The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  The Sniffer jumped down from his chair and clapped his hands. “Consider it done!” he said.

  “Do you know the child?”

  “I can sense her, a fine lassie she is too. I don’t know where she is, not yet, but I will, I will! You shall hear from me within the month, and the child shall be yours.”

  It snatched up its cane and its bag, and capered directly out of the office.

  A second later, a very flustered Kasagalio came running the opposite way into the room with the Tyn’s drink.

  “Where did it go?” He said, looking around wildly for the Sniffer. “Where did it go!?”

  “You didn’t see it on the stair?”

  Kasagalio shook his head. He looked miserably at the milk.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Kasagalio, it told you to bring the milk here. It did not specify it should receive it. These things are terribly literal.”

  Veridy would understand, he thought. Of course she would. The needs of the family business had to come first. Not that there was any way in which he would stick to his agreement, he thought quickly. He thought of the thing’s hands all over his daughter. He felt ill.

  Kasagalio dared not take the milk away, and set it on the game board beside where the Tyn had appeared.

  Vand stared at the cooling drink for ten minutes afterwards, wondering what on Earth he had done.

  He needed Filden again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  A Momentary Kindness

  THE SAYING GOES that fate is cruel, and that is true. What is not often acknowledged is that fate is far crueler to the poor than it is to the rich.

  The poor were much in evidence upon the Golden Lane, the high road out to the north of Karsa City. This was because Golden Lane had yet to be redeveloped by Per Allian as part of the rebuilding of the city, though that was on its way, and so the poor flocked there.

  From the new boulevard of the Grand Parade, the architect’s ruthless demolitions devoured the capital street by street to the northeast and southwest, while new roads straight as wheel spokes radiated from the plazas at the either end of the Parade. Everywhere, grimy old Karsan vernacular was toppled in favour of new, shining buildings in the Maceriyan revivalist style.

  Allian’s forest of cranes had reached the southern end of Golden Lane, having already reshaped Far Reach Road, the way that had continued Golden Lane into the centre. Where Golden Lane met Far Reach Road, the road had kinked around Wicker Square, a hamlet swallowed not a hundred years since when the growing capital ate up the last of the farmlands within the outer walls. Chiefly, Wicker Square was known as the location of an ancient structure, whose foundations had, until recently, been visible in the base of a basket weaver’s shop. Scholars speculated it to be of Morfaan build, others said Maceriyan. No remains of either civilisation had been found so far west anywhere else.

  The point was now moot. Per Allian had little respect for things that did not fit into his vision of the future. Weaver’s Square had gone. The kink in the road had been ironed out. History had been erased to make way for his grand idea of what a capital city should be. Impressive maps in the Sunderdown Palace depicted an ideal Karsa City. When Golden Lane’s redevelopment was completed, it would be possible to see all the way down its length from the old Northgate to where the city plunged into the basin of the Lemio river. A pair of fine towers would frame the view of the Spires, the fantastically carved ridge where the nobility dwelt, dividing Lemio from Var. A view of the rich, designed by the rich, for the rich.

  The poor, as always, were displaced.

  As each crumbling tenement and higgledy-piggledy mill was brought down, its occupants were flushed out like rats, away from the demolition gangs and into the parts of the city Allian did not care for or had not yet reached. The last mile of Golden Lane held out, for now. In this refuge for the past, individual tradesmen battled crippling rents and ever more proficient industry to earn a living. Families lived ten to a room. But though these people were desperate, and in some cases starving, they were not the poorest. The poorest could be found on the street.

  Golden Lane thronged with beggars chased out of the new city. Many of them were children who, thanks to the crusading efforts of a certain Katriona Kressinda-Morthrocksa, found themselves unemployed.

