“Oh, no. Something I take much more pride in.”
“Guns?” I knew he’d been working on some smaller version of an arquebus. And he knew my low opinion of firearms.
He shook his head. “Open it.”
Inside was a brace of throwing knives, ivory-handled, single-edged, elegantly simple. I picked one up. It was perfectly weighted for my hand.
“I was saving them for a special occasion. You’ll find they hold an edge quite well.”
“You made these? They’re beautiful.”
“Helped make them. I owe you a few knives, no?”
“All right. Thank you. I’m certain I won’t need them or the necklace, but thank you.”
“I don’t like seeing you in danger,” he said, face tightening briefly.
We were a pair. Even after a year together, we both found it hard to share our emotions. But then, after the things we’d been through, most times, that wasn’t necessary.
“I’ve got to go.” I slipped the necklace on, feeling it warm to my skin almost instantly, and put the knife case into a graceful old sabretache I’d lifted from an annoying cavalry officer. The fashionable idiot had worn it low enough that it had slapped his knee. I wore it higher up, against my thigh, like the non-idiot I was. The knife case didn’t leave much room for anything else.
I’d have to have sheaths made for them once I’d reached Bellarius; they wouldn’t fit in my current rig. I stripped it off and hung it on a hook. Over the last year, I’d decided to limit myself to two knives on my person at any one time in an effort to better play the respectable woman of business role. It wasn’t easy. I felt, if not naked, at least under-dressed.
It was time to go, or I’d have to wait another day at a minimum for the next outbound berth.
“Come back soon,” he said. “You know how I fret.”
I kissed him, letting my mouth say in one way what it had trouble saying in another. It occurred to me, as his hands tangled themselves in my hair, that a month was really rather a long time to be apart. I let my hands run down his bare, pale chest. Lean, but muscled, and scarless since being regenerated by Tha-Agoth’s blood. My own body was nearly as unblemished save for the stain that Abanon’s Blade had left on my palm and the scars on my face that were far older and apparently beyond the power of a demigod to erase.
“A month,” I said, grabbing his waist. “That really is quite a long time.”
Judging from his reaction, it seemed the same thought had occurred to him.
An hour later, the hack I’d hired was making unusual speed down to the docks. I wondered as the cobbled streets jounced me around inside the carriage if I’d miss my boat. Just at that moment, I didn’t really care.
Chapter Two
I’d sent a messenger to secure the first berth available to Bellarius. It happened to be on a ship called Horkin’s Delight, a three-masted carrack, lateen rigged. It reeked of turpentine and dried fish. I had a hunch that it was both faster and more maneuverable than it looked. I was sure it was at least sometimes a smuggling ship. Not that that bothered me, especially. I wouldn’t have to deal with any nonsense about a woman traveling on her own. I would have to keep a sharp eye on my belongings, but I would have done that in any case.
I climbed up the rope ladder thrown over the Delight’s side, grateful to be off the bobbing, pitching deck of the lighter I’d hired to row me out. False-dawn was creeping up on the sky. I was met by a small, paunchy man in stained finery much too big for him. Horkin, I assumed.
“You’re almost late,” he said, taking in my disheveled hair and mis-buttoned shirt as my traveling chest was whipped up from the lighter by two of the sailors.
“And you’re almost making a point,” I replied.
He laughed, a surprisingly rich, deep laugh. “Oh, we’ll get along fine, you and I.” He hooked a thumb toward one of the sailors roaming the deck, preparing to get underway. “Haemis will show you your berth after you show me your coin.”
I produced three gold marks and put two into his palm.
“Right fine,” he said, smiling. “I’m Captain Horkin. Just remember, you’re cargo. Stay out of the way.”
“I know my way around a boat.”
“Then you’ll know when you’re in the way,” he replied, and whistled up Haemis to lead me below decks. Haemis lifted my chest without even grunting, and I followed the silent, muscle-bound sailor down into the depths of the Delight. After surveying the dark, filthy closet that was my cabin, I decided that Horkin was far too easily delighted. And that I’d be sleeping above deck when the weather permitted.
