by Will Panzo
Seconds later, the legionnaire exited the house. He bent double in the lane and coughed and wiped at his face. Behind him came Vorenicus, a small Native child cradled in his arms.
He placed the child on her feet and led her to the old woman, leading her slowly and talking to her as they moved. He handed her off to the old woman, and the woman hugged the child. Seconds later, the roof of the house collapsed in a shower of bright embers.
The old woman was seated on the floor, and she grabbed Vorenicus’s hand as he turned to leave and she kissed the hand and threw back her head and wept in the rain and cradled the child to her heavy body, all while Cassius watched.
• • •
With the patch over his left eye and the hood of the cloak raised, Cassius lost most of his sight. The visible world narrowed to the span of four fingers directly in front of him, disappearing completely on his periphery.
The alley was cramped. Large refuse piles, wet from the earlier rains, writhed with vermin. The moon shone above him, a pale sickle in a haze of mist, and by its light, he stared out at the city walls.
A middle-aged fat woman approached him from the street. She had bleached hair and thin lips, and she wanted to know if Cassius was looking for company.
“I am,” Cassius said.
“Maybe I could be your company,” the woman slurred. She yanked down the top of her dress, flashed her breasts.
“Maybe.” Cassius offered the woman a half-silver piece. “What could I get for that?”
“Whatever you want.”
“I want to know about a man named Brieus. Blond hair. Works for Cinna. Patrols out here sometimes.”
“What you looking for that bastard for?” the woman asked.
“Not a friend of yours?”
The woman spat. “No friend of mine. Always robbing me. I pay enough already. I don’t need to give him a cut, too.”
“Have you seen him around tonight?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But I will. He’s always out here.”
“If you see him, send him this way.”
“What should I tell him?”
“Tell him the truth,” Cassius said. “You saw a man with one eye by the wall. He looked like he was up to no good.”
She made a sound deep in her throat that was part laugh, part wheezing cough. “Are you playing with me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The woman wandered off, and Cassius stood waiting in the dark mouth of the alley.
• • •
Cassius woke in Lucian’s stables, his ears ringing and the world distant and unfocused. A smell like a snuffed candle hung in the air and, beneath this, the smell of curdled milk. Next to him pooled pink vomit.
There was a voice in his head. It spoke a tongue he did not understand. He called out to it, and the voice did not answer but instead began to fade, growing faint and distant, like an echo dissipating as it traveled. And then it was gone.
He tried to sit up but could not, his body tense and numb and none of his muscles responding to his will. His face slick with sweat. His hands throbbing.
He tilted his head and scanned the dark stables and spotted his gauntlets, half-covered by the short cloak, which lay crumpled in the dirt. He reached for them and the muscles in his arm strained and he grunted but no sound came, then his hand was folded inside Lucian’s hand and Lucian’s face was over him and he began to shake and he shut his eyes against the roar in his head.
• • •
Cassius squinted against the sunlight through the small window. He was naked, covered in a thin sheet. His hair was wet, and the muscles of his jaw ached. He rolled and spotted Lucian sitting in the center of the room, perched atop a high stool.
“You awake, boy?” Lucian asked.
There was an earthenware pitcher on the floor, a stained towel, and a deep clay bowl, the bowl filled with water and the water scummed with bloody soap and bits of dark matter.
“Where are my gauntlets?” Cassius asked.
“You were carrying two pair. Both are under the bed.”
Cassius sat up and retrieved his tunic from the foot of the bed and dressed. His hands were bloodstained. Blood caked in his cuticles, under his nails.
He fetched both pairs of gauntlets from under the bed and hitched his pair to his belt and set the other pair on the mattress and inspected it. It was set with roughly fifteen jewels, the worth of an apprentice spellcaster.
“You want to talk about last night?” Lucian asked. “You were out fighting, weren’t you? Had yourself a goddamn fit.”
“I don’t remember.” He did remember, of course. Remembered many things. The hiss of Brieus’s short sword drawn from its scabbard. The growling of the wolves, their lips peeled back over slavering fangs. The cries of the watchmen as the beasts set upon them. Brieus calling to the gods for an end to his pain.
And another sound, a voice. One he could not quite place but that seemed familiar nonetheless.
“It was worse than the one you had earlier,” Lucian said. “You fell in and out of consciousness. Cried out. I thought you were dying.”
“Did I say anything?” Cassius asked.
“You said a lot.” The barkeep stood and walked to the window. “You called for your mother.”
“What did I say exactly?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lucian said.
“It does to me.”
“Working for Cinna is your choice, boy.” Lucian stood haloed in the light from the window, gray and weary and worn, like the statue of some suffering god who, unique among his kind, was not immortal. “But I don’t want any trouble brought to my doorstep.”
“I wasn’t working for Cinna last night. And I wouldn’t have come here if I thought I was followed. I know better than that.”
“I hope so.”
“Is that my blood?” Cassius asked. He found his boots next to the nightstand, soaked through with blood, as though he had walked a slaughterhouse floor. He reached for them. His hands began to tremble.
