Djoss ran stumblingly away, carrying coins to the hookah pipes.
The bouncer had this look on his face like he had just accidentally killed a friend, which I imagine is precisely what he had done. More importantly, he had killed a king’s man.
Salvatore called out to the bouncer. “It was an accident,” he said, “I saw it with these eyes. But you think for a minute the king’s men are going to care if a plug ugly animal like you rolled their fellow for real, or not?”
The bouncer turned. He reached into his empty scabbard for a sword, but there was no sword there. His hand clenched on air twice. Then, the bouncer lifted the club-like scabbard up.
“Easy,” said Salvatore, “I don’t even want a name. I want the uniform, and I don’t care about this fellow who’s dead. I don’t know a thing from a thing about that king’s man or you. Give me his uniform, and dump your mistake into the swollen river and consider it lesson learned. Never be flashing a tooth when a blackjack’ll do you fine.”
Salvatore swung his little weapon in the air. Mishaela remained in the shadows.
The bouncer kicked Geek’s body in the stomach. “Take whatever you want,” he said. The bouncer’s hands shook. His face was paler than Salvatore’s. His eyes were scared. He walked back to the door with the red stripe on it. The bouncer didn’t think to recover his sword.
Salvatore went to work on the body, fast. He pulled the bloody sword out from the back, and tossed it into the canal. He stripped the body nude.
Mishaela stepped carefully from the shadows.
“This is horrible,” she said. She was pale.
“I know people pay good money for bloody uniforms,” said Salvatore.
“Who?”
“King’s men. We dump the body, and sell the bloody uniform back to the king, and he figures out which fellow won’t be back for muster so the families find out, you know? Do a good deed for this fellow, and make a bit for ourselves, too.”
“Right,” said Mishaela, “What about the bouncer?”
“It was an accident,” said Salvatore, “Didn’t you see it?”
“I could barely see it through the rain.”
“I saw it fine. I was closer. No one’s fault, really. Just an accident. King’s man got in the way of the bouncer and they both fell. King’s man fell on the sword.”
Geek’s mute corpse kept looking up into the rain. His mouth was full of pinkish rain that spilled out of the sides of his mouth like the water was coming from inside of him instead of from the sky.
Salvatore finished stripping the uniform. He folded it up small and shoved it into his deepest cloak pockets. He rolled the naked corpse into the water, and watched it float away until the rain shrouded the white skin in darkness.
(Jona had seen very little through the rain. He had seen only enough to know that someone was knocked down. He hadn’t seen the uniform well enough in the dark. He hadn’t seen anything real. He had been trying to decide if he should follow Djoss, or stay with Salvatore, or just go home and hide. He knew someone died, and Salvatore was taking their clothes. I can see what he cannot, because I can smell the rain on the uniform when it turns up again, and the rust from the blade’s edge. Still, I am not completely certain. Memories are only as good as the mind that carries them. Blessed Erin has shown me this vision in the night. I show it here.
Know that neither Salvatore nor Jona did anything to help the dead man. For this sin, alone, they deserve their fate.)
Jona stood in the dark, watching the rain fall, and wondering what exactly had happened up ahead, where he could barely see through the torrential rains.
It was so thick in the air, and he was so tired of following Salvatore and of living someone else’s life, when anger boiled up cooled into a simmer until it didn’t matter that he was angry. He was tired, and wanted to go somewhere warm and dry.
He went home.
Salvatore didn’t seem to recognize him, anyway.
***
Clouds curled into themselves like gray hair in water. The old woman of the winter storms wiped away the sun’s summer rage with her mop of thick, gray hair.
The rain was far worse than the summer heat for the Pens District. Salvatore’s building flooded out, and water devoured the limestone foundation. Half the building crumbled into rubble. Salvatore was asleep in his hammock. He woke to the groaning in the walls where the bricks worked loose from mortar. Then, the crash and the screams.
Salvatore’s room, on his half of the building, hadn’t collapsed, yet.
Salvatore rushed out of his room, and down the hall and to the stairwell and on one hand he had sturdy brick walls and on the other open air and rainfall where wall used to be and a dozen screams fighting up through the fallen bricks and some of the people of the street had thrown aside their parasols and hats to tug at the bricks and some of them kept walking like this catastrophe was just another street trick to sucker them.
Survivors piled furniture on carts, covered them with blankets and bed sheets that didn’t keep the rain out.
Two little kids—for laughs—were beating on the dead with sticks. They were cursing this mangled body for the crimes it had committed in life, and these kids were laughing.
Salvatore shuddered at that.
I’m convinced he shuddered at that. It’s the sort of thing that would happen there, and it’s the sort of thing that would make him shudder. He is a wicked thing, but he does not believe in his own wickedness, and he can not love wickedness in others.
CHAPTER 9
“Wake up, Djoss,” whispered a voice. “Djoss!”
Djoss groaned.
“Djoss!” shouted the voice. It was Rachel. He felt fingers on his arms. Fingers wrapped around his wrists, and pulled at him. They were Rachel’s fingers.
