by C K Gold
“Let me, uh, help you get him back,” Goat said.
Chapter 4
Fang sat in his canal street apartment, staring at the papers scattered all across his biggest table. The edges curled in the humidity; he’d had to weigh down the corners with anything that came to hand. He knew the basic ins and outs of ships from his cargo handling days, but that wasn’t the main challenge. Even the rolling river current wouldn’t pose a problem if a storm broke that night.
His real dilemma was the number of knives now pointed at his back. He’d humiliated Big Wei at the banquet, and no amount of kissing up would mend that fence. He’d sealed their status as enemies. The junior brothers respected Fang’s strength more, but now even he caught whispers about how much stronger he was than Big Wei. Fang’s gain was Big Wei’s loss. The man himself had retreated into sullen drunkenness. It wouldn’t take long until Red Hand decided to act, and Fang didn’t know what to expect. He’d dishonored his elder “brother,” and Red Hand didn’t tolerate open disorder in his house. But Big Wei had also acted out of keeping with Red Hand’s expectations.
It wasn’t something Fang could do much about, in the end. Red Hand was unlikely to act before the matter of the Ten Gates tribute ship was resolved. He wouldn’t snap his knife in half and then get into a street fight. And Ranu and Jun had their own agendas as always. Unless they determined his disrespect for Big Wei threatened them, Fang didn’t expect them to act. Not on Big Wei’s behalf, at least.
But Big Wei’s wasn’t the foe Fang had to watch out for. The Moon Knives hadn’t forgotten his role in their current troubles. It wasn’t much of a reach to suspect that some of their more enterprising membership saw snuffing him out as a good way to rally more men to their faction’s flag.
Fang wondered at the state of their treasury. He hadn’t even asked Orchid about it, and Birch had been much more interested in arguing that night than in sharing information. Fang pinched the bridge of his nose.
The Rootless Society’s broader membership was becoming a thorn in Fang’s side. They’d been emboldened by the decapitation of the Moon Knives and the rumors of the River Roses fight a few days ago. They’d taken to indiscriminately rolling gang members out alone or in twos, driving Red Hand to explicitly ban working alone.
At this point, Fang couldn’t let himself be seen at all if he wanted to avoid a real dust-up.
He cradled his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Days of spying, plotting, and planning were more likely to end in a headache than a miracle. Big Wei was probably right on the money when he called Fang’s assignment a death sentence. Fang wasn’t about to give up and flee into the night with his tail between his legs. He wasn’t a whipped puppy.
He rose and walked out of his rooftop apartment to look down on the canal below, which connected the river to the provincial palace’s moat. A fresh breeze from the mountains kept the worst of the smells at bay, not that Fang really noticed them on any but the absolute worst of days. The market was alive with color, and boatmen poled their narrow crafts along the canal and into the causeway. Somewhere down there, an old widow was frying up the day’s umpteenth batch of dumplings, a smell that made Fang’s stomach growl.
Years ago, someone had added what amounted to a four-room cabin on top of this old stone tenement. It took up a about a third of the roof; then there was a single stairwell at the opposite end. The rest was all tenants’ plants and rain barrels. Fang left those alone. He had noticed the place while on the run after another fight; the gap between buildings here was narrow enough to jump, but only for someone reasonably limber. A little wrangling and a little money and the strange cabin became his.
Light footsteps caught his attention. Orchid emerged from the sole stairwell, dressed in a bright cotton tunic and loose pants. Not her usual style for a casual visit. That means business. Fang did his best not to let his irritation show. The last thing he needed was some interruption with more Society drama. That he was the source of at least some of it didn’t matter.
She had a basket covered with a yellow cloth in her arm. She swatted his hand away when he reached. “You haven’t even greeted me yet,” she pouted, and hooked her arm in his to lead him back inside.
“Orchid,” he said.
“Still very serious today?” she asked, and released his arm so that she could sprawl on the vacated divan. She lightly dropped the basket on a clear spot and glanced at his papers. “Thinking of taking up the river captain’s life, I see.”
Fang rolled his eyes and pulled up a low stool. “Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking of the pilot’s life for a long, long time. Maybe pick up a merchant’s seal, take up trading sheep for goats.”
“I think you’d get on very well with the goats,” she replied. “Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that the doctor has been hard at work and we secured a supply of medicine with plenty left to spare.”
“No wonder they’ve been all but crawling up my ass,” Fang said, thinking of the Society gang.
She shrugged and pulled back the yellow cloth. Inside were steaming buns. She tossed him one with none of her usual decorum, but here in the apartment, with no prying eyes, Orchid was a little freer about showing her true self.
He split the bun partway and sniffed. Delicious roasted pork, onions, chopped clear noodles, herbs. He bit into it and closed his eyes as the flavors burst across his tongue.
“You don’t even sound like that in bed,” Orchid complained. “You’re going to make me jealous of a bun. Very cruel, Fang.”
He ignored her and finished the bun. “What did you stop by for?”
“I can’t visit my lover?”
