Savage Bounty

by Matt Wallace

  Oisin is hunched over and seething, but the dagger is still clutched firmly in his glove.

  He stammers, “You little… you accursed… little… I’ll…” before lunging forward to advance on Dyeawan’s tender, raising the dagger above his head.

  Unfortunately, in his diminished state and hurried step, the sole of Oisin’s boot slips messily in the pool of Tinker’s blood.

  Both of the Ministry agent’s feet are swept high into the air and he plummets to the floor beside her body.

  Dyeawan watches the back of his head smack against the hard stone masonry.

  Though he flails, Oisin makes no immediate attempt to get back up.

  In a rare instance of abandoning all conscious thought, Dyeawan rows her tender forward furiously, pumping all the strength her arms can muster through those paddles.

  In seconds she closes the gap between them, Oisin sprawled out before her on his back. Dyeawan cuts a sudden, hard turn, jostled on her platform as the right tracks roll up and over Oisin’s neck, pinning it to the floor.

  He thrashes beneath the tender, sputtering and cursing and almost unseating her as he stabs harmlessly yet fanatically at the tender’s wheels.

  Dyeawan grits her teeth as she struggles to steady herself, gripping the edges of both sides of the platform.

  A conscious thought finally breaks through the survival instincts driving her. Dyeawan releases the edge of the platform’s left side and shifts all of her weight to the right side. She clutches the top of the wheel track tightly and pushes against them until her rump has lifted clear up off the platform.

  Holding herself like that for just an instant, Dyeawan steels herself and then smashes her full weight against the right side of the platform with Oisin’s throat stuck beneath its track.

  His thrashing ceases. There is an audible crunch, followed by a sickly wheezing, and finally Oisin’s body goes still.

  Dyeawan leans away from the edge of her tender and tries to will her frantically beating heart to slow and breath to replenish her depleted lungs.

  “Are you all right?” Nia asks her.

  “I don’t know how to answer that question,” she admits.

  Through it all, the pain of her body and the shredding of her mind by Oisin’s revelations, a disturbing idea bubbles up inside Dyeawan’s head.

  “How long were you conscious and able to move before you decided to act?” she asks Nia, trying very hard to make the question not sound like an accusation.

  Nia considers her in silence for a moment before answering. “A while,” she admits.

  Dyeawan already suspected as much. “What made you decide to help me?”

  “In the end?” Nia pauses, and then says with little emotional attachment to her words, “Because you are my sister, I suppose.”

  Dyeawan gapes at her in surprise. “Oisin showed you, too?”

  Nia looks down at his body, still contorted beneath the tender’s track. “I already knew,” she says. “Edger told me long ago.”

  Dyeawan wants to laugh, bitterly, but there is no laughter left in her. “We weren’t his daughters,” she assures Nia. “We were his projects.”

  “I owed him no less in either case.”

  “I did,” Dyeawan says stonily.

  Nia has no counter for that.

  Dyeawan peers over the edge of her platform at the portion of Oisin’s exposed body that is visible from that angle. She carefully rows her tender backwards, removing the track from his neck and leveling herself.

  “What did he mean?” Nia asks her.

  Dyeawan can only shake her head to indicate she does not take Nia’s meaning.

  “When Oisin said if Edger had listened to him he’d still be alive,” she presses. “What did he mean?”

  Dyeawan has no answers for her, but judging by Nia’s reaction, Dyeawan’s silence, or possibly the look on her face, is enough.

  “What will happen now?” Dyeawan asks, hoping to relieve the pressure of that subject for the time being. “What do we do about him? And us?”

  Nia considers both Dyeawan and the dead Protectorate Ministry agent.

  “I don’t say this often,” she admits. “But I have no idea.”

  TURNABOUT

  IN HER DREAM, LEXI IS making love to Brio in the bed he has not shared with her for what feels like months beyond count. Most of the time, in her waking hours, she is too preoccupied to think about how much she misses both the closeness of their sex and the pleasure, release, and escape it granted her.

