by J. M. Martin
At that same hour Valen of nowhere, former man-at-arms in the king’s legion, clearly guilty of stealing nivat seeds from a reputable seedsman, would have his right hand lopped off. Cautery would be supplied at the prisoner’s own expense, to be worked off with indentured labor, as the prisoner had nothing of value on his person.
For once in my life, I kept my mouth shut. I was deathly afraid I’d start blathering that I was pureblood and that the magistrate would die horribly for taking my hand. But even life with one hand would be better than what my own kind had in store for me were I to be captured after six years on the run. Never again would I be allowed to make a choice for myself—whether to eat, speak, sleep, dance, sing, or marry. I could be contracted to the most unscrupulous of masters, kept deaf or forbidden ever to see the sun or breathe the air of the world. I could be whipped or put on public display as an affront to the gods for rejecting the divine gift of magic and the life it laid out for me. There had to be another way out of this mess.
#
The cells consisted of four windowless iron boxes below the Magistrate’s Hall. The hulking second constable Hugh dragged me down the stair and shoved me into one already occupied by an ancient jolly drunkard named Elfun, who stank of piss, and immediately began spewing nonsense stories. Elfun would have been a fine companion were we holed up in an alleyway in a storm with a barrel fire and skin of ale, but on this night I’d no good humor to share with him.
Bless the builders of the Hall, the cell door was not solid, but a grillwork of bars. I clung to it, willing the single weakling lamp never to burn out and pretending I could breathe. Matters could have been much worse. A cell was a damned sight better than the oubliette where they were going to stow poor Denys. The testy young Lord Felix had squeezed that concession from old Maslin. Constable Bastien had pronounced it a fine idea.
The stair spat out a pair of Lord Felix’s men-at-arms, a stumbling, shackled Denys, and the constable. “Your master needn’t fret,” Bastien snapped at the two guards as he yanked open a trap in the floor of the cell across from mine. “None’s going to escape from here.”
A cackle from behind me spewed the scent of rotted teeth my way. “I’ve a tale about a prisoner what let a rat eat him bit by bit. He thought the most of him could escape that way, though he never figgered how to get his bones out…”
“Stop your rattling, lunatic!” The constable’s irritation quieted old Elfun’s babbling, but didn’t stop it.
“…and then there was another feller what chewed off his toes, thinking to slip his shackles…”
They lowered Denys, shackles and all, into the hole without benefit of the wooden ladder that was propped against the wall, and dropped him when he was scarce halfway down. He made not a whimper as the trap door fell shut, trapping him in the pitch-dark hole. Even the imagining gave me the shakes, though I had my own share of those already.
“Constable, please,” I said, once the growling Bastien had locked the trap and the cell door. “I’m going to die in here. ’Tis murder to leave me. I beg you…”
Between the confinement and the lurking fire in my gut, I’d no need to feign desperation. Shuddering, I licked my lips and scratched my arms, then blotted my forehead with my sleeve. My hands would not stay still.
“None dies in my cells. If they’re judged deserving, they die clean and proper on the gallows. The law is the law.” Bastien dragged his gaze from their fix on the trap door and scowled at me. The signs of a nivat slave were known to any who walked the streets. “Then again, if they’ve murdered themselves with unsavory pleasure, ’tis on their own head.”
“If I could change it, I would,” I blurted. “But I was young and sick when I started. Pain eats your soul.”
Why did I tell him that? I needed to make a plan before thought became impossible. “There’s a halfblood in town will do the spellwork for me. All I ask is twelve seeds and an hour’s freedom to get it done. On my mam’s life, I’ll come back.”
He burst into decidedly unmerry laughter. “Naturally an honest fellow like you would come back. Oh, but then, you’re not honest, are you? You’ll need more than spelled nivat paste in the morning when they take an axe to your thieving hand…or will the pain just make the pleasure finer?”
It would. Gods’ save my raddled body, it would…for about ten heartbeats. “Better to lose the hand than my mind.”
