by M. J. Kuhn
“Sorry, fellows,” Tristan said, “looks like Felice was looking out for me that hand.” His voice caught as King Drunk’s hand slammed down on the table.
“Felice, my ass. You’re a fucking cheat.”
Tristan shared a bemused look with the man beside him. “A cheat? How do you figure? You saw me shuffle th’ cards right on the table. You cut th’ deck yourself!”
The third man pointed a wobbly, accusatory finger at the drunk. “Yer just mad you started this game with a crescent and a woman an’ ended with neither.”
Tristan gave an apologetic smile. “That’s just th’ way the cards fell. I’m sorry, my friend. I’ll tell you what—you call the next game. How’s that for fair?” Tristan wiggled the cards in front of the drunk’s face. “What’ll it be? Gildesh Wine Merchant? Maybe a li’l Bobbin Draw?” Before getting stuck here in Carrowwick, Tristan hadn’t known a single one of these card games. After all, cards were the swindler’s pastime, as his father said. But Tristan had always been a quick study. Now he could stack the deck for a hundred games or more.
King Drunk ripped the wooden crown from his head and pushed himself to his feet, his pipe threatening to fall from his cracked lips. “How ’bout we play gut the cheat?”
Tristan laughed, but his heart rate tripled as he caught sight of the steel at the man’s belt. Not a run-of-the-mill sailor. A freebooter. Despite the fact that he was probably moments away from being eviscerated, Tristan couldn’t help but note that it was a little galling to be called a cheat by someone who held up lace merchants for a living. The other men at the table scattered away into the bar, finding new homes at less contentious tables.
“If you find a cheat to gut, let me know,” Tristan said, voice hardening. “Now come on then, fair’s fair.” He looked at the crescent as it disappeared into King Drunk’s fingers again. “Pay up—you can play me for it next game.”
“So you can have another chance t’ cheat me?”
Tristan’s palms were slick with sweat. It wasn’t often he wasn’t able to talk his way out of things. He looked the man up and down. Suddenly he wished he’d picked on a much smaller drunk.
But just then, the man froze. His face paled as his eyes flicked between Tristan and the space just over his left shoulder. He cast the crescent back onto the table.
“I see wha’ this is,” he grumbled. “Take your damned gold.”
Tristan let out a breath as the man ambled away. “Well, you certainly took your sweet time getting here.”
Ryia leaned against the rotted wooden pillar behind him, picking nonexistent dirt from her fingernails with the blade of one of her hatchets. The distinctive weapon announced her reputation to anyone too foolish to know who they were dealing with. The Butcher of Carrowwick.
“Oh, fuck off. Sometimes I have better things to do than beat up little boys for you.” Her voice was raspy and melodic, like a summer wind sweeping through tall grasses. She stalked across the room, stopping just in front of him.
“Let me guess… drinking your weight in Edalish ale?” he asked.
“I’ll have you know I was on very important business for our dear friend tonight,” she said, stroking a finger along Tristan’s jawline. He jumped. Not one of her fingers.
He ducked away from the severed digit. “You’re disgusting, did you know that?” She just gave her usual wicked grin. Tristan looked warily toward the finger, now bouncing back and forth between Ryia’s hands. “Whose is that, anyway?”
“Someone who was a royal pain in Clem’s ass,” she said cheekily.
Tristan rolled his eyes, scooping the mound of coins into the purse tied on his belt. “It’s a good thing your axes are sharper than your jokes.”
Ryia raised her left hand, crossing the first two fingers. She was strangely familiar with the vulgar gestures of the middle kingdoms for a Brillish girl… then again, Ryia was familiar with vulgarity of every sort.
Her eyes flicked to his purse. “How much you bring in tonight? Enough to keep Clem’s dogs at bay?”
“You tell me,” he said, trying and failing to hide his bitterness. “You’re his prized pup, aren’t you?”
