Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  Areau’s laugh was unspeakably ugly. “Oh, I hope not,” he giggled. “Oh, I hope not! You and me… we have some damage to do!”

  “I’m not an assassin!” Dorjan snarled. “That’s not the purpose here!” He felt a slick knot of nausea in his stomach. He wasn’t an assassin? Oh, he’d certainly killed easily enough, oh yes he had!

  “You liked it,” Areau said, his eyes burning feverishly as he trembled on the balls of his feet. “Tell me you liked it! You loved it! Your knife sinking into flesh, the force of your body cracking bones, ripping skin—”

  “Stop it!” Dorjan cried, his entire body shaking. For a moment the nausea warred with the cold pleasure of adrenaline, and he ran his own hand over his mouth. “Stop it—this isn’t fun, Areau! What I did out there, it’s brutal and it’s ugly… you stay here in this safe house and you make these plans for bloodshed—”

  “Oh I do!” Areau cackled. “I do! I make plans for you to cut, to kill, to maim… I get hard in my study, do you know that? I think about you, the person I love most, killing and hurting and—”

  “Stop it!” Dorjan swung out blindly, aiming for Areau’s shoulder, but Areau—oh seven hells and nisket dung, did he duck into the swing? He must have, because Dorjan’s fist made a sick thud against Areau’s scarred and tender jaw, and Areau staggered back, coming up against the wall of the stable, where the tack for the hexahorses was kept. The horses themselves snorted mildly and shifted on their six legs, and Dorjan looked at Areau in horror.

  Areau’s return grin rang of nothing less than vicious, feral sanity. “That was good,” he purred. “That was excellent. Now more… more….”

  Dorjan wanted to—his muscles ached with the need to beat his friend, his brother, until he was insensible, until he bled, until the boy Dorjan had fruitlessly loved returned to the battered husk of his body, just as he had left. But they were not children, and Dorjan turned away, fury and grief aching in every sinew of his shoulders.

  The riding crop thrown recklessly at his head made him whirl. Areau stood naked, his hands against the wall of the stable, and he was weeping with need.

  Dorjan looked at him and gasped. The scars on his face—well, Dorjan saw them, was used to them, had even started to think they gave his friend a certain barbaric beauty, but this?

  “Those aren’t burn scars,” he said, his voice as thin as wire. “What did they do to you?”

  Areau’s smile burned. “They hurt me, Dorjan, and they….” He shuddered. “And it felt good. But first the pain… would you hurt me? Please… oh, Bimuit, Dorjan! Hurt me!” He undulated that scarred, glorious body, making sure his erection—unscathed and long, glowing like marble in the dim light of the stable—was abraded against the rough wood of the wall.

  “Stop that!” Dorjan said sharply, and Areau did. Oh Bimuit help him, his cock was hard under his armor, and Dorjan loosened the stays on the thin synthetic metal plates and let them fall to the floor in an acrylic clatter. He pulled off his triangular mask with its goggles and the cowl under it and looked at all his friend was offering.

  Areau looked him in the eyes and spread his legs, aware, so aware of what he was putting on the platter.

  Dorjan made a gruff sound in his throat.

  “I’ll do anything you ask,” Areau whispered. “They popped my cherry with a mop handle in the asylum, Dorjan. There was blood, cherry rip, cherry ripe! I could stretch it for you this time, just… just give me the pain….”

  Dorjan’s cock throbbed viciously, and he closed his eyes, the thrill of the kill, of the city, of revenge, still coursing through his veins.

  He came closer to Areau, thinking I could talk him down, I could gentle him, send him back to his room. He ran his hand over Areau’s shoulder, the ripples of tissue rough under his palm.

  Areau recoiled like he was tainted. “Hurt me,” he hissed. “You have the crop in your hand! Don’t tell me you don’t have the stones for it! Hurt me!”

  Dorjan’s engorged cock brushed over Areau’s backside, and Areau shuddered. Dorjan startled back, and Areau whimpered at him, “Please, Dorjan, please—”

  “I said no,” Dorjan whispered, but Areau stuck his ass out and whimpered, and he thought about a little redness, just a little smack, to punish Areau for just… just doing this to him, on this night when Dorjan needed gentleness more than he’d ever needed it in his life.

