by Ed McDonald
I went to the bar. The casks of ale and bottles of what was probably meant to be whisky pleaded with me from across the counter, but I ignored their suicidal whining for now and addressed the barkeep. She had her hair in a stack of red curls up on her head to display a gold chain around her neck. At least someone here was making money.
‘I know you,’ she said. ‘That coat ain’t fooling me any. You step careful around here. There’s some boys might not want to be seen.’
Deserters, most likely. You’d think that men who fled the service would head away from the Misery, but we tend to stick to the places we know.
‘Point them out to me, if you see them.’
‘If you’re hunting trouble, do it outside.’
‘I’m not after trouble. I’m looking for navigators,’ I said. ‘Any around?’
‘Nolt’s around,’ she said. ‘At least, he was in here yesterday. Weren’t looking for work though. His nerve’s gone. Mostly just sits telling his stories now.’
I thanked her, and despite my good intentions took a couple of drinks of whisky. It wasn’t half as bad as I’d expected it to be. I paid more than it was worth and turned to leave, only to see three aggressive shapes blocking the doorway.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You look like you’re wanting to talk to me.’
Perhaps ‘talk’ was the wrong word. They were dressed in oddments of armour, poor-fitting and speckled with rust, suits cobbled together from other men’s harnesses. One of them was short with an eye swollen shut. The second, taller, was missing some of her teeth. The third was heavy in the gut, mutton-chop whiskers framing a drinker’s face. They hadn’t drawn steel, but they must have seen me ride in, gone and got themselves kitted up while I was busy with the whisky. Drinking would be the death of me, that’s what everyone thought. These three were taking the idea too far.
‘We know who you are,’ the woman said. She seemed to be their leader. The only one with any brains behind her eyes. I recognised them as well – not personally, not by name, but I knew their kind. To be a soldier takes some guts, some discipline, and some hardness. To be a deserter only takes the last. They felt strong here, on familiar territory, with numbers, and their scavenged plate. They thought that I was here gunning for them, and if I’d known who they were, maybe I would have been. But I’d not been expecting a fight and I’d come lightly armed.
‘I’m not here for you,’ I said. ‘Best for everyone if all I can see of you is dust in less than five minutes’ time. I’ll give you a head start. Want me to count?’
‘You strung up Binny and Wilks,’ the woman said. The heavy, whiskered man growled. ‘They were vets. Survived the Siege. And you hanged them because they’d had too much Misery-time and couldn’t wash it anymore. You shouldn’t have done that.’
Binny. Wilks. A couple of runaways, at least a year ago. Men I’d almost forgotten. The alehouse patrons seemed to sense that the atmosphere had gone to the storm, and were moving quietly to the sides of the room.
‘Go plead it to the law,’ I said. ‘My business isn’t with you. Don’t make it about you now and maybe you get to keep running that mouth of yours someplace that people want to hear it. Picking a fight with me isn’t smart.’
It wasn’t smart. But unlike the barge, I didn’t have surprise on my side here, and Luck won’t favour you if you push her. If the deserters went for me, I’d be best off throwing myself through the nearest window.
The acrid, woody odour of burning slow match reached out to me. I heard the lock of a firearm getting cocked.
‘You folks need to back the fuck off,’ the barkeep said. She sighted down the barrel of a matchlock. ‘Keep your swords in their scabbards and go get on your flea-ridden mules and get the hells away from my bar.’
The deserters glared at the barkeep, but her fingers were steady on the firing lever.
‘I’m looking for a navigator,’ I said, trying to move their minds to something that didn’t involve laying me open. The barkeep only had one shot and even if she hit, the odds would still be against me. The deserters weren’t just fronting: they feared going the same way as Binny and Wilks, and did it really matter if someone shot the fat one? They were all playing through the scenarios in their minds.
‘I’m looking for a navigator. A freelancer. You know where I can find Nolt?’
‘Nolty?’ the woman said, narrowed her eyes. ‘What’s he done?’
