Dark the Dreamer's Shadow

by Jennifer Bresnick

  He really would do it. The Siheldi was promising him death, but he already expected to be dead. These moments, as confusing and painful as they were, seemed like nothing more than an unanticipated bonus. Maybe that’s why he felt so calm, he thought as he did his best to shift his weight onto his shoulders. One sharp arch of his back and he would rip the delicate wound wide open. One quick movement and he would never see the sun again.

  Your neneckt knows your value better than you do, the Siheldi said. You are a man hunted by many, Arran Swinn. But few know what you really are. If they did, they would not pursue you. They would fear you.

  “Like you fear me?” he guessed.

  The Siheldi hissed like a spitting cat, which Arran supposed passed as laughter in such a harsh and hostile place. Those with power need not know such things.

  “But my people should be afraid?”

  If they are wise. Ask your friend Faidal why the sea king sleeps uneasy, and the iron men tremble in their beds. Ask her why your mother cries inside your dreams.

  “I don’t understand.”

  The Siheldi did not reply, but a small skin of water landed near his feet and bounced into the nested blankets around his knees. It was followed by the ear-splitting shriek of stone as the boulder rolled over him, sealing him back into velvety silence.

  Arran sank back to the ground, feeling certain he was going to throw up again. The calmness might have just been an illusion, because his heart was howling at furious speed and he was fairly sure his head was going to burst. He didn’t want to move an inch ever again – he just wanted to think about what had just happened. He wanted to sleep, and not think at all. But his dry mouth had only gotten worse during the unhelpful exchange, and he needed the water.

  He hoped it was water, he thought as he tried to work the container closer to his hand without straining himself. Poison seemed like a very roundabout way of killing him. The Siheldi had said it wanted him alive – but also that he wasn’t going to live. Was he to be some kind of experiment, then? Some caged animal in a menagerie intended only for study and observation until he collapsed into a fatal fever on his own?

  It would happen soon enough, whether they wanted it to or not. He only had to wait for it. At some point in the blind timelessness, he would close his eyes to sleep. At some point, he simply wouldn’t wake up again, and it would all be over. He could feel it approaching. He knew he shouldn’t fight it. It would do him no good in the end.

  He was so cold and so thirsty, even after he drained the waterskin dry, alone in a grave where no one would ever find him, dead already to anyone who might have cared. At some point, he wouldn’t care either. He only had to wait.

  ***

  Genedi had always enjoyed watching the sun rise in Niheba, heaving itself up from under the sea like a whale breaching to splash on the surface with the pure joy of being alive. The best way to see it was from the top of one of the high towers of Tiaraku’s palace, where nothing could obstruct the clear, clean bowl of the warming sky. It took a lot of effort to get there – stairs did not come cheaply when one was unused to the creaking joints and uncooperative, swinging weight of even the slimmest, most fragile human shell – but if he was going to be forced onto the land for any length of time, he was going to enjoy himself.

  Dawn was his favorite part of the day. No one but human servants and human merchants were abroad at such an hour, and Genedi could ignore those like he ignored the ants that scuttled beneath his feet. He didn’t dislike them, nor did he actively hate them, as some of his kind had taken to doing. They just weren’t interesting enough, on the whole, for him to pay much attention.

  As one of the Tiaraku’s liaisons with the land-dwelling populace, however, he did occasionally have to consider them as legitimate residents of his island, no matter how irritating. The position was not a desirable one, nor one he had ever coveted. But Genedi was not a particularly desirable personage in Tiaraku’s new world, and his options were few. As an offshoot of the lowly, mercantile Bluegills, he had been lucky enough to take whatever court position he could get, and he had learned to be relatively happy with it.

  Still, he started his day with the sunrise for the same reason that the wealthy ladies of Paderborn started theirs with a dip in a scented soaking tub: as a ritual act of cleansing before facing the soiling effect of other people during the long hours to come. The very thought made him spend a few extra moments letting the sun’s rays warm the awkward prison of his earthy flesh before he made his way back down the tight spiral of the tower’s steps, one hand running lightly along the smooth, curving wall as he spun around and around during his descent.

  The tower door led directly into one of the city’s main thoroughfares, which was handy enough. His first rendezvous of the morning would not be taking place on the palace grounds, and he didn’t particularly want his whereabouts known to the general public. Not everyone who flitted in and out of the gardens and between the administration rooms was interested in minding their own business. There were plenty of prying eyes scattered among the lush greenery and cloudless pools that rippled quietly with the pounding of nearby feet.

  To combat the ever-present threat of inconvenient gossip, Genedi had the habit of choosing different faces for different occasions, and today he was using one he had never used before. Catching sight of his unfamiliar features in the reflections of the water was always somewhat jarring, but he savored the little thrill of intrigue as he led his mild eyes and bulbous nose towards a highly unofficial assignation.

  “Do you have any juniper beer?” he asked a passing server at a tavern near the water’s edge.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We’re fresh out,” she replied.

  “That’s a pity. It happens quite frequently in this place. Third time this week, I reckon.”

  “I can fetch the owner for you if you have a complaint, sir,” the girl said after hesitating for a fraction of a second, his strange face making her wary.

