“They were slow,” she negated softly. “They underestimated us.”
“Three strikes, Squirrel.” Cur remained the only living person who had ever called her by that nickname with no ridicule or mockery. It reminded her of the way Jesan had called her his night bird. “You killed two men and crippled another in three strikes.”
“They were slow. And they had weapons. I could not have done it without taking that knife.”
“No. You were… you blurred. I saw the first hit—I mean I did not see.”
“Heh. Neither did he afterward.” That should have gotten a sharp laugh.
Cur’s throat worked convulsively, and for the first time Sequa saw his fear. Fascinating and a little terrifying in itself… he feared her? She had acknowledged long since both to herself and to him that he was the superior hand-to-hand fighter. If they fought, she would lose.
Testing it, she stepped toward him, and he drew back against the wall.
She only just froze her lips before the smile started. “What has you quivering like a virgin whore, Cur? My speed is my savior. I have been away for how many Measures of the Dance? The seasons have spun through three times since last we spoke. Foolish to assume you know me enough to see all changes.”
“You did not look… “
His light eyes rose to catch her gaze. He was afraid, certainly, afraid of her and afraid for her.
“You did not look mortal.” He shook his head. "You always healed fast but now? Not one full cycle of the Goddess, not one full Turn ago you had a deep wound in your shoulder. I saw it. Where is it now?" The fear in his eyes became desperate.
Nascent high humor drained away as his words reached in and shaved the skin from her heart. She wanted—needed—to mock it back at him but the flippancy died on her lips.
Since she had returned here, something had not been right. In her, around her. Something deep and real and strange all at once. Something to do with this whole mess. Something to do with death and dancing.
Here in this cramped room, reeking of blood, with her only ally in the world twitching in fear, she could almost see the shape of it across her mind’s eye. It looked like the shadow of feathers on a wall and gore on the stones of the street. It looked like a pattern in fallen leaves and the turned dirt of a grave. It looked—
An abrupt knock on the door jarred her physically out of her reverie. The sequence faltered but the path it cut in her mind remained. Pieces dangled before her, their importance unclear. She would search for them later. Cur jumped, looked to her for permission and then unhooked the strap keeping it closed. It swung open on Parri, looking grim.
One glance at her face and he went white again around the lips. Caused probably by the blood; she had managed only to partially cleanse herself. It had started to cake and dry against the skin of her neck. Annoyed that her thoughts had been snapped like a dry twig, Sequa twisted her mouth into a smile. She must have looked like a harlequin of death, and he jerked back a step.
“Anem asks for you, Champion,” he said. “And only you.” He glanced at Cur without hostility. The taller man nodded and sat down against the wall.
Sequa tossed down the length of cloth and stepped into the corridor. Without her asking, Parri closed the door and took up a guard position in front of it. Sequa looked at him a moment, straight in the eyes, to show respect, and nodded. He gestured down the corridor, but she hardly needed it.
As she walked away, she heard him mutter under his breath “And what’s that awful smell?”
The internal walls, made of thin wood and lathe, meant she heard Anem’s voice clearly even now, three doors further down.
“… you did not think.”
“Of, of, that? No, why—” The sly fat man spluttered.
“You did not think.” Anem’s voice had gone down, lower and quieter. As intimidation went the technique conveyed more rage than shrieking. “Why, exactly—please explain—would I be working to prepare that prisoner a solitary cell and then send him to you unannounced to be left unprotected?”
“I thought… “
“Stop saying that. You did not think.”
Sequa cracked open the door and slid inside silently. As she suspected, the fat man had with his back her, Anem sitting at a desk in the center of the cramped room. The Commander, Goddess bless, did not even twitch when Sequa entered.
Rolls of sweaty flesh bulged from under the man’s collar, and the rank smell that filled the room was enough to drown for a moment the blood scent she carried with her.
“They brought him here and told me to take him. It seemed like a message. I th—”
Sequa stepped close enough she could have licked the back of his neck and interrupted him on a hiss. “The Commander asked you not to say that.”
His whole body went slack, and he wobbled on his feet. Sequa took a gliding step back in case he passed out.
Anem looked her up and down. “It’s lucky you weren’t in your armor. It would have been badly marred. You will have to burn that arming vest.” She tossed Sequa a new cloth, cleaner and softer than the others.
Sequa shrugged, stepping around the fat man as though around a pillar in her way. The briefest flash of urine drifted up under the sweat and blood.
“It’s the scraping it off my back that will be the problem. It went down my collar.”
Anem looked at the fat man and made a dismissing gesture. “Go. Clean yourself up. Do as I ordered you. Do it perfectly. Or I’ll send her to speak to you about it.”
After he left, Sequa sat down on a stool quite close to Anem and continued to scrub the now dried blood from her face. It rained down in rough flakes, coating her legs and the floorboards in dark spots.
The older woman leaned in and spoke softly. “I know all who did this, given the faces I did not see as I rushed over here. Faces that I see now. Two were missing at the entrance, both righteous men. They are not from our…family.”
Not Children of Home, she meant.
