THE IMPERIAL DISTRICT, WARD THREE,
ANDERTON, CAPITAL OF SOUTH ANAVEN
“Leather-neck,” slurred a balding human, right before he hocked a glob of spit in Naliah’s face. It was warm as it slid down Naliah’s cheek. “Can wear those pretty silks all ya want, ya fuckin’ demech. Still a worthless klava underneath ‘em. Wel illyacadt drataustech.”
The man’s empty glass bottle slipped out of his hand and shattered against the dusty flagstones of the half-abandoned, buttressed street they were standing in. He stepped forward and jabbed Naliah in the throat with a thick finger, his slanted eyes glazed. Naliah raised an eyebrow, refusing to retreat even when the man squatted down to snag the bottle’s broken neck from the other green shards of glass and brandished it like a dagger. The people in the street fell into a hush, watching them. “I should do—should do everyone a favour. Get rid of ya, ya fuckin’ scourge. I could do it.”
“Yeah?” Naliah levelled a mild glare at the man. An old feeling crawled up his spine—the memory of an instinct to beat this man to death in the street and leave him for the rats. “Far be it from me to reason with a drunken hahna,” Naliah said evenly. The Anavene word grated its way out of the back of his mouth.
Behind the stranger, Naliah could make out the handful of people in the shadowed street, including the city patrolwoman who had been assigned to his protection for the day, the Star of South Anaven emblazoned on her purple tabard, oil-black hair knotted on top of her head. She was visibly tensed up, her hand on the hilt of her machete, but she didn’t intervene. The city patrol rarely did on his behalf, and that was only when he was fortunate enough to receive a guard at all. The guardsmen served Southern Governor Bettina Venneigg, and none of Bettina’s orders had convinced them to look after Naliah—so he looked after himself as he’d always done, listening for footsteps in dark alleys, taking the occasional knife to the stomach, sniffing his soups for poisons before he ate.
“Don’t care if the Council anointed ya or not, y’callused up little demon-whore,” the drunkard continued. His breath reeked of cheap scotch and peanuts. It puffed against Naliah’s face as he crowded Naliah out of the shadows the steep buildings were cutting and back instead against the sun-baked stucco of some manor’s abandoned carriage house. The wall burned heat through Naliah’s clothes and his skin.
Nearly even with his face now, Naliah could see that the armpits of the drunk man’s double-breasted linen shirt were ringed down to the waist like the inside of a tree with several days worth of sweat, and around his neck hung a single gold medallion that glinted in the gilded evening’s light. The medallion was pressed with four interlocked circles, looped by two words in repeat, and while Naliah couldn’t read, he knew those words. They were engrained into him.
Faeutsch Mollens. Strength Conquers.
It was the motto of the South Anaven Masters Guild, whose insignia had once hung over the city hall and had flown from thousands of ships that had once sailed down the Wilhemis to dock at Anderton’s ports and trade in flesh. It was only legally worn by masters in the city. Naliah’s master had always worn his like a holy relic, polished, hanging outside his clothes, but this man’s was in poor shape. Links of the gold chain had been hacked away and messily reattached, likely pawned off for extra coin to fill his pocket.
“You’re not my fuckin’ Guardian,” the drunkard said, and jabbed the broken bottle at Naliah’s neck. The cut it made stung. Naliah let his head fall back against the wall behind him with a smirk, felt the heat soak through his knotted hair, felt a trickle of blood roll down his throat and over his collarbone. “Rather see ya split with a cock an’ knife. Hung from the Klavasbrege like your ma. Old Rem worshipped—he worshipped this country. An’ you? Fucked your way through every whorehouse this side of West Mill, you little slug. Fought like a fuckin’ mutt in the Pits—bombed us—stabbed us in the backs like cowards. All your kind’ve gone and done is ruined this whole damned country, drataustech. Burned it and bled it and that fuckin’ Council gave it straight to ya. Whole line of human Guardians. Only ones in history. And those fuckin’ demechs dismantled it all.”
The man pressed the broken bottle to Naliah’s neck again, hard and full of intent, and if politics hadn’t tied his hands, Naliah would have swung his fist wide and plowed it into the side of the man’s head, sending him sprawling across the cobblestones. He had to content himself with staring at the drunkard blandly, like his throat wasn’t about to be slit.
