by Sam Sykes
“Seven? Were we in Temple Row, they would burn you for blasphemy! Eleven!”
The numbers flew back and forth. There were curses exchanged and polite rebuttals. And Asper heard them all, but only barely. It was, after all, rather difficult to hear one’s attributes and roundness so thoroughly described, labeled, and priced.
At that moment, she couldn’t help looking over her shoulder to where Kataria had disappeared. Should she have followed, she wondered?
It was a ruse, of course. She knew it wasn’t really demeaning. Was it? But surely, she could have thought of something better. Surely, she could have put together something more sensible. Lenk was right, she was about to go in hostile territory, unarmed and half-clad and apparently, now, alone.
She looked down at her left arm. Maybe it wasn’t too late to listen to Amoch-Tethr. But he—whatever he was—remained silent.
“Nine.”
Her attentions were suddenly snapped back to the envoy as she began counting out coins in her hands.
“Or we walk,” the envoy said.
“Fine, fine.” Denaos sighed, taking the coins and tossing them off to Dreadaeleon. He gave Asper a wink that was not nearly as comforting as he intended it to be before nudging her off the platform.
She suddenly became aware of the house guards closing in around her, regarding her with cold iron stares.
It might have been just nerves dancing beneath her skin. It might have been her imagination. But she couldn’t shake the idea that whatever dwelt in her left arm was, at that moment, sighing disappointedly at her.
“You got turned down?” Lenk asked, bewildered.
“That’s what I said,” Kataria muttered. She unabashedly tore off her silk skirt as she reached for her breeches draped across a nearby barrel. “Something about a bunch of trouble in the Souk.” She grinned at him, flashing canines. “I think I might be famous now.”
Lenk rubbed at his eyes. “You spat on them, didn’t you?”
Her smile grew distinctly more unpleasant. “Like a champion.”
“You”—his voice came out on an angry breath—“have fucked up everything.”
“Don’t ask me to feel bad about not having to go into that den of monsters.” She stripped off the silk barely covering her breasts and shrugged on her shirt. “I was willing to go along with this, but I’m not going to waste time crying that it didn’t work out.” She glared at him. “And if you ask me to, you’re going to feel a lot worse than you already do.”
“Do you honestly not understand what’s happening out there?” He gestured over to the curtains. “The only reason I came onto this plan was because I thought you’d make up for whatever weapons we couldn’t sneak in. It’s a two-person job. Or it was. Someone needs to be in there to watch Asper’s back.”
Kataria stared at him for a moment. She narrowed her eyes at him, less in anger and more in appraisal. She pulled her hunting knife from her belt and advanced slowly upon Lenk. He backed away, gaze wary, hands up.
“What,” he said softly, “do you think you’re doing?”
In an instant, she was upon him. She seized him by the tunic and dragged him close enough that he could feel the tip of her blade against his belly. She hissed through her teeth.
“Fixing it.”
There was a violent tearing sound. Lenk felt cold metal brush against his flesh. He looked down to see the knife’s edge racing upward, ripping his shirt in two. Before he could protest, she tore the rent garment from his back.
“I, uh…” He stared down at his own naked, scarred flesh. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Give it time.” She seized him by the belt and angled her blade toward his trousers. “It’s a two-part plan.”
“Admittedly, I didn’t think that was going to work.” Dreadaeleon counted through the coins, covertly palming a pair of them into his own pocket. “I thought your haggling had ruined it. Surely, there wasn’t a need for that.”
“Says you.” Denaos stroked his mustache as he watched Ghoukha’s guards depart, Asper in tow. “She’s a dear friend of mine. I wasn’t about to sell her for a pittance.”
Dreadaeleon lifted his spectacles to watch. “Do you… do you think she’ll be all right?”
“No.” Gariath rumbled from beneath his cloak. “Selling humans as meat, sneaking around like cowards; this city is making us as sick as it is. No one in it is all right.”
“Oh?” Denaos rolled his eyes. “So you don’t like this plan, either? Would you have us go along with Lenk and rush in and burn down Ghoukha’s entire estate?”