“I don’t blame them,” Sequa said from under the muffling cloth. “I would be righteously angry as well, if I thought Cur guilty.” She pulled the cloth away and met Anem’s eyes. “But they are wrong.”
“I still wonder how you know that.”
“I wonder that too, but—well—I do know it.”
“Have you yet had thought about how you mean to prove it?”
Sequa held out her right hand, seeing the life of a man cracking and spalling off her skin as she clenched it once, palm up. Again.
“While Cur is locked in here, safely alone…there will be another death.”
“Another? The same way?”
“Yes. As the Goddess returns to Her Fullness, another boy-child will be thrown to his death.” Sequa took a deep breath. The question she could not answer would come now.
Anem shocked her instead. “I hope you are wrong,” she said simply.
“It will clear his name, and then we can be out,” Sequa muttered.
They looked each other in the eye, measuring and calculating. Anem sniffed, and a slow realization crossed over her gaze.
“Oh, Sequa… oh, how exactly did you get inside here? I know you were turned away at the gate.”
The small woman bared her teeth then rubbed her hand across her eyes. “It occurs to me I may need to replace my wardrobe…and my skin if possible. Or I will never be able to enter a room unnoticed again.”
Anem did not laugh in her face, kindly. “There is a bathhouse my people use, near the Temple close. I will send word for you to have a private room there. You can go make use of it anytime. Now, even.” She described the location in a few swift words.
“Will Cur be—”
“I’m bringing him back to the Quarters. He’ll stay there under my eye. It makes things more difficult but less…uncertain.”
“Thank you.”
Shaking her head, Anem opened her own hand palm up on the desk. “I pray you are wrong, for it eases my burden. But if you are right… I will need y
our full attention. Any distraction I can remove…”
“You could just let us leave.”
Sequa bowed again and left the room, leaving Anem to her laughter. She headed for a hot bath and a down to the bone scrubbing.
Chapter 6
Sequa had managed to get the blood and stink out of her leathers by dint of a scouring so lengthy they were now at least a shade lighter in color. She had replaced her veils, tunic, and leggings in a few swift passes through the clothing district before braving the Atharian cobbler again to explain what had happened to her beautiful new shoes.
She’d taken the fearful, good-natured scolding humbly and been equally humbled when he produced a new pair as if by magic.
“These are different, tighter at the toe and bridge of the foot, as we discussed. If you dislike that, tell me on the moment and I’ll change the third pair back.” He smiled then, teeth very white and shapely in his dark face.
His dark skin made him look like a Noble, and Sequa could not help but want to defer a little to anyone so visibly not Peasant-born. Barely Merchant class by his birth, he must know by now how to make good use of the natural tendency of her people to defer to those with darker skin. A wonder more Athari had not set up inside the borders and made use of that prejudice.
They made idle conversation and drank sweet tea for a little while, Sequa revelling in her few moments of peace and rest. He had tucked the ruined pair into his little workroom, declaring that he might be able to salvage them as a fighting spare. Before she left, she showered him with more gold.
A cleric waited on the street outside the shop when she emerged into the late Godslight, well wrapped in her new veils.
Since the unsettling conversation on the roof of the Temple, Sequa had avoided service there and at any temple or shrine. What formal obeisance she gave the Gods had been swift and cursory, a few pieces of fruit and eggs left for the Great Good Goddess on a roadside shrine, the discarded feather of a raptor burnt in the Father’s eternal flame near the north gate. Twice before she had spotted high clerics of the Father in their bright saffron robes on the street of her lodgings. Clearly the Voice of the God sought her. They had the good manners not to actually come into the building, instead lying in wait at a nearby ale house, so her proprietor still had no idea of her identity. He seemed to think her a young man, in fact. Of course, that meant as long as she came and went by the window, she was safe from any socially and religiously uncomfortable meetings. The uncertainty came from how long the living avatar of the Great God would put up with being thwarted by a former slave, but she didn’t think he would reveal her in the process.
He must be getting desperate to have them standing out in the open like this. Sequa turned sharply left, away from the lurking figure and jumped up to grab a window sill on the next floor, ready and willing to go straight up the side of the building if she had to.
“Champion!” The cleric called in a woman’s voice; unusual. Few women came to the service of the Father; fewer men stood under the hand of the Great Good Goddess in white. “You must come, you must!”
Her voice, young and on the edge of panic, made Sequa release the sill to drop back down to the ground. Despite the heat of the God, she shivered with the woman’s next words.
“There has been another… a boy is dead. The Shadow, the Voice, they beseech you attend. Please, Champion.”
Sequa nodded and followed the girl all the way to the north end of the city, to a private park attached to a Noble’s house.
Iron Guards cordoned off the entrance, held back a gaggle of barefaced Nobles, men and women both. Parri stood still and stolid, blocking the path of an angry man and a weeping woman, both dressed richly and lightly in the sight of the God.
Skittering along the edge of the wall, Sequa abandoned her companion and slipped into the garden unmarked.
The child’s corpse lay already partly obscured by drifting leaves; a rich, red blanket to soften his grave. Sequa crouched near his head, looking for signs.