“It works better if you aim for my jugular,” he offered.
“Ya little fuck,” the drunkard said, rolling his jaw, and Naliah knew for certain that he’d crossed a dangerous line. He’d always suspected that, at the end of his life, sarcasm would account for most of his near-death experiences. “I’m going—to carve out your fuckin’ guts,” the man said, and tossed the bottleneck down. It exploded with a sharp pop. “Yaut zeiglher das kün kleffen, ad—ad wel dass Maughreninne.”
The pain that stabbed into Naliah’s stomach was immediate. It was like someone had twisted their fingers into his intestines and jerked. He bore down on the initial panic that welled up in him until the panic died away, and then he chuckled. He really had to admire the bold ones.
“That’s what you’re going with?” he taunted. “Spellcasting? My old master’s grandmother could do more damage with an iron bookend and a potato sack.”
When another wave of pain ripped through him, sharper and stronger, Naliah couldn’t keep a small cry from bubbling up. With it came blood. It filled his mouth with copper, but he spit it into the street without a thought. “Come on. I know can do better than that,” he said with a tame smile. “I don’t think you’re even trying.”
“Wel watschnell vorrh yat,” the drunkard spat. “Wel wat—”
But he didn’t continue. He stumbled back, and his eyes emptied of life like water leaking out of a punctured wetskin. Slipping off his neck, his head rolled across the cobblestones. Arterial spray geysered up through the air and came down like rain before the man’s body collapsed backward, revealing the guardswoman standing behind him, her machete held aloft, her face blank. The drunkard’s blood continued to spurt out across her boots.
Only after Naliah was sure that none of the man’s blood had gotten anywhere near his mouth did he raise an eyebrow. “Was that the smartest move? Decapitating an old master of the city? And in front of witnesses?”
The guardswoman glowered, unamused. “What right do you have to judge my actions, Klavasgoed? You are the one who waged war against the past. I participate, as I must.” She sheathed her machete and looked down at the dead man in the street. “The Guard will dispose of him. He will be a footnote to history.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I thought he was a charming fellow,” Naliah said. The guardswoman snorted quietly. “I bet his grandchildren adored him. They probably skinned cats together after church.”
“You are despicable.”
“That’s an odd way to pronounce hilarious.”
The guardswoman snorted again but gave no further indication of his presence. In fact, she was already turned away from him, eyeing the rest of the street around them and the handful of witnesses it held.
Naliah huffed at her. “Oh, come on. Give me something more to work with here. You just killed a man on my behalf. Banter with me. We see each other twice a week. Our relationship can’t be entirely one-sided.”
“There is nothing humorous about death,” she said. She cut him a sidelong stare, quirking a half-shaved eyebrow. “Besides, do you even know my name, Klavasgoed?”
“Sour-Faced Guard Number Three?” he shot off, to her visible distaste. It made him smirk. “It’s not? What a shame. It’s a beautiful name. I thought you’d gotten it from your mother.”
Her slanted eyes slid back toward the smattering of people steadily returning to puttering about the narrow street, and Naliah let the conversation end, turning his focus to the strangers her gaze had zeroed in on.
Several pac
es away, an older woman with a pinched nose was sweeping her front stoop with judgmental eyes; a switch-thin young man was whittling a figurine; a pack of children was tossing rocks at a stray dog as they chased it down the street; and on his balcony, a man was smoking a pipe, bare feet propped on the wrought iron railing. Even from here, Naliah could smell the man’s tobacco and rank toes, and he wrinkled his nose.
As a demon, he could smell most of the district, which came together in a sick cologne: thick sweat, the putrefaction of some heat-baked corpse in a dilapidated manor ahead on the right, sour river water, honeyed bread, red beans, emptied chamberpots, and rotting garbage. He couldn’t hear much in this district, though—but not because his senses didn’t extend that far. In fact, the streets a mile over were filled with many sounds: the stilted chords of an acoustic guitar, an argument between two men who were discussing the upcoming parliament elections, the crackle of a fire, haggling from a marketplace, and even the incessant honk of a goose. Here in the Imperial District itself, however, were few sounds, the area quiet like it was marching steadily down the riverwalk toward the gallows. To its death.
