Tales of the Emerald Serpent (Ghosts of Taux)

by Scott Taylor

  “Good day to you, sir. My name is Emil Lacosta.”

  “That is a Findalynn name, is it not? But you are Zimbolay, like my friend here.”

  “It’s true,” Emil said. “It’s what my people call a ‘public name.’ We have private names which are just that.”

  “It is good for you that you are a scholar of obvious breeding,” Rene answered, smoothing his mustache, “or no one would do business with you. When my friend here gives his name, the Sturgeons accuse him of using an alias.”

  The cutpurse smiled, making the knife scars around his mouth turn grey. “I am called Increase Coin,” he said.

  “An auspicious choice,” Emil said politely, inclining his head slightly. It was common for men of low class to choose such names.

  Rene continued. “Still, it must be difficult for a black man in Taux, yes? Even for a man of privilege like yourself.”

  Emil nodded to acknowledge the comment, then turned the conversation to business. “There is something you should know from the first, Sir: I will not sell a potion or powder to make some unsuspecting person fall in love with you. What’s more, do not think you can purchase a potion under some pretense and use it on an unsuspecting person. The magic will work on one person only and be directed toward one person only, and I will not cast such a spell without the express permission of the person it will be used upon, not even under pain of torture.”

  “You misunderstand me, Sir. I do not wish to make someone else fall in love with me. I want you to make me fall in love with my wife.”

  A young girl came to the table carrying three wooden cups and a red clay jug of wine. Increase poured their portions, but only he and Rene drank.

  Emil waited until the waitress had left before he spoke again. “That is an unusual request. So unusual, in fact, I’m tempted to refuse you outright.”

  Rene gave him a crooked smile. He was really quite a handsome man, and he knew how to use his charm. “Hear me out first, please. I beg you. I am in your hands.” Emil could tell he was trying to sound sincere, but he was too arrogant to excise all of the sarcasm from his tone. “Three years ago, I married. I did not love her, but what difference did that make? I was a Captain, good with a sword and doing quite well for myself. She was young—but not too young—and impressionable. Also, her family is tremendously wealthy. How perfect, yes? She wanted me, and I wanted her money. Do you recognize me now? Surely you have heard the gossip.”

  “I have not,” Emil admitted. “I spend much of my time in my laboratory, trying to keep up with my clients’ requests.”

  Rene laughed and turned to Increase. “By the Saints, the first man that I hoped would recognize me is the first who does not.”

  Increase laughed hoarsely. Emil could see that Rene felt slighted in some strange way. “Please accept my apologies,” Emil said mildly. “Affairs of the heart do not hold my interest.” Remembering Mariella’s expression, Emil realized that she must have recognized the Captain immediately. Perhaps he would ask her at the end of the day.

  Rene waved his hand as though brushing away a fly. “It does not matter, my friend. In any event, things have changed. My bride no longer blushes when I look at her. In fact, she sneers. I fear we are about to divorce, which will ruin me.”

  “In what way?”

  Rene drained his cup, then slammed it onto the table. He noticed that Emil had not touched his own drink, and his grin became crooked. “There were certain... contracts I was obliged to sign. We had eloped, you see, and when we returned that great fat fart Daddy Oswald – my beloved bride’s father is Oswald Burgunzi, so you see what I mean about wealth – had me dragged from my own wedding bed and brought to him in chains. You see, I had convinced my precious little one that I loved her with all my soul, but her father was not so easily fooled. So, with a knife at my throat, I signed. I am pledged to adore her in all things for her long life. If I do not, we divorce and she will get half of everything that is mine. Half! If that meant she would take just one of my ships, I would consider it, but she has told me she intends to collect half of each ship. She would have them cut down the middle. I would be ruined. You see, she hates me because I am a man, with all the appetites of a man.”

  “Why not just set sail, then? Isn’t it the privilege of the man of the sea to venture onto the ocean and leave his troubles behind?” Emil asked.

