But he said across from her anyhow. Placed his hat on his knee.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said, dealing out the cards. The deck was familiar. The game, he suspected, was Five-Card Shot. When she placed a single card face up between them, it confirmed his guess, but he demurred.
“What are we playing?” he said. “I admit I don’t have a head for cards. I’ll need the rules.”
She told him the basic rules in a breezy tone, deftly dealing the cards. He knew to lose his first hand. He won the second two.
“You’re not from here,” she said, leaning back in her seat, hands behind her head as he lay his winning hand face up.
“Just luck.”
“You are a poor liar.”
“Am I?”
“Kid’s name?”
“The mother is Bafasa Mundi. But it’s less a person I’m looking for and more of a thing. Is that all right?
“Same.”
“But –”
“Things are generally either carried, lost, or hidden by people. It’s one and the same. Lots of trophies taken during the war. I’m wondering – we looking for something that got stolen from you, or for a trophy you stole from someone else?”
“…yes?”
“You from Moronov?”
“Yes.”
“And all you got outside is that alpaca with the rocks?”
That impressed him. He assumed she had not seen the alpaca, let alone had the time to see what he carried. But if she knew he carried the glass, she would know he was from Moronov. And of course – her grandmother had wanted the glass. Mez would have known that.
“Are you a wizard?” he said.
She collected her cards.
“I just wonder what kind of person walks five hundred miles from Moronov carrying just a few bronze rings, some rocks, and maybe a local script for a bank? You better have a script for a bank.”
“What kind of person gets into retrieving people?”
“Are we going to go visit this kid wizard or what?”
“Don’t you have to find him first?”
“I know where the Mundis are.”
Nev crossed his arms. Of course. “So you just thought I’d be an easy mark for cards? An easy day’s pay for you.”
“Not really,” she said. “They’re dead.”
#
That eerie yellow field of his youth, smeared in red. Blood always looked more watery than Nev expected. And there, again - the girl’s voice. High and melodic, surreal in its perfection because she was clearly so young.
He raised his head from the prickly pillow of grass, knowing this was among his last breaths, terrified to consider how many more he would see. Saw two small brown feet, toes curled in the bloody field. She was only four or five year old.
She wore a tattered blue shift. Her hair was coiled back from her head in braids coming loose now at the ends. She was unharmed. Unblemished. Smooth, perfect skin. All her fingers and toes. Bright, glassy eyes.
Five years old. The age he had been when he found out what he was. He had worn a tattered shift just like this, already begging his mother for men’s pants and wearing his brother’s hats into town. They told him he was a fool, back then, told him he was a she, that being born into that body came with its privileges, and he should be happy with his place in the world. He knew. But it never sat well with him.
And here, again – a young girl. A new, fresh body. A new start. As if the universe were offering her to him, as if he could start again.
He lay gasping like a fish as he bled out, reaching for the girl. He rasped, “Help me. Please. Please help me.”
All he needed to do was get his hands around her throat. End her life cleanly, swiftly, before his expired, and then move his soul from his body to hers. And then he would be free. He could get far, in her form. No one would notice another dirty, tattered child in the streets of the big cities, some refugee from the country, fleeing the war. He would be vulnerable for a time, perhaps, until he found another form, but he would take any body now, for one more breath. No matter the price.
The logical thing to do was to kill the child and inhabit her body. It’s what the guild had taught him to do. We all die. Few were so privileged to see their bodies inhabited again once their spirits had passed over. He was going to do her a favor, truly.
“Are you dying?” the little girl said.
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes. What are you called?”
She leaned closer.
He snatched her wrist. Dragged her to the bloody field beside him. Her face was so close he felt the heat of it; her dark eyes went so wide he felt he would fall into them.
Take her. Wring her neck. Steal her body. Do it, Nev. You have done it a thousand times before. You will do it a thousand times again.
#
Nev walked a step behind Mez, leading his alpaca. The way to the graves of the Mundi family was a day’s walk, and Mez had insisted on loading the alpaca with beer, musty blocks of cheese, and a fried meat product of some kind that she called jerky.
The family had been killed just outside the next town, a little hamlet called Fortezia. Nev knew the name from his map, but had never been there. The road turned quickly from paving stones to dirt, but at least the rutted way was dry. Mez insisted on taking side paths several times, muttering darkly about bandits. He had encountered none since crossing the border into this country, but he did not argue.
“You have a name for it?” she asked as they came over a wooded ridge and back onto the proper road.
“Hm? The alpaca? I call her… alpaca.”
“How can you call her the same name as any other alpaca?”
“She answers to it.”
“Hardly creative.”
“Creativity doesn’t improve the experience in any way. A woman called Mag is no different if she is called Magoransa. Same woman.”
“I’d disagree, obviously. Good dig, though. You wouldn’t just call her, hey… human!”
“Not if she preferred another name, no. That would be rude. Would it not, Mez?”
