The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  Denaos’s eyes drifted up to the walkway ringing the upper floor. No servants were in sight, which suggested that this was a place where servants should not be seen. Which, in turn, suggested he should work even faster than he thought he might.

  He swept up the stairs, holding himself still and quiet as he heard another pair of guards come rattling past down below.

  “All I’m saying is,” one of them muttered, “if it comes down to war, we’re better off enlisting with them.”

  “Which one?” his companion asked. “The Karnerians or the Sainites?”

  “Doesn’t matter. They both pay better than this oid.”

  “Because they expect you to die for that coin, moron. Fashas just want you to look pretty. Besides, if the mediation goes as planned, there’s not going to be a war. Think of how many lives would be lost.”

  “The mediation is a myth. They’ve been planning for months and haven’t done shit. Besides, this is Karneria and Saine we’re talking about. When have lives lost ever concerned them?”

  He waited until he couldn’t hear them anymore, then swept about the upper level. He cracked open each door, peering inside.

  Silks, bed, mirror—guest room. He moved to the next. Table, window, jug—breakfast room. He slipped to the room at the far end of the walkway. Papers, chair, desk—there we go.

  The people who suspected that a good rogue stuck to the shadows were the same people that probably thought a good rogue would go straight for the vaults. True, there had been some good thieves who had lifted a few precious things from a few unwary fashas in the past. Those were freelancers, though: unguilded, unmade, and usually killed quickly. Denaos was a professional.

  And professionals knew that the bulk of a fasha’s wealth was wrapped up in deals, trade agreements, and arrangements made with other merchants. Professionals knew that the most valuable things in a fasha’s house lay sprawled out on the desk in sheaves, like those Denaos saw when he slipped into the room and shut the door behind him. Professionals knew that the most dangerous men in the world were accountants.

  Lady Teneir undoubtedly knew this as well. The desk was a mess of papers without a single lick of organization to them. A clerk who had his own system—especially a messy one—was a boon for paranoid fashas. It made his notes harder to root through, as Denaos quickly found out.

  Fortunately, messy clerks tended to leave their most recent business close at hand. And this one had left the most important part of any fasha’s fortune: the trade manifest.

  He pored over the numbers, searching for any sign of mysterious payments, donations or expenses with suspicious names and found little.

  Little of Teneir’s expenses, anyway: nearly every coin she had spent had gone directly to the Church of Ancaa or artists specializing in Ancaa-inspired decor. But what her rivals were doing was of greater interest.

  It wasn’t surprising that the fashas should keep tabs on each other’s expenditures. It was a practical necessity for staying competitive. Teneir’s lists were accurate to the last copper. The relatively skimpy lists of Fasha Mevuum and Fasha Mejina—and the shamefully short list of Fasha Sheffu—looked like little minnows on the paper, fit to be swallowed by the massive fish that was Fasha Ghoukha’s expenses.

  The bulk of it was rather standard fare for a fasha known for such excesses: crates of fine wine, Muraskan cheeses, fruits shipped from distant lands…

  New house guards: twenty-six, one hundred seventy gold pieces weekly, Denaos read. Wine, food, arms, and armor for them and an additional one hundred: two thousand gold pieces. Weekly income: four thousand?

  What had that guard said? Ghoukha’s silk was stronger now? In high demand? Enough that he could afford hiring a small army? There were expenses listed for architects, engineers, and laborers that suggested he intended to build even more lodging to house even more guards.

  Or… what everyone thinks are guards.

  Could that be it, he wondered? Could Ghoukha be hiring an army of paper guards whose identities existed only in the ledgers of accountants? Could the real bodies filling his halls and carrying his weapons be Khovura agents?

  Obviously, he half-thought, half-cursed to himself. Look at this. Everyone’s profits are down but his. The Khovura are targeting other businesses, ones not under his protection. They might be behind this powerful new silk, as well.

  The Khovura did have a fasha on their side, and they were rigging the economy to make him the wealthiest, most generous, and soon-to-be most-well-armed man in Cier’Djaal. Rezca would want to know this. Rezca would need to know this.

  And Denaos committed to tell him once he resolved the little matter of someone pressing the tip of a dagger against the back of his neck.

  Just as soon as he figured out how to do that, everything would be coming together.

  “Well?”

  A voice ran down the blade like cold water, settling at the base of his skull.

  “Well, what?” he asked.

  “Well, there is a certain way we do this sort of thing,” the voice at the end of the blade said. “It usually concludes with someone bleeding out on the floor. But before that, there’s a little shameless begging. Before that, a few empty threats. And before that, a bunch of ridiculous lies as to what a shkainai dressed up as a saccarii is doing in a fasha’s accountant’s office.” A throat cleared behind him. “So, you know, whenever you’re ready.”

  “It sounds kind of like a waste of time, doesn’t it?” he asked. “If you were going to kill me, you would have done so already. And since you know I shouldn’t be here, you probably already know what I’m doing here. Which means either you’re a self-absorbed, loathsome individual who enjoys threatening people with knives purely to get a sadistic shot of confidence at the expense of someone else’s fear,” he sniffed, “or you’re a good friend of mine.”

