Under the Rushes

by Amy Lane

  “It gave people hope,” Areau said, believing it. “I felt it when I saw you walk through the door, because I knew who you were, what you could do. Imagine living on these streets, knowing the world for one long misery, and having but one thing that might step in. Wear it, Dori. Taern needs you to be larger than life now. He needs you to be the Nyx.”

  Dorjan nodded and sank to his knees again. He bent down so his face was close to Taern’s, and whispered, “I’m going to disappear, Taern, and the Nyx is going to take my place. Don’t despair, right? Just because you can’t see my eyes.”

  “Like Nyx,” Taern mumbled. “Nyx. Nyx is a hero.”

  Dorjan breathed hard through his nose then and pulled on his hood and his mask. He looked at Areau through the alien insect goggles and nodded. “Run for the millipede station, Ari. We’ll be gone before you get there. Mrs. Wrinkle and Krissa…?”

  “Have already left for Dre’s. Here, don’t forget his mask,” Areau said, retrieving it from the wreckage of what must have once been a fine green-and-white-striped davenport. “He hates it when you get to be a hero without him.”

  Nyx nodded then and whispered, “Good-bye, Ari. I’ll see you at home.” He took the small packet Areau had given him, with months of Areau’s hard work bottled in a glass syringe, and tucked it in the satchel, which Areau had stocked with water and a little bit of bread and cheese, not knowing what he’d need.

  “There’s silver in there,” Areau said abruptly, and Dorjan fumbled for it, then pressed it into Areau’s hands.

  “The next millipede,” Dorjan cautioned. “Ari, it’s going to be close.”

  “I swear,” Areau vowed, “for once, I won’t let you down.”

  Dorjan looked away before squatting to hoist Taern into his arms. “You never let me down, Ari. It was I who disappointed you.”

  “Never!” Areau cried, but Dorjan had taken off running, his steam armor-enhanced movements nearly too quick for the naked eye.

  Ecstasy and Home

  TAERN heard Dorjan’s voice, and suddenly his grief over Madame M was not quite so overwhelming. He’d gotten there in time to hear a woman scream, had seen the thugs all over the brothel, and had set about to kill.

  Dorjan had no compunctions about killing but no thirst for it either. He would as soon thump a man on the head and knock him out than slit his throat, but Taern had always been certain the man he let go was the git who was going to stick a knife in his back. Taern had no hesitation about killing either, none whatsoever, and so as he’d set upon the men who were threatening his one sanctuary growing up, he hadn’t worried if the armor propelled his fist through a skull, a spine, or a once healthy set of teeth. He wanted the men to stop. Death was one way for them to stop, disability was another, and them running away saved him a swing, thank you very much.

  And that was how he made it into Madame M’s sitting room in time to watch M kick the bald fucker who had one of the girls up against the wall with his hand on her throat, right behind the calf. The man went down on one knee, and Taern grabbed the girl’s hand to pull her away and send her running down the street. When he turned around, one of the other men had grabbed M by her hair and hauled her hair back.

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” Taern snarled, and M looked up at him and smiled.

  “That’s my boy!” she crowed, and the fucker slit her throat.

  “M!” Taern cried, sitting up in Dorjan’s arms, and Dorjan whispered to him.

  “I’m sorry, Taern. I’m sorry. She’s gone.”

  “I tried, Dorjan! I tried. I’m so sorry. M, I tried. M—”

  “Sh, baby. Sh. You can weep for her, it’s horrible.”

  “I’m sorry… I’m… oh, Dorjan… why? Why do I feel…. My skin feels prickly, like spiders and ants… make them stop, Dorjan, make them stop!”

  “Not yet, baby.” Dorjan’s voice was breaking, thin, and Taern hadn’t heard it breaking and thin since that first night in the alleyway.

  “Someone’s got to take care of you, Dorjan,” Taern said sincerely. “Someone has to take care. You need someone. I knew it that first night. How come nobody’s taking care of you?”

  “’Cause you’re sick, baby, and it’s my turn to take care of you.”

  “Dorjan, what’s that sound? It’s all the time, and it’s humming in my belly. It’s making me shiver. What’s that sound?”

