City of Night

by Michelle West

  He teaches Angel how to fight. There’s no honor in it, and no attempt to teach morals. It’s just about the fight itself, and that much, Angel can focus on. The morals? Not so much. Not when he can walk the streets and see people thin with starvation, begging, hands or bowls in their laps, all dignity lost in the face of hunger and their inability to make themselves useful to people who have money. Not when he can leave the Common and walk half a mile and be surrounded by buildings that his family might have used for firewood if the wood itself weren’t so rotten. Not when he can turn the wrong corner or cross the wrong street and come face-to-face with boys little older than he is, waving daggers, strutting across the landscape like roosters.

  Not when right and wrong have become so damn blurred.

  Sometimes he remembers that it wasn’t always blurred. Sometimes remembering helps, but it gets harder and harder to remember the when, and the why, he thinks, is buried with his parents. He doesn’t think about Weyrdon often. He doesn’t go to the port, doesn’t stand on the docks, doesn’t look for a glimpse of the Ice Wolf’s long shadow. He doesn’t replay the conversation about war and endless night—because in some ways, he’s already living it. Here, on the ground, as the heat fades and the sea air turns damp and chill. The beggars are desperate now, and he watches and listens until he cannot stand to listen to another word.

  He should be grateful. He thinks it, in the dim light of Terrick’s kitchen. He should be grateful. He’s not in the streets; he’s not begging; he’s not starving. But he feels he has more in common, in the end, with the people who are. And the day that he can’t meet Terrick’s gaze, that he forgets how, is the day Terrick looks at him across empty plates and air thick with silence, and says, have you forgotten Garroc?

  And he’s out in the street, the Common empty, the stalls looking thin and forlorn as new beggars; he’s out through the gates that are still patrolled, out past them, circling the Common streets. He knows this close to the Common, those streets are safe—but even if they weren’t? He wouldn’t care. He sees the facades of merchant buildings, runs past the Merchant Authority; sees his reflection in the windows of the permanent shops that Terrick would never frequent. He hates his reflection, hates the running, slows to a walk. But even walking, he’s a coward; he’s running. He knows it.

  There are tears on his face, but that could be the rain. He doesn’t believe it, but he doesn’t know what to believe anymore; he just knows that someone else might, if they saw him. He knows, takes comfort in knowing. Someone else might believe it. Someone who isn’t Terrick and isn’t Angel, might not understand just how weak he really is. Garroc’s son? Garroc, the man who put swords in their hands in the heat of summer, and taught them how to handle them so they didn’t cut off their own damn feet?

  He doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t even care.

  But he isn’t surprised when he stops before the gated courtyard of one of the larger cathedrals in the City. It’s not one of the three, and it’s not as fine as the cathedrals on the Isle—cathedrals that he’s never seen because he’s not rich enough or stupid enough to cross the bridge and stand in the shadow of Avantari, the home of Kings. But it’s close enough, and the gates aren’t locked; this close to the Common, this close to the heart of Averalaan’s wealth, they won’t be.

  He walks into the courtyard that leads to the arched peaks of its doors. The wood is dark, but it’s dark anyway; lamps burn to either side. He follows the steps as if they’re a footpath, cleaving to their center, and as he approaches the doors, he sees that their stone sides are carved. To the left and the right, at equal distances, swords are raised; they will never be lowered to bar entrance. But that’s not the point, is it? At the peak of the architrave, in the same stone relief as the swords, he sees a shield; it is carried in the pinions of stone hawks. None of these carvings are particularly ornate, and the hawks are smooth, their wings unbroken by the actual texture of feathers. No paint colors them, and they are small, but it doesn’t matter; Angel recognizes them.

  He knows where he is.

  Looking up a moment at the shield, he raises his palms to his face and wipes the rain away. The water, curse it, has gathered in his hair. It’ll take its damn time trickling down the sides of his face, but there’s nothing he can do about it now; he can either stand in the rain or get out of it.

  He walks up the last three stairs, taking them one at a time, and he touches the closed door.