“You were drenched in it. But I didn’t find any wounds on you.”
“It’s all hazy,” he said. “I forget things when the sickness comes over me.”
“Smart man might take that as sign that he’s traveling the wrong path.”
Cassius did not respond. He sat staring absently until Lucian called his name again. And then he came to attention.
“Did you ever fight during the Uprising?” he asked. He slid his boots on, one and then the other.
“Yes,” Lucian said.
“Did you have a hard time with it?”
Lucian shrugged. “I was fat, if that’s what you’re asking. I tired easily.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
Lucian turned from the window. He squinted in the light.
“Doing something unpleasant gets easier with repetition,” he said. “Do you understand what I’m saying, boy?”
“I do,” Cassius said.
“You have to be careful about doing a thing too much. Otherwise, it can get easy to do. Even if you don’t want it to. Even if you regret it afterward.”
“Would you call that sacrifice?”
“I’d call it stupid,” Lucian said.
“If you put your life at risk for something that is just, or put your soul at risk, or your mind, then that makes you—” Cassius bit back the word.
“Makes you what?”
“If you sacrifice something for the greater good, you are a hero by definition.”
“Piss on that,” Lucian shouted.
“Just like Attus.”
“Are you daft, boy? Attus fought because he was a fugitive slave. He didn’t want to lead a rebellion. He needed an army to help him rob desert merchants. And to protect him from his enemies.”
“You’re being cynical. That’s not how history remembers it.”
“Don’t speak for history,” Lucian said. “You should see what Fathalans write about him. They say he was a madman. A savage. A child murderer. And in the Eastern Kingdoms, they don’t know his name at all. Don’t need to. They have their own warlords to lionize.”
“Attus was a spark,” Cassius said. “The Antiochi revolution had been fomenting for years. But it took Attus, just one man, standing up and fighting to ignite a fire. A fire that swept the Fathalans all the way back to the desert. A fire that cleared away the brush so something new could take root and grow. It’s the same thing you were trying to do in the Uprising. The same thing someone needs to do now.”
“Your sense of history is warped, boy,” Lucian said. “And as for the Uprising, we were fighting for Cinna’s and Piso’s profits. We didn’t know it at the time. But ignorance doesn’t change the truth.”
“You thought you were doing something just.”
“And I was wrong. Do you know how Piso and Cinna tricked me into believing otherwise?” Lucian stared at the boy in his blood-soaked boots. “Because I thought myself a hero on some damn crusade.”
• • •
The midday sun broke through a low veil of clouds and shone on the east end of the city, the tradesmen’s district. The streets were crowded with foot traffic and mule-drawn carts. Laborers sang filthy rhymes as they toiled. Cassius moved amongst these people, his gray cloak pulled tight and his gauntlets, the instruments of his own work, hidden from view.
There was a hierarchy amongst the craftsmen of the east end, and the layout of the streets matched. At the top were metalworkers. Silversmiths and goldsmiths and weaponeers specialized in rare alloys. They occupied the Street of Silver, the Street of Gold, and the Street of Steel, places near the Market and with easy access to the main avenues into Lowtown, where supplies arrived from the docks. Their shops were large, with dozens of workers and storehouses guarded by famous mercenary companies.
Below this group, and farther from the Market, were masons and sculptors, whose workshops lined the Street of Stone, where statues of gods and heroes and monsters rose half-formed into the open air, straining to break free of their prisons of rock.
After this came papermakers and scribes, textile workers, skilled and unskilled laborers. And occupying a rare niche in this system were men who traded in blood and bone. Vivisectionists, torturers, chirurgeons, physicians. They were outcasts amongst honest workers, their shops small and rude and pushed up against the city wall, with bloodstained stoops and the smell of decay wafting from their doorways. Flesh was cheap in Scipio, and the trade attracted only the desperate or the deranged.
Hidden in the midst of the flesh workers, at the end of Charnel Row, was a curious stucco shop whose sign depicted a pair of crossed gauntlets.
The door to this shop was open, and when Cassius called for the owner, he received no response. He scanned the front room and found it empty and entered the room and was two steps past the door when he felt a thrumming in his chest. He spun and reached for his gauntlets as a Yoruban emerged from a side room.
The Yoruban was in his middle twenties, tall and with a shaved head, a thin, neat beard, ebon skin. He was shirtless, his belly paunchy but his arms long and muscular and slick with blood. He wore a bloodstained wrap tied about his waist, the wrap reaching to his knees, and wore also a pair of jeweled gauntlets.
“Easy,” the Yoruban said.
Cassius’s hands hovered at his waist. He lowered them slowly, all the while watching the Yoruban.
“I’m unarmed,” Cassius said. “I’d feel better if you were as well.”
“You’re in my shop.” The Yoruban had a deep voice. His Antiochi was flawless, and he spoke it with the singsong rhythm of his native tongue.
“As a customer,” Cassius said.