  The blade slid from the back of his neck, scraping at the finer hairs, before tapping lightly on his shoulder. A tongue clicked behind him and the voice, languid and liquid, whispered.

  “Can’t it be both?”

  When he turned around, the first thing he saw was her smile. It wasn’t a beautiful smile, not naturally: thin lips, curling up at the corners not unlike the way a cobra’s mouth naturally curved. But it was beautiful by design, coiling with rehearsed spontaneity, meticulously crafted and honed to look as natural and unfinished as possible. It was a painted, pretty picture that told men that she was so very happy to see them.

  Everything else about her was built around the fraud upon her face: the smooth, slow curves fit into tight black leathers, the long, dark hair that pooled with a carefully carefree grace around her shoulders, the eyes that glimmered like cut gems. She was as slender, as honed, and as beautiful as the blade in her hand, but even that didn’t look half as dangerous as her smile.

  He saw Anielle’s smile first, because Anielle wanted men to see her smile first. And back when they had run in the same circle, it was her smile that men had always seen last.

  “Ani,” he said, softly. “It’s been a while.”

  “So long that I don’t even know what to call you now,” she replied, lofting a black brow. “When you fled the city, you were still Ramaniel. Now I hear you’re calling yourself Denaos. But that was a day ago. You might have picked out something new since then.”

  “Ramaniel’s dead,” was all he offered in response. “He died in the riots.”

  It would have to be a remarkable thing to make a smile so elegantly sharpened waver like hers did at that moment. But there hadn’t been anything quite so remarkable as the riots. She had been there, with him, behind the scenes, holding the knives that had made them happen.

  “A lot of people did,” she replied, voice heavy. “No one else came back, though. Must have been someone special that made you.”

  She didn’t finish that thought. She didn’t have to. The gleam in her eye, the breathless rasp that came in on the end of her sentence made her question clear. Denaos was merciful eno
ugh not to make her say it. Just as he was cruel enough to shake his head, no.

  “I run with a new crew right now,” he resigned himself to answering. “This is just a one-time favor for Rezca.”

  And suddenly, that smile returned. But there was an edge to it this time, one of morbid joy.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Yerk had the same thought as Rezca, which is why I’m here.” She glanced over his disguise before pulling a hood around her head. “Of course, I came in the real way.”

  “What? Sneaking in? Like some kind of fairy-tale cutthroat?” He rolled his eyes. “Please.”

  “It’s classic!” she protested. “In like a breeze, out like a shadow. Also?” She gestured to her hood. “This right here? Amazing.”

  “A moving shadow, a talking breeze,” Denaos replied. “People tend to notice those. Disguise, at least, has the benefit of not drawing attention to itself.”

  She opened her mouth to reply. All that was heard was the distant clang of an alarm bell followed by the clomping of boots and the rattle of armor as guards rushed to assemble.

  Someone, apparently, had gotten a craving for curry.

  He nudged the door open and peered out into the hallway. Guards were rampaging up the steps; veterans, they knew exactly where a thief would be heading.

  “Damn it,” he muttered. “Let’s hurry up and—”

  No reason to finish the sentence, he realized as he looked over his shoulder. Anielle already had hurried up. The window hung wide open, leaving only shadows and the breeze where she had just stood.

  All right, he admitted to himself as he rushed to the window, so it’s a classic for a reason.

  “All right, all right,” Anielle said, pointing to the upper-left window, where three guards swept through a parlor, looking behind couches and wardrobes. “Look at this guy, trying to be all thorough, tearing up pillows. As though there’s a two-foot-tall assassin hiding under them.”

  “I’m watching this fellow here,” he replied, pointing to the window just below, where another pair of guards searched carefully through a bedroom. “You can just barely make it out from here, but he’s waiting for his friend to leave so he can drop his trousers and claim to have been naked in Lady Teneir’s bed.”

  She laughed.

  And he found himself smiling.

  Not for the sound of it, of course—she had the sort of laugh that only ever came out when old people got hit in the head with bricks—but rather because it was the only part of her that she had never been able to hone, to perfect, to disguise.

  When she laughed, she was just Anielle. And he was still Ramaniel.

  And it was almost like the time back when neither of them had killed anyone yet.

  “You remember when we first did this?” she asked him.

  He leaned back on his hands and felt the tile under his palms, cooled by the night sky. The roof they sat upon was part of some other fasha’s home that overlooked Teneir’s manse, every window filled with shadows as guards searched for a murderer they’d never find, unaware of the two people watching them from the outside.

  “Dark Croi’s gang,” he said, “squatting in a warehouse on the docks. We snuck in, lifted his favorite ax, sat on the roof of the warehouse next door, and watched him through the windows, threatening all his boys, and tearing the place apart looking for that thing. What’d he call it again?”

  “‘Kiss of Death.’ Remember what happened then?” she asked, grinning broadly. “We had it blunted, painted it pink with big, googly eyes and lips and renamed it the ‘Kissy-face of Death.’”

  “Hung it at the Harbor Gate. Dark Croi thought a rival gang was coming for him and disbanded.” He laughed. “Never even crossed his mind that it was just a couple of kids.”