Ryia just smirked, clearly unfazed by the accusation. But of course she wouldn’t be upset. She might even be proud. After all, she had chosen this life. She hadn’t been roped in and scarred with the Saints’ brand against her will like Tristan had—she’d volunteered to be Clem’s strongman. To spend the rest of her days shaking down and carving up anyone who got on the Snake’s bad side. Sure, there were plenty of gutter rats in this city who gladly signed right up, but Ryia, whatever she was, wherever she had come from, was no gutter rat. Tristan would never understand how she had come to decide the Saints’ life was the one for her.
He picked up the cards and gave them a lazy shuffle, peering around the bar. “Now that my muscle has decided to show herself, I can take enough risks to make more than a few crescents.”
Ryia shook her head, picking her teeth with her tongue. “No deal. I’ve got to see Clem.”
“I’m sure he can wait a few hours to see that horrific trophy of yours,” Tristan protested, glancing toward the pocket the severed finger had disappeared into.
She pursed her lips, the scar along her left jawbone puckering as she pulled something small and iron from her cloak. “That’s not all I need to show him.” She tossed the thing to Tristan.
A coin, about the size of a copper. He flipped it over in his hand, running a thumb over the poorly engraved mark before looking grimly back to Ryia. “Oh, for Adalina’s sake… Clem’s not going to like this.”
4
RYIA
A gust of wind buffeted Ryia’s face as she stepped outside the Miscreants’ Temple. It was moist. Warm. Like breathing air directly from a street dog’s mouth.
“I wish autumn would hurry its ass up already,” she griped, slogging through the gutter.
“Summer just started.” Tristan looked at her sideways, sweeping his dark hair out of his eyes. “Maybe if you didn’t insist on wearing long sleeves, you wouldn’t hate it so much. Or smell so bad.” He gave an overdramatic wince as Ryia punched him in the arm. “Besides, I thought you folks from Briel were tough in the heat. Isn’t it like this year round down there?”
Ryia fiddled with the intricately carved namestone around her neck. The mark of any citizen of the kingdom of Briel, some two thousand miles to the south. “Maybe down in Safrona. It was drier than Rolf’s breakfast bread where I grew up.”
Not completely false. Also not strictly true. Just like most things she said.
Tristan chortled as they wove their way toward the slipshod row houses lining the southernmost wall of the city. “That bread really is awful.”
“So are Dresdellan summers.”
Tristan shot her a crooked grin. “I’m not the one who told you to come here—I’m sure there’s plenty of need for a butcher up in Boreas.”
“Oh, there was. You should hear what they call me up there.”
Tristan laughed. Ryia didn’t. The three months she had spent in Brünhavert had been the most miserably cold, windy months of her life. She had honestly been relieved when the Guildmaster’s smirking Disciples had tracked her down that time.
“Wait, are you ser—” Tristan started.
“Shh.” Ryia flung out an arm, catching him in the chest.
“Ow—what was that f—”
“I heard something,” Ryia said, shrinking back a step, nostrils flaring.
“So what? There’s a party going on. Did no one tell you?” Tristan teased. But all the color drained from his skinny face at the hiss of voices on the adjacent street.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the problem, Mr. Griffith,” said the first voice. Calm, measured, and cold. A scalpel slicing through flesh.
Callum Clem.
Ryia glanced at Tristan, now pressing his back into the building behind him like he was hoping to fall through to the other side. Given his penchant for corporal
punishment and his unpredictable nature, there probably wasn’t anyone alive who really liked Clem… but Tristan hated him.
Not surprising, since Clem had nearly gutted him the night they met. Only someone very young or green as a clover field would have been stupid enough to try to cheat Clem so brazenly. Tristan had obviously been both. It honestly begged the question how he’d survived the past sixteen years at all.
As for Ryia? Well, she had worked with some pretty nasty sons of bitches in her years on the run. Highwaymen, assassins, and thieves, the lot of them. Clem was probably the slyest, most calculating man she’d ever worked for, but there was a strange sort of comfort in that. After all, she would need to run some calculations herself to stay hidden from the Guildmaster. It had been almost a year since his Disciples had last sent her running, but they would track her down eventually. Sometimes they showed up in her newest city before she had so much as taken off her coat, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes she was able to eke out a life for a few years before they came to break down her door, but no matter how well she hid or how far she ran, they always found her.
