by Sam Sykes
He gestured to his table.
“Scarecrow Sashe, who could put a seagull’s eye out at sixty paces. Sandal the Candle, who burned her guards alive like stuck pigs in their own homes. And of course, you all know me, Yerk, Anielle.” He glanced around the room. “But who do you think it was that brought it all together? Who do you think it was that had the honor of killing the Houndmistress herself?”
He stomped his boot on the table.
“Who posed as the man who would become her counsel? Who lied, weaseled, and wormed his way into her innermost confidence? Who played the game so well that when he finally cut her down in the night, they had no idea it was even him who did it?”
Fenshi whirled and leveled a finger at Denaos. His grin was manic.
“This man right here. This man, who is the reason we’re still around. This man, who is the reason the fashas and the merchants and the people look to us to lead this city. This man whose presence demands we drink until we vomit! THIS man who will solve this Khovura problem once and for all.”
He raised the idol of Silf over his head like a goblet. Countless glasses were raised with him—by Sandal, by Sashe, by the trembling recruit and every last Jackal in the room. And they all pointed to Denaos.
“The man who killed the Houndmistress,” Fenshi said. “The man who caused the riots. The man who let us build in its wake.” He held his hands out. “RAMANIEL!”
“RAMANIEL!”
The word—for it was no longer a name—was taken up over and over, drank to over and over, until every glass was dry. And Fenshi lowered the idol and grinned at Denaos.
“So, tell us, Ramaniel. Tell us how you cut that bitch’s throat.”
Denaos’s cheeks puffed slightly. His lips pursed. He shrugged helplessly and waved his hands.
“Humble,” Fenshi said, nodding. “Always humble. She saw that humility, too, right before he killed her. You don’t remember her, of course, you little turds. Maybe you remember the riots that followed, when we killed every last loyalist in the city, and those were dark times, too. But we came out of them stronger than ever, just like we’ll come out of this stronger than ever! All thanks to Ramaniel!”
“RAMANIEL!”
The word filled his ears.
“RAMANIEL!”
The word followed in his footsteps as he nodded graciously and excused himself out the door.
“RAMANIEL!”
The word chased him into the street as he stepped delicately into a nearby alley, placed his hands on his knees, bent at the waist, and vomited copiously.
Every ounce of wine, every bit of food, everything he had in him and then some came splashing out on the stones. And when he could vomit no more, he spat words into the puddle of puke.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know, I know, I know. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
He crumpled against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and wept hot tears. Through his fingers, he could see the puddle of vomit begin to stir. From beneath the greasy surface a hand emerged, thin and delicate. An arm followed, gripping the stones of the street. Another arm followed and, between them, began to haul a body out of the puddle of bodily fluids.
She rose out of the vomit, dripping with his bile, and smiling broadly. Her eyes were huge. Her hair hung down to her shoulders. And her throat was cut open with a gash as big and terrifying as the smile she wore.
“Good morning, tall man,” she said to him.
And he shut his eyes.
And he prayed to Silf. Or to Talanas. Or to anyone who would listen.
And when he opened them again, she was gone. And only a puddle of bile remained behind. He breathed slowly and forced himself to his feet. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He forced a smile to his face.
And slowly, Denaos turned around and went back to the bar and when he opened the door, the word greeted him.
“RAMANIEL!”
TWENTY-ONE
SCENT OF GOD
Gariath raised his snout into the night air. He took a long breath and drew in the scent of everything wrong with the world.
The stink of humans was everywhere and everywhere stank of fear. There was no scent more common, and it reeked sickly sweet in his nostrils. It was an odor he had no use for, and he quickly ignored it.
He smelled anger, of course. He got that in short, stagnant bursts as he wandered through Cier’Djaal’s lamplit streets. It seeped into his hood and burst at the back of his mouth as though he had just taken a bite of a lemon. It was a stronger odor than fear, but far too common to be helpful.
He was looking for a rarer scent. And he drew in breath upon breath to find it.
He found resentment: common. Resignation: depressingly common. Desire: alarmingly common.
All of them useless.
Then, suddenly, he caught it. Just a whiff, at first, but it bloomed into something overwhelming. The aroma of floors scrubbed by hands raw with labor, books burning on pyres, breath thick with fever and words. It was an aggressively stagnant aroma that hung in a narrow, thick trail through the odors of the city.
Faith.
Fanaticism.
Rare. Useful. Uniquely human.
Faith, being a concept, could not be smelled. But the primal reeks that went into it—desperation, despair, fear, and hate—always followed people that prayed. He had never scented it in another race. Only humans seemed capable of looking at a mess of stone and sand as this city and convincing themselves it was worth anything, let alone worth dying for.
He called this mess of scents faith. Or delusion. Same thing, really.
The Khovura, as the humans had named them, had reeked of it. He had smelled it in the bloodstains and broken bodies at the Souk yesterday. He had found it again today in a thick, twisting scent that wound through the city.
And he had followed it here, to a uniquely human creation.
The archway that loomed before him on the western edge of the Souk’s back-alley streets was something that had probably been very grand in its day. Here was where it had stood proudly rounded before crumbling in the middle; there were pedestals for statues long stolen or smashed; overhead was where bold letters of a bold name had been carved in the stone before time and wind and sand and neglect had worn them away.