  “You don’t have the stones for it!” Areau hissed. “You were always the sweet one, remember? I could go and throw stones at birds but you couldn’t—I could tease the niskets until they drew the hexas’ blood, but not you! You’re weak! You stood there and watched those children burn, and you listened to me scream, and you didn’t fucking care!”

  “That’s not true!” Dorjan cried, knowing what Areau was doing and not able to stop the lurch of panic in his chest. Bimuit, was it true? Was he weak? Had he caused all of that? Oh hells, had it been his fault?

  “You liked it when your father died, didn’t you? You didn’t have to live up to any standards, and that’s why it took so long for you to avenge him—”

  “You shut up about my father!” Dorjan pulled his hand back with the crop.

  Later, he’d know that even as he stopped, his body thrumming like a plucked string, the moment he raised his arm was the moment Areau won.

  “You liked that! You could grieve him and you didn’t have to do anything, just cry in your room like an infant, pissing away your manhood like a gelded hexahorse or a neutered nisket. You wanted him to die—”

  “Shut up about my father!” Dorjan screamed so loudly spittle flew out of his mouth, and he sliced the crop across Areau’s shoulders with a vengeance.

  “Yes!” Areau gasped. “Do it again! Harder! Harder! Oh God, Dori, I’ve needed… I’ve needed so badly! Harder, you gelded hexacow, fucking harder!”

  Snarling, rabid, rutting beast that he was, Dorjan struck him harder, but when a line of blood followed the welt, he hesitated for a moment, frozen in horror at what Areau had made him do. But he was still grunting, panting, aroused beyond endurance by the thrill of giving pain when it was begged for, and that was when Areau spit on his fingers and reached behind him. With a triumphant crow, he thrust his own fingers up his arse without mercy or hesitation.

  “God, yes, it hurts!” he howled, and Dorjan, Bimuit help him, Dorjan shoved his cock where those fingers had been, and Areau screamed in pain and ecstasy and came against the stable wall. He screamed again, and again, as Dorjan plowed his untried cock into his friend in an act of brutal agony and craved pain.

  His release, when it came, hurt—it flooded his nerves with blazing ice and tore his synapses asunder. He moaned and collapsed against Areau, aware of the stickiness beneath his chest that was blood and sweat, and of the stickiness flooding his groin that was blood and semen.

  Blood. Any way he looked at it, there was Areau’s blood.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered in Areau’s ear. He was suddenly exhausted, drained, barely able to raise a shaking hand to pull his friend’s hair back from his sweating face.

  Areau slithered out of his embrace. “Don’t be,” Areau mumbled, throwing his trousers on. Dorjan’s seed was tracing the inside of his thigh, and Dorjan watched it, numb as a frozen tree limb. “Don’t be sorry. But don’t be kind, either. Kindness makes me vomit.”

  And with that he was gone from the stable, leaving Dorjan to fall to his knees and weep into the clean straw, so empty that sobs were beyond him, so weak with self-loathing he couldn’t even reach for the knife in his armor to slide across his wrist.

  TEN years. It had been ten years since that first seduction of Areau and his pain, and for ten years Dorjan had played the fool in the Forum and vengeance at night. For ten years he had come home from his bloodier missions to find Areau in the stables, or in Dorjan’s room if Dorjan managed to escape him in the stables—hell, in the kitchen, in the privy, Areau would be there, naked, angry, bitter, and needing, and Dorjan would give in.

&nb
sp; Every morning Areau would apologize, but he would run, unable to be touched by the man who had fucked him the night before, unable to stop forcing Dorjan to give him the thing he craved but that was destroying Dorjan flog by fuck by folly.

  Dorjan watched him disappear now, thinking that the scars from his time in the asylum had faded from Areau’s back but that in his heart, on his mind, they were more raw than ever.

