One Man

by Harry Connolly

  “Um, doesn’t it mean being a good person?”

  He knelt so that his face was at the same height as hers, which meant her hand fell from his arm. His wild hair and beard hid most of his face, but Riliska was surprised to see that his skin was sort of red too, and spiderwebbed with scars on the left side. “Among my people, it does not. It has nothing to do with being good or bad. It means to always do what you have promised to do, to keep every oath, and to follow the rules that have been set for you. No excuses may be made. If the rules and your oaths urge you toward good, then you are a good person. If they urge you the other way, then you are not. But there is no other worthwhile measure of a human being. There is no other way to know if you can be trusted.”

  “I think I understand,” Riliska said, “but it sounds terrible. What if you want to be a good person?”

  “Then you must take care in the oaths you swear and the allegiances you make.”

  He was looking at her with a serious expression, as though there were something he wanted her to understand. It was almost as if he were sending a message. Was he trying to say he was a good person forced to do bad things?

  Maybe he just felt sad.

  Riliska gently laid her hand on his cheek. The northerner looked surprised just before she did it, but he did not pull away or stop her. Riliska wondered what his real name was. She knew what people called him, but that couldn’t have been his real, actual name.

  Then his expression went blank and he stood tall. “Come along, child,” he said. They went down a flight of stairs into the cobwebbed darkness of the lowest level.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The room the doctor had chosen for herself was rancid, cramped, and airless. Killer of Devils could not understand why she had settled there until he saw the piles of leather packets. She was an addict, and this room was at the end of a long corridor. If someone came for her, she would have ample warning. What she would do with that warning, Killer could not guess, but his time with the Pails meant time with addicts, and their paranoia could be all-consuming.

  Surveying the room a second time, he realized it had once contained cleaning supplies. Now it held only the doctor’s blades, her cot, her bloodstained table, and a pot brimming with old chicken bones and excrement.

  “I don’t have a tank here,” the doctor said from her cot. “I thought I explained all this. We can’t preserve anything.”

  Killer spoke Harkan better than Salashi, so he switched to that language. “This one is not for the tank. Tin Pail does not want to sell her. She is for revenge.” If she was truly a doctor, she would have had to learn that language.

  With a groan, the doctor sat up. She switched to Harkan, too. “Fine. Eyes and skin, then?”

  “That is what Tin Pail wants.”

  “Fine,” the doctor said again. Then she switched back to Salashi. “Up onto the table, little one. Let’s look you over.”

  Riliska approached it hesitantly, then glanced back at Killer as though hoping he would take her somewhere nicer.

  The doctor lifted her onto the table. “You were supposed to have a bath first, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

  Killer realized he was still standing in the doorway, and he had no idea why. His duty was done. There was no reason to linger. The way the girl stared at him, imploring his help, made his skin prickle.

  This was who he was now. This was his role in an evil world.

  The doctor said, in Harkan, “You know, a lot of people think being a doctor means you’re soft-hearted. Maybe you thought that yourself. I hear it all the time. ‘How good you are to help people in need,’ ‘How kind you are to take care of the sick and injured,’ and all that. And sure, it’s nice to help people, but I was well paid, too. I guess what people don’t understand is that most of my patients mean nothing to me. A lot of doctors are like that. The soft-hearted ones usually don’t last. Do you know why?”

  “I do not.”

  She continued her examination of the girl while she talked, although Killer was not sure why she bothered. “Because the most important part of our work involves cutting people apart. Slicing flesh, even when you’re trying to save lives, can be harrowing for the weak-hearted. We have to be as hard and smooth as slate so the blood just washes off. I like to think we’re similar to warriors in that way.”

  She smiled at him over her shoulder, showing those stained lips. Eight hells, she was making a pass at him.

  “Perhaps we are more alike than we seem,” he said.