  It swings inward, silent. Even so, he stands a moment in the darkness before he accepts the invitation. He steps across the stone threshold.

  Before him, the building stretches out forever. There is light here, and it is the even and diffuse light that only magic can grant. He can’t see where it starts, although he does try. The only church he visited in the Free Towns was the Mother’s. It was smaller than this, although not much tidier. The first thing he could see, when he entered her hall, were the walls of the vestibule. To either side of the open arch, that wall was lined with candles. Some of them were made by the Priests and the Priestesses, but not all—some were made by the congregation. Different sizes, different shapes, different colors. One of them was made by his mother, and whenever she came to the church, she would light it.

  But there’s nothing on these walls besides names.

  People don’t light candles, not in this church. They don’t pray for their sons or daughters that way. It’s not for safety that you come to Cartanis, after all.

  You come to serve.

  You come to be found worthy to serve.

  God of Just War.

  Angel passes the vestibule itself, which is easy: it’s small. There are doors recessed into the wall to the left and right. They don’t matter. He looks at them anyway, and then takes a breath. Without the drum of rain, it’s bloody quiet here. The Mother’s church was never quiet.

  But it was small, that church. Full of small people. They brought grain, wheat, corn—he remembers that. What do they bring Cartanis here?

  Not the harvest.

  He passes the walls, shadowed for a moment by the width of a great stone opening that is grander and taller than the arch of the outer door. Gray and smooth, unadorned by carvings, it rises toward a ceiling that seems to stretch on forever. The light follows that stretch, and he can see—as if the sun were housed here—the paintings that adorn the ceilings, following its curve. He can’t see support beams or joists, and he wonders how it is that the ceiling doesn’t fall down.

  But clearly it doesn’t, because there’s no dust or plaster, no stone or wooden beam, across the rows of benches. The benches themselves are broken by aisles, and at the end of each bench, a wolf sits, like a silent sentinel. The dogs of Cartanis. Unlike the birds, these bristle with fangs, and fur seems to rise slightly from the tufts of their ears and the width of their neck.

  He walks between them, toward the nave.

  Toward Cartanis.

  They don’t leave much to the imagination, when it comes right down to it. Cartanis is carved in stone, larger—far larger—than life. His hands grip the pommel of a greatsword, point to the base of the statue; it gleams, as if it were real. He wears a shield across his back, and his face is helmed; he wears plate chest, and epaulets, as well as shin splints. No wolves sit sentinel beside him, and no hawks soar above; nor do they sit on his shoulders. Armored, he is unadorned. And he looks down. It’s a long way to look.

  Angel feels every inch. He stops walking for a moment; looks away from Cartanis to see the braziers to his right and left. They gleam yellow in the light, and smoke rises from them in a lazy, skyward plume. There are windows along either wall, beyond the benches: beveled, colored, held in place by bars. No light shines through them and they are curiously flat and lifeless.

  He shouldn’t be here. He thinks it, knows it, and takes a breath. But he keeps walking, and only when he reaches the base of the statue does he stop.

  People don’t come to Cartanis to pray.

  They don’t
come to Cartanis to scream or shout either—but he has to stop himself from doing both. He is so angry at the god.

  My father served you all his life, and what did he get?

  The god doesn’t answer, of course. Gods generally don’t.

  But absent the god’s answer, the answer is there: death.

  Of course. Death.

  Angel would leave, but another thought comes to him as he glares at the helmed visage of Cartanis. Death is all you get, in the end. There’s no point in serving one god or another if you just want to avoid death.

  It’s life he wants to avoid. And people who want to avoid life? They don’t come to Cartanis. He raises a hand to the god, palm exposed; it’s like a salute, but there’s no strength in it; if it weren’t for the angle of the palm itself, it would be a beggar’s gesture. A plea. But he can’t make it here. He can’t even ask the question. If it’s life he wants to avoid, he knows where to go.

  Yes, Garroc served Cartanis. Yes, Garroc died in Evanston, defending his town, and his home. Angel has no town. No home; it’s Terrick’s, after all, and Terrick doesn’t need Angel. Nobody does.

