by Sam Sykes
‘Down! Down!’
He spared no words for Gariath, who stood with arms hanging limply at his side, snout tilted into the air. The dragonman’s eyes closed, his wings folded behind his back, as he raised his hands to the sky. Though he could spare but a moment of observation before panic seized his senses once more, Lenk noted this as the only time he had ever seen the dragonman smile pleasantly, almost as though he were at peace.
He was still smiling when the Akaneed struck.
Its roar split the sea in half as it came crashing out of the waves, its skull smashing against the boat’s meagre hull. The world was consumed in a horrific cracking sound as splinters hurled themselves through the gushing froth. The companions themselves seemed so meagre, so insignificant amongst the flying wreckage, their shapes fleeting shadows lost in the night as they flew through the sky.
Air, Lenk told himself as he paddled toward the flashes of lightning above him. Air. Air. Instinct banished fear as fear had banished hate. He found himself thrashing, kicking as he scrambled for the surface. With a gasp that seared his lungs, he pulled himself free and hacked the stray streams out of his mouth.
A fervent, panicked glance brought no sign of his companions or the beast. The boat itself remained intact, though barely, bobbing upon the water in the wake of the mayhem with insulting calmness. The rations and tools it had carried floated around it, winking beneath the surface one by one.
‘Get to it, fool,’ the voice snarled. ‘We can’t swim forever.’
Unable to tell the difference between the cold presence in his head and his own voice of instinct, Lenk paddled until his heart threatened to burst. He drew closer and closer, searching for any sign of his companions: a gloved hand reaching out of the gloom, brown hair disappearing into the water.
Green eyes closing … one by one.
Later, he told himself as he reached for the bobbing wooden corpse. Survive now, worry later. His inner voice became hysterical, a frenzied smile on his lips as he neared. Just a little more. Just a little more!
The water erupted around him as a great blue pillar tore itself free from a liquid womb. It looked down at him, its feral disdain matching his horror. It wasn’t until several breathless moments had passed that Lenk noticed the fact that the beast now stared at him with two glittering yellow eyes, whole and unskewered.
‘Sweet Khetashe,’ he had not the breath to scream, ‘there’s two of them.’
The Akaneed’s answer was a roar that matched the heavens’ thunder as it reared back and hurled itself upon what remained of the boat. Its skull sent the timbers flying in reckless flocks. Lenk watched in horror, unable to act as a shattered plank struck him against the temple. Instinct, fear, hate … all gave way to darkness as his body went numb. His arms stopped thrashing, legs stopped kicking.
Unblinking as he slipped under the water, he stared up at the corpse of the ship, illuminated by the flicker of lightning, as it sank to its grave with him. Soon, that faded as his eyes forgot how to focus and his lungs forgot their need for air. He reached out, half-hearted, for the sword that descended alongside him.
When he grasped only water, he knew he was going to die.
‘No,’ the voice spoke, more threatening than comforting. ‘No, you won’t.’
The seawater flooded into his mouth and he found not the will to push it out. The world changed from blue to black as he drifted into darkness on a haunting echo.
‘I won’t let you.’
Three
ONE THOUSAND PAPER WINGS
Poets, she had often suspected, were supposed to have beautiful dreams: silhouettes of women behind silk, visions of gold that blinded their closed eyes, images of fires so bright they should take the poet’s breath away before she could put them to paper.
Anacha dreamt of cattle.
She dreamt of shovelling stalls and milking cows. She dreamt of wheat and of rice in shallow pools, dirty feet firmly planted in mud, ugly cotton breeches hiked up to knobby knees as grubby hands rooted around in filth. She dreamt of a time when she still wore such ugly clothing instead of the silks she wore now, when she covered herself in mud instead of perfume.
Those were the good dreams.
