The Raike Box Set

by Jackson Lear

  Officially, the governor protected Erast with the city watchmen. They mostly fell into two groups; foreigners and citizens. Foreigners would never rise far enough in any rank to assume command. Citizens rarely started as low as a foreigner. I myself was considered a foreigner, despite being born and raised here. There are three ways to becoming a citizen: you’re born into power and wealth (and both of your parents are citizens), you are granted citizenship for some remarkable deed that benefits Ispar, or you spend fourteen years in the army.

  The Captain did his time in the army, one of the few of us who actually came from that kind of discipline. Greaser too. The rest of us were the kind of slime you find on the waterline of a boat. If you made it to adulthood you should consider yourself lucky. If you died with several women fighting over your money, you became the thing of legend.

  These days, as I write this down with fading vision, I find myself hoping people will instead fight over which of my stories was the best. The number of scars across my body may have increased, but at least those I earned by protecting others from being killed themselves.

  I found Lieutenant outside, waiting for me. Together we breathed in the filth around us as the noon air warmed the streets.

  “How was it?” he asked.

  “Not as much shouting as I expected.”

  “I didn’t tell him everything, just enough to raise his temper a little.” Lieutenant’s eyes bore into me like an interrogator. Perhaps more time passed by than I expected. “You better not be risking your ass again on this.”

  “Some things seem like a worthy cause.”

  He nearly guffawed at me. “There’s not a single worthy cause in the world, Raike. Isn’t that what you told me when I first joined?”

  Quite likely.

  “I get it, though,” he said. “Some things sting when you think it’s all said and done. You dream of someone, you wake up thinking of them like you haven’t before. You hear an old girlfriend just had her first kid, you start to think of the ‘what if’s.”

  “Too bad I’ll be missing out on the new year festivities.”

  “I think everyone will be a little nervous about this one, given our new Emperor’s reputation.”

  The whole ‘years’ thing was getting a little tricky. The New Year began on the coronation of the new emperor and is celebrated on that anniversary. Over the last four seasons we’d had four emperors. The first one died of old age. The second one drank so much he died in the senate. Apparently he pissed himself just before it happened. The third emperor was the second one’s son who won the crown by raising the largest army and crushing two claimants to the throne. The fourth had a merchant fleet, took his army west in disguise, and landed on Ispar’s coast. He had people on the inside to open the gates. His army ran in, sacked the city, and killed half of the senators. That happened about a month ago. His coronation was in a few days. Before that could happen he had to restock the senate and have a unanimous acceptance for his claim to the throne.

  By now, all of the generals and senators would have been fed up of traveling back and forth to Ispar to swear their allegiance to the new emperor. As such, the festivities around us were waning in enthusiasm. The cities celebrated with the colors and banners of wherever the emperor was from. We’d have new food, new sayings, and new laws. It would be much easier if every emperor was born in Ispar. Markolo VII was not. He came from Adiun, renowned for its seaweed. Pig shit would’ve tasted better.

  One thing that risked jeopardizing our province was that the generals almost hadn’t made it to Ispar in time. There’s a reason why no army is able to push north from here. The storms are just too volatile. Ispar may get its fat rain and heavy wind, but the storm we had at the end of spring tossed a fleet of merchant ships a mile inland. A landslide destroyed the main road south, putting a mountain where none used to be. Emergencies have been declared as a result. Tempers were frayed. There was a good chance that the generals would have lost their lives for not swearing allegiance to the emperor in person.

  Lieutenant headed upstairs to get some shut eye. He’d been up for a whole day already. I was left thinking about Día, debating on how worthwhile one thirteen year old girl really was in this world. Few knew her. Few cared about her. I didn’t give a damn about anyone else in her orphanage. I’m pretty sure there had been a good ten years when I thought the whole place should’ve burned to the ground. But it seemed like the sestas actually helped when no one else did. Día shouldn’t have mattered, yet she had been chosen explicitly because of that reason. That alone gave her life some value.

  I headed down the alley to our third building to get some help. Agrat had read more books than the rest of us put together. He sat in on lectures, he could recite a world of philosophies from every corner of the world, and he enjoyed the theory of magic more than the practice of it. He got his name because it sounded just like how he sneezed. He lost the use of one eye to a donkey. The iris had since turned a milky white and caused him to need to blink so frequently that tears formed when he was least aware of it.

  He stared at Día’s note, transfixed by the wording and the smells the paper provided.

  “Can you tell me who wrote this?” I asked.

  He moved closer to the window, holding the note upward against the sunlight. “No, but it’s most likely to be a man. Someone nearer his later years than his earliest. You can see each stroke is long and slow. He’s re-inked the nub between each stroke. There is a hint of cursive here … he’s used to writing, joining the letters together, but this is deliberately not cursive.”

  “Would that make it easier for a layman to read?”

  “It would. I’m not sure if that’s the whole reason, but it certainly is easier to read than any other way.”

  “Why would an educated person leave a note behind like this? Wouldn’t this cause a lot of risk?”

