by Sam Sykes
“How in the hell would you know what we’re looking for?” Lenk asked.
“Not hard to find out what people want,” the saccarii said. “Even less hard when people are a pair of pink northerners who say everything that comes into their head with no care for who might be listening.”
That statement made Lenk hesitate before asking again. “And why should we believe you can help us?”
“Who else gonna help you?”
“There’s plenty of people to ask.”
“You don’t go to people to get information. Souk’s full of them. From above, they all look like starving rats crawling all over each other. To know what’s going on, you go to the ground.” Khaliv’s ocher eyes narrowed. “And the saccarii have lived underfoot for a long, long time.”
Lenk barely had a moment to look thoughtful before Denaos placed a hand on his shoulder and took him aside.
“You don’t want to do this,” he muttered into the young man’s ear.
“I want to find Miron and get paid,” Lenk retorted sharply. “As I thought you did.”
“And in order to do that, I want to stay alive,” Denaos replied. “Dealing with a saccarii has never been conducive to that.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the creature. “They’re the native race of Vhehanna. When Cier’Djaal was built, it was built atop their homes. They do not have fond memories of humanity.”
“I travel with a shict, a thug, and… Gariath,” Lenk replied, plucking Denaos’s hand off his shoulder. “If I went around judging people by their race and profession, I’d be a lonely man.”
“Then judge him by the fact that he’s a freaky little thing skulking in the shadows staring at us,” Denaos hissed. “Or by the vague threats he’s spewing at us.”
“We get threatened all the time,” Lenk said. He affixed the man with a suspicious stare. “Or do you know of a reason why we should take this one seriously?”
More than you know, runt.
Denaos opted not to say that and the whole messy story that went with it. He merely held his hands out to the side, inclined his head, and made a note to rub this in later when it all went to shit.
Lenk, satisfied, turned back to Khaliv.
“We’re looking for—”
“I can find him.”
The young man blinked. “I haven’t told you yet.”
“Talanite, right? Northerner, I’m guessing? Ain’t hard to find someone like that in the Souk. Coins to curses says he’s at the fountain.”
“This is why you don’t trust a saccarii,” Denaos interjected. “There’s no fountain in the Souk.”
“There wasn’t until the Lady Fasha Teneir found the love of Ancaa and had one commissioned for the poor to have water,” Khaliv replied. “’Course, the poor aren’t allowed in the Souk, so it’s just a nice place to visit if you’re a foreigner.”
Lenk eyed the saccarii carefully. “Show me. Then you get paid.”
“You suspicious of me?” Khaliv asked.
“Very.”
“Smart.”
The saccarii rose with joints popping and bones creaking. He rolled his head on his neck, rotated his shoulders, and cracked his knuckles, his body groaning in protest. Neither man could see what expression he wore beneath his raggedy veil, yet neither would doubt that he probably took great pleasure in the disgust present on theirs.
He bowed low, extending a long arm out toward the crowd.
“After you, sirrahs,” he said.
With a hesitant look, Lenk began walking. Denaos had just begun to follow when he noticed a pair of eyes on him. Between two stalls, so distant as to be a memory, a man in dark leathers stared right at him. The tall man froze, as if all his problems would be solved if he simply held still enough. Maybe it actually worked; the man in leather drew up a tan hood and turned, disappearing into the crowd.
“They ain’t here for you, adviser.”
A word. A title. As common as any. Yet it was one that made Denaos stiffen like a blade. Because it was one that Denaos hadn’t been called in years.
“You been gone from Cier’Djaal too long,” Khaliv whispered. “Lot’s changed since you stood by her and spun your sweet lies.”
“And what,” he whispered, “do you know of that, saccarii?”
“I know who you are. I know who you were. I know who you killed.” He adjusted his veil, pulling it up over his eyes. “And I didn’t tell nobody.”
He flexed his fingers. The skin on his joints sloughed off and fell as a pale shedding, leaving glistening dark flesh behind. He shoved his hands into his pockets and pushed past Denaos.
