‘You boys plan to paint the town, you aren’t going to start in here. Got it?’
Quiet. Wine dripped wetly off the jagged angles of the bottle stump.
The two remaining Majak looked at their companion, curled up on the floor and twitching, then back to the wet gleam of Egar’s makeshift weapon. Rage and confusion struggled on their faces, but that was as far as it went. He saw they were both pretty young, reckoned he might be able to brazen this one out. He waited. Watched one of them rake a hand perplexedly back through his hair and make an angry gesture.
‘Look, Dragonbane, we thought—’
‘Then you thought wrong.’ He had his reputation and his age – things that would have counted for something among Majak back on the steppe, and might play here, if these two hadn’t been away from home too long.
If not, well . . .
If not, he had bare feet and a broken bottle. And glass shards on the floor.
Nice going, Dragonbane. Better make this good. He put on his best clanmaster voice. ‘I am guesting here, you herd-end fuckwits. My bond with these people compels me, under the eyes of the Dwellers, to defend them. Or don’t the shamans teach you that shit anymore when you’re coming up?’
The two young men looked at each other. It was a dodgy interpretation of Majak practice at best – outside of some small ritual gifts, you didn’t pay for guesting out on the steppe. And lodging at a tavern or a rooming house, say, in Ishlin-ichan, wasn’t considered the same thing at all. But Egar was Skaranak and these two were border Ishlinak, and they might not know enough about their northerly cousins to be sure, and in the end, hey, this old guy killed a fucking dragon back in the day, so . . .
The one on the floor groaned and tried groggily to prop himself up. Time running out. Egar pointed downward with the bottle. Played out his high cards.
‘And what do your clan elders have to say about this shit? Stealing another man’s whore out from under his nose? That okay, is it?’
‘He didn’t kn—’
‘Pulling a knife on a brother? That okay with you, is it?’
‘But you—’
‘I’m done fucking talking about this!’ Egar let the bottle hang at his side, like he had no need for it at all. He stabbed a finger at them instead, played the irascible clan elder to the hilt. ‘Now you get him up, and you get him the fuck out of my sight. Get him out of here while I’m still in a good mood.’
They dithered. He barked. ‘Go on! Take your fucking party somewhere else!’
Something gave in their faces. Their companion stirred on the floor again and they hurried to him. Egar gave them the space, relieved. Bottle still ready at his side. They propped the injured man up between them, got his arms over their shoulders, and turned for the door. One of them found some small piece of face-saving bravado on the way out. He twisted awkwardly about with his half of the burden. The anger still hadn’t won out on his face, but it was hardening that way.
‘You know, Klarn isn’t going to wear this.’ Egar jutted his chin again. ‘Try him. Klarn Shendanak is steppe to the bone. He’s going to see this exactly the way it is – a lack of fucking respect where it’s due. Now get out.’
They went out, into the rain, left the door swinging wide in their wake. The Dragonbane found himself alone in a room full of staring locals.
Presently, someone got up from a table and shut the door. Still, no one spoke, still they went on staring at him. He realised the whole exchange had been in Majak, would have been incomprehensible to everybody there.
He was still holding the jag-ended bottle stump.
He laid it down – on the table he’d swiped the bottle from in the first place. Its owner flinched back in his chair. Egar sighed. Looked over at the innkeeper.
‘You’d better keep that door barred for the time being,’ he said in Naomic. To the room more generally, he added: ‘Anyone has family home alone right now, you might want to drink up and get on back to them.’
There was some shuffling among the men, some muttering back and forth, but no one actually got up or moved for the door. They were all still intent on him, the barefoot old thug with iron in his hair and his shirt hanging open on a pelt going grey.
They were all still trying to understand what had just happened. He sympathised. He’d sort of hoped— Fucking Shendanak. He picked his way carefully through the shards of broken glass on the floor, past the stares, and went upstairs to get properly dressed.
He wanted his boots on for the next round.