  “It’s the train, Taern. We’re in the luggage compartment, yes?”

  “You’re not sending me away. You can’t send me away. I want to see my sisters someday, but you have to come with me. You can’t send me out of the city without you, right? We’re a team, right? I put on the armor so we’d be a team. You can’t send me away!”

  He was pounding on Dorjan’s chest plate with his armored gauntlets. It had to have hurt, but Dorjan simply captured Taern’s hands in his own gauntleted hands and held them still. “How can I send you away?” he asked, his voice calm and very Dorjan-like. “You’re indispensable, you obnoxious brat!”

  Taern relaxed for a moment, and then the awful, insistent shivering took over, his skin twitching like a millipede’s legs. “Feel so strange. Help me… make it stop. Make it stop. Oh, help… help me, Nyx, it’s getting me. It’s getting me. It’s… oh… I’m going to… I’m going to be sick….”

  He barely remembered actually heaving his stomach contents, but he knew he had because his muscles felt abused, and there was cool water being poured in his mouth and some more sponged on his brow.

  “Sorry, Nyx,” he muttered. “Sorry. What’s… what’s wrong? My muscles… they’re… they’re so tight… why can’t I…. My chest… my chest… my chest!” He screamed then, or he thought he screamed, and there was a prickle in his arm when he didn’t remember taking his armor off. He must have, though—someone must have! Because he was naked, wrapped in a strange blanket, in the dark place with the clickety clatter and the constant rocking.

  He didn’t feel perfect then. He didn’t. He still felt jittery, and sometimes he was talking to Dorjan and sometimes to Nyx, and sometimes to Areau or Krissa, but not as often. He talked to Madame M some and told her to forgive him, and she told him she was proud of him and there was nothing to forgive.

  The ride was interminable, and the crawling sensation, the pain—oh, the pain in every limb, in every ligament, in every joint. It got worse and then worse and then worse and then—oh Dorjan, make it stop!

  And Dorjan did. Taern managed to focus then, and Dorjan looked at him from deadened, exhausted brown eyes.

  “You should sleep, love,” Taern said quietly. “You need to be taken care of. Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “I’m caring for a sick friend.”

  “I hope he’s sufficiently grateful,” Taern sniped. “You look bloody awful.”

  “I think he’ll be grateful enough when he’s done,” Dorjan said, and Taern grunted.

  “Couldn’t be as grateful as I am that you love me.”

  Dorjan caught his breath. “You cued in to that, did you?”

  “Well, you have to! Did you think I didn’t love you?”

  “I give thanks every day that you seem to,” Dorjan said softly before kissing his brow.

  “Careful, Dorjan. Someone in your bloody province will see!”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Dorjan said quietly. “My bloody province can do without me, and I don’t need its approval. Not for you.”

  Taern smiled. “Mm… lovely thing to say. If my mouth didn’t smell and taste like puke right now, I’d kiss you.”

  “You’re ever considerate,” Dorjan said softly, and Taern got to babble over that compliment for who knows how long before his stomach cramped and the semipleasant time, the time in which he remembered some of what he was saying, retreated back to the golden-toned memories of his childhood. What surfaced was the red time, the time his skin crawled and the pain came back, and Dorjan wept over him and looked at the clock and the countryside and anywhere other than Taern’s eyes as he repeatedly
denied Taern some relief, oh, please, something to take the edge off the sword carving him up like poultry.

  “I have to wait,” Dorjan said, looking at the timepiece on his wrist. “I can’t give it to you too early,” he murmured. “We’re not close enough to home!”

  Taern had begged then, cried, pleaded, and to his shame, screamed at Dorjan, abused him, called him names that were horrible, that wounded him as sure as physical blows. Taern called him a baby-killer once, looked him in the face as he said it, and watched Dorjan’s features etch with a stonelike stillness against the direct hit.

  “Call me what you need to,” Dorjan said. “Call me what you need to. If it helps you stretch just another hour, Taern, just one more hour, so we can get you to the mines.”

  “Putting me to work in the fucking mines, you bastard?” Taern cried out, and to his surprise, Dorjan laughed, the sound brittle and joyless in the noise of the jouncing train car.

  “Oh, Taern, if only it was all a plot to make you work!”

