Bring Down Heaven 01 - The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  “You don’t like it?” The man sneered, turning away. “Buy her yourself. Show her what a gentleman you are.”

  As a matter of fact, he wanted to do something along those lines.

  Save that his method involved more fire and ice. He could feel the power at his fingertips, burning behind his brow, singing beneath his skin. The magic inside him begged to be released, to show these heathens what it meant to cross a wizard, to show Liaja, whatever her true name was, that he could save her.

  And then he felt it: the electricity, the fluctuating temperatures, the pressure bearing down on him. He was aware of the wizards who would eagerly kill him for unleashing his magic over so trivial a matter.

  Thirty-four degrees to the east. Nine hundred and fifty-one paces in a straight line.

  And he let go of his anger. And he let the power dissipate inside him. And he sighed, let his shoulders stoop, and said only what came to mind.

  “This is horrible.”

  “This is business,” the man in the silks replied and moved to pick up the next person from the bench.

  Onstage, Liaja was being taken down. A man in a black suit emblazoned with a crest depicting a curling black cat took her gently by the arm and led her away. She never looked up to see him watching her, to see his eyes fixed impotently upon her and growing ever smaller as she vanished into the crowd. She could not see him hold his hand out, strain to reach after her, and fail to take even a step forward.

  She did not see him.

  There was small comfort in that.

  And growing ever smaller.

  A shadow fell over him suddenly. He didn’t bother looking up. There was something distinctly familiar, almost comforting, in the aura of contempt that heralded Gariath’s presence.

  “Who was that?” Gariath asked.

  “A woman,” Dreadaeleon said. “I don’t know what her name was.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh.” Dreadaeleon frowned. “Right.”

  The shadow shifted as Gariath turned to go. “I found a scent. Come.”

  “Of Miron?” Dreadaeleon asked without looking up.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Come and find out. Or you can stay here and wait until I solve all our problems again.”

  As good a reason as any to leave, the boy thought. He did desperately want to put this place behind him. He did want to forget this happened.

  But as he turned around, he felt paralyzed. There was not enough blood left for his legs to move. It all swelled in his chest.

  Gariath, at some point, became aware of this. He turned and looked at Dreadaeleon.

  “I watched her disappear,” the boy said. “And I didn’t do anything. I could have set fire to something. I could have frozen them where they stood and made off with her. But I’d have been breaking the law. So I sat here and I just watched her go.”

  Gariath said nothing. Gariath did not move. And so Dreadaeleon felt something stick in his craw and spoke in a choked whisper.

  “Should I have done something?”

  “Whatever you could have done, you didn’t.” Gariath’s voice was flat as he stalked away. “So, what’s it matter?”

  SEVEN

  THE BRASS LADY

  He couldn’t see himself in her face.

  There was too much there already. Her eyes were too full of purpose to reflect someone else’s desires. Her chin was too strong to be bent under the weight of someone else’s needs. Her lips, the enigmatic tug of a smile at the edges, were for someone else. Not him.

  And for that, Denaos was grateful.

  He felt distant as he watched her, even though she was two feet away. She was that kind of woman, though: the kind who bore a purpose too big for most men to contemplate, let alone understand. He had always felt dwarfed by her, in awe of her, of all she did. Just as he did now.

  And still, he stared. He cleared his throat. He offered a nice smile.

  “You look good.”

  His voice cracked.

  “I mean, considering.” He looked away, up to the chipped and smoke-stained stone that framed the shadowy alcove she stood in. Refuse crowded her sandaled feet. Sand hung like a shroud over her shoulders. “I remember this place being nicer, at least.

  “But you,” he said, looking at her again, “you are more beautiful than I remember. And there hasn’t been a day I haven’t remembered.” He squinted as he leaned closer. “Except it looks like a seagull shit on your head or something. Let me get that for you.”

  He withdrew a handkerchief from his belt and began scraping away the dried filth from her hair. Not a single lock moved beneath his finger. Nor did she blink as he pressed himself against her. And she continued to say nothing.