The nightmares had men clad in the rich robes of money-lenders, their brown faces red as they yelled at her father and waved debtor’s claims. They had her father helpless to resist as he signed his name on the scrolls and the men, with their soft and uncallused hands, helped her into a crate with silk walls. She would dream of her tears mingling with the bathwater as women, too old to be of any desire for clients, scrubbed the mud from her rough flesh and the calluses from her feet.
She used to have nightmares every night. She used to cry every night.
That was before Bralston.
Now she dreamed of him often, the night she met him, the first poem she ever read. It was painted upon her breasts and belly as she was ordered into her room to meet a new client, her tears threatening to make the dye run.
‘Do not cry,’ the older women had hissed, ‘this is a member of the Venarium. A wizard. Do what you do, do it well. Wizards are as generous with their gold as they are with their fire and lightning.’
She couldn’t help but cry the moment the door closed behind her and she faced him: broad-shouldered, slender of waist, with not a curl of hair upon his head. He had smiled at her, even as she cried, had taken her to the cushion they would sit upon for many years and had read the poetry on her skin. He would read for many days before he finally claimed what he paid for.
By then, he needn’t take it.
She began to yearn for him in her sleep, rolling over to find his warm brown flesh in her silk sheets. To find an empty space where he should be wasn’t something she was unused to; a strict schedule was required to keep his magic flowing correctly, as he often said. To find her fingers wrapping about a scrap of paper, however, was new.
Fearing that he had finally left her the farewell note she lived in perpetual terror of, she opened her eyes and unwrapped her trembling fingers from the parchment. Fear turned to surprise as she saw the slightly wrinkled form of a paper crane sitting in her palm, its crimson painted eyes glaring up at her, offended at her fingers wrinkling its paper wings. Without an apology for it, she looked around her room, and surprise turned to outright befuddlement.
In silent flocks, the cranes had perched everywhere: on her bookshelf, her nightstand, her washbasin, her mirror, all over her floors. They stared down at her with wary, blood-red eyes, their beaks folded up sharply in silent judgement.
So dense they were, she might never have found him amongst the flocks if not for the sound of his fingers diligently folding another. He straightened up from his squat on her balcony, casting a glower over his bare, brown back.
‘That wasn’t precisely easy to fold, you know,’ he said.
She started, suddenly realising she still held the wrinkled paper crane in her hand. Doing her best to carefully readjust the tiny creature, she couldn’t help but notice the unnatural smoothness to the parchment. Paper was supposed to have wrinkles, she knew, tiny little edges of roughness. That paper had character, eager to receive the poet’s brush.
This paper … seemed to resent her touching it.
‘None of these could have been easy to fold,’ Anacha said, placing the crane down carefully and pulling her hand away with a fearful swiftness that she suspected must have looked quite silly. ‘How long have you been up?’
‘Hours,’ Bralston replied.
She peered over his pate to the black sky beyond, just now beginning to turn blue.
‘It’s not yet dawn,’ she said. ‘You always get fussy if you don’t sleep enough.’
‘Anacha,’ he sighed, his shoulders sinking. ‘I am a hunter of heretic wizards. I enforce the law of Venarie through fire and frost, lightning and force. I do not get fussy.’
He smiled, paying little attention to the fact that she did not return the expression. She was incapable of smili
ng now, at least not in the way she had the first night she had met him.
‘This is a lovely poem,’ he had said, as she lay on the bed before him. ‘Do you like poetry?’
She had answered with a stiff nod, an obedient nod scrubbed and scolded into her. He had smiled.
‘What’s your favourite?’
When she had no reply, he had laughed. She had felt the urge to smile, if only for the fact that it was as well-known that wizards didn’t laugh as it was that they drank pulverised excrement and ate people’s brains for the gooey knowledge contained within.
‘Then I will bring you poetry. I am coming back in one week.’ Upon seeing her confused stare, he rolled his shoulders. ‘My duty demands that I visit Muraska for a time. Do you know where it is?’ She shook her head; he smiled. ‘It’s a great, grey city to the north. I’ll bring you a book from it. Would you like that?’
