The knight in the leather jacket cursed his run of good luck.
The rules of spotz did not seem to have changed much—at least not here, ten miles outside Exmore at eleven in the evening on May 17, ‘94—from those of his younger days. Twelve cards were dealt each to two players, from which they built three hands—one of two cards, one of three, and one of four—and carried the other three into the next round. As in poker, a hierarchy existed for each configuration—in the four-long, four-of-a-kind beat a straight flush, which beat two pair square, meaning all four suits were represented, which beat two pair, for example. To outrank the opponent in all three hands conferred an automatic win of the wager, while the more common two-one split had to be achieved thrice in a row to win the game.
The knight’s efforts to lose money were failing, because tonight’s mark was such a poor player. With top aces, he had boosted his three-long, losing to the knight’s five-six-seven of onions, a rather mediocre hand. An hour had passed and the knight had only shed ten grot. He worried that his mark might also be a hustler, that they were both in the process of trying to lose in order to set up a swindle.
“Just what do you do, old man?”
“For a living?” The knight chuckled. “As little as possible.”
“Come on, give me a serious answer.”
“I’m a witch-hunter.”
“Bullshit.”
“Then don’t believe me.” The knight, after an undesired win, handed the dealer a two-penny tip. “I don’t come here to talk about work.”
“Where’s the money in witch-hunting?”
“Where’s the money in anything?” The knight’s two-fingered salute indicated, We’re both Company.
“You work for them?”
“I wish.” The knight spat into an empty glass. “Freelance.”
The dealer looked no older than seventeen. He seemed, like most of the young these days, implacably bored. The knight, too, feigned disengagement. He made a point of playing blind, but an off-order peek showed that chance had put his nine-ten-jack of coins together; not to risk winning, he pointed out an unusually dressed woman at the bar, using the mark’s moment of inattention to break his own land.
An old woman came by with a tray supporting several pitchers full of beer. A less skilled carrier would have lost balance, making a mess. The knight bought two and paid for both before the mark could reach for his wallet.
The knight poured beer into his glass mug. “Let me guess. Z-10?”
The mark scoffed. “Higher.”
He sipped. Beer didn’t taste as good as it used to. “Z-9, then.”
“Z-8.”
“Oh. Impressive. It takes a lot to get to Z-8.”
The mark smiled. One of his teeth was missing, and another had invaded the opening. He wouldn’t make Z-7 unless he got that fixed.
They revealed their hands. The mark lost in all three hands, despite the knight’s intentional poor play.
The mark said, “I guess it's not my night.”
“Another hand?” asked the dealer.
“Of course,” said the knight. “My friend’s luck is sure to turn.”
The mark scoffed. “Just ain’t getting cards tonight. Losing to a fucking witch-hunter.”
“Use that anger to beat me, friend.”
The dealer shuffled the cards in an oddly precise way and gave them new hands. The knight looked at his deal and found an ungodly run of face cards. It would be impossible to lose with these cards and not make it obvious that he was throwing a match.
The Globbo stood up. “Gotta water the fish.”
“You do that,” said the knight. “If you find your game in the privy, come back with it.” Once the mark had left, the knight grabbed the dealer by the shirt. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t like that guy.”
“I don’t like him either, but I’m no cheat.” The knight pushed his cards across the table. “Deal me a fair fucking hand.”
“Or...?”
“Or I’ll...” The knight shook his head. He wouldn’t hurt a kid. “Nothing. No threat from me, but you do know who he works for, right?”
“The Globbos steal the world’s wealth. Somehow, we have to get it back.”
The knight looked around. “I agree, but not in this way. I am playing to lose. I can lose on a fair hand. Trust me on that. The rest of the night, deal clean.”
The teenager nodded and gathered the cards.
The plainclothes Globbo returned. “Just what the hell are you doing?”
“Two of the cards stuck together,” the dealer said. “A misdeal.”
“You little fuck. I knew you were—”
The knight stood up. “Don’t get angry. Your luck can turn at any time.”
“No! This kid’s a cheat.” He pointed his finger at the knight. “You are a cheat. I haven’t had a hand since—”
The knight chuckled. “That means you’re due. If you were a real gambler, you’d know that.”
The mark pulled back a fist. “You know what? Fuck you.”
The knight unsheathed a dagger and stabbed the beer-sodden table. The mark’s eyes widened, and the dealer stood back.
“This is bluesteel,” the knight said. “What do you think it’s worth? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you. A hundred twenty. I’ll wager it. We’ll play the next hand as sudden death. Sound fair?”
“Fair? I’m not making any deal with someone who—”
The dealer had finished, so the knight said, “It wouldn’t hurt to look at your cards.”
The Globbo did so. “If I win, I get the knife?”
“That’s correct.”
The Globbo’s lip moved as he suppressed a smile. “What happens if you win?”
“You apologize to this boy, and to me, for calling us cheaters. You buy each of us a beer.”
“That's all you want?”
“It's all I want,” said the knight.
“I suppose that’s fair.”
The knight, sitting back down, looked at his cards. He put a nine and a five into his two-card hand. To make it look like he had been trying to build useful hands, he put a pair of sixes and a dlayo in his three-long. Some strength, not a total throw. He put a lousy pair in the four-long. As he did this, the mark wore a dopey smile on his face, aligning the edges of the cards before separating them into hands.
“Ready?”
The mark nodded.
In the showdown, the knight’s nine-five lost to a pair of threes; in the three-long, the mark had triple fours, sufficient to win.
“Well played,” the knight said as he slid the knife across the table. “This is yours.”
“What was in your four-long?”
“It doesn’t matter.” The knight mucked the hand before anyone could see the cards. “I think I’m done for the night.” He slid a five-grot note to the dealer. “Buy this man the finest vodka you have.”
The mark smiled. “You know, a few rounds back, you split your seven trips for, what, a low straight? You could have won the three-long or carried them over to quad up.”
“Could have, could have. You beat me.” The knight put his arm around the mark. “Thanks for a good game.”
A young woman arrived with a bottle of vodka. The knight filled the Z-8 mark's glass at every chance. The Globbo, with pomposity ill-fitting a man who had attained so little, prattled about local history and lore, all this with a specialist’s attention to his own sexual conquests.
“You must be the most interesting person within a hundred miles of here,” said the knight as he slapped the mark on the back. After a pause, he added, “That knife’s a family heirloom. I didn’t expect to lose it. I’d like to buy it back. Would you say one fifty’s fair?”
The Globbo scoffed. “You carry that kind of money here?”
The knight reached into his leather jacket. “I’ve got it.”
“I’m not stupid. If you’re offering one fifty, it’s worth two.”
“I told you the fair market value is one twenty. You wouldn’t get half that at a pawn shop, but sure, I’ll meet you at two hundred. I’ll even throw in another round of drinks.”
The mark smiled as he looked at the knife, which reflected the tavern’s low light. “No, I don’t think I’ll do that.”
“Fair’s fair, I suppose. You did win it from me. Let’s forget the knife. I’m curious about your work. As a Z-8, do you have a lot of insight into—”
“Ha! I actually have a Level 4 clearance.”
“Women must be all over you. For that, as much as your skill at cards.”
The Z-8 smiled. “Life ain’t bad.”
“Forgive me for asking, but are you high enough in the Company that you could, you know—”
“I could get you an interview,” the Globbo said. “I can’t promise a job offer. Understand that we are very selective—and very thorough.”
“I do understand,” said the knight.
“Just because you have a connection—that'd be me, if I still like you when I wake up—it doesn’t mean you don’t have to prove yourself. I could get you started at Z-10, but if you want to be high up like me, you’ll have to work for it. Nothing’s free at the Global Company.”
“Of course.”
“So… ye’re really a witch-hunter?”
The knight whispered, “Special mission in Exmore.”
“Exmore? Don't they think—?”
“Quiet down. And yes, that’s why I’m here.”
“Whattaya think she’s like, this Fer-issa?”
“Farisa? To be honest, I was hoping to learn something from you.”
“I might know a thing,” the mark said.
“Oh?”
“She’s in that vyrim ghetto. Where yesterday’s riots were.”
“Vehu.” The knight shook his head. “Protecting a mage. What won’t they do? It’s not enough to run all the banks and oversee every book that gets published. They have to get into fucking witchcraft, too.”
