by Matthew Ward
“I believe that she believes it.” He raised his voice to a parade ground roar. “Elbow up, lad! Move like you’ve a purpose! Sorry, where was I?”
[[Lady Reveque’s disapproval.]]
He stared at the house, barely visible through the trees. “How could I forget?”
Even in the riverside’s seclusion, said disapproval loomed like a shadow. Sidara wasn’t a problem. She’d embraced Anastacia at first sight – much to the latter’s obvious discomfort, and Kurkas’ amusement. But the simple truth was that even without Anastacia offering forbidden tutelage – which she so far had not – they’d already invited Sidara to deceit. Fortunately, Constans had been confined to the house as punishment for transgressions earlier that morning, so he at least remained free of conspiracy. How that was to be managed on other days, Kurkas wasn’t sure.
A sharp crack drew his attention back to the fight. A late parry sent Sidara scrambling away in panic.
“What did I tell you?” roared Kurkas. “Be faster!”
She shot him a look of pure poison, but the next parry was faster. The thrust that followed sent Altiris reeling for the first time that morning. Teeth clenched and face grim with satisfaction, Sidara pursued, the singlestick a blur. Anastacia’s hollow laughter danced beneath the trees.
“That’s it, girl!” shouted Kurkas. “Put him in his place!”
The sticks clashed, once, twice. Altiris’ stick went wide. With a cry of pure, angry delight, Sidara lunged, the point of her singlestick against Altiris’ chest.
As she did, Altiris locked his free hand around her wrist, and hooked a heel behind her ankle. Triumph spiralling into alarm, she fell onto churned leaves and muddied grass. Altiris kicked away her stick and set his own at her throat.
“Do you yield, milady Reveque?”
Like his earlier bow, Altiris’ attempt at a noble’s clipped accent didn’t quite pass muster. Nor did he take proper note of the reddening of Sidara’s cheeks, or the murderous cast to her brow.
Kurkas sighed. “Now we’ve trouble.”
He started towards the pair. Before he’d taken a second step, Sidara lashed out her foot.
“Hey!” Altiris leapt back, sparing his shin a painful encounter.
Sidara sprang to her feet. Face thunderous, she grabbed at the lad’s singlestick. “You worthless, cheating southwealder!”
Altiris jerked the weapon out of reach, and earned a stinging slap across the cheek for his troubles.
“Oi! Enough!” Kurkas stepped between them. “Yes, he cheated. But what do you think we’re doing here? Playing a game?”
Sidara glared. Blue eyes flickered gold, and regained their normal colour. Kurkas pretended not to notice, but his certainty slipped a notch.
Sidara shifted her gaze to the ground. “No, captain.”
“Go on, over there.” Kurkas pointed towards the birch. “Clear your head and we’ll go again.”
She stalked off. Kurkas waited until she was out of earshot and cuffed Altiris about the head.
“Ow!”
“If you’re trying to impress her, this ain’t the way.”
“I’m just doing what you told me.”
The defence was too pat, too rote. Given the chasm in rank and status – to say nothing of the fact that Sidara was a pretty enough thing, even to Kurkas’ jaded and disinterested eye – it would have been stranger if Altiris didn’t want to impress her. And she’d saved him from the Raven’s clutches. Gratitude shaded into humiliation so easily, and humiliation in turn invited competition.
“Uh-uh. I told you to spar with her, not embarrass her.”
Kurkas glanced towards the birch. Sidara and Anastacia were deep in conversation, the former with angry hand outflung at Altiris. Anastacia set a hand on the girl’s shoulder and leaned in, her frozen lips to Sidara’s ear.
“You’re a good lad,” said Kurkas. “I ain’t forgotten what you did for Lord Trelan, but rein it in. Or Sidara gets to watch while you and I spar. We clear on that?”
Altiris winced. “Yes, captain.”
Kurkas patted him on the back. “Good lad. I’m not telling you to let her win, mind. Lessons are lessons.” He raised his voice. “Right! Let’s try that again.”
Sidara, composure restored, raised the singlestick in mock-salute and started out from the birch. Altiris went to meet her.
