by Ben Galley
Despite her agony, she drifted in and out of consciousness until the sun scaled to its zenith. When Heles could stoke herself into action, she pushed herself from the sand with her good arm. Her skin was hot, burned in the places that were split or not used to sun. New wounds announced themselves with shocks of pain or vicious twinges. She poked at them, taking note of each.
Her right wrist was broken, and the skin around the suspicious-looking lump was a blue bordering on black. Purple and red patches covered the rest of her body. At least three ribs were broken. Her left knee was aflame. One eye was almost swollen shut, and at some point in the fight, her lips had clashed with her teeth and come off the worse. Two of the aforementioned teeth were absent. There was a gash on her forehead, and Heles couldn’t decide whether it was grit or skull fragments she could feel in the wound. In any case, it had finished its bleeding, but not before painting her face crimson. She could feel it flaking under her fingertips, and they came away dark. It was probably why they had assumed her dead, but why she hadn’t been bound and sold already was beyond her.
It took far too much time, but Heles got to her knees. Her scrutiniser’s robes had been ripped and torn to the point of shreds, but the black cloth and silver lining were still recognisable. Scrutinisers were not loved any more in the Sprawls than they were in the city’s core. With a grimace, she pulled at the threads of her uniform until it had fallen to the sand, then she heaved up the sackcloth and wore it as a makeshift cloak.
In a shambling crawl, she reached the nearby body. Her suspicions were proven true once the ragged black cloak had been torn away. It was Jym, jaw and nose caved in and teeth all gone, but Heles still recognised his eyes, all wide and wild. They were a snapshot of his emotions the moment of his death: dread and panic.
She thumped his chest several times, cursing him breathlessly until her aching throat formed a word out of spit and sand. ‘Stupid!’
Heles fell back onto her arse, panting while she regained enough strength for standing. She had no doubt in her mind what task lay before her: return to the city. That was the only logical thing to do. Chamberlain Rebene had to be informed precisely what Horix had done. What she had under her garden. The scrutiniser in Heles could already see the links forming between Horix and Temsa. Their ruthlessness, secrecy, and plotting…
She stood, but kept her eyes on Jym as she rose. Horix had made a mistake in killing a proctor of the Chamber, but she had made a bigger mistake leaving a scrutiniser alive. She should have had the guards kick Heles’ face in, too.
Using her good hand, Heles seized his heavy foot and, with much stumbling and lung-burning effort, dragged Jym’s corpse towards a nearby drift of sand. With a shard of pottery she found in the shade, she gave him the best burial she could offer, dragging the sand over the broken body until it was hidden. At least there, on the very edge of the city, Jym’s shade would have a better chance of hiding out until the Tenets dragged him to the afterlife.
Heles stumbled in the direction of the distant towers, eying every nook and cranny of the tumbledown buildings about her, flinching every time the hot breeze moaned over curved rooftops. A few empty shacks of palm-wood and broken crates sat in gaps between houses. These were the hovels of those almost at the very bottom of Araxes’ social pyramid. It was still better than indenturement.
Few belongings remained inside the shells of buildings. Only gaudy graffiti and poles decorated with ceramic skulls. Crossed bones had been painted over door frames; a macabre welcome for any visitor. A few houses even had steps supported by clay skulls that grinned at the street.
Death held a mighty sway out on the edges of Araxes. Pickings were fewer, but the profits were huge. Binding had become more than a commerce to those of the Outsprawls. It had become a definition of life, something almost to be worshipped.
Heles kept her blurry, throbbing gaze fixed on the soaring core of the city, many miles north. The distance made her legs want to crumble, but she chastised them and dragged them on regardless. Weakness was a product of fear, and she refused to be afraid.
A lone yellow tower watched over the local sprawl of adobe and sand. It was a circular construction, decorated with rings of red stone. She heard a clanging emanating from its walls, and began to tread, or rather shuffle, quietly. She was in no mood nor shape to deal with any soulstealers or would-be chancers. Her soul was her own, and needed in the city.