‘Nothing I know of. He’s not in any kind of trouble. Not with me, anyway. Just tell me where I can find him and go on your way. Then keep on going so I don’t ever see you again.’
‘Find him yourself,’ she said. ‘Come on boys. Tide ain’t waiting.’
We were a long way from the sea, but they saw which way their sails were trying to take them and the deserters backed through the alehouse doors. The barkeep breathed a sigh of relief, lowered the matchlock and killed the slow match. The drinkers ambled on back to their usual tables. Order had been restored in their hazy world. I turned back to the barkeep and ordered another drink. Now I just had to wait.
Nolt came to me. Word gets around a small town fast. He limped in on a crutch, a haggard man who’d seen better days, missing most of his left leg below the knee. He was dressed in shabby outdoor leathers and looked like everybody’s father, but he had a yellow hood around his shoulders. He sat beside me at the bar, and it was clear that he was more than happy to talk as long as I was buying him some of that sweet Teak’s ale. He practically thrust his face into the mug, glugging like he’d been denied water for a month.
‘Good?’
‘What can I say?’ Nolt said. ‘Times are tough and money’s short.’ He gestured down toward his missing foot.
‘What got you?’
‘Gillings,’ Nolt said. ‘Twelve years navigating, and then one night my buddy dozed off on sentry. Woke up because I needed a piss, found the little bastard had made his way up this far.’ He shook his head at the bad luck. ‘Hard to find decent jobs since then. Citadel don’t want me, no matter I can still ride. You’d think they would. Bloody good navigator, I was.’
‘That’s what I heard,’ I said, which was a lie.
‘I heard you were looking for a navigator. Thought you ran with Tnota. Now, he’s a man that knows his way around the Misery. So what can I do for you? You got a job for me?’
Nolt’s tone, his posture, said that he was interested in work. Wanted to show that he was still as good as any other nav, even if he was down a foot. But behind his words, his tone, there was a silent plea. Don’t send me back there, it said. Don’t send me back into the cursed wastes, to see the ghosts and the things that don’t have names. Please. Please don’t. I felt sorry for him. Can’t be easy to wake up and find a little red thing sucking on your bone marrow.
‘No. I’m looking for someone who might have offered you a job. Navigating to Tiven’s Dale.’
I’d hit the mark. He feigned sadness that I wasn’t looking to hire him, but the relief ran far stronger. I bought another round of drinks to ease his story out.
‘I’d have taken the job,’ he said. ‘I could do it, you know. Not an easy nav, but I could do it no sweat.’ He wanted me to believe him. To accept that he was still the man that he’d been. I didn’t ask why he hadn’t taken the job. He’d have been forced to lie.
‘You did the right thing to turn him down. You remember who approached you?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I remember him. Odd type for Misery work. Posh voice. Lennisgrad accent. Not cream, but not far off. Educated. Ego the size of a fucking barn.’
‘He give you a name?’
He thought about it a few moments.
‘Nacomo,’ he said eventually. ‘That was it. Nacomo. Like the town.’
It wasn’t a common name, but it wasn’t rare either.
‘I have to track this man down. Anything else you can remember would help me.
’
Nolt had reached the end of his line as far as Misery work was concerned, pretty understandable given the circumstances. He’d been given an honourable discharge. But he was still a patriot, still a fighter at heart. His desire to serve hadn’t been chewed away with his foot.
‘Medium height, brown hair. White. Young-looking, but old hands?’ He thought for a few moments. ‘There was one thing. Whenever the sky howled, and it was howling fierce the day he came looking for navs, he’d practically jump out of his seat. Made me think he was new on the Range. Really had me wondering what he was doing wanting to go as deep as Tiven’s Dale. He make it there?’
‘He did, I think. Thanks, Nolt.’
‘Any real work comes up, you let me know,’ he said, but the tremble of his jaw said the opposite. I gave him enough money to stay in beers for the rest of the week, which was a heavy payoff for a name and a handful of details. I’d pass them to Valiya and see what came of it.
