Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  “Their armor is hexashite!” Areau snapped. “I came up with the design ten years ago, and it’s a child’s toy compared to what he’s wearing right now!”

  “Then you need to come up with something better so I can save his arse, now don’t you?” Taern snarled, and Areau bared his teeth.

  “Someday, you snotty little prat, this isn’t going to be about him. It’s going to be about you and me, and then there’ll be a reckoning,” Areau hissed. “Now get out of my way so I can make your bloody armor!”

  That was three days ago. From what Taern could see, the people in the gentry section were pretending it wasn’t happening. The dressmaker and the tailor had shown up not too long after Evvy and Alla, and although the joy had gone out of it for both of them, Krissa and Taern had both ordered clothing. Krissa had ordered a dress for each of the girls, much to their excitement, and Taern was pretty sure Dorjan wouldn’t mind. Besides, hearing them excited, picking out ribbons and pretty cotton prints and eyelet trim? That was something that kept spirits up, and Taern and Krissa desperately needed that.

  The market had stayed open, though Taern escorted Mrs. Wrinkle in the morning and they wrapped up their business as quickly as possible. Taern could make out shouts and screams and weeping, individual sounds that made up the general roar, but nobody in the better quarters said anything. They didn’t make eye contact with each other, but they didn’t say anything either.

  Taern seethed and decided that very few people in general deserved saving, until he felt Mrs. Wrinkle clutching at his sleeve and remembered himself. People were afraid. That was no reason to condemn them to die in their own violence like a goldfish died in shit.

  And Areau had worked obsessively, night and day, in his cluttered, oddly beautiful workshop, so Taern couldn’t even be angry with him, as much as he’d like to.

  He’d spent the past two nights sleeping naked in Dorjan’s bed, clutching the knife box obsessively like a stuffed toy and feeling oddly out of sync. If he wasn’t working at Madame M’s, if he wasn’t challenging Dorjan, if he wasn’t joining the Nyx on the streets, who was he?

  Apparently he was the man who cheered up the children, supervised Areau when Krissa was losing her mind, and kept Mrs. Wrinkle company when she claimed she’d been a solitary worker most of the time before and there was no reason for her not to work alone now.

  In a very short time, he’d managed to make himself at home here in Dorjan’s home, and it galled him that he was doing such a smashing job of it when Dorjan wasn’t there.

  Bimuit, Karanos, Gretzky, and sons—he wanted his Nyx home!

  But until this moment, late in the afternoon of the third day, he had managed to keep his anxiety contained (if not exactly to himself) and not let it spill crazy into Areau’s overflowing vault of it.

  Areau had worked—Taern had to give him that. His workshop was an odd place. There was the eclectic mix of beakers, bubbling experiments, distillation glasswork, and general miasma on one table; and gears, springs, tiny weapons, and diagrams on the other. Taern had pretty much expected to see those things—they were mad-scientist staples, and Areau was nothing if not as crazy as a hieterbird. What Taern had not been prepared for was the fey and lovely hanging sculptures Areau had crafted out of extruded nylon wire and spare parts. He must have spent hours on them, standing on a ladder, pinning each wire to the vaulted ceiling, following it down, deciding which gear to put at the end of it, at what length. The results were ever-shifting mobiles that actually hung in distinct shapes—a jointed man much like the Nyx, a double helix, and a curling, crashing wave. The sculptures were large—as long as a man, with a width almost as great—but they were kept shallow, perhaps two layers of tiny gears and metal parts. They hung about chest high for someone like Areau, so that, were you tall enough to pass through them, they parted like a curtain.

  The sound they made when a breeze hit them, a sort of tinkling, delicate shatter, was what Taern had imagined a nisket’s laughter sounded like, when he had been very young. Now that he was older and knew they were real, the impression was much the same.

  It was harder to fume and rage at Areau when he worked in a place with such beautiful craftings to his credit, but that didn’t mean Taern didn’t feel like he was coming apart at the joins.