  She dreams she is astride his thin yet strong body, her hips grinding down upon his, thrilling at the sensation welling up from that central point of their coupling. The light from the torches in their bedchamber fills his eyes and dances across the skin of his bare chest.

  He always looks up at her face, holding her eyes with his. She likes that. He always reaches up and rubs just the ends of her hair between his fingertips. She likes that even more somehow. He has always fit inside of her and against her as if his body is tailored to hers, and she likes that best of all.

  Afterward she sees them lying in bed and eating segments of dragon fruit that Brio cut up himself before they retired for the evening. That happened often, too.

  “I wanted to be a sailor,” he says, prompted by nothing.

  “What?”

  “Since I was a boy. I didn’t want to follow my father or become a pleader. I wanted to be a sailor.”

  “You never once told me that.”

  “I always imagined you would find it a silly thing to want to be, particularly for me.”

  “I would never think that. And ‘silly’ is not a thing you are. You have always been too serious, if anything.”

  “I could have been a serious sailor. There are serious sailors, are there not?”

  “Why a sailor?” Lexi asks him, giggling to herself.

  “When Father would take me along with him on his excursions to the Bottoms, we would visit a Rok Islander vessel in the port, the Black Turtle.”

  “They have black turtles on Rok Island?”

  “I don’t know,” Brio says, as if the thought never even occurred to him before. “In any case, its captain was a little puffball of a woman. She was harder than a Skrain sword, though. She liked me. She let me run around the deck, pestering all her hands. I would watch them scrub that deck and tie their rigging and mend and fly their sails. I never actually saw them upon the water, but I would stare out at it from the deck, and it seemed like such an escape.”

  “Why did you want to escape?”

  “Who does not want to escape now and then?”

  “And would you have taken me?” she asks, poking him in the ribs none too gently.

  “You don’t care for the water,” he answers with a wicked grin.

  She begins lightly pummeling his chest with the flats of her hands, and he laughs, pulling her to him to quell her outburst.

  Lexi is calmed in their embrace. She leans her forehead gratefully against his and stares into his eyes anew.

  A part of her knows then that this is indeed a dream. More than that, it is a memory she is reliving while she sleeps.

  Brio begins singing softly then, yet the voice is not his own.

  Lexi leans back with a start, staring at his face. His eyes remain the same upon her, filled with love and affection and comfort in the history they share.

  His lips, however, seem to move independently of the rest of that. He sings a song she has never heard, a children’s lullaby, in a different man’s voice. Though it is not his, Lexi thinks she recognizes that voice all the same.

  She wakes from the dream in the dead of night, sitting up in the same bed.

  Lexi can still hear the singing. It drifts into her bedchamber from somewhere down the stairs beyond.

  She rises and grabs for a silken, multi-colored dressing gown nearby, covering herself with it. Her body is slightly damp from the intensity of the dream, and her breathing more than a little elevated from its conten
t. Lexi retrieves a flint striker she keeps near her bedside and uses it to light the head of one of the torches in a freestanding sconce. When it’s blazing, she removes it from the cradle and strides off across the room to her bedchamber door.

  It is already partially open, which is why she was able to hear that voice coaxing out its song. Lexi slips through and descends the familiar steps of the tower, torch held aloft to light her way. The singing begins to grow louder and she tracks its source, and she begins to understand the words.

  You are the lily atop the pond

  You are the frog that hops upon

  You are the croak the frog yelps out

  As they hop about

  But a frog wants only the flies

  Its tongue flicks out to find

  It hops to seek its prey

  The fly buzzes to get away

  But the frog needs only one

  And not all of them are won

  And so both the frog and the flies

  Live ’til morrow’s sun does rise

  In the morn it begins anew

  And now you know what frogs do

  She reaches the bottom of the staircase to see rippling firelight dancing across the floor of the foyer. She can hear the fire in the hearth of the receiving parlor crackling loudly.

  That is where the lullaby is coming from.