“They had the right idea ‘bout Vehu in the old times.” The Z-8’s words were increasingly slurred. “Truth be told, I don’t have a huge issue with them. I just know they don’t belong here. This isn’t their country. Cyril knew. Smitz knew. Hampus? Sometimes I think he’s one of ‘em.”
“Hampus never believed in anything but himself,” said the knight. “For quite some time, not even in himself, but never mind that. Let’s talk about Farisa. What’s your plan? Surely, you don’t think you can just go up to a witch and ask her nicely to—”
“Naw, I’m no idiot. See, I know people. Fareesa, I am told, has a soft heart. Children, animals. I’d put a kid in danger, or a dog if I couldn't find one. She’d use her magic to intervene, get herself spent.” He smacked his hand on the table. “That’s when I’d go in.”
“Smart,” said the knight. “That’s a good plan. What happens when she recovers?”
“That’s the Company’s problem.”
“Something tells me the bounty’s not your only motivation. There are easier ways to make money.”
The mark smiled.
“I understand.” The knight tried not to shudder as he put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’m a witch-hunter, recall. No one fucks like a mage, that I’ll say.”
“If she’s spent, she won’t even have a say in it. Best fuckin’ ta my smarts is when she screams and fights, but I wouldn’t take that risk on a mage. Blackrue’ll knock ’er clean out.”
The knight gave a skeptical glare. “Your plan is to make her ingest blackrue? Where are you going to get it? I’m not sure you’ve thought this through. You know, you might not be fit to have my bluesteel knife. I’ll give you three hundred if you give it back to me.”
The mark laughed. “You’re telling a corporal at the Global Company he doesn’t know how to do his job?”
“I’ll tell you what. Let’s work together. You seem to have a lot of information. I’ll do all the work, and we’ll split the bounty. I’ll take twenty percent.”
“Ten. I’m an officer.”
The knight laughed. “A Z-8 is an officer?”
“To you, yes. You’re a nobody.”
“You’re right,” said the knight. “A nobody I am. You argue well. Fifteen percent.”
“Twelve.”
“Fuck it, thirteen percent it is.”
“To Fareesa,” said the Z-8 as he raised a shot glass.
“Don’t say that name so loud.”
“Sorry. I’m a little…”
“I know,” said the knight. “Don’t be ashamed. This is the right place for it.”
The knight had already signaled to the bartender to send him shots of water, so he could sober up for a couple hours. The Globbo prattled on about what he would do to his prize mage, his fantasies growing more perverse, to the point where the knight wished he were anywhere else. The mark’s spells of drowsy silence, however, increased in duration until the man’s eyes closed for a solid minute and the knight judged that he could be walked off.
“He’s my friend,” said the knight to the bartender. “I’ll take him home.”
“He lives over by the—”
“I know where he lives. Good night!”
As the knight walked the Z-8 out of town, it required significant effort to keep the mark upright. The knight’s arms were still strong, but age had taken some of his stamina, and his shoulders were starting to ache.
“Let’s rest here,” he said as he laid the Globbo down in a patch of grass.
The man mumbled incoherently as the knight searched his jacket, finding a copper-plated dog tag, proving that he had not inflated his rank of Z-8. This would be perfect for the knight’s getting into Exmore: high enough in rank to defer questions, but not so high as to draw attention. He would let the mark keep the “bluesteel” knife, a forgery that had only cost him forty cents, an item he would be happy never to see again.
The mission would have been an ordinary robbery, had the corporal not voiced his violent fantasies about Farisa. Such intentions would never come to fruition—the Z-8 overestimated both the ease with which he might find Farisa, as well as his ability to subdue her if she did—but their existence, as well as the man’s confession to having violated women before, meant mere theft would not suffice. This man had to die. The knight poured moonwater—a pint of ninety-five percent—into the dozing man’s mouth and waited for the man’s face to turn blue and his breathing to stop, as no one would investigate a low-ranking soldat who had drunk himself to death, but about an hour passed and nothing seemed to happen, so the knight checked the man’s pulse.
“Of course it didn’t kill you. You're a fucking drunk.”
There wasn’t much time; the overnight coal train would come through here between two and three. He dragged the body to the railroad. He pointed the head away from himself, facing the ground, and walked into the bushes and waited.
Trees in the distance brightened as the light of a train came around a bend.
“I didn’t exactly lie when I said I was a witch-hunter. I track them and I protect them.”
The train came slower than the knight had hoped for—the headlamp approached, the engineer screamed at the drunkard to get out of the way—and there seemed to be an infinite succession of moments at which the drunken man might come to his senses and escape... but he never woke and he never did. The train split his body into three pieces.
“If you threaten one of Dashi’s daughters,” Claes said, “you die.”
#
August 7, ’75.
Claes, Dashi, and Hampus Bell stood on the hacienda lawn. In cooler weather, the men might have been playing mallet-ball, but Loran’s humid heat—Dashi was the only one used to it—stifled the impulse toward any activity more strenuous than idle talk over rum lemonade.
“The climate of three summers,” Hampus Bell said.
“One dry, one rainy, and one hot,” Dashi added.
“They’re all pretty hot,” said Claes.
Hampus asked, “Is there any agreement on what order they’re supposed to come in?”
Dashi said, “The monsoon decides, not us.”
Claes looked over at the tents that had been erected for the banquet. One could see Loran’s racial stratification, even here at an event hosted by a man who opposed such injustices. The seated women had the large eyes and light skin of their seafaring, conquering ancestors. The ones serving tea looked like Dashi—dark-skinned, thin-nosed, and short.
“I find your caste system savage,” Hampus said.
Dashi stepped into a mango tree’s shade. “It is.”
Hampus Bell waved his hand. “But then...”
“It’s what they’re used to. I pay them thrice the going wage, and they’re free to leave.”
Claes scratched his bearded chin. “Aren’t you from—?”
“I am,” Dashi said. “Ninth schedule, the bottom under the bottom.”
Hampus said, “And yet here you are.”
“Work and luck,” Dashi said. “Mostly luck. All of this could disappear as quick as it came.”
“It won’t,” said Claes.
He and Dashi had entered business together; their fates were entwined. Twenty-six was too young an age to believe time brought anything but progress. The plagues and invasions that littered the history books were there because of their rarity. Work, if efforts were allocated with forethought, tended to be rewarded by society. He truly thought that, once.
“At a large enough scale,” Claes said, “good things don’t just ‘go away.’”
“I don't know if that’s true,” Dashi said. “The scientists are now saying that, on any given day, there are three hurricanes somewhere on the planet. It comes to chance whether they land. Of course, no one truly knows what’s in the southern half of the world. More than storms, there are earthquakes and droughts and plagues and fires—”
“Wars,” Hampus added.
“Those too.”
One of the servants came by with a plate of appetizers.
Hampus grabbed a deviled egg and ate it. “This is delicious. Send my compliments to the cooks.”
Dashi said, “My wife makes ’em for herself when she has that craving. I assume you know what that means.”
“Congratulations,” said Claes and Hampus simultaneously.
“I thought Farisa would be the last.”
Hampus asked, “How old is she?”
“Almost two. She can form basic sentences, so... now she’s dangerous.” Dashi chuckled. “I worry that her mind is too big for a toddler’s body.”
“Kyana said she’s your favorite.”
Dashi laughed. “Kyana says things. I don’t believe in favorites.”
“There’s always a favorite,” Hampus said. “This I know, having not been.”
“He loves you. How could a father not?”
“My father is Smitz Bell.” He thanked a woman who delivered him a fresh drink. “Anyway, we came to talk business.” He paused and looked at Dashi, sustaining eye contact for long enough that most people would have looked away. “I imagine we want the same things.”
Claes said, “Do we?”
He had not come from a wealthy background, nor had he been an acquaintance of Hampus Bell until recently. In fact, he had applied to work at the Global Company upon leaving college with most of an engineering degree. Rejection would not have angered him. In fact, he expected to be told to go back to university and reapply in six months, with a letter that would have easily gotten him back in. Instead, he got several offers, but all for menial positions—they had not overlooked him, but seen in his lack of a favorable family background, as well as his recent mistakes, an opportunity to take advantage. The experience had left him with no use for the Global Company. He would be independent or he would die poor. He met Dashi a few months later, and they had made a small fortune in food preservation, a boring business, but one that had undoubtedly saved lives, and were moving now into shipping.