* * *
He found Shendanak holding court outside the big inn on League Street where he’d taken rooms. The Majak-turned-imperial-merchant had ordered a rough wooden table brought out into the middle of the street, and he was sat there in the filtering rain, a flagon of something at his elbow, watching three of his men beat up a Hironish islander. He saw Egar approaching and raised the flagon in his direction.
‘Dragonbane.’
‘Klarn.’ Egar stepped around the roughing up, fended his way past an overthrown punch that skidded inexpertly off the islander’s skull. He shoved the tangle of men impatiently aside. ‘You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?’
Shendanak surfaced from the flagon and wiped his whiskers. ‘Not my idea, brother. Tand’s getting his tackle in a knot, shouting about how these fish-fuckers know something they’re not telling us. Starts in on how I’m too soft to do what it takes to find out what we need to know. Come on, what am I supposed to do? Can’t take that lying down, can I? Not from Tand.’
‘So instead, you’re going to take orders from him?’
‘Nah, it’s not like that. It’s a competition, isn’t it, boys?’ The Majak warriors stopped what they were doing to the islander for a moment. Looked up like dogs called off. Shendanak waved them back to the task. ‘Tand sets his mercenaries to interrogating. I do the same with the brothers. See who finds out where that grave and that treasure is first. Thousand elemental pay-off and a public obeisance for the winner.’
‘Right.’ Egar sat on the edge of the table and watched as two of the Majak held the islander up while a third planted heavy punches into his stomach and ribs. ‘Menith Tand’s a piece-of-shit slave trader with a hard-on for hurting people, and he’s bored. What’s your excuse?’
Shendanak squinted at him thoughtfully.
‘Heard about your little run in with Nabak. You really bottled him over some fishwife whore you wouldn’t share? Doesn’t sound like you.’
‘I bottled him because he pulled a knife on me. You need to keep a tighter grip on your cousins, Klarn.’
‘Oh, indeed.’
It was hard to read what was in Shendanak’s voice. Abruptly, his eyes widened and he grabbed the flagon again, lifted it off the table top as the islander staggered back into the table and clung there, panting. The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose, his lips were split and torn where they’d been smashed repeatedly into his teeth. Both his eyes were blackening closed and his right hand looked to have been badly stomped. Still, he pushed himself up off the table with a snarl. The Majak bracketed him, dragged him—
‘You know what,’ said Shendanak brightly. He gestured with the flagon ‘I really don’t think this one knows anything. Why don’t you let him go? Just leave him there. Go on and have a drink before we start on the next one. It’s thirsty work, this.’
The Majak looked surprised, but they shrugged and did as they were told. One of them gave the beaten man a savage kick behind the knee and then spat on him as he collapsed in the street. Laughter, barked and bitten off. The three of them went back into the inn, shaking out their scraped knuckles and talking up the blows they’d dealt. Shendanak watched them through the door, waited for it to close before he looked back at Egar.
‘My cousins are getting restless, Dragonbane. They were promised an adventure in a floating alien city and a battle to the death against a black shaman warrior king. So far, both those things have been conspicuous by their absence.’
&nbs
p; ‘And you think beating the shit out of the local populace is going to help?’
‘No, of course not.’ Shendanak leaned up and peered over the table at where the islander lay collapsed on the greasy cobbles. He settled back in his seat. ‘But it will let the men work out some of their frustration. It will exercise them. And anyway, like I said, I really can’t lose face to a sack of shit like Menith Tand.’
‘I’m going to talk to Tand,’ growled Egar. ‘Right now.’
Shendanak shrugged. ‘Do that. But I think you’ll find he doesn’t believe these interrogations are going to help any more than I do. That’s not what this is about. Tand’s men are better trained than mine, but in the end they’re soldiers just the same. And you and I both know what soldiers are like. They need the violence. They crave it, and if you starve them of it for long enough, you’re going to have trouble.’
‘Trouble.’ Egar spoke the word as if he was weighing it up. ‘So let me get this straight – you and Tand are doing this because you want to avoid trouble?’
‘In essence, yes.’