“No.” Gariath turned toward the rogue. The white of his teeth was bright beneath his cowl. “I wouldn’t stop there.”
Any concern Denaos might have voiced at that was lost in the sound of a scuffle behind the curtains nearby. Their eyes turned to Kataria as she emerged, hands on Lenk’s bare shoulders, shoving the young man—now clad only in a crudely wrapped silk breechcloth about his waist—toward the stage.
“So…” Denaos watched the scene with vague alarm. “Is this… something I should know about?”
“It’s a two-person job,” Kataria said, struggling to keep Lenk at the stage’s edge. “And we only sent one out.”
“All well and good.” Denaos glanced toward the skimpy cloth hanging from Lenk’s hips and cringed. “Or at least, all well. But the envoy’s already taken off with—”
“HEY.”
Gariath’s roar carried across the Harbor Road, commanding the attention of the envoy, as well as several other merchants. He seized Lenk by the back of the neck and shoved him forward, waving him at the envoy like a child’s toy.
“Buy this one, too,” he bellowed.
“This isn’t—” Lenk began to stammer, looking helplessly from Kataria to Denaos. “I didn’t mean—”
“Do you want this plan to work or not?” she snapped back.
“Well, yeah, but not with me!”
“But it was fine when it was me?” she snarled. “Denaos is the one they talk to. We obviously can’t sell Gariath. And clearly, I’m not good enough to be someone’s half-clad, simpering flesh-slave. Poor me.”
“What about Dreadaeleon?” Lenk demanded, pointing a finger at the boy.
“No one’s going to pay for him!” Kataria growled.
“Hey,” the boy protested meekly.
The envoy trotted up with a bit more vigor in her step. A groomed eyebrow rose in appreciation as she swept an appraising look over Lenk.
“Well, well.” Her voice came lilting out between the faintest curves of a smile. “You old hoarder, were you holding out on me?”
“Ah, yes,” Denaos began, “well, this one is a recent arrival—”
“Buy him,” Gariath interrupted tersely.
The envoy took her time in surveying the young man. She hardly appeared to notice him squirming beneath her gaze; if anything, it made her grin more broadly, though the eager greed playing in her eyes was quickly smothered by her appraising, businesslike stare.
“He’s a bit torn up, isn’t he?” Excitement was tempered by caution in her voice. “Is he a warrior? Has he seen many battles?” Her eyes slithered across the expanse of his chest. “He certainly looks fearsome, doesn’t he? Will he take orders?”
“I don’t know,” Gariath grunted. “Maybe.” He snorted. “Buy him.”
“Very well,” the envoy said, tapping her cheek. “I’ll give you… eight.”
“Ten,” Gariath retorted.
“Nine.”
“Eleven.”
“What?”
“Four.”
The envoy furrowed her brow. “Is… this some northern haggling technique?”
“You want him or not?”
“As you wish.” The envoy shrugged and counted out the coins. “Four, you said?”
“Who cares.”
Gariath didn’t even wait for her to hand the coins to Denaos before he shoved Lenk off the stage. He cried out as he stumbled, colliding with th
e envoy. She let out a soft giggle, placing hands on his shoulders to steady herself.
“Oh, my,” she said, sliding her palms across his skin. “Usually, we don’t get them this excited.” With an intentional slowness, she slid her fingers off of him. “Ah, ah. But we mustn’t let instinct get the better of us, must we? Civility and all.”
She gently nudged him toward Asper and her guards, who enclosed around them both. With a curt nod to Denaos and Gariath, she took off once again down the Harbor Road, giggling as Lenk cast a worried glance back to his companions.
In another moment, they rounded a corner and vanished.
“So,” Denaos said, twirling his mustache, “the pieces are in play. The trap is set. Our little keys are behind the locks. We need but wait for dusk to begin act two of our dark performance.” He sniffed and took the moment to scratch himself discreetly. “So, what do you guys want to do until then?”
Kataria looked up at the noonday sun and shrugged. “Get some curry?”
“Always with the curry,” he said. “They have more than just that here, you know.”