The Yoruban nodded, conceding the point. He slid his gauntlets off and tossed them onto a nearby table, the table cluttered with vials of powder and colored liquids, jars of salve and cream.
Cassius had never before seen a spellcaster disarmed this willingly. The Yoruban moved so casually, his expression so self-assured, that he half suspected this to be a trap.
Then the Yoruban smiled, a wide jovial smile so out of place in Scipio that Cassius was certain this was a trap.
“Relax,” the Yoruban said. “You have nothing to fear here. What can I help you with?”
“You’re a healer.”
“I am. Are you in need of my services?”
“I might have broken a few ribs.”
“Come.”
The Yoruban passed through an alcove hung with a white sheet, and Cassius followed. In the other room, he found the carcasses of two pigs splayed atop thick sailcloth, the sailcloth stained with blood and with flecks of gore and entrails.
“Lunch?” Cassius asked.
“Patients.” The Yoruban sat atop a high stool and motioned for Cassius to stand before him. “Or at least practice for the real thing.”
“Has business been slow?”
“Business is always slow.”
Cassius surveyed the shop. Rich tapestries covered the walls, multicolored weaves that mixed bright greens and yellows with deep reds. Here and there, strong-scented candles burned, casting the room in soft light. Scrolls with intricate, hand-drawn anatomies lay unfurled, some labeled in Antiochi and some in the ideograms of Eastern Kingdoms and some in languages Cassius had never seen before, dead languages written on ancient parchments carried up from the depths of stygian tombs.
“May I?” the Yoruban asked.
Cassius nodded. The Yoruban pressed his large hand against Cassius’s side, and Cassius winced. The Yoruban felt along Cassius’s ribs with the tips of his fingers, prodding bone and bruised flesh until Cassius yelped with pain.
“Two ribs,” he said. “Maybe three.”
“Broken?” Cassius asked.
“I believe so. I know a bone-knitting spell. Do you want me to fix them?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Why is business slow?”
“Because healing by spell is expensive,” the Yoruban said. “And I’m young. And the process is dangerous. The people here don’t know me, and I have no one to vouch for my talents.”
“So why practice here?”
“It is a hard path to become a healer in the Western Kingdoms. There are guilds and colleges who hold monopolies on healing spells. They stifle outsiders. I didn’t want to spend half my life working as an indentured servant. So I came to Scipio, where I could practice my art undisturbed.”
“I can appreciate a man who operates on his own,” Cassius said. “That’s not very common in Scipio.”
“This is true.”
“There’s a lot of pressure in this town to pick a side. For prosperity. For safety.”
“I think I take your meaning.” The Yoruban nodded gravely. “Rest assured, I serve no master but my art.”
“I notice that you haven’t asked my name yet.”
The Yoruban smiled. “I figured you would offer it when it suited you.”
“You’re a discreet man, then.”
“The privacy of my patients is important to me.”
“Privacy is my main concern,” Cassius said.
“I see.”
“More so even than the ribs.”
“Understood.”
“I know that healing is expensive, but I’d be willing to pay for it and pay for privacy as well.”
“My prices are fair. And you’ll get what you pay for.” The Yoruban’s eyes were amber-colored and heavy-lidded. They were attentive and concerned but not intrusive. “I would, of course, need to be paid up front.”
“Do you have many spells?”
“Not many. But I have the right
spell for you.”
“Do you have a spell to seal a wound?” Cassius asked.
“I do.”
“And to staunch bleeding.”
“That as well.”
“What about a spell to draw out wound rot?”
The Yoruban shook his head. “This is a master-level spell. Maybe a few hundred exist in all the world.”
“Would you like to own this spell?”
The Yoruban paused, measuring his words. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that before I know your intentions.”
Cassius reached into his tunic and drew out a small leather pouch. The pouch was tied with twine, and Cassius handled it by gripping the tip of the twine between thumb and forefinger.
“This is a wound-rot spell. I’m sure you have spell indices here. I’ll let you examine the rune, then we’ll check the indices and you’ll see I’m telling the truth. This spell is worth a fortune and it will be yours if you can keep my secret.”
The Yoruban looked to the pouch. He stood and pressed his hands together and bowed and, even bowing, he was nearly as tall as Cassius.
“Respectfully,” he said, “I don’t believe this arrangement will work.”
“Why not?”
“I must be paid up front. And you will want to hold the spell so that I will hold your secret.”
“I will hold the spell, but I will also pay you up front. Gold for the healing, every time I need it. And then the spell, no later than three weeks from today, if I find you have kept my secret.”
The Yoruban sighed heavily, the distress on his face plain.
“You don’t think this is a good deal,” Cassius said.
“No, I think it is too good a deal. It makes me nervous.”
“You have every right to be cautious but no need to be nervous. I’ll prove this to you. For now, we will have a simple transaction. One healing, paid for with coin in advance. What do you say?”
The Yoruban wrung his large hands. “I am trying to say something, but I need to find the right words.”