She nodded. He smiled and rose, draping his coat about him. She watched him go, the sigil upon his back shrinking as he slipped out the door. Only when it was small as her thumb did she speak and ask if she would see him again. He was gone then, however, the door closing behind him.
And the urge to smile grew as faint then as it was now.
‘This is … for work, then?’ she asked, the hesitation in her voice only indicative that she knew the answer.
‘This is for my duty, yes,’ he corrected as he set aside another paper crane and plucked up another bone-white sheet. ‘Librarian helpers, I call them. My helpful little flocks.’
She plucked up the crane beside her delicately in her hand, stared into its irritated little eyes. The dye was thick, didn’t settle on the page as proper ink should. It was only when the scent of copper filled her mouth that she realised that this paper wasn’t meant for ink.
‘You … This is,’ she gasped, ‘your blood?’
‘Some of it, yes.’ He held up a tiny little vial with an impressive label, shook it, then set in a decidedly large pile. ‘I ran out after the four hundredth one. Fortunately, I’ve been granted special privileges for this particular duty, up to and including the requisition of a few spare pints.’
Anacha had long ago learned that wizards did laugh and that they rarely did anything relatively offensive to brains from those not possessing their particular talents. Their attitude towards other bodily parts and fluids, however, was not something she ever intended to hear about without cringing.
She had little time to reflect on such ghastly practices this morning.
‘Why do you need so many?’
At this, he paused, as he had when she had discovered wizards could lie.
‘What is your duty?’ she had asked, their sixth night together after five nights of reading.
‘I’m a Librarian.’ He had turned at her giggle and raised a brow. ‘What?’
‘I thought you were a wizard.’
‘I am.’
‘A member of the Venarium.’
‘I am.’
‘Librarians stock shelves and adjust spectacles.’
‘Have you learned nothing of the books I’ve brought you? Words can have multiple meanings.’
‘Books only make me wonder more … like how a Librarian can go to Muraska and afford whores?’
‘Well, no one can afford whores in Muraska.’
‘Why did you go to Muraska, then?’
‘Duty called.’
‘What kind of duty?’
‘Difficult duties. Ones that demand the talents of a man like myself.’
‘Talents?’
‘Talents.’
‘Fire and lightning talents? Turning people to frogs and burning down houses talents?’
‘We don’t turn people into frogs, no. The other talents, though … I use them sometimes. In this particular case, some apprentice out in the city went heretic. He started selling his secrets, his services. He violated the laws.’
‘What did you do to him?’
‘My duty.’
‘Did you kill him?’
He had paused then, too.
‘No,’ he had lied then, ‘I didn’t.’
‘No reason,’ he lied now.
‘I’m not an idiot, Bralston,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘You read books.’
‘Don’t insult me.’ She held up a hand, winced. ‘Please … you never insult me like clients insult the other girls.’ She sighed, her head sinking low. ‘You’re bleeding yourself dry, creating thousands of these little birds …’ She crawled across the bed, staring at his back intently. ‘Why?’
‘Because of my-’
‘Duty, yes, I know. But what is it?’
He regarded her coldly. ‘You know enough about it to know that I don’t want you to ever have to think about it.’
‘And you know enough about me that I would never ask if I didn’t have good reason.’ She rose up, snatching her robe as it lay across her chair and wrapping it about her body, her eyes never leaving him. ‘You want to be certain of carrying out your duty this time, I can tell … but why? What’s special about this one?’
Bralston rose and turned to her, opening his mouth to say something, to give some rehearsed line about all duties being equal, about there being nothing wrong with being cautious. But he paused. Wizards were terrible liars, and Bralston especially so. He wore his reasons on his face, the frown-weary wrinkles, the wide eyes that resembled a child straining to come to terms with a puppy’s death.
And she wore her concern on her face, just as visible in the purse of her lips and narrow of her eyes. He sighed, looked down at his cranes.
