Savage Bounty

by Matt Wallace

  Another pair of men soon steps in front of Dyeawan and Oisin. At first she takes no notice of them as they blend in against their surroundings, but a strange flash of black marking one of their faces draws her attention. Once Dyeawan actually looks up at the pair, she cannot look away.

  The men are Edger and Oisin, ten years younger and wearing the garb of simple merchants who operate in the Bottoms.

  Dyeawan glances back at the Oisin of the present, who offers her only a shrug and an unreadable expression.

  Dyeawan studies Edger. His hair is darker. There are fewer lines in his brow. More remarkably, however, he wears half of a black, leathery mask over one side of his face.

  The other side is still expressive, its muscles twitching and moving in the heat of the afternoon.

  This must have been before the affliction that stole his ability to emote fully took hold.

  The younger Edger and Oisin are silently, but with intense interest, watching a little girl chasing an errant rat up the sidewalk. They say nothing to each other, but Edger in particular appears intensely interested in the child for some reason.

  Dyeawan knows that raggedy little girl with a smudged face who wears a cut-up sack instead of proper clothes. She watches the child’s small, thin legs move fast and free as she pursues her quarry, giggling despite the muck in which she dwells as she easily weaves around the bodies of adults who ignore her utterly.

  The girl is Dyeawan.

  She watches herself as a child keep the rat firmly in her sights, clapping her hands as if this is a game rather than the pursuit of rare meat to nourish her and help keep her alive for another week.

  The rat is both fast and clever. As its pursuer draws near, the rodent slices quickly to its left, leaping from the sidewalk and disappearing momentarily beneath a passing fish cart.

  Child Dyeawan halts, the soles of her bare feet skidding across the walk. She frantically scans the street, spotting her quarry as the rat emerges from the passing shadow of the cart.

  Though she knows the stomach of her current form is only a product of her imagining, present Dyeawan feels it churn.

  This scene is a memory, she realizes. She remembers this day. Not Edger and Oisin’s clandestine presence, certainly, but she remembers chasing that rat.

  She also remembers what happens next.

  Child Dyeawan smiles triumphantly, leaping from the sidewalk to pursue the rat into the busy street. The creature skitters anew, making for the other side of the thoroughfare.

  The little girl avoids the bustling traffic as easily as the sea of oblivious passersby on the walk, at least at first. As she reaches the middle of the road, however, one of her dirty, bare feet catches a loose stone and she trips, falling forward onto her stomach.

  It knocks the wind out of her. Dyeawan remembers that, too.

  She never saw the wagon that is now barreling down on her younger, prone form.

  Present Dyeawan looks up at Edger and Oisin. The side of Edger’s face that can still move is contorted in sudden, dark concern. It is a striking thing for her to see, Edger looking on her, any version of her, with such passion and worry and obvious affection. It also makes no sense because he did not know her then.

  Did he?

  Edger actually takes a step forward as if to intercede in the events they are observing from afar.

  Oisin, the younger version of the agent, bars Edger’s way with a firm arm.

  Edger looks back at his companion in alarm, and the younger Oisin shakes his head, eyes flashing a warning.

  A clear desperation fills that remaining expressive portion of Edger’s face. He does not continue moving forward, but there is anguish as he continues to watch the little girl.

  The child that was Dyeawan manages to avoid being trampled under the hooves of the horses drawing that wagon, but she cannot wriggle away fast enough to avoid the wagon’s wheels.

  Those wheels she does remember seeing.

  Present Dyeawan is filled with the impulse to scream. She closes her eyes, not wanting to watch what occurs in the next moment.

  When the scream comes, it is her childlike self lying in the street who unleashes it, and the pain contained within that shrieking is beyond measure.

  Dyeawan only opens her eyes again after that screaming ceases.

  The busy street is gone. Edger and Oisin the younger are gone.

  Dyeawan’s tender, the Oisin of the present standing beside it, is resting on another street, a much quieter street.