“Go to sleep. I’ll see Bek’s here with his cautery iron tomorrow. His fees are low and I’m sure he can find some way you can work off the debt. Even one-handed. Mayhap it will help that he knows what you’ll endure as your perversion takes its vengeance. He threw off nivat’s claws years ago.”
His disdain rubbed me raw. The blackguard constable had no way to know what had driven me to the seeds. “Your friend the corpse-cutter’s already made his coin off me today. Do you collect a tithe when you get him work cauterizing stumps or tending young nobles whose brutish pricks get them into sop-house scrapes?”
The constable rammed his arm between the bars of my cell and about my neck, jamming my face to the grillwork. “Hear me, twistmind. Bek’s work is more honest than stealing a seedsman’s stock. Maybe you fought honestly for the king, maybe you didn’t, but you, at least, are guilty of your crime. The law demands you pay. Justice demands you pay.”
“True enough,” I croaked, low enough the edane’s men could not hear. “But how just is law that punishes one who suffers the crime? None’ll whip the seedsman, but they’re going to geld a merry young man who’s done no wrong—the friend you’ve just thrown into yonder pit. Will you summon Surgeon Bek to cauterize that wound? Law is not so simple as you pretend. Perhaps this Magistrate Maslin should let you study it.”
Spewing a disgusted breath, he released my head and shoved me backward. On his way to the stair, he doused the lamp. “I do study it,” he said from the dark. “Now sleep.”
#
I didn’t. I couldn’t. At first, fury at the callous constable held me together. But as the night crawled onward, it became more difficult to think beyond the chaos inside my skin. I clung to the bars, shaking and sweating as sickness and my damnable terror of confinement tightened their hold on my sinews. Despair taunted me. How could I imagine that a man who served the law cared for anyone? The law would have both Denys and me half men by the next nightfall.
I was almost desperate enough to rouse the snoring Elfun to strangle me when soft footsteps descended the stair. The muffled jingle of keys, then hinges, keys again, and a quiet clank sounded from the cell across the way. A deeper darkness yawned in the pitchy lockup.
“Denys.” Only practiced skill enabled me to hear the whispered name. “Are you awake?”
Even pureblood hearing could not detect an answer from the pit.
“Move aside. Ladder’s coming down. Yes, you will. You’ve no say in this.”
Sky Lord’s mercy, was he going to turn the man over to Felix beforetime?
Evidently Denys didn’t believe so. His shackles rattled as he climbed.
“You’re ruined if you let me go, Bas.” Denys’s steady voice put me to shame, while at the same time stirring my dead hopes. “I can’t allow it. I won’t. Five years you’ve worked to erase the past. They’re going to offer you the position in Palinur because even this maniac magistrate can’t find fault with you.”
“We’ll go north. I’ll start over. Find another post. I’ll not build my life on your grave.”
“They’re not allowed to kill me.” This time Denys’s voice quavered…but only a little. “I’ll survive a few scars…”
And as if some impish godlet shot an arrow of starlight through the clouds to sting my backside, their honest care for each other gave me an answer.
I mustered every shred of calm and reason I could manage. “The way I see it there are several ways we three can end up at the end of this coming day. One has handsome Denys a eunuch, the constable a guilt-ridden prick, and me a one-handed lunatic peeling his skin away. A second ha
s Denys and his studious constable become fugitives—which, let me tell you, is not at all a cheerful way to live—and me the same lunatic as the first. But a third possibility has Bastien’s position preserved, Denys owning all the parts he was born with—albeit needing a home other than Wroling—and I, Valen, confirmed in my depravity, but carrying forward the knowledge of a good deed which might someday redeem me.”
“Are you gone mad already?” snarled the constable. “There’s no possible—”
“Hear me out.” The plan had come together near full blown. “The entire cost would be the favor owed me by a lowlife halfblood, whose name will remain secret, and twelve nivat seeds, which Denys could hand over only when he is safely away. Sadly, I’ve no wherewithal to pay the seedsman for his lost property else I’d never have stolen them in the first place, but perhaps one or the other of you might see to it in return for the help I’ll give. For certain, Wroling’s tender justice will suffer. But perhaps the balance of right will outweigh the balance of wickedness in this case: I will forever reap the punishment of my sins, and Constable Bastien, who studies the law, will be left free to uphold the good.”