  “I would be much obliged if you could, miss.”

  The young woman nodded and disappeared into the back, leaving Genedi to wait for some time, rubbing his fingernail absently along a deep groove in the wood.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” Agnise asked when she emerged from the kitchens, her hair done up in a kerchief and her hands wrinkly and clean from scrubbing dishes. “My girl said you had a problem.”

  “The juniper beer, Agnise,” he said. “You’re always out. And I wish you would start serving that sesame cake again. The one with the lemon blossom honey drizzled on top.”

  “Oh,” she said, sitting down. That was their private code for when she didn’t know his face, and it seemed to satisfy her. “Well, the man who sells me the honey has been on the mainland these past six months. I don’t like to buy it from anyone but him.”

  “Adventuring, is he? I wonder what he will learn.”

  “Some very interesting things, I’m sure,” she replied, undoing the kerchief and running her hands through her hair, now fading from blonde to coarse gray. “But there are plenty of stories to be had right here.”

  “I am with child to hear them,” Genedi said.

  “I thought you might be. Do you know a personage who goes by the name of Faidal?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “He’s one of yours. One of Tiaraku’s own, in fact. A Black Salt.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. A Black Salt with a very strong will for his freedom. You might even say he has an iron will,” she added, stressing the second to last word. “It has led him into all sorts of trouble.”

  “Such as?”

  “You might want to ask his new comrade, a Paderborn smuggler called Arran Swinn. They were both last seen in the company of our friend Bartolo, and neither of them has been seen again. It’s been a week at least.”

  “I see. And where are these stories originating, if I might ask?”

  “You may ask, but I won’t answer,” she replied. “A reliable compatriot gave m
e the tip. The rest is just due to digging.”

  “What is this reliable compatriot’s agenda?”

  “The same as mine,” said Agnise. “He thinks this Faidal may give up Bartolo. If Bartolo killed the smuggler from Paderborn, that’s grounds for the Guild to hold him. We haven’t been able to find any other way in.”

  Genedi sighed and flicked a speck of dirt from the table. “The Black Salts just want revenge against Tiaraku. No one will believe this Faidal creature is telling anything other than a lie. I cannot bring this to anyone of note. You don’t have any proof about the smuggler?”

  “I have some details,” she said, and he felt the corner of a piece of paper bump gently against his knee under the table. He quickly folded it into his palm and slipped it into a pocket with a practiced motion, the whole transaction taking less than the blink of an eye. “If he’s under-island, that’s your domain, not mine,” Agnise added.

  “True enough,” Genedi nodded. “I will see what I can do.”

  Agnise smiled. “Thank you. Now, will you stay and take some breakfast? I’ve got a lovely ham come from the market just this morning.”

  “I suppose I ought to, if only for the look of things,” he said. “But you know human cooking does nothing for me. Especially yours.”

  “Oh, aye,” she laughed. “I’ll bring you a double portion then.”

  A meal at Agnise’s table was ample compensation for the inconvenience of walking all the way out into the slums, and Genedi left the tavern more or less satisfied with the morning’s work. He would have to wait until he was in a private place to look at the note, but he was in no hurry. Agnise was not a frivolous person, and she would not have signaled his attention unless she thought she has something worthwhile for him, but his initial inclination was that the case was going to be a waste of his time.

  The Bluegills had never liked the Black Salts, and perhaps that’s why he was reluctant to believe that this Faidal person was of any real importance. Black Salts were notorious for being little more than thieves and fraudsters, skulking at the heels of the better tribes to snap at their scraps and leavings. He would not stake so much as a penny on the word of one, and if he was to follow up with Agnise’s cryptic assertions, he would be gambling with so much more: not only with his life, but with hers as well.

  “Would you excuse me for a moment, Poeling?” he asked his human assistant, who was doing something with the papers on his desk in an office that rarely needed any additional tidying. Genedi was a fastidious soul by nature and delegated few of his affairs to the attention of others, especially humans. He had been asked to take on the young man’s services in the spirit of unity, but he suspected that much of what Poeling did with his day was simply try to look busy.

  When the young man had gone, Genedi locked the door behind him and settled into a chair to read Agnise’s letter. He was glad to see that it was coded into neat, vertical rows of numerals. Not only was it important to keep up the Guild’s practices, but it was nice to have a puzzle to work on for a few moments.

  A novice would need a separate page, a pen, a special code book, and a great deal of patience to read the missive, but Genedi was not as young or naive as he liked his bodies to appear. Long practice had made the cypher second nature to him, even when the entire sequence had been turned inside out to add extra difficulty, as Agnise always made sure to do. She was a bit of a genius when it came to the mathematics of it, and his respect for her talent was one of the reasons he was doing his due diligence for her.

  “Oh, dear,” he murmured when he had finished reading. He scanned it again for good measure, then carefully folded the letter, placing it on his desk and pushing it away a bit, as if it was a snake that might leap to strike its venom at him. If even a fraction of the information was true, then he had been wrong to misjudge Agnise, and even more wrong to dismiss the Black Salt slave as irrelevant.