“I will be honest,” said Claes. “I cannot summon eager interest in whatever the Global Company intends to offer.”
Dashi looked at him and smiled in thanks. Claes had served the purpose for which he had been brought.
“I’m no fan of my father’s, shall we say, military operations.” Hampus Bell scratched the side of his head. “I have always felt that the Company belongs strictly in Ettaso, and has no right to go beyond the Continent’s shores. Loran, in particular, has so much history, and such a beautiful culture. It would break my heart if the fighting reached this place.”
Claes said, “I believe you, but you can’t deny that war in Loran would be great for your career.”
“Career?” Hampus laughed nervously, but all three men knew it was true.
Hampus Bell had been relegated to this tropical backwater because he lacked his father’s favor, or even approval. The important bits of the world were still being run by the Patriarch or the favored son, Pyotr. Still, an island city with a population of one million and set in the estuary of a continent’s longest river could not be overlooked for its strategic importance.
Hampus set his drink on a table, then smacked both men on the back. “Why would I want a career? Careers are for poor people.”
Dashi looked around nervously.
“Jobs are a losing bargain. Why work? To get to ‘the top’? I’ve seen the place, and it is bland. Cyril tolerated the daily work. My father despises it. I, on the other hand, do nothing, and my personal holdings generate two million per year. It isn’t easy to live on such a stipend, but I manage to get by.” Hampus smiled. “Anywhere in the world”—he looked around to be sure no children were nearby—“I can bed a woman of any color or kind. Why would I trade that to sit in an office in Moyenne, surrounded by a passel of poffers? Pyotr can inherit all of it.”
The sun had set. Under the largest tent, the orchestra began to play an Ettasi symphony Claes had heard before but whose name he did not know.
“Smitz thinks I do a job down here,” Hampus said. “I do nothing. It’s a free paycheck. I am glad to play as small a role in his Company as I can. You don’t know my father. He's a terrible man, and if I can slow down his will, I shall.”
Dashi, perhaps impelled by some atavistic notion of decorum, finding it dishonorable to stand with a friend’s insult (however deserved) against his own family, said, “He’s what the world needs him to be.”
“I will give him this. His cruelty ceases when there is no profit in it. My son is worse.”
“Rychard's just a boy,” Dashi said.
“He’s sixteen.” Hampus, who still drank back then, grabbed another glass of rum lemonade from one of the servers. “Old enough to know better than to....” He lowered his voice. “Do you want to know the real reason I’m here?”
Claes said, “The food? The beautiful women?”
“Let’s get away from the others.” They walked to the lawn’s edge, where a stand of coconut trees held back the forest. “Lysita and I were still together, trying to be a usual Easthorn family. Dinner at seven, bed by eleven, no bathroom words in public. Senna was an angel. Rychard was... not. Picky eater, sarcastic, bad grades.”
“No worse than I was,” Claes said.
“Smitz thought it’d be good for his grandson to have an outlet for his boyish energies, as if he could diagnose the problem in a child he saw once a year, so he bought him a hunting knife, about this long, for his fourteenth birthday. Rychard, who can barely sit in one place for three minutes, and who won’t go outside if it’s raining—that Rychard, a hunter! He starts carrying the knife everywhere. A few months later, he’s out on Third Avenue where he sees a woman dressed for summer, so to speak. We all know what kinds of thoughts fourteen-year-old boys have, but we don’t act on them, right?”
“Right,” Claes said.
“He invited her to a hotel room.”
Claes withheld comment. The people of Moyenne’s Eastern Horn, he had always thought, were overly sensitive. Theirs was a world where every spoken word was a potential threat, and wherein a fifty-year friendship could turn into a multigenerational feud over a misplaced pause between syllables. Surely, it was boorish for a teenage boy to ask a woman out like this, but it hardly qualified as scandalous street harassment where he had grown up.
“He wanted to ‘do it’ with her,” said Hampus. “You know what I mean by ‘do it,’ right?”
Dashi laughed. “I have little ones, so I’m familiar with how they’re made.”
Hampus didn’t smile. “The woman says no.”
“Rejection is a rite of passage,” Claes said.
Dashi added, “Happens to the best of us.”
“Right. So if my idiot son had left it at that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Instead, he says, ‘My grandfather is Smitz Frapping Bell,’ but he doesn’t use the word ‘frapping,’ if you catch my drift. ‘My grandfather is Smitz Frapping Bell, and he will kill your whole family if you don’t come with me.’”
“That isn’t right,” Dashi said.
“No,” Claes added.
“It gets worse. It turns out this woman is a Z-3’s wife, so Smitz finds out about Rychard’s behavior.”
“Shit,” Claes said, before remembering that Hampus didn’t like profanity. “How’d that go over?”
“If I had pulled the family name like that, he would’ve ground me into a paste. My son does the same thing, and Grandpa just laughs and tells him not to do it again. He takes me aside and explains that if I don’t teach my son about the ‘good’ overtaking—the kind women have to pretend they don’t want, but secretly do—he’ll end up doing the ‘bad’ kind, which is the one act the world never truly forgives, not even from a Bell.”
Dashi said, “So that’s why he put you here?”
“You still haven’t explained the part about the knife,” Claes said.
“I’m not done,” Hampus said. “A month later—this is in broad daylight, a block from Tabatha Square—Rychard runs into the same woman. He’s furious. How dare she reject him. How dare she report him to his grandfather. That melodramatic bull-spit. She’s walking a dog, one of those expensive white beagles, and my stupid frapping son goes up to her and starts yelling at her, so the dog tries to block him to protect her, and that is where my father’s knife comes in.”
“He...?”
“Right in the dog’s belly. Broad daylight. I’m told there were a hundred witnesses. Not even a Patriarch can fix that.”
Claes said, “I’d have run him out of the family.”
“No,” said Dashi. “Family is the most important thing in the world.”
Farisa, twenty-two months old, toddled up to her father. She cooed as he picked her up.
Hampus spat in the grass. “I considered putting Rychard in that spit hole in Exmore. I’ve always thought he was a bit sick. Perhaps they can take out the part of his brain that makes him act this way. Smitz refuses to allow it. He keeps saying I am to blame for my son’s actions. We had a nasty fight about it, and in the end... he sent me here.”
Dashi put Farisa down, and she went back to her mother. “There are worse places to be.”
“I have no complaints. Pyotr will be an excellent Patriarch. If I had the job, I’d be fired in six months.”
Claes laughed. “Fired? How does a Patriarch get fired? Can’t a Patriarch just”—he made the sound of a hanged man’s neck cracking—“anyone who tries?”
“We don’t publicize the fact, but the Company Charter allows it. There’s this thing called ‘syr Konklava.’ I don’t know exactly what it is or how it works, but it can replace a Patriarch.” With a half-drunk grin, Hampus added, “If you repeat this, though, I might have to kill you.”
Dashi chuckled. Claes didn’t.
“It was a joke.” Hampus patted Claes on the arm. “I don’t give a hair from a rat’s belly about the Company. Frapp the Company. Smitz still has me at Z-4. Can you believe that? A Patriarch’s son, stuck at Z-4. My father and his work can go to the frapping Antipodes for all I care.”
Dashi said, “Has your son’s... health... improved in our sunny climate?
Hampus shook his head. “I wish I could say it has.”
Claes looked away, hoping he could either change the subject or exit the conversation. Today’s event was supposed to be festive, and this exchange had turned the opposite.
“Do you remember that stormcat we used to see around Ariel’s Rock?”
“I haven’t seen that one for ages.”
“I haven’t either,” Claes said. “Not since spring.”
“They don’t seem to be as big down here. Twenty pounds, at most. They’re not like the beasts up in the Far North, but I wish they were.” Hampus paused. “He would have learned a lesson. The reason you haven’t seen the stormcat is.... I found it in our frapping yard, the head caved in with a rock. Rychard didn’t even have the decency to finish the job. He broke the animal, but I had to kill it.”
Dashi said, “How do you know it was him?”
“One of the neighbors saw him do it.” He pointed. “It happened right over there.”
Dashi said, “There? Just outside my window?”