  Rene shook his head, his lips pursed in distaste. “Were I to leave the city, her father would call it abandonment – a petition for divorce, essentially – and I could never again do business in a port where the Burgunzi family are established, else they have my ships seized. In truth, I cannot even take on cargo and ply my trade upon the waters! Even discussing a trading voyage that would see me back in her bed in a mere six-month brings talk of ‘abandonment.’ You see, Taux is a free city for everyone but me. I am trapped.”

  Increase spoke suddenly and urgently: “We cannot remain.”

  Rene gestured toward him. “You see? My own crew – the greatest friends a man could ever hope for – long to abandon me and my ships. I still pay their wages and ask nothing in return, but they do not want to linger.”

  “Only a madman would live in this city of ghosts,” Increase said. “Only a fool would stay here when the doom that befell Taux might return at any time.”

  Rene pointed to his companion as though he was a proof of a complex philosophical theory. “You see? My time in this city is short. However, I have a plan: Were my wife to request this divorce herself, as I’m told she is close to doing, I could refuse. I am her husband, after all. The matter would go to the court.”

  “The Burgunzi family has many friends among the magistrates,” Emil observed.

  “True! But if I truly loved my wife, if I protested against this separation openly, before the bench, I believe they would dissolve the marriage – and the contract – in my favor. The agreement states that she can take half if I spurn her love, not if she spurns mine. I would keep my ships and regain my freedom.”

  Emil shook his head. “You do not need magic for this. Just profess your love in court.”

  “I could never pull it off,” Rene said, leaning back and sighing. “I would have to perform for days, and my nature is too ironical. I must convince everyone, even the most skeptical, that I love her…”

  “...more than himself,” Increase finished. Both men laughed.

  “Yes, you see? Exactly.” Rene gestured to his own face as though presenting a work of art. “I am a prideful man; I am not ashamed to admit it. It is my great flaw. At some point in the trial, I would smile sardonically, or make a snide remark under my breath, or roll my eyes. It is not just the magistrate I need to convince, it is also her whole cursed family. I am a great man capable of many things, but wooing a woman in front of her mother, father, and a whole room full of strangers? After I’ve already bedded her? I could never manage it.”

  “No one would be hurt,” Increase said.

  “He is right. No one would be hurt,” Rene said, his voice low. “You would only be helping me out of a bad spot. And now you know why I could not come to your shop, where anyone might see. Do you understand my predicament, my friend?”

  Emil was silent a moment. “In my time, I have made a few potions that would save a marriage, but none that would save a divorce.”

  Rene got a canny look. “Does that mean you will do it?”

  “Will I have to deliver the potion to you here?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Then the price will be two and a half times normal, payable by a bank note. I will not carry coins inside the Black Gate.”

  Rene turned to Increase. “That... can be arranged. I am told the writ will be delivered soon but do not know exactly when. If your potion works for three days as rumored, I will need two dozen doses.”

  Emil shook his head. “That’s not necessary. The short-term doses are for the consorts who work here. For you I would create a different formulation that would have longer effects. Th
e price would also be much lower than twenty-four doses.”

  “Ah! That is good news! How long would it last?”

  “It depends on the person. The average time is about two years, but some people with a weak will or a powerful sense of self-hatred can feel the effects for the rest of their lives.”

  “So, in Rene’s case,” Increase said. “It will last a month.” He and Rene laughed again.

  “No,” Emil said. “Even for a man with a great pride, the spell should persist for longer than a year. I should warn you, though: The one thing you can never trust is love. People in love can be unpredictable. Your heartbreak, when the object of your devotion rejects you, will feel entirely real because it will be real. Your pain will be great.”

  “My friend, I am counting on it. You need a lock of her hair, do you not? I cut it myself while she slept.” He passed a folded square of red velvet across the table. Emil opened it, saw three times as many straw-colored strands as he would need, and pocketed it.