  Lavinia Tuvacs shivered under her threadbare shawl. Unlike the other children begging up and down the street, who shouted and bawled for the attention of people barely richer than they, she kept her eyes downcast. Shame made its home in her hollow heart. She had never begged in her life. She had always worked. As a young child, she had run with the gleaner gangs in Mohacs-Gravo, always poor, but never a beggar. To find better work, she and her brother Alovo had risked crossing a continent. She remembered their journey, running from the gang bosses, leaping in the night onto passing trains, and fleeing to the glorious west.

  “Look Lavinia, we have crossed half of all the Hundred!” Alovo told her one sunny morning. He yanked back the sliding door of the millet truck they rode. She remembered it well, the rattle of the train as it crossed an iron bridge hanging incredibly over a gorge thousands of feet deep. The future had seemed so promising. Karsa’s industries attracted people from all over Ruthnia. There would be work for them, perhaps even prosperity.

  A hopeful future is the lie of the past, they said in the land of Mohaci. The old saying was right. The jobs they found were near slavery, their accommodation infested with lice and dripping with Karsa’s hideous damp. Her brother had been forced to thieve. He had been caught, and taken from her. The threat of the gang bosses in Mohacs-Gravo were paltry in comparison to the facts of her current life. The present was hellish. Her clothes were more filth than thread. She was so hungry her ribs showed through her dress. After Alovo had gone, there had been the lie of the dice factory. The contract Boskovin had secured her had been sold on to the Lemio Clothing and Shoddy Company, where there was no food, many beatings, and thundering machines stole her hearing away. Then, another of hope’s false dawns; release under laws rarely enacted before. A dray wagon took them away in full sight of outraged worthies, only to dump most of them in the slums around the Northgate.

  Now there was less food, and more violence. She could barely sleep for fear of rape, or worse. Several times she had been propositioned, tempted to sell herself for money. The men varied from the leering to the nervous to the sympathetic, but all of them wanted the same thing. Every time, she had refused. She feared there would come an occasion when she would not. Hunger would compel her, and then she would be lost.

  She was going deaf, she knew. Everything she heard since the Lemio mill was perceived as though through a heavy woollen blanket. In the stillness of the night, the muffling in her ears showed itself as a persistent, irritating whine that cheated her of other noises.

  Her face stayed impassive as she despaired. Her bonnet delineated her world, framing a view of shit-caked cobbles between shoes too small for her growing feet. Her toes poked through split seams.

  Misery had her so tightly she was numb to it. She would die there, on the streets of this foreign land. Alovo had abandoned her. She did not even have the comfort of the letter he had sent her, dictated to his employer and written in the goodfellow’s neat hand, explaining why he had to go. Alovo had never learned to read or write. The letter had been lost when they were released from the Lemio mill.

  Both of them had run from freedom. In this land of Karsa a person could not be bought and sold, but their terms of service could be. It was a legal modesty for the outrage of slavery. In the letter Alovo had said he would return for her. She had read that part a thousand times. There were dark moments when she doubted if it were true. She had not heard from him since he had gone.

  The clattering of dracon cattle bells had her start from her misery too late. She failed to catch the beggar’s alarm. A boy pelted past, showing the blackened soles of his bare feet as he leaped over her knees. His bronze bells clonked right by her ear, but they sounded so far away.
His shout came as if from underwater.

  “The watch! The watch is coming!” He said, then he was away, cursing at the coins spilling from the hat clutched against his chest. A boy of four or less scrabbled for the change. A well-heeled man kicked him out of the way and pocketed the money.

  She got to her feet. A dozen constables were working their way down the side of the busy road, kicking over begging bowls and yanking waifs to their feet, sending them staggering away with blows of heavy wooden truncheons. The constables laughed and shouted as they worked, though their words were inaudible to her. Too often, the watch was the day job of nocturnal criminals. She turned to run, slamming straight into the arms of a waiting watchman.

  “This area is to be cleared! Demolition starts before winter. No beggars. Beggars first out!” He shouted into her face. He raised his arm to strike her and she shrank back, hands up in front of her face to protect herself, knowing as she did that he would hit her anyway. The blow would shatter her fingers and he would not care.