Hampus nodded. “One of your girls might have seen it too, for all I know.”
#
They had taken their seats for dinner. Rosemary candles had been lit to scare off insects. There was an art to choosing one’s table position—one wanted the smoke’s protection from mosquitoes, but not the candle’s radiant heat. Claes and Alice—they were not married yet—exchanged flirtatious glances from three tables away.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Dashi explained, “When asked if you want a second helping, the answer is always yes. For a third, it’s always no.”
“I’m not sure if I can eat two servings,” Hampus said. “Too hot.”
“It is,” Claes agreed. “If you need help with appetite, I've got hemp leaf.”
Hampus scoffed. “Drugs are vacation for poor people.”
Dashi laughed. “Never change, Bell.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t have had all that jerky.”
Claes said, “You’re the one who brought it.”
He’d taken one bite of Hampus Bell’s Ettasi import, dried wolf’s liver, and decided it was enough for one lifetime. It tasted like metal and dirt.
Hampus Bell accepted a folded napkin from a caterer. “Have you heard of the Nalai people?”
“Southern Terosha, right?”
“As far south as one can go. We’re talking thirty-one, thirty-two degrees of latitude. Nothing grows or lives in the flats, but I’m told the mountains are quite lush. People are black as night, blond as the sun, and haven’t got much, to be frank about it. They use a whistling language to communicate across the hills.”
“What about them?”
“My father’s fascinated by them. We believe they produce more mages than anyone else: one in fifty girls, one in a hundred boys.”
Claes thanked the waitress who delivered the entree: red-curry fish on green rice. “Is that right?”
“What’s more, they’ve never heard of that—what is it, Blue Contessa? Imagine how much power a mage could have if he didn’t have that fear of madness hanging over him. So my father has spent millions to figure out what's going on with them. Our chemists look at every berry they eat and every tea they drink. Smitz even spent five thousand for a barrel of their... you know.”
Claes laughed. “I don’t know.”
Dashi said, “Their what, Hampus?”
As if defeated in a board game, Hampus said, “Excrement.”
Claes asked, “Did he find anything?”
“I wouldn’t know. You need a Level 9 clearance for any of that stuff about magic. I only have a six.”
Dashi confessed, “Sometimes I worry.”
Claes took the first bite of his dinner. “Worry?”
“Farisa. Sometimes at night, I see a glint of blue in her eye. Our people don’t have that color, nor Kyana’s. What if she... is one?”
“A mage?” Claes scratched the bridge of his nose. “You had the same worries about Catella, and she seems well.”
“So far. She has odd dreams.”
“All children do, my friend.” Hampus sat back in his chair as if the seat wasn’t quite comfortable enough for him, but in a manner that suggested he wanted to hide the fact. “Senna was a sickly child, but look at her now—the platinum debutante of Moyenne. Meanwhile, Rychard, a perfect eight-pound baby boy—”
They had barely touched the first entree when the second—five-citrus capon decked with cardamom and cloves—arrived.
“I suppose we should do more eating and less talking,” Hampus said.
“I suppose,” Claes agreed.
They worked on their meal until the music stopped.
“What is it, eight-fifteen?” Dashi looked around. “The girls have to be up early tomorrow, so pardon me while I put them to bed.” He got up from the table and walked away.
Hampus leaned in. “You notice something, right? It’s a million and twenty flags out, and not a single woman has taken her shoes off. In Ettaso, they’d be washing their feet in the fountain over there.”
“Lorani foot modesty,” Claes said. “Loranian, actually. It’s not just here. The whole continent observes it.”
“What do you think that’s about?”
Claes swallowed a last bite of meat. “I have no idea. I never really thought about it.”
“The theory I’ve heard, and my personal favorite, is that it goes back to one of their kings.”
“Dlayos,” Claes said, although the word’s correct plural form was dlayovik.
“Right.” Hampus sipped his beer. “Some dlayo ten thousand years ago, some sick frapp the world would’ve otherwise forgotten, carried a candle, if you know what I mean, for feet. He must be the one who invented twigging. You know that started here?”
“I did not.”
“A hundred generations later, a whole nation of women has to cover their feet.”
“Just the soles.” Claes looked around. He didn’t enjoy this conversation; something about it felt predatory. “I’m told no one cares about the top of the foot.”
“Isn’t it so arbitrary?” Hampus chuckled. “It’s terrible, but it’s also beautiful. You know, I get it. A woman’s highest pride is—”
“—is her modesty,” Claes said. “I don’t disagree, but—”
“So, anyway, all because of some long-dead pervert dlayo—”
“—who may not have existed.”
“All kings are perverts. Take it from the son of one. They have wealth beyond comprehension, so only two things are left: extremity and legacy. If you can get a whole nation of women, thousands of years later, to tie their shoes tight so no man ever sees the bottoms of their feet—well, that’s a frappin’ trick. It’s both legacy and extremity in one strike.”
Claes said, “It seems you actually have thought about the Mahogany Chair.”
Hampus Bell guffawed. “I mean this with all the best intentions: get frapped with that spit. I’d rather be a witch doctor in some Teroshi jungle.”
Dashi returned and sat down. “Did you know Rychard’s at the children’s table?”
Hampus scratched his forearm. “I put him there.”
Claes looked over at the boy. The children had all been put to bed, leaving teenage Rychard alone, with a dour but imperious face suggesting pride in having a table all to himself at the same time as a sense of shame in his isolation.
Hampus continued, “If he wants to sit with adults, he’ll become one. We grew up quick when I was his age. I was twenty-one—Lysita was eighteen—when we had Senna. The Company’s world has created this extended adolescence I don’t like.”
Dashi said, “The poor can’t afford to grow up, and the rich don’t have to.”
“That’s exactly it!” Hampus put a hand on Dashi’s shoulder. “Ettaso is dying, and its moribund culture no longer produces adults, but long-lived teenagers—fifty-year-old adolescents. I have been to Wyo. People in those cultures know their place, so it doesn’t take thirty years to figure out one’s life. The future is there.”
“I’m not so sure of it. They have—what is it called, Claes?”
“Hikhmazhati. House hermits.”
“Perhaps,” said Hampus. “Enough about all that.” He reached into his pocket for a deck of cards. “Anyone?”
“I’m not bad at ehrgeiz,” Claes said. “Ambition.”
“Egg-sack that,” Hampus said. “That game's for communists. Doriyats. No, let’s play something we can gamble on. I figure the gods overlook one vice per life, and I choose the one I can win at. How about seven-card rob-the-bank poker?”
“No limit, five-grot ante,” Dashi said.
“Black fours beat all, bluffers drink,” Claes added.
“Caught bluffers drink,” Dashi said.
Hampus shuffled the cards. “Perfect.”
They started to play. A few guests joined in, but the table never got bigger than six. Claes had played quite a bit of poker on Ettaso, but he was used to large games, and in this variant that meant threes and fours regularly landed in the bank, so his strategy of trying to triple low pairs sputtered at this short table.
“How much are you down?” Hampus asked.
Claes looked over his short stack of chips. “Forty-one grot and change, looks like.”
The game felt unfair. The players all worked under the same set of rules, but these amounts meant nothing to Hampus. For Claes, even with his and Dashi’s recent success in business, small losses still stung. Had his father come home two score light, his mother would have… no, Claes, the past never matters as much as you think it does.
“You fold too much,” Hampus said.
“Nothing rushes on a hot August night,” Claes said in a monotone.
“If you don’t play, you can’t—”
Claes rapped his knuckle on the table. “I’ll play the next hand, sight unseen.”
“He’s just trying to rile you,” Dashi said. “Don’t fall for it.”
“Sight unseen. Deal.”
Dashi raised an eyebrow and drew a deep breath. “Very well.”
Claes drew a decent hand—not a sure winner, but worth staying in contention long enough to rob the bank. His lowest card was the four of onions. The gun card was a beautifully useless nine; he flashed it to the table’s view.
Hampus opened a small velvet purse. Five gold coins fell out—these were the authoritas, valuable and rare enough that almost no one used the denomination. Each coin had Smitz Bell’s face stamped on one side and an odd-looking mushroom on the other. “Five hundred.”
“I can’t match that,” Claes said. “Table stakes?”
Hampus put his cards down and leaned back. “No one said table stakes.” He paused. “Come on. I’m sure your credit’s good here.”
