The Broken Man

by Brandon Jones

  “The land didn’t exist, did it?” Josen asked. “The man falsified the deed.”

  “No, the deed was real, as was the land. But it was worthless. It was in an area of Pomay my father was unfamiliar with, full of low mountains, rough and untamed. Nothing grew there but some scraggly bushes and short, tough grass. Seventy thousand acres of unfarmable wilderness bought at a pittance is still unfarmable. His friends told him to take the man to the law, demand redress. Father was young, with only one wife, a dozen farmable acres to his name, and very little money. The pittance he had paid was nearly everything he had.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Uncle Marathan was with Father the first time he visited his newly purchased land. He said Father grinned when he saw the land and said, ‘I will make a fortune here.’ ‘But nothing will grow here, brother,’ Marathan said. ‘Sheep,’ my father told him. ‘Sheep will grow here.’”

  “I don’t think the Church will take sheep in place of ceral,” Josen said.

  Sam shook his head. “My father now owns more sheep than any other man in Pomay and sells his wool in all of the Passbound cities. Turns out that the short, tough grass native to those mountainsides make sheep wool soft, makes it grow fast. He loves to tell people, ‘I thought I was buying land. Instead, I accidently bought seventy thousand acres of bleeding sheep seed.’” Josen laughed, despite himself, at the bad pun inside the bad joke. Sam smiled too, but he wasn’t finished. “My father was foolish for not looking more closely before leaping at what he saw as a great opportunity. But he was also smart, optimistic, and determined. The man who sold him the land thought he was taking advantage of my father. My father turned it into an advantage.”

  “Did he ever find the man who sold him the land?” Josen asked.

  “He did, several years later. Esmale had lost all of my father’s money. Gambled and drank and whored it away. My father found him in a debtors’ prison, dirty and starving and wretched.

  “Father blessed him. He kissed Esmale’s face, washed his feet, and brought him home. Esmale has been my father’s head of shipping for as long as I can remember. Do you know what he ships?”

  “Wool, I would assume,” Josen said, perplexed.

  “Of course. And livestock destined for the slaughterhouse. But he ships another sheep byproduct that surprises most people.”

  “And that is . . .?” Josen asked, humoring the boy.

  “Sheep shit.”

  “Sorry, what? Why?”

  “You people think the grain you grow here in the Basin is the result of some God-sent miracle, an unquestionable gift from your Faceless God. It’s all religious, so nobody bothers to think about how it works—why it works.”

  “That’s bold blasphemy,” Josen said carefully, not sure where this was going.

  “Maybe. But I don’t think that bothers you,” Sam said. Josen could tell the boy was nervous, but he pressed on anyway. “Besides, I’m from Pomay, remember? Everyone knows we don’t really hold with your Faceless God. Which is lucky for you, in this case, because it means I might have a solution for you.”

  Josen let that sink in. He watched Sam in silence for a long moment, weighing his options. Sam was right—the blasphemy didn’t bother him. It was the sense that he was being maneuvered that had him wary.

  “Fine,” Josen said finally. “I’ll bite. What’s your magic solution?”

  “No magic. Fertilizer.”

  “What?”

  “Fertilizer. It’s food, essentially, for plants. That’s what your floods do each year that allows you to plant the same crop in the same places every year without stripping the soil bare. They leave a layer of nutrient-rich silt over anything the water reaches.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means,” Josen said.

  “The flood makes growing ceral possible because it leaves behind things in the dirt the plants need to grow—fertilizer. Begging pardon, but the Stewards might already know this if they were more willing to approach agriculture from anything but a religious stance. But flood water isn’t the only way to fertilize land. Farmers in Pomay and Chessay have used manure on their farmland for generations to create the same effect.”

  “Sheep shit,” Josen said, both the solution and Sam’s angle dawning on him at the same time. “And your father owns all the sheep. Who is he?”

  “Father is Abbahim Binovine, and you’re in luck,” Sam said. “I can introduce you to him in two weeks, at the Planting Gala, if you can get him an invitation.”