  They’d been doing this for ten years, and every time Areau came looking for sex and pain, Dorjan died a little more inside, and Areau got no better and no worse. What they did, the blood Dorjan stripped from his back, the degradation of fucking someone who only fed on his own self-loathing, the excruciating remorse of the morning—it was a stopgap measure, good for maintaining Areau at a working level. Areau had to work or Dorjan couldn’t go out on the streets at night and visit the only justice working on the streets of Thenis. Very often, Dorjan was the one who kept the street hierarchy and press-gangs from devouring children whole. Dorjan was the one who kept the whores from being beaten to death by corrupt landowners, and Dorjan was the one who kept the asteroid dust trade at a minimum. The Forum was ineffectual, the long-term war waged on, and the lack of able-bodied adults in the city left the criminals and the weak and nobody in between.

  Sure, there were strides being made in the Forum—subtly, and without being accused of using too much brain, Dorjan had been maneuvering some Forum members into standing against Septra on key issues. They’d been voted down, but their influence was gaining. Dorjan had long ago abandoned the idea of a strong leader—even himself—emerging and claiming the land for good again. The war was too entangled, the corruption too deep. But, he thought painfully even as he came awake this bleak morning, if he could get enough people on his side, when he finally assassinated Septra, the government would not fall apart.

  Even Dorjan knew that no government was worse than bad government, and considering what bad government had cost him personally, that was saying something.

  But he couldn’t go on like this. Even with what he had to do that night—had to do that night—he could not promise to come back again and debase himself in Areau’s bed to keep him functioning.

  But he couldn’t just stop, either.

  He’d tried to stop a few times, had refused to rise to Areau’s baiting, had simply done what he should have done in the first place. He’d found Areau the next night in the stews, in a brothel known for its twisted tastes, half-dead from blood loss and begging for more pain. Areau needed it like the asteroid-dust users needed their next touch of powder, and the only person Dorjan trusted to administer his fix was Dorjan himself.

  Dorjan rolled over in bed and buried his face in the pillow, closed his eyes tightly, and tried very hard not to remember his beautiful friend daring him to climb just a little higher in the apple tree and hang from an asteroid umbilical. Dorjan had done it, and had nursed the burns on his hands and a broken ankle from letting go, and Areau had visited him every day in remorse. Areau hadn’t been able to sit down because his father had tanned his hide, and the two had sworn then, solemnly sworn, not to put the other in danger that he was not willing to face. Dorjan went out on the streets each night, and it put Areau’s sanity in further jeopardy. Dorjan came home and tried to make it right.

  It was a pretty thing to tell himself, lying in sheets stained with blood and come. It was a pretty thing to believe as he went out on the streets and killed and maimed and hurt. It was a pretty, pretty lie that let him try desperately to keep the pieces of world from flying outward, like asteroids without tethers, to scatter into the blackness of space.

  HE FORCED himself to make it to breakfast and to talk to Areau like they were human again, because he had no choice.

  “Again?” Areau asked, surprised. “You need to make another run so soon?”

  Dorjan looked at his steamed grains, made special by Areau with honey and nuts and butter, and tried not to heave. He had to eat. Food powered his body like lumium powered their steam engines and lights, and at best he was an effective killing machine.

  “I’ve found the man who’s been killing the little girls,” he said gruffly, not wanting to think about the tiny violated bodies he’d been finding in his other nightly adventures. Nearly twenty in all, starting with the girl who had brought him the information on his father’s killer for silver coins. The money Dorjan gave her for informing had eventually not been enough, and she’d gone to working the streets.

  In less than a month, she’d been dead.

  The loss hurt—Dorjan had felt like her protector, and he’d obviously failed—but back then he’d assumed it was a random killing. The stews of Thenis were dangerous, and he could only do so much.

  And then he’d found another tiny body of an underage prostitute. And a few months later, another. The girls were the smallest, the youngest of the streetwalkers, and Dorjan started to warn the madams at the brothels to watch their youngest, and to warn the girls on the street too. His warnings must have held some weight, because a sultry, violent summer passed, and there were no deaths—and that was Dorjan’s first clue.

  His second was when the next body was not the body of a prostitute, because the younger girls weren’t being allowed to work without supervision.

  His third was when the girl who died was last seen getting into a rabbit—something that only the landowners could afford these days, when even the public centipedes were offline for lack of funds. Suddenly Dorjan felt as thick as he pretended to be on the Forum floor.