‘In essence, is it?’ Fucking court-crawling wannabe excuse for a . . . He held it down. Measured his tone. ‘Let me tell you a little war story, Klarn. You know, the war you managed to sit out, back in the capital with your horse farms and your investments?’
‘Oh, here we fucking go.’
‘Yeah, well. You talk about soldiers like you ever were one, so I thought I’d better set you straight. Back in the war, when we came down out of the mountains at Gallows Gap, I had this little half-pint guy marching at my side. League volunteer, never knew his name. But we talked some, the way you do. He told me he came from the Hironish Isles, cursed the day he ever left. You want to know why?’
Shendanak sighed. ‘I guess you’re going to tell me.’
‘He left the islands, married a League woman and made a home in Rajal. When the Scaled Folk came, he saw his wife and kids roasted and eaten. Only made it out himself because the roasting pit collapsed in on itself that night and he got buried in the ash. You want to try and imagine that for a moment? Lying there choking in hot ash, in silence, surrounded by the picked bones of your family, until the lizards fuck off to dig another pit. He burnt his bonds off in the embers – I saw the scarring on his arms – then he crawled a quarter of a mile along Rajal beach through the battle dead to get away. Are you listening to me, you brigand fuckwit?’
Shendanak’s gaze kindled, but he never moved from the chair. Horse thief, bandit and cut-throat in his youth, he’d likely still be handy in a scrap, despite his advancing years and the prodigious belly he’d grown. But they both knew how it’d come out if he and the Dragonbane clashed. He made a pained face, sat back and folded his arms.
‘Yes, Dragonbane, I’m listening to you.’
‘At Gallows Gap, that same little guy saved my life. He took down a pair of reptile peons that got the jump on me. Lost his axe to the first one, he split its skull and while it was thrashing about dying, it tore the haft right out of his grip. So he took the other one down with his bare hands. He died with his arm stuffed down its throat to block the bite. Tore out its tongue before he bled out. Am I getting through to you at all?’
‘He was from here. Tough little motherfucker. Yeah, I get it.’
‘Yeah. If you or Tand stir these people up, you’re going to have a local peasant uprising on your hands. We won’t cope with that, we’re not an army of occupation. In fact,’ Egar’s lip curled, ‘we’re not an army of any kind. And we are a long way from home.’
‘We have the marines, and the Throne Eternal.’
‘Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot. Even with Tand’s mercenaries and your thug cousins, we have a fighting muster under two hundred men. That’s not even garrison strength for a town this size. These people know the countryside, they know the in-shore waters. They’ll melt out of Ornley and the hamlets, they’ll disappear, and then start picking us off at their leisure. We’ll be forced back to the ships – if some fisher crew doesn’t manage to sneak in and burn those to the waterline as well – and we haven’t even provisioned for the trip back yet. It’s better than three weeks south to Gergis, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do it on skewered rat and rainwater.’
‘Well, now.’ Shendanak made a show of examining his nails – it was pure court performance, something he must have picked up on the long climb to wealth and power back in Yhelteth. It made Egar want to crush his skull. ‘Getting a bit precious about our campaigning in our old age, aren’t we? Tell me, did you really kill that dragon back in the war? I mean, it’s just – you don’t talk much like a spit-blood-and-die dragon-slayer.’
Egar bared his teeth in a rictus grin. ‘You want a spanking, Klarn, right in front of your men? I’ll be happy to oblige. Just keep riding me.’
Again, the glint of suppressed rage in Shendanak’s eye. His jaw set, his voice came out soft and silky.
‘Don’t get carried away here, Dragonbane. You’re not your faggot friend, you know. And he’s not here to back you up, either.’
Egar swore later, if it hadn’t been for that last comment, he would have let it slide. [GdM]
The Knife of Many Hands
A Second Apocalypse Story
R. SCOTT BAKKER
Glory drinks blood and vomits history.
—Ajencis, The First Analytic of Men
High Spring, 3801, Year-of-the-Tusk, Carythusal.
Violence hangs from you in sacks when you triumph in the Sranc Pits. Cruelty is contagion.
