by Jay Lake
Bijaz ran his hand over the stretched face. The expression frozen there was not anger, or even agony. It was despair.
Bijaz had been steward of Jason's father's wealth until his employer had lost everything in the affair of the soul bottles. The father had been broken for debt, then torn apart by a crowd of paupers. Kalliope sold herself to a Tokhari for a concubine, while their mother left Jason standing in the street. Their other sister Ariadne simply vanished, into the dwarf pits perhaps.
There had been nothing else to do, so Bijaz took the boy home. He'd had the raising of Jason from the time the lad was twelve.
In all honesty, Jason had been a vicious, spiteful boy. Still, he was a full-man, and had been willing to fill some of Bijaz's more personal needs in exchange for a bit of freedom of his own. Even now, that memory brought a hot blush of shame. The education Bijaz tried to deliver had stuck sufficiently for the boy to grow to a young man who could read a contract and balance an account.
Bijaz had set Jason to work for his brother shortly before Tomb had decamped for the South Coast amid the Jade Rush. Jason had stayed on the docks in Tomb's employ, growing older if not wiser until he'd made the acquaintance of Ignatius of Redtower. Bijaz avoided his former ward in those years. They had little enough to say to one another, and Jason had spoiled Bijaz's daughters besides.
It all seemed to matter so much less now. The girls were long since launched into their own lives, Empyrea married to a wool factor, Beaulise working on the Jade Coast. Jason had given everything for Ignatius and the City, becoming the first successful regicide in modern history. This even though both killer and victim were already in a sense dead before the act.
They'd let him slip away afterward. There had been a tide of confusion and shame after the death of the Imperator Restored. Some questions were easier not to ask in those hurried days. Bijaz owed Jason a better reckoning: for the sake of his father, for the sake of the boy he'd used and abused, for the sake of the man he'd shamefully neglected.
With that thought in mind, he reached to shut Jason's eyelids.
The skin there was rough, dried, and crackling rather than shiny and smooth. Bijaz closed his own eyes and sought the white place the Numbers Men had left within him. He thought of water and cream and the smooth flow of the river after the spring spate. His fingers brushed across the wrinkled terrain of Jason's face, trying to ease and settle what remained there.
Something flowed. When Bijaz looked again, Jason's eyes were closed, but the desiccated skin of his face was suffused with something dark.
Blood? Tears?
Bijaz sniffed his fingertips.
Oil.
"Careful, my friend," Kalliope whispered as she moved to put the rushlight out once again.
She was right. They did not need flame now. Bijaz let his nimbus flicker into being. It was little more than a glow, not the bright flare with which he had contested Ashkoliiz.
Thinking of her pale blue eyes, he stroked Jason's lids. "Come, grow, prosper," he whispered. "Your soul has clung to this body beyond all reason or measure. Return to yourself and find a better existence."
He rubbed the oil into Jason's face with smooth, circular motions, pushing it into the skin of the cheeks, wetting the backdrawn lips. He opened his other hand to a bundle of sage and rue, and stroked the herbs across Jason's skin.
"The body is too dry," said Kalliope.
"I know," Bijaz replied. "I am trying to restore his dignity, not his first life. My powers do not extend that far."
He slipped Jason's ragged coat free and began to open the shirt. It had been misbuttoned, one buttonhole off all the way down as a small child might have done. Bijaz's hand strayed across Jason's chest, spreading more oil in an echo of the touching he had once forced upon this man when he was a boy.
Kalliope reached to cut her brother's clothing away. "I do not know if you will truly help him, but it eases my heart to see him less withered."
The oil still seeped from Jason's face. Bijaz continued to spread it. He and Kalliope worked it into the dead man's gut, his legs, his arms, his hands and feet. Then they picked Jason up and laid him on the map table, heedless of the oil staining the surface.
Jason weighed no more than a bundle of sticks encased in leather.
His back was raddled too, protruding ribs separated by the knobs of spine. Bijaz oiled there, covered Jason's buttocks, then steeled himself to reach below to the scrotum and the cock.
In time, Kalliope laid a hand on Bijaz's arm. "Enough. You have done all there is of this to do."
They looked at their handiwork. Jason was spread out flat now, once more on his back. His limbs were not twisted or strained. His skin was almost supple. His eyes and lips were shut. It was as if he were sleeping.
"He is still stuffed with straw," she said after a time.
"What would the stuffing have been, back in the desert?"
"Sage. Verbena. Rat's nettle. Nightrose. Wound together with the yellow watervine."
"But here you used straw?"
"Stabling looted from some farm at the edge of the Rose Downs. It was deep winter. I had no green to work with. In summer I might have made him a man of your woods, with ivy and honeysuckle and wild onion and rushes from the streambeds."
"Stabling. So you brought him back as a creature to be ridden, to draw loads, to serve and be whipped and driven to his knees."
