Rogues

by George R. R. Martin

  And then he saw nothing, not even the ever-present light

  Not anymore.

  Not until it crept back, a flicker here and there. A pixel at a time, that charred patchwork of vision, gleaming around the edges from all the cones and rods adjusting to the light that wasn’t there.

  The stars came back, but this time they were above him. He blinked. Real stars. Not the ones that snowed across his vision when the light went away.

  He was lying on his back, and a sharp jabbing sensation in his side suggested that someone was poking him with a stick.

  “Ow …” he mumbled, then swiped at the stick.

  The stick was held by Ammaw Pete, who also hefted an oversized flashlight with a big 9-volt battery exposed on its underside. To her credit, she didn’t aim it at his face. She aimed it at the ground beside him, illuminating his headlamp—which had fallen off and ceased to function.

  “Wake up, big man. You’re done here.”

  “Done … here? I didn’t …” He rose slowly, ratcheting himself up with his elbows. “I didn’t do anything.”

  The frown on her face suggested she might argue, but she only said, “Whatever. Get yourself together. I found your car up the hill there, but your battery’ll need a jump. There’s more than one kind of life, you know, and I’ll want a ride home.”

  “You walked here?”

  She shined the light in his face this time, and he winced. “Of course I walked. How else was I supposed to follow that light? Drive through the trees? Not sure what kind of car you think I got, and I don’t ride a bicycle. Never did learn. It ain’t natural, running around on two wheels like that.”

  “Pretty sure it’s … pretty natural,” he argued with a grin. She offered him a hand for the sake of show, but he pushed himself to his feet without her assistance. “Is that how you found me? You followed the light?”

  “Better than the star of Bethlehem.”

  He was only half-serious when he said, “Hush your mouth, ma’am.”

  “Oh, sure. You can ask the pagan holdouts for a handout, but I can’t tease a bit about astrology. Fine. You big fat hypocrite.”

  He dusted himself off and felt around for any broken bits. All in all, he felt pretty good. Tired, but good. “I’m a big fat lot of things, but that’s not one of them.”

  “Well then, maybe you’re only confused. Whoa now,” she said, and stepped in to steady him. It worked, mostly because he didn’t want to fall down on top of her. “Take a moment if you need it.”

  “Not sure what’s wrong with me,” he muttered. “I didn’t do anything. I asked for help, and it came. That’s all.”

  She patted his arm. “No, darling. That wasn’t all. You were right,” she told him, guiding him by the crook of his arm, back up the hill toward the Jolly Roger. “There was life in this place. A lot of life. Your life. And my Old Man,” she said with a wink. “He borrowed a bit to make his point. You did a good job, calling him back.”

  Kilgore frowned down at the small woman with the fierce grip on the meat of his arm. She carried on, straight ahead.

  “I knew if I asked you outright, you’d never do it. Not in a million years. Bless Him, He’s got the time, but you and I don’t.”

  And as they walked, the flicker in her eyes didn’t come from the flashlight, or the moon.

  Daniel Abraham

  In the worst of bad neighborhoods, where life is cheap and usually it’s everyone for himself, it’s good to find a friend that you can count on—and sometimes they’re to be found in the most unexpected of places …

  Daniel Abraham lives with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is Director of Technical Support at a local Internet service provider. Starting off his career in short fiction, he made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere, some of which appeared in his first collection, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Turning to novels, he made several sales in rapid succession, including the books of The Long Price Quartet, which consist of A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring. He’s also written the The Dagger and the Coin series, which consists of The Dragon’s Path, The King’s Blood, and The Tyrant’s Law. He also wrote Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, as M. L. N. Hanover, wrote the four-volume paranormal romance series Black Sun’s Daughter, and with Ty Franck, writing as James S. A. Corey, the space-opera Expanse novels, consisting (so far), of Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate.