Hobbling between the houses and shacks as fast as she could manage, Heles caught glimpses of a small leather-clad band gathered around an anvil. Beneath the sweat and forge-soot their arms and bare chests had been ringed with crimson-painted scars. The bigger the man, the more scars and rings he owned. Heles had rounded up enough soulstealer gangs to know their type. No doubt whatever sharp implements they were forging were not meant for good, and she hobbled on, eager to be gone. No eye caught her and no shouts followed. She kept her head up and her ears sharp, despite the piercing ringing in one of them.
In an alley she found a discarded crutch, left atop some sackcloth. It was as close to a grave as Araxes got these days, and clearly belonged to some beggar whisked away in the night by knife and greed. Heles gritted her teeth at the injustice, but as she tucked the crutch’s splintered handle into her armpit, she guiltily thanked the stealers for their single-mindedness. All they cared for were souls. Countless times she had found coin-purses and rings discarded beside bloody clothes, as if they were as worthless as wood or papyrus. She wondered what the ancient days had been like, when bandits had taken either coin or lives, but never both. Now it was purely the latter.
A society that puts no price on murder is no society at all.
Pushing her anger down into her legs, Heles adopted a faster pace. She stuck to the shadows, half for shade, half for secrecy. Her crutch thudded softly on the sand. The bustle that had been so distant was growing louder, though to her eyes the towers had come no closer.
If the busyness of Araxes’ core was a raging fire, then the Outsprawls were its scattered embers. In some places, like her current surroundings, they were char and ash; coals flung too eagerly in the desert. In others, they smouldered on, trying their best to burn like the core of the city did. Heles was glad for it; crowded spaces and broad daylight meant for safer passage than dark and empty streets. Even in Araxes.
Heles pressed a shoulder up against a corner and poked her head around it. There was a rainbow-coloured crowd at the far end of the deserted street. A few beggars dotted the doorways between her and the press of bright cloths and chattering voices. The beggars sat with their heads down, arms propped up on drawn knees, empty hands or upturned hats out for alms. A few sported cuts and bruises like she did, though none so gratuitous or numerous. A few were painted with white ash, a sign of complete poverty in the Sprawls. Beggars like these normally didn’t last long. Either the soulstealers found them in the night, or the beggars sold themselves into indenturement just for a release from the mortal struggles of age, hunger or disease. Heles saw one man with his hat on the sand, his ashen hands busy twisting string and slathering it with dark yellow grease. A tallow candle, to light come nightfall. To let the stealers know he wouldn’t put up a fight.
Heles pulled her ragged body forwards, leaning heavily on the crutch. It groaned in protest. The first beggar, the one busy with a candle, gave her a glancing look. His eyes soon swivelled back to her, wider now they had clocked the blood and bruises between the sackcloth. He gave her a sympathetic look, then turned to the candle in his hands and calmly set it to one side, unfinished. It was still there by the time she reached the busy street.
The commotion dizzied her after the sneaking and the silence of the abandoned streets. She took a moment to catch her breath against a column of a building and watched the stream of people rush past her. Half the street flowed one way, half flowed the other, and at the sides it was undecided, eddying around bright stalls and shopfronts. The chatter of voices combined into one incoherent drone, broken at times by merchan
ts ringing bells every time a deal was struck. Heles didn’t know if it was her aching eyes or the squat buildings allowing more sunlight into the streets, but the crowds seemed more colourful, more vibrant here than in the city proper.
Signs proclaimed their goods in Old Arctian as well as the Commontongue, and some glyphs Heles had never seen before: nomad scrawl, older than the empire itself. There were fewer shades mingling with the living, revealing the poorer nature of the Sprawlers, but plenty of beasts. Scarab beetles, cows, centipedes, donkeys and their riders plied their way through the radiant crowds. Some tugged along carts with merchants perched on top, yelling offers while waving bowls of nuts and silks in their hands. Desert crows and finches and parrots flitted back and forth between the stalls, carrying messages and trades between vendors. Heles took a breath, feeling overwhelmed, and spices stung her sore nose. She winced. There were scents on the breeze she did not recognise, and for the first time in decades, she felt foreign in her own city.