“Fuck.” Claes shook his head. “Can I borrow against next month’s—?”
His friend nodded.
“I’ll double this bitch. A thousand.”
Hampus smiled. “I call.” He exposed a full house, sevens over fives.
“No flush, straight, or weight,” Claes said. “Just these black fours.”
Hampus bell shook his head, then smiled. “You son of a taint.”
Claes laughed. “So you do swear, Bell.”
“What? No!” Hampus balled a fist in the other palm. “I said taint! Taint isn’t profanity.”
“I think we all know—”
Hampus stood. “You played beautifully.” He pushed over the gold coins, and emptied his wallet of curled bills. “All I’ve got on me. Count it up and if I still owe you, we’ll settle it tomorrow.”
“Eight hundred and sixty-three,” Claes said. “No need to settle. It’s enough.”
A commotion rose. A chambermaid came running from inside Dashi’s house. “Farisa! Get back here right now!”
The woman caught the toddler around the waist, but the girl broke free, screaming like a feral animal. Kyana came running from the rose garden.
Farisa pointed a finger at Rychard. “He hurt cat! He hurt cat! I saw him hurt cat!”
The boy stood. “Get away from me!”
One of the guests laughed. “Afraid of a little girl, Rychard?”
“Frapp-face son,” Hampus said under his breath.
Rychard threw a bread roll at Farisa.
“You hurt cat! Cat die of you! Not fair, not fair!”
Rychard picked up one of the rosemary candles. “Get away, kid. I’m warning you.”
“You bad person! You hurt cat! I stop bad person!”
Claes, as he watched Rychard swing the candle, felt in his guts like he had fallen off a horse. He couldn’t imagine even Rychard intending to harm the little girl, but the flame came close enough to Farisa’s face to illuminate it, and he knew, as Dashi and Hampus ran toward them, that something terrible was about to occur.
Rychard swung the candle again. “I said get away!”
In colors foreign to natural combustion, the boy’s clothing caught fire, causing him to run screaming in no apparent direction until a servant, carrying a carpet from inside Dashi’s house, caught up to him and smothered the flames.
Farisa pointed. “He hurt cat! He make cat dead!”
Kyana picked up her daughter. “Let’s go inside.”
The men stood there dumbfounded. What they had seen could not be true; mages did not show first signs so young.
As a pale-skinned woman, one with a mix of Lorani and Ettasi features came by, Hampus said, “My son. How did—? It happened so fast. Is he going to—”
“We need to get him to a hospital immediately,” she said.
“I’ll get my fastest horse,” Dashi said.
“I suppose I have to go be with my son,” Hampus said as he followed Dashi.
Claes ran after him. “Just remember, she’s a little girl.”
Hampus nodded.
#
Claes arrived at the hospital five hours later.
“You don’t need to be here,” Hampus said. “There’s no chance of him dying. They’re just trying to keep the pain down.”
“I can’t process it.” Claes, who still smoked back then, drew on a cigarette. He offered it to Hampus, who refused. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Hampus Bell looked him in the eye. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“I heard....”
“Third-degree burns.”
They could hear the boy howling in pain, in spite of a concrete wall between this antechamber and Rychard’s ward, which he surely had to himself because of his position. Claes considered Hampus Bell a friend, but he was nervous about having been witness to something that would have been called “an international incident” when nations had existed. He felt a need to measure every word, or perhaps stay silent.
“It was my son’s fault.”
“It was nobody’s fault.”
“No one is going to be made to suffer for this,” said Hampus.
“You are not the one people are going to be worried about.”
Hampus Bell—this being the one time Claes could recall the man having a sweet tooth—reached in his shirt pocket for a piece of candy and ate it. “I’ll tell Smitz it was a freak accident. If Rychard says anything different, I’ll finish the job Farisa started. Don’t worry: Dashi’s family is safe.”
A male nurse emerged and asked Claes, in broken Ettasi, not to smoke there.
“Sorry,” Hampus said. “We’ll go outside.”
“Tesh,” Claes said, thanking him in Lorani.
“They don’t do house calls here.” Hampus Bell led Claes about twenty yards to a point with a view of the night sea. Clouds of the nearing rainy season hung like galleons over the ocean. “Can you believe that? His name is Rychard Bell and he’s in a hospital like a poor person.”
“They did clear a floor for him.”
“They did,” Hampus admitted.
“You have Dashi’s assurance, and the dlayo’s, that your child will get the best medical care possible, at no charge.”
“Like I care about the price.” Hampus looked over his shoulder. “I don’t mean to be sullen. I’d say my son deserves it, but what I’m worried about is.... He’s my only son, and I don’t deserve, and even my father doesn’t deserve the end of... Never mind. How’s Farisa?”
“I saw Dashi just before midnight. Asleep.”
“Poor girl. To have her first attack so young. Not even two, right?”
“Wait, you think that—?”
“I don’t think, Claes. I know. She’s a mage. When I was younger, I read all about this topic and, while Rychard’s at fault, sixteen flags out of sixteen, as he’s the one who picked up the candle. You saw that fire. It had a tinge of blue, like an electric arc, and it leapt for him.” He shook his head. “It’s not fair at all. If any couple deserves healthy children, it’s Dashi and Kyana. First signs at two? She’ll be dead or mad by age ten. It’s a frapping shame.”
A short, bald man with glasses came from the hospital. In fluent Ettasi, he said, “Your son is ready to see you.”
Claes followed Hampus inside. Rychard's left arm would require amputation. What muscle was left was now exposed, with much of the flesh charred black. The boy’s face and neck, at least, had been spared disfigurement, aside from a scar on his cheek.
The doctor said, “His condition is fully stable.”
The boy writhed. “It hurts so much.”
“The pain is a good sign. It’s where there isn’t pain that we worry.”
“That... that, I suppose, makes sense.” Hampus lowered his voice and walked to the other side of the open-bay room. Once confident his son wouldn’t hear, he asked the doctor, “Could you give him something for that, though? His screaming has been awful.”
“We’re giving him an adult’s standard dose of laudanum. We could use more, but we’re cautious with the young. No one wants to make him a termer.”
“Termer?”
“Long-term user.” The doctor took a deep breath. “He will lose the left arm. I’m very sorry about this. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I understand,” Hampus said.
“The burns on his right side are all superficial—first degree, second at worst.”
Hampus nodded.
“As for his lower body... I know you are from an important family. Do you have other children?”
“I have a daughter,” Hampus said. “Why?”
The doctor looked at Claes. “Could you leave us for a moment?”
#
The men didn’t see much of each other over the next few days. A letter arrived from Smitz Bell, Patriarch of the Global Company, calling his son and grandson to leave Loran at once.
“It has been fun,” Hampus said before boarding the northbound ship. He shook Claes’s hand, then Dashi’s. “Even to the end.”
“You were an honorable guest,” Dashi said.
“Senna will marry in December. If she has sons, and Kyana gives you another daughter, we could join houses. Think about it.”
“It is an idea.”
“Farewell,” Hampus Bell said as he got on the ship, with a sadness in his voice that Claes had never heard before. His son, scowling at anyone who dared even notice his bandaged stump of an arm, followed.
All three men believed at the time that Hampus’s vessel would return to Moyenne, where the spare son and broken grandson might resume a respectable but ineffective life on the Eastern Horn. The Global Fleet reached Hampus about two hundred miles north of the Fourth Continent with news—Pyotr Bell had taken ill and was not expected to survive. (In fact, he forestalled death for five more years, in constant pain, as his father’s experiments did sustain his existence, if it could not be called life.) The Global Fleet, for reasons that would not be clear until much later, did not return to Ettaso. Instead, it surrounded Loran. The nine-month siege would result in starvation, guerilla warfare, and inevitably the defeat of the island city.
The Global Company assigned Dashi’s family a debt of five million grot for the harm done to Rychard Bell and put Kyana—the preferred debt policy, at the time, was to incarcerate female relatives so the men could remain productive—in the prison where she died. Alice, Claes’s wife, was of Teroshi ancestry and dark enough to credibly raise the prisoner’s baby—Kyana died in childbirth, but really of medical neglect—as their own. It had become so unsafe to be Dashi Zevian’s daughter, the father demanded that Claes promise the sisters would not know each other’s whereabouts until the youngest turned twenty-one.