Naliah was only partially ashamed of the role he’d played degrading this district so heavily in so many short years. When he’d been a child, these streets had been wreathed with golden orchids and petunias that had waterfalled from their pots. Pearls and river crystals had hung from every doorway, every buttress, every balcony, singing in the wind. Residents had been carried by slaves to their horse-drawn cabriolets so that their silk weig never had to touch the flagstones. It had been a district of opulence, the jewel of Anderton, which had in turn been a jewel itself, seeing as it was the capital of the country. Northern and Southern Anavenese alike had made pilgrimages to the city to gawk at its marble statues and gold-plated city hall, but they had come to this district specifically, just for glimpses of the rich masters and their collared slaves who had trailed their owners’ heels with downcast eyes like beaten hounds. It was in this district that Master Beringer had lived. Here that he had taken Naliah to dinner parties in new silk finery, where Naliah had been forced with idle magic to crouch next to polished oak tables for hours and let noblemen and noblewomen tilt his head to admire him, where he had listened to them bid over who would bed him for the night. He’d snapped at them in those young days, screaming foul words and biting at anything in his reach. Isn’t his spirit admirable? his master used to coo. I’ll miss it.
Naliah shook off the memories. It was hard to conjure up a smile, but he forced himself to. “You know,” he said to the guardswoman, “I’m beginning to think that death threats are a standard greeting on this side of town. Either that or everyone here hates me. It’s a mystery, really. What do you think?”
His guard didn’t look at him. She didn’t even smile, but when she spoke, there was a quiet note of fondness in her tone. “I think you are a fool with a fool’s heart, Klavasgoed.”
“I’m not a fool, Adrina,” he said. The guardswoman’s eyes snapped to his in surprise, and he gave her a gentle smile. “I’m just an idiot that someone gave an important title to.”
“Better an idiot for a deity than a warmonger.”
“We’re all warmongers. Just for different causes.”
Naliah used the cuff of his shirt to wipe the dried spit out of his beard and out of the crease where his nose met his cheek. Then he mopped the sweat from his brow. It was an uncomfortably hot winter day today, even this late in the evening. Naliah’s thin shirt was already sticking to his chest with sweat.
He’d hoped this little mission of his would be a quick one, but the old masters of the city always seemed intent on keeping his life interesting and hindering it where they could. There was never a dull moment for him in Anderton.
Along the narrow street, empty stuccoed manors sat back from the road inside massive stone fences, the villas tilted at odd angles, sinking into the ground the way most houses near the river did without proper spellcasting maintenance to their foundations. A gang of stray cats darted underneath the remains of a one-wheeled lacquered carriage in the street. Plastered to its door was a sun-bleached but easily recognizable advertisement for Wesson & Wesson, a slave carnival that had long been out of business in South Anaven but was still clinging to life in their sister country to the north. Naliah had been to it once. A mile ahead on the right, the red clay shingles of Master Beringer’s manor peeked over the tops of the other houses.
“If I can’t see my reflection in those stairs by the time I’m home,” Master Beringer said, pulling down the brim of his grey bowler, “I’ll take that collar off you just so you can heat up your own brand, demech.”
It had been two hundred and sixty odd years since Naliah had left that manor, sold to a butcher on the sewer end of town at the tender age of thirteen for a quarter of his worth, but he could still hear Master Beringer’s smoke-rough voice as though the man himself had risen from the dusty road, cane and all. Despite it, Naliah headed toward the manor. He had a reason for coming here, and he wasn’t going to leave until he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do.
Once he made it down the entire length of Crown Street to Manor Forty-Six, kicking at the dust in the street with his silk weig along the way, the guardswoman at his heels, Naliah came to a halt. The Beringer family’s old manor was set inside a stone fence that the buttressed walls of the street seamlessly morphed into. The manor had an empty circle drive, a flat roof, and tall mullioned windows full of broken panes. There were iron lions sitting on either side of the open front gate, but Naliah stared past them, across the expansive yard, beyond the now-crooked front steps of the old manor, into the darkness lurking just beyond its gaping red door.
He didn’t realize he was trembling until the guardswoman broke his trance with a simple, “I will leave you to your brooding, Klavasgoed. I have flesh to bury.” The soft pat of her slippered feet receded down the street before he could respond.
