by J. C. Staudt
“Huh.” Daxin creased his lips. What he said next pained him, almost like shoving a knife into his own back. “Well, he certainly runs a good business, and one we all benefit from.”
“Luther, you have to trust me on this one. Nichel Vantanible may be a genius where his empire is concerned, but when it comes to dealing with people, he’s an arrogant prick who has all the tact of a punch in the neck.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Daxin said. “But you’re clearly bitter about whatever it was that got you sent away.”
“It wasn’t that we got sent away. It was worse than that. We were about to get arrested, so we left.”
“You’re telling me the merchant company was going to arrest you and lock you in a cave somewhere?”
“You heard me right, Luther. The mayor has his own little police force. The dway is ruthless. Sadistic. Corporal punishment, executions, you name it. Especially when it comes to disloyalty. He’s got no tolerance for it.”
“Have you ever met a man who does?” Daxin was making every effort to maintain his ‘I’m just a neutral bystander’ routine, but it was becoming difficult.
“Guess not. Vantanible’s business is the reason Unterberg is so well-off. We had it really good there.”
“So tell me what happened,” Daxin said, though he already knew.
“About a year ago, the caravans started getting attacked. They’ve always gotten attacked a lot, though. But Vantanible’s caravans are strapped to the gills and well-guarded, so it’s usually no big deal.”
“Yeah, they’ve got the shepherds and all that. Right.” Daxin thought of his brother again. When Toler had first become a shepherd, he had promised Daxin he’d continue the search for Victaria, but Daxin soon realized that was only an excuse. Vicky was long gone, and Toler had never brought home a trace of news about her after that.
“Anyway, the caravans start going down all of a sudden,” Biyo was saying. “Like getting hit hard, no survivors. Vantanible has no idea who’s doing it, so he decides to change the routes, hoping it’ll throw them off. Meanwhile, we’re starting to have a rough time in town because our creature comforts are getting scarce. You know how you get used to a certain standard of living, then when that gets taken away, it’s hard to adjust. I don’t know, maybe you don’t. Not like we were starving or anything, just didn’t have the abundance we were used to.
“So then we find out our caravans are getting hijacked on their new routes. Vantanible changes the routes again, and the same thing happens. He starts losing his shit, claiming someone in the company is leaking the routes, or selling them to the nomads or something like that.”
Daxin gave a wry smile. “So he decided to arrest dozens of people on account of one suspected traitor?”
“That’s not too far from the truth, actually.” Biyo scratched his head and turned to check on the others. They were standing around or sitting beneath what shade they could find among the dead trees, sipping water from their skins or carrying on quiet conversations. “These dways will be ready to head back once Schum finishes his trap.”
Daxin nodded. “So how many of the people here in Dryhollow Split used to work for Vantanible?”
“All of us.”
“All sixty of you?”
“More than sixty. It was about sixty of us who got wind of the arrests before they happened. There were well over a hundred, if you include the police.”
“High Infernal.”
“Yeah. Vantanible had no trouble filling the empty jobs, I’m sure. It would’ve been easy for him to arrest all of us and keep us locked up until he found out who was spilling the routes.”
Daxin wetted his lips. “Do you know who it was?”
Biyo looked over at him, puzzled. “One of the people who got arrested, I hope. Infernal forbid it’s someone here in Dryhollow Split. There’s not a soul here who’d think twice about flaying that bastard alive.”
There was a lump in Daxin’s throat. “You should ask around,” he said, trying to lighten the mood.
Biyo didn’t laugh. “Ask? Whoever it was—if there really was a traitor—would have to be a dope to admit they were selling the caravan routes to the nomads. A dope, or somebody with a death wish.”
CHAPTER 17
The Underground Sea
Each time the ship crested a wave, Lizneth’s stomach left her. She hadn’t so much as set foot on a seagoing vessel before, and it wasn’t long before she realized that the sea would extend her no mercy to ease the transition. The boat’s cargo hold was even smaller than her parents’ modest hut, and yet she found herself crowded into the cramped quarters with more than two dozen other full-grown ikzhehn.