  Despite what he would like Agnise to believe, Genedi did not work for the Guild of Miners in any capacity. Nor did he really work for Tiaraku – at least, not entirely. He worked for crown of the neneckt nation, which was not the same thing. The king who sat on the throne at any given moment quite often had the best interests of his unwieldy realm in mind, but he equally often did not, and it was up to relatively anonymous ministers like Genedi to decide which was which.

  The Guild was a useful ally in the endeavor, if only to gauge the desires of the humans who had colonized the neneckt homeland. While the land-dwellers themselves held little attraction for him, he had rather a soft spot for their most famous institution. The Guild had no need to play nicely with those who crossed them, and made no pretense at it. He admired their efficiency, their complete disregard for their detractors, and the way they always paid like with like, for good or ill.

  Agnise had found a neneckt called Mikkal, a family relation of the mysterious person of interest. After some persuading, Mikkal had seen the wisdom of cooperating with Agnise, and it was his words that she had reported in the letter.

  If they were true, Mikkal’s testimony would lead Agnise and the Guild directly to Tiaraku’s enormous cache of plain pig iron that was shaped, sanded, dyed red, and delivered to eager underhanded markets on the mainland for more than ten times its actual price.

  That presented Genedi with a quandary. He knew about the counterfeiting operation, of course. Nearly anyone with half a brain and a diplomatic pass had figured it out ages ago. While he found it somewhat morally repugnant to cheat helpless peasants out of their silver and their lives, he was a practical fellow at heart. The more that Tiaraku’s wealth increased, the more his own crept upwards, too. Fastidiousness about such things had never done a politician any favors, and he had no particular desire to try bucking the trend.

  Besides, even if he hadn’t been profiting off the situation, the neneckt king was not someone to trifle with. The Black Salts had learned that lesson years ago, but it could just have easily been the Bluegills who were ravaged, destroyed, and scattered beyond the limits of the Sea Father’s sights. It could easily be the Bluegills next time.

  The choice he was about to make, therefore, wasn’t really a choice at all. He may value the Guild, and he may value Agnise as a colleague as well as a cook, but he valued his own welfare just a little bit more than any of those things.

  Agnise would have to be taken care of. Mikkal would have to be silenced, and Genedi would need to find where Faidal and Arran Swinn had gone before the Guild’s network of informants had time to spread the information where it ought not to be. Fortunately for him, there was a very simple way to accomplish all of those things without even leaving the room.

  “Poeling? Can you come here for a moment?” he called, unfolding the letter again and drawing a fresh piece of paper from his writing desk, placing the two pages side by side so he could translate the code for an uneducated reader. “I would like you to get Habur for me.”

  Genedi had finished his task and made it half way through some unrelated paperwork by the time Habur decided to grace him with his presence. The warrior was in his usual foul mood when he arrived, and had no interest in formalities like the mid-morning nibbles that were considered the bare minimum of hospitality among the neneckt, so Genedi saved the last of his favorite spiced, crispy kelp for his own enjoyment later that day. He would be in need of some consolation after betraying a woman who likely considered him a friend, and the treat would go some way towards cheering him up again.

  “What do you want?” Habur said bluntly when Poeling had shown him in. He was unused to being summoned, and Genedi was not someone who typically had enough authority to do so. Poeling must have been very persuasive.

  “Can I offer you anyth–”

  “No.”

  “Very well,” Genedi said, indicating that Habur should have a seat. He did so, dwarfing the chair as he crossed his arms and settled in.

  “Speak.”

  Genedi pushed his other papers away and placed Agnise’s letter in front of him, t
rying not to fidget with the edge of the parchment as Habur glowered in front of him.

  “As you know, I sometimes have dealing with land-dwellers who are not always interested in the peace and harmony of our great King Tiaraku’s rule.”

  “I know what your duty is. What of it?” Habur asked when Genedi paused, choosing his words carefully.

  “Sometimes I must extend the appearance of my friendship to them,” he continued slowly. “Sometimes it appears as if I am involved in their affairs, when really I am just encouraging them to be forthcoming.”

  “But you have always been a loyal servant of the great and wonderful master and would never betray him,” Habur said in a high-pitched, mocking tone. “Yes, I hear that a lot. What pile of parrotfish dung do you want me to dig you out of?”

  Genedi sighed and pushed the translated page towards him. “This one.”

  “Who sent this?” Habur asked sharply when he had finished reading. It didn’t take nearly as long as Genedi suspected it might.

  “A Guild agent called Agnise. She keeps a bar by the harbor. I think it might be beneficial if she stopped being so knowledgeable about this particular issue.”

  “And what issue is that?” Habur asked, looking sternly at him.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Genedi replied automatically. “I don’t really know anything.”

  “Like hell you don’t.”

  “I’m coming to you in good faith,” he said nervously as Habur stood up, a hand on the hilt of the ornate coral glass knife he always kept in his belt.

  “Good faith? I think there has been plenty of snooping where that nose of yours doesn’t belong.”

  “It’s my job,” Genedi protested.

  “What else do you know about Swinn?”

  “Nothing. I swear. I had never heard of him before today. Everything I know, I learned from the letter you’re holding. There is nothing more.”