  Denaos wasn’t quite sure what he expected a brass statue to say.

  But Denaos hadn’t quite expected to see this statue. Not today, anyway. He wanted to come at night, when there were fewer people, when he could have been alone, when he could have apologized and wept and begged her for forgiveness.

  As he had begged her once before, on a cold night when she drew her last breath in his arms, her blood on his blade and a gaping wound he had torn in her throat.

  Through careful meditation, steadfast reflection, and lots and lots of alcohol, he had learned not to let his thoughts drift too far back. If they did, he would feel the shiver of that night. He would feel the warmth of her blood on his hands. He would feel the urge to scream.

  And then everyone would know. They would know everything.

  Even now, they stared. The people of the Souk would slow as they walked past and saw this pale northerner polishing her statue, sweeping refuse from her alcove. But they would do nothing more than make certain he was not defacing her.

  Perhaps they had forgotten who she was. Perhaps the younger among them weren’t quite sure what she did. But all of them could still remember her name.

  Houndmistress.

  Of the many names they gave her—Savior of Cier’Djaal, Thiefslayer, Punisher of Sin, Bitch Queen—and the many names she loathed, that was the one that stuck. It didn’t capture the entirety of her deeds: her love of the people, her love of the city, her hatred of the fashas that wanted to abuse them both.

  But the people would only remember how she stood against the Jackals, those thieves, those assassins, those thugs, and triumphed. They would remember how she and her crusaders had smoked them out of their dens and sent them running into the streets, out the gates, and into the desert.

  And they would remember when the Jackals returned.

  They would remember that cold night when the heralds everywhere lined on every street and said to every person that the Houndmistress had been murdered. The night a single stone hurled from the crowds had killed her herald. The night of the riots.

  Days later, so many buildings burned and fourteen hundred people dead, everyone knew the Jackals had returned and things were going back to the bad old days. They would remember that.

  They wouldn’t remember him, though.

  He was confident of that. He was darker when they had seen him at her side, his skin covered by time spent in the sun and patched with false pigment. He was pink and pale and northern now. His hair had been dark and glossy back then, dyed thick and groomed meticulously to fool them into thinking he was one of them. Now he had red-brown stuff growing in unruly messes out of scalp, chin, and jaw.

  That had been another man when he was in Cier’Djaal last, when he stood beside her. That was a man who had had a wife and a heart and a soul. That man vanished on the night she died and was never seen again. That man was dead.

  And only Denaos remained.

  They didn’t know him. They didn’t know his face, or his name. But they knew his deeds, as they knew hers. They knew his death, as they knew hers.

  But she had a name.

  He knelt down to the plaque upon the pedestal where her statue stood. He pulled a dagger free from his belt and meticulously began to dig every grain of sand from each
letter until he could see it, summarized in a few short letters, an afterthought of a story of a myth.

  He spoke her name.

  “Imone.”

  And he tried hard not to hate himself for doing so.

  “Who is she, anyway?”

  Lenk’s voice. Right behind him. Denaos paused, took a breath. In a single twitch, tears retreated, breath steadied, a smile returned. He turned around and saw the young man standing, arms folded over his chest, staring up at the brass lady.

  “I’ve seen little shrines of her all over the place,” Lenk said.

  “The Houndmistress,” Denaos replied. “Local heroine. It became required by law for all places of business to feature an icon of her after the work she did for the city.”

  “Huh.” Lenk shook his head. “They do things weird in the south, don’t they?”

  Denaos coughed. “Yeah.”

  Lenk responded with a curious loft of his brow. “So, uh, why were you—”

  “How long have we known each other?” Denaos interrupted.

  “About two years.”

  “And how many times have you found me hunched over in a dark, smelly corner somewhere?”

  “Well, I…”

  “And have you ever wanted to know what I was up to in any of those times?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, if you haven’t shown an interest in my hobbies before, why the hell should I tell you what this one was all about?” Denaos snapped.