  He turns, sees, for a moment, lightning illuminate the church, sharp and harsh through windows that night can’t penetrate. Hears thunder, as if it’s the tongue of gods. But it has no words for Angel, no wisdom, no command.

  He turns toward the arch, and beyond it, the door.

  No Priest comes to stop him. No novitiate. There are only Cartanis and Angel, and the rows of empty benches, their stone wolves staring straight ahead. The rain slants, slapping glass; he hears the howl of sea wind. He doesn’t want to go out again; the anger’s spent, and without its heat he’s cold and damp.

  So he slumps across the nearest bench.

  5th day of Morel, 410 AA Twenty-fifth holding, Averalaan

  “Angel?” Finch said, and he blinked.

  “Sorry. I was thinking.”

  She hesitated a minute, as if she were picking through her words and tossing out the bad ones before she used any of them. “Help me in the kitchen?”

  Kitchen was the wrong word for the cramped, crowded room. It was Jay’s space; she did her writing and her reading there. If she wanted to have a talk, it was always kitchen. Still, he was standing closest to it, given that Carver was cooking. Carver had vacated the room; he’d done his damage and he’d moved on.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Help me cut stuff. Teller can carry it. Jay wants us to eat fast. She’s got a surprise,” she added, lowering her voice. Given that no one else had stopped talking, it meant Angel almost missed the words. But he shrugged and nodded.

  Finch handed him a knife, taking care to point it at the floor. His mother had always done that.

  Sometimes it was hard to be the outsider. Sometimes he forgot why he wanted to be here.

  Angel

  But when it’s hard, he remembers, and he dives back into the moment more carefully than he holds on to the knife that Finch has finally let go. She doesn’t like the sight of blood.

  The windows look different at dawn. They overshadow the gray stone of wall, and their colors spill across the farthest benches, reflected by gleaming wood. There are deaths writ large and flat in glass. Good deaths. Noble deaths. He’s heard the stories; everyone has.

  But he never wondered, hearing them, about the husbands—or the wives—those deaths left behind. He never wondered what happened to the children, because there were children, must have been children. Did they starve? Did they grow up wondering why serving Cartanis was more important, in the end, than staying at home?

  He’s spared that. It’s a small mercy. His father was going to die anyway. He was one of a dozen men in Evanston who knew his way around a weapon; he was one of far fewer who had experience with raiding.

  Angel pulls himself off the bench; his neck is stiff, and his arms ache. The church is still empty, still silent. He walks away without looking at the statue of Cartanis, but as he reaches the door, he feels the hint of a breeze, and the light from the windows, the glass-blue skies, makes him feel—for just a moment—that he’s walking into the world; that the world is more contained, somehow, than the cathedral.

  And then he’s in it, and the rain is gone; the sun is low, the sky a wash of colors that haven’t yet faded to blue. The air is clear and cold; the ever-present taste of salt across his dry lips is the only thing that reminds him of the sea.

  He is so tired of the City. Of what it means to be here. Of what it says about Angel, Garroc’s son. Terrick is at the Port Authority; Angel could go back to a blessedly empty room and sleep until sundown. He starts to do that. He means to do that—he could swear he means to do that—but the streets twist unexpectedly beneath his feet, like a sudden turn in a conversation that you didn’t want to have in the first place.

  He’s not where he should be; the Common’s trees are way the Hells across the City. The sun is higher, and he’s dead tired because pew benches are not the same as the floor above the foundry. He turns toward the trees, sees the stretch of road, narrower and lined with brown weeds. They’re the only growing thing that survive the wagons, horses, and shoes that tread back and forth across the cracked causeway. He recognizes them, even transplanted; here, no one bothers to get rid of them, because nothing useful grows where they grow.

  That was one of his jobs.

  To weed.

  He stops; the weeds are obscured for a moment by feet, by passing people. He hated weeding. He hated it, complained about it, got cuffed on the side of the head for forgetting to do it as he got older. He can feel the rough hand, meant to sting, not hurt.