From the first exchange, Kurkas knew something was wrong. It wasn’t just that Altiris was more hesitant – overcompensation, no doubt – and Sidara more aggressive. No, the clincher was Anastacia’s contented pose, one shoulder propped against the birch and her chin upraised in amusement.
Altiris feinted left and attacked right. Sidara stepped beyond its arc. Her back to the trees, and Altiris’ to the river, she raised her stick in fresh salute.
“Do you yield, southwealder?”
Altiris halted mid-swing, brow creasing in puzzlement. “Yield? I’m not beaten.”
Sidara clasped her hands together. Sunlight blazed along the riverbank, the girl a flickering shadow at its heart. Kurkas yelped and twisted away. Altiris’ startled cry ended in the slap-crash of a body hitting water. Sidara’s laughter danced along behind, chased on by Anastacia’s soft, sardonic applause. Kurkas glowered at one, then the other. He felt no surprise. In hindsight, all was inevitable.
“I—” Altiris broke off in a chorus of gargled splutters. “I can’t swim!”
Chastisement falling silent on his lips, Kurkas ran for the riverside.
Sidara beat him there. Mirth soured as the boy fought a flailing battle to stay afloat, and lost by degrees. “Help him!”
“Me?” snapped Kurkas. The backwash of magic had flung Altiris into the centre of the weed-choked channel, beyond the reach of helping hand or extended singlestick. “Just how well do you think I swim with one arm?”
Her face fell further, the horror so complete that Kurkas – who seldom entered untamed waters, but was entirely capable when he did – experienced a twinge of guilt at his deception.
Expression hardening, Sidara cast aside her singlestick, tore off her boots and gambeson, and dived into the river. She reached Altiris just as his head slipped under the surface for the third time. One arm crooked under his armpits and his head against hers, she kicked furiously for the bank.
Kurkas helped her hoist the lad to safety. As Sidara clambered up after, Altiris retched a stream of greenish water onto the mud, and collapsed, half-sitting, half-lying while his chest shuddered.
Kurkas crouched beside him. “You all right, lad?”
Altiris nodded, coughed, and nodded a second – more convincing – time.
“Good.”
Kurkas clapped him on the shoulder and stepped back to regard the slimy, sodden pair. “Well, well, well. Lessons all round today. About how there’s always someone ready to cheat harder…” He shifted his gaze from Altiris to Sidara. “… to the perils of wielding a weapon you don’t understand.”
He glanced at Anastacia, who made no more effort to involve herself in aftermath than event. Had she meant it this way? Proof that Sidara needed control over her magic if tragedies were to be avoided? Certainly she’d claim that as her goal. Lessons all around, save for Anastacia alone… and maybe for him as well, if he didn’t stop expecting better of her.
Sidara glared, but aristocratic hauteur lay beyond the reach of one who resembled a bedraggled rusalka come to drag her victim into the weed-strewn depths. “I didn’t mean for—”
“I said you’d good instincts,” said Kurkas. “They tell you to do this, or warn you off?”
Her deepening scowl gave all the answer needed. Kurkas was glad, for he wasn’t sure what he’d have done had she argued the point. Between her family’s influence and what the girl herself was capable of? Well, that could turn all kinds of nasty. Out of his bloody depth, as usual, and his only anchor a plant pot of uncertain motivation. No life for an honest soldier.
Away through the trees, Abbeyfields’ bell chimed noon, soon joined by the cacophony of
others sweeping across the city. A reminder of challenges to come, and other depths in which to drown.
“I reckon we’re done for the day,” said Kurkas. “Lady Reveque, perhaps you might see to it that the guardsman is given a bath and a change of clothes? Doesn’t do for a phoenix to be walking the streets looking like that.”
She glanced at Altiris and winced. “Hawkin will see to it. I’ll ask her.”
Altiris squelched to his feet. “I thought I was coming with you. Watching your back.”
“In that state?” Kurkas replied. “I don’t think so.”
[[Watching your back?]] Anastacia’s voice, close at his shoulder without warning, set his heart skipping. [[Doing what, exactly?]]
“Never you mind.”
[[I could help.]] Innocence crowded the words.
A tempting offer, had he trusted her. “Reckon I’ve had enough of your help today.” He offered Sidara a shallow bow. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Think on what you’ve learned this morning, for all our sakes.”