  Chapter 25

  “You Reverates sure do love drama,” Akelle said beside Josen.

  Josen grunted. He didn’t like being kept in the dark either—literally, in this case. When he and Akelle had arrived for the Planting Gala, they had been ushered into the entirely unlit Great Hall and told to wait. Josen could hear dozens of people in the dark, all murmuring softly to each other. No one seemed particularly pleased about the setup.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” a booming voice called over the mutterings. “Reverate Vasture wishes me to welcome you—”

  “Turn on the lights!” someone yelled from crowd, to agreeable murmurs.

  “To this year’s Planting Gala,” the voice continued, ignoring the interruption. “Behold,” he said, and the lights came on all at once, “the Glass Radiance!”

  Josen flinched as the Great Hall burst to life in a sudden, blinding riot of colors. All around him, people went from shielding their eyes from the overwhelming flood of light to gaping at the sight spread out below them.

  “Fancy,” Akelle said from beside him.

  Josen grinned.

  The Great Hall was filled from end to end with glowing displays. Literally glowing. Josen and Akelle joined the rest of the guests—perhaps a hundred or so—moving to get a closer look at the displays. It took Josen a moment to realize that each piece was made of glass and lit from behind—and often from within—by a steady burning light rod from Jurdon. And there were dozens of them—perhaps a hundred or more. The contrast between the guests—dressed all in black and white per Vasture’s request—and the cacophony of glowing colors surrounding them only served to heighten the splendor. The effect was awesome.

  “What do you think, Akelle?” Josen asked as they stopped at a spectacular display of stained-glass replicas of famous paintings—Breath of Winter by Yllin, Petrovich’s Three Maidens at the Well, and Galiound’s Fate of Man among them. Josen tried not to gawk like a child. “Akelle?”

  Josen looked over at his young friend, who was looking from the glass artwork to a nearby side door, a calculating look in his eyes.

  “Akelle,” Josen said, more sternly.

  “What?” Akelle asked, annoyed at having his scheming interrupted.

  “How would you even lift one?” Josen whispered soft enough to be sure no one could overhear them. He gestured at the pieces, most of them between four and six feet tall, some larger still. “They must weigh two hundred pounds each. At least. Not to mention how unwieldy they would be to carry.”

  “Well, if it were easy, then anyone could—”

  “No, Akelle. Don’t even think about it.”

  Akelle huffed. “You know, maybe I wouldn’t be so tempted if you would agree to try anything bigger the milk jobs we’ve been doing.”

  “We’re doing the best we can under the circumstances. We just have to be careful.”

  “No, we have to clever.”

  “The Gennio job was clever.”

  “And pointless. We made almost nothing on that job—just enough that we can’t spend it because we can’t explain how we got it. Besides, we’re trying to make the Broken Man into a legend, not open a bar. This is the kind of stuff we need to be stealing,” Akelle said, gesturing to the glowing art. “Because it’s hard. Because it doesn’t make any sense. Because there are a hundred of the most important and influential people anywhere in the Union here at this party, and all of them would talk about nothing else for the next year if we could pull off the right kin
d of job. I’m not planning to actually do anything; just thinking about how I would do it. If I was going to.”

  “Good,” Josen said, unwilling to admit aloud how much he agreed with Akelle. Josen wasn’t sure exactly how much each of these glass works would be worth, but the original paintings were effectively priceless. He had tried to convince Saul to let him have a go at Fate of Man—considered the most valuable of the three—on more than one occasion.

  Reverate Vasture had likely commissioned the pieces for this event, purchasing access to the originals for the artist. It would have cost a fortune; each was held in separate private galleries—Yllin’s was displayed in Sefti, Petrovich’s in Kendai, and Galiound’s in Ludon—but the point of these galas was, in large part, for each Reverate Steward to show off their financial prowess.

  If Josen was being honest, his own fingers itched a little just looking at the artwork in front of him, but the nervous, sidelong glances he received from more than a few people helped dissuade him. The Planting Gala was Josen’s first return to the Ceral Basin since his disastrous… altercation with that starving Carter on Silo Hill. By now, everyone here had heard the story, and they were all watching him, wondering if he would do anything exciting tonight. And by exciting, Josen meant rash and moronic.