  Rising in front of them is a shabby, state-run orphanage on the outskirts of the Bottoms. It is the same building Dyeawan once escaped as a child even younger than the one struck by those wheels.

  The clacking of shod horse hooves and the lash of a buggy whip rises in the distance.

  The buggy that rears behind them a few moments later is nondescript, but its windows are shrouded in thick, black curtains. Its driver is as nondescript and forgettable as the buggy itself.

  Dyeawan glances back to see the buggy’s door open and a woman of middle age climb out, bearing a large basket. The woman is familiar, if not immediately recognizable.

  Dyeawan watches her ferry the basket past them without notice, walking up to the door of the orphanage. She carefully places her burden at the step of that door, pulling apart the loose weave of the basket’s rim to peer at its contents.

  The woman smiles then, and that Dyeawan recognizes more than anything.

  The woman is Tinker, nearly twenty years younger than when Dyeawan first encountered her at the base of that volcano.

  Tinker reaches inside the basket, briefly giggling to herself. Then her smile turns sad as she regards whatever is inside. Dyeawan thinks she sees reluctance in the woman as she stands, staring disdainfully at the door before finally turning away and walking back over to the buggy.

  The door opens and Tinker climbs inside without a look back at the burden she has unloaded at the orphanage step.

  Dyeawan’s gaze lingers on that door after the buggy doesn’t immediately pull away. Those black curtains ripple, and then a gloved hand pulls them back. The face that peers out doesn’t belong to Tinker.

  It is Edger, a young man with a handsome, somberly expressive face. The half-mask is gone. Not a trace of paralysis afflicts his features.

  Edger stares across the road at the step of the orphanage and the basket that has been left for its cruel administrators.

  For the first time, Dyeawan attempts to read his face. His brow hangs heavily, but she cannot discern whether it is concern or curiosity Edger is expressing. In either case, he is clearly attending to business of the most serious and personal nature.

  After a time, he replaces the curtains and the buggy driver cracks their whip, urging the horses forward. Edger’s expression never changes, and Dyeawan is left wondering how he felt about what just happened, clearly under his orders.

  Oisin offers nothing when Dyeawan looks to him. He only shifts his gaze to the step of the building in front of them.

  Filled with a virulently spreading sense of dread, Dyeawan looks from him to the basket still waiting at the foot of that door. She begins to slowly row her tender over to the orphanage entrance, employing her conveyance’s brake and climbing forward to the edge of the tender’s platform.

  A soft blanket lines the inside of the basket as she peers down at it. Dyeawan reaches from her tender and begins to unravel its cottony folds. She starts as a plump little hand and impossibly tiny fingers grip one of her digits from within the basket.

  Dyeawan pulls the final piece of the swaddled blanket aside to peer into the face of a pulpy-headed baby, not long out of the womb.

  Somehow Dyeawan knows the baby is herself, even if she cannot fully accept that as a fact.

  The infant looks so healthy and clean and innocent. There is purity in their unknowing gaze. Those eyes represent so much possibility and hope and promise. At the same time, they also project so much ignorance of the harsh world into which they’ve been
born.

  The baby knows nothing of what awaits them, how dark and hungry and anguished and fearful the long nights will be.

  She knows her tears are not real, but Dyeawan sheds them all the same, watching as a salty droplet falls upon the baby’s soft little cheek.

  Oisin approaches them. “Edger seeded many of you,” he explains, his words barely managing to penetrate her understanding. “However, it wasn’t his seed that truly mattered. Edger was convinced your raising was the key to the whole endeavor, the way and manner in which you all grew up, as well as the location and circumstance. He wanted to see how those differing circumstances would affect the development of both your minds and who you became as people. He placed some of you here, in the Bottoms, given nothing to build upon. Some were raised by the Skrain to be soldiers. Some, like Nia, were raised in the Planning Cadre.”

  Dyeawan wipes the nonexistent tears from her eyes, swallowing a nonexistent lump. Her mind is racing, and as a result the world around them seems to visibly quake.