  He looked at Mrs. Wrinkle, crying softly, trying to hold the little household together with pie, and realized he didn’t have the luxury of coming apart.

  “Yes,” he said, meaning every word of it. “I’m going to go bring him home.”

  STRONG words, when he was waiting on someone else’s labor to make them happen.

  He was in the middle of his final pass along the courtyard obstacle course in the lengthening shadows of the autumn afternoon when Krissa came hurrying out after him.

  “It’s done, Taern. It’s done. It looks sound—I tried it on myself. Come see.”

  Taern was in the middle of running backward on top of the spinning barrel, and he stopped running and let the barrel throw him off. He used the momentum to take a diving leap onto the padding beneath the barrel, did a roll, and came up to his feet quickly. He didn’t waste breath or words asking Krissa questions but followed her back inside.

  Areau was in the workshop, tinkering with some part of it, but he stepped back when Taern entered the room.

  “You’re wearing the knit smallclothes?” he asked quickly, but it didn’t warrant asking. Taern had worn nothing else unless he was escorting Mrs. Wrinkle to the market, because he spent most of his time running the obstacle course in order to keep himself sane.

  Without bothering to answer, Taern started sliding on the armor, testing the joins at his knees, elbows, shoulders, thighs, and core very carefully. The armor was wonderful stuff—supple, soundless, fluid in movement, damned near impenetrable—but it was not bare skin. Areau held out a gauntlet and Taern slid his hand in, listening as Areau explained the bells and whistles.

  “If you fling your hands out like so”—he demonstrated, throwing his hands out to the side—“your main knives will slide forward off your forearms. Dorjan has a spare blade coming out of his gauntlet, but yours are smaller. No room for the curved blade, so I added the tiny throwing stars instead. You have a grappling hook at your belt and a pocket full of smoke tablets. Watch out—the white ones make smoke, the red make flame, and the green ones make a sleeping gas that will work on you as well. There’s a long knife at your waist and a shorter one at each ankle. If you throw your hands out like this, tiny spikes will come up from your gauntlets. They’re not for battle but to help you scale walls. I have a satchel for you—it has first aid supplies and a sort of astringent. If you get dust or anything questionable on your skin, wash it off immediately, and it should reduce risk of contamination. If you get injured, or if he is injured and bleeding, dump it in the wound and it will prevent infection. You move faster than Dorjan—I made your helmet smaller and sleeker, and your armor is not quite as thick—”

  “What’s this roll at the neck?” Taern asked impatiently, tugging at it because it was extra bulk.

  “I was getting to that. If you need it, it’s a cloak—use it to hide, use it as a weapon, they’re surprisingly helpful. Feel free to exploit it.”

  Taern nodded and looked down, surprised to find himself outfitted and ready to hit the streets just that quickly.

  He looked at Areau and bowed shortly. “Thank you for this,” he said, meaning it. “This… this puts paid to many things.”

  He did not care for the look he got in return, but he couldn’t deny the armor was a gift. He looked at Krissa, who gave him a quick hug, armor or no. “Be careful,” she muttered. “Bring him home.”

  “Tell Mrs. Wrinkle I shall do my best,” Taern said. And then he grinned as he pulled his black cap and facemask over his head, followed by the sleek helmet, with the goggles that went over to protect the eyes. “And tell her I’m taking some of those apple tarts. I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten in three days.”

  And with tha
t he ran out, hitting the kitchen first and then going through the side door to the stables. From the stables he slipped into the shadows and began sprinting with all his speed to the source of the ocean roar, of the smoke, of terrible noises of screaming, destruction, and death.

  SLIDING past the guard was sickeningly easy. They all stood with their backs to the good quarter, intent on keeping people locked inside the violence instead. The guards in their bulky urban armor didn’t see him, which was good, but after that he was almost at a loss.

  They had gone running for three days—only enough time for Taern to see six routes through a city with a thousand of them. He ran one of the ways familiar to him, but he was running for a specific place. He figured he’d go to the place Nyx had last been seen.