Fang reached across and grabbed another bun out of the basket. “Now I know you’re up to something.”
She sighed heavily. “Fine, suck all the fun out of it.” She pulled a small vial out of the basket and rolled it across the papers.
Fang fished it out from a coiling cargo manifest and opened the little wooden cylinder. Inside was a tightly furled note with a date, a time, and a location.
“There?” he said, lip curling.
“You promised to take me wherever I wanted to go,” she sulked. “Especially after you upset me so last time.”
Fang crumpled the note. Another meeting, another so-called tea house. The Rose was going to see a lot of his coin this month. Worse, Orchid was toying with him while maintaining her cover – the Pearl wasn’t as fancy as Abalone’s. Fang definitely wasn’t off the hook.
He blew through his nose. “Well, I do value the quiet life,” he said. “If you promise you’ll be content a little while after this.”
Orchid lit up so brightly Fang couldn’t tell if she was faking or not.
The new meeting place was one of the buildings that formed the clustered River Roses. It wasn’t the same place he’d dragged Big Wei out of on the night of his ill-fated feting. The Pearl was a lower class place than Abalone’s, and attracted an even more mixed clientele. Fang mostly avoided it; the hostess and her paramour unnerved him for reasons he couldn’t quite explain, and he didn’t like to spend too much time in the old neighborhood anyway.
But the Roses were a convenient meeting place, and the Maze was a major source of those conveniences. The bonus and the problem both were that the other brothers whiled away time and money there, too. He wouldn’t be out of place to an outsider, but the brothers would notice him.
It’d also cement Orchid in everyone’s minds as his lover, a relationship he was uneasy about pursuing any further for the most obvious reasons. He’d failed to clear anything up with Orchid or Birch at Abalone’s, and now she was pretending that nothing had happened. Aside from Fang upsetting her.
“You’re thinking too hard,” she said with a purr. “I can help with that.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Too many problems to solve for distractions right now. Thanks for the meal.”
She huffed and snatched up her basket and whirled her way out of the apartment and, he hoped, out of his fa
ce until their next meeting. Those were coming entirely too frequently these days, even if Birch had unexpectedly shown up twice now.
Almost, but not quite worth it. Fang pressed his finger into a crumb of bun that had escaped and ate it. She didn’t have to take the basket, too.
There wasn’t much for it. Fang perused his mental list of followers for those likeliest to be able to fight on a deck against experienced sailors. Most of them probably couldn’t swim, but it wasn’t like a man took a dip in the Silver River and lived long, anyway. It was cold, deep, and rotten with alligators. Worse, the filthy water festered with fever. Even the canal wasn’t a safe place to take a dip. Much of the city’s sewage ran or was dumped directly into it to wash out into the river.
Brother Goat can lend a hand this time, Fang thought with a smirk. It was perhaps cruel, but if Goat couldn’t keep up, then Fang would have one less problem to keep track of.
⁂
Fang arrived at the Pearl a touch late. Stragglers from the Knives had been waiting just off the street he usually took to get from the canals to the market streets where the River Roses squatted. Worse, it had begun raining, so not only did he have to put a handful of men on their backs, but he’d also had to haggle with a parasol hawker who had an overinflated view of his products’ desirability. The paper had been indifferently waxed, leaving Fang almost as wet as he would’ve been if he’d just saved the coin.
He pushed past a small crowd of gamblers arguing under the awning. They were muddy and reeked of cheap wine, and had probably been kicked out as much for the scene they caused as they argued, as for whoever had actually cheated. One took a look at him and urged the others back after a moment’s drunken shock. Well, at least drunks made way for him.
Inside, he gave the hostess the name of the blue room which Orchid had supposedly reserved for them. The hostess regarded him like he was a particularly strange-looking bug, and then concealed her face behind her fan. On the other rare occasions he’d visited the Pearl, the woman had always looked at him like a prime piece of meat. She had a strange air about her that made him ill at ease; that hadn’t changed between his last visit and now.
She led him upstairs and pointed to the second to last room at the end of the hall. The place was so small that there was only one hall — it certainly wasn’t a big enough place to get lost in. He thanked her as courteously as he could and extricated his arm from her long-nailed clutches.
“Orchid,” he growled as he slid the door open.
Birch stared back at him with a mildly puzzled expression, as though they’d just happened to inexplicably show up to the same noodle stand at the same time without prior planning.
“Shit,” Fang said, “Orchid.” She’d set him up. This was her bratty idea of a joke.
“Don’t just stand there,” Birch said impatiently. “Get in before someone sees you.”
“No wonder that bitch was looking at me so strangely,” Fang muttered, but he obediently slid the door shut behind him.
Birch had eschewed the theatrical garb this time in favor of a more natural, reserved look. His dark outer robe was open at the waist, showing a dark tunic and trousers beneath, made from cloth of better quality than most of Fang’s clothes. He suddenly felt a little underdressed, but dismissed the feeling as foolish. He’d come to meet with Orchid, thinking there was some information he needed for his mission, not to be made a fool of with Birch.