  Lexi slowly drops her foot from the last step onto the foyer, stiffening as she feels a sudden, warm wetness rise around the edges of her sole.

  There is more than firelight staining the stone floor at her feet. There is quite a bit of blood, as well.

  Lexi lowers the head of her torch to examine it. The blood is spattered across the floor in a broken trail. She follows where it leads slowly and with rising terror, her bare feet careful to avoid the rich, red viscous liquid as they pad toward the main entrance, where the trail abruptly ends in an ever-widening pool.

  New drops are falling in the center of it from above.

  Somewhere behind her, the singer of that gentle lullaby continues their recitation unimpeded, only adding to the ghastly mood of the scene.

  Her sense of dread approaching its crescendo, Lexi raises her torch from the foyer floor to light the doorway.

  Shaheen hangs from the perch below the oriel window by her bound wrists. Her chin is slumped to her repeatedly pierced chest. Lexi’s gifted wrap is hanging in bloody, shredded tatters from her body. Her eyes are neither open nor shut; they appear to have been plucked out. Though her tongue hanging from her mouth is more than enough to convey the tormented expression with which she died.

  Her feet are bare, and the blood continues to drip from the very tips of her toes.

  Lexi is too stunned and horrified even to scream. She merely covers her mouth with the fingers of her free hand. Her hand clutching the torch trembles violently, and finally loses its grip. The haft slips away. The torch tumbles into Shaheen’s pooled blood there at the front of the door with a brief clatter.

  Its light is dimmed upon impact, and slowly the fire encompassing the head of the torch begins to die out, leaving Lexi in the darkness beyond the glow of the receiving parlor arch.

  “Do join us when you are finished, my dear!” an elderly, feminine voice calls to her from the parlor.

  It doesn’t belong to the singer, for they’ve yet to cease their concert.

  She could run, of course. But where would she go, in her bare feet and dressing gown? Whom would she go to? The Circus Aegins, who may or may not be controlled by the Ignobles? Will she run to the tower of another Gen who spits upon Stalbraid? Will she flee all the way to the Bottoms, and hope the ragged masses of desperate, barely fed people will swarm to protect her?

  “There is very little to consider, my lady!” Burr shouts in a more severe tone after Lexi hesitates.

  Balling her fists against her hips, Lexi slowly turns and forces her feet to begin covering the space between the foyer and the receiving parlor. She can feel every step she takes leaving a bloody footprint upon the stone.

  Entering the field of light spilling from the archway, Lexi finds she is even more terrified, something she wouldn’t have thought possible, about what is waiting for her in the room beyond. She expects a scene even bloodier and more menacing than the one to which she has just turned her back.

  Instead, she finds Burr sitting cozied in a plush chair near the blazing hearth of Tower Xia’s receiving parlor, sipping from a small clay cup of what smells and steams like strong, hot tea. Near her, straddling Lexi’s favored chaise, Kamen Lim gently bounces Char upon his knee with a smile while singing his song about the frogs in the pond to her.

  Shaheen’s daughter looks unharmed, at least physically, but her eyes are wide and staring into seemingly nothing. As Lexi looks on her, the girl barely blinks.

  Did she watch? Lexi wonders with frantic and renewed horror. Did they make her watch?

  Burr formally greets Lexi. “Good evening, my lady.”

  “Oh, look, Char!” Lim nudges the girl enthusiastically. “Te-Gen is here! I told you she would be down soon enough.”

  “So sorry to rouse you from your bed at this unseemly hour, my lady,” Burr says.

  “W-what have you done?” Lexi brokenly sputters at her. “What…”

  “Why, I have made new friends.” Burr gestures to the traumatized little girl in Kamen Lim’s lap. “Just as I hear you have been making new friends.”

  She sips her tea demurely, allowing her words to sink in.

  “Who was it?” Burr asks a moment later. “From the Protectorate Ministry, that is to say. And I don’t mean your little…”—she pauses, gesturing with her cup—“… hanger-on out there.”