  THE MEANING OF LOVE

  Daniel Abraham

  The name Sovereign North Bank referred to a strip of land along the river Taunis within the great city of Nevripal, but not of it. It existed first as an accident of politics. When, centuries before, the wizards of the Hanish Empire sued for peace after the War of Ten Emperors, the lands surrounding the slow, dark river were ceded to the Council of Nestripon, but an exception was made for the Hanish winter palace and its grounds, which were the favorites of the Empress. In a sentimental gesture of good faith that often follows wars between monarchs who are also family, the land remained technically within the Hanish Empire though no official or citizen remained there. The mayor and burgers of Nevripal, not sharing the familial fondness for their defeated enemies, declared that the Sovereign North Bank was, in essence, its own problem. With no Hanish to oversee it and no Nestripon willing to take responsibility, it became that rarest of all places: an autonomous zone where the law protected and enforced lawlessness.

  Over the ages since, the north bank had become a curiosity. The detritus of a dozen cultures found their way there, or were forced to it when there was no other refuge. The sluggish, dark waters of the Taunis carried barges and rafts to the muddy shores. Criminals and debtors fled to it, refugees of wars national and domestic, the addicted and the poverty-lost. And like the vast and mindless organism that it was, the Sovereign North Bank grew.

  That there were no magistrates did not mean there were no planners, no architects, no geniuses or madmen. Rather it meant there was no restraint to those who lived there and invented. Over the decades, the press of humanity and desperation drove the buildings higher. One story and then another rose up, built from whatever came to hand with the unofficial motto Good enough is good enough. Towers leaned and swayed and sometimes collapsed, grinding the men and women within them to blood and pulp, only to be rebuilt by the survivors or the next wave of refugees. Walkways of rope and wood were hoisted between the buildings until it was said a native of the place could cross from the boundary wall on the north to the sluggish waters at the south without ever touching ground. Shit and piss and trash were thrown from windows to the distant street until rain came to wash them away, and like plants in rich soil, the unstable, unreliable buildings rose, driven by the deep human desire to be the one least shat upon. The streets, such as they were, grew darker and narrower and sometimes disappeared altogether under plank-and-tar awnings that redefined them as homes and shacks.

  As with any community, there were landmarks and centers all through it. The Temple at the root of the city that was said to be part of the original Hanish palace. The Water Market, built out over the river itself, where men and women exchanged trinkets and junk with the focus and ferocity of gem merchants. The opium dens against the wall where men slept themselves to death under strings of pale beads long since yellowed to amber by their smokes. There were neighborhoods and demarcations invisible to the untrained eye, but named by the natives: the Salt, Hafner’s Choke, Jimtown.

  Two miles long, a mile and a half wide at its greatest, the Sovereign North Bank was home and hovel to fifty thousand people. What little order there was came from the crime lords for whom it was a refuge from the magistrates. What little food there was came from houses of charity in Nevripal whenever the gentry of the greater city felt magnanimous,
or was stolen from the river traffic or fished from the filthy waters. The residents of the city-without-citizens ranged from squalid and starving babies who shat their brief lives away in the shadows to the dark-robed holy men in the Temple, from rail-thin addicts half-mad from longing and hunger to masters of crime and violence whose penthouses looked across the river at the lights of the respectable world like reflections in a tarnished mirror.

  And in the depths of the city, not too near the wall nor too close to the river, neither at the exalted and uncertain heights nor drowned in the trash and offal that choked the lowest streets, there was a small room with a tin brazier under a thick clay-pipe chimney, filled with two ancient, stained mattresses. On one mattress lay Prince Steppan Homrey, fugitive heir of Lyria. On the other, Asa, who was secretly in love with him.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, neither was sleeping.

  “I love her,” the prince said, his arm thrown over his brow and manly tears beading in the corners of his eyes. He was ten days past his twenty-third naming day, and the older of the pair by half a year. “I love her, and she is going to be sold to the workhouse.”