  Then Emil wrote a price on a scrap of paper and passed it across the table. Rene seemed almost delighted by it. They made arrangements to meet the next day to complete the transaction. Emil and Rene shook hands on it, clicked their cups, and drank.

  “We have, of course, been seen here,” Rene said. “If asked, I intend to say that I wanted a potion for my lovely bride.”

  Emil nodded. “I will neither confirm nor deny anything. Discretion is part of the service. Be aware that the potion will make your body temperature run high for a day, while your spark seeks a new balance, and that might give you away. Is our business concluded?”

  “I must ask you something, my friend. Forgive me if I seem to pry. Can you really stay in business when you operate in this way? One man to another, are there really so many people longing to fall in love—at these prices—that you can afford such fine cloth and bracelets of gold?”

  “No,” Emil answered after a slight hesitation. “No, there aren’t. It’s a common misconception, though. Along with the ability to create love comes the ability to destroy it. The great bulk of my business involves purging people of painful infatuation and heartbreak.”

  “Is that so? I had not realized. You destroy love? That sounds terrible. Isn’t it a great tragedy to take love out of the world?”

  “Perhaps. But it is not just the money that keeps me in my lab, working long hours into the night. When a young wife comes to my shop, weeping over her unfaithful husband, and her mother shows me the knife scars on her wrist…”

  Rene quirked his head at this.

  “…and the young woman swears she will try again,” Emil continued. “I cannot help but feel I perform a great service. Because truly, this happens more often that I can say.”

  Rene and Increase looked at each other in a strange way, as though recalculating their price. Finally, Rene said: “You are more honorable than I expected.”

  Emil slid out of the booth and bowed to the two men. In his mildest, most polite tone, he said, “I do not need your respect.”

  Then he went through the doors of the House of the Silk Purse into the blazing day.

  Emil climbed the stone stairs that lead to the walkways above the Ullamalitzli court. The walls along the stairs were carved with horrifying images of murder and human sacrifice, but above the court the limestone walkways were mostly bare. The only company he had was the neglected corpse of a Razor, bloating in the sun. The new residents of the city killed as often as the old ones. They just didn’t record the deeds in stone.

  The ball court was empty for the moment, and there seemed to be fewer people milling about by the Black Gate. Emil made his way down another flight of stairs, hurried through the gate and turned south, away from the tombs of the city.

  The unexpected meeting had delayed him so much that the midday sun was already high and hot. He was a madman to live here in this so-called free city; Increase was correct. Every building he passed was covered with images of war and bloody ritual, and the doom that had come to this city, the one that had left it an empty shell to be ransacked by vicious white traders, whatever it was, it would come again. He was sure of it.

  By then he hoped to be back home with his wife and daughter, living on his family’s hilltop stone estate, trading gold, fur, and ivory. He only needed a little more money. Just a little more.

  He passed down the narrow, shadowed street that lead to his building, went under the two corbelled arches that marked the entrance of his plaza, and strode across the grass toward his shop. In Zimbolay, this mud and grass would have been replaced with smooth blocks of close-fitting stone, but in Taux the streets were full of weeds crushed under square-heeled shoes.

  Mariella was already waiting for him in the front room. The house, being one of the original stucco and limestone buildings, was cool inside. Best of all, the walls were bare; Emil had long ago erased the carvings inside his shop with acid. Those with ties to the Element of Earth told him that it did not silence the voices of the souls contained within, but at least he could concentrate on his work without having to stare at the images of their torment.

  He stopped in the doorway, letting the door swing shut behind him. Something was wrong. “Mariella, did you deposit the note?”

  She didn’t answer. Emil felt a little tingle. His apprentice was especially sensitive. Sometimes, when she sat alone in the dark, she heard whispers.

  “Sir?” she finally asked, her long, pale face looking morose in the lamplight. “Do you think they were better than us?”