  Because why should they not be? Both worked for the same criminal in a doomed, depraved city. Both were engaged in the same cruel tasks. Why should he not fuck this unfeeling addict in her reeking abattoir? Why should he not fuck her beside the bloody corpse of this child?

  This was the place his honor had taken him.

  The girl still stared at him, imploring his help with her expression, while the doctor pushed her flat on the table and strapped her in place. Killer of Devils did nothing, because nothing was what he was required to do.

  * * *

  Kyrioc said nothing as they rode through Spillwater toward the east tower. He had already scouted the Pails’ hideout, but only briefly and from a safe distance. A band of ironshirts, mobilized quickly like an army, would almost certainly draw the attention of the people they were hunting. All the Pails had to do was draw back the plankway that connected their deck from the rest of the city, and the constables would have one option. Wait them out.

  Only this broken carriage, and Tin’s concern for her brother, that might keep the plankway in place.

  As they approached the east tower, the bureaucrat leaped from the carriage.

  “Secrecy,” Kyrioc said, voice still raw from lack of use. “All is lost without it.”

  The bureaucrat rolled his eyes. “Please.”

  * * *

  Riliska had never met a doctor before, but if they were all like this, she never wanted to meet another. The woman smelled awful and she was strong—stronger than any tar head had a right to be.

  Riliska’s legs were strapped down first so she couldn’t kick. Then her hands. A sob escaped her, as surprising as it was embarrassing.

  Never once had Riliska stopped being afraid, not from the moment she saw the man with the crazy smile pinching her mother’s nostrils shut, but she’d done her best to hold it in.

  Now—right now—this doctor was making her helpless, and that brought all her panic and loneliness up, and she couldn’t hold it in any more.

  Riliska wailed her terror and loss. They were going to do something huge and unthinkable to her. It would be so far beyond the petty cruelties she’d endured so far that she couldn’t even imagine it. She only knew it would be awful beyond her experience.

  But most of all, Riliska was afraid for her mother. If she died here, how would her mother know what became of her?

  Now would have been the time for the doctor to say something comforting, but instead she lay a strap across Riliska’s forehead. Before she was fully immobilized, Riliska managed to glance at the big, red-haired man. No one else could save her, but he only stood in the doorway, as still as a broom handle leaning against a wall.

  But he wouldn’t do anything, because he wasn’t a good person. He was only honorable.

  Her screaming turned raw as the doctor pulled the strap over her chin and mouth, muffling her. She could only breathe through her nose, and her skin was so hot and her heart racing so fast that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was going to suffocate. She was!

  Somewhere, out of sight, she heard clinking metal. The doctor had picked up an instrument.

  * * *

  Fay knew the night captain of the east tower slightly, but it was enough. The man was ambitious. So, when Fay turned up in the middle of the night for a secret raid on a gangster hideout, the captain was happy to call up his ironshirts.

  Fay had hoped the captain would recognize the location the Broken Man had given him, but he didn’t. Low Market, wh
ich was the bulk of the east tower’s responsibilities, was made up of four centuries’ worth of decks, platforms, plankways, and footbridges, many abandoned and reclaimed, burned and rebuilt several times over.

  The ironshirts would leave the tower in groups of two to five, some casually, some rushing as though headed for trouble, some dressed like they were sneaking out for drinks. They would change back into uniform, if necessary, and meet at the rally point Kyrioc recommended.

  Where Kyrioc waited.

  If they realized the cart held dead bodies, they’d collar him and they wouldn’t be gentle about it. If they recognized him as the man who put six constables in the hospital, they might throw him off a deck. The ironshirts Kyrioc attacked worked out of the south tower, but they were still constables.

  Fay wasn’t worried. As long as he kept a reasonable distance between the ironshirts and his informant, he could keep the collar off this Broken Man until he’d led them to the Pails’ hideout.

  After that, he didn’t care what the cosh did to the man who’d broken into his boss’s home.

  * * *

  Culzatik stood in the dark room, breathing in the musty air. It had been a long time since he’d come in here… A year? No, two years, maybe a little more. He’d told himself he would stop doing this, and he had.