“I’m awake,” he said. He opened his eyes. His legs and arms still weren’t working right. In his hand, he still held the long stem of the hookah.
Djoss smiled. “I had a horrible dream.” Djoss looked around the room. A low haze of purple smoke hovered in the air. Soft pillows stank of vomit and pink smoke and spread along the filthy cellar floor.
“I was looking for you all night!” shouted Rachel. “I didn’t know where you went!”
Djoss laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You spent all of our money, didn’t you?”
“No,” he said. His body slowly discovered solid ground below him.
“How much did you waste this time?”
“Not all of it,” he said.
Two mostly nude men with the tans and hats of foreign sailors watched listlessly as the siblings fought. From upstairs, a bouncer peered down into the cellar. The light and the noise of the tavern spilled in from the open door. He shouted, “Take it outside!”
“I had to pay just to come down here and find him!” she shouted.
“I don’t care!” shouted the bouncer, “Keep it down!”
Djoss nodded. “We’ll go,” he said, “Will you help me outside?”
“No,” she said. She let go of his hands. She had been holding his hands. He sank back down to the pillows. She snarled, and grabbed his hands again. She dragged him to the stairs.
He struggled to work his legs. He couldn’t quite make them work.
“Hey, you!” shouted Rachel to the bouncer. “Hey! I’ll pay you to throw him outside!”
The bouncer shrugged. “I’ll do it for free just to be rid of you.”
Djoss dropped asleep when the bouncer picked him up. Djoss dreamed of flying. He woke up lying in an alley behind the tavern, his face covered in mud. He looked up to see his sister’s frowning face. He grimaced. “Rachel,” he said, “Have you been here long?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Have I been here long?” he asked. He tasted the rising bile on his tongue.
“Yes.” She folded her arms. “How much did you spend?”
He threw up into the mud.
***
The siblings sat on his
bed below the window. Djoss stared at a cup of tea she had made for him. He didn’t feel well enough to drink it. He held the teacup in his palm like an egg.
Rachel sat across from him, and stared at his tea. She didn’t want to look at him.
She leaned back, calmly. “Aren’t you going to tell me you’re sorry?”
“Probably not,” he said.
“Are you sorry?” She looked at his face, desperate to see remorse in the crevices.
He thought about his answer. He looked down into her eyes. “Yes,” he said.
The tea’s waves of steam faded into tepid nothing. Time passed in silence.
“Drink your tea,” she said.
“I’m not ready, yet.”
She sniffed. “Drink it anyway.” She was calm.
He nodded. He held his breath, and swallowed as fast as he could. It burned down his sore throat. When it landed in his stomach, it sunk like lead weights.
“Feel better?” she said, bitterly.
“No.”
“Good,” she said. “What are we going to do with you, Djoss?”
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“We have to leave the city,” she said, into her hands, “I would rather spend the rest of my life sleeping under a tree than watch you do this to yourself. We have to leave any city that has that awful stuff.”
“Where will we go?”
“Do we have any money left?”
“I have a bit in my pocket. I think I won it gambling.” He looked down at his hands. Geek’s coins looked up at him, winking in the light like thieves. “I hope I won it.”
She coughed. She shook her head. “That’s what will happen if you keep this up. You’ll spend the rest of your life staring at the ceiling and drooling. You won’t remember a thing. You’ll do terrible things, and you won’t even remember, and you won’t be doing them for the right reasons.”
“I know.”
She clenched her fist, and pounded the wall. The tea trembled. “If you know…!” She hit the wall even harder. The plaster dented. She heaved her teacup out the open window.
“I don’t know why I do it, Rachel,” he said. Djoss’ bottom lip trembled. He closed his eyes.
“We have some money left, however you got it. We’ll sell everything. We’ll sign on with a merchant in need of haulers and pack handlers, if we can. We’ll walk through the woods if we have to. We have to get out of the city. We’ll find somewhere new, somewhere far away. We’ll start over, new.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I guess it’s all me this time. First time it’s ever been me, huh?”
She held the rest of her words inside of her. They burned like acid.
***
Rachel carried a small sack on her back full of the pots and cracked crockery they had been using. They would sell all of it at whatever fence would offer any money for stuff that was almost worthless. Djoss searched around for the teacup, but already the street had swallowed the cracked, white clay egg. Djoss carried nothing at all. He was still too weak and uncoordinated.
The landlord’s wife came out from the butcher shop and asked if they were leaving. Rachel told the landlord’s wife that she and Djoss were going to buy new furniture soon.
The butcher’s wife snorted. “Tell me when you’re done. You paid up and you can stay until the end of the week, but you get nothing back from us. Don’t even ask.”
Rachel didn’t repeat her lie about new furniture. She didn’t say anything at all. The two women looked at each other in the street, both of them gauging the other.
“Will you wait until we’re done moving out?” said Rachel. “We’ll be done today. We’ve already sold everything of value. Nothing is left worth stealing.”“We’ll wait until sunset,” said the butcher’s wife. “Once the Pens empty out, people come asking.”
Djoss coughed. He rubbed his hands together like they were cold. “We’ll be out by then,” he said, “Just give us a chance to finish and don’t show anybody the room until we’re done clearing it.”
