by Col Buchanan
She jerked around, startled to see him there. She’d been crying.
‘Please,’ said Curl, wiping her face clear. ‘Not now.’
What to say to her, now he had a chance to speak?
‘I only need a moment. Then I’ll stay out of your way. I promise.’
She turned her back to him, shoulders hunched; looking small and cold and vulnerable in her longcoat and dark leathers. Ché glared at the two rangers behind him until they backed off a little, then sat down beside her on the parapet. He stared at Curl hard, all his feelings surging up inside of him like a sudden nausea.
It was strange that he wasn’t more surprised to find her here like this, in the same place he had ended up too. Ché didn’t believe in signs or any other such nonsense. Yet here they both were again, as though it was truly meant to be.
The pain in the girl’s eyes was still there, fresh as ever. He knew that Curl was a refugee, one of the few to escape the island of Lagos, where the Empire had put her people to the torch.
He’d shared only a single intimate night with this young and beautiful medico, this girl who had caught his eye back in Tume, during a game of Rash – of all things – while Ché had been disguised as a civilian. Yet something of Curl had remained with him long after their physical parting.
In Ché’s darkest moments down in that stone hole where the Khosians had imprisoned him, the girl had been one of the things he’d thought about to stop himself from going mad, from biting through the veins in his wrists. Her startling blue eyes as they’d made love on a stranger’s bed; her smile like warm sunlight flooding the gloomy spaces of his mind.
Nothing more, really, than a brief, bright spark of connection in a life that had long ago ceased to have any meaning for Ché; the life of a state assassin, a life barely lived at all.
‘They let you go, then,’ she said quietly. ‘I was hoping they would lock you in a dark cell somewhere, and let you rot.’
‘They did. A very dark and cramped cell.’
‘So you’re on our side now, is that what we’re supposed to believe?’
Ché blew air through his lips in exasperation.
‘Curl. I don’t know what side I’m on. I’m not on any side. But I’m not a Mannian, a believer in the faith. I hardly ever was. Just because I was born into it, that doesn’t make me one of them.’
‘So you’re innocent. You have no blood on your hands.’
‘Innocent?’ Ché piped with surprise. He thought of the people he had killed during his short career as a Diplomat. He thought of a big bronze water boiler whistling with steam, while a terrified boy hammered from inside it as he was boiled alive. ‘No. I’m hardly that.’
‘Get away from me; I mean it!’
‘Look. I just wanted to tell you—’
‘Tell me what?’
His mouth hung open as he stared at the fear and anger in her expression. He saw how Curl held a hand across her belly, as though soothing it, cradling it. Ché blinked, feeling the brush of some vague intuition.
‘Tell me what?’ she demanded to know.
‘I just wanted to tell you, I’m . . . sorry.’
She tightened her mouth at that. Tears fell from her eyes, but she wore them like proud scars now, not deigning to wipe them away as she rose to her feet to confront him.
‘You’re sorry?’ came her small, twisted voice. ‘Just stay away from me. Do you hear me? Stay away!’
And with that she strode off across the roof for the stairs, leaving Ché to wonder what else he should have said to her. Yet he knew in his heart there were not enough words in the world to fill the gulf of space between them.
‘Curl!’ he called after her like a love-sick fool.
But she was gone, and the remaining rangers cast their dark accusing looks at him, the greatest villain in the world.
*
That night, Ché dreamed again of the same deep lake that he’d dreamed about under the influence of the Lie Teller. He floated on his back in the milk-warm waters with his eyes closed against the sun, and the longer he lay there the freer he felt from his cares.
Ripples breached the surface before him. He thought it was a fish at first, but then the tiny head of a baby bobbed out of the water and smiled directly at him.
How bizarre, reflected Ché.
More ripples washed against him as Curl broke the surface too, her crest of hair flattened wet against her skull. She grabbed the baby and they both giggled, turning in the water.
‘Curl?’ he said aloud to catch her attention.