  Taern screamed at him until something stoppered his mouth, and beat at him until his hands grew raw and bloody, but still the fucker refused to… refused… finally conceded…

  Ahhhhh… bliss.

  But not real bliss. Partial, edgy bliss again, and Taern tossed about some more in pain.

  The train had stopped and started several times, and Taern had been peripherally aware of it. He was not prepared, therefore, when, before one of the stops, Dorjan stood, pulled his mask on, threw Taern over a strong shoulder, and waited. As the train started to slow down, Dorjan kicked open the door leading to the outside, and Taern was aware of cold whooshing air around his—oh, was he naked? No, he was covered in a blanket, and it wasn’t enough, and the wind hurt his skin, and oh hells, was Dorjan jumping from the back of the train?

  There was a dip and a whirl and a tilt to the world and Taern was suddenly not hanging over Nyx’s back, he was being cradled in his arms, and Nyx was running full-out, with every enhancement the armor had to give, running so fast the wind blew through the wool blanket like a knife and not even Dorjan’s wide shoulders could shield Taern from the cold. Taern’s skin felt like it was being flayed open by rusty knives in that cold, and he opened his mouth to scream…

  And couldn’t stop.

  HE MUST have passed out—must have. He was aware of being over Dorjan’s shoulder again, of being jostled, squeezed, and carried up a liquid ladder, of vertigo and wind and then warmth and darkness.

  The warmth and darkness didn’t last long. Suddenly there was a whirling, a glowing, a clattering, and then that beautiful, frenetic mess was around him, and then it was him, and he was being made light and beautiful, his body becoming thin, transparent, as tiny metal flowers alit on his flesh and fanned him until his skin stopped hurting and his shivers stopped shaking his teeth from his head. They flurried around him, a confusing cloud, and then Dorjan held something to his lips, forcing him to drink. It tasted rank and coppery, but Dorjan wouldn’t leave him alone.

  “Fruit juice?” he begged, and he got some of that too, but then he got more of the pink stuff Dorjan called nectar, and then he was surrounded by that glittering cloud of metal flowers again, and he grew lighter, lighter, lighter, until he was going to float away.

  HE WOKE up aching, his stomach sore and cramping. He felt brittle, like maple candy in the snow.

  He was on a bed in a small room, surrounded by white gauze curtains. The surrounding building was… black, was the impression he got. He looked up, and there was a cavernous space above him, above the curtains, with what looked to be raw crags of rock embedded in the…

  Wait. Not embedded in the ceiling. The raw crags of rock were the ceiling. Taern squinted at them and then looked around his little gauze enclosure again, and saw Dorjan to his left, wearing only his stretchy black knits, asleep as he sat.

  “You’re pale,” Taern said crossly. His throat was dry and his voice was raw, but that didn’t stop the charge of temper that zinged through him. “Why do you look like death?”

  “Because you worried me that way,” Dorjan snapped, opening his eyes and sitting up. “It didn’t occur to you to wait for me before you confronted a street gang in a brothel?”

  Taern glared. “I had no idea you’d be there!” he protested, and he saw the hurt on Dorjan’s face and regretted it.

  “Stupid prat,” Dorjan grumbled. He held out a flask of fruit juice with a straw, and Taern drank appreciatively. “I’ll always be there!”

  “What happened to me?” Taern asked, returning the flask. He tried to sit up, but his body just hurt too much to think about it. “Why do I feel like the bottom of a sidewalk in a piss alley?”

  “Because that’s the shite they shoved in your veins,” Dorjan grunted. He sat up too, and Taern thought again that his eyes looked sunken and his lips were near blue. “What you’re feeling right now is the cost of cleaning it out of you.”

  “Mm… I get that. Right. That’s why I feel like hexashite. Why do you look worse than I feel?”

  Dorjan’s chest shook for a moment. “We had to bond you to the niskets to clean out your blood,” he said, changing the subject.

  That did make Taern sit up. “Really?” he asked, excited. “I’m bonded to the niskets? Like you and Areau?”

  Dorjan smiled faintly. “Yes, you are bonded to the niskets, like me and Areau. That pleases you?”

  “Well, yes! Doesn’t that make you happy?”