“But alpaca –”
“She hasn’t told me her name. I would be happy to use it if she had. Do you know it?”
“Now you are being didactic.
“Only honest.”
They huffed along awhile longer. Mez clearly struggled a little more than he did. He suspected she was spending most of her time sitting around playing cards in taverns and a lot less doing the leg work required to find people. Perhaps she had people for that. Despite her imposing form, he suspected he could outrun her easily. Wit and speed and his peculiar talent had always been his most effective weapons.
“You said your nephew.”
“What?” she narrowed her eyes.
“The child,” Nev said. “The one you lied to. Do you not have any children?”
“No. And you must not either. Well, not any you actually hang out with.”
“I don’t think I do,” he said. “It’s been –” and he had to close his mouth, because though his face was that of a man who might have been in his mid-twenties, he could not clearly remember the last time he’d had sex. Four decades ago? Six? Before the war, certainly. He had spent long stretches of peaceful time in cities before, a year here, a year there. They were pleasant enough times while they lasted. But as time went on he found his was more comfortable traveling alone. Fewer questions. Fewer emotions.
Mez crooked her mouth. “Don’t tell me you can’t remember?”
“Perhaps I can’t.”
“Remind me to give you a drink. See if that kicks anything loose.”
They spent the night at a way house. He insisted on sleeping outside, but she offered to share a room. “For the trickery on my part,” she said. “This is a favor more than a job. Though you’re still paying me what’s left of that volcanic glass.”
Nev liked to th
ink he was good at reading people after all this time. It’s why when she offered him a beer he pretended to drink it, and when she began pulling at him to dance with her and sing bawdy songs, he said he needed to find an outhouse and instead went to the barn, untethered his alpaca, and drifted back onto the road. He didn’t mind her company, but he had yet to relish it, and it was always a good idea to move quickly before one transformed into the other.
The stars were out; the night was blessedly clear. The great gory constellations and massive swirling nebulas gave him enough light to get by. He abruptly turned off the road at the first path he found and continued on, despite his alpaca’s annoyed humming.
“She’s drunk,” he said, thumping the alpaca’s cream-colored neck. “One turn enough will deceive her.” He was uncertain if that was true, but it sounded well enough there in the dark. It sounded so good that when the alpaca stopped, twitching her ears, he thought there must be some predator in the dark; it certainly couldn’t be Mez.
He was mostly right.
The thump in his chest knocked him back a step. Nev had a moment to wonder at the feathered shaft jutting from his chest before the pain hit him, a purl of fire that uncoiled across his whole left side.
How terrible. He had loved this body.
The second arrow took him in the left side, a little lower. He let himself fall because he knew they would keep shooting until he did. He loathed to let go of alpaca’s lead, but did so, yelling for her to run. She kicked up her toes and took off into the darkness.
Nev lay on the still-warm ground. He slipped his fingers behind him, took hold of the small utility knife he kept in a discrete sheath tucked into the inside of his belt. The burning pain of his wounds threatened to cloud his mind, but he breathed through it, as he has been trained to do.
“He down?”
“He’s down. Where’s the fucking camel?”
“I can track it.”
“Let’s search him first.”
Nev closed his eyes and listened to them approach. Two voices. More importantly, two clearly separate gaits, not three or six or eight. Two was difficult, but not impossible.
He had really loved this body. Youth was wasted on the young.
Their hands on him. A rough kick at his wounded side.
Nev rolled and lunged, stabbing the nearest man in the throat. Blood gushed. The man gurgled. Behind him, a younger woman, little more than a girl, shrieked. She fumbled with her bow, dropped it, thinking better of the distance, and went for a knife.
But by then the man was bleeding out. Nev pulled him close, so close he smelled the terror of his breath and felt the tinkling of the man’s curly black beard. Nev pressed his palm to the back of the man’s neck, skin on skin, as if they would share a kiss, while the man’s hot blood soaked them both. The man’s body sagged.
Nev huffed out a breath.
Felt the distant stabbing in his side. The girl with the knife.
Too late, though, too late.
He jumped.
#
The girl in his grasp. The yellow field. Easy to take her. Face to face. Breath to breath.
But as his fingers closed over her throat she murmured,
Come little Jini in your flying machine
Come across the waves with me
Those golden waves, Jini
Those golden waves.
Nev released her. Lay back. Huffing. “Bring help,” he said. He stuffed his fist in his wound. He wouldn’t make it. It would take too long. If they knew who – what – he was, maybe a line commander would send a body. But how…?
He grabbed the chain at his neck. Yanked at it, too weak to fumble with the clasp. On the end of the chain dangled a stone of green glass and silver, etched with his name and rank within the guild. It contained something far more important than that, though.
“Get this stone to a soldier,” he said. “Command. Send… help.”
The little girl took the stone into her palm. Wiped at the blood. “I’m Matild Clovanis,” she said, “from Avarise. What is your name? I can’t help a stranger.”