The girl’s eyes were black coals burning with malice. She came towards him, lifting a hand clear of the water. Sunlight glinted off nails that were as long and sharp as talons. Smiling wickedly, Curl slowly drew a claw across the skin of his throat.
He gasped at the sudden stinging pain of it.
Ché sprang awake, feeling the pain for real across his throat, realizing that he could barely breathe.
He blinked his eyes open and stared up at the darkness of the inkworks, too shocked to move. The iron taste of blood filled his mouth. It was all he could smell.
Over his sleeping furs crouched a figure with a length of steel in its hand, dripping blood in the lantern light.
‘That sound you hear right now,’ hissed the voice of a man he knew at once to be Fanazda. ‘That’s the sound of the air bubbling from your lungs and out through your slit throat.’
It was the truth of it, for Ché reached up and felt the bloody mess of his throat. Mortal fear seized him as his clawing fingers tried to close the open wound.
The knife, you fool, get the knife!
But even as his bloody hand snaked for the knife under his furs, he knew that it was no longer there. Fanazda had it in his grasp.
The Rōshun lowered himself towards his face, breathing fast.
‘That’s the sound of you dying, Ché.’
Do something!
Gasping mutely, Ché swiped his manacled arms to grab at something, anything, though he only succeeded in knocking over a mug of water sitting on the floor. He could feel the hot blood gushing from the livid rent in his neck.
Ché floundered while Fanazda gazed down at him in panting rapture. It was luck that made him grasp the steel mug again; desperation that caused him to hurl it across the room.
From across the space the voice of his guard spoke out, and then footsteps were approaching.
‘What’s going on over there?’
Fanazda vanished into the shadows.
Ché’s vision was fading. It pulsed with blackness around the edges. More figures hovered over him, someone shouting at the top of their lungs. Ché could only gasp and shake and try to stop his life from spilling out through his fingers. His limbs were growing numb. He knew he was a dead man with only moments to live.
‘Let me through,’ snapped a woman’s voice, and he knew it was the Dreamer from the power he heard in her words, just an edge of it, enough to scatter the faces gathered around him in the sudden lantern light.
Ché shut his eyes and felt the Dreamer’s hands clamp down over his own. He heard her saying something in words that seemed to make no sense to his fading hearing.
He slipped away from her, away from them all. Now that it was over, now that all his fears and memories would soon be gone from him forever, Ché was almost relieved that it was death he fell into. He released the last of his breath in a long and bubbling sigh, and allowed himself to sink deep, deep, beneath the warm waters of the lake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Coya
The Broken Wheel was a large and sprawling establishment perched on the foundations of an old wagoners’ warehouse, where once trade wagons had deposited their cargoes brought there from far beyond the city. It was not a single building, but rather a series of structures added gradually over the years, thrown together with sheets of tar-paper and scraps of wood of every kind and size, from pale pine to the darkest of tiqs, from old wagon planks to bits of driftwood w
ashed up on the coast, so that for all the obvious skill with which it had been built, the notorious taverna resembled something of a greatly oversized beach shanty.
Open every hour, day and night, it remained popular with a clientele just as motley as the patchwork components of its outer shell. All kinds of folk frequented the Broken Wheel. Some came to relax, others to make use of its many pleasures for sale or hire, or to gamble on the regular pit fights staged in the basement below. Others still to talk their illicit trades and deals.
At any time of the day, a person could see burly wagoners still dusty from the roads of Khos – leathery-skinned crews running freight between the city and the island’s heartland towns – rubbing shoulders with professional gamblers, stocksmen, fight followers, street girls, thieves, hustlers and dross runners in a miscellanea of Khosians and foreign nationals. The taverna was located in the western limits of the besieged city, where the northern wall and the southern coastline came close together, pinching off an area of warehouses, stock pens, and reeking, bubbling tar pits known either as the Flats or the Stinks, depending on who you were speaking to, whether they lived there or were neighbours to it. A working district, where most of the Bar-Khosian freight operations were run as well as much of its smuggling.