  A half dozen possible replies wrestled in Asa’s mind—You’ve seen her once, and from a distance and Better the workhouse than here and You may be confusing love for a different kind of longing—until a diplomatic victor came out on top.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should have seen her. She was like dawn on a winter morning.”

  “Frosted over, you mean?”

  “No,” the prince said. “She was pure and pale, and she shone like the horizon when it is almost too bright to look upon.”

  “Ah.”

  “I asked her name from a boy there. Zelanie, daughter of Jost. I would swear she has royal blood. If you’d seen her, you’d know what I mean. The way she held herself was like seeing a queen at her coronation. Everything around her was made bright just because she was close to it. I was meant to find her. I see that now. Whatever plan the gods have for me, I was meant to find her. And so I must have been meant to save her. You should have seen her father. He had the face of a butcher.”

  Asa shifted. The mattress rustled and settled.

  “You think I’m a fool,” the prince said. His eyes were red with weeping, and his face a mask of melancholy. Asa sighed.

  “I think you’re being hunted by a stepmother who’d like nothing better than to see you facedown in a river. Your father is the prisoner of a Kyrean wizard, if he’s not dead. Half the people in your home country think you’re a murderer and the other half think you’re a fool. You’ve got a full plate without taking on anything else.”

  “This isn’t something I asked for,” he said. “You see that, don’t you?”

  Asa’s whole life had been spent in and out of the Sovereign North Bank, working as a petty thief, an acolyte of the gods, a grifter, a broker of information, and—like the city itself—an avatar and embodiment of whatever-needs-doing-gets-done. Becoming the unofficial protector of a political fugitive wasn’t the wise thing either, but it had happened.

  Steppan had just arrived when they met the winter before, the fine stitching and well-carded wool of his supposedly unobtrusive cloak making him stand out like blood on a wedding dress. He’d worn a scowl that had been equal parts moral outrage at the misery around him and masculine self-pity, and he’d lost the coins carefully stitched into his sleeve within the first half day of coming down the wall. Even the priests would have thought twice before putting their fates with his, but here he was, months later, his hair longer and shaggy at the nape, his clothes the yellow-brown that everything washed in the Taunis eventually became, and staring across the room with tear-stained eyes like a puppy that had lost its boy. He hadn’t shaved in a month, and his black whiskers shone like they’d been oiled. He was the very image of not-something-I-asked-for, and so Asa had to allow him the point.

  “Where was she, again?”

  “I saw her on the walk beside the one building that looks like it’s stooping. With the four pillars.”

  “I know the one. And this was two days ago?”

  Prince Steppan nodded, then he rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. “Will you find her for me? Will you carry her a message from me?”

  “No, I will under no circumstances start announcing you to anyone I’m not utterly certain of. But I’ll look into the situation. See what there is to be seen. Zelanie, daughter of Jost? That, then.”

  Asa knew the place. The building was the old tower with roots in the stables of the Hanish Emperor’s palace and a long history of minor collapse. A family living there was likely desperate enough to sell their adult children into the workhouses. Traffic in slaves was prohibited in Nevripal, but Sovereign North Bank wasn’t Nevripal. Asa knew of two places where legitimate businessmen met to make trades like that without technically breaking the law. And in truth, it wasn’t the worst thing a father could do with his daughter.

  “Thank you for this, my friend,” the prince said. “I love her.”

  You’d mentioned that, Asa thought bitterly, but didn’t say.

  When the sun first started brightening the eastern skies, Asa was already walking across the rope bridges between the buildings. The air stank of smoke and sewage, but no more so than usual. The sounds of voices came from bare windows and the streets below: shouting and cursing but also singing and laughter. Men and women in dark cloaks squeezed past each other on bridges no wider across than a single handspan, backs and bellies rubbing against each other in a way that would have been intimate if it hadn’t been routine. Every week or two, a bridge would collapse, spilling two or three people down through the filthy air, smashing their bodies through whatever roof lay below them. But then, more died from the flux and no one was doing anything about that either. The bridges would be rebuilt if enough people cared and had the rope to spare, or they wouldn’t. The paths of the city would shift and change like a slow river uneasy in its banks. It was part of what Asa loved about the city. But only part.