"There was need." Her voice blossomed with shame. "We came upon the Stonesource thinking to find the end of all things at hand. And besides, I had cause for vengeance."
"Upon him?"
She skipped a beat, a silent sob. "He stayed and grew fat. I was dragged along on the back of a camel to be a toy for old men."
"It was not his doing," Bijaz said.
"I know."
"Straw. I can make something of straw, perhaps."
He laid his hands on Jason's gut, on the raw stitches where Kalliope had taken out the sweetmeats in ancient ritual. Straw was bedding, Bijaz thought. But it was also the corpse of grain, the golden heads which bowed to the wind and sun before being cut and threshed and made into beer and bread. The stuff of life, grain.
Bijaz imagined the stirring of the yeast within a bowl of flour. He called to mind the golden sunlight pouring onto a bright field. A man clad in the leather and linen of a Rose Downs farmer walked there, scythe swinging, cutting down the proud grass to make another generation. Bijaz, intent on his own errands, nodded to the reaper man, who nodded politely in return.
Gather these heads, he thought, thresh the seeds, make something more out of what was brought before me.
It could be no more difficult than farting butterflies.
His hands played across the furrows of the soil, which lifted in the pattern of Jason's ribs above his sunken belly. Chips fell onto a table as a wheel clicked somewhere. Bijaz did not allow himself a distraction. If the Numbers Men wished his attention, they could seek audience. He was at work, smiling brightly down upon the fields beneath his care.
Water flowed, pumped by the bellows of air which draw it up from river and ocean to scatter rain across the land. So Jason needed to flow. He needed to keep from being too dry to live, to irrigate the yeast building their tiny empires in the straw of his gut.
A man might never have his liver and lights, and still walk beneath the sun. Could he not then walk in beauty, with light in his hair and eyes the color of winter sky?
Bijaz sank further into the dream. He watched the reaper man cross the hilltop with the scythe upon his shoulder. The water ran now as a wheel turned, mill grinding grain, the ball of chance dancing atop it to find another slot even as the baker turned the loaves and the mother turned her breast to the newborn and life was drawn through the watery lungs of the sky.
He let go of all that was green and gold and opened his eyes to the pink leap of dawn reflected in those blind windows.
"I was afraid," Kalliope whispered.
Bijaz looked down. Jason seemed whole. Sleeping o
r dead, that was harder to say.
"How long?"
"You have been lost to me five hours and more. I knew better than to call for help. I have sat with others who walked the night desert, but you followed paths I could not take."
"It was not a desert," Bijaz said. "A field of grain beneath a summer sky. There was a reaper man, and a baker, and people laying wager just beyond my sight."
"My path to power is a desert, bone dry and lit by no moon that ever rode our sky. Your path is through the grain of your city's blackland farms."
"Straw." He laughed softly. "You sent me through the stables, because winter had bound you over with nothing more to work your magicks. I have passed again through the white room of the Numbers Men, but this time I chose my own path. Or let you choose it for me." Bijaz wondered what the price would be for walking that route. At the moment he did not care overmuch.
"So was he a means or an end?" Kalliope looked down at her brother.
Jason began to snore.
Bijaz's heart could have leapt with wings to meet the dawn. "All his life he has been used. First by me, then by Ignatius, then by you. Perhaps it is time for him to decide."
"I will send for food," she said. "He will be hungry when he wakes, and I am famished now."
"Yes. But please . . . no bread nor beer. I do not think I could take grain this morning."
He reached down and picked a curling sprout of green from Jason's lips. Jason moaned, stirring until his eyes flickered open.
They were blue-white, not the storm gray they had been in life. Bijaz's satisfaction at his private miracle was tempered by a quick stab of fear. He had given Jason the eyes of Ashkoliiz.
"I think they're pretty," said Kalliope, looking over his shoulder.
"Hello, sister." A butterfly darted out of Jason's mouth to make its staggering way toward the windows.
Onesiphorous
Boudin fished him out of the water yet again. This time, the boy was not laughing. The incoming tide had pushed Onesiphorous through the race beneath the bridge, but his assailants could climb to the railings and spot their position at any moment.
"My thanks," he gasped. "Now row, boy."
"Tell your mother, ah!" Boudin was already pulling, the swamp rich in his voice again. "She say you got trouble, I think to watch for you. Trouble come soon, I say myself."
Onesiphorous slumped in the bow. "I don't suppose you know where Big Sister might be."
"I not know who Big Sister might be."
"Do not worry."
They pulled around another islet. Boudin backed water to drive the boat into a calm pool, then braced them against a rock with an oar. "You're not drowning now," he said, losing his accent as the stress of the moment subsided. "Where you want to go?"
Onesiphorous considered that. His next decisions were probably a matter of life and death. "I don't know where to find Big Sister. The Boxers likely blame me for Trefethen's death. The Openers are the ones in blue who came for me." He very much did not want to throw himself on the mercy of the Harbormaster.