“Fine,” she replied. “We can get whatever you want once you lose the mustache.”
Denaos narrowed his eyes at her. His fingers twirled about the tips of his false facial hair.
“Curry it is.”
THIRTY-ONE
RICH MEN AND THEIR DREAMS
There was, Asper decided, a certain cynical satisfaction in knowing exactly how much, by the current value of the Djaalic coin, the sum of one’s body, mind, and soul was worth.
Just as there was a certain fear in knowing that there existed a bottle of wine that was worth more than one’s life.
“To spill a drop,” the headman, an elegantly trimmed and dressed servant, said as he filled each goblet on her tray, “is to invite misfortune.” He stared at her intently. “To spill on a guest is to invite death.”
He replaced the bottle upon the table and gently pressed the tray into her hands, wincing as the goblets trembled precariously. He made a sweeping motion out toward the houn and the throng of guests thereon.
“Be careful out there,” he warned. “I know you’re northern, but I’d rather not see you executed on your first night for offending one of the fasha’s guests.”
She crept timidly out of the antechamber, pausing at the archway to peer out into the massive houn. A sea of silk and painted faces greeted her, hardly any space left between bodies to navigate through. She glanced over her shoulder and suddenly felt a jostle. A servant with an empty tray pushed past her without so much as a look of acknowledgment. She panicked, briefly, as the goblets swayed on her tray before settling. Holding her breath, she took a slow, careful step into the den of luxury.
Every nobleman worth his silk in Cier’Djaal, she had been told, had a houn like this. Well, not like this. Ghoukha’s houn was said to be twice as big as the second biggest in the city.
She believed it. She would have believed any story about Ghoukha’s estate because, as she looked around it, she sincerely believed that the human imagination was too limited to make up a story grander than this kind of wealth.
The massive chamber—bigger than most temples—stretched impossibly wide, forming a vast field of polished marble. Its ceiling was a balcony-laden vaulted dome painted with elaborate depictions of Ghoukha’s lineage—lots of spiders, lots of burly men, and lots and lots of naked women. Bearing the burden of this art, golden pillars marched the length of the hall, each one carved to resemble a statuesque female, elegantly holding up the ceiling with delicate hands.
Tapestries hung from every wall, each one woven of silk from Ghoukha’s spiders. And the artisans themselves were in attendance. The horse-sized arachnids could be seen skittering up the pillars, leaping gracefully from balcony to balcony or crawling across invisible strands of silk they had woven as a net beneath the ceiling. Each display of arachnid agility was met with laughter and applause from the legion of guests below.
Strange, she thought, since the upper class of Cier’Djaal was perhaps the only thing weirder than giant, free-roaming spiders.
As was all the rage in the city, nearly every face was painted with a riot of colors: blue cheeks, white scalps, red eyelids, green noses. Across the houn, their faces wrought a nauseating rainbow with their colorful silks and jewels. Some foreigners were present as well. She recognized the staunch military bearing of Karnerians and Sainites and a few other minor priests. A swaying, jewel-encrusted headdress of a priest of Ancaa commanded the attention of several Djaalic guests.
House guards, clad in armor painted with Ghoukha’s emblem, stood at various corners. Rather than guarding, though, a great number of them seemed to be imbibing and showing off their weapons to excited guests. She suspected they were likely here as another display of wealth, rather than as effective protection.
Among all this, and in stark contrast to the ostentatious wealth, was the common man. Servants, half-clad in scanty silks and bearing laden trays worth more than they were, darted expertly between the guests, filtering in and out of the antechamber with empty and brimming trays of food and wine. One of them emerged between a pair of noblemen, leaning over as he passed by her.
“Hey, northern,” the servant whispered. “Fair warning: New meat has to tend to the oids. Try not to stare.”
“What?” she asked.
He offered nothing else as he quickly strode toward the antechamber. Asper felt a cold shadow fall over her a moment before she heard the jarring monotone.
“Greetings are heaped upon your face, shkainai.”