Heles’ eyes followed a long-legged insect as it plodded through the crowds, towering over nine feet tall. A mere child sat atop it, a girl with a narrow gaze and a high chin. She was wrapped in shimmering silk, and held the reins aloofly, off to one side. Her beast’s carapace was bright green. It had a tall domed head, and its legs were sharply arched and pointed. The insect trilled away to itself as it serenely picked its path. Heles had never seen the like of it.
She followed its movements until she spotted a trough in the gap between two stalls. Her thirst overrode all other thoughts, and before she knew it, she was limping over to it, tongue already lolling from her mouth.
For a brief moment, as she gazed down at the murky water, with its film of oil and slobber and scattered straw, her breeding stalled her. The spiny, mustard-yellow boar slurping away at the far end of the trough eyed her suspiciously, but all she could see was its lapping tongue between its sharp tusks. Thirst won her over, and she plunged her face into the trough.
The water was warm and tasted of animals, but she drank anyway, half-drowning before coming up for air. Her split lips and forehead stung anew, but she forced herself to cup the water and wash them as much as she could bear.
‘Oi!’ a voice yelled from behind her. ‘That’s for beasts, not beggars!’
Heles spared a moment to face the speaker, making sure her eyes carried heavy measures of dangerous and displeased. He was a pale-skinned man in a turban. In his hands he held a rope, the other end of which was looped about the boar’s neck. The man caught the venom in her eyes and pouted.
‘Who says I’m a beggar?’ she croaked.
‘Just look at yer! And yer filth is getting in all the drinkin’ water. Who knows what diseases you lot carry?’ His point made, he tugged at his spiny boar, who seemed irritated his drinking had been disturbed, and the two of them walked away.
Heles drank until her stomach ached before pushing herself back to her feet and crutch. Her antics and the man’s shouts had drawn looks. Several of the nearby traders watched her, faces wrinkled in distaste. A few mercenary guards on the other side of the street were pointing at her. It was time to move on.
She walked for an hour, perhaps more. The guards followed her for a time, but they were only paid enough to guard so much of the street, and before long she had become somebody else’s business.
The Outsprawls had not changed, growing no taller nor closer to the ever-present shadow of the city. The crowds ebbed and flowed between the compact districts. Some had been friendlier than others. Heles had seen a few figures huddled at the edges of streets, eyes flitting about the crowd. They had lingered on her for longer than was comfortable. They had the look of hawks watching a procession of rabbits, noting the injured, the lame, the young, the old.
Here and there, along broader streets, trouble stirred around warehouses of white stone propped up by black marble pillars. Brown-clad hooded figures stood behind rows of hired men, while queues of angry folk with buckets and barrels cried out and berated them. The shouts were too many, too emotional to glean much sense from them, but Heles knew Nyxites when she saw them. Queues at Nyxwells or warehouses were not uncommon in the outer districts, but these commotions seemed more serious. Heles also knew the beginnings of a riot when she saw one.
She wandered closer to the nearest warehouses, trying to pick complaints out of the barrage of noise and cursing. There must have been forty people clamouring at the broad steps of the warehouse, pressing against the sellswords’ shield wall. The protestors were of all cuts and colours, from servants and workers to businessmen and soultraders. Halfway between their guards and the doorway, two Nyxites repeatedly waved their hands for peace and understanding, and were repeatedly denied.
‘How can it have “dried up”?’ came the bellow of one man in a shit-brown coat. He threw his papyrus pail to the dust and stamped on it, over and over. ‘I don’t have time for this!’ he cried out between wild grunts of effort.
‘Please! Calm! We are as concerned as you are!’
‘What are we to do?’ yelled a woman, reaching forward over the shields only to be barged back into the arms of another.
‘I have souls to bind!’ called yet another.
One of the Nyxites wore a shaky smile. ‘Shipments are coming from the Core Districts, we assure you! And two of the Nyxwells in the next district over also have water!’