The Broken Wheel was notorious for all these reasons, but most of all because of who owned and ran it – the Tuchoni criminal family known as the Javalli Clan, respected throughout the city’s underworld.
The Javalli were nomads of the road who had settled down, mostly, into an urban life of larceny and fencing stolen goods. Though these days their main activity was smuggling large amounts of dross to the southern continent, with the help of a clan of Sea Gypsies, their historical blood cousins – dross being a substance that was illegal in the Empire, unlike in the Free Ports.
Even the local population of the district looked upon them well enough, here where most folk made hardy livings and tended towards a healthy disdain of the authorities. For the Javalli were unlike many of the other criminal gangs in the city, such as the notorious Caw-Caws or the Dockside Hoods, who were little more than thugs extorting the citizenry with brutal tactics of intimidation. The Javalli understood the importance of community relations. Instead of being a blight upon their area, they gave back to their immediate community by way of festas and food given out daily, ensuring both friendly relations and a certain protective shroud against the law.
For Coya Zeziké, they were often his most valuable contacts in the city.
*
His head was throbbing tonight, even with all the hazii cakes he’d eaten.
Coya stifled a yawn, feeling the weariness of the day weighing down his body. He’d barely returned to the little house he was staying at in the south of the city, just through the door in fact, when the housekeeper had handed him a message in an envelope, brought there by courier earlier in the day.
Coya had sighed as he glanced at the note. It had Vay Javalli’s signature scrawled upon it, and nothing more. Her way of saying they needed to meet. He’d thought of going to bed and sorting out this business in the morning. He should have done. Yet something had told him it couldn’t wait, and he had told his bodyguard to find a rickshaw so they could head up to the Broken Wheel.
And so here he was, waiting for Vay Javalli as he yawned away in the vast and crowded basement room of the Broken Wheel, with another series of explosions going off somewhere above ground, pummelling the district surrounding the rickety building. More enemy Birds-of-War he supposed, sweeping up from the south to hit the area with dropped munitions.
For the last few nights they’d been striking the western limits of the city, in lightning raids launched from the imperial-held Lansway to the south, targeting the granaries and the thousands of penned animals, trying to destroy what was left of the city’s winter food stocks. He hoped they wouldn’t be at it all night long again. He wanted to get back to his bed.
Coya scowled as the ground trembled from the aftershocks. He could feel the vibrations strumming through the crowded wooden tiers which filled much of the basement space of the Broken Wheel, and which half encircled the wide pit in the floor; tremors rising up into his dully aching joints. Dust trickled from the floor beams overhead, and he followed it as it fell past swaying silk lanterns into the miasma of smoke below, where excited men and women thronged around the deep pit in the floor, yelling down at the pair of fighters locked in lethal combat there – if they could even be called fighters.
Even now, Coya could hardly fathom what he was seeing down there. From the top tier of seating, he gazed down into the pit at the naked imperial soldier fighting for his life against the advances of a lone slin, its flopping head inflating and deflating as it leaped on him with its scrambling goat legs. The gamblers screamed louder around the pit.
Coya could just make out how someone had stitched shut the slin’s gills along its bare flanks, no doubt to stop it from releasing its blinding, noxious scents into the room. Yet he could still smell the creature, even from here on the utmost tier, the odd foul whiff like burning hair.
He looked towards his bodyguard, Lynx, sitting a few arm’s lengths away, flexing her spine in that animal way she had of stretching whenever she felt like it. She was so focused on the fight that anyone could have been sneaking up to kill him, especially here in this packed basement, which he thought was precisely the kind of place a Mannian Diplomat would favour for an attack. But just as he was reflecting on how useless she was as a bodyguard compared to Marsh, Lynx suddenly rose and stepped down to block the path of a figure climbing up to join him, a thin fellow in a waxed longcoat.