  Like stealing something in plain sight.

  Luckily for Josen, competing on an equal level with his desire to put his thieving skills to the test was his wonder at the sheer variety and depth of artistic talent on display. Josen quickly lost himself in the wonder of each successive little gallery, dragging Akelle from piece to piece with the enthusiasm of a child—a display of larger-than-life statues carved from ice as clear as a mountain brook were carved to depict scriptural scenes; multicolored glass sculptures worked into abstract shapes, frozen in patternless waves and spirals; glass worked into the shapes of animals and plants, from the most delicate of flowers and small birds suspended on delicate string to a pair of crystalline Kendanese tigers.

  On and on it went. Josen nearly gasped aloud when he saw two actual Vuriche wood mosaic mountainscapes—possibly worth more than even the original Galiound—sitting next to a pair of three-dimensional glass diorama versions. Josen barely even saw the glass dioramas. The Vuriche wood mosaics were stunning, both comprised of thousands of tiny pieces of wood, individually carved, stained, and fit perfectly to form a gorgeous mountainscape. The technique—marquetry—was so time-consuming, and Vuriche’s pieces so intricate, that he had only completed five known works over the course of his career. Of those five, only four were accounted for, and there were two right here!

  When Josen finally managed to tear himself away from gawking at the Vuriche pieces, he was drawn to a display of glass marionettes the size of children—each manned by several puppeteers to handle their weight—danced in front of an all-glass stage set. To the side, an orchestra played, illuminated by lights that changed with the music from pulsing yellows to slow, shifting blues and purples. It was all wildly impractical, but that was the point.

  “I’m hungry,” Akelle said after a moment watching the show. They had walked into the middle of it, but Josen recognized the story as a popular stage adaptation of a Seftish myth called The Legend of the Lonely Brother.

  “Are you kidding?” Josen whispered, not taking his eyes off the show in front of him. The Brother was in the middle of his stirring speech, a climactic point near the middle of the story, rousing a hesitant rebel army to help him take the throne back from his treacherous brother. “How is food even mildly interesting compared to this?”

  Akelle shrugged.

  “Whatever. Go stuff your face. And Akelle,” Josen whispered after his friend as Akelle started toward the refreshment tables. Akelle looked back at him, eyes questioning. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Akelle grinned. “Too late,” he said, and kept walking. “But I promise to be good anyway.”

  Josen shook his head and turned back to the puppet show to see Vale approaching him. He felt a sudden surge of apprehension. He had been avoiding her as best he could manage for the last week. It hadn’t been difficult. Josen had spent the week laying low in Ceralon, and Vale had needed to step in to fill the void left by his absence in the Basin.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Vale said without preamble.

  Of course, she had made several trips from the Basin to Ceralon explicitly to see him.

  Josen shrugged and looked back to the puppet show. There was no use denying it, but that didn’t mean he wanted to speak any more now that the pretense had been stripped away. What she said at the meeting a week ago had haunted Josen’s thoughts since. He understood what she saw—for every problem he fixed, a dozen more seemed to pop up. But that didn’t mean he could ignore the problems.

  Except for Vale herself, of course. He had no qualms about ignoring her.

  “Josen, you can’t ignore me,” Vale said.

  “Shh,” Josen said. On stage, the three glass soldiers—representative of the rebel army—cheered at the conclusion of the Brother’s speech, then knelt to him, offering him their fealty, their swords, and their lives. Josen always found this part of the story both stirring and unbelievable. He found it difficult to believe that a simple speech, no matter how passionate or rousing, could change a man’s mind and make him suddenly willing to die for a cause. It was beautiful and moving and entirely outside of Josen’s understanding. A huge number of these men, Josen knew, would die as a direct result of their choice to follow the Brother here at this moment.