  Anielle sighed, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her chin atop them. “That was about two months after you came in on the boat and begged to join Rezca’s and my gang.”

  “I remember that,” he said, lying back against the tile. “A gang made up of a nervous little fat kid and a girl that looked like a boy. What was I thinking?”

  “Likely, you were thinking that we were your only hope for survival as a shkainai boy in Cier’Djaal.”

  “Doubtful. You kept calling me ‘pale boy’ and laughing at the way I sunburned.”

  “Well, you had it coming. You were pale and you smelled like bacon when you got burned.” She fell back alongside him. “More than anything, we wanted to be Jackals.”

  That was the only part that was missing: the desire to be a Jackal. Everything else fit just like it had when they were young.

  Here they were, lying down next to each other on a roof, staring up at a night sky that still didn’t seem half as big as the city. Here they were, laughing about doing terrible things to other people, talking about Jackals like they were creatures of myth and not a gang of thugs. Here, on cold tile, the heat of her body next to him and… and then…

  What happened next, again?

  He felt feather-soft fingers slide alongside his neck and trace the path of a blade’s tip down to his collarbone.

  Oh, right.

  He should have said something, then, as she rolled on top of him. He should have listened to a voice not between his legs as she spread hers across his waist and leaned down upon him. He should have been thinking of other things than the fingers sliding into his hair, the warmth of her breath as she drew close, how easy it was to recall the circle of her mouth and how his lips fit around it and how very, very nice it was to shut his eyes and pretend that this was all he ever wanted.

  He didn’t, though.

  Some men made mistakes in their lives.

  And then some men lived mistakes.

  Denaos was that man now, just as Ramaniel had been that boy. The boy who never wanted anything more than to impress her, the boy who would piss off Dark Croi just to hear her tell him he was stupid and brave. That boy was here, eyes shut, breathing in the ink-and-leather scent of her skin, feeling the curtains of her hair brush against his jaw, feeling the way her fingers remembered the curve of his cheek as she pulled him ever further into her.

  That boy’s fingers were back, as well, fumbling at the belt that hung from her hips, trembling as they tried to concentrate despite the rise in his trousers screaming for him to hurry. That boy’s fingers had only ever shown up once before. Only ever with her. But there was no avoiding it; he would have to look to see what he was doing, just like he had then.

  And when he opened his eyes, that boy was gone.

  So was Anielle.

  Straddling him was Imone, the woman they called the Houndmistress, eyes wide, grin wide, throat slit open in a bright red slash, a river of blood pouring down her breasts, slithering over her belly to stain the fingers that trembled terribly and pulled away.

  He shut his eyes again. Opened them once more.

  Imone was gone.

  And so was the boy.

  “I can’t,” he whispered into her mouth.

  She pressed her lips a little closer, shut her eyes a little tighter, gave a gentle moan as an answer, and pretended she couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t lie to each other—never had been able to—but they could deny. They could pretend.

  Or she could, anyway. He had to pull away and mouth a silent apology to her as she looked down at him. No anger in her stare. She had known this was going to happen, even if she pretended she couldn’t have. She was just sad that he couldn’t have, as well.

  “You shouldn’t have come back, Ramaniel,” she whispered.

  “I hadn’t planned on seeing you.”

  “Do you seriously think I’m concerned for me?” she asked. “Were you entertaining fantasies of me sitting by my window, waiting for you to come back?”

  He shook his head.

  “I was happy when you left,” she said. “I knew something was going to kill you if you stayed—it was either going to be the Houndmistress’s supporters or it was going to be yourself. When you disappeared, I
knew you’d at least die far away and I’d be able to tell myself I couldn’t have done anything to stop it.

  “But you don’t get to come back and act like things have changed, Ramaniel,” she said, rising off of him. “You and me, we scarred this city when we were done. You coming back is just putting a knife back in that old wound. You don’t get to choose to stay out of it. Not after what you did here.”

  “Like I said, this is just a one-time favor,” Denaos replied. “When I’m done, I’ll be gone forever.”

  “You were supposed to be gone forever last time,” she said, walking to the edge of the roof. “And you know that there are no one-time favors when it comes to the Jackals. You’re a veteran and you came back during a war. You really think they’re going to let you sit this one out?”

  “They aren’t going to do to me what they did back then,” he protested, clambering to his feet. “This isn’t going to change who I am.”

  “That’s why you shouldn’t have come back.”

  He knew, again, that he should have done something. He should have rushed her, stopped her before she could leap off the roof. But he didn’t. And when he looked down off the edge, she wasn’t there. Nothing below but shadows and a breeze.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE LOW ROAD

  Lenk was ten when he drank his first ale at a harvest festival. Mere moments after that, he had met his first alcoholic in the form of a widower who traded his barn for a barrel. And while he would have more ale and meet more drunkards during the years that followed, he had always remembered that festival when he had staggered home drunk and been given an earful from his grandfather.

  “Some men live at the bottom of a tankard,” Grandfather had said, “and down there, it’s dark and cold and quiet. A man hears nothing, sees nothing, and feels nothing.”