In its place was a big wooden sign tied with a rotting rope and daubed with greasy paint that read, in letters that smelled of low education and malnutrition…
SUMPS. NO GUARDS. NO GODS. NO PROBLEMS.
Straightforward. He appreciated that.
He leaned into the archway, peering past the meager torches halfheartedly sputtering light against the encroaching shadows. Beyond the sign, though, light didn’t even bother. No orange glow of torches or lanterns met his eyes. Slivers of moonlight slipped like rats between crumbling buildings and cracked windows, chased by ever-shifting darkness.
The scents here were deep. Not old, but constant and seeping, embedded in damp earth and drowning under stale water. It was the reek of things broken and dying, but not yet dead and far from forgotten.
Something old. Something sodden. Something altogether not human.
Yet there, amidst the scent of hundred-year despairs and drowned ambitions, was the serpentine scent he had been tracking all day.
The Khovura had come this way.
Of course, Gariath knew, as he trod past the archway and into the shadows of this place, that his precious time could be better spent elsewhere. Such as tracking down Kharga and ripping his head off. However, over the past year with his companions, he had come to appreciate the nature of teamwork as he saw it—that is, forgoing ripping the head off of someone he really wanted to in lieu of ripping the heads off of people other people wanted him to so that they would shut up when he ripped the aforementioned head of the original desire.
For tonight, he could rip heads off on Lenk’s behalf.
Such was his nature. He was a giver.
And so he set off into darkness, following the odious reek of hatred with the distinct intent of killing someone tonight.
Dry land gave out three steps into the Sumps. Water rose gradually, first to his ankles, mulling over his presence before it decided to rise up to his calves and then, embracing him like a brother, up to his thighs. That, he supposed, was where the Sumps got its name.
The ground was an uneven plane of sand and shattered cobblestones beneath his feet. He splashed awkwardly through the water, his every movement heralded by the churn of froth. Stealth was impossible.
Which was fine by Gariath. Stealth was for cowards who had too little sense to know when their time would be better spent coming out to be killed by him.
Besides, he reasoned, any water that came up to his thighs would be up to a human’s waist. They would be as loud as he was. Not that he needed sound here.
Out of the corners of his eyes, he caught glimpses of orange firelights. Shy flickers that knew they didn’t belong here; they darted away every time he looked toward them, dark shapes vanishing into shadows as the light fled. That was fine. He didn’t need sight, either.
The other, cruder stinks were stronger here. Wet dreams mired in the sodden earth, despairs that hung in the shadows. He didn’t need these. He had the pure scent of hatred to guide him, the twisted knot that coiled through the Sumps, guiding him ever deeper, growing ever stronger.
And leading him toward a light that did not flee.
He saw it there, a bright orange halo painted upon the wall of a long-decayed building, walls torn and windows smashed, whose decrepit shadow looked like a grimace most displeased about being exposed to such light. And painted upon that light were shadows, unmoving.
Either someone hadn’t heard him or they had and just hadn’t started running yet.
Sometimes, fate rewarded the charitable.
He picked up his speed, heedless of how obvious he was. The scent was powerful here, overwhelming, intoxicating. The orange light grew brighter as he approached, the scent of anger rising on the smoke of torches, and through the hiss and crackle of flames, the sound of voices was clear.
“You’re in the wrong damn neighborhood, oid.”
They were talking to someone. Not him. And there was a response. Without words.
The scent grew stronger. The anger grew purer.
“Sumps, Souk, or Silktown, Cier’Djaal belongs to us,” a voice, bitter and moist, hissed. “You come here, you pay.”
Gariath turned a corner and gave a shape to the voice. Short, skinny, dark against the torch in its hand and accompanied by three other figures, each one wearing the same kind of malicious glare upon their faces.
“You deaf, oid?”
Humans reeking of hatred.
No surprise there.
What was surprising was the creature they had cornered against the wall. Taller and leaner than they, gray skin covered in coarse silver fur and topped with a wild mane of hair the color of dull iron. A face, sloping and knotted with thick scars, stared back with yellow eyes.
A tulwar. That was what the humans had called it, wasn’t it?
That was less surprising than what the tulwar was currently doing. Or rather, not doing. He stood, knee-deep in the water, long arms folded across a long chest, unmoving. Even his scowl, amber-clear and blade-sharp, was unflinching as it fixed itself upon the lead human.
The one reeking most strongly.
“You got blades. Been doing merc work? Must’ve made something.” The man waded forward, hand extended demandingly. “Just pay up and you can—”
And then, the tulwar moved.
“Seamless,” Gariath decided, was a good word to describe what happened next.
Without hesitation, the tulwar’s fur-covered hand slid to the long, wrapped hilt at his side. Without a sound, he drew a heavy blade. And before he could blink, the human’s arm was not so much hacked as unseamed, rendered from an appendage into a bloodless, flopping fish that wobbled precariously in the air before splashing into the water.
Between the moment the appendage vanished beneath the inky waves and the moment when the screaming began, the tulwar moved again.