  A hand grabbed the watchman’s arm. The watchman turned his head very suddenly, like he were not in complete control of his own anatomy. His eyes and veins in his neck swelled almost comically, and his smile became a snarl.

  “Unhand me, goodman!”

  His challenger did not release him, but stepped into view and prodded him in the chest with a ringed finger. He was a young man, with long, curly hair that was shaved to the scalp on one side of his head. A neat goatee, and long, waxed moustaches graced a handsome face. The style of his clothes, which were fine, and his jewellery, which was almost immodestly abundant, announced him as hailing from Renia, a morsel of a kingdom sandwiched between Marceny and Corrend.

  “Stay your hand, goodconstable,” he said. His Karsan was fluent, though strongly accented. She caught most of his words through the muffles circumstance had placed on her hearing.

  “I said get off!” said the constable. He threw the Renian’s hand off. “Who are you to stop a member of the watch about his lawful duties?” The man had a rough, gutter voice. A dockland whelp.

  “If I were the Prince, I would spend less time on buildings and more on reforming institutions that employ men like you,” retorted the Renian. “Striking young girls is no lawful thing.”

  The constable smacked his truncheon into the palm of his hand.

  “Care to say that again, and you can be beaten first, if you want, you filthy foreign dog.”

  The Renian swung his left foot and arm wide, displaying the sword, pistol and dagger, all hung close by one another on his belt. “Be my guest, my friend. We will see who lives.” He placed his hand on the butt of his gun.

  “You’re threatening an agent of the peace,” said the constable. He did not strike.

  “And you obstruct an officer of the district,” the Renian said. He pulled out a small sheet of paper. “My license. I am here to remove these children, by more peaceful means, at the behest of the North District council.”

  “Child catcher,” the constable said. He stepped back. “Why weren’t we informed you were operating here?”

  “I am no child catcher,” scoffed the Renian. “I am no menace to these people. I am empowered to help the poor, like you. Unlike you, I also have the inclination.” He hurried on speaking as the constable began to object. “I did not know until this morning that Golden Lane was scheduled for clearance. By all means, beat them and drive them off, they will be back tomorrow. I have a request from Goodfellow Morthrock for young workers to be housed and fed at his expense.”

  “Philanthropists,” growled the constable.

  “Tell your colleagues,” said the Renian calmly. “Have them corral these youths. I will assess them, and take those that best fit the Goodfellow’s requirements.” He looked at the huddled children. “Today, I will take thirty off the street. I will not even ask you for payment for doing your job for you.”

  The constable scowled, but turned away, whereupon his voice was lost to Lavinia.

  “Come now.” The Renian looked down at her with a warm smile. “I am not going to strike you. You are safe.”

  She hesitantly lowered her hands.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re a pretty young lady.” A calculating look came to his face.

  The intensity of his gaze made her drop her eyes for a moment, but she quickly raised them. More and more she relied on watching people’s lips to hear their words. She was experienced enough in poverty to see an escape from her current predicament. It would vanish if her impairment was apparent to the Renian.

  “Have you any experience in the factories?” he said.

  “Yes, goodman,” she said quickly. “At the Lemio Clothing and Shoddy Company. I had many duties there. I am a good worker. I—”

  He silenced her with a hand on her shoulder. It was so clean it accentuated her own filthiness; she flinched, ashamed at the state of herself. He gripped tighter to prevent her flight.

  “No need to babble.” He looked her up and down. “I think, I think you’re exactly the kind of person the goodfellow wants for his factory. Your accent, you are Kuzaki?”

  “Mohaci,” she said softly.

  “Well, not that it matters,” he said. “I am curious. I am Goodman Donati, of Renia. Say it to me, so you don’t forget.”

  “Goodman Donati, of Renia,” she said.

  “Good!” he said. “Now, you will be coming with me.”