  The old tower looked sad in the yellow light of morning. It leaned a degree to the east, and windows spotted its sides, knocked through the walls wherever convenience demanded until they looked like an architectural pox. Asa took a ladder and then a stairway made from driftwood logs nailed to the outside of the building, and emerged in the yard Steppan had described. Four massive pillars rose up from the ground, tall and proud as trees, and overshadowed. A few dozen men and women slept in the muck or made a show of waking up. At the far end, three boys played a game of chase with a dog no one had eaten yet.

  “Looking for a man named Jost. Daughter’s Zelanie,” Asa said, touching a man’s shoulder. A headshake and a shrug, and then the same question again of the next person, and then on and on, one after another, until movements and words became rote. When, near midday, a woman nodded and pointed, she nodded and pointed toward the river. Asa cursed. That wasn’t a good sign.

  The men from the workhouses were set up on westernmost quay. They had well-fed faces and laughter that was made cruel by its context the way a gem could be made ugly by being set in tin. The pens weren’t finished yet, but a pair of local boys were hammering the walls in place, building the corral for their less fortunate compatriots. The workhouse overseer stood smoking a pipe at the waterside, looking out over the sullen gyre where the river shaved off a bit of its current. His desk was a plank between two piles of bricks with a purple cloth over it to make it seem respectable. A line of men and woman waited for the trades to begin. One of them was a tired-looking man perhaps twice the prince’s age with a pale-skinned girl at his side.

  “Jost?” Asa asked, coming near.

  The man looked over, and his daughter a moment later.

  “Here,” the man said.

  Asa smiled. “Then this would be the lovely Zelanie.”

  She was a thin creature with dark hair that was a few degrees less lank than might be expected, more roundness in her cheeks and breast
s than perhaps the average. Asa didn’t think she was a beauty for the ages, and certainly not the winter dawn translated to flesh, but pretty enough and capable of smiling. Her eyes had what might or might not have been intelligence but was at least cunning. If there was royal blood in her, it was well hidden.

  “What is it to you?” she asked.

  “In line for the workhouse?”

  “If they ever open the table and start hiring,” her father said.

  “Hiring? I’d have thought buying was the verb.”

  “Well no one fucking asked you, did they?”

  Asa turned to the girl, but before he could speak, a familiar voice called from the alley behind them. Josep Red staggered out, waving his good hand and grinning like he’d just found a pearl in a night pot. “Excuse me,” Asa said, eyes locked on the girl’s in a way that might seem meaningful. She scowled, then smiled uncertainly and turned away.

  “So, Asa, you wasted spunk,” Josep said as they walked a little distance from the line together. “I been looking for you.”

  “Flattered.”

  “You still in the market for news about hunters?”

  Asa hoisted an eyebrow, and the old man cackled.

  “Yes, I am still in that market. What have you got?”

  “Two magistrate’s men came down the wall last night. They’re wandering in Hafner’s Choke, asking people about a picture.”

  Asa spat, looked back at the line of men and women, the half-built pen, the girl whom Prince Steppan had decided he loved. Can’t expect me to do everything at the same time. Asa pressed a copper coin in Josep’s unscarred hand.

  “How about you show me?”

  The magistrate’s hunters weren’t dressed for subtlety. They both wore boiled-leather armor with the scales-and-axe sigil of the high council carved into the breast, and the swords at their sides would have bought food for a week to anyone with the courage to take them. They walked with a firmness that carried the right of way along with it, and they ignored most of the people on the street, accosting only the better-dressed men and women, and speaking even to them in sharp, condescending tones. Asa and Josep Red watched them for a time without being seen, and nothing that they saw made Asa think well of the men.