#
Night on a ship. It always made me feel small. The wind and the waves and the creaking of wood and rope, and nothing else for miles and miles. And, as a passenger, nothing to do but think.
I was sure it was Theiner. No one else knew what Borold had done to me that day. And while Theiner might have told someone else, I doubted it—and doubted too that anyone besides Theiner would think I’d want such a grisly favor. Come to think of it, I couldn’t see why Theiner would think I’d want Borold’s head, not after all these years.
I shook my head, tried to clear away all the questions that couldn’t yet be answered. Theiner was mixed up in all this somehow; that much was fairly certain. Just what “all this” was about, I had no idea. Nor would I until I got to Bellarius. But something was wrong. Theiner wasn’t the type to bestow grisly presents, like a cat bringing home some gutted toad or thrush. Nor was he the kind to send cryptic messages. Certainly not magical ones. Theiner was shrewd, plainspoken, and practical. That’s how I remembered him, at least. But it had been years.
Theiner, the Theiner I’d known so long ago, was as decent a boy as the streets of Bellarius allowed him to be. I could still recall his broad, farmer’s face, the shock of blond hair that stuck up from the back of his head, and the dusting of freckles across his nose and cheeks. He looked slow, almost simple, but there had been a sharp mind inside that thick skull of his. Sharp enough to keep him alive for years on the streets of Bellarius after war and plague and famine had dumped hundreds, perhaps thousands of unwanted children onto a city already bursting at the seams.
He’d never let the constant grind of survival take away his sense of right and wrong. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have made it through my first week on the streets there. He’d taught me how to survive, and taught me too, that there were some things worse than not surviving.
“Two things you never do for money, little one,” he’d told me. “You never sell your body. And you never take a life. The one you give away or maybe it gets taken, and the other you do if you have to, and do it smart and quick and sure. But you don’t sell such things. Some things are worse than dying, eh?”
I’d just nodded, then, taking on faith that what he said was true. And after all these years, I’ve still never sold my body or my blade.
I sighed, tried to get comfortable in the moldy hammock I’d got Horkin’s grudging permission to string up on the quarterdeck, stared out at the stars above the Dragonsea. Whatever Theiner was up to, unless he’d changed far more than I thought possible, he was driven to it by some sense of right and wrong, some sense of justice. Or because he was forced somehow. But still, it wasn’t adding up.
Despite myself, I thought back on those bleak, terror-filled days before I finally escaped Bellarius for good, before Theiner helped me stow away on an outbound ship. I remembered the Blacksleeves roaming the night streets, slaying the gutter children where we slept in doorways, ferreting us out of rooftop hideaways and abandoned buildings and deserted cemeteries. They said that a mage was working with the Blacksleeves, that it didn’t matter where we hid. I believed it then. Hells, I believed it now. It was why I took the chance of being found out as a stowaway and tossed overboard, meat for pheckla or gray urdus.
The Syndic and the Council of Three had finally had enough of our petty depredations, I suppose, or maybe it w
as the shadow guild culling the herd, getting rid of those too stupid or unlucky to eventually recruit. In any case, someone in power had finally had enough and decided starvation and disease and abject poverty just weren’t doing the job fast enough. And so came what was referred to in polite society as “the Purge” when it was referred to at all. Such a simple phrase for the mass murder of street children.
I looked out into the night, and the slow rocking of the Delight showed me stars and water, stars and water. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of hundreds of head-sized boxes floating on the swells of the Dragonsea, and a shadow darker than the night that moved across the stars. It laughed, that shadow, and the laugh was like distant thunder.
#
It was a cloudless, golden autumn morning when we came in to Bellarius’ wretched port. It took nearly two hours to warp in to the dock; enough time for me to remember just how much I loathed the place. When it had been over the horizon, I could loathe it in an abstract sort of way. Once it was in front of me, my disgust became more visceral. I wanted to just turn around and go back to Lucernis.