His dark hair, cut unusually short, matted now with darker blood. Drying, sticky, and thick. A few bloated flies still clung to the strands, bellies pumped full of liquid. Bone poked through the skin of the near arm, white also clotted with red, broken when he hit the ground, when the heart still beat. He had likely not felt any pain; the skull had already been crushed by the impact. Her experienced eyes picked out a shattered hip, ribs, the long bone of one leg.
Too many. Too many bones broken.
The shadow of the tree he had been climbing had shifted to partially cover him. She looked up, judging. The tree rose high, older than the city that had built up around it, older than the wall that now encased that side of the estate. It soared up and up, the trunk sturdy and gnarled, the branches thick. A tree made for climbing. She could see among the thinning foliage the remains of more than one redoubt nestled against the wood. Imaginary castles in the sky. This boy and his older siblings, his friends, had probably pretended to be Hawk-blood changelings, soaring the breezes below.
Until she had become a Runner, Sequa had lived in a vertical world of stairs and rooftops, learned the way angle and distance changed a fall. Learned when you could safely hit a wall and rebound because of a slight cant and when you would slide to your death. Learned to judge exactly where you would touch down on the paving stones and dirt… or where to drop the body of your prey.
He had landed several body lengths from the base of the tree, on a flat angle.
This boy had been thrown to his death.
So the killer had been up at the top of the tree with him before he died. No one, not even a child, could have avoided seeing someone that close if they had been there before. So perhaps they had climbed up after him?
The ground under the tree seemed mostly wet dirt. The only tracks came from the boy’s bare feet. Nothing else, on any side. No other trees or buildings or fences anywhere close to ancient one. The wall stood a good distance away from the tree; she couldn’t have made the jump. But someone must have. No other way they could have been in that tree to hurl a child to his death.
Sequa stalked back to the body and stepped in closer, trying to avoid the cast-off spray with her new shoes. Children of Home considered it unlucky to blood combat gear with another’s kill. She looked closer, past the injuries, past the broken meat of the body.
Tears at the shoulder of his embroidered tunic, three, four. Small, straight tears at about the point you would grip a boy this size to pitch him headlong from the top of a tree. She sidled down a pace, and saw matching tears on his hose. Rocking back on her heels her hands flexed, miming the throw.
The father’s voice got louder, higher, behind her. Hysterical. Parri’s deeper rumble lost ground. She had very little time before this Noble would latch onto the closest target for his rage. Her boot knife she kept sharp enough to slice even that fine cloth easily. She hacked the parts containing the cuts free, expecting to see bruises on the skin.
No bruises. Blood. Four little pin pricks of blood. Something shuddered and squirmed in the turned earth of her mind. A needle stiletto left such marks. The thin blades stabbed deep and snapped off against the skin. Experts’ tools, they needed a sure hand and intimate knowledge of the points of the body that could be compromised by such a tiny obstruction. Sequa herself had never had the fine control to use them consistently and judged them not worth the expense.
Needle stiletto but not? No metal left behind. No Child would use eight of them to kill with. And none of the marks were in a good place to kill with that weapon.
It should have troubled her more to be hunched over this child’s corpse, inhaling the blood-scent of his cracked skull, looking at the glistening tissue revealed. It should have bothered her to see the pool of blood mixed with cast off leaves. A downy, white feather floated down over her shoulder and landed in the blood, melting to red.
She felt elation instead. Here lay Cur’s absolution, her own freedom from her vow and the first thread she had to g
rasp that contained more than just vague feelings of unease. Here lay in blood and death the first sign of agency in the pattern. These cuts did not come from falling, but from being thrown. That it seemed impossible anyone could have been there to throw the boy remained merely a detail.
Sequa tucked the scraps of cloth into her belt pouch and stepped over the body, heading straight for the exit, trailed by the sounds of grief.
~ * ~
“I’m not sure this proves anything.” Anem toyed with the hunks of cloth. “Most people—well, everyone—will not even know what this means.”
Sequa placed both hands palm down on the desktop and leaned into the older woman. “You know.” Still veiled, having come in from the roof door, her eyes narrow.
“Yes,” Anem sighed. “And I am widely considered now to be in league with you in some manner.”
“In league? What are we planning?” asked Sequa, momentarily distracted by the novelty of the idea. That turned-earth feeling came again. Well, perhaps that’s not a bad thought.
“I have no idea. But the fact that you traipse in here, and into the Temple, at will is making people believe I planned to have you disrupt the hanging. Since they will not criticize the avatars, that leaves me.” Anem eyed her with a certain amount of distaste.
“I suppose it did not help when the Voice drew me to dance.”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Give me Cur, and we will be gone. He did not do this. He could not have.” Let me be gone from this place, this enticing, horrific city. Let me be gone from the presence of the Gods. I spend too much time with them now.
“He did not do this. He did not kill this boy.”
Sequa straightened. “You will play that game?”
“This is no game, Sequa. I agree, Cur cannot be held to this death. But you provide me with nothing to say he could not have killed the others.”
“His own words…” she stopped. Rage choked her throat, pulled her back up straight, hands down. Her lovely new sticks, no longer shiny and unmarred, pressed against her spine… One hand…
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