It was long past dark by the time I made it back into Valengrad. Recently the streets were always busy with traffic. A lot of new arrivals, their life’s possessions stowed in wagons. They were ordinary people, tradesmen and farmers, some with skills, some with nothing more than determination and mouths to feed. There were plenty of empty houses waiting to be occupied, if they wanted them. So many had died during the siege, both those who had gone down battling atop the wall or beneath it, or those who had hidden and been found, or run and been caught when Shavada’s troops entered the city. There was something unremittingly bleak about moving into the dust-covered, untouched home of a person who’d died saving you. But four years on and people seemed to fill the city. They came with purpose, yellow hoods a declaration of their devotion to the cult that had taken root in every walk of life. If it had been up to me, I’d have treated them like any other Doomsayers and stamped their fledgling religion into the dirt, but there were a lot of them and the less I had to do with them the better. They called themselves the Bright Order, and I hated them.
I settled down at The Bell with a jar, dark ale, bitter enough to bite the roof of your mouth. It wasn’t good but it was cheap. I could have afforded better. Hells, I could have bought the whole louse-infested joint on half my yearly pay, but old habits cling stronger than ticks. Across the room, shabby-looking men and women passed a bowl of white-leaf back and forth. Off-duty mercenaries lounged in a half circle around the fire trying to outdo each other with largely fictional stories of highly unlikely conquests. After the Siege, Tnota and I had practically taken this place over until duty and work got away from us. Some of the kids who’d looked after us were still there, working. When I gave the place over to him, I’d made Sav promise both to keep them on, and not to let any of them whore until they were full-grown.
I’d sunk three beers in quick succession by the time Tnota joined me.
‘Valiya talked to the cemetery boys. They received Devlen Maille’s body but that’s where their records seem to end. They didn’t remember him, and they didn’t write down which pauper’s pit they chucked him in.’
‘It was a long shot,’ I admitted. ‘What else?’
‘None of the usual whisper-men had anything,’ he told me. ‘Tried the mercenaries too. Looking for a thirty-strong troop recently back from the Misery with Spinners in tow. Nothing there either.’
‘You try the boys at the east gate?’
‘Valiya did. No leads.’ Tnota signalled to the girl for wine. She grinned at him. They all loved Tnota, for some reason. He’d been a regular on top of The Bell’s lads before the Siege, but he’d mellowed out since his injury. He’d not lost his grin, but he’d lost more than just his arm. Like Nolt, his nerve was fried, both for navigating the Misery and navigating around a bed. Didn’t even glance up at the bare-chested lads lounging along the balcony.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘If your boy Ost hadn’t been shot over it, I’d not believe a word.’
‘Makes me wonder if he was just mixed up in something local. Looking to have me fight his battles for him. Only they went in close, after he was down. Real determined to make sure he wasn’t getting back up.’
‘Here’s trouble,’ Tnota said. He nodded over to where two middle-aged men had just walked in, shaking the rain from their long cloaks. Their hoods were yellow. Bright Order men.
‘Maybe they’re not the arsehole type,’ I said, but I didn’t hold out a great deal of hope on that front. Most people were exactly that type, whether or not they subscribed to a newborn religion. The newcomers approached a table of old mercenaries, tried to foist flyers on them and were duly told to fuck off, which sent them over to us. They had the look of provincials, with accents to match.
‘You’re wasting your time, son,’ I said. ‘There’s only two things people come into The Bell for. One gets you drunk, the other gets you laid. No amount of talking about visions in the light is going to change that.’
The Bright Order man mostly ignored what I’d said. He took on an almost apologetic air.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to convince you to believe in anything you’ve not seen for yourself. Your beliefs are between you and the spirits,’ he said. ‘It’s just an invitation, for any honest men who are fed up with paying more than their due. There’s a public meeting to protest the marshal’s latest tax. We’d love to hear your opinions.’