For this and many other reasons, Thurror Eryelk stood apart in the crowded confines of the Third Sun, a tavern renowned for the diversity of its clientele. Since time immemorial the place had been a notorious caste entrepot, a place where ‘gold danced’, where decisions made atop silk pillows became deeds in the gutter. Caste-nobles populated the incense-fogged gallery along the back, reclining in their divans, tipping their heads back in laughter, or leaning forward to peer across the commotion. Merchants, menials, soldiers, and even priests packed the thundering trestles below, raising toasts, arguing business or love or politics. Prostitutes either sashayed into groping hands or slapped their way clear of them. Naked adolescents–Norsirai slaves–held their serving trays high, slipping as if greased through the raucous gauntlet of patrons.
Eryelk relished his solitude near the entrance. Truth was, he had been famous the day he first set foot in Carythusal, for his red hair as much as for his unnatural frame. Ratakila, the swarthy Ainoni called him, ‘Bloodmane’, and without exception, they were wary. They could sense it in him even then, the Incarnal, the patter of some unseen pulse, beating as quickly as murder. They could see the necks his great hands had broken. What they witnessed in the Sranc Pits would simply confirm their immediate suspicions. Something was not quite right with Thurror Eryelk, the new Inris Hishrit, or ‘Sacred Hewer,’ the most recent champion of the Sranc Pits.
But the well of fools, as they say, knows no bottom.
‘Are you the new Hewer?’ a voice piped from his side.
‘Earth and muck,’ the Holca cursed in his native tongue. He turned from his reverie, assessed the man who accosted him. He was one of those sharp and oily picks–the hard as opposed to the talking kind, bearing murders that only drink could blot from their conscience. He wore the ciroj tunic of a trader, a saffron that had been bled yellow by sun and wear and too many washings. His jet-black goatee looked like something dried and hardened. He even sweat the sweat of some disreputable caste-merchant, vicious for drink.
But the man was anything but–Eryelk could see it.
All sorcerers bore the Mark of their sin.
‘Are you...’ the man pressed in a drunken slur, ‘the new Hewer?’
The new champion of the Pits clamped his teeth. He scanned the crowded tables about them, found what he was looking for leaning against the nearest of the Third Sun’s many columns. He graced the rat Schoolman with a look of pale-skinned cheer, turned square to the ma
n, watched the fact of his physique cloud the fool’s charade.
Arms like knotted pythons. Shoulders as broad as a greatbow was long. Chest as deep as a sarcophagus. His war-girdle could strap a saddle, yet he was lean, striate. Elephantine legs, sunburned beneath his mail skirt. Without exception, his presence awed all those near or in his shadow. He poked the man in the chest the way he did whenever some vengeance-seeking relative accosted him, not because he thought the man was such, but because this was what the pantomime demanded. This was the great sickness afflicting Carythusal, the fact that everything devolved upon mummery.
‘The Men I kill are all condemned to die,’ he said. ‘Scamper off to Sarothesser, pick. Your grudge is with your King.’
The nameless Schoolman’s head wobbled about some incredulity. A moment passed before Eryelk realized the man was laughing.
‘You have no inkling, barbarian.’
The barbarian’s second heart kicked deep in his chest. Boma-bom.
The first of the Flush crept into his pallor, line upon web-thin line, a scribble of faint crimson across his skin. Were this pick the mere drunkard he appeared to be, the matter already would have been concluded. But he was not.
Eryelk scratched his close-cropped beard. Humour sorcerers, a dear old friend had once advised him. Humour them so far as your life is worth. Play along with their games, especially in Carythusal, home of the accursed Scarlet Spires.
‘If your grudge is with your King, why throw number-sticks against me?’
The surrounding uproar slipped into oblivion, and the slow pounding of his warrior’s heart–boma-bom-boma-bom–climbed into its frame.
‘Because I saw you...’ the Schoolman replied with a queer softness. ‘I saw the Queen cast you her blessor.’
The Holca followed the rat-like glance at his waist, saw the pale white ribbon jutting from it, laying like a thing wilted against his hip, the text inked along its length plain for anyone to see.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #2 Page 6