The silence from the other cell was profound. I liked to imagine I heard the sound of wrestling consciences, rather than insane disbelief.
“Holy, holy, holy…hee, hee, hee…now that’s a wild tale.” The cackling clattered like a fistfuls of pebbles thrown at the iron walls. “Though I don’t remember new tales so well. The next tankard of sack will wash this’n all-l-l-l away.”
“Hush, Elfun,” I said. “Or I’ll give you something wild to remember.”
Biting, undecipherable argument emanated from the dark. I begged Serena Fortuna for a bit of grace.
“How would you get me out of here without compromising Bastien?” said Denys, admirably calm.
I clenched my hands to keep from wrenching the bars from their mortar. “I’ve long experience with locks and hiding, as long as we’re fast.” Really and truly fast. “And Bastien will need a solid alibi…”
The constable took some convincing. And he utterly refused to allow Denys to hold the seeds that would be my payment, believing I’d kill his friend to get them. But eventually they both agreed. One thing about being backed up in a wretched corner with the howling wolves’ saliva dripping on your toes: There is only one way to go. Straight through them.
#
“Up, thief, show yourself!” Like clockwork, Bastien’s man rattled my cell door and tested the lock. Lord Felix’s man bawled at Denys to show himself below the opened trap. Twice, the pair of them had done the same. Twice they’d left, satisfied that all was secure. During the visits and for every moment in between Bastien remained in his workroom upstairs with the rest of his men and Felix’s—well observed.
For the third time, the guards were satisfied. Their footsteps faded up the stair.
Before beginning his hourly surveillance, Bastien would have scratched a number above the sop-house door, indicating to my mysterious halfblood friend that he was to meet me outside the lockup at fourth hour of the night watch. That meant it was time for us to go.
The cell lock was not so different than the myriad I’d met before. With a breathed prayer to Erdru, Lord of Vines and Drunkards, I laid my fingers on it and called up magic. Pins snicked inside the lock. Levers fell. And stuck. I tried to jar it loose…to no avail. Gods, only an hour till they’d return.
A slight adjustment to the spell, and the cursed mechanism fell open, spitting orange sparks. I shoved the gate open and cast a soft light. The lock was halfway melted.
Tittering broke out behind me. “Something wild for sure. Who’s done that?”
“Valen’s halfblood friend,” I said. “Tell that to all who come and they’ll let you out come morning.” No help for it. My incompetent spellwork removed all question as to how the locks were broken, further reducing the time we had to get away.
Another burst of sparks opened the cell in front of me. A third that trembled the floor opened Denys’s pit. I shoved the ladder down. “Quickly!”
Once he was up, I set to work on Denys’s shackles. Spelled locks. Damnation!
Forcing patience I didn’t have, I peeled away the simple spell on his left shackle and burst the lock. Denys sucked in his breath.
“Does Bas know?” he said softly, as I began working magic on the right side.
“No,” I said. “And he cannot. Not ever.”
Another burst and I breathed again.
Only when Denys climbed the stair in front of me did I note the charred stocking and burnt flesh on his right ankle.
“Sorry that was rough,” I said. “Truly I’m not good at much of anything. Though I could have shown you a fine evening if I had partnered you in the galliard.”
His quiet laugh and his hand on my shoulder had me grinning as I doused my light and we darted across the courtyard of the Magistrate’s Hall and into the lane.
I pressed Denys into the shadows. “Wait.”
Kneeling on the deserted street, I closed my eyes, laid hands on the filthy cobbles, and drew on the reservoir of magic that lived in my blood. My drunkard mother was a diviner, but it was my father’s bloodline magic lived in me. The Cartamanduas were a line of cartographers—mapmakers, route finders, and guides. My particular bent, pitiful as it was, allowed me to read a road.