Guards took shifts on the deck above. It seemed Lizneth could hear the crew engaging in their drunken merrymaking at all hours of the day and night. From beyond the noise of their celebrations came a dull throbbing, more something she could feel than anything she heard. It was soft and deep, vibrating along the planks like the rumble of distant thunder. There were two pitches, arriving one after the other, slow and steady. She didn’t always pay attention to it as the hours trudged by, but it was always there.
Boards groaned as the vessel listed on the waves, complaining of age like a gaggle of elderly dams. No matter how hard Lizneth pressed her face into the deck or how she changed her position, there was no relief from the queasy feeling in her gut. She was sick often, and the sack had still been around her head the first few times. By the time she loosened the drawstrings enough to finagle herself free of it, the fur on her face and neck was plastered with half-dried vomit. Bile was all that came up before long, and after that she was only retching.
Passing in and out of an uneasy sleep, she dreamed terrible dreams. In some, she was behind the levee again, in the great trough. A horde of slavers was chasing her, black-toothed mongrels whose mouths ran red with blood; the mists became a yellowed cloud of choking smog that lowered around her, blinding and suffocating her until she couldn’t see a thing and she was so out of breath she had to stop running. Then the slavers caught up with her, and they were fighting over whom she belonged to, each of them pulling on one of her limbs, shouting out their own names or the gruesome names of the masters they served.
In other dreams, she arrived home to find her family working the mulligraw fields in chains, with Sniverlik and his Marauders at the whip. When he saw her, Sniverlik began to set the members of her family on fire, one by one. She woke from those dreams with her tail scalding hot and her empty stomach twisted in knots, greeted only by the gloom of the ship’s bowels and the pounding of that distant, thundering rhythm. The captives’ bowels too were hard at work; the floor of the hold was slick with bilgewater and the leavings of her fellow prisoners, both voluntary and otherwise.
Few had escaped their bonds, so there hadn’t been much conversation in the first hours of their voyage. Whenever a guard heard voices, he would descend into the hold and give any loud-mouths a stern shutting up before tightening their fetters. Even without words to speak, Lizneth’s sharp sense of smell offered her illumination aplenty. From the haick, she discerned that their diets were mostly fish and refuse and leftover hydroponic crops, like the kind grown in the nethertowns. By this she determined that her fellow prisoners had been plucked from Bolck-Azock’s poorer classes. Metropolis slavers didn’t need to look far to find easy prey, it seemed—especially if they were anywhere near as foolish and naive as she had been.
There was no conception among them of how much time had passed at sea or how many days their journey might yet take. Lizneth passed that first indeterminate stretch of time in the irregular seesaw between miserable consciousness and fitful sleep. The crew never fed them during this time—at least not while she was awake, though she doubted she would’ve kept anything down if there was food to eat. The waves felt impossibly sheer, but perhaps that was only because she was such a stranger to life on the water.
When first they heard the sound of chains above them, it came from the front e
nd of the ship, at once a terrible clatter and a deep growling over the deck, louder even than the sea’s hiss. The sound soon became an unbearable racket in the tiny cargo hold. Lizneth couldn’t cover her ears, so she shut her eyes and tried to think of better things. Home and family. Her fields. The life she’d taken for granted.
Then the grated door opened, and a hulking gray-and-white roan with half a tail and an ironwood spike for a leg hobbled down the steps and began tossing bodies topside. The chafing noise across the deck was deafening, and Lizneth cowered with dread as they began taking the other captives away. She didn’t know what they were doing, or why. She didn’t think she wanted to know, no matter how cruelly things were about to go for her.
“Next,” they would yell from the deck, after they’d cut each captive’s ropes and shackled their wrists and ankles in irons. Lizneth was one of the last to be removed. When she’d been lobbed through the hatch, she found herself standing before a snaking line of bedraggled captives, bound together by a string of heavy chain. The sea was dark around them, the air thick and gray. Lanterns creaked in their hangers, casting their yellow beacons through the fog.