  She hoped he would leave her alone, but he gripped her bicep tightly and marched her down the street to where a ring of constables surrounded the group of shivering children. How she hated the watch’s uniforms. When they had arrived and arrested Goodwife Agna at the factory, they had been saviours, now they seemed like demons, sent to drag her away from one hell to a worse one.

  Donati looked over the gathered children. “My, what a pitiful lot.” He said this strangely, with a mix of contempt, humour, and sympathy. “At Morthrocksey we will fatten you all up, and get you clean.”

  He took out a silver whistle and blew on it hard, waving up the street.

  A long dray wagon, very much like the one that had driven Lavinia out of the Lemio Clothing and Shoddy Company, came down the street. The constables loaded the battered children onto it. The Renian shook his head at a few of them, and they were removed from the group.

  They left the weakest, the sickest and the youngest behind. The drays pulling the wagon started out so slowly that she felt she were drifting by on a cloud. Life had become unreal, a waking nightmare that tormented her with snatches of dream.

  The-four-year old sat in the gutter with a bloody nose, weeping piteously.

  The Renian winked at her as the wagon drove by the child, leaving him to his fate.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Army of the Drowned

  AARIN NO LONGER needed to breathe. He revived to find his heart still beating and water flowing in and out of his lungs.

  Tallimastus’ gifts were gone from his hands, but they were not lost. He felt them, close by, and he thought should he need them he might draw them forth from wherever they waited. Two drowned men pulled him at an unnatural pace through the ocean, holding one of his wrists each. Aarin thought for a moment that some magical means or even mechanical aid dragged them so, but when his vision cleared further he saw two giant fish ahead of them, their tails thrashing. Rope ran from copper hooks embedded in their fins into the outstretched hands of the drowned. By this means they were pulled through the deeps so rapidly the hair of his escort streamed out behind them.

  It was at that point that Aarin also realised he could see under the water, with none of the distortion a person ordinarily suffers when submerged. He blinked, amazed, at the murky landscapes passing under his trailing feet.

  The fish were phenomenally strong. Aarin’s robe dragged at the water. The two drowned men were heavily armed, carrying wide scimitars and bucklers on their belts, but the fish swam tirelessly, their muscular tails sending the sea in to vortices that caressed Aarin’s f
ace.

  The seabed was a hundred feet beneath Aarin, a pale expanse of sand dotted with rocks and patches of submarine vegetation. The surface was about the same distance above. The deepest water below was dark and inky, but above it became increasingly blue until the shining, dappled sky of the surface roofed all over.

  Aarin looked at his escorts. Both were recently drowned, their skin still whole and bodies not yet puffed up with the absorption of water. He tugged at his arms, but they held him fast, and stared fixedly ahead at the murky horizon.

  A darkness approached. Such was the occluding effect of distance under the water that for a long while Aarin could not see exactly what it was, until the barrier turned a dark green and broke into individual shapes. Tall fronds of kelp that stretched the full distance between seabed and the world above resolved themselves, and he found himself drawing closer to an undersea forest.

  The fish dove, dragging their passengers into the weeds. The drowned moved not a muscle, they may as well have been carved of wood, and so Aarin could not decide if they directed the fish, or the fish knew the route they were to take without command.

  Across the flats of the tidal plains, kelp draped itself in giant mounds at the lowest water, stinking of ocean chemistry and alive with transient clouds of flies. Aarin had always associated the plant with rot. To witness the length of these living ropes reaching for the distant light, their flat, bladed leaves moving in the gentle ocean current was to appreciate them in a totally different way. It was a verdant landscape, rich as any terrestrial woodland, whose birds were colourful fish, the flowers anemones blooming on rocky beds, the animals slow moving sea drays nosing the silt and blowing up columns of sand.

  For a land dweller, the sea was deadly. So high were the tides, and so deadly the perils, natural and supernatural, that few men took their living from it on Aarin’s Earth. It was mysterious, and feared. But now the roles of land as life giver and ocean as death were reversed. Under the water, it was the air that was strange and menacing, and the sea that was rich with life.