Below them a shrill shriek rose up from the pit before ending abruptly. The crowd roared.
‘Doesn’t look much like you’re enjoying the show,’ ventured the man, staring up at him.
‘It’s all right,’ Coya told his bodyguard, seeing that it was the old smuggler Passon, one of his contacts here in the city.
Passon stopped on the tier beneath him, which thankfully was as empty as the one at the top. He removed his hat, and took out a pocket rag to mop at his sweating bald dome. It was hot in this basement with all the people crowded together, and Passon was a man well advanced in years, red-faced and slightly wheezing; clearly a fellow wringing out the remains of his useful working life before old age rendered him infirm.
‘How in all the world did they find a slin and an enemy soldier?’ Coya asked with a nod to the pit.
Passon shrugged, his mind on other things. ‘Heard they were captured on the wall. Don’t ask me how they ended up here.’
Bribery or the return of a favour no doubt. The Javalli had contacts all over the city, including within the middle ranks of the military.
More explosions shook the high ceiling above them. The concussions were coming closer now, dislodging even more trickles of dust onto their heads, though only Coya and Passon seemed to pay them any heed. Old Passon looked up with his watery eyes at the sounds raging above the surface, as though they invoked memories from his past. Coya remembered that he hailed originally from the Green Isles in the far west of the Midèrēs. The famed Green Isles, where they had fought against the invading Mannian Empire just as the Free Ports were doing now, and had been ruthlessly destroyed for their resistance.
Passon had lived through the worst of those times. In his lifetime he had witnessed the most terrifying tragedy of them all, the downfall and enslavement of his own people.
More than anyone, here was a man who knew how the city’s survival was anything but guaranteed. That not every story had a happy ending. The very worst could still befall them.
‘I got those news-sheets for you,’ Passon said, handing Coya a leather-bound package. ‘Including your favourite. An edition of the Holy Times, straight from the imperial capital.’
‘Why, thank you, Passon,’ said Coya as he eagerly unwrapped the package. ‘What do I owe you?’
But when he looked to Passon the old smuggler was already ste
pping down to the floor. Passon merely threw a hand over his shoulder in farewell.
By his side, Coya’s bodyguard watched as he unfolded the printed pages of the Holy Times.
‘You read the news-sheets from Q’os?’
‘Know your enemy,’ he told her. ‘Now, hush, let me read in peace.’
It was hardly the right lighting to read by, let alone the best setting. Yet Coya managed it by holding the paper up and peering at it closely while he tuned out all else.
According to its date the news-sheet was more than a month old, if he was figuring his imperial calendar correctly. The front page of the Holy Times, and indeed much inside of it, was dominated by a single story, a recent spate of attacks within the Empire’s capital of Q’os.
Democras fanatics slay sixty in latest terror campaign.
He blinked incredulous at the headline a few times before scanning through the text of the story. It described how the recent state funeral of Sasheen, deceased Holy Matriarch of Mann, held after her body had been flown home from the battlefields of Khos, had been blighted by a series of bombings and shootings in the streets of the imperial capital.
The Holy Times blamed teams of masked fanatics from the democras, heavily armed and thoroughly trained men prepared to die for their cause. Scant evidence was provided though. A suicide note supposedly found on one of their dead bodies. Slogans shouted out as they’d shot people in the streets, hailing the virtues of the democras to anyone who was listening. It seemed that after the slaughter they had made it back to their safe house, only to be surrounded and killed to the last man, not a single one left alive for interrogation.
Yet as a member of the covert network known as the Few, Coya was sharply aware that the remarkable details of the attacks were largely words of fiction. No such operation had been launched from the Free Ports, or ever would be. Hence why no demands had been made by the masked attackers. It was all a depraved show, the main act being the public murder of citizens.
These men were not fanatics from the Free Ports at all, but skilled provocateurs of the Empire acting as such against their own people. The whole thing was a stinking set-up, right down to the bodies found in the safe house – which were likely not those of the real culprits at all.