  The streets were labyrinthine and eerie. Through some blocks, there was nothing, not a sound, not a peep, just trash—broken furniture, strewn clothes, the sad and rare child’s toy. Taern ran full-out through those places, not even wanting to imagine the tension of being a family in one of the silent houses, tucked into the basement, shivering with fear, praying it was over. Taern rounded the corner from one such block and almost ran straight into an epic rumble—mostly men, fighting so hard they didn’t bother to shout. There were grunts, the thuds of flesh on flesh, the occasional roar of exertion as someone launched a kill-or-die effort. Taern stumbled back as he watched a fist hit a mouth and explode in a cloud of teeth and blood from a distance of not two arm’s lengths away.

  He found the shadows then and scrambled—the tops of trash cans, fire escapes, window ledges. He cleared the rumble and realized he was three blocks from Madame M’s. Good—a fair place to start. If anyone knew where Nyx was, she would.

  He slipped in through the basement window, which was harder in his armor than it had been when he simply hadn’t wanted to face anybody coming through the foyer, but he made it. As soon as he landed, he took off his mask, because most of the people here knew how to use a knife too. He took a brief, hopeful look around the basement room and saw the scattering of furniture on top of Madame M’s oldest rug, the racks keeping the liquor, the cabinets that held the extra clean linens, and the hampers with the dirty ones.

  One of the hampers caught his eye, because most of the linens were white, but there was a sodden heap of brown-red, and Taern had to swallow hard. Lots of people were getting hurt out there—there was no reason to assume that was his blood just because he’d slept down here.

  He had just shored himself up to go upstairs and ask Madame M when he heard a rustle. When he looked up to the top of the stairs, he realized that she had come to him.

  “Taern?” She looked him up and down with hard eyes, her throat bobbing as she took in his armor. “What are you doing?”

  “Where is he?” Taern asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “Is the blood his? Is he here?”

  She shook her head. “Where is he? Fucking everywhere, sweetheart. He’s saved more lives in the last three days than the entire fucking military in its entire wretched existence. But as for where he is now?” She looked at the linens and nodded, and his stomach clenched. “Yes. That’s his. The wounds aren’t mortal, but they’re not child’s play either. I don’t know if they were enough to send him home.”

  Taern growled and thought about kicking the couch. “No, of course not. Rather die a martyr on the fucking streets than come home to me.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he was thinking,” M said kindly, and Taern glanced at her.

  “Did he say anything?” he asked, feeling pitiful, and she smiled gently.

  “He said you were a colossal pain in his arse and that you were—his words—‘the most recalcitrant brat I’ve ever yearned to spank’.”

  Taern grimaced. “Is that all?”

  “No. Every other word he utters is about you. I think that is the point.”

  Taern rubbed his hand over his mouth. “I’ve got to find him, M. We’ve got things to finish.”

  She nodded. “The fringe houses—the nice neighborhoods that were going a bit shabby. Those are the places he’s been helping the most, because they’ve got the most silver on hand. The fucking soldiers—” She spat. “—they’ve killed almost as many people as the thugs. That last wound was a steam spear, and not the first one, or the armor would have held.”

  Taern snarled. “He’s fucking done! I don’t care if he’s rescuing a kitten from a tree, he needs to come home!”

  M sighed. “He’s done his part. Tell him I said he could quit now.”

  Taern heard the regret in her voice. “Did you tell him something different before?”

  “What do you want me to say, Taern? This is not about you getting laid or meeting your meal ticket or even about true love. He’s saving lives. And right now, this quarter of the city has damned few people who give a hexashite about that. We need him, and if you’re on his side, we could use your help as well!”

  Taern growled and kicked the couch, the enhancement of his armor knocking it back against the wall, where it collapsed, all four legs breaking off at the same time. “Do you not understand?” he asked, looking at the couch through a haze of red. “If he’d been in the Forum the last three days, he might have been able to do something to keep the soldiers out of it. He’s one man!”