  Admittedly, Josen didn’t know the first thing about armies or combat beyond back alley brawls. With the exception of the Pomish, none of the Passbound cities kept a fighting body of any significance. Even Pomay’s “army”—the Babalites, as they called themselves—consisted of less than a thousand mounted men and women whose primary purpose was to patrol the foothills of the Gaddeshori Mountains for Amorlens raiding parties.

  “Josen,” Vale whispered fiercely, turning him by the shoulder. “We have to talk.”

  “What?” Josen said, spinning on her. “What is so important that we have to talk about it now?”

  “Please. I promise it is important.” She looked worried. “But we should find somewhere more private.” She didn’t look angry or out of patience, she looked … concerned. Genuinely, deeply concerned.

  That gave Josen pause.

  “Okay,” he said. His annoyance and apprehension dissipated a little, and he let her lead him away, pausing only briefly to grab a small dish of candied, puffed ceral—heralded here as some kind of new, inventive treat, though Josen recognized it as something he had once bought from a Jurdish street vendor. The only difference was that tonight’s puffed ceral was colored to match the rest of night’s festivities.

  “We can’t keep doing this,” Vale said as they walked. She chose a small table in the corner of the hall and took one of the chairs.

  “Doing what?” Josen asked, sitting across from her.

  “We can’t keep fighting like this. We can’t start and end every interaction like we’re still petulant children, arguing over who’s going to tell mother we broke the glass on her favorite cabinet.”

  “That was your fault, by the way,” Josen said.

  “You pushed me! God’s tears, Josen, can you please focus for two seconds? I’m serious. It’s not always your fault. I get irritated and snap at you, and you get defensive or flippant or ignore me until I finally manage to say something so hurtful you can’t ignore it. I’m sorry. I don’t want it to be like this. Neither of us has time to spend dodging each other when we should be working together. I know it’s been hard for you, getting used to all this.” She waived her hand at the milling people, looking at the art or sitting at their tables. A few were even dancing on the huge, sunken dancefloor in the middle of the room. “It’s a lot of responsibility, and you’ve never done very well with that. You’re too impulsive.”

  “You wouldn’t be referring to the Deferate I punched last
week, would you?” Josen asked.

  “Among other things. How’s your hand, by the way?”

  Josen looked at her, confused for a moment, then looked down at the hand he had thought he broke during the Gennio job—and had used to punch a Deferate. He had entirely forgotten until she mentioned it.

  “Feels fine,” he said, holding it up for her to look at. It was perfectly healthy—not a hint of swelling or bruising. Master Roetu had barely said a word when he on his follow-up visit, only that the hand was healing exceptionally well.

  Josen flexed his hand, then rested it back on the table.

  “Good,” Vale said. “Speaking of which,” she said, then hesitated, as if she had been gathering her courage, only to find it suddenly fled. “Josen, I …” Vale swallowed, clearly trying to muster her courage.

  “How is Kalen doing?” Josen asked, unable to bear the silence any longer. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  It was the wrong question, apparently, as Vale went from unconformable to sick. She smiled in an attempt to cover it, without success. “Well,” she said, taking a calming breath. “He’s well. Kalen is … away, with one of his ships on its way to Venland to trade for spices.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know he made trips himself.”

  “He doesn’t often, but he has some new contacts he wants to meet personally in Venland. He’s considering diversifying, expanding to new types of cargo. Ever since the Chessay Pass opened up, anyone with a boat larger than two skiffs tied together seems to think they’re full-fledged spice merchants. Cinnamon and coriander just don’t bring the same price they did for Kalen’s father and grandfather.”

  “Hmm,” Josen said, not sure what to say to that. He didn’t know the first thing about shipping. “I’m sure he’ll be okay.”

  Vale nodded but didn’t say anything. Josen thought he understood her nervousness now. The spice route from Chessia to Venland was two months’ round trip in good weather, and it forced the ship to skirt around the Okeelay Islands and the pirates that lay wait in those waters. It was a long, dangerous trip, but lucrative for those who made it back home safely. For a fleet owner like Kalen, the danger was mostly monetary, and the eventuality of losing a ship was undoubtedly guarded against through insurance of one kind or another. Vale wasn’t used to the danger being so immediate, and it was worrying her.