  But after Kyrionik’s service and the sighting of that scarred man who looked so much like him, the urge to return to his older brother’s bedroom had built until he couldn’t resist it any longer.

  The bedsheets. The practice weapons. The boots. Everything the Safroy family had kept of his brother’s was still here, but the servants had let a thin layer of dust accumulate. He’d have to have a word.

  After another few moments, he went into the hall, lit his candle, then returned to the room and set it on the desk. He couldn’t sleep, so he might as well not-sleep in here. It occurred to him suddenly that his parents might clear the room out now that Kyrionik’s services were finished. He’d gone missing. They waited the required time. They’d held the service. He was legally deceased.

  It was time to say goodbye—past time, really—but Culzatik wasn’t ready.

  The door opened slowly. Culzatik looked up and saw a familiar figure lean in. His father.

  He braced himself to hear the inevitable bark of aggravation and disappointment. Culzatik was supposed to be asleep. If he’d kept up his sword practice, he’d be too tired to wander the compound at night. And so on. He’d heard it all before.

  But his father didn’t say any of that. Instead, he stepped into the room and quietly shut the door. He was not wearing armor, of course, but he was wearing a steel bracer on his left arm. He was a fighting man, and wearing metal seemed to bring him comfort.

  “I come here sometimes too” was all he said.

  Culzatik was so astonished that he didn’t trust himself to speak, but some answer had to be made. “I didn’t know that.”

  “He was my son. We can’t…”

  Whatever he was thinking, he couldn’t say it.

  “Father, that man in black at the funeral, the one I chased?” Culzatik knew this was a mistake. He knew he should shut up, but he couldn’t. The urge to speak was irresistible. “I didn’t see a knife. You know that. What I saw was Kyrionik. He looked so much like him. Just…the way he stood, and moved. Scars covered his face, but I could have sworn…” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry. I know it’s ridiculous. I know it can’t be him. But right there, in that moment, it seemed undeniable.”

  It was time for Father to lose his temper. It was time for a slap, or a roaring tirade in the quiet hours of this sleeping house.

  Instead, his father sighed. “When I was a young man, I made a name for myself with my tenacity. Do you know that story?”

  It was a strange question to ask. Of course he’d heard the story. His father’s carrack had been attacked by two pirate ships hoping to ransom the Safroy heir. His father knew that if he surrendered, he would have been spared, but the guards, servants, and crew would have been slaughtered.

  So, he’d fought, long past the hope of capture and ransom, until he was wielding his sword with his right and holding in his guts with his left. The pirates broke and ran, losing one of their ships, and Father survived only because one of his servants had been entrusted with a nugget of glitterkind flesh. According to the story, she had shoved it directly into his slashed gut wound.

  Then Culzatik realized why his father was asking this question. “I’ve heard it, but not from you.”

  “I’m not a storyteller,” his father said simply. “But holding on, never giving up…it’s a fine quality in battle, but maybe not in grief.”

  “It would be easier,” Culzatik said, “and less painful if you could let him go. But you don’t want it to be easier. And you don’t want the pain to lessen.”

  His father looked at him, stone-faced, and nodded three times. Then he moved to the table by the bed and picked up an iridescent blue ammonite shell. He wiped the dust from it. “This was a gift from the girl he loved.”

  Culzatik hadn’t known that, either. The shell had been on display there for years, and he’d thought it was just another trinket. “Not Essatreska.”

  “No. He didn’t like Essatreska any more than you do. This was someone else. His mother knew her name, I believe, but I don’t pry.”

  The urge to sit and talk with this girl—well, a young woman by now—was powerful. He let it pass. “Was she at the service? She should have been.”

  “Many people were there. I don’t know.”

  Silence.

  “Why was that Carrig Tower Apostle there? Do you know the woman I mean?” Father shook his head. “She wore a red bonnet, which is religious garb for nuns who worship the Ancient Kings.”