  Lenk looked back at him with an expression somewhere between apology and perplexity. It was as true now as it had been then, Denaos realized: The best defense to inquiry was semi-coherent rants and accusations.

  “And where have you been this whole time, anyway?” the tall man asked. “You said you found a lead an hour ago.”

  “Sort of,” Lenk replied. “It’s more that I had an idea.”

  “That’s not the same thing as a lead. And it doesn’t take an hour to form an idea.”

  “No, but it took me an hour to find a Talanite beggar.” Lenk grinned at his companion’s befuddlement. “See, I found a lot of beggars clinging to the sides of the Souk. They’re all carrying holy symbols, begging in the name of one God or another. Most of them are for some ‘Ancaa’ God, but I finally found one begging in the name of Talanas.”

  “Miron’s a priest of Talanas,” Denaos replied, realization dawning on him.

  “A Lord Emissary of the High Church of Talanas,” Lenk replied. “Duty-bound to aid every suffering soul…”

  “With special consideration to the faithful.” Denaos’s grin grew wide. “Clever.”

  “That, my friend,” Lenk said smugly as he strode down the streets, “is why I’m the leader.”

  “You’re the leader because no one else wants to be held responsible when we’re finally caught,” Denaos replied, striding alongside him as they pushed their way back into the crowd.

  At the edge of the Souk, Lenk and Denaos found them.

  The pious beggars sat in a long row, pressed against the Harbor Wall for want of pews. They knelt upon the stone or discarded rucksacks, for want of prayer cloths. They scrawled crude holy symbols upon the street and wall in chalk and coal; they made crude effigies out of whatever they could find; they muttered quietly to men and Gods for alms.

  They knelt in a long line. Too poor for priests, too pitiful for Gods, the beggars of Cier’Djaal held sermon to a sky that offered nothing.

  “That’s him?” Denaos asked, gesturing to one soul with his chin.

  Lenk looked and saw him, one sullen face among many. He was a northerner, paler than they, his skin the color of curdled milk rather than the tarnished bronze of the Djaalics. That was only barely noticeable, though; poverty had painted them all the same color.

  Upon the dirty streets before him, he had scrawled out a picture of the Phoenix, the sacred sigil of the Healer and patron beast of Talanas. His head lolled as his lips dribbled out a wordless plea.

  “Yeah,” Lenk replied. He pointed to the wooden bowl at the man’s feet. “He’s got a few coins, too. Someone’s been by. Maybe Miron.”

  “So go ask. I’ll wait here and keep watch.”

  Denaos watched as Lenk carefully made his way toward the northerner. But it wasn’t long before he found his attentions pulled toward the people of the Souk. Though he suspected all had seen him at one point or another, back when he still lived here, nary a one looked at him with anything more than the contempt they held for a man standing in the middle of foot traffic.

  And he, in turn, knew none of them. Silf the Patron, God of Thieves, held anonymity as a virtue as valuable as infamy but less precious than ignorance. With every passing moment Denaos knew that wisdom. There was comfort in staring out over a sea of faces, each one as meaningless as the last.

  Except that guy, Denaos thought as he caught sight of someone uncomfortably familiar. I know him from somewhere, don’t I? He squinted for a moment. Back in the old days…

  And the moment it dawned on him, the blessing of ignorance died in his eyes.

  He couldn’t remember the man’s name. But he remembered his face. And he remembered the vile deeds that man had done with a dagger. And he remembered the dark clothes he wore and the sandy hood that he gently tugged up around his collar as a pair of similarly clad men met up with him.

  Jackals.

  He remembered them. Every blade in the dark, every house burning in the night, every cold dawn that rose to find more corpses of debtors and squealers hanging from the Harbor Gate. The Jackals ruled Cier’Djaal’s underworld with such cruelty precisely so that every man would remember them.

  But he was among the few men that the Jackals were certain to remember, themselves.