His face flooded with a riot of yellows, reds, and blues. The tulwar erupted out of the water in a spray of froth and a flash of steel. His foes brought their blades up to meet his onslaught.
Theirs were short, clumsy things made for quick and dirty stabbings. His blade, long and lethal, cut clean through cloth and flesh. But fear, common as it was, was a useful emotion. It drove them to rush at him, blades flashing, sending him back against the wall with a deep gash in his shoulder.
He took it without complaint. The blood from his wound seemed pale next to the bright colors of his face. Each lunge they took at him was deflected by the deftness of his cuts. Fear was a short-lived thing, and soon they exchanged nervous looks, suddenly wary of a foe that wouldn’t die so easily.
And this would have all been very impressive to watch, Gariath thought, had he more time to appreciate it.
But the reek of anger and hatred, the scent of the Khovura, was almost choking here amidst the melee. One of these creatures knew something he would very much like to know for himself. Or rather, something one of the humans would like to know and something Gariath felt just motivated enough to kill to get.
Ordinarily it would seem rude to interrupt a good fight. But this was taking far too long.
Want something done right, Gariath thought to himself.
He let his cloak fall from him as he waded forward, still courteous enough to at least give them a little time to kill each other.
And to the tulwar’s credit, his blade arced upward, a sheet of blood trailing the edge of his blade and a human folding, neat as a piece of paper, over a red line carved in his chest.
One of the humans, after watching his cohort vanish beneath the waters, turned to run. His head turned well after his body, and when he saw Gariath—his long, tooth-filled snout, his onyx eyes, his curving horns, and earfrills painted by torchlight—the human’s eyes went wide.
Gariath was used to this.
Eyes wide first, yes, yes, he thought, then the babbling lips trying to find words—yes, just like he’s doing now—and then he’ll finally say…
“You’re… you’re…” the human sputtered, “you’re a—”
“I am.” Gariath placed a heavy hand on the man’s head. “I’m also in a hurry.”
Gariath jerked his arm down, shoving the human beneath the water. A mess of bubbles and froth was all that surfaced before he brought up a foot and stomped it down on what he thought was the human’s neck. The sound of bone snapping was muted beneath the water. But an instant later, he felt it grow significantly warmer around his foot.
So, apparently that hadn’t been the neck. Good to know. He would be happy to take better care of the remaining two.
The scent was still strong. The drowned one wasn’t the one he was looking for. That left the human with one arm—desperately trying to cinch his belt around his stump to stem the blood loss—or the human with two, desperately trying not to die.
Against the wall, the two-armed human struggled with the tulwar. The long blade was high above their heads, all hands wrapped around its hilt as the human fought to keep it out of his skull and the tulwar insisted that it would look better there.
The tulwar’s face was colored with fury, his muscles trembling beneath the fur covering his arms. His lips split apart in a feral snarl, simian teeth bared. In another four breaths, the human was going to be quite messily dead.
That would make what Gariath was about to do very rude, indeed.
He stalked forward, seizing both combatants by their shoulders. The tulwar, he shoved away. The human, he drew closer. He caught a glimpse of a dagger reaching for a hilt poking out of a belt. An instant later, he caught a tender wrist between his claws, gave a quick twist, and—
“MY HAND!” the human shrieked. “YOU JUST BROKE—”
“You probably didn’t hear me when I said I was in a hurry,” Gariath growled. “Let’s pretend you’ve already called me a monster and then begged for your life, and get right to the good stuff.”
He hoisted the writhing human by his shattered wrist, dangling him out of the water like a pale, shrieking worm on a hook.
“You reek of the Khovura,” he said. “Two chances to tell me where they are.”
And Gariath got the first surprise of the night.
“You’re after the Khovura?” the human laughed hysterically. “And you want me to tell you about them? Right.” His grin was broad with manic terror. “You’re just a monster. And the Khovura are—”
“Again,” Gariath said, “in a hurry.”
His hand found the human’s throat. His arm found the room to swing. And, in short order, his captive’s face found the nearby wall. A bright red halo spattered against the brick. An unmoving body peeled off of rock and slid beneath the water, sputtering crimson bubbles.
Gariath turned and looked to the human with one arm. He was cowering against another wall, clutching his stump. Even if he hadn’t been ghost-white with blood loss, Gariath would have sensed him.
Because the scent that came from him as the dragonman pointed at him was definitely not anger.
“Same offer,” Gariath said. “Speak quickly.”
“S-same?” the human sputtered. “You said two chances!”
“I did,” Gariath replied, gesturing to the blood-smeared wall. “That was your first one.”
“I… I’ve seen men,” the one-armed one stuttered. “Not from the Sumps, like us. Black clothes, hanging near the Harbor Wall on the northwest end. They come every night and are gone by morning. That’s all I know.”
Gariath nodded, jerked a thumb in no particular direction. “Go.”
“My arm…” the human whimpered.
“If it loves you, it’ll come back.” His lips curled back, exposing rows of teeth suggestively. “Go.”
The human took off as fast as a one-armed human with severe blood loss wading through smelly water could. Which, when Gariath was around, turned out to be rather quick. In his wake, he left a few scents, most of them foul and fleeting.