“You gonna owe me a favor.”
Denaos wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring at the empty space where Khaliv had just squatted. But when he turned around, the saccarii was gone, Lenk was gone, the Jackals were gone, and everyone was gone but the human tide.
And he wished that he were as alone as he felt.
EIGHT
NATIVES
Just as Lenk had begun to grow used to Cier’Djaal’s Souk and its seething tide of humanity, the metaphor proved painfully apt once more.
Where before it had ebbed and flowed, it now receded, parting before him as though he were a prophet. Though the wary gazes cast his way with varying amounts of scorn were anything but reverential.
The vast majority of glares, however, were not for him.
Khaliv’s slow, ambling gait cut a path through the crowd. Even if Lenk could have seen his face past his veil, he doubted the saccarii gave much notice to those whispering about him. And as Lenk overheard some of the more threatening ones—ones revolving around ropes, mostly—that began to worry him.
“You’re too tense, pinkie,” Khaliv said reprovingly.
“Yeah, I get that way when I get the feeling everyone wants to kill me,” Lenk replied.
“Every predator is always aware of prey,” Khaliv said. “Humans ain’t no different. You show ’em fear, they’re gonna show you teeth. So toughen up.”
There was an obvious truth there, Lenk knew. He was the one with the sword, after all. And yet, for all his steel and scars, they looked at him as if he was meat instead of a warrior. While Khaliv, with his rags and filth, bade them move by presence alone.
And when he stopped and looked around, the entire crowd stood stiff.
“Ain’t got much time,” Khaliv said. “Jhouche’ll be here soon. They ain’t gonna show me the same courtesy as these fine folk.”
His gaze settled on a nearby lamppost and he gamboled toward it, sending people scattering out of his way with a gasp. He shimmied up, perching upon its iron hood and staring out over the crowd. A long, bony finger extended, pointing out to the crowd.
Lenk followed. Lenk saw.
A ghost stood among the living. His white robes were too white, unsullied by sweat or sand. His back was too straight, his chin too proud, his features too gentle for this cauldron of stooping, weary people. Upon his breast, he wore a pin of Talanas’s Phoenix.
Miron Evenhands. Chatting away with a merchant as the world idly ebbed around him. As though he didn’t even care that people were looking for him.
Lenk looked up and found Khaliv staring down at him expectantly.
“I should have told you,” the young man said. “I don’t have money.”
“Nor I, friend,” Khaliv said. “Saccarii don’t trade in coin.”
Lenk couldn’t see it, of course, but somehow, through veil and filth, he could feel Khaliv’s long, crooked smile.
“You’ll owe me.”
And with that, the saccarii leapt off the lamppost and landed lightly upon the cobblestones. Thrusting hands in pockets, he took off at a jog. The crowd opened before him, closed behind him, and swallowed him whole.
Lenk glanced behind him. Denaos was absent. Unsurprising; the rogue had a good instinct for sensing when a bad idea was about to go wrong. Fortunately, Lenk had an equally good instinct for realizing when bad ideas were the only options.
&
nbsp; And he chose to listen to it once more.
Hiking his sword up, he took off, weaving through the crowd. As if they sensed his attempts as one collective entity, the people pressed closer together, impeding his progress.
Miron stood not far away, chatting away the day. His laughter was long and crystalline in the din, inviting others to join in. His smile coaxed out grins all around him.
The Lord Emissary was, indeed, a pleasant enough fellow to be around if he didn’t owe one money.
“Evenhands!” Lenk called out.
Miron twitched slightly, looking around for the source of the voice. Lenk cried out again, leaping up to be seen over the heads of the crowd and waving his hands.
“Evenhands!”
From beneath his cowl, Miron looked at Lenk. His eyes twinkled brightly, a pair of stars set in a soft, pale dawn. The smile he offered was soft, slow, and gentle. Lenk saw it for just a moment before the priest turned smartly on his heel and departed.