Dashi vanished until the Company found a body in Tidehome, Loran’s poorest neighborhood, in the ruins of a burned-down hovel on October 28, ‘76. The local papers declared that Farisa, then three years old, had murdered him, but Claes knew it could not possibly be true, because only he knew where the little girl was—the Coral Steps, a hundred miles away. The orphan tried for the murder looked nothing like Farisa.
In disguise, Claes watched the trial from afar. The officiator put the little girl in a cage and lowered it into the ocean, arguing that a witch would, in panic, use her magical capacities to escape. The child did not. The city grew restless. Lorani people hadn’t learned what it meant to live under the Global Company—they believed they still had rights, and protested the killing of a girl of their own kind who had shown no evidence of witchcraft. The trial’s officiator agreed to have himself subjected to a public trial of sorts—the next day, the city’s mayor had him speak to an angry crowd. In a sheer black suit capturing both the essences of imperial abundance and gun-mold minimalism, he argued on the basis of arcane Lorani folklore that yesterday, February 17, had been the date on which Mahu Botosi, the god of magic, slept. This had been the cause of the little girl’s—no, the dangerous witch’s—failure to escape the oceanic trap. Witches were still about, he said, and he would prove it. In fact, there were hundreds of them in this city. They were the causes of failed harvests and recent hurricanes, but they need not fear, because he—Hampus Bell, now Z-3—would go on to find them all.
Farisa had moved, or been moved, several times since then. Coral Steps to Medvesziget. Medvesziget to Tevalon. Tevalon to Cait Forest. Today, she was in Exmore, a city on Ettaso’s Central Plain, one that had never had much in the way of natural defenses, ten miles away and surrounded by at least half a thousand Globbos, not to mention all the plainclothes sympathizers to the Company cause, so long as it would fatten their wallets. No option existed but to get her out of there as fast as could be done.
Rumor’s of Dashi’s survival—only a burnt body had been found, that humid October night—had always been afoot, but invariably came short on evidence or coherence. Of late, though, sources of high credibility were suggesting that he survived, an explanation being an escape to Bezelia via northern Wyo, leading to current interest in the Mountain Road, though it remained unclear what he was seeking or how far he would go. What if Dashi Zevian were alive, though? It would mean that the Company had not killed an old world outright; it would suggest a limit to its powers and that Reverie, in some matrix of scattered embers, could live on. The odds were not high, but if these rumors were true, such news would bring hope to this dim vestibule of a world.
#
May 18, ’94
Claes rode a black pony, a nimble horse better equipped than his typical travel steed for the quick turns of a city, through a misty morning rain. Orange and white wildflowers, in patterns seen only in these parts, dotted the meadows at his flank. It made for a pleasant ride, the last nine miles, and it did not feel as if he had entered a city until he reached the Waxler Street checkpoint.
“Halt!” Said one of two Globbos.
Claes flashed the dead Z-8’s dog tag.
“You may pass,” said the guard.
Claes sniffed the air after perceiving a foul odor, similar to a house fire but too diffuse to come from one place. “What happened?”
“Riots,” said one of the guards.
“It was worse two nights ago,” said the other.
Claes said, “Has ‘the objective’ been captured?”
The guard shook his head at first and then corrected himself. “Peace has been restored.”
Claes watched a falcon fly along Andor Street. “What stopped the rioting?”
“Orc scare.”
The younger guard, a privatto according to his insignia, shivered. “I wouldn't be out here if I didn’t have to be.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” Claes said before riding in.
He hadn’t seen Exmore for decades, and found the place barely recognizable. Having grown up nearby, he’d first come here by train at fifteen—back then, the city buzzed with promise; back then, you knew each building had some fascinating story in it—and tasted his first whiskey (awful) in addition to winning twelve grot at darts. At eighteen, he lost his virginity to a girl attending Spire College, when it had been in operation. He could barely remember her face or voice now, though he had then been more attached to her than she had been to him. He remembered dancing and drum poetry and waiting outside 38 Lighthouse Avenue on a cold winter morning because, even though their coffee was expensive and they didn’t open till six o’clock, three hours past his bedtime, theirs was the best. He could say that he had grown up here.
He trotted his pony to what had once been called Worker’s Square, though the Company had surely renamed it. Crows circled overhead. The greengrocers, book traders, and local artists who used to come here were gone.
Most of Andor Street’s house numbers were missing, but he recognized the sharp incline of the Vehu District as he rode uphill. At 137, Chan Verida’s windows had been blown out; dark smudges on its walls suggested an explosion had taken place. What had these people—nine-tenths of whom were kind, simple-living folk—done to deserve centuries of hatred? Nothing, as far as he could tell. He shook his head as he went next door to Merrick and Nadia’s house and dismounted. For all of their correspondence—and before that, for all his time in Exmore—Claes had never been here.
The windows at 139 had been broken for entry. Books were strewn across the floor. On the third floor, a heavy safe in Merrick’s map room had been dragged for about a yard, as indicated by scars on the hardwood floor, before the thief had given up. Claes used a brass key to open it and found all the letters left here, deemed too sensitive to put on a wire, that Merrick had probably hoped to hand over in person, had the city not turned as it had.
The first was one Merrick had received from Moyenne: Demeter is vurkt. This was disappointing news, but not surprising. As a mage, she had been one of their most effective spies, but moral pollution—as Claes and Merrick and Nadia had warned—could conquer a mage’s mind at the speed of prairie fire. This had been the very reason for putting Farisa, during her childhood, in the Far North—she’d have a better moral education in the Library of Tevalon than in places like... well, like Cait Forest. Demeter had been thrown too young into high-level espionage, and was now unreliable.
“I told you,” Claes said as he used his lighter to destroy the message. Demeter should not be in the field this long, he had written seven months ago. “I fucking told you.”
The second letter said, Hampus Bell considering Feb. 15 retirement. This left him cold. Claes had no love for the sitting Patriarch—the man had betrayed Dashi, not to mention the whole city of Loran—but also had no illusions about Hampus Bell being the only evil man, or even the worst one, in the Global Company. Hampus had a knack for showmanship, but he lacked the charismatic coherence of his grandfather as well as the terrifying cruelty of his father, so he had led a period of stagnation rather than expansion. Also, Hampus Bell, as Claes remembered the man, would have found the Mahogany Chair to be a chore. He hoped this was still the case. Suffer in that throne, you bitch.
Several of the letters pertained to logistical matters, and few of note.
Noises coming from outside caused his neck to tense up and his shoulders to pull together. He’d have to sort through these papers more quickly: some could be returned to the safe, but others he’d have to burn or take with him.
A folded sheet of paper fell on the floor. On it, he found a short message: Riot 5/16, GC bought police. Quake bells saved us. N has already left. F-17 whereabouts unknown, we hope 263—MK.
Claes heard a knock at the door. He looked back—through a window too high for entry but broken nevertheless—at the white sky.
“I know ye’re in there!” The voice was female, with a pessima’s twang.
Claes quieted his breath. His horse was as good as stolen, but he could escape blunt robbery.
“I saw ya go in!” The woman kept knocking. “I could just use the window, ya know.”
He grabbed his weapon and crept down the stairs to the front door.
“I ’ave Farisa!”
The busted house gave no real security, but he looked through the front door’s peephole. An olive-skinned woman wore a black leather jacket and a headband that pulled back her wavy, shoulder-length hair. Her black denim pants had a hole at the knees. Slowly, Claes opened the door. “What do you know about Farisa?”
“Are ya Claes Bergryn? I’d like to ’elp you.”
“Where’s Farisa?”
“Calm yerself. You get nothing if ya ’urt me. Trust me. We want the same things.” The pessima offered a peach, which Claes refused. “Suit yerself.” She bit into the fruit. “Where did yer parents meet?”
“Excuse me?”
“Farisa said ye’d know the answer. Where did yer parents meet?”
“Oh.” Claes gritted his teeth. “A café.”
“My name’s Mazie,” said the pessima. “Glad to meet you. Let’s go to ’er.”
“Mazie what?”
“For now, just Mazie. I know ya don’t like me—”
“Who said that?”
“Call me ‘pessima’ if that’s yer scratch, but that’s not a distinction that matters where we’re going.”
