by Jay Lake
"Hargraves, Donati, restack those fur bundles!"
"You two, in the green—Arcus and Orcus—count those axes again. See that we're not missing any."
The ice bear would move on, poking and prodding. Everyone gave it a wide berth. Not panic, but more like frightened respect.
And so it went until full dark, Slackwater Princess emptying out her belly for the first time on this journey.
Ashkoliiz stood at the gangplank and paid the riverboat's captain by the glare of the electricks. She walked ashore, the last member of the Northern Expedition to debark. The crew began the process of casting off.
Slackwater Princess had not once sailed in the darkness the entire eight days of the journey upriver.
The boat didn't sound her whistle, either, just slipped into the current and thrashed her way upstream. The moon was not risen yet, but Bijaz had no difficulty following the vessel's progress by the glare of her electricks.
Ashkoliiz stepped onto his balcony. "So," she said, her voice clotted cream. "What do you think so far, little god?"
"I think that's a tall cliff ahead of us," Bijaz said, ignoring the insult. "I think we've mislaid some horsemen. Most of all, I think half of what I see here is more show than substance."
She laughed, her voice thrilling with chills upon his spine. "You misunderstand. Everything you see here is for show."
Definitely not cut from the same mold as a canny old syndic, he thought, for all her strong words.
The riverboat's whistle began to screech. Something was wrong. The sound was throatier and pitched higher than normal. He could see the dots of light moving oddly. Was she spinning? In the current this far up the Saltus, that could be deadly.
Slackwater Princess broke apart with a rumbling flash of orange and white. In a moment, the riverboat was gone. A cloud of fog and steam rising into the starry night.
"Boiler explosions are a terrible tragedy." Ashkoliiz's voice was as cold as the ice in her eyes.
Bijaz could say nothing to that. He watched the current, wondering if anyone would survive, and what story they would carry home.
Of course not, he realized. The woman was far too thorough. He turned to her, fearing the expression he would see upon her face, but she'd slipped away once more.
He spent another bad night amid the bales, worrying about a slim knife in the dark. Bijaz's own small blade would be useless against treachery. He knew she was fatally ruthless. She knew he knew. Destroying the boat had been a stupid mistake, to boot.
What mattered to her?
Bijaz could scarcely guess.
Nor could he come to a good reason for her to destroy the riverboat. She might be able to escape blame, it was true, but why even do the deed? Was there some secret of hers that the captain or crew might have betrayed?
It could be as simple as her paying the ship off in bags filled with stones, then ensuring that the captain never returned to the City Imperishable to blacken her name.
These thoughts kept him twisting until dawn arrived with its own flying horrors returning home on the wing.
The next morning Ashkoliiz led a memorial for the captain and good sailors of the late, lamented Slackwater Princess. She stood on the balcony he'd used the night before. The men assembled along the docks with their backs to the water.
"Northern Expedition!" Her voice carried in the dawn air.
"And bears," shouted a wit amid the ragged, groaning rows.
"And bears." Her tone could have frosted iron. Then: "We gather now to pray mercy for the souls of our departed helpers and servants. They were not the first to lay down their lives that the Northern Expedition might prevail."
Oh really? Bijaz thought.
"They will not be the last," she went on.
At this the men murmured.
Prophecy, or threat. He interpreted her statement in either light.
"Without their brave sacrifice, there would be no Northern Expedition. There would be no history to be made and remade. There would be no fortunes to be brought home upon our straining backs."
That got a cheer from all except the most thoughtful.
She lowered her voice so the men had to strain to hear. "Today we thank them, and speed their souls onward in care of whatever caravan may convey them across the black deserts of the next world. Today we climb the stairs they have built for us, sailing the course they laid down their bodies to chart. Today we let them make us great." Then: "Hip-hip . . . "
"Hooray!" screamed the men.
She led them through the traditional three cheers. Bijaz had never seen anyone so happy about the death of a boatload of people.
Later a grubby little man who'd lost quite a bit of money gambling on the river sidled up to Bijaz as he sat sorting tent stakes. "Herself wants to be seeing you, sport." J. Quesenberry, Bijaz recalled.
"You running messages now?" he asked with a smile.
His jocularity was rewarded with a whine. "Everybody's got to pitch in." Quesenberry cast an injured glare and wandered away.
Bijaz picked his way amid men laying out loads along the dock. They were preparing for a line of march. He could not see how the supplies were to be carried.
There was very little food, he noted. He presumed that Ashkoliiz planned to live off the land. This wasn't such a large group to make that impossible, but nothing he'd read back in the City Imperishable about the high desert country behind the Silver Ridges suggested a useful degree of fertility.
Ashkoliiz had set up a temporary headquarters just inside the gaping doorway of some old temple or commodities exchange. Snakes and cattle intertwined the surviving pillars of the facade, each bearing blossoms in their mouths.