“Hey!”
Lenk pushed a body aside, ignoring a curse upon his family. He elbowed his way past a portly woman, suffered a slap for his efforts. He ignored the sweat and filth and noise as he pushed his way through the crowd.
“Get back here, priest!”
Miron gave no sign that he had heard the young man. Miron gave no sign of stopping. Without weaving, without shoving, he seemed to flow through the crowd, a line of white froth amidst the tide.
That wasn’t right. How did he move like that? Lenk wondered. The tide barely even seemed to acknowledge him.
Lenk grit his teeth, suffering the elbows and curses of the crowd as he shoved his way through. He kept his eyes upon that froth, that man too pristine to be among the Souk. Miron would not walk away with his money, his new life, again.
“PRIEST!”
“Demon.”
“She-beast.”
“How did it get in here?”
She could hear them. As they crowded around the fountain, held back by the guards in black clothing, they whispered to each other. Her ears rose, taking in every sound.
“I thought the Souk was supposed to be safe.”
“Look at her. She’s not the same color as the others.”
“Is that blood around her mouth?”
And she could see them. She could see their wide-eyed stares peering over the guards’ shoulders. She could see the fear, the curiosity, and the faces they would show only in the presence of a beast.
“Who let a shict in here?”
“Why don’t they just throw her out?”
“Filthy oids. Why don’t they just leave?”
As she looked at them, as she heard them, their terror, their hatred, she found she could not hate them.
No more than she could hate any maggot for crawling from a diseased corpse.
That, Kataria knew, was what they were. Blind, grubby little things that knew nothing but rotten flesh and putrid meat, terrified of the world outside their homely corpse. Their corpse may have been of stone and sand, their meat may have been gold and silver, but they were maggots all the same.
And she could not hate them for that.
She could only hate that her companions had come from the same kind of corpse, possessed the same appetites and the same fears. She could only hate that her companions would leave it all behind, leave her behind, for this corpse. These maggots.
That was a flimsy hate, though. She needed something stronger, hatred she could hold on her tongue, sharpen on her teeth, and jam into someone’s eye.
She forced that hate up from her heart into her mouth. And there she held it behind clenched teeth, staring across the square at the first one who would die.
“Khutu,” she had heard them call him: a maggot that had learned to walk and dressed himself in blue silk to hide his flabby body. His face, cherubic and overhungry, was painted with gold and white and blue. He tilted his nose up as high as it would go as he looked over her bow, handling the weapon like it was some charming piece of antiquity and not something she would use to kill him.
She made a note to savor the surprise on his face later.
For now, though, the only thing on his face besides all the paint was arrogance, the cautious pride one shows a caged beast. And he showed it to her in a broad, blue-lipped smile. Perhaps he sensed the hatred boiling in her mouth; she made little enough effort to hide it. She didn’t care. As he tossed her bow aside, he made a fleeting gesture.
“Bring her unto me.”
Eight gauntleted grips tightened on her arms and shuffled her awkwardly toward the small man. The guards moved her warily and she could feel the tremble in their steps as they did. It was a point of pride that it took four men in armor with swords to restrain her. It would be a bigger point of pride when they realized four men weren’t nearly enough.
Khutu raised a hand, slowly, as if to cup her chin in his manicured fingers. He cringed, though, as he spied the blood around her mouth. His hand, instead, slipped into his sleeve and withdrew a long, thin wand of ivory wood. He bent it daintily between two soft hands as his kohl-painted eyes slithered over her.
He turned about, glancing to the armored men ringing them, keeping the crowd at bay. His eyes settled on a large tent on a raised wooden platform that squatted ominously beside the marble-carved fountain. Ten shirtless, brawny slaves stood at its sides, eyes straight ahead. The sunlight caught the black fabric of the tent, painting in shadow a massive shape within the tent that raised a hand and waved.
Khutu nodded and turned back to Kataria, blue lips coiled into a smile.