  “Maybe it was a signal. He’s telling someone it is done. Or …” He hesitated, broken with a quick glance to his books. “Or it’s a summons.”

  “For who?”

  “You,” said Agrat. He looked over the note once again, drawing out every clue he could find. “Not you specifically, but I wouldn’t rule that out. There is a realm of magic that requires a spectator. If this girl is being tortured she would be understandably distressed, but if she’s being tortured in front of someone who knows her, a parent or a sibling, then the theory is you can draw from the emotions of that second person as well as the first. But that’s some real dark magic there, if it’s actually true. Drinking the blood of a virgin type of dark.”

  “Does any of that actually work?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of, but that’s not to say it’s impossible.” He peered at me like he didn’t already know what I had been up to all night. “Why are you looking into this?”

  “Another girl disappeared, twenty years ago. Same note. I want to know what happened to them both.”

  “And this recent girl almost caused you to break your oath?”

  “Yeah. I need your help to swing this to the Captain.”

  Agrat sniffed the note, breathing in every detail he could. “The sesta you took this from, was she rich?”

  “No.”

  “Nice clothing?”

  “No.”

  “Arthritic?”

  “You think she wrote it?”

  He shook his head. “The ink has flecks of something that sparkles. Not sure what.”

  “Can you let me know when you do?”

  He eyed me carefully. “Everyone has a past, Raike. Some things are better left to rest.”

  “If Broker’s Wharf and Red Hill have had abductions, what’s to say Farcourt hasn’t, or won’t?”

  “That’s a stretch. You barging into those places because of something that might happen in ours?”

  “All right. I’ll tell the Captain it really pissed me off once, has now pissed me off twice, and we’ll really have a problem if it pisses me off a third time.”

  “
I recommend telling him something else. I have to ask, is she actually worth dying for?”

  “No.”

  “Risking your life, then, to get her back?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Risking your life to find out what happened to your friend?”

  “To a degree.”

  “Risking your life to come face to face with the people who did this to your friend?”

  I stared back at him. He knew my answer.

  He looked at me like I was a dead man walking. “Then this note truly is a summons. And, I daresay, there is some dark shit happening that you’ve never seen before.”

  Chapter Seven

  Agrat offered to look into the note and see what else he could derive from it, but it would take some time. Meanwhile, I was to keep myself out of trouble. I returned to the main hall, where I was bound to receive the last portion of Chef’s cooking, if any, courtesy of being on lockdown. I half expected to go hungry that night, since the Captain would have seconds to put me in my place. He would no doubt invite others to have seconds as well. If I had properly planned this I would’ve stashed several days’ worth of food. Then again, maybe this would be for the best. Better to go hungry for a few days than to have the Captain figure out that I was cheating him out of a heavy handed lesson.

  I was forced to while away my time. Around me sat Scurvy, Docks, Shadow, Greaser, and Runaway. Of the six of us, I was the most bleary-eyed. I’d been up since just after dawn the previous day. They could all see it in me. My eyes stung like hell and I was ready to crash. Greaser pushed a tankard of ale my way, hoping to speed things up. I didn’t touch it. Even though the Captain was serious about keeping me on lockdown, I wasn’t about to give up on Día just yet. Besides, I was too wired to sleep.

  I don’t expect many high-borns have ever played bones. If you can explain the rules and remember them while drinking yourself to oblivion, then bones is for you. We use the knuckles from a sheep, clean them up, and mark them on one side with scratches and ink. If you don’t scratch them then the ink will rub off, and if you don’t ink them then some asshole will knife them under the table when he thinks no one’s looking. There are anywhere from no marks to three. Everyone has three bones in front of them in secret so no one else can see what you have. To one side is a rapidly decreasing number of coins. There are anywhere from three to five bones in the middle of the table. A whole bunch of them remain in the pouch. Usually to win, you need the largest number from the combined bones. If you have a run of one, two, and a three, your hand is worth more. If you have a set with all the same number, your hand is worth more. If you can pair your hand with what’s in the middle of the table, your hand is worth more. Zeroes can sometimes be wild. You spend the game betting, bluffing, and trash talking someone until they forget what they have in front of them.

  Scurvy looked my way. “What has you so squeezed, Raike?”

  “A girl disappeared from an orphanage. I went to find her. Didn’t succeed.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Not yet.”

  I got a round of nods for my trouble with the Captain.

  “Vanguard Territory,” muttered Greaser.

  “Fucking hell, Raike,” said Scurvy. “You better not have brought any of that shit back with you.”

  I was still trying to figure out if Greaser had told everyone that he had been sent to intercept me. Perhaps he had and they all decided to see what my side of the story was. “Whoever took her left a note. ‘Her death will live on for decades.’”

  Then it came: silence.

  “People don’t leave notes like that,” said Docks.

  “I saw it myself.”

  “You can read?”

  “Nope.”

  “So it could’ve been instructions on how to find your mom’s hairy asshole.”