  Dorjan nodded, his movements slow and old. “You have no idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we actually use it as sort of a wedding ceremony, when someone new moves to the keep. The niskets feed off both parties, and then they swap nectar.” Dorjan’s eyes wandered. “There is usually a great deal of sex when that happens. I think we’ve been deprived.”

  Taern looked at him uncertainly. “So, we’ll have the sex later. We’re married now?”

  Dorjan’s smile grew deeper, more real. “If you want to be, nothing would make me happier.”

  Taern nodded, still uncertain. “What’s wrong, Dorjan?”

  Dorjan swallowed. “I’m just a little low on protein, I think,” he said, and Taern’s eyes widened.

  “Wait—we exchanged blood?”

  “Sort of. I think the exchange was a little more one-sided than that. The niskets couldn’t clean yours out fast enough. Mine didn’t need to be chemically cleansed when turned into plasma. Mine came a little faster, that’s all.”

  Taern reached out a leaden hand and clasped his hand. “Dorjan?” he asked, squeezing that hand with all his strength. “How close was it?”

  Dorjan tilted back his head and closed his eyes. “Close, love. Too close to fathom.”

  “Come here,” Taern murmured. “Come here and put your head on my pillow. Come here and rest.”

  Dorjan shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Not even for a moment?”

  “They’re coming. They’re coming to take my lands, Taern, and I can’t allow that to happen. Areau and I have a plan, but they’ll be here soon—”

  “Is Areau coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he find us?”

  Dorjan’s mouth quirked. “The niskets will show him.”

  “Then come. A second, Dorjan. A minute. An hour. Please? You of all people know how precious the smallest moment is.”

  Dorjan nodded then and squeezed his eyes tight. He grunted as he shoved himself over and flopped gracelessly on the bed.

  Taern lay on his side and looked into those shadowed dark eyes and cupped a hand to a stubbled cheek. “We’re really married?” he asked, and he felt that smile—that small quirk of hope—under his hand.

  “Just don’t come into the mines with anyone but me,” Dorjan mumbled, and Taern tucked himself against him and swore that he would not.

  Soon—far too soon—there was a voice calling up from what seemed to be the floor.

  “Dori? Dori? The niskets think you�
�re in here. Dori?”

  Dorjan shot upright and snapped out, “I’m up! I’ll come down!”

  “Did it work? Did he make it, Dori?”

  Areau was apparently ignoring him, because the voice was getting closer, and behind the gauze, against a source of ambient light Taern hadn’t fathomed the last time he’d looked, Areau emerged from the floor, silhouetted against the dark. As Dorjan was standing up, Areau pushed his way into Taern’s curtained enclosure, his scarred face pale against his black travelling clothes and the dark of the asteroid around him.

  “It worked!” Areau crowed, looking at Taern with a really sort of wonderful smile on his face. “Oh, I’m so glad it worked. He would have been lost without you!”

  “It almost killed him,” Taern said quietly, and Areau’s eyes flickered to Dorjan.

  “Well, your death would have too,” he said frankly. “It’s like the niskets and the mines. One of you cannot exist without the other. The asteroids need their gases and their chemical exchanges to not explode or come crashing to earth, and the niskets need their minerals to live. And our whole bloody planet needs that to happen or it will fall to shite!” Areau beamed, obviously pleased with himself, and Dorjan let out a rusty laugh.

  “Proud of yourself?” he asked, stretching and looking like a man desperately trying to wake up. “That was an outstanding conceit right there. Should we ever revive arts programs in Thenis, I think you’ve found your calling.”

  “Don’t be snide, Dori,” Areau said, all smugness. “It doesn’t become you.”

  “I was serious!” Dorjan protested, laughing. “You have a flair for the dramatic.” He turned to Taern, and Taern sat up fully and held out his arms. Dorjan hugged him—but not satisfactorily enough. He was trying to be strong, Taern could tell. He was keeping distance between them as though they were brothers or friends, perhaps to keep pressure off of Taern’s tender, sensitized body.

  “Not good enough, you git!” he snapped, and Dorjan put one knee on the bed and hugged him, his bones and muscles melting into Taern’s like Taern was strong enough to hold him up.