The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  “Of course.” Savine laughed a black, hysterical chuckle. Her left eyelid twitched. “The blood is only neck-deep today.”

  “Be hours yet before we drown,” Malauch muttered, securing the bandage around his patient’s stump.

  “Beautiful,” Aturach said, turning toward a distant table occupied by surgical implements and a basin. “We can speak more freely over here, mistress…?”

  “Asper. Just Asper is fine.” She glanced over at the two priests as she walked with him. “And really, I can speak to your high priest instead. You seem a little…”

  She couldn’t choose between “underinformed,” “overworked,” or “smelly,” so she let the thought trail into silence.

  “Ah, if you’d like to talk to him, I can show you to his quarters,” Aturach said as he began to dip a cloth into the basin.

  “Oh, you can just tell me where they are, if it’s too much trouble to take me.”

  “Certainly.” He nodded, gesturing to the door. “You just hang a right once you leave the temple, turn left when you reach the much-nicer temple of Ancaa, and then hang another right when you see the cemetery. He’s buried in the northwest corner. Look for the flowers we left there yesterday.”

  She met his black smile with a frown. The scent of suffering was no more apparent than there, between the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth.

  It always started in the smile. People grew too comfortable with suffering. They always found it too easy to grin around the dying. Then they stopped washing the blood from their hands.

  Then they became killers. Or sometimes, adventurers.

  He pulled the cloth from the basin and she saw it was tinged red with blood that had already been washed away from earlier procedures. Maybe some of her thoughts seeped through that frown. Or maybe he just noticed the lack of hygiene. He cringed and emptied the basin into a bucket beneath the table.

  “I’m sorry,” he offered meekly, not looking at her. “I’m… I’m not usually like this. This…” He made a vague gesture around his face. “I wasn’t lying. High Priest Thaala was killed two months ago in the footwar. Seffa was with him. She’s buried next to him. Jalu left the city shortly after, Maribi hanged himself, Khefka converted to Ancaa, and…”

  He gestured over at the hall, to all the bleeding and the suffering and the dying.

  “This is what’s left of it. Of us. There are more injured every day and they come to us for healing because that’s what we do—Talanites and all—but then they just go and say ‘praise Ancaa’ because that shit’s apparently great right now and they leave us with fewer supplies and… and…”

  Asper became aware of it the same moment he did: the crystalline tears forming in the corners of his eyes.

  “Sorry, I suppose I should have offered you tea before I broke down crying like an infant.” He wiped a hand across his face. “As I said, I’m not usually like this.” He looked at her intently with those quivering eyes. “Would you? Like some tea?”

  The tears were ones she had seen before. The question, one she had heard before. And thus, she knew, he wasn’t asking for her sake.

  She shook her head gently. She smiled softly. And she asked, in a very low voice:

  “Would you?”

  To mend the big wounds, sometimes you must mend the small ones, she thought as she poured tea into a copper mug. And sometimes, the small ones are so small you can’t even see them.

  A wise man had once said that.

  Well, a wise woman, anyway.

  Well, she had said it. Thought it, really. Just now, even. But it certainly sounded wise to her.

  “This isn’t necessary,” Aturach said from behind her. “I mean, you had questions to ask, right?”

  “That can wait,” she replied.

  No, it can’t, she told herself.

  “There are more important things.”

  More important than a missing Lord Emissary of Talanas? Unlikely.

  “Such as getting this temple in order.”

  A temple that isn’t yours full of priests that you don’t know.

  She tried to keep the thoughts, small and harsh, little pinpricks at the back of her head. Those she could ignore.

  The images of all those dead people in the Souk, the knowledge that she couldn’t do anything for them, the utter stupidity in thinking that, by helping this temple that wasn’t hers, she might somehow be able to undo anything so terrible in a city as sick as this…

  Yes, well, she thought, more important things.

  “Look, I should really be doing this.” She heard a chair scoot on the wooden floor as Aturach rose. “You’re a visiting priestess and a guest of the temple. I should be the one to—”

  “You’d screw it up.”

  She turned around. The hurt apparent on his face was the sort one typically expected to see in children who had just been slapped with their own puppies. The sunlight bathing him from the small dormitory window beneath which the table sat gave him something of an angelic glow.

  “I… what do you…” He bolstered himself, gritting his teeth as she sat down across from him. “Look, we’re doing the best we can.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “And if you are, you need to do better. I saw too many crooked stitches, too many old bandages. You’re pushing yourselves too hard and you’re making mistakes.”

  “These people need our help.”

  “And you won’t be helping them if they get infected when they leave.” She pushed the cup across the table toward him. “So, you’re going to drink this tea. You’re going to take an hour. Then you’re going to make another cup for Savine and she’ll take an hour. Then she’ll do the same for Malauch. You’ll do this in shifts until you stop killing people.”

  He stared into his tea for a moment, contemplating the darkened reflection. He drew in the plumes of steam on a breath, sighed them out.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I suppose we can’t save everyone.”

  “You can,” she replied. “But not this way.”