‘Outrageous!’ shouted the man in the turd-coloured coat. Leaving his pail in the dust, he threw up his hands and marched away, leading most of the mob north to the next well, like a blustering wind dragging a squall along with it. The two Nyxites blew sighs of relief as they hurried back into the safety of their warehouse. Heles loitered a moment by the building’s edge, watching the sellswords and those who remained to wait and mutter angrily to themselves. With a humph, Heles slipped away to a quieter street, wondering what in the Reaches would cause the ever-present Nyxwell to dry up like a common desert spring.
Passing under the cool shadow of a crooked tower, she found a secluded doorway by a bustling junction and awkwardly collapsed into it. Her limbs were afire and several cuts had reopened during her stubborn shuffle north. The feet of the crowds trod inches from her own but she did not care, despite the tuts and curses aimed her way.
Breathing a deep sigh, Heles stared down at the awl she had swiped from a leatherman’s table while he had been distracted screaming at a customer. It was a short, rusty thing, but it had a big enough spike for jamming into eyes or ribs or groins. She tried to grip it in her right fist, but pain lanced up her arm. Left arm, it would have to be. She secreted the weapon inside her makeshift sleeve. Once more, she lost herself in the crowd’s noises; the gentle tapping of an artist’s hammer; something sizzling in iron pans; the braying laughter after a crude joke; hooves and feet scuffing in the sand.
‘There is but one god who still lives, friends. Neither dead nor lost, is he!’
Heles’ eyes snapped open. Through the forest of legs and feet, she spotted a shade standing on a small wooden pedestal. He glowed even in the bright sunlight. His face beamed as he delivered his words, and his robes were the colour of blood. A small crowd had gathered around him. Many of them were free shades, with white feathers splayed across their breasts. The rest were fine-dressed dawdlers, as alive as Heles was.
The shade continued his speech. ‘It is he who gave us the gift of binding, stolen from jealous gods who would seek to keep man and woman slave to their promise of afterlife. Who would ask us to devote our lives to giving them prayer. We were promised a paradise, friends, but it is an empty void. Nothing more. Nothing like the second life we owe to Sesh today!’
Although a shout of, ‘Fuck off!’ came from the crowd, the gathering at the preacher’s pedestal grew in number. Heles heard their curious murmurs over the bustle.
With great difficulty, and a lot of grunting, she made it to her feet and set about navigating the flow of the junction. Despite the shoves and much, much stumbling, she reached the edges of the gro
up, and hovered near to a wall. No doubt the day’s sweat – not to mention being wrapped up in a sack for gods knew how long – had made her smell riper than an old chamberpot. She could not be bothered with attracting more attention.
As the shade waxed on about Sesh’s gifts and endless love for both living and dead, Heles’ eyes toured the gathered. When not intrigued, most faces were blank. A few nodded along to the words.
Heles caught sight of other hooded figures loitering on the far side of the pedestal. They too were clad in deep red, hooded and as still as the column she leaned against. They had the bulk of armour beneath their cloaks, and she noticed the glint of silver at their collars and cuffs. If they moved, she would no doubt see the shapes of swords at their hips.
Heles felt sweat on her injured brow; the sting of salt as well as cold.
The Cult were allowed no weapons. It was royal decree. Emperor Milizan himself had given that speech, many years ago, before retreating into his Sanctuary. Heles had been but a proctor then. A volunteer, just like Jym.
She knuckled her brow and winced, her hand coming away bloody from a reopened cut. Some of the blood began to drip into her swollen eye, and she turned around. The speaker’s words caught her.
‘We preach not what old religions demanded of you, such as tithe or prayer. We preach only understanding, friends. Fairness for all, and an end to the miserableness of the lie the Arc has told itself for centuries. An end to crime, to poverty such as this.’
Heles found the eyes of the gathering on her as the shade pointed her out, sackcloth bruises and all.
‘Charity, friends. An old idea, long forgotten. Such as it is, the Church of Sesh has decided upon a momentous change. We are no longer a brotherhood of the dead, but of the living too. The light of Sesh should be for all, especially in times of such chaos and shortage.’