  They laughed. I’m sure that joke has been around since the dawn of time, much like how everyone’s dick is so tiny you might as well be considered a woman, except for the one guy who is so long he has to tie it around his stomach like a belt.

  At that time we all noticed Runaway. He was frozen on me, his mind leaving the game in an instant.

  “Scary shit,” said Scurvy. “Why were you even there?”

  “Because the same thing happened to a friend of mine years ago. Same orphanage. Same note.”

  No nods that time. Instead, a chill hung between us. I was going to get it from all sides, that the Captain was right to lock me down, that poking my nose into this mess was no longer any of my concern. I was a company man now. I was supposed to sever all ties with the past and let it go. I swore an oath … you know how it is. They said it. I heard it. But if I was to get anywhere with convincing the Captain to look into Día then I needed their help. It didn’t help my cause that I started a winning streak of bones like you wouldn’t believe. Even when I bluffed my ass off they all folded.

  Around me were the most gifted thieves and mages the city had ever seen, but the sad truth of it was that we did little in the way of regular thieving or maging. Both were excellent ways of getting yourself killed if you didn’t follow a plan as precisely as possible. The planning mostly came from the Captain. We’d scout out the target and spend some time on rooftops, in alleys, sending urchins out to see who came and went, and no matter how good we were at hiding someone would always spot us and ruin the Captain’s plan. Our dreams of storming into a particular vault or making off with a ship’s cargo disappeared because of one nosy neighbor who recognized our type and alerted the authorities. Mostly, we stuck to enforcing our territory in Erast and making problems go away.

  Which made that game of bones something of an urgent issue. I had a problem, one that wouldn’t go away without some of these guys helping me with the Captain. So, I did what I could to keep them at that table for as long as possible.

  Scurvy must have been dropped on his head one too many times as a baby, because the guy stared into space more often than a soothsayer. As long as he focused on your mouth when you spoke you could be sure he understood enough to keep him on as being useful, but the moment his eyes glazed over everything else was a futile effort.

  To his left was Docks. There was a theory going around that his mother was punched in the gut while she was pregnant and the fist hit the kid square in the face, distorting his features and thus explaining why his eyes were that far apart. Or his mom had been fucked by a fish. I liked the guy, but he found a problem in every plan we came up with, even if it was as something as simple as going out for drinks and getting laid. One thing he hated more than a plan that involved his participation was changing a plan on the fly.

  Shadow was fifteen. We were on the hunt for him long before we knew who he actually was. As a kid he slept on our doorstep, avoiding the orphanages and the Lady nearby. One of our guys, Stomp, had been pinched by the watch and was hours away from learning just how sharp an ax can be against his neck. We could either pay an exorbitant bribe to the watchmen or bust him out. Company meeting. Was Stomp worth it? What got him caught? Is it really worth the risk of starting a war against the city watch? Lo and behold, Stomp walked in with a ten year old kid by his side. It turned out, Shadow had learned of our plight. In the time it took us to deliberate, he had snuck off, stolen the keys to the dungeons, freed Stomp, and walked him back to the company. The little shit upstaged every single one of us. As retribution we got him blind pukingly drunk. If he could help me, I’d let him.

  “You guys come from orphanages, right?” I asked.

  “Not me,” said Docks. “I–”

  “We all know your story,” said Greaser. “There’s not a body in here who hasn’t heard it a hundred times.”

  “It’s a good story,” said Docks.

  “Maybe the first fucking time.”

  “You laughed so hard you had a stitch.”

  “Yeah. The first time. You need to come up with better stories like the time Runaway got kicked by a donkey.”

  “Hey, what the fuck?”
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  Greaser threw his hands out to the side, puffing out his chest like he was part of some warrior dance before a fight. “You saying it didn’t happen? Because I was there. So was half the table.”

  And half the company fell for it, too. You’d be out on the street, bored, waiting for just about anything to happen to stir your interest, without realizing that your judgment had lapsed something awful. Along came a donkey, a mule, or even a grandma with a foul attitude. ‘You want to see something funny?’ Greaser would ask.

  No. You do not want to see something funny.

  But this was the first time Greaser had started to relax around Runaway, the first time he was willing to treat the new recruit like a human being, instead of one of those yapping dogs, buck-eyed with a tongue hanging out, desperate for approval from all of us assholes.

  ‘You see that donkey over there? If you flick him in the balls–’

  At that point, whatever Greaser promises will happen next almost never will. You might also see the rest of us sniggering, trying to keep a straight face while wondering just how much damage this donkey might do to the doe-eyed youngster.

  “So aside from Docks, the rest of us come from orphanages, right?” I asked. “All from Erast?”

  All except for Runaway, who came from Helrun.

  “Anyone heard of this before? A kid goes missing and a note is left behind?”

  Runaway started to nod, drawing everyone’s attention like he had just aged fifty years. His shoulders drooped, his gut sagged, and in just a few words he looked as tired as I was. “I have.”