Magic flowed through my fingers. Iron-wheeled carts and farmers’ barrows had laid down tracks here, as had every kind of shoe from crudest leather to fine slippers, as well as naked feet, mules and pigs, geese and horses. Fewer threads had woven this road than others I’d known, and hope permeated the dirt and stone more than enmity or sorrow. Wroling was a newer town and had never seen war.
Heaving a full breath, easier now that no walls confined me, I sank deeper into the magic, stretching my awareness beyond the plot I touched. Soggy waking here and there, sleepy lovemaking that tempted me to linger, anxieties about empty market stalls…hunger…wariness at hungry soldiers wandering so near daughters and bringing worries of the world inside the town walls. No signs of lurking spite or ready knives. Magistrate Maslin’s town felt safe. Our safety depended on my sense of his town.
“All’s well for now,” I said, popping to my feet. “Let’s move.”
“You’re no halfblood.”
“No.”
“A renegade, then.”
“Best if you don’t question. I’m going to save your balls.”
Denys laughed again and stuffed a small green bag into my waist pocket. “If you trust me enough to show me this, then I’ll trust you to honor your promise.”
I tried not to think what he’d given me. I wasn’t worthy of that kind of trust. Though it was too late, anyway. Once I fed my perversion, I was useless for a day, thus certain to get caught.
We raced through Wroling’s quiet streets. Even if we could sneak through the city gates—wholly unlikely—we’d no time to get far enough away. So we would keep moving, laying down a confusion of tracks for the edane’s hounds and any purebloods they brought in. I blessed the low clouds that spat freezing rain on us as it kept people late in their beds. Half an hour more and our escape would be discovered.
In a nearby alley, Bastien had left Denys a thick wool shirt and a good cloak that quieted my slight companion’s shivering. The cloak he’d left for me scarce reached my knees, and the moth-eaten woolen scarf would have done better to wrap fish, but they would serve to disguise my garments.
He’d also left my rucksack that contained my every possession. A touch assured me that its false bottom was intact. I stuffed Denys’s little green bag in beside the shard of mirror glass and the silver needle and refused to think more of them. Cramps already tormented gut and limbs. A few hours and the craving would begin to devour my senses. Eventually we’d have to go to ground.
#
We didn’t need the tolling bell to know when they’d discovered us missing. We kept running, traversing every street and alleyway, slowing only when
we encountered other people. Every little while, I would lay my hands on dirt or cobbles and use my bent to judge where we needed to go next. I felt the hunt spreading out from the Magistrate’s Hall. Determined at first…and then furious…murderous. Lord Felix must have joined them.
“Are you all right, Valen?” Denys steadied me as stabbing fire in one thigh set me stumbling. “We should stop.”
“Not yet.” I couldn’t say more without heaving.
From time to time we’d trade cloaks or scarves. I hunched my shoulders hoping to disguise my height. Sometimes we separated, rounding a block of houses in opposite directions, but never far enough a cry would fail to bring us back together. The coal in my gut burst into flame. Raindrops felt like small hammers that left bruises of acid. But we could not stop.
Again, I knelt and poured out magic. The hunt had moved north. We moved south. Bless all gods that Denys knew the streets. I had warned Bastien not to hold back in the chase, swearing that my disreputable friend would see to Denys’s safety. And so I would. I did not fail my oaths.
In late afternoon weak magic joined the hunt. If I used magic again, we were lost. But it was yapping hounds threatened to end us first.
“We’re done!” A panting Denys gaped at the moldering mountain of foulness that choked the narrow alley—fifty years, at least, of Wroling’s refuse, rotting carcasses, ashes, and slops.
“Not yet.” I gasped as a belly cramp speared my gut. “Crawl under. Deep as you can bear. They won’t let the hounds dig too deep. I’ve done this before.”
I dug in, too, and held still for an eternity of demonic howling, expecting slavering jaws to drag us out at any moment. My incessant shivering must not give us away. Must not. Would not…
#
“Valen? Can you hear me? They’re gone.”
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Surely a fiery dagger was slitting the skin along my spine. The foulness that buried me had triggered a wrenching nausea, and every heave felt like a giant knotted my gut and crushed it in his fist. The world was naught but pain and need.