great plateau. She’d visited these uplands with the clanless, to set an ambush for the shadowkin caravan on the orders of their shadowy Zekti patron. The unguarded thought let in a surge of pain, because that was how she’d met him. She clamped down on the emotion.
This was nightwing country. She’d heard a nightwing once, in the distance; its unearthly cry had filled her with terror. She had no desire to get close enough to see one.
Or did she? What if she stayed out here, exposed and unprotected, and dared one of the world’s most fearsome creatures to put an end to her misery? Assuming her animus let her.
She shook her head. Too easy. But if she didn’t want to end up as a nightwing’s dinner she needed to find shelter before darkness fell.
The vegetation on the plateau was lush but low, nothing to provide cover. Then, as the Sun touched the mountains, she saw something odd. Just off to the right a stand of plants grew high, in an unexpectedly regular shape. She hurried over.
The shape resolved itself into a roofless house, a square vegetation-covered box. No windows, but an open doorway, wider and higher than any normal door; it covered half the wall facing her. She crept closer, cautious and alert; some creatures might consider this an ideal lair. But she sensed no complex life save a faint mental warmth from one of the vines covering part of the structure: it had an animate portion that brought back dead creatures to feed the plant-part, but she was both too large and too lively to be of interest.
Up close she saw there was a roof after all, just a flat one. She stuck her head inside. The last rays of the Sun shone in slantwise, showing an open space with growths on the walls. The far wall wasn’t vertical but diagonal, sloping down at a steep angle.
She entered. The plant life inside was sparser, just the carrionvine and various moss- or mushroom-type stuff that didn’t need much light. Pale grey walls showed between the multi-coloured patches of furry or scaly growth. Dej ran a hand along a section of bare wall. It was smooth, and cool. Not brick or stone or wood. Some sort of metal? She didn’t think there was this much metal in the whole world.
The diagonal wall was even odder. Faint daylight shone through at the very top. It was transparent, like glass, though smothered in vegetation most of the way up.
This had to be some pre-Separation wonder, built by the Children of the First themselves. Which made it unholy, spiritually dangerous – for shadowkin. For a lone skykin, it was just somewhere to shelter from nightwings.
She examined the vegetation, locating a vine whose swollen stem-parts had a soft and succulent centre. She pulled some off the outside wall near the door, and sucked out the sweet heart of the plant. Then she settled down against the wall across from the door, wrapped in her cloak. Though this was the most alien place she’d ever been, somehow being here felt right. It’s disconnected from everything, by time. I’m disconnected from everything, by choice.
She lulled herself to sleep constructing extravagant, limitless fancies about the god-like beings who might once have lived in this place.
CHAPTER 18
Sadakh looked down at the body. “I’m sorry, old friend,” he said, as he picked up the knife.
The obsidian blade slid through Ritek’s cool flesh; blood welled from the cut, thick and dark. Blood is the source… His ghost sounded almost gleeful. But she was right.
This was the freshest body Sadakh had ever dissected, but it brought no joy.
When Ereket, Ritek’s wife, had turned up at the priory this morning Sadakh had been shocked: for her to come to him was unheard of. With the use of mime and a writing pad she explained how she had woken to find Ritek dead in bed beside her.
Pausing only long enough to summon a bodyguard, Sadakh had taken one of the priory’s punts over to the islet near the edge of the city where she and her husband had their innocuous little laundry business.
Ritek had indeed died in his sleep though his face was frozen in a near-comical expression of surprised discomfort, as though he had been struck down by indigestion. Sadakh had comforted Ereket but explained that he needed to examine her husband’s body before it was taken to the pyres. She had nodded, even as tears ran down her face.
Sadakh drew the blade across the soft flesh below the ribs, then downwards, and across. Ritek’s skin still showed residual redness from taking the serum. He peeled back the flap of fat-crusted skin to reveal the gut. The organs within looked healthy enough, wet and shining, no obvious blemishes or swellings. So why had Ritek died?
A month ago this would have been a sad mystery. Today, it was a disaster. Ritek had been the first subject since the Shenese boy to survive taking the serum. And now he had died: suddenly, inexplicably. Despite the closeness of the room, Sadakh shivered.
He worked quickly, and did not probe as deeply as he coul
d have. He needed to leave the body in a suitable state to be wrapped in a shroud for transport across the lake before sunset. He could hear Ereket crying in the corridor outside. Like her husband, she’d had her tongue removed as a punishment during her previous, criminal life; her empty mouth made her hollow sobs sound disturbingly childlike.
Nothing looked amiss in the body cavity, save the heart being perhaps a little bigger than expected. He took samples of blood and scrapings from various organs, placing some on his quartz examining slivers, preserving others in fluids the launderers had procured for him. Then he closed, bound and wrapped the body. His bodyguard carried Ritek’s remains out to the parlour where he prayed with Ereket then left her to wait for the deathsmen.
Back in the workroom, he placed his magnifying-frame near the window. He adjusted the angle of the vertical wooden viewingtube and tilted the specimen tray to catch the last of the daylight. He still smiled to remember the moment when he had first fitted the newly-ground lenses inside the tube and examined a drop of lake-water. He’d been amazed to find it alive with a myriad of strange creatures.
But blood had been the breakthrough. It too had structure. Comparing blood, of the living and the dead, of skykin and shadowkin, had got him thinking on its nature. Then he read a treatise from Physic of Pelk, on how the combined saliva and blood of a horse that had survived jaw-rot, when dripped into a scratch on the nose of its infected foal, had cured the young beast. The key to creating what he now knew was called a serum, and ensuring it was accepted by the subject’s body, was to combine the animus extract with the blood of the subject.
Ritek’s blood looked much as he expected; similarly the samples of organ tissue. No clue as to why a substance designed to extend life might end it. This was one piece of news the caliarch would not be hearing.