“You will note, first, her savagery.” His voice came gentle as song, high-pitched and uncomfortable in her ears. “A treasure such as this is not meant to linger in the tender grip of lord or lady fasha. She demands a ferocity to match her own. She demands a fury. Such is the nature of the shict.”
The men’s grips on her arms were overly tense, hard with fear, and they only grew tighter at the description. Bowstrings drawn too taut; they would snap if pulled hard enough.
“And it is this natural aspect to the shict that must be treasured,” Khutu continued. He waved his wand at her, glancing back to the tent. “You see how she barely follows? No doubt, the tongue of civilized men eludes her. This feral grace she exudes is unpracticed, undisciplined.” He absently chewed the tip of the wand between two blue lips. “Untested.”
Kataria looked over at the tent, if only to look away from Khutu for a moment. The figure within trembled with an emotion Kataria dare not venture a guess about. But her eyes caught it for only a moment before they were drawn to the sigil painted in white upon the tent’s fabric. A naked girl atop a bed of coins, just the same as the vulgore at the harbor had been wearing.
She felt something tap beneath her chin. Her eyes crossed to see the wand’s tip, still slick with saliva, tilting her head upward.
“Note the angle of the jaw,” Khutu said, tracing a line across her chin. “Perhaps in our own civil society, this might be considered mannish. But in the shict, it is a marvel of nature. Jaws such as hers are required for the gnashing of bones and meat that provides the she-beast with such anatomy.”
He tapped the wand against his cheek, mouth open in thought as his eyes drifted lower. Her abdomen contracted instinctively as she felt his eyes settle upon her midriff.
“Correct her posture,” the man said.
The men tightened their grips on her arms; she could hear the clanking tremble of their gauntlets. They were growing tired, held too tense for too long. Not enough, though, to make her move and not enough to keep them from hoisting her to her feet and forcing her spine erect.
Khutu’s wand followed his gaze, coming to a slow and gingerly halt beneath her sternum. She could feel the brush of the finer hairs on her body as it slipped down, tracing a delicate line down the center of her belly.
“The rare quality of such musculature is never seen in the women of civilized lands,” Khutu hummed, the wand tracing a slow circle about her
navel. “Nor even in the khoshicts, who strive so much to be like us. In the north, the shicts of the forest make no apologies for their restless savagery.”
Her breath caught in her throat, the muscle of her abdomen contracting as she felt the tip of the wand gingerly slip into her navel. He twisted it idly between two fingers, pressing at tender skin. She kept her teeth hidden behind her lips, but nothing could hold back the growl boiling up in her throat.
“But they can be tamed,” he whispered, “given patience… and time.”
He looked over his shoulder to the tent, smile broad and blue.
“I trust she meets with your approval, O fasha?”
The shape within nodded once. Khutu beamed beneath his paint.
“Outstanding,” he said. He looked to the men holding her. “Have her taken to the palanquin and we’ll…”
His voice trailed into an undignified cringe as he caught sight of something awry. A single, waxed eyebrow rose in query.
“Did I not send five of you out?” Khutu asked.
She heard the rattling of armor from the nearby crowd, the groan of pain. And from the wide eyes on Khutu’s face, she could guess what he had seen. No doubt the fifth guard had just found his way back, stumbling out of the crowd with a red smear upon his neck and a pulpy stump where an ear had once been.
Khutu’s eyes drifted down to her face. As they noted once more the smear of blood at the corner of her mouth, they grew wider still. She smiled, showing him the crimson staining her overlarge canines. He opened his mouth to say something.
She spat.
Something flew into Khutu’s mouth. He flailed briefly, choking on words and spittle alike as he bent over and coughed something out onto the stones. The better part of a human ear glistened with blood and saliva, the same that trickled over Khutu’s painted lips.
“Ancaa alive!”
His voice quavered into a shrill squeal, hands flying up. The men’s grips on her trembled at his fear and anger.
And she saw her opportunity.