  He didn’t need to ask who she meant. He glanced at the wall, where he’d burned away a scene of a slave being ritually knifed. “They killed, we kill,” he said. “But we went into their Ullamalitzli Stadium, the ball court where they played sacred games, and we built a whorehouse. They could hardly be worse. Come on. We have work to do.”

  They worked together in the basement lab for the rest of the day creating the love potion. The next morning, Emil met with Rene in the market, as planned. They exchanged bank note for a vial in an herbalist’s shop, and Emil had no cause to think of the matter for half a month.

  The days were growing shorter as the autumn equinox approached, and even dried spring herbs like woodruff had become dear. Emil had spent long hours haggling in the market over a bundle he absolutely had to have for the long winter, but the asking price was ten times what it should have been. As a result, he did not return to his shop until after dark, and he was irritable and distracted.

  As he hurried down the narrow street toward the double corbelled arches leading to the little plaza in front of his shop, he noticed too late the squelching footsteps of the man following him. Emil glanced back and saw a tall pale man in a quilted vest only a few paces behind. The man’s right hand lay on the hilt of his undrawn rapier, but his dagger was naked in his left hand.

  Emil broke into a run, knowing there was little hope the man was alone. He ran under the arches into the muddy plaza and was met by three men. All their rapiers were drawn.

  Emil sidestepped, backing into an alcove. The stone wall was rough against his shoulder-blades... carvings pushing against him. He had bumped against the ceremonial art that covered so much of the city. These were a scene of war, he suddenly remembered, just as the moonlit blades moved toward him.

  There were two men standing close, and two behind them. Emil raised his hands beside his face so his sleeves would slip down, showing his golden bracelets. “There’s no need for violence. I will turn over my valuables without a fight.”

  The man who’d followed him down the alley came close, the point of his blade aimed at Emil’s heart like a long needle. “Oh, we’ll be taking your valuables, and I don’t expect much of a fight.” The other men laughed nastily, moving closer.

  So be it. Emil pressed his left bracelet against his mouth and, snapping a latch open with his teeth, blew into it with all his strength.

  A cloud of fine powder billowed out, engulfing all four men. They gasped and shook their heads
, staggering a little. Their swords dipped toward the mud.

  “By the Saints,” the nearest one said. He sounded dumbstruck. “I...

  “You love me,” Emil said. “All of you.” None of them disagreed. They just stared at him, enraptured. “But I’m terribly sorry to say that I can only love one of you in return.”

  There was a pause while his meaning sunk in. The first to understand was a man at the rear; he plunged his rapier into the back of the one who’d followed Emil into the plaza. The man’s death scream shocked the others into action, and their swords slashed and clashed against each other.

  Like most fights, it was over in seconds. The first man to be struck had been pierced through the heart and was stone dead. The man who’d killed him lay in the mud, his slashed throat bleeding fiercely. The one who’d cut his throat had managed a short fight with the fourth man, but the fourth had pierced him three times before he’d managed to thrust his knife under the man’s chin and into his brain.

  He took one unsteady step toward Emil, then collapsed. “I’m dying,” the killer said. “By the Saints, I just found you. I just found you and I’m dying!”

  Emil knelt beside him. If he’d known healing magic, he could have saved the man, but there was no hope. “My love,” Emil said. The man’s spark, fueled by the magic in the powder, made him feel feverish. “You fought so bravely.”

  The man looked deeply into Emil’s eyes. The moonlight was dim, but Emil could see that he had a square, ugly face, bulging eyes and a squashed nose. The face of a thug. “I just found you moments ago, and now I’m going to slip into the next world without you.”

  Emil laid his hand tenderly against the side of the dying man’s face. “Do you think anything could come between our love? Even death?” Tears brimmed in the man’s eyes and he laid his hand on Emil’s, but his strength was fading and his arm dropped into the mud. Emil lowered his voice to a whisper. “Tell me, my sweet, who sent you here?”