Twenty-Nine
Kurkas had never known the mists so thick, nor the air so chill. As ever, there were more eyes in the alleyways than on the streets proper, but they at least offered little concern. Shorn of phoenix tabard and armour, Kurkas was just another battered soul wandering beneath the jettied eaves.
He told himself the cold kept the vranakin at bay – the darkened streets were almost deserted of all save the vaporous etravia – but recognised the sophistry of his silent claims. The sunlit city was holding its breath, Dregmeet was waiting. Waiting uneasily, as evidenced by pale, bluish flames flickering at stoop and windowsill. Bowls of ghostfire; burning fleenroot, duskhazel and silver dust to keep the dead from breaching sanctity of hearth and home. A custom normally observed at Midwintertide, when wronged cyraeths walked the Living Realm for a single, vengeful night. Except Midwintertide was a night of cheer, of shed sorrows cast to the flames. Not this.
More concerning was that streets Kurkas knew by heart felt wrong – sometimes shorter by a dozen paces, or longer by twice the tally. The familiar landmarks of tavern signs, factory gates, graffitied statues and clock towers were nowhere to be seen, or else in places at odds with memory. Heart-wrenching sobs reminded Kurkas that more than etravia walked the mists.
Should’ve brought the plant pot.
He pressed on, blaming the mists for senses awry, all the while knowing it was something more. Dregmeet, always tottering on Otherworld’s boundary, had slipped its moorings. The muffled toll of bells brought to mind old nursery rhymes that seldom ended well for the lone, curious traveller. Tales of streets twisting back on themselves, the passage of days and nights jumbled as the sunlit world slipped away and time twisted upon itself beneath the dominion of Raven’s Law. Eeriest of all was the occasional glimpse of a kraikon, frozen and lifeless as the world swirled away around it, its spark of magic suppressed by the mists.
All told, Kurkas’ nerves were jangling by the time he slipped down into the Brocktree slums. They lent force to both voice and bunched fist as he hammered on peeling green paintwork.
“Come on, Kolly.” He thumped the door again. “It’s horrible out here.”
The door opened a crack. Sweet duskhazel scent wafted out. “Vlad?” Koldra swore under his breath. “You can’t be here.”
“So open up before someone takes an interest?”
The door fell open, revealing a desperately unhappy Koldra. Permanently disappointed, he’d resembled a man of middle age long before his thirtieth year, two decades ago.
He hurried the door shut behind Kurkas. “What do you want?”
Kurkas glanced around the decaying room, all threadbare furniture and peeling wallpaper – a twin to the one in which he’d grown up. All it missed was his mother sitting beside the fire, sifting the day’s bounty, working out what to keep and what to pass on as the Parliament’s tribute. Half the keelies on Dower Street had answered to her. Blood kin or crow-cousin, they’d feared the lash of her tongue and the strike of her fist.
Most had died of sickness or quarrel long before Kurkas had fled the sunken streets. Niarla, with her crooked knife and thirst for rotgut brandy. Travor, buried alive as a groom of the grave for having the nerve to withhold tribute, and lacking the wit to conceal the theft. Sedvin, as silver-tongued a lad as any Kurkas had tumbled with, rotted inside-out by poison – the price of stealing from the wrong manor. Kurkas’ broken heart had never quite mended right, and not for want of trying.
Far as he knew, Koldra was the last of them. Not a mate, exactly – the old adage about not being able to pick your family was never truer than in Dregmeet, where everyone was family, even when you were stealing from them – but as close as otherwise could be. Spoils shared and throats cut in good company was the best you could hope for. More like the army than most folk wanted to believe. The only friends Kurkas counted were Lord Akadra, insofar as the gap in status allowed, and maybe – maybe – the plant pot. Revekah Halvor too, had she lived. After all, she was the reason he wore the phoenix.
“You know what I want,” said Kurkas. “The Crowmarket’s still holding southwealders. Where?”
“No one’s talking. Not since Westernport. Not to me.”
Same old Koldra. Not quite truth, but not quite a lie either. “Maybe, but I know that you know. Your keelies hear plenty they shouldn’t, plying trade along Lacewalk and Nut Lane.”