  “Yes, well right now he’s one man who’s single-handedly taken down two street gangs, and he needs to go home. We can discuss politics later, Taern. Go find him. It’s why you came.”

  Taern nodded and lowered his mask before he moved toward the window to hoist himself out through it again. He turned before he pulled himself up. “Thank you for taking care of him. He’s… he’s a good man.”

  “Honey, he’s a great man. That’s going to make your life harder, you know that, right?”

  Taern had a breath of humor, much needed. “Parts of me!” he said cheekily as he chin-upped to the opening. “Parts of me are spending time very hard indeed.”

  He held himself up for a moment, looking to make sure no one else was out there, and then wiggled his shoulders through. His feet scrabbled on the wall and then he felt two strong, wide hands on his backside through the armor, and he was shoved through the window with spirit. When he’d picked himself up from the ground, he turned and looked back down and waved at Madame M, and she waved back jauntily.

  Later he would be glad he did that, the wave, the joke. Some things are meaningful when the world is on fire.

  HE HAD to stop more than once. The first time was to scale the wall of a building next to a burning tenement and pull out three children who were hanging out a window. He got them down to the ground, and one of them started to wail for a parent just as the tenement collapsed. All the children started to scream hysterically after that, and Taern gave them to the nearest adult, a middle-aged woman who looked shell-shocked and tired but who took the children automatically, as though it had been preordained.

  He continued on through the back alleys then, thinking he would move faster that way, when he almost ran into a thug who had the flat of his hand on a screaming woman’s back as he was rucking her skirt up and fumbling with his breeches.

  Taern pulled his foot back and swung, forgetting about the armor until he heard the man’s spine crack. Very possibly Taern had punctured something inside of him as well.

  The man screamed and pitched forward, and the woman started to scramble out from under him. Taern took four steps back, shouted, “Duck!” and ran forward with enough momentum to use the side of the building to vault the moaning rapist. The woman was whimpering, pulling her skirts down, but when she turned to see who her rescuer was, she started to sob harder, probably frightened by a man in armor and a mask. Taern didn’t bother to stop—there was nothing he could say to her that would mean anything, nothing he could do for her that would make the last five minutes of her life any better, and any attempt to communicate with her would just frighten the piss out of her some more.

  He continued to run.

  There
was smoke on the streets, and he actually thanked Areau for the filter built into the facemask, not that Areau could hear. Some of the violence seemed to be dying down as he ran, and he was almost sorry for it. He was furious, angry, downright wrathful, not just at Dorjan but at everybody. Looters, rapists, soldiers, politicians—all of them. It was all of their doing, and now he was plowing through a human trash heap trying to find one just man.

  His blood was up, and his heart hammering with violence when he kicked through a pile of trash cans and burst out into his second-worst nightmare: Nyx, bleeding, weakened, standing in the middle of the street, in the center of what seemed to be ranks upon ranks of the Forum’s soldiers, armor shiny, clubs raised.

  “This isn’t going to end well for you!” Nyx called out, and although he sounded winded, he also sounded confident. Nyx gestured with his chin. “It didn’t end well for them!”

  Oh Karanos! Between the advancing soldiers, the street was littered with bodies. Death Masks, Hieters—whatever they were calling themselves, they lay crumpled and inert. Some of them moaned and shifted, and some of them would never move again.

  “Yeah, but we’ve got armor, Nyx!” one of the soldiers called out. He had the rank and insignia of lokogos, and as Taern took in the situation, he realized that he was, in fact, looking at one small battalion—and one badly trained lokogos—and that he had arrived just in time.

  “My armor’s better!” Nyx said. He made a show of bouncing on his toes, and Taern wondered if he was the only one who noticed Nyx’s movements were frantic, the last adrenaline spurt before the total collapse.

  “Yeah, but you’re still alone!” the lokogos called out.

  In the tense pause that followed, Taern took five steps back and called out, “Yeah, but not for long!” before running forward again and using the side of the building to boost himself up and jump into the middle of the fray.