“Where we are going?”
“Farisa said ye’re going to the Antipodes.”
“The Antipodes?” Claes looked aside. “Hardly.”
“I haven’t got much to live for up ’ere.” Mazie took another bite of the peach she had surely stolen. “I’m going with ya, and ya don’t have a say in the matter.”
“Farisa better be safe. Let’s find her, and then we’ll talk.”
#
To Claes’s surprise, his pony, which he’d hidden in what had once been Merrick’s backyard, had not been stolen. He decided to leave the animal there, as there would be two of them going north on Andor Street and, in any case, there was too much debris for a horse’s speed to be possible. Mazie led the way. Claes walked past a boy of about seven who added two white tally marks to a concrete wall.
“I promise you that Farisa’s in good care and ’ealth.”
Claes covered his nose as he stepped over a dead groundhog. “She better be.”
“It doesn’t take long for a city to fall apart, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It’s just awful, how this city is turning on the Ve’u.”
“Aren't you a pessima?”
Mazie stopped and stood in front of Claes. “So?”
Claes pointed to a bigoted poem written on the hull of 167, the implication being that someone like her had written it. “Your people aren’t known to get along with them.”
“Ignorance. Most of us ’ave never been inside a school. We’re told from childhood that Ve’u run the Company.”
“And you believe it?”
“Me? I don’t.” Mazie dismantled an improvised barricade, now a pile of lifeless wood, so they could progress. “I know what’s true. Anywhere you go, ninety percent of people live in a world of lies. What’s money? Some people are born with it, some people without, because previous generations willed it so, but for what reason should we care? None. Money is the loudest lie of the dead, that’s all, yet it governs almost everything people do.” She laid a discarded plank across a puddle so Claes could cross without getting his boots muddy. “As for me, I’ve lived ’ere my ’ole life, so chaos is my natural ’abitat, but I take pride in knowing what is true and what is not.”
Claes noticed that Mazie was able to move fast despite Andor Street’s rubble. “We’ve just met. Forgive me if I’m skeptical about your motivations.”
“I dated a Ve’u boy. ’E dumped me, but shit’s shit sometimes. I’m not going to ’ate a whole race of people for it.” She removed her leather jacket, exposing a red sleeveless blouse, and pointed at a mark on her upper chest. “Look.”
“I’m not sure what—”
“I don’t expect you to smell my armpits. Just look.”
Claes leaned in to see a spiral-and-star tattoo beneath her collarbone.
“Vehu don’t tattoo,” he said.
“I know that now. I got it as a kid.”
“But you’re—”
“Seven-eighths white-boned Exmore trash, I know. ’Owever, my mother’s mother’s father was Leo Geller of 83 Brook.” She pointed. “The ’ouse on that corner over there.”
“Mother’s mother’s father. Unless you’ve converted, which I somehow doubt, the Vehu would say that doesn’t count.”
“You think the G-Comps, when they go against the Ve’u, are going to make that distinction?”
Claes heard a disturbing bruit, not unlike a large animal eating. “Quiet.”
“I ’ear it too,” Mazie said, ducking behind a barricade of sandbags and disembodied carriage parts to lower her profile. Their view of the even-numbered side of the street blocked, they crept, checking all lines of sight before taking a step. Claes spotted a bald, red-faced orcling who rocked back and forth as he tore bloody meat from a dog’s carcass. He unholstered and cocked his gun. The sound scared the orc off.
“Ye’re not going to shoot ’im?”
“It won’t bring the dog back.”
“I know orcs.” Mazie drew her pistol and fired. The orcling’s nose became a red blossom. Blood sprayed as the tiny body fell back. “They send the small ones as scouts. You 'ave to kill them, or more will come.”
They crept into the 220s. Explosions had left smudges everywhere. Uneasiness filled Claes’s body. He heard no birds, no insects. Something jumped in his peripheral vision, and before he could lock eyes with it, Mazie had fired into an open doorway. The man in gray screamed, bleeding from the chest, putting fingers in the bullet hole as if he could stop the flow of blood. Mazie’s second shot, between the eyes, killed him.
Mazie grabbed Claes’s arm. “We need to run. He threw meat.”
He looked down. A clump of raw beef had landed between his feet. A green-skinned orcling emerged to grab it. Claes and Mazie hurried through debris. A full-grown sallow orc spotted the larger prize, a fresh-fallen man about six feet tall, and clawed up the Globbo cadaver’s body, burying its face in a side wound it had created. Unfazed, tucked inside windows and doorways of houses they had conquered, men in gray continued tossing out meat and fish in various stages of decay. Within less than a minute, Andor Street grew full of orcs—some were bare-clawed, while others carried iron pipes and daggers.
“’Ow many bullets ’ave ya got?”
Claes said, “Not enough.”
Mazie’s head turned. She pointed at a stoop where a massive stone flowerpot as well as the husk of an abandoned armored carriage held Andor Street at bay. “There.”
She ran to the stoop’s concrete wall, chest-high at its low point, and scaled it like a cat, as if gravity did not apply to her body.
Claes tried to do the same. He wished he were still young and nimble. Failing to bound over the wall, as Mazie had done, he tried to lift with his arms, but felt an urge to turn around just in time to shoot the machete-wielding orc that had lunged for him. Another orc came with a crowbar; to conserve ammunition, Claes used the first orc’s blade to sever the second’s leg. Lumpy brown orc blood flew everywhere. The third orc was a small weaponless female, and he had no desire to harm her, so he hoped his outstretched machete would serve as a deterrent, but she ran right into it, mouth forming a ring of surprise as her eyes shuddered and shut. Hunger really makes them stupid. Unable to pull the machete out, he let the weapon fall with her.
Mazie yelled, “Get up ’ere, man!”
Claes again tried to climb over the stoop’s side, but a twinge in his hip made it impossible to swing his leg high enough. He still had a young man’s strength, but less mobility. So, he stacked the dead orcs’ bodies next to the stoop and used them to boost his climb. Even with that, the wall’s slant forced his foot into an unnatural position, producing blinding pain as he tried to climb over, and he needed help from Mazie’s triceps—she was strong, much stronger than she looked—to get over the rim.
Mazie pointed at the flowerpot; it and the skeleton of the carriage were the only barriers between them and about thirty orcs on Andor Street. “‘Ow long do you think it’ll ‘old out?”
“Not long enough.”
A blue-haired orcling grabbed a larva-ridden lump of red-gray meat and squeezed it over his face, causing juices—mammalian blood and maggot waste—to drip into his open mouth.
Claes, eyes facing the road, backed slowly up the stoop. “I’m going to try the doorknob.”
“Is it open?”
It would not turn. “No.”
Mazie fired on an orc that had begun to dismantle the fallen carriage. “We ’ave two options. One is to wait them out and ’ope they leave once they run out of easy food. Of course, if they think they ’ave a shot of making us a meal, they’ll stick it out. Not my favorite.”
“What’s the other?”
“Pee.”
“Pee?”
Mazie shot off the hand of an orc that landed on the giant flowerpot. “They love the smell of shit, but they hate piss.”
A rock flew over Claes’s head. Window glass shattered behind him. “You know this because…?”
“G-Comp used to set ’em loose in the slums with guns, ’oping the things would figure out ’ow to use weapons, but they ’aven’t got the best eyesight. So they were target practice.”
“Pee,” Claes said as he severed the arm of an orc that had reached for him. Although scared, he did not feel that particular urgency, and had never been able to urinate on demand. “I don’t know what use that information is, but... thank you?”
Wielding an iron pipe, an orc rushed Mazie’s side of the stoop and swung. Claes cringed as his mind created the sound of a human arm breaking, but Mazie, unharmed, grabbed the orc by the solitary lock of hair on the back of its head and drove a knife through its throat. She wrested the pipe from the creature. “Take it. You’re stronger than I am.”
Claes dropped the machete—the pipe would have more stopping power—and swung the bludgeon at an orc trying to climb the pile of bodies he had himself used to scale the stoop wall. The orc’s skull cracked and it shook as it collapsed. Coming behind, a much larger one snarled. Claes swung at its face, but the blow rattled Claes’s arm as if he’d hit a wall, and the large orc did not slow. A thrown rock collided with his temple, causing pain to shut his eyes... half-blind, he swung again, and the large orc yanked the weapon out of his grasp. The orc smiled as it looked over the purloined bludgeon, but its right eye exploded due to Mazie’s bullet.