‘A woman is involved.’
‘A woman?’
‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘A woman came to the Venarium … told us a story about a heretic.’
‘You get plenty of stories about heretics.’
‘Not from women … not from women like this.’ He winced. ‘This heretic … he … did something to her.’
She took a step forward, weaving her way through the cranes.
‘What did he do?’
‘He …’ Bralston ran a hand over his head, tilted his neck back and sighed again. ‘It’s a gift that we have, you know? Wizards, that is. Fire, lightning … that’s only part of it. That’s energy that comes from our own bodies. A wizard that knows … a wizard that practises, can affect other people’s bodies, twist their muscles, manipulate them, make them do things. If we wanted to, we wizards, we could …
‘This heretic … this … this …’ For all the books he had read, Bralston apparently had no word to describe what the rage playing across his face demanded. ‘He broke the law. He used his power in a foul way.’
‘That’s why they’re sending you out?’ she whispered, breathless.
‘That’s why I’m choosing to go,’ he replied, his voice rising slightly. She took a step back, regardless, as crimson flashed behind his eyes.
She could only remember once when he had raised his voice.
‘What happened?’ he had asked as he came through the door.
It had been a month since he had begun paying for her, not yet to the point when he began to pay for exclusive visitations. She had lain on the bed, the poetry smeared across her breasts with greasy handprints, her belly contorted with the lash marks upon it, her face buried in her pillow, hiding the redness in her cheeks.
‘What,’ he had raised his voice then, ‘happened?’
‘Some …’ she had gasped, ‘some clients prefer to be rough … I’m told. This one … he brought in a cat.’
‘A whip? That’s against the rules.’
‘He paid extra. Someone working for the Jackals with a lot of money. He … he wanted it …’ She pointed to the hall. ‘He’s going down the halls … to all the girls. He had a lot of …’
Bralston rose at that point, turned to walk out the door again. She had grabbed his coattails in her hand and pulled with all that desperation demanded. No one troubled the Jackals. It wasn’t as hard a rule then
as it was now, the Jackals being a mere gang instead of a syndicate back then, which was the sole reason Bralston never had to raise his voice again. No one troubled them; not the nobles, not the guards, not even the Venarium.
Bralston pulled away sharply, left the room. His boots clicked the length of the hall. She heard the scream that ensued, smelled the embers on his coat when he returned and sat down beside her.
‘What did you do?’ she had asked.
He had paused and said. ‘Nothing.’
She had barely noticed him pulling on his breeches now. He did not dress so much as gird himself, slinging a heavy belt with several large pouches hanging from it and attaching his massive spellbook with a large chain. He pulled his tunic over the large amulet, a tiny red vial set within a bronze frame, hanging from his neck. It wasn’t until he reached for his final garment that she realised he wouldn’t be stopped.
‘Your hat,’ she whispered, eyeing the broad-rimmed leather garment, a steel circlet adorning its interior ring. ‘You never wear it.’
‘I was requested to.’ He ran a finger along the leather band about it, the sigils upon it briefly glowing. He traced his thumb across the steel circle inside it. ‘This is … a special case.’
She watched him drape the great coat across his back, cinch it tight against his body. She watched the sigil scrawled upon it shrink as he walked to the balcony. She never thought she would get used to the sight of it.
*
‘You’ve … come back.’ She had gasped not so many years ago, astonished to find him standing on her balcony, clad in his coat and hat. ‘You said it was a special case.’
‘It was. I came back, anyway.’ He smiled, shrugged off his coat. ‘I’ve already paid.’
‘Paid? Why?’ She pulled away from him, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘I thought … you were going to take me away when you came back. You said …’
‘I know … I know.’ The pain on his face had been visible then, not hidden behind years of wrinkles. ‘But … the case got me noticed. I’m being made …’ He had sighed, rubbed his eyes, shook his head. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I won’t lie again.’