Two diminutive agouti-furred crewmembers worked at Lizneth’s bonds with rigging knives as she stood on the deck. It was the first time she’d been able to get a good look at her fellow captives, and she found them as unkempt as she would’ve imagined. Even in their disgrace, she could see glimpses of who they’d been before: peasants, fisherfolk, carpenters, tanners, smiths, chandlers, and farmers like her.
The two agoutis had just finished clapping her in irons when the door to the captain’s quarters opened and Curznack emerged with his two brood-brothers. He limped forward with a pained sneer and began to inspect the new captives as if he owned them—which Lizneth supposed he had a right to do, since he did. She saw his mouth twist as he moved, a subtle hint of the deep wound beneath his tunic and overcoat.
When he reached her, he paused. She could see the edges of the cloth bandages snug around the inside of his shoulder, a thin sliver of red soaking through the fabric. His whiskers flexed forward and he sniffed her. His eyes were crusted with reddish secretions. He looked her over from toe to tip and ran a pink tongue down the back of his longteeth. That look sent a chill through her, the kind that made the knots in her stomach pull all the tighter. She lowered her eyes, pleading silently for him to move on.
“Keep this one off the line,” said Curznack, still staring at her with a glazed expression. “Take her into my quarters and chain her up.”
The irons were heavy, even before Lizneth had moved; the weight of the chains pulled the manacles against her wrists and pinched her fur in the metal seams. The agoutis hustled her inside and fastened her to a ring mounted on the wall, then slammed the door behind her.
The air was rife with the stink of buck, and Lizneth recognized Curznack’s haick and the similar signatures of his brothers. The cabin was meager in size, but it was more than adequate, especially compared to Lizneth’s current environs. The room was laden with finery; all the treasures one might expect a slaver’s life to afford. Beds were set into the nooks along each of the three adjacent walls, soft feather mattresses dressed in faded blue satin. There were six bunks in all, three of them made up but unused. Parchment maps were stuffed into bins and crates in the corners; several lay in loose rolls on the floor, trundling from one side of the cabin to the other as the ship swayed. Windows at the back looked out over the nothingness of the Omnekh’s dark waters; whitecaps crowned and fell away, and the horrors of the unfamiliar tides left Lizneth with a feeling so bleak it made her shiver. That was what awaited her, even if she chanced to find freedom before the voyage’s end: a lonely contest, her finite endurance versus the ceaseless waves and the inestimable depths.
One of the maps was open on the modest square table in the middle of the room, knives staked at its corners to hold it in place. Lizneth reached, but the closest knife was far outside her grasp. The ship lurched and her stomach followed; she made for the floor, but the chains coursed through the ring and grated taut before she was halfway down. Her overworked abdomen clenched, and her tongue climbed her throat until the bitter taste of bile was in her mouth again. She spat it away and groaned, letting the chains hold her, leaning like an off-duty marionette.
There was another commotion outside; the sound of the chains scrabbling along the deck grew faint, then neared the door again. Hinges creaked, and clinking footfalls descended. The noises died after several minutes, and she heard the cargo hatch slam shut again so hard it shook the deck. She hadn’t noticed the thunder-like rumble missing from the air until she felt it resume, slow and rhythmic.
It was a long time before the door opened again. When it did, Curznack came in carrying a bowl of food and fastened the lock behind him. Lizneth could pick out the smell of each individual morsel, but the thought of food was both tantalizing and sickening.
“I can see you’re enjoying the voyage so far,” Curznack said, smirking to himself. “She’s a smooth ride in calmer seas, I promise. The Halcyon, we call her. A finer galley you’ll never set eyes on in these waters. You haven’t had a chance to formally meet my brood-brothers, Azhi and Qeddiker, but you will soon.”
“You lied to me,” Lizneth said.
Curznack smacked his tongue, his jaw working on a bite of cheese as he crossed the room to his bunk. “I told you I was a thief and a criminal. What you chose to believe after that is of little consequence to me.”
“You said I couldn’t go home. You said Morish would catch me if I tried.”