A thought came unbidden: Ashkoliiz.
Would the mountebank take him in? Could she? Otherwise he would have to head for the swamps, or seek a friendly plantation somewhere along the coast.
No, he told himself. Not her. She'd sell him to the highest bidder.
"What about the Flag Towers?" he asked. "They're largely empty. I can hide there awhile, see what happens next. The Openers won't be searching for me under the Harbormaster's floorboards, not at first."
"There is a place for you in the green shadows," said Boudin. He shoved off and began to pull at the oars. "Best you lay down in the bottom of the boat and pretend to be a bale, ah?"
Onesiphorous huddled as low as he could get, showing only his wet back to the cold wind. He'd likely catch his death of pneumonia. The thought brought a tired smile to his lips—that wouldn't serve Imago's interests in the least.
Boudin let him off by a ladder well underneath the Flag Towers.
"Get back to the swamp and stay there," Onesiphorous said. "It won't take someone long to work out that asking you where I am is a good idea."
"I do what she tell me," Boudin answered. "Right now she tell me to go home."
Onesiphorous reached out to shake the boy's hand, his left fist gripping the slimy iron rung. "Then she and I agree."
"Ah." They clasped a moment before Boudin pulled away.
The dwarf climbed toward the underside of the keep, passing barnacles and mussels and clumps of sodden plant life. The tide was rising. Onesiphorous watched the rock, trying to see the towers of some ancient city.
It was just rock, fractured by wind and wave, slimed from the permanent shadow of the keep above. The stonework was just pillars extending downward to spread the load of the building above.
He paused to study that underbelly. The structure was wooden. Scattered catwalks dangled, and a few stouter bridges including the one he'd been led along before.
No one was visible down below. It wasn't a place a sensible person would linger—chilly, too easy to fall unnoticed into the water below until you were missed somewhere in daylight.
Onesiphorous climbed a few more feet and pulled himself onto a catwalk. He was cold and wet, likely to take a chill or worse. He could not stay down here. Going up presented its own problems. He was fairly certain the Harbormaster had no dwarf servitors, so he could not reasonably hope to pass for a palace servant.
He would have to rely on his eyes and ears, and stay to the quiet passages. With luck he'd be fine. He went to find a way in.
A closet full of place settings was the best he could do. The hallways were packed with people running back and forth. This was nothing like the deserted calm when he'd been brought in before meeting Ashkoliiz. Had she already set Port Defiance to riot?
It was a near thing finding an unlocked door that didn't lead to an open space. Inside Onesiphorous was able to skin out of his soaked clothing and wrap himself in a tablecloth—inelegant, but dry.
Outside, voices and more voices. They were not speaking Civitas, the language of the City Imperishable. He recalled the dark ships sailing unheralded into port.
The Flag Towers were full of corsairs.
No wonder the Openers had come for him. They had not wanted the one authoritative voice of the City Imperishable present for their little plays of betrayal and counterbetrayal. Big Sister had said the Boxers were on the so-called citizens' council. The Openers must be aligning with the Harbormaster in his pursuit of rebellion.
Selling oneself to corsairs to escape the City Imperishable struck Onesiphorous as an especially poor bargain—trading chains of money for the flat of a sword. But he was not the Harbormaster.
The citizens' council would likely come to an understanding soon enough if the flow of funds from the City's banks were cut off. He doubted corsairs cared for the business of money transfers. Their reputation was far more direct.
Onesiphorous waited for the voices to die down without. He would need to move soon, to find a more permanent place with a fire to dry his clothes, and food. He might be a spy in the house of rebellion, but he couldn't work cold and hungry.
When he estimated it to be late evening, Onesiphorous stole out to the halls again. He'd wrapped the tablecloth into a sort of very old-fashioned tunic. Things were quieter now, though he could hear distant singing. He tried to move away from the sound, but that was difficult to judge. The floors of Flag Towers served as a series of gigantic drumheads, carrying noises in strange directions.
He kept trying the dustiest halls and doorways he could find, until he came across a caretaker's apartment. It had a firebox and a rope-strung cot, as well as two racks full of tools. There were hammers and saws and vises. He could improvise weapons if need be, though he had never been more than a casual street brawler.
Onesiphorous realized he should have asked Boudin to take him upriver, at least far enough to hail a packet coming downstream and commandeer a r
ide back to the City Imperishable. He now had no way to communicate with Imago.
It didn't matter at the moment. He built a little fire and lay down. He needed to sleep off his chill. A clear head to think with on the morrow was a priority as well.
Onesiphorous woke to find two children staring at him. One had her finger far up her nose. The other was a boy who was a little older. He also appeared quite suspicious.
"What are you doing in Old Bendlin's cot?"
"Um . . . Old Bendlin told me I could use it." He tried to swallow a coughing fit.