  “Ah. The Carrig heretic. They’re looking to seize power, and your mother is going to give them silver and weapons. We’ve been hearing rumbling of another attack on Koh-Salash—another attempt to drive us out—and your mother believes a homegrown insurrection will keep their armies at home. Better for the Carrig to kill each other than to sail here to kill us.”

  “Aren’t the Apostles a minority?”

  “In Carrig? Yes, but they’re a majority in other places, praying for the return of the Ancient Kings, which they have been predicting for generations and will probably keep predicting for generations more. But minorities can wield power. The Salashi nobles are a minority.”

  That was something Culzatik wouldn’t soon forget. “Father, I know I’m not him”—Culzatik suddenly couldn’t say Kyrionik’s name—“and I’ll never measure up to him, but I promise to do what I can for this family.”

  “Of course you measure up. You take after your mother. And, like your mother, I’ll never understand you.” There was silence for a moment, and Culzatik didn’t know what to say. He’d always believed his father hated him. “But you’re my son.”

  Culzatik had a sudden urge to invite his father into the library but he squashed it. Instead, he sat quietly, enjoying the moment.

  Then he said, “I can’t let go either. I keep hoping that Kyrionik is going to return and fight for this family the way he was born to do.”

  * * *

  Kyrioc waited inside his cloak of shadows at the mouth of an alley. There were no vagrants, but the stink of human excrement was still fresh, and gnawed bones littered the planking. They’d been cleared out, and recently.

  His back to an abandoned candle shop, he looked over the long ramp that led to the northern edge of Low Apricot. The spa at the end of the long plankway behind him had faux columns constructed with skywood facing, six stories, and a peaked roof with three chimneys and a water inlet. Fancy. It would have been an exclusive destination once, and the shops that sprang up around it would have served both the spa and its wealthy clientele.

  But like every fashionable place, it would have become unfashionable. Then, isolated as it was, it would have died, and scavengers would have moved in.

&
nbsp; Three heavies wearing expensive leather boots and black cloaks came around the corner. All were slender and loose-limbed, moving with the grace of sprinters. They kept a wary eye. On their last patrol, they’d driven off a pair of drunks.

  The smallest ran into certain buildings as they circled around, then emerged a moment later. Kyrioc had already shadowed them twice on their circuit. In this deck, where the only light came from a few cheap torches at the edge of the plaza and Suloh’s bones far above, no one even noticed his cloak of shadows.

  The people he waited for were another matter.

  When the heavies finished checking the buildings, they moved on. Kyrioc returned across the plankway. The horses and shattered carriage remained where he had hobbled them, in a Low Apricot alleyway out of sight.

  The Carrig bureaucrat had arrived. He’d wisely left the constables at some distance. Wooden moaned softly. The ulund was wearing off.

  He could make all the noise he wanted in a few minutes.

  “The constables are close?”

  The bureaucrat nodded. “But not too close. If they knew what you had here, they’d collar you.”

  Kyrioc almost said, They could try. Then he remembered how many ironshirts he’d asked for.

  But he needed them. Kyrioc had asked for an exchange in a public place, but he had no intention of conducting one there. If Tin Pail was naive enough to believe him, she and her heavies would stream across that narrow plankway into the plaza, and it would be easy for him to blend in. Then, when they hit Low Apricot, the constables would collar them while Kyrioc slipped away with Riliska in the confusion.

  Except he didn’t believe Tin Pail was naive. Not for one moment.

  He needed a distraction so he could slip into her crowd of heavies, where his cloak of mirrors would have its full effect.

  The constables and the heavies, well, they didn’t mean anything to him. The heavies could all be collared, or the ironshirts might take bribes and walk away, or they might all kill each other. It didn’t matter as long as he got Riliska to safety.

  He shrugged off the cloak he had taken from the cookhouse and offered it to the bureaucrat. “The beetles have seen me wearing this.”