It had been exactly one year to the day since he’d last visited this place, and while he wasn’t happy to be back, it was ritual by now at the very least. A compulsion.
Most of his memories from this manor had faded with time, but he still had enough left. He could remember clinging to his mother’s apron as she’d cooked pots full of sugared peanut chicken. He could remember tending the bright, bloody gaillardia that had lined the front of the manor with his father, the sun baking the two of them, their backs aching and gloveless hands stinging. Now, the kitchen windows were cracked, wearing dust like a beggar wore a frock coat. The flowerbeds were overgrown with scraggy weeds—those, too, even brown with death.
Staring at the manor, Naliah rubbed at his healed throat, his fingers rasping against the grain of his stubble and congealed blood. He almost expected to find the old leather of his collar still fastened tight around his neck, but there was nothing, only an invisible weight where his leather collar had once been—a weight that hadn’t dissipated once in all the years he’d spent as a free man.
Naliah scoffed at the thought. “A free man,” he whispered. “What does freedom even mean?”
Naliah could easily recall the day he’d bought his body for himself. His second master, Joseph Elias, had reluctantly thrust Naliah’s deed at him outside the city hall with a gnarled hand and had released the spellcasting on his collar. Only after the portly bastard had hobbled out of view with a sack full of coin had Naliah unbuckled the leather from around his neck and let it fall to the immaculate flagstones.
The act hadn’t felt liberating, though. No. It had felt like cutting the only line that had kept his battered lifeboat clinging to a ship. There had been nowhere for him to go—no straw mattress in the backroom of a butcher’s shop, no downy bed in a gilded manor he’d shared with both of his parents. Only a city that sneered as he passed, that posted signs in their windows that leather-necks need not apply, that wouldn’t rent him two square feet in a dirty alley much less a room at an inn. He was drataustech, demech, klava. He was a slave, the foun
dation Anderton had been built upon, and he had undermined it.
“Today marks the two hundredth anniversary of the day I bought my freedom from Elias, you know,” Naliah told his old master’s manor conversationally. “I wanted to buy my parents’ freedom, too, but you— You— You. I used to hate you for that. I still might. I don’t know. I hated you for a lot of things back then. For owning us. For selling me off. Even for making me miss you.” He paused, still ashamed to admit that. “For years, I missed you. Now, whole days go by that I don’t think about you. I’ve been free longer than I ever belonged to someone. I don’t know why that doesn’t make me feel better.”
Because you never got your pound of flesh, he thought.
As a child, Naliah had wished every single night for his suppressed demonic magic so that he could burn his master’s manor to ash. Now, uncollared, it was easy to conjure the fire.
Naliah held out his fist as it was engulfed by idle flame. The fire danced across the surface of his yellowed skin with only the slightest warmth. He watched the play of orange and blue light, transfixed, before he reached for another dense thread of the magic in his chest, uncoiling it. Immediately, he could feel a wider berth of molecules in the air vibrating around him. Could feel their potential to spark. It was easy to convince them to. All he had to do was curl his fingers in a coy invitation, and they came.
Around his hand, flames grew higher. The heat of them tightened the skin of his face, even the skin underneath his beard. The edge of his sleeve went black, and the smell of burnt linen overtook the rotten smell of the Wilhemis River that was wafting in from the south on a dry breeze.
Burning the manor didn’t have the same appeal that it used to. Naliah could admit that to himself. He’d aged. He knew it wouldn’t bring back his parents. He knew it wouldn’t punish Master Beringer, who was sleeping soundly in his grave. It wouldn’t even keep Naliah from being sold. Wouldn’t return seventy-three years of his life to him—years he’d spent like a chained dog. It wouldn’t remove the invisible scars, the unexplainable panic, the fear, the ghost hands he felt on his body some days without warning. It wouldn’t erase all the bones he’d broken fighting in the Pits for coin enough to free himself and his parents. It wouldn’t erase the sheer heat of the blood that had soaked through his linen shirt as he’d held other slaves—his friends—close in the Anavenese Riots—as they’d gurgled for their last breaths and choked on them, the human slavers closing in on their ranks with enchanted weapons held high, spells on their tongues.
A Shard of Sea and Bone Page 3