  “What do you mean, he ‘seeded’ many?” she asks, her voice trembling as violently as the imagined street beneath them.

  “You know precisely what I mean,” Oisin says coldly.

  Edger was your father. You killed your own father.

  Dyeawan recalls their first meeting, after she woke up in the keep after falling asleep in a dungeon. Edger was so curious about her. It seemed so sinister to her at the time. She remembers how stricken and surprised and amazed he was when she showed him that first light box she constructed. She remembers his many lessons, the effort he put into teaching her Crache’s secrets and machinery, and how hard he pushed the other planners to accept her.

  It all seemed so random to her then.

  She wants to tell Oisin it’s impossible, but Dyeawan knows it is entirely possible. It is, in fact, who Edger was. Life was a raw resource to him, to be manipulated and tested and forged as he saw fit to serve his purpose.

  He wanted an heir, a new mind to push the Planning Cadre forward after him, and this was his method. He spawned her and put her through hell just to see what kind of person doing so would produce.

  The world around them ceases to quake, and begins to grow cold. Soon, snow is falling and blanketing the ground. Snow never falls in the Bottoms.

  “I was an experiment, then,” she says, dispassionately.

  “A failed one, in my estimation.”

  Dyeawan nods, refusing to deteriorate into a tantrum in front of the odious man, construct or no.

  “Who was my mother?” she calmly asks.

  Oisin shrugs. “There were many of them. They were chosen because they were good breeding stock, not for their personalities. I truly could not tell you which one gave birth to you. Records were not kept. Edger wanted it that way. They were not to be involved further in the process. They were well compensated for their contribution, and they had no knowledge of their progenies’ fate or purpose.”

  Good breeding stock.

  No records.

  Process.

  Well compensated.

  Dyeawan becomes aware of her fists, balled so hard against the paddles of her tender that her knuckles have turned stark white.

  “You wanted to know,” Oisin reminds her, watching her steadily break down. “You ordered me to tell you, in fact.”

  “Then why didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell me when I asked?”

  “I was under orders not to. From Edger. In a keep filled with the greatest secrets of Crache, your origin, and the origin of those like you, was Edger’s most closely held secret, even from the majority of the other planners.”

  Dyeawan’s gaze furiously bores into him. “Then why tell me now?”

  “Because no one will ever know I did,” Oisin answers simply.

  It is all too much. Dyeawan cannot harden her heart or steel her mind against it any longer. She screams, savagely, and the building behind her explodes as if it were made of glass. Oisin is blasted across the street from the force of the combustion, but Dyeawan and her tender are unaffected.

  The echoes of her scream linger long after her lungs are exhausted, and Dyeawan doubles forward, gasping and crying and pounding her fists against the tender’s paddles.

  Slowly, the world around her begins to crumble, not the walls and objects made of stone, but the very air.

  Dyeawan’s image of herself crumbles along with it.

  The world contracts and she is once again staring across the planners’ meeting table at Nia, who stares back at her, seemingly frozen in place.

  Dyeawan tries to move her head, then her arms, and finally just blink her eyelids. Her entire body is held, motionless and out of her control, by the lingering effects of the potions. She can’t even move her eyeballs about in their sockets.

  From the corner of one of those eyes, Dyeawan spies Oisin standing beside the table, very much in the flesh. He watches her with a reserved yet clearly sadistic glee.

  From the corner of her other eye, Dyeawan sees Tinker, or rather the old woman’s body.

  She is lying on the floor on the other side of the table, dead, her life’s blood emptied in a pool around her from a slit throat.

  Tinker’s wide, empty eyes seem to stare up at Dyeawan from the floor. She has such a look of surprise on the rest of her face.

  Even through the terrible shock and the horror creeping within every inch of her, Dyeawan can’t help having the thought that it’s so incredibly strange to see the woman without the constant, assured expression she always wore, as if Tinker was always in possession of a secret only she knew.