It was maddening the way that asshole could follow a trail that wasn’t there. Someday she would learn his secret and be free of him forever… or she’d just lop his hairless head from his shoulders and be done with it. Either way was fine with her.
Pushing daydreams of a gloriously headless Guildmaster from her mind, Ryia edged forward. She peered around the corner. Four shadows split the street beyond. Clem stood on the right, alone on the cobblestones. He was not a tall man, nor was he particularly large, but his ego made up for all that. His hollowed cheekbones and hooked nose stood out sharply in profile, his short blond hair almost silver in the moonlight. As always, he looked like he had dressed for a dinner party. Fancy clothes, impractical shoes. Probably just another show of confidence—unable to run, but unconcerned. After all, Callum Clem would never run from anything.
“Of course you don’t understand the problem,” sniped the ratlike man on the left, presumably Mr. Griffith. He was flanked by two beefy-looking bodyguards. “I know the way your kind operate. It’s why your little operation is circling the drain at the moment. Your Saints have been asking for a comeuppance for years, and now you’ve gotten it.”
A smile crept up Clem’s face. It was cold, laced with a hunger that had always been there but had grown more and more pronounced every day since the fall of the Foxhole.
“Is that so, Mr. Griffith?” He scratched his chin with one immaculate finger. “If you have such a poor opinion of my… associates, it begs the question why you agreed to do business with us in the first place. You signed the contract, yes?”
Griffith clenched his fists. “Well, yes, I signed the—”
“Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. We’ve done our part. I expect five hundred crescents added to the Saints’ coffers by the end of the week, or I’ll have to arrange a little meeting for you with my Butcher.”
“Looks like I’ll have to check my schedule, eh?” Ryia whispered, nudging Tristan.
Misbehaving Saints, business partners gone wrong, rival gang members caught in the wrong alley… it was Ryia’s job to deal with them all. It didn’t make her very popular… unless infamy counted. Ryia liked to think it did. Tristan just looked vaguely ill.
Ryia’s nostrils exploded with the raw scent of danger as Griffith snapped once and four silhouettes became six.
The new shadows in the alley were dark robed and solemn. Adept Kinetics. Tristan flinched as they grabbed Clem by the arms, hauling him off the ground with inhuman strength and speed. Their faces remained completely expressionless as they reared back, slamming him against the darkened shop window behind him. There was a reason Adept Kinetics were so expensive. A reason why the men who owned them reigned supreme in their respective corners of the world. Ryia curled her lip as she silently weighed the word. Owned.
The Kinetics’ arms held steady, unyielding as stone as they ground Clem into the glass pane behind him. The Guildmaster’s Kinetic Disciples were by far the strongest Kinetics in Thamorr, but even the weaker, brainwashed ones, like these two, were pretty damned unbeatable. They moved faster than the human eye and were stronger than a dozen oxen. They had appeared in the alley, seemingly out of thin air. Had lifted Clem like he weighed no more than a single leaf of parchment. It was almost impossible for anyone untouched by the mysterious magic of the Adept to face one and live. In the days before they had been broken and enslaved, Adept had ruled the world. It wasn’t hard to see why.
“You shouldn’t have come alone, Callum,” said Griffith, tightening his fist. The Kinetics mimicked the motion obediently, grabbing Clem by the throat and squeezing. One face was female, the other male. Both were blank and passionless. “Your cockiness has always been your undoing. I’m sure Asher in particular will appreciate the irony.”
Ryia reached for her hatchets, cracking her neck. Why did Clem insist on walking these streets by himself? Until recently, his reputation had been his armor. But now? Clearly things had changed with how far the Saints had fallen.
Words and bluster couldn’t save him from the death blow of a Kinetic.
“Wait,” Tristan whispered, grabbing her forearm. His face was white.
Ryia nudged him. “I know you hate the man, but my gold comes from his pockets.”
“No,” Tristan said. “Look. He’s smiling.”
