“So that’s how it went down,” I concluded. “The nephew of the man who killed my parents – he killed one of my best friends, and threatened to kill my neighbour.”
Linn lifted his eyes from the tiny scales he was expertly slicing into the side of his oaken fish.
“My baza voz killed,” he said after a few seconds.
“Your brother?” I licked my lips. “How… what happened?”
“It voz long ago, and far avay.” Em’s dad raised his face to the window, looking out at the sky. “Emrelet voz too young, she does not remember. Zere voz an argument, and later ze man – one of our neighbours, yes? – he came to ze house, viz a dagger hidden in his coat.”
He didn’t continue.
“And… what did you do about it after?”
“Ve overpowered him, brought him to ze sheriff. His hands and feet vere taken viz a saw before he was executed.”
I lowered the chunk of wood I’d been working on, the shape to come still hidden.
“He was hanged? Beheaded?”
“No.” Linn shook his head. “No, he voz not.”
He went back to his work, and I didn’t want to press. I didn’t think I really needed the details. I supposed having your hands and feet removed with a saw would probably kill you in minutes or less anyway, if no treatment was applied to keep you alive.
“And vot is zat, vot you are carving?” Linn asked after a minute, without looking.
I looked down at my hands – perhaps this was his way of reminding me I was in the middle of a job.
“It… it was my mother’s.” I held up what would hopefully soon become a little fat cat, one paw in the air, a very un-feline, satisfied smile on its face. “She had a cat, when she was young, I think. She had this little ornament of one on her dresser. Looked a bit like this.”
It was in a drawer now. I hadn’t looked at it in a long time.
“It took me years to accept – you know, accept they’re dead? It was like some trick. I thought maybe – maybe they were, you know, testing me? Like they’d just run away somewhere…But… it was the gods testing me, wasn’t it?”
“And you think zat by killing zis man you can put it right.”
“What? No – no, I don’t want to kill him.” I wanted to take him, torture him, turn him over to devils and let them do things to him the reports of which I would not be able to bear hearing – but that was far beneath the surface. What I wanted to do wasn’t what I needed to do, and not just for him – for me. For my sanity. “I want to do what’s right, and that doesn’t start with killing.”
I almost wanted him to contradict me.
If I saw Orven again, in the flesh, I was very likely to erupt, and I knew it. I couldn’t let that happen. I’d barely even focussed on his face when I’d met him and crushed him against the wall with my shields – the potential faces, all of them ugly and evil, flickered before my mind’s eye constantly, merging, separating, blending and blurring. I knew I’d recognise him if I saw him again, though.
Orven Lulton. Fate conspired against me.
I suspected that was why Telrose Gaum never gave Orven’s surname, even when threatened with hell. Because of Wyre Lulton and his reputation, the boss’s fury at treachery that would exceed anything I could do by plunging him into Infernum. I could only offer Telrose an eternal torment to which he was already bound, but Wyre Lulton would considerably shorten Telrose’s time on this plane anyway, and make every last minute into a living nightmare, especially if he had any loved ones left to him whose torture would hurt him, transform his existence into an expression of pure anguish. Hells, back in the day the word on the street was that the only reason anyone had testified to the watch about my parents’ murders was because Wyre hated his brother Toras with a passion.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
I came back to myself as Linn responded, but it didn’t quite live up to my hopes.
“I think you are right about zat. Zere is no good to be found in killing. I watched my baza’s killer die, and I felt nothing. Years later, zere was a time… a time a loved one voz in danger. And I had no thoughts of anger. I only vonted to save zem.” He sounded very grim all of a sudden, then cleared his throat. “You see zis? Death is only emptiness. It brings only anger for zose left behind. I… I do not know vot I vould do if Emrelet vere to die.”
I glanced across at him, but his eyes were intent upon his work. He’d never before said anything like this to me while we were carving.
“You must protect her, Kastyr. You must. You know zat I am counting on you.”
Little splinters and curls of wood were flying off his almost-ready fish. I lowered my head to my own work, brain boiling.
She did die, I thought. She died and she won’t tell you and she won’t even tell you she’s a champion now. How long until they find out? What will he think of me then? What will Atar think of me? Hiding it from them, when he’s opening up to me like this?
But there was nothing I could say. It was her choice. When the truth came out, hopefully he’d see my side of things.
I repeated the paltry justification to myself:
My potion healed her, kept her alive long enough for Nighteye to resurrect her.
Nighteye…
I grit my teeth.
“I’ll protect her,” I managed to say, “the same as she protects me –“
“No.” Linn set his wood down in his lap, turned to me with only the knife in his hands. “No, you are ze man. You understand zis? And you are ze – ze Liberator of Zadhal. You must protect her, at all costs.”
I sighed.
“I understand, Mr. Reyd.”
It was only five minutes later that Em called us in for dinner, and I sat there next to her at the table, on the couch, drinking beer and trying my hardest not to think, just to exist, to be in the moment.
It wasn’t enough. My eyes painted Orven’s barely-remembered face before me, crushed, bones pulped, everything from the inside on the outside. Em lying in the bed, the way I’d taken her hand, thinking her dead or dying when the truth was that she’d already been brought back to life.
Nighteye, changing shape with me, saving me from Termiax and Rissala’s mizelikon. Lightblind, unceremoniously pinned to the wall by Duskdown. Leafcloak, turned into a garment for a sick god.
It was starting to build up within me – the feeling of inadequacy, the sense that no matter what I did, it would never be enough. Never even close to enough.
In the sun-room the lifeless chunk of wood waited for me, the cat-figurine still only subsisting in the potential, needing the edge of my knife-blade to birth it.
I never did go back to that piece of wood.
* * *
“He was here,” Killstop said to me, reaching out her hand and touching the wall yet again, moving her fingertips in tiny motions. “He leaned against these panels – I can’t tell when, though.”
“So this could’ve been from before he was kidnapped?” I asked. “Look, he must’ve leaned on a thousand walls in various bits of the city –“
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes frowning at me like her mask. “I’ve arranged the facts in order of importance. Him leaning here – it’s important. Damn it, Feychilde, can you take this seriously?”
I returned my attention to her face. We’d drawn quite a crowd, and the market-goers in this particular corner of South Lowtown didn’t seem to be particularly comfortable with our actions so far. “I’m not getting distracted – it’s just, everyone’s looking at us funny –“
“Do you care?”
“No,” I said, a trace stubbornly I had to admit. “It’s just, can you please stop fondling the woodwork like that… People already think we’re weird enough without us caressing random oak boards like they’re gonna grow arms and caress us back. We’ll find him, don’t worry.”
“I am worried,” she snapped, then sighed. “Go, work damage control. Let me think a minute.”
“Fine.” I turned my back on her, facing the market square and the horde of nonplussed shoppers. The people moved slowly, if at all, as they (supposedly) crossed through the area in which Killstop had found a trace of Nighteye.
“Soooo… Good morning, folks. Don’t mind us. Just a bit of magic business. Nothing that’s gonna cause any harm. Is there…”
I stopped myself before I could say, ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ That could get me a thousand different requests.
“… Do any of you young ‘uns have any questions?”
“Yeah – are yer really a dead man like they says?”
“Are you really goin’ out with Stormsword?”
“D’yer ‘av any o’ that wine we keep ‘earin’ about?”
“Did yer really kill the King o’ Zadhal in a jewel?”
I heard Tanra chuckling behind me.
“I’ll get you back for this,” I said in a low voice that wouldn’t carry beyond her, barely moving my lips.
“Ha-ha-ha,” she laughed mercilessly, “my dear Feychilde – you shall try.”
* * *