  “I know, I know.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s just… I wasn’t meant for this. I wasn’t even Thaala’s intended replacement. Khefka was. But his family always wanted him to be a priest for a major church and once Ancaa became popular…”

  “Can’t they help, then?” Asper asked. “They seem wealthy enough.”

  “Ancaa is about wealth, yes. They share their wealth; they share their fortunes; they share their bounties. But it’s a young religion. The Ancaarans don’t have the practical skills we do.”

  “What about the Karnerians? The Sainites? In the north, they look to us for medical advice and treatment and we can expect their aid in exchange.”

  “In the north, I wager they usually aren’t crammed into the same city, much less the same district.” Aturach shook his head. “No, we can’t ask for the help of one without the other considering it a pledge of loyalty. Then, when the city goes to war, we’ll be considered valid targets. Better to just ignore them both and hope they do the same for us.”

  “What?” Asper asked, furrowing a brow. “I thought the city already was already at war.”

  “The footwar? Nothing more than two gangs of thugs pretending to be nations.” Aturach’s face grew dark as he lowered it over his cup. “I’ve been inside the Sainites’ temple. I’ve seen what they’ve been hoarding: ballistae, fireflasks, an entire flight of fully grown scraws, hundreds of troops, and enough crossbows to put a quarrel in the chest of every man, woman, and child in Cier’Djaal.

  “The Karnerians are no better. Two legions, training day in, day out, each one led by a war priest who’s seen no less than three campaigns. And there are rumors that they’ve brought in one of their siege-golems. Ten feet tall, feeds on human blood.

  “The fashas play them off of each other, making sure neither grows strong enough to take over and convincing each that they need to buy more supplies from fasha warehouses. But with the footwar, each side has been bringing in more and more
soldiers, claiming they need the extra defense. They’re both just waiting for the moment they can drive the other out and claim Cier’Djaal for themselves.”

  “What if the moment never comes?” Asper asked. “They’ve been here for ages and haven’t fought yet, right? A war in Cier’Djaal would disrupt their silk trade, wouldn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to come, no. It still might not. There’s to be a treaty discussion in a few days. High Priest Thaala was supposed to mediate, but then the footwar started and…” He sighed, rubbed his eyes. “An Ancaa priest is sitting in instead. It might work. It might fail. But a few months’ disruption of silk trade against the chance of a lifetime supply is a good risk to take. Especially when the cost is only a few thousand lives.”

  His smile was small and hysterical, a very contained fit of madness, for it was quite apparent that if he hadn’t allowed himself that, he would have flung himself screaming from the window.

  “Their war spans decades. Their armies cover nations. Whatever the Khovura and Jackals do to each other will look like a slapfight in comparison to what they can do.”

  And there it was.

  In the moment he stared into his tea and saw his reflection staring back up at him with wide, unblinking eyes, he must have realized how much of himself he had spent to accomplish so little that could be taken away so easily.

  It was a moment Asper knew with painful intimacy. The words he spoke next were ones she had once asked heaven and been met with a silence that had echoed throughout her life.

  “What’s the point?”

  In that moment, Aturach’s wounds were no longer small.

  And to mend them was no longer a matter of duty.

  “The point is people,” she said. “The people downstairs who are dying because, somewhere inside you, you’re afraid to help them. You think they’ll go back to Ancaa and forget you, you think they’ll be killed anyway, so you stop trying.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I would. I did.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Nothing changed. The world didn’t stop. Wicked men with wicked blades kept killing. People kept dying.” She stared down at her left hand, drumming fingers on the table. “Only then… I was the one killing them.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You didn’t drive the blades into them.”

  “I didn’t stop the blades, either.”

  “Could you have?”

  “Not all of them. But I could have tried. If I couldn’t stop them, I could have healed the wounds. Or maybe I could have just given them a good burial, I don’t know. It’s not a matter of absolutes. You have to do something, anything besides just standing around and watching the world burn.”

  She looked up and smiled softly.

  “Even if it’s just making a cup of tea for someone.”

  He nodded slowly. He raised the cup to his lips and drank. He lowered the cup and frowned.

  “This tastes terrible,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’ve never been good at making tea.”

  “Kind of… ruins the metaphor, doesn’t it?”

  “Only if you think about it.”

  “But—”

  “Anyway,” she interrupted, “about my questions. I’m looking for a Talanite. A Lord Emissary. We were separated from him in yesterday’s battle at the Souk. I thought he might have checked in here, if he was able.”

  “A Lord Emissary?” Aturach quirked a brow. “We would have been informed of his arrival, surely. Usually we get word days before they come.”

  “You didn’t this time? Could it have gotten lost in the chaos?”

  He shook his head. “I’d remember something like that. What was the name?”

  “Evenhands. Miron Evenhands.”

  Aturach nearly fell out of his chair, so quickly did he start. “Evenhands?”

  “You know the name?”

  “I do. Though I haven’t heard it in years.”

  “So you know what he looks like? You could help me search for—”

  “Let me rephrase that: I haven’t seen it in years. The last time I read it was in an old record of the temples of the south. He was a low-ranking priest of no particular reputation in an old city lost years ago.”