The interior was roofless. They were under the same sky as the men outside. As with the docks, virtually all the rubble had long ago been removed. Vines grew from cracks in the floor, spreading like a green carpet with flowers the color of muskmelons. The blooms were tended by small, dark insects.
Ashkoliiz had papers laid out across a stone table just inside the entrance. The ice bear and one of her Northmen were there, along with three of the expeditionary hirelings.
Bijaz knew two of them from the card games on the main deck—toothless Carmen Priola, and Wee Pollister, a dark-skinned giant with a dreamy expression and shaggy straw-colored hair. Wee Pollister was easily the biggest man in the expedition and the only one Bijaz would have backed in a bare-knuckled bout against the ice bear. The third was a dapper, twitchy fellow in a deep blue velvet cutaway and mismatched gray twill trousers with braiding along the seam. He was of ordinary build, badly shaved bald, his scalp covered with scratches. He turned to examine Bijaz, with one dark blue eye and one pale gray eye. They were slightly crossed, which might explain the poorly shaven head.
"Ah, friend Bijaz." Ashkoliiz smiled. Somehow he didn't find her winter-eyed gaze so compelling this morning. "Welcome to our councils."
"Am I to be your court dwarf?" He hadn't meant to be so sharp, but the bald man's gaze was disconcerting.
"Not at all." She remained silk-smooth as ever. "Perhaps our consulting deity." Ashkoliiz looked to her deputies. "Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Bijaz the dwarf, a longtime leader of the minuscularian community in the City Imperishable and of late blessed by divine powers. He is here as the representative of Lord Mayor Imago of Lockwood. I have invited him to sit on our innermost councils. He has graciously accepted my poor request."
It was a declamation worthy of a hearing before the Assemblage of Burgesses. Bijaz was fairly certain the mountebank's words had skimmed past all the listening ears but his.
Of course, it was to him she was primarily speaking.
"My good Ashkoliiz," he replied with a slight bow—moderated by degree, to indicate courtesy only and not the respect due to higher rank—"I take great pleasure in overseeing your affairs on the part of the City Imperishable. As it is in our name you act, we have been most gratified to be invited into the governance of your Northern Expedition."
She nodded, her sunny expression slipping momentarily. "Fair enough." Ashkoliiz indicated her hirelings. "Do you gentlemen have any questions for Bijaz?"
"'S an odd one," Priola said with his soft-edged grin. "But he been fair belowdecks in sitting judge on our games, and never got all dwarfy on us."
"Ya," rumbled Wee Pollister.
The rest waited to see if he had anything else to say, but Wee Pollister subsided to inertness.
"I'm thinking something." The bald man tossed a narrow, hiltless, leaf-shaped blade in one hand. It had not been there a moment before. Bijaz wondered how difficult handling such a knife would be, even without sending it spinning by one's fingertips.
Ashkoliiz nodded slightly. Bijaz was not sure for whom the signal was intended. "I believe you have the advantage of me," he said brightly.
"And I aim to keep it that way. Whump's the name." A couple more slips of the knife. Then: "What's a squat-bodied defect like you doing walking into the high, hard country anyway? I don't aim to see us slowed to carry your larded arse on the backs of good men."
This was familiar territory. Years of struggling with First Counselor Prothro and the rest of the Inner Chamber had inured Bijaz to insults, albeit usually somewhat more nuanced. He had plentiful practice in cutting to the heart of fighting words.
Bijaz kept his voice level. "If you are suggesting that you might be obliged to help me up the mountains, I assure you that I shall pull my own weight and more."
"I'm suggesting you don't know how to survive." The bald man's leaf-bladed knife snapped through the air with a faint whistle.
The path through the wheat field loomed large in Bijaz's mind. This was only a scythe, a blade to cut the grain, and he was not yet ripe. He reached out and blocked the edge as it swung close. The scythe took another stalk instead, which broke with a scream like a rabbit trapped in a burrow beneath burning stubble.
The bald man staggered backward, his eyes crossing. The blade was stuck in his sternum, blood soaking his ruffled silk shirt. He dropped to his knee and opened his mouth to gasp for air. Tendrils of green emerged from his throat and slid out of the rent in his shirt to wrap his knife.
Bijaz felt no twinge of regret at all. He watched the bald man collapse. The tendrils writhed to wrap him tightly.
"Does anyone else wish to question my survival skills?"
Ashkoliiz continued to smile at Bijaz fondly. Priola and Wee Pollister both had found architectural detail to study. The bear favored him with a level gaze, while the Northman waited at the door.
The mountebank nodded. "Fetch the next one, please."
The Northman nodded and departed.
"I expect my councilors to exercise a modicum of judgment," Ashkoliiz told the room at large. "Anyone who sees fit to draw weapons against a divine figure has failed a most basic test of intelligence."