He pushed a damp flyer toward us. The rain had got into his bag and made the ink run, turning it mostly illegible. Seeing that he’d get nothing further from us, he and his companion moved on around the room.
‘Awful lot of those Bright Order converts coming into the city these days,’ Tnota said.
‘The Grandspire,’ I grunted. ‘They treat it like a holy place, and it’s not even finished.’
‘They might be a bunch of bores, but at least the place isn’t a ghost town anymore. Good for the tradesmen, at least,’ Tnota said. ‘Big Dog says that more bodies on the Range has to be a good thing. They can’t all be witless.’
I wasn’t so sure about that. Their faith seemed to be an accumulation of spirituality and revolutionary philosophy pasted onto the visions of the so called Bright Lady that had been happening all over. Word was that the High Witness was coming to Valengrad to help spread the Bright Lady’s message – maybe when he did he’d be able to explain their ideology more coherently than the peasants clogging up the streets.
Tnota and I drank, played a game of tiles. Tnota was a terrible opponent and I usually had to let him take back a move or two just to make sure the game didn’t end before it had started, but I blinked and found he’d trapped half my pieces. Maybe it was the fug in my head, or maybe my mind was just somewhere else. I lost half my front tiles to a trap I should have seen a mile off.
‘I saw her again,’ I said.
My one-armed friend nodded. Like he’d guessed already what I was going to say.
‘Lot of people seen her,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’re coming here, isn’t it? All them yellow-hoods think they’ve seen her. They think she signifies a new world order’s coming. That what you think, Ryhalt?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘And it’s not the same. They say they see a woman in the light. What I see – it’s not the same. She’s dead, and I’ve made my peace with that. Whatever’s left in the light – it’s no more her than a footprint is a man. But … I saw her.’
‘You saw a big flash of light,’ Tnota said. ‘You’ve been in battle enough to know that when your blood’s hot, you won’t remember everything clearly. When was the last time you even slept?’ Tnota knocked ash against the table, put his hand over the top of his beer. That meant he was getting serious. Talking, not drinking. ‘I know it’s not easy, Ryhalt. You found Ezabeth and you lost her, and somewhere in that dented old skull of yours you can’t help but blame yourself, for all that you done as much as anyone to make sure we aren’t all drudge now. But you want my advice?�
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‘I don’t know. Will I like it?’
‘No. But I’ll give it all the same. You need to get some sleep. You’re burning the candle at both ends and roasting the middle over a fire. You keep this up much more and you’ll be doubting everything you see.’
‘I see her when I sleep,’ I said.
‘Just dreams,’ Tnota countered. ‘We all have bad ones.’
‘What if Dantry was right? What if she’s not dead? Not completely.’
‘That man had a brain the size of a city,’ Tnota said, ‘And no common sense at all. But even if he was right, that there’s something more than an echo of her left in the light, he couldn’t figure out shit about what to do about it. You ain’t some mathematical genius like he was, but if you want to believe she’s going to come dancing back, maybe you should go join the cult. A hood would suit you.’
‘I wish he’d come back, wherever he went,’ I said. I meant it, too. Dantry Tanza had stuck around with us for a couple of years. I’d let him board in my house. Then things got difficult. He wasted his fortune obtaining an ancient book, became obsessed with it. The Taran Codex. It was written in Akat, a dead language. Taran had been Nameless a thousand years ago. Nobody alive could read more than a handful of words in Akat, only those that remained on crumbled monuments and broken statues. Dantry employed researchers, linguists, the best academics in the states in his efforts to translate it. He believed that if he could decipher it, he might find a way to save Ezabeth. It was wasted energy, a fool’s errand. I couldn’t endure his constant talk about his sister, his certainty that she lived on, trapped in the light. I believed it too, at first, but as the days wore by, my faith wavered, then snapped. The living woman had been flesh and blood. Whatever part of Ezabeth remained, it was just phos. Just an echo. It was too painful to talk about.