  “You’re back, aren’t you?” Oisin delightedly observes. “I can see you in there once more.”

  The Ministry’s Cadre liaison leans casually against the edge of the table, sweeping his half-cape aside and folding gloved hands in front of him as he regards her. “Well then,” he says. “Congratulations. You’ve won.”

  He casts a glance back at Nia, who shows no sign of renewed awareness.

  He grins at Dyeawan, who continues to strain futilely to regain control over the upper half of her body.

  “So, now you know.” Oisin leans down to seek the level of her fixed gaze. “Do you feel better, or worse?”

  Dyeawan has neither the time nor the energy to ponder that question just now. She is more concerned with the murdered body at the base of her tracks and sharing Tinker’s fate in the immediate future.

  “Edger should have listened to me about you,” Oisin laments with false sincerity. “He would have lived much longer.”

  He stands away from the edge of the table, moving closer toward her. As he does, Oisin’s gloved hand closes around the hilt of his sheathed dagger.

  Dyeawan’s heart is racing now.

  “But now the failed experiment finally ends,” he seethes at her with open contempt. “I am sure he would take comfort in that now.”

  Dyeawan becomes aware that her tongue is once again rolling inside her mouth. She can feel and taste the acidic saliva of her own fear. She strains again to move her lips, feeling them part slowly and with great effort. The rest of her remains locked in its immobile state.

  “Oh, you wish to speak?” Oisin asks her with mock sympathy. “Please, grace me with your final words. Make them as smart as Edger was always so certain you were.”

  Dyeawan’s eyes dart frantically from Oisin’s self-satisfied expression to Nia, still a monument in her chair.

  “What,” she forces past her lips. “What… about… her…”

  Oisin glances back at Nia, and then offers Dyeawan a shrug. “She wants what I want,” he says. “That being not you.”

  Oisin draws his dagger, brandishing it at his side. His gloved fingers flex disturbingly around the handle as he looks down upon her. “I have no desire to see your body suffer. This will be painless and efficient.”

  Dyeawan begins to sense a tingle in her shoulders, and then down her arms. She begins gently rocking side to side atop her tender platform. Feel
ing is slowly returning to her fingers, as well.

  “And worry not,” he says. “I have no intention of harming your little friend. She will be there to mourn you.”

  Dyeawan is able to grip the ends of her tender’s paddles, but it’s too late.

  Oisin is finally done talking. She can see that in his eyes. Dyeawan still cannot close hers to avoid watching the strike come, however. She only hopes he is telling the truth about Riko, and that her friend will go on to fashion the toys of her dreams.

  Before Oisin can rear back his dagger-wielding arm to strike, two large needles with bellows attached to them are plunged through each of his cheeks by steady hands.

  The Protectorate Ministry agent shrieks and whirls away from the table, staggering frantically around the back of Dyeawan’s tender as he wildly swings his dagger at the naked air.

  The steady hands that drove the needles into his face belong to Nia.

  Dyeawan looks up to see her standing where Oisin was when he drew his dagger. Her shoulders rise and fall rapidly with the quickened pace of her breath.

  Nia looks back at her with a clear anguish in her eyes.

  Dyeawan is finally able to command her arms to row their paddles. She backs her tender away from the table as quickly as she can, turning it to face Oisin.

  The Ministry agent yanks one needle free of his cheek, and then the other. His own breathing has become ragged and enraged. He focuses on Dyeawan with infernos in his eyes, though they are clouded by the residue of the potions those needles contained. His already swollen cheeks are crying tears of blood diluted by that same residue.

  Dyeawan watches a single drop fall and splatter upon his eagle’s eye pendant.

  She has no plan. She thinks if she can somehow circumvent him and guide her tender out of the room, she might outrun him in the corridors long enough to call for help.

  Dyeawan also realizes escape is a goal, not a plan, and the path to accomplishing that goal is beyond her capacity to see at that moment.