She looked up. A couthi, four hands folded delicately upon perfectly smoothed black robes, stared down at her from behind a rather elegant portrait of a young lady in springtime. His smaller hands reached down to pluck a goblet from her tray, passing it off to his larger hands.
“It is both surprising and pleasant to see you in such conditions,” the couthi said. “Your contribution to the economic fortitude of the human city will be commended. This one wonders, though, what happened to deliver such a status to you.”
“Do we…” She let the question linger.
“Apologies. This one did not engage all adequate mannerisms.” He swept both left arms out in a bow. “Man-Shii Kree. We exchanged pleasantries in the Souk. When last seen, you were a free female.”
She stared blankly, struggling to comprehend the monotone. She racked her brain for her cover story.
“Uh, I… made some bad decisions,” she said. “Debt slavery was the only way out.”
“This one accredits your fortuitous rotation to the city,” Man-Shii Kree said. “All serve the greater function here. The downtrodden trod upward on economic stability. The system is to be praised.”
“Uh-huh.” Her eyes were locked, dumbfounded, upon the couthi’s portrait-face.
“You are staring, shkainai.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I just… hadn’t seen any oids. I mean, non-humans here.”
“Privilege is the harvest of the seeds of civility planted by the couthi,” Man-Shii Kree replied. “Our ability to provide the enigmatic warrants invitation by the humans possessed of gold. The unwashed tulwar and shicts remain uninvited.” He swiveled his portrait toward her. “A memory. How fared your shictish company.”
“She…” Asper paused, forming a lie. “Gone. Disappeared.”
“This one mars no face with tears,” Man-Shii Kree said. “A shict is no friend to the couthi and all have earned death. This one is pleased to have hastened hers, though this one regrets inconveniencing you by alerting the humans to her presence.”
“Yeah, well…”
Man-Shii Kree looked up, casting his gaze—or so she assumed—over the assembled crowd.
“This is not our home.” The slightest edge of emotion, something as cold and bitter as the winters that never came to this city, crept into his voice. “These are not our people. We lost both in our wars with the shicts. Because of them, we are here, mongers and floo
r-scrapers among those who would have trembled at our might.”
All four of Man-Shii Kree’s hands trembled, clenched into fists at his sides and around the goblet he grasped.
“They want more war, these humans. They will not listen to us. Another home will be lost to us again.” From behind his portrait-face, Asper had no doubt that Man-Shii Kree was snarling. “And the couthi shall once again preside over a court of ashes.”
For a long moment, he stood completely still. His hands slowly relaxed and hung limp at his sides. He inclined his portrait toward her respectfully. She quivered beneath his unseen gaze.
“Apologies upon your face, shkainai. This one should be more considerate.”
The crowds of guests and servants parted before him as Man-Shii Kree glided across the floor, a looming shadow in a room filled with bright, golden light.
She forced his words from her mind. She was, after all, working.
She maneuvered her way through the crowds, offering wine and being waved away enough to make her disguise look plausible. Through the rumble of conversation, fragments of phrases assaulted her ears.
“—if you ask me, we should just kick them out. Mobilize the dragonmen and evict the Sainites and the Karnerians and every other shkainai in—”
“—then in two months, they bring their armies here and turn Cier’Djaal into a battlefield. Don’t be such an—”
“—never had it this bad in his time. My grandfather built his fortunes from two coppers and a sack of salt. Sure, the criminal guilds were bad, but this is—”
“—not thieves. The Khovura are something else entirely. I’ve heard talk of monsters… demons. They’re worse than the Jackals, mark my—”
“—it’s the shicts, you know. Always those damn oids making trouble. Either them or the tulwar. Remember the Uprising? Why’d we ever let them—”
“—and Ghoukha’s brought us here to boast again. Does he ever get tired of this? The glutton’s got a new silk and suddenly he thinks he’s Ancaa incarnate?”
The fear that had been burbling at the base of her spine since she had woken up this morning and heard Denaos’s plan had now crawled up to her neck. To hear the nobles talk, Cier’Djaal seemed as though it was on the brink of three different apocalypses. She tried not to worry about that as she maneuvered closer to the massive doors of the houn.