The Bay of Bellarius is a natural, deep-water harbor, sheltered by the bulk of Mount Tarvus to the east. The Mount’s western slope is—was—covered by increasingly fine houses, and then the spire-tipped towers of the Gentry, and then the Riail, the Syndic’s palace as you neared the summit and the Citadel. To the north, the bay is sheltered from the worst weather by the black face of the Rimgurn Cliffs, which are really an extension of the mount. Lining the cliff top and the narrow stretch of land beyond are more houses of the well-to-do and then the Lesser Lighthouse and the sea. Perhaps there had been a Greater Lighthouse at one time; now, the Lesser was also the Only.
To the south is Hardside proper, a low, muddy spit of land good for little except growing shanties and generation after generation of poverty. Beyond Hardside are the marshes, home to smugglers and fugitives and the odd witch or black magician. Between Hardside and the Mount is Bellarius proper, known to one and all as the Girdle.
Every few years, the sea would rise up to sweep away most of Hardside, which is, I suppose, why those of means never bothered much with it in land-short Bellarius. It was Hardside where I was born and bred. It was Hardside where my father had killed my mother, and I had killed him.
I looked out at it all as we made our slow, tedious way to port. The Girdle and the high houses of the Gentry were ugly. Bellarius was an ugly city, no way around it. Graceless and cramped. Hardside though—Hardside just looked diseased.
#
I paid Horkin his other gold mark and climbed down onto the bleached boards of the pier, which was already filling with beggars, hawkers, thieves, working girls, and the occasional family member waiting to greet the Delight. My chest would follow shortly, but I kept Holgren’s box of knives on me in my sabretache.
Some people keep talismans. Some kids have a favorite doll. Knives comfort me, and I needed a bit of comfort, coming back to Bellarius. Don’t judge.
As soon as my foot met the tar-stained wood, I felt an instant of sickening dizziness. For a moment, I couldn’t seem to draw a breath. It passed almost instantly though, and at the time, I put it down to suddenly solid footing after eight days aboard ship.
“Aya, lass!” Horkin called, leaning over the rail. “We’ll be in port for a fortnight. Make your way down to the Pint and Anchor if you want to lose some marks at dice.”
I waved to him then paid a burly fellow with the body of a war god and the face of a simpleton to toss my sea chest on his shoulder and follow me. Then, I weaved through the crowd toward the Girdle to the north of the docks. I was a little unstable due to my newly acquired sea legs. Dicing wasn’t on my mind. I wanted a decent meal, a bath, and a glass of wine while I mulled over what to do next.
I’d made it about halfway down the pier when I heard my name being called over the babble of the crowd. At first, I thought it was Horkin again and turned back a little impatiently. It wasn’t Horkin. A scabby, black-haired youth was swaggering toward me, face set in a practiced scowl. I was familiar with the look. I’d worn it myself at his age. He was carrying a letter.
I let him get close, my hand dipping idly into the sabretache. He had the letter in his left hand; his right swung free. As he came toward me, I shifted so that I was a little to his right. Before he could say anything, I hooked my left arm through his right. Instantly, we were two friends easy in each other’s company. Except my other arm, extended across my midriff, had a knife at the end of it that poked firmly but gently into his scrawny side. He stiffened.
“Keep your mouth shut, and don’t make trouble,” I said, my tone pleasant and calm, “and you won’t get punctured.” I led him down the pier, my hulking porter following along, mindful of nothing but what foot came next.
“Look, lady–”
“Shut it,” I said again, and poked him a little. He shut it. Smart kid.
Someone—Theiner?—knew I was coming, and maybe on what ship. It could have been good guesswork, or the kid could have been staked out here, waiting for someone who fit my description to show up. Or it could have been magic at work, or something else that hadn’t occurred to me yet. The boy, or to be fair, young man, had to know something. I glanced around, trying to see if anyone had been set to watch him but saw no one who showed interested in us. Didn’t mean a thing. Have I mentioned my suspicious nature?
My first thought was to haul the kid into the first dark alley I came across and make him talk, but I couldn’t be sure he didn’t have someone set to watch him. I didn’t want our private conversation interrupted by his mates or employers. I just wanted answers.