  Something inside her unsettled. Somehow, she found the words. “How many years ago?”

  “Asper,” he said softly, “Miron Evenhands has been dead for three centuries.”

  NINETEEN

  CIVIL MEN WITH CIVIL NEEDS

  By virtue of their very existence, everything wizards did had meaning.

  The relentless protocol, the unyielding rules, the construction of their many towers across the world: Each and every action performed by the Venarium was an order of necessity.

  Even a creation so vast and elaborate and slightly ostentatious as Tower Resolute served a purpose far more intricate than what the uninitiated would surmise as nothing more than a demonstration of power from arrogant wizards.

  Not that such a demonstration wasn’t one of those purposes; it just wasn’t the most important one.

  Towers such as Resolute served many functions. They were schools into which simpering, terrified youths who had just discovered their magical abilities by accidentally setting fire to their siblings would be ushered. They were libraries, sanctuaries of studies in which the most powerful women and men would become the most brilliant. But above all else, a tower was a graveyard.

  Tower Resolute was built upon a ring of solid, unyielding stones. And each stone served as both brick and coffin. Encased in each perfectly hewn, flawlessly carved, ten-by-ten block was a corpse. Quietly decomposing inside a suffocating tomb, the remains of a former wizard lay interred. While it might have seemed macabre to an outsider, this, too, had a purpose. For while a wizard’s body might fail, his Venarie, that special quality that gave him his power, lingered on like the perfume of a wealthy lady: unseen, potent, and completely impossible to ignore.

  A wizard’s skin, blood, bones, and hair all carried Venarie long after a wizard’s death. And Venarie could be used for any number of things, all of which should be used by those who already had it, or so the Venarium thought. For only the Venarium knew how to use it.

  Magic was something primal, born in the body from a place that no one knew and manifesting itself in ways that nobody could ever predict. And perhaps it was to combat this chaos, this inherent meaninglessness, that the Venarium created their relentless protocol, their unyielding rules, their rigid towers.

  To combat meaninglessness, meaning must be present everywhere.

  Even in something as mundane as filing.

  Dreadaeleon reminded himself of this, as he stood in front of the clerk’s desk in the lobby of Tower Resolute. He found it increasingly harder to take comfort in it as the second hour passed.

  “Your contributions are past due,” the little man with the glasses said from behind the desk far too big for him. He didn’t bother to look up; whatever file he had in front of him seemed far more important. “Well past due, in fact.”

  “I have an exemption.” Dreadaeleon was surprised at the confidence in his reply. The novelty of finally meeting someone smaller and meeker than him, he suspected. “I’m an adventurer.”

  “Less than one-sixtieth of concomitants in good standing choose… that practice,” the clerk said, as though testing to see if this were all a clever lie. “I’m not certain it’s even still considered a valid method of contribution.”

  “Well, I suppose you could either go back into your files, dig up whatever ancient amendments and notations on the subject lie buried under undoubtedly years of misplaced paperwork and layers of dust that likely have their own ecosystems by now”—he paused to breathe—“or you can just take my word for it.”

  The clerk, for the first time, looked up over his glasses. He cleared his throat and sniffed.

  “I’ll be right back,” he replied, disappearing into a door behind his desk.

&nbs
p; After so much time already wasted, one would expect this would elicit more than a weary sigh. But Dreadaeleon couldn’t find the nerve to be that upset. In the clerk’s absence, thoughts began to seep into his head, the same thoughts that had kept returning to him since yesterday, thoughts so private that he needed to be alone in a room as vast and empty as Tower Resolute’s main hall to think them.

  And as soon as he was, her name came flooding back to him.

  Liaja.

  No, no. He shook his head. That’s not her name. But she wouldn’t tell you her name, would she? And she doesn’t know your name, either. What’d she call you again?

  He tried to pretend he wasn’t desperate enough to have remembered every little word she had said. He failed.

  “Northern boy.” Like you’re some kind of child. No, she was sweeter than that. She smiled when she spoke to you. There were tears in her eyes. Granted, she was about to be sold into prostitution, but still.

  He remembered her tear before anything else, the sparkling drop that drew a thin, clean line through the dust upon her face. From that, he could remember the vibrant curve of the cheek it slid down. From there, the soft, warm smile that she had shown him. And then her eyes…

  Which he could never remember fully. Why couldn’t he? What was so special about that woman’s eyes that he couldn’t remember them? As though he was afraid to look at them again, to see them and the tears in them and realize that he should have done something to help her, anything, if he weren’t such a—

  Steady, old man, he warned himself. We’re not here to daydream about girls. Remember, the others are counting on you. If you can request the Venarium for access to their divination methods, you could find Miron in a heartbeat. Less than a heartbeat, even. Focus on that. Not on the woman. What was her name again?

  He tried to pretend he didn’t know.

  “As it turns out,” a shrill voice, growing shriller, spoke up, “there was quite a bit of paperwork surrounding it.” Dreadaeleon looked back to the desk, where the clerk slammed a heavy sheaf of papers down. “Fortunately, it was thick enough to stand out.”