  Areau was lifting a piece of fruit to his mouth. Mrs. Wrinkle had prepared his favorite—she was in her fifties now and had garnered more wrinkles than she should have. Dorjan knew that not a few of those were from the washing their sheets, from seeing the fresh marks on Areau’s back, from hearing Areau mutter, screech, and chatter to himself as he worked in his laboratory, and from watching Dorjan drag himself in night after night, dripping death from his battered homemade armor.

  As of yet, she hadn’t issued a word of reprimand or censure, and Dorjan had made sure her children and grandchildren stayed out in the provinces and very, very far from Thenis.

  “He’s a Forum member, Ari,” Dorjan said quietly, and Areau set the fruit down in the bowl.

  “A what?”

  “It’s Ibram. Ibram Manste.”

  Areau blinked hard. “Wait—isn’t he…?”

  Areau’s distress was gratifying. Unless they were playing the pain/fuck game, it meant he was still listening to Dorjan when Dorjan spoke politics, and that he was still applying his fine mind to strategy and not just his fix.

  “He’s the biggest supporter of reform, yes,” Dorjan said quietly. “And apparently he’s also visiting the stews and picking up the youngest girls. And sometimes, when he can’t hold his water, he’s beating them to death.”

  Areau groaned. “Are you sure?”

  Dorjan looked away. “I grew suspicious when the killings stopped over the summer. The only people who have enough money to leave during the summer are the landowners—the Forum. And the girl talked about a rabbit. I searched them all, Ari. Remember when I had you make me a master key?”

  Areau’s lips went blue with shock. “But… but a Forum member?”

  “His rabbit had blood all over the inside. More than one girl, Areau, because some of it was fresh and some was older. He needs to be stopped. We’re the people who stop him.”

  Areau let out a whine. “But you can’t kill him, Dori—he’s the—”

  Dorjan nodded and shook out a sigh. “He’s the leader of the rebellion party. He’s the one that the other Forum members listen to about policy. Yes. I know.”

  Areau scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “But… but without him, the rebellion will fall apart. Dori, we’ll never go home!”

  Dorjan gaped at him. “That’s what you’re working for?” he asked, and Areau turned a pale, sweating face to him.

  “I’ve just been thinking,” he said slowly, darting his eyes to the sid
e. “What are we working toward? What is our reward for this? For my scars? For yours? What do we get? And… I loathe this city, Dorjan. I hate it. The only time I’ve been happy for the last ten years has been when we’ve blooded with the niskets. When you’ve sent me home.”

  Dorjan started laughing helplessly. Of all the silly things—“Home? Is that all you want? Bimuit, Areau! I’ll put you on the millipede myself!”

  But Areau shook his head. “Not just me. Us. Don’t you see? At home, we are friends, and you don’t hate yourself, and our bodies only touch in the mines, and I can love you too. I can’t go home without you, Dori. You know that.”

  Dorjan closed his eyes against the plaintive, childish notes in Areau’s voice. It happened sometimes. Sometimes the bitter masochist, the manipulative deviant, became the little boy Dorjan had loved, both in Areau’s own head and in Dorjan’s heart.

  “Yeah, Areau, I know,” he murmured. “I know. But we can’t do it on the blood of children. I have some pull on the floor now. I’ll simply have to glad-hand a little more, right?”

  Areau looked at him helplessly. “There’s not a whole lot of you now,” he said, more lucid by the moment. “Bimuit knows I take my share.”

  Dorjan shook his head. “I’ll simply have to give a little more.” He’d stopped eating moments before, and Areau’s hand suddenly covered his quiet, chilly one.

  Dorjan couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at this vulnerable, thoughtful academy graduate or the bright-eyed boy who had dared him to climb just a little higher.

  “You won’t need to come to me tonight,” Areau said softly. “I think maybe, this once, I won’t need fixing.”

  Dorjan kept his gaze fixed at the stone ledge around the little window by the breakfast table. “Thank you,” he choked out, because Bimuit, it really had come to that, hadn’t it? The thought of killing a man was not nearly as repugnant as the thought of coming home and fucking his best friend.