  Keep steady, he reminded himself. They don’t know what you look like now. They don’t know you’re back. You’re just another fellow standing in the Souk, minding his own business… and slowly reaching for a dagger. Stop that.

  He became aware of his fingers unconsciously wrapping around the hilt of the knife, just as he was aware of his heart crawling into his throat. He steadied himself as the Jackals glanced about warily before disappearing into the crowd.

  He knew that look. They were planning something. Which meant that his immediate plans should involve getting as far away from here as possible. As soon as Lenk was finished with—

  “YOU!”

  Dagger came to hand easily. He whirled about as a voice screamed from somewhere, but the scream was not for him.

  He saw Lenk holding out his hands, mouth fumbling in explanation as the northern beggar backpedaled, thrusting a quivering finger at the young man.

  “Demon!” the beggar screamed. “Murderer! Stay back! STAY BACK!”

  For a man who came from a part of the world where begging was an occupation instead of an art, Denaos noted, this northern fellow seemed to have the act down cold. He sprang to his feet and scooped up his bowl in one breath, turned tail, and took off running in another.

  He sheathed his blade as he came up to Lenk, who stood dumbfounded, staring at the chalk drawing where the beggar had just knelt.

  “You spoke to him for all of thirty breaths,” Denaos noted, “and he took off screaming and cursing your name. This is a new record for you, isn’t it?”

  “I knew him,” Lenk whispered into the dry, hot air.

  “What?”

  “I knew him. I… was speaking to him, trying to make nice, and I asked him where he was from. And…” Lenk stumbled over his voice, picking words up as he found them. “He said ‘Steadbrook.’”

  Denaos raised a brow. “Your hometown.”

  “Burned to the ground. And I recognized him. I knew his name. Gathwer. He owned a farm at the edge of the village. I said his name.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s when he started calling me a demon.”

  “Well, maybe he meant something different.” Denaos glanced over his shoulder. He saw more hooded people, more Jackals, dispersing throughou
t the crowd. “We should really be—”

  “How many different ways are there to interpret someone calling you a demon?” Lenk asked, glowering at the man. “We need to go after him. He’s our only lead on finding Miron.”

  “We can find others.” Denaos swept his gaze around. Everywhere, he could pick them out. Sand-colored hoods. Figures slinking in shadows. Knives covertly drawn. There couldn’t be this many here for any other reason. They knew he was here. “Later. Much later. For now, we need to—”

  “Ain’t no good running, pinkie.”

  The voice, sharp and low like a bent blade, stuck in their ears. Neither man had any trouble discerning from whence it came, for neither man could ignore the ochre stare fixed upon them from the nearby wall.

  Far apart from the other beggars, with no God to feign patronage to, the creature crouched upon thin legs, resting thin arms on thin knees. Every bit of him swaddled in dirty rags, a scarf wrapped about his head, all that was visible was a pair of eyes without a face.

  “You seen ’em, you already dead.” His eyes were impossible to read, but the upward inflection of his voice suggested he was quite amused by this fact. “If only there was a mysterious stranger with an air of opportunism around that could help you.”

  “I assure you, the scent of desperation that led you here was coming from someone else.” Denaos cast a look down to the empty stone before the creature. “And a beggar without a bowl is less than useless.”

  Lenk held up his hands. “Sorry, I seem to have missed… everything.” He glanced at the rags-swaddled creature. “Just what the hell are you?”

  “This, Lenk,” Denaos interjected, “is a saccarii, a creature that stands distinct in a city full of scum by somehow being too loathsome to let in and too shifty to keep out.”

  “Among the human carrion do we humbly thrive.” The saccarii offered an incline of his head on a neck far too long. “And for a mere favor, can the services of one such as Khaliv,” he tapped his chest, “be yours.”

  “What kind of services?” Lenk asked.

  “Wrong question,” Denaos muttered, taking his companion by the arm. “You don’t ask a saccarii for favors, you don’t owe the saccarii favors. Better that way.”