  “Strinnix,” Lexi says, no coyness or duplicity left in her exhausted and tormented body.

  “Ah, of course! You should feel honored, my lady—that dried-up albino is among the highest-ranking officials in the entire Ministry. We must really be worrying them. That, or she has taken the disappearance of her twin personally. I suppose she loved her, in her way. Ginnix was the soldier of the two. Strinnix is the brains. It’s a shame Daian didn’t kill her instead.”

  “They know about you,” Lexi tells her, desperately, hoping to appease or alarm the Ignoble enough to deter her from further bloodshed. “They know who you are. They know where your castle is.”

  “And I know who and where they are,” Burr says, sounding thoroughly unsurprised and unconcerned.

  Lexi hangs her head, deflated. Her knees feel impossibly weak. She is, in fact, uncertain how she’s still standing upright.

  “What did Strinnix want, precisely?” Burr asks her. “We have our suspicions, of course, but I want to know for certain. The girl wouldn’t say. Her conditioning ran quite deep, and I saw no need to prolong her questioning, knowing you would volunteer the only information I really need.”

  “Strinnix wanted to know the names of the others. She wanted to know who the other Ignobles are, the powerful ones like you, who would replace you if you fell.”

  “I see. Very good then.”

  Lexi watches her twist her teacup upon its saucer as Burr regards her, the slow grinding of clay upon clay sounding impossibly loud in comparison to the crackling of the fire.

  Lexi waits, tensing, wondering if her time upon Kamen Lim’s dagger has come.

  “I did see value in your suggestion, however,” Burr informs her.

  They are not going to kill you, not yet. Lexi’s weary body relaxes as she breathes slightly easier.

  “I agree the time has come to escalate our rallying of those dwelling in the Bottoms. Words can only push them so far, after all. Are you listening, my lady?”

  Lexi becomes aware that her gaze keeps drifting anxiously from Burr to Char. She blinks her eyelids hard, shaking her head quickly and trying to focus her attention on the Ignoble. “Yes,” she says fearfully. “I am sorry.”

  “No matter,” Burr says. “As I was saying, at the end of this week you are to give a speech, among the newly m
inted bones of your charitable feeding house to be in the Bottoms.”

  “A speech?”

  “Yes, my lady. One of your signature rousing oratories, such as the impassioned performance you gave in the court of the Arbiters that first galvanized the lower folk. We’ve already dispatched operatives in manufactured tatters to pose as homeless indigents and spread the word among the other rabble down there. We want to ensure you have a vast audience for your public address to all of your grateful petitioners.”

  “But… why? To tell them what?”

  Burr shrugs. “It matters very little to me at this point. All I require is for you to be present, beloved by the masses, which you already are, and to reinforce precisely what you’ve been telling them for all this time. An indifferent bureaucracy strangles Crache, and the return of nobility would see all people cared for and well fed, including them. We will take care of the rest.”

  Lexi swallows what feels like rose thorns. “May I… may I ask what the rest is?”

  “Quite frankly, I am not certain I can trust you with that information, my lady.” Burr sips from her cup, staring pointedly over its rim at her.

  Lexi says nothing.

  “Simply play your assigned role,” Burr instructs, licking her lips.

  “What if—” Lexi begins, but she is unable to continue.

  “Yes?”

  “What if… they approach me again, before the end of the week? What am I to tell them?”

  “Tell them whatever you wish,” Burr says, beginning to sound impatient.

  “And if they stop me from speaking? If they take me, as they attempted to do before?”

  “If that happens, know that your service to my house has been greatly appreciated,” Burr relays to her in a formal tone.

  It doesn’t matter, Lexi realizes. They’ve built her up to be the symbol among the people of the Bottoms that Burr desires. If Lexi disappears now, they can turn her into a martyr for their cause, even without a body, and use her to rally the people that way.

  “Sir Kamen will continue to see you to your daily rounds,” Burr says. “If you should want to preview any of your ideas for your speech to him, feel free. He is quite verbose.”