“I’ll do what I want with my room,” said the butcher’s wife.
Djoss popped his fist into his palm. “I’ll do what I have to do about our stuff. We need the money more than some thief.”
The woman looked Djoss up and down with empty eyes. She smiled, wanly. She spoke to Rachel. “You picked a hard boy, but I can see the pink in his face. I’ve seen it from the start. I’ll give you to sunset, woman, and I hope you pick a better man when this one smokes his head to cheese. If you was a real Senta… Well, you ought to see his fate easy. Everyone else does.”
Rachel sneered and snapped a flame in and out of the air where she could feel the combustion in the koan of the spaces between. “Maybe I’m the only one who does see his fate,” she said. “You don’t know anything about us, or my brother.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said the butcher’s wife, but she clearly didn’t believe it. “I won’t put the sign out until sunset.”
Rachel and Djoss were done within the hour. After nothing was left. Rachel gazed at the empty room. She smelled the bittersweet manure and meat rot of the butcher shop and the salty smell of more sea rain to wash away more of the animal smells that seeped in from the porous wooden and brick walls.
Rachel leaned out the window. She turned around to look up at the swirling clouds overhead. She turned around again to see the narrow street and all the people there that didn’t know her name. She sighed. Djoss said nothing. He waited quietly in the hall for his sister to close the door behind her.
***
A sidewalk café cut into the warehouses for the porters. Djoss and Rachel sipped berry tea even though they hated berries in tea. The berry tea was the cheapest thing to drink, and they could get lots of it with all the rainy weather spoiling the berries that hadn’t ripened yet.
Djoss and Rachel ate wheat bread and stew because it was the heaviest thing on the menu. They couldn’t afford to eat twice that day.
They spent one more night in a trashy inn. She tied him down to the bed with ropes she borrowed from the innkeeper’s stable. He didn’t argue with her about the ropes. She showed Djoss what she had gotten, without consulting him about it. She told Djoss where to place his hands. He complied.
She slept sitting in a chair with all of the money under the cushion below her.
He didn’t fight her.
That night must have been so long. I can only imagine the howls that must have emerged from that room, like a beast was chained down and dying. Rachel never told Jona about that night.
I have heard the men deprived of the demon weed wailing like banshees caught between the real and the damned. I imagine she watched the contortions of her brother’s face, and saw her father there, writhing in a demon agony inside of the ear. She saw the dying poplars where she says he fell, how the trees puckered to ash like paintbrushes drying up, and all the bloody puke flowing from her brother’s mouth was like a river of death that washed him clean.
I imagine she pulled ice from the air, and wrapped it around his head to cool the burning fevers. I imagine she called forth the wind and the fire of the Senta to burn away the stink of his sick body, and blow it all out the window, if she was clear-headed enough to think of it.
He could barely walk the next day. They spent all day wandering the streets slowly, looking for a hiring caravan. Men looked at the man who could barely walk, and did not hire him. Rachel and Djoss knocked on the doors of warehouses and asked whoever opened the door if they had a caravan leaving the city. Djoss was in no condition to walk, much less work.
A sea of faces, all of them hard and bedraggled and tired, with one rough dog voice barked the two away back into the street.
***
Jona was across the street looking out a window with a scrivener from the guard. Jona sipped a beer slowly and waited for Rachel and Djoss to step out from the barred doorway where they slept out of the rain.
He waited a long time. He sipped only the one beer.
Next to him, the scrivener won round after round of drinks in a card game with a couple lowlife smugglers that had gone birdie for a drink. Jona had bribed the gangers to keep the scrivener drunk and happy. A week of Jona’s wages slowly traveled from Jona’s pocket to a street thug to the scrivener.
Jona’s mind did not hold that scrivener’s name, or his face, or anything about him at all except for this: when he was drunk his cheeks reddened and his smile was very wide and the more he drank the redder his cheeks became and the wider the smile and the Pluckies found the kid’s joy infectious and they cheered the boy on letting him win every round, and the scrivener was king for a day of all the Pens and all the fates. Jona drank so slow. What more was there to know about the truth. He had always known. The pieces he had put together were there for anyone to find that cared to look. The Night King’s power was so great, that she did not even have to hide for people were too afraid to look. What was the point of writing any of it up?
He had gone to the man that ruled his night, a carpenter to the street. He had left a single note, with a single line. Now that I’ve seen it, I know who I’m working for, and that’s fine.He watched the woman he loved leave an alley where she had been sleeping with her brother, and he felt dead inside. He felt like even suicide was pointless.
***
Djoss rested his elbows on his knees and stared at his fists against the cloudy night sky. His sister watched him from the other side of the alley. Read his lips if you can, Jona. She doesn’t even see you to get closer.
“I took care of you,” he said, into his hands, “I took care of that monster that made you. I took care of you after our mother got taken. I always took the best care of you. You were never evil. You were supposed to be evil, but you’re not. I don’t think you even feel the bad stuff in you because of me. I raised you, Rachel. I raised you good.”
We Leave Together Page 10