“Who sent you?” I asked him as we neared the end of the dock. I glanced at his face, noting the first growth of downy beard on cheeks and chin and above his upper lip, the stubborn set of his jaw. I poked him again with my knife.
“Thought you wanted me to keep my gob shut,” he muttered.
“I’m a woman. I get to change my mind. Get used to it.”
He snorted, and I liked him a little better for it.
“Who?” I asked again.
I felt the chill hand of unleashed magics grope the back of my neck just as he opened his mouth to speak. Whatever the kid was going to say was lost in the crumping roar of the dock behind us being blown to bits.
Chapter Three
Most believe the eleven hells are all savage infernos. I happen to have it on authority that at least one of them is in fact bitterly cold; but in any case, it was as if a huge hand had risen up out of some flaming hell-pit of the more traditional sort and slapped me and the boy sprawling.
I must have flown a dozen feet before touching down again and skidded a dozen more across splintered planking that bucked and swayed and peeled skin from my arms and face. Smoldering chunks of wood and flesh rained down around me. Someone close by was shrieking in short, sharp, monotonous bursts. I smelled burning cloth and hair, realized it was coming from me, from my shoulder and the back of my head. I patted out the flames with stupid, trembling hands and looked around me, trying to understand what had happened.
Nothing would hang together at first. The world was screams and smoke and fire and people running, some away from the dock, some toward. I looked back and saw that the dock that I had just walked down was flaming wreckage, most of it floating in the Bay. The Delight was on fire, as were two or three other ships. There were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, lying on the remains of the dock, floating in the water, tossed into the burning rigging of the nearest ships. It was wholesale slaughter, and I felt—knew—that it had been meant for me.
The youth was a yard or so away from me, unmoving. His arm was folded under him at an unnatural angle. The letter he’d carried was nowhere to be seen. My knife, miraculously, was right next to me rather than in me. I picked it up and put it in my belt while absently still staring at the boy. As I looked at him, a woman rushed past, her face sheeted with blood. Unseeing, she ki
cked the boy in the face. Uncaring, she stumbled on. I dragged myself up and grabbed him by the collar. I wanted to get him off what was left of the dock or at least to one side so he wouldn’t be trampled to death. He was my only source of information, after all.
He proved to be heavier than he looked. A balding merchant in gaudy, singed velvets stopped to help. His face was white, and his hands shook, but he got the boy’s good arm around his thick neck and dragged him off the dock and onto gray cobbles and, after a quick nod in my direction, hurried back toward the conflagration. I felt the odd urge to follow him, to help where I could well up inside me, but common sense overruled it. If the fire had indeed been meant for me, the best thing I could do for all involved would be to go far away as fast as I could.
Bells were ringing now, clamoring, being taken up throughout the city. I could see several Blacksleeves, members of the watch, pushing their way through the frantic wharf-side crowd like fish swimming upstream. Fish with truncheons that they used freely. It was time to go. Bellarius’ peacekeepers were brutal and efficient when it suited them.
The youth was twitching and moaning now at my feet. I gave him an open-handed slap to the face that had his eyes open and his good hand searching for the knife at his belt. The one I’d already made disappear.
“Blacksleeves are coming,” I said. “Can you walk?”
He nodded, face gray with pain, and I helped him climb to his feet.
#
It was to Hardside that we made our way. The place I’d lived until I was ten. The place I’d killed my father. The place he’d killed my mother.
It felt like going home, and I dreaded it. But Hardside was the closest and easiest place in Bellarius to go to ground.
I thought that I knew Bellarius, particularly Hardside, but as we stumbled and shambled down refuse-littered, grimy “streets,” I realized that more than a decade had changed details I remembered. I don’t know why this should have surprised me, but it did. Perhaps because my memories were so vivid if mostly horrid. I felt a strange sense of indignation that the streets and buildings were not trapped in amber. Stupid. Nonsensical. Would you curse a knife that gave you a scar for growing dull or rusty? Gods only knew how many times Hardside had been washed away by flooding and rebuilt since I'd left.
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