Wee Pollister's gaze drifted back down from the stonework. "All's know him what was touched by the Numbers Men," he said. His voice was like millstones grinding dry. "Some's don't believe what they been told is all."
Bijaz looked at the man-shaped cluster of vines. Tiny red blossoms the color of shed blood covered him. The black insects were already exploring. "I should hope belief will not be in such short supply now."
He wondered if he ought to be regretful, or afraid, but if he felt anything at all, it was an angry sense of justice having been done.
Onesiphorous
"I am Clement." His guide paddled them in a dory much like Boudin's boat. "You are that little man with the strange name."
"Onesiphorous," the dwarf said glumly.
"City name. You got a water name?"
He thought of Silver, with her strange intensities and curious priorities. "I've been called Oarsman."
"Oarsman you are now." Clement laughed. "You want to paddle?"
"No, no thank you."
"Oarsman who sails no boat. A person could make a song of that, ah?"
"Be my guest."
Clement hummed and paddled, guiding them through apparently blind channels without pause for thought.
"You knew Boudin?" the dwarf finally asked, picking at the misery of his guilt like a child worrying at a scab.
The humming stopped. The paddling stopped, too, missing a few beats before it resumed. "Boudin is my sister's son."
"Was." Onesiphorous was thoroughly miserable now. "He drowned for me."
"No man drowns who does not live again, ah." Another stroke of the paddle. "Corsairs stick him in the belly, that be great mourning. Drown in the honest sea, ah."
Despite his words, Clement gave out a heavy sigh.
"I'm sorry." Onesiphorous huddled around his knees. "He was taken trying to help me."
"You force him help?" Clement asked sharply.
"No."
"You catch him in irons?"
"No."
"You tie him before the tide?"
"No."
"Then you got no right to be sorry. You got right to be angry, if you want. These not your regrets, City man."
They slid among a grove of narrow trees unlike any Onesiphorous had yet seen in the swamp. He looked up to a close blackness. He realized that these were not trees, but houses on poles. This was Clement's village.
Clement took Onesiphorous to a long, low room with half-walls that let the night air move. Several trestle tables were set up, along with an oven of stone and clay. It was a refectory—he didn't think the swamp had much room for restaurants. A huge pot steamed over a banked fire, from which Clement ladled stew into a wide wooden bowl. It was dark, tasting slightly burnt but in a tangy, satisfying way. There were several vegetables he couldn't identify, and clumps of rice. Peppers too, spicier than what he was used to, and bits of fish and crustacean floating about.
At least he hoped they were crustacean.
His host offered Onesiphorous a piece of bread. This was torn ragged from a flat round which had been baked clinging to clay walls within the oven. It tasted of some dark-green herb, and was the best part of the meal.
The fact that he hadn't eaten since the day before might actually have been the best part of the meal. Onesiphorous would have gladly gulped down catmeat soup from the worst Sudgate potshop.
He sopped the last of his stew with the bread fragment, then looked up at Clement. The swamper's face was set.
"So I am here," Onesiphorous said. "And I must ask you a thing."
"Ah." Clement nodded very slightly. "And this thing?"
"You told me no one sees a fire in the night. Not one of her fires. Whoever she is." Onesiphorous waited for a reaction, but Clement said nothing, just continued to stare at him. "But I did see it. I'm not one of her people. Maybe I'm permitted to see more than you are. She promises a fight, but not armies at the City's command. All of these things I think I understand. I do not understand how Boudin knew to bring me to her, the first time. What was the boy to her?"
Clement cleared his throat. "See, you dangerous, little City man. You ask questions we know not to. You see things we allow to cloak our eyes. Whatever she let you see, let you do, that be her judgment, ah. But these strange times now. Hard times, live on sword edge instead of by casting of nets. Boudin. My nephew." He stopped, breaking eye contact with Onesiphorous, then paced the room.
The dwarf waited him out in turn.
Finally the swamp man tore off another piece of bread and worried it in his hands. "We got no standing temples here. Everything is sacred. Every shadow is altar, ah. You understand?"
"Yes," Onesiphorous said, though he didn't yet understand at all.
"We got no priests, neither. No fat men in cloth-of-gold. No crazy women cutting chicken necks. Just us and the swamp. So when she come among us, she got to find horse to ride. Boudin, he be one of them horses."
"Is there more than one horse?"
Clement's eyes shifted as he continued to pace, not looking at Onesiphorous at all. "Everything with eyes can be a horse, ah. Carpenter got many tools, she got many horses.
"
He had to know. He needed to understand. So he pushed a little harder. "Is there more than one of her?"
"Is there more than one swamp? Moonrise in spring not the same as storm off the ocean in autumn. Mists of winter different from daylight in summer. How many faces the world got, ah?"