  And gods, he misses it. He misses the weeding. The planting. The feeding. He misses the anger and the resentment and the love and certainty of home—there’s no word for what home meant, no word for the loss. He stares at brown weeds in a street that’s growing more crowded.

  Then he does something stupid. He walks against traffic, toward those weeds, and he kneels in the wet street, placing his fingers at the base of the flattened shoot. He pulls it free of the dirt that exists between cracks—more mud than anything right now, and cold—and he tosses it over his shoulder. Then he stands, and he looks at his fingers, looks again at the street. It’s stupid. It’s worse than stupid.

  But the longing is like a hunger, like the hunger the beggars expose, day in and day out, in the shadow of the Common, except it’s worse—there’s nothing at all that will satisfy the ache. Nothing. Not even the next weed, or the next, or the next—and he knows, because damn it all, he tries. He has to try. He doesn’t know why. If someone asked, he’d probably hit them.

  But no one asks. They never do. Maybe they think he’s stupid enough to try to eat them; some weeds, you can eat, if you’re hungry enough. Not these, but it doesn’t matter; it’s not about the damn weeds. His hands are shaking and his arms hurt and he’s cold and bone-tired and it’s like he’s falling, and the only thing he can grasp to slow his fall are the weeds themselves, and he tries.

  Because he knew who he was, when he last did this. He knew who he was, and what he was supposed to do, and what he believed in, even if he never thought about it much. Because he has fallen into this life and he doesn’t want it, and he wouldn’t be here if—

  If—

  His mother hadn’t died. He should have stayed. She wasn’t the one with the sword, and he should have stayed. But he didn’t.

  And when he hears the voices—the voices—when he hears the shout, broken mid-word into something like a whimper, his hands freeze at the base of another useless plant; his fingers are dark with dirt, and shaking as he rises. He sees the people moving away, hears the taunting, the brief curses, the orders. Boys’ voices, so like his, so unlike his.

  He’s in the City again; the streets coalesce around him, emptying just to one side of two buildings that form an alley. He knows what he sees, but he sees it askew: Boys with clubs and daggers. They aren’t using the daggers, but they don’t need
them; their victim is already on the ground, and she’s not putting up much of a fight.

  He recognizes them, knows where he is: This is the twenty-fifth holding. They’re Carmenta’s den. He’s run from them before, skipping fences and almost eating dirt in his rush to be gone. But the dirt beneath his nails—it’s like an anchor. For just one moment, everything is clear: the cathedral, the weeds, the mud, the den—and the woman on the ground. An old woman, because it’s always the old women who stop to talk to Angel. Maybe because they sense that he’s lost; maybe because they’re old and they’ve lost everyone else and they need to talk, too.

  It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.

  He doesn’t have a sword with him; it’s at Terrick’s, under the bed. But he doesn’t need a sword here, and if he didn’t have a dagger, it still wouldn’t matter. He sees the old woman, and he finally understands. She’s not that far away. They’re not that far; the road in the twenty-fifth isn’t wide. His legs lose their cramped ache as he stretches them, breaks stride; he doesn’t have to push other people out of the way, and for that, he’s grateful.

  He doesn’t even shout as he hits the first boy, and the second; they don’t shout until they’re tumbling because they don’t see him. Clumped together like this, the only thing they listen for is the metallic sound of a passing patrol, and right now? There isn’t one.

  Just Angel.

  Angel is enough. The sheer surprise of him, the unexpected strength of one. They cluster together, shoulder to shoulder, and three go down; the other three swear as they stagger, shout, one snarls—and then he stops, and he looks, and he finally sees Angel.

  This is when Angel should run away, because he still can, and if he doesn’t, he won’t be able. But he’s done with running. He’s finally done with running. This is a place to stand, and if he stands here long enough, maybe their victim will crawl away. Maybe she’ll call the magisterial guards. Maybe she won’t—but it doesn’t matter. He’s not doing this for her, not really.