Ryia could see the serpentine curl of Clem’s lips from here, even as a trickle of blood spilled from between them, his face reddening. Clem nodded toward the Kinetics holding him.
“Yours?”
Griffith blinked. “They belong to the company.”
Clem’s smile widened. “Do you have the blood?”
“Do I… what?”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Mr. Griffith.”
Griffith’s bodyguards suddenly stepped forward. One struck a match, lighting a fast-burning torch, while the other drew a short metal rod from his coat sleeve. A branding iron.
Ryia froze, teeth clenched as she watched. One guard heated the iron while the other pulled a small container from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Griffith’s voice grew half an octave higher with each word as he lunged for his guards—about as effective as a puppy nipping at a horse’s hooves.
“You see, Mr. Griffith, I did not come alone. You did. These are not your men, as you just noted—they are the company’s men.”
“My company.”
“Not anymore.”
The branding iron hissed as one guard dipped it into the liquid filling the container. Blood—Clem’s blood. The guard stepped forward. He hesitated… then pressed the brand into the first Kinetic’s cheek. The Adept fighter blinked as Clem’s blood ran down her face, working itself into the new burn on her cheek, then immediately released her grip.
The other Adept followed suit as soon as he was marked, lowering Clem to the ground and falling, dead-eyed, to attention, now ready to obey Clem instead of this Mr. Griffith.
“Hayworth does not seem to share your low opinion of me, Mr. Griffith. We have made an arrangement. As of this morning, the majority stake in Hackle Holdings belongs to me. As a responsible investor, I can’t possibly allow you to continue to head the company.” Clem shook out his long, thin arms and took a step forward. “You know… I heard a rumor you signed a deal with the Saints of the Wharf, is that correct?” He tutted in mock disapproval. “Common street gangs… I think Hackle is better than that, don’t you?”
“But I… but you…,” Griffith sputtered, looking around the empty street for help and finding none.
“Goodbye, Mr. Griffith.” A mad breed of joy danced in Clem’s silver-blue eyes as he snapped his fingers.
Tristan hid his face in his hands as the Kinetics sprang to action, but Ryia didn’t look away. They moved with quick, efficient brutality, motions blurred like those of a dragonfly’s wings as they went about their bloody business. They were unarmed, but they didn�
�t need weapons to get the job done. Bones cracked like twigs under their hands. Their unnaturally sharp nails cut through flesh like hot piss cut through fresh snow. In an instant, poor Mr. Griffith lay on the ground in pieces.
“Get someone to clean that up,” Clem said, dismissing the Hackle Holdings guards and his new Kinetics. He stepped neatly over a pile of tangled intestines as Ryia rounded the corner. “Did you enjoy the show, Butcher?”
He greeted her without looking up. Sometimes Ryia swore he was a Senser, somehow escaped from the Guildmaster’s mysterious spell. But she knew that was bullshit. There was only one free Adept in all of Thamorr. She should know.
Not that living her entire life with one eye over her shoulder really counted as “freedom.” No matter where she ran, she always felt like she was a fly caught in the Guildmaster’s infinite web, just waiting for him to finally scuttle across the map to devour her.
“It didn’t look like you needed my help.”
Clem inspected the hem of his emerald coat for blood. “I do hope you’ve come with good news.”
“Not exactly.”
His thin lips curved, forming either a grimace or a smile. Of the two expressions, the grimace was far less dangerous. “Don’t tell me my Butcher has been bested by that odious creature.”
“Hardly. You’ll be getting your payments from that prick, don’t worry.” She tossed the finger to him. “And I’ve left him with a nice reminder of our time together. Should send a pretty clear message.”
Clem examined the severed finger with mild interest, pocketing it as though it were as ordinary as a pen. “Good.” He dusted off his trousers, carefully shined shoes reflecting the moonlight. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
Ryia drew back her hood, letting her inky ponytail fall over one shoulder. “No, it’s not.” She pulled the Crowns’ coin from her pocket, turning the stamped side toward Clem.
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “We should speak in private. Feel free to bring your shadow with you,” he said, indicating the corner where Tristan was still lurking out of sight.