“Nevarius. Now run! Go! Before I change my mind!” he snarled.
She leapt away, a startled deer.
He lay where she left him. Tears clouded his vision, or maybe the darkness was coming. He wasn’t sure which – or both. More the fool, him. A soft heart. Corpse soldiers with soft hearts wouldn’t last a decade, let alone a century. He would die on this field with all the others, because he did not have the heart to kill a little girl.
Nev rolled on top of his own fist, using the pressure of his body to further quell the blood from the worst wound. From this vantage he could just see the outstretched hand of a corpse, one half buried in mud churned up by some elemental wizard.
Nev clawed his way forward. An inch. Two. A hands’ breadth. Gagging, making bloody bubbles, sick with pain, he crept forward. Again. Again.
The darkness. Death. The long night. He felt it, comforting, like a warm bath after a long, agonizing day punishing his body to the brink of its endurance. How wonderful would it be to just… stop?
He stopped. How far to go?
Nev reached for the fingers of the corpse ahead of him as the darkness took him.
I should have been a better soldier, he thought.
It was the last thought he had in that body.
#
Nev was not the first to escape the Body Mercenary Guild; he certainly would not have been the last. There was no public record of rogue Body Mercenaries; it would inspire panic and pogroms if the public knew exactly how many people like him walked among them. His records, such as they were, would be closely guarded things. He liked to imagine that perhaps he had been officially declared dead. After all, there was no physical way to know he was still alive outside summoning his soul into another body.
And only one with the stone could do that. The stone he had given Matild that day. Matild from Avarise. He would never be free, truly free, until he destroyed that stone.
The guild loved to make its members lives more difficult; to make all lives more difficult. The more difficult the lives, the better it felt it was doing its job. It believed itself the arbiter of whose lives counted, and whose did not. In all his living years, decades, he had never thought who got to be human a political position. It was a moral and religious position. But in most of the countries and city-states he lived, there was no line between government morality and religious morality. Right and wrong were beliefs, as were religions. Intrinsically tied, for better or worse.
His own existence had come down to his military usefulness. What greater fear could an army invoke than unleashing a wave of undead against the enemy, undead who could take on the face of those they killed? Shock. Horror. Awe. Fear. He had seen all of it.
Nev came sputtering back into consciousness. He lay on the ground next to a pock-marked young man with two arrows jutting out of his torso. From this vantage, the young body Nev had worn looked foolish, foppish, the mussed hair, the terrible complexion, the knobby knees and elbows.
He bent over in his new, shaggy body and vomited. Black bile. A little blood. He reached reflexively for the wound he had inflicted while in his other body. It had already closed. His tunic was heavy with his own blood.
Nev gazed into his big, calloused hands. Coarse black hair studded the knuckles.
Across from him, the girl was on her knees, eyes glistening in the starlight. “Papa?” she said, choking on her tears. “Papa, are you all right?”
Nev’s guts churned. He stumbled off the path and yanked down his pants. A wet sea of shit left his body. He braced himself against a heavy tree trunk and vomited again.
Gasping, spitting, he yelled, “Stay away!” He did not even know her name. They tried to kill you, he thought, here you are, soft again. But he had made his own terrible choices often. He understood.
“Papa, I –”
Nev heard the crashing befo
re she did. Whether it was his heightened senses after the body jump, or her fear and grief that disguised it, he did not know.
A figure smashed into the girl, knocking her flat.
Nev cleaned himself up as best he could and slogged toward the ruckus.
Mez tussled on the ground with the girl. Popped her nose. Just as he got hold of Mez’s collar, she locked the girl into a neck hold.
Nev heard the snap.
He let Mez go. The girl’s body dropped like a marionette, the neck broken.
“Mez, I –”
She punched him in the face.
Nev reeled back, stunned, but he could feel the second wind coming, the massive surge in adrenaline that he got after every body hop. His senses became heightened. The pain vanished all together.
Mez hit him again. He snagged her arm and twisted it behind her.
“It’s Nev! Mez!”
She snapped at him, nearly taking off his ear. He pushed her and held her down, relying on this new body’s brute strength and the adrenaline that still coursed through his healing body.
“Mez! I’m Nev. The alpaca named alpaca. We played cards.”
She head-butted him. His nose burst. Tears welled. He spit. He was aware of the injury, of the pressure, but no pain. Not yet, not until the rush wore off. Already, the blood gushing from his nose stopped. He would have a few more impervious minutes for her to flail at him.
“Your nephew believed griffins were nocturnal. You have no children. You tried to serve me a beer and dance. You remember that part at least? I do.”
She tensed. Arms tight, still pushing him away. But her look was different. She eyed him like a terrified animal caught in a snare. Maybe that’s what he had done.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I let you up? Mez, if you kill me I’ll have to kill you and take your body. You understand? There’s no reason to attack me. Don’t make me do that.”
Her body softened, almost imperceptibly.
“All right?” he said.
One nod; a spastic jerk.
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