Not that there’d be work for them now. Hard to imagine bought and borrowed passion faring well on the mist-drowned streets. Then again, there was no accounting for taste.
“Sorry, Vlad, can’t help. Not this time. If our cousins find out? I’ll be floating at the docks by morning.”
Our cousins. A long time in the past. Kurkas set hand on his sword. “Might still happen.”
Koldra scowled. “You’d do that? To me?”
Kurkas set a purse on the sagging table. “Fifteen crowns. Same as before.”
“Why do you care? Trelan’s left the city. Ain’t like he’s riding you on this.”
Kurkas stifled a sigh. Fifteen crowns was more than a hearthguard earned in a year. Ample compensation for the information he sought. Koldra seemed somehow smaller and pettier each time they spoke. Would he have been any better, had he stayed? “That’s my business.”
“Hah! Don’t tell me you’ve come over all noble. Doesn’t suit you, Vlad.”
“Consider it a debt. Last year someone went to the fire to save my life. Sure as stone she’d be here in my place otherwise. And you, Kolly old son, would be on your knees begging her to let up on you. Her loss is your gain.” He reached for the purse. “Still, if you want no part of it—”
“Wait!” Koldra licked his lips. “I’ll need more. Thirty. Debts. You know how it is.”
“Then you’ll have to wait for the rest until I know your information’s good.” And until he’d chance to leverage the rest out of the safe at Stonecrest. Lord Trelan would understand.
“Don’t trust me?”
“Kolly, back when we were both rassophores you once cracked me over the head and left me for the constabulary while you scurried off with my take. Six months I spent in that cell, knee-deep in salt water every time the tide washed in. Still be there if the army hadn’t been desperate. So I reckon it’s a bit late to be bawling about trust.”
“You have it on you?”
“Guess you’ll have to take my word.”
“My cousin’s, or the high and mighty captain?”
“Whichever you like,” said Kurkas. “So long as you tell me.”
“How about I show you?”
He snorted. “You want to go out in that lot?”
“There’s no danger, not to loyal cousins.”
“I ain’t so sure. The streets are all messed up. More than the streets. Reckon the old stories are coming true.”
“That’s why there’s no danger,” said Koldra. “Otherworld is rising. The Crowmarket is rising with it. No more hiding in the shadows. No more being hu
nted by the Council. An end to fat priests hoarding wealth behind church doors.”
Kurkas stifled a grimace. “Yeah, yeah. Gold crowns falling like rain and eternal life for those deemed worthy. I know the stories. Kids’ stuff, Kolly. Don’t you ever wonder about the truth?”
“That is the truth,” Koldra replied, eyes shining. “The Raven has returned to us.”
Kurkas’ gut shifted. Koldra didn’t just believe old tales were coming true – he welcomed the idea. But what else was there in Dregmeet? Or anywhere else, for that matter? Raven’s Eyes, but what else did the Republic operate on except the hope that one day old debts would come due, and old wrongs be righted? Why else did common folk tolerate the Council, save out of hope that their children might one day sit atop the pile and smother others in the dirt?
More than ever, Kurkas wished he’d shared his worries with Lord Trelan. But the business with Altiris? Then the news from Ahrad? The chance had slipped away. Whether Koldra’s lead panned out or not, the Council had to know, which meant Kurkas had to tell them – even if there was little chance they’d believe.
No life for an honest soldier.
“The Raven, eh?” he said. “Say hello for me, would you? But first, show me what I came to see.”
The deeper into Dregmeet they trod, the worse things became. The air grew heavy with the musty scent of yesterdays. Ravens crowded rooftop and lintel. Whenever they took wing, they left smoky, vaporous trails.
Soon, the streets were empty of all save etravia. The ghosts no longer drifted without purpose, but filed along the narrow roadways in great spectral columns, altering course only to avoid the flickering blue-white flames. Kurkas couldn’t guess where they were headed, but then he himself was thoroughly lost, even though every nook and cranny, every shortcut and refuge, had been burned into his brain since his earliest years.
But worst of all was the weeping. It rose and fell with the billow of mist, lost and forlorn, at times everywhere and nowhere. Kurkas’ fingers ached, locked tight about his sword’s hilt.
“Better not be leading me into a prizrak nest, Kolly,” he muttered.