Claes looked back at the stairs and Andor Street. The stone flowerpot had been removed; the toppled carriage rocked as the orcs began to tear it apart.
“There’s too fucking many,” Mazie said. “We ’ave to get out of ’ere.”
Where would we go? We’re surrounded. The orcs were loud and hungry and he had fewer than ten bullets, so there was a good chance he was going to die here with a... a... a pessima. “You know how to pick locks, right?”
“I do.”
He handed her a safety pin from his pocket. “Try to get in.”
Mazie snatched the pin and ran up the stairs.
Claes swung the lead pipe. “I can hold them off for ten seconds if I’m lucky.”
He cracked an orcish skull. The smell of rotting flesh was everywhere, and their ravenous slurping noises were worse, so he felt nausea coming on. Slavering in hunger, pounded on the carriage that was rapidly coming apart. The underside had not been reinforced at all—an orc’s fist broke through.
Of course the bottom of the carriage is a cheap piece of crap. This, he worried, might be one of his last thoughts. The Global Company is stingy as shit. They cut corners whenever they can and they use that cheap paint that peels in half a year and smells like...
... cat piss.
He got himself close, dangerously close, to the downed vehicle and let his lighter’s orange flame nuzzle the vehicle’s painted hull. At first, there was no reaction and he expected an orcish kick that would shatter his skull, but the paint started to sizzle and give off a sour smoke. The fire spread. The adversaries fell back.
“I’ve got it,” Mazie yelled as the front door swung open.
Claes followed. He locked the door, not that it would buy much time. “What do we do now?”
Mazie ran up the first staircase. “Rooftops.”
“During the day?”
“If you ’ave a better idea…”
“I don’t think I do,” Claes admitted.
She climbed the second staircase, then put her palm on a door.
“It’s locked, but it’s one of those internal locks.” She struck it six inches above the knob with a hammer fist and it opened. Watching her work was transfixing; he hadn’t decided whether Mazie was naturally brilliant or had burgled so many houses before that she had learned every unsavory skill there was, but either way, he was impressed. When they reached the top floor, she found a cord, connected to the ceiling, that had been tucked away behind a bookshelf. She pulled it, letting loose a drop ladder. “Trap door.”
Once they reached the roof, they closed the door and put a cement block on the hatch. Claes looked back at the street. The carriage was fully engulfed. Repelled by the burning paint’s odor, but still hungry, orcs surrounded the house at a radius of about forty feet.
The sun had whitened a weak spot in the clouds. Claes and Mazie checked their lines of sight, not to be visible from Andor Street, except when it could not be avoided, as they worked their way north. Twice, they had to run over long planks that had been set there to connect rooftops, and Claes’s balance wasn’t what it had used to be, but he refused to look down and managed to get across.
“We’re at 263,” Mazie finally said. “The Ve’u safe house.”
“You know about that?”
“There’s a nation of people who ’ave lived in every city ever built. We ’ide, we scout, and learn every nook of the place.”
“Nation?”
“The poor.” Mazie opened the trap door of 263 Andor Street. As she descended, she said, “We should be quiet. Farisa’s probably sleeping.”
#
The windows of 263 Andor Street were nearly opaque, so light was low inside. Claes followed Mazie, who carried an oil lantern.
“There’s plenty of food ’ere.” Mazie pointed to barrels of grain, nuts, and cheese along the walls of the third floor. “There’s a stove in the basement. Can I make you something?”
“I’ll see Farisa first,” he said.
“Of course. Please do.”
On the second floor, Farisa lay sleeping. Nadia’s cat, the silver tabby, had curled up on her chest.
Mazie turned a knob to dim her lamp. “She’s ’ad a tough spell, no pun meant. Barely able to get out of bed, but somehow finds time to wind a watch.”
Claes looked under the blankets to be sure Farisa hadn’t been harmed. “She is something.”
“I’m going to fix coffee for when she wakes. How do ya take yours?”
“With cream.”
“There isn’t any, but there’s sugar.”
“Black, then.”
Mazie grabbed a metal folding chair and set it next to Farisa’s bed. “Sit. She's asked about you, so ya should be ’ere when she wakes up.”
While Mazie was downstairs, Claes noticed that Farisa had packed some books, and looked through them, curious what her young mind fancied. She had taken The Rise and Fall of Loran’s First Empire, a light read at only nine hundred pages. Underneath was A History of Wytchcraft, 6500 to 8250; along with that, she’d packed a thin brown paperback with no visible title. Intrigued, he flipped through it. At first, it seemed to be a jumble of nonsensical numbers, but he remembered his engineering classes well enough to recognize it as a book of tables: sines, tangents, and logarithms to eight places.
As Mazie returned, he chuckled and said, “Thrilling reading.”
“She ’as a smut book too. Jackoff’s Gun, the one with all the misspellings.”
“I suppose she’s allowed to read some trash.”
Farisa sat up in bed. “It’s Jakhob’s Gun, and it’s not trash.”
Claes said, “You were awake?”
Farisa rubbed her eyes. “You two kept yammering.” In adulthood, her face was thinner. That slight double chin she’d had as a teenager was gone. “I have that book for a reason, you know.”
“I know that reason well.” Mazie laughed. “We can leave if ya need us to.”
Farisa threw a small pillow at Mazie. “Not that! The errors. There’s a message in them.”
“I’ve heard this theory before,” Claes said. He remembered her having said something like this, on their journey to Cait Forest. “You know my thoughts on that one.”
Mazie laughed. “What if ya find a way to crack ’is code, and it’s just ‘Bang,’ like those prank guns?”
Farisa rolled her eyes. “It’s not Teller’s way. He doesn’t write to be anticlimactic.”
“No, ’e doesn’t.”
Farisa sat up, wool-socked feet on the floor. “Let me pose this.” Farisa’s eyebrows were about to start popping with every syllable. “It’s the 9620s and we’re in a theater. People urinate under the bleachers. We’re only half a century past the Castle Age, after all. Hawkers sell fake jewelry and street meat in the aisles. If the crowd dislikes an actor, he’s pelted with rotting food.”
Mazie wrinkled her nose.
“Three thousand people packed shoulder to shoulder, rich and poor together... in freezing rain or summer sun... often, to see a story they already know. Women aren’t allowed to be actors because it’s such a seamy job, so to fill female roles, they hire ten-year-old boys—to kiss men as old as Claes. To make sword fights realistic, they wear sheep bladders full of blood; during a battle, these break and spill all over the audience.”
Mazie asked, “Where are ya going with this ’istory lesson?”
“Let’s say a failed lawyer, a poet of middling repute, decides to drop all pretenses and write in the vernacular. He steals most of his stories. Some of his work is heady and philosophical, but he also writes rape and cannibalism. Every third line is a sexual reference or a political pun that’ll lose all relevance in half a century. When he feels like it, he makes up words. He seems to know the rules of verse, but he flat-out breaks them when he feels like it—after all, the commoners won’t care. Would you call that trash?”
Claes nodded. “I suppose I would.”
Mazie added, “It doesn’t sound like ’is work is ’igh culture.”
“Trash, you say.” Farisa’s voice took a triumphant lilt. “I would call that: Pallastro. Salah, not Wilhelm. I’m pretty sure the wife wrote the plays and he just counted the bacon.”
Claes scratched his beard. “Point, Farisa.” He laughed. “I’m not sure I buy your baconian theory, but you win.”
Farisa said, “No one considered Pallastro’s plays, written for a mass market, to be high culture at the time. The world nearly lost Ragnar and Teefa, because it wasn’t for another hundred years that anyone thought it had any value. His works, the crown jewel of Ettasi literature, are extant because of one person, only one, who thought them worth preserving—a tax collector assigned to his estate.”
Mazie said, “You really think Jakhob’s Gun is going to be remembered in four ’undred years?”
“That? I have no idea. If the Company has its way, there won’t be culture left in the world inside twenty. No, I’m not bringing the Teller book because I think it’s high culture. I’m bringing it because, while I may not have figured out how to decode it, there’s a message in plain sight. Steganography.”
Steganography. Claes missed those Farisa words.