“That wasn’t a lie, my dear.” Curznack was casual, smug. “Morish would’ve taken you. Then I would’ve been out a valuable asset, wouldn’t I? My business doesn’t get by on giving away good product to my competitors.”
The ship listed. This time, hope abandoned Lizneth, along with her stomach. When the heaving stopped, she wiped her mouth on her arm. Her fur was already so filthy that a little more was nothing to mind.
“You’ll keep my swabbies in their jobs yet,” Curznack said, taking a bite of salt pork even as he stared at the puddle of black vomit.
“So all that about your younger brood-brothers then… that was a lie?” Lizneth asked.
“No, that was the truth too. You see? I didn’t really have to lie to you. Your fear alone was enough to make you believe what I wanted you to. I do have two younger brood-brothers. Morish took them away and sold them as slaves not a month past. This will be our first passage to the daylit side of the Omnekh since then, and I hope to find them there when we arrive. If I’d been able to question Morish, we’d have a better idea of where they might be, but since that didn’t work out…”
“You’re still blaming me for letting Morish get away?” Lizneth wasn’t sure why she cared enough to be insulted.
“I’m not blaming you. I don’t blame anyone but myself for what happened back there. My brothers were too young to be off on their own, and it’s my fault we’re all in this mess now.” Curznack took a brown glass bottle from beneath his pillow, uncorked it, and took a long pull. He licked his lips and swallowed, then started in on a semi-circle of hard biscuit. A fat weevil crawled from a crevice near the bite he’d taken. He plucked the weevil off with two clawed fingers, wrinkling his snout as he examined it up close. After a moment, he tossed it into his mouth. He ogled her as the weevil crunched between his teeth.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Lizneth said.
“Be happy I’m only looking.”
“I can’t believe I trusted you to keep me safe.”
“Oh, but you are safe. Morish will never find you, just as I promised.”
Lizneth scritched, a shrill sound, full of loathing. “How safe will I be when we reach the shore?”
Curznack frowned, pensive. “Well, I don’t know. That’ll be up to your new master, I suppose.”
“Se dyagth, krahz,” Lizneth said, and spat.
“Ehi fyer puq kherai,” said Curznack, laughing. �
�I find it best not to spoil my product before sale. If you’re that desperate, I could make a request to the crew on your behalf. Several of my sailors have mentioned that they find your haick… agreeable.” He waited a beat, brandishing a satisfied smile when Lizneth sulked. “Though, I’d prefer it that they think I’m the one who’s mounted you. I’ve learned it’s easier to exercise my authority over them when I play to their weaknesses. Just the idea of a fresh young doe like you is enough, oftentimes. Let them starve and they’ll revolt, but give them a small taste, and they’ll hunger for it all the more. Once I put the thought of breeding into their heads, they’ll get us to shore faster than any ship this size has a right to travel.”
“Does it make you feel good to trick them like that?”
“It worked on you, didn’t it?” Curznack looked pleased with himself. “What you desired most was safety. I positioned myself as someone who could give it to you.”
“Yes, you’re brilliant. You took me for a fool and it turned out you were right. Should I tell you how impressed I am?”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. I brought you in here so I could scent you, and so I could indulge myself in a good look. Don’t worry, I’m not going to mount you. Not today, at least. But I’m going to make it look like I did.”
“I’d rather go downstairs and rot, if you’re finished.”
“I’m not,” Curznack said, rising from his bunk.
By the time he summoned the two agoutis to take Lizneth below decks again, there were bruises on her snout and cheeks, and a weeping gash above her eye.
“Wash her first,” Curznack told them. “She was… lequinzhe.”
The agoutis sniggered, noticing Curznack’s boastful smile. They lowered a rope and bucket overboard, then doused her with it. The freezing water sucked the air from her lungs, stung her eye and bit into her skin like a jawful of icy teeth, but she kept silent. They repeated the process twice more before throwing her into the hold, wet and shivering. Distressed as she was, she would’ve been shaking even without the cold.