He sat heavily across the table from Birch and rested an elbow on his knee. “How’d she get you here?”
“She said you wanted to meet,” Birch said. “And I admit, I was curious as to why you’d want to meet in a place like this.” He already had a cup in front of him. He plucked another from its tray and plopped it in front of Fang.
Fang looked away. Birch poured.
“She’s pretty angry with you, I take it. Did you believe her when she said it was nothing serious?” Birch laughed. “She’s a good liar. I suppose now you’ll have some extra spice for your legend.”
“If we’re here, then we might as well talk seriously,” Fang said. He couldn’t smell the steaming tea before him, but maybe that was just whatever herbs the Pearl was perfumed with. The tea liquor was oddly light, though. “Orchid might’ve mentioned that you took care of the little coin surplus sometime recently. Your boys have been enjoying it — they’re thicker than fleas right now.” The Moon Knives hadn’t fallen apart yet, though.
Fang raised his cup to his lips. Ah. Wine, not tea. He and Orchid never drank wine at these meetings.
“More money, more men,” Birch said with a shrug. He poured himself a cup. “Why don’t you get comfortable? You look like a half-drowned dog.”
Fang wanted to protest on principle — really, just out of stubbornness — but he had to admit to himself that this was stupid. He peeled off his overcoat and hung it on an oddly high hook on the wall. He decided not to think too closely about what such a broad hook was more regularly used for here.
“Better?” Birch asked.
“Now I’m just cold,” Fang said.
“You should eat more ginger, then you won’t have such bad circulation.”
“What I’d rather have is some breathing room from your brothers.”
Birch didn’t meet his eyes; instead, he poured another cup and pushed it over to Fang. “I’m afraid I can’t do anything about that until you come back to the fold.”
“This is making it harder for me to do that,” Fang said. He moved to take the cup, but Birch didn’t let go and their fingers touched. Fang jerked his hand back like he’d been stung.
Birch barked a short, harsh laugh. “Do you want in or out? My friendship or my anger? Revenge or power? I was wrong about the drowned dog thing; you’re more like a cat who doesn’t know what he wants.”
“Watch your mouth,” Fang growled. The wine sat between them unclaimed. “Nobody has cause to question me—”
“Except the position you put yourself in makes you questionable from every possible angle. You’re either betraying him or me — us. Either way, you’re a traitor, right?”
Fang gritted his teeth. “I’m on the side of justice. Why are you baiting me? What are you trying to get at?”
“The artifact,” Birch said.
“What about it?”
“If it’s so powerful that Red Hand really wants it, bring it to me instead.”
Fang stared, struck speechless by the audacity of Birch’s demand.
“Then I won’t have any cause to doubt you. We can use it against Red Hand. Even if it’s not useful itself, we can pin the theft on him and return it to the authorities once word gets out that it’s been stolen. You’ll be a hero like you’ve always hoped, and Red Hand will hang. The guards will scatter the gang. Everything will be through, and there won’t be any questions among any of us about where your loyalties have lain all these years.”
Fang sat thunderstruck by Birch’s brazen madness. Offended as he was, Fang imagined the outcome Birch proposed: lead his followers in stealing the artifact, let some of them fall or be captured to leave evidence of the Four Winds’ involvement, and then hunker down with the thing for a few days to ensure that its disappearance was discovered. Before Red Hand could resolve to make any overtures to the governor’s palace, Fang and Birch would entreat the palace for an audience, and present the recovered stone to the governor, position themselves as the stone’s rescuers, pin everything on Red Hand, and…
The plan relied on a shaky blend of credulity and cynicism that Fang couldn’t bring to a happy conclusion. If they managed to convince anyone they had the stone, he and Birch would end up imprisoned and tortured at best, and tortured to death at worst.
Even if they convinced officials of Red Hand’s culpability in the theft, it wouldn’t matter. An ambitious bureaucrat would want the credit, and would dispose of them to make sure there were no loose ends. Fang had already resigned himself to the likelihood that he’d die in the course of his revenge, but putting the other
s in danger was just unacceptable. And if Birch died? Entirely unacceptable.
He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
Birch pounded his fist against the tabletop. “Why can’t you make this easy? It’s not just about you! This is about all of us, all Docksiders!”
“Who do you think’s gonna believe your story?” Fang snapped. “And if they do, what’s it matter? We’ll be hanged anyway because it’s more convenient. If the governor was interested in justice, there’d be guards in Dockside, and nobody, not the Knives or the Winds or the Demons would’ve ever gotten so big! They don’t give a damn about us. It’s more convenient to let us terrorize each other. Who cares about a few murders? Let’s copy the warlords’ game, as long as nobody gets too uppity!”
“Now you wanna parrot radical shit to me, brother?” Birch snarled. “You’re not the one who’s been living with his nose in the shit for the past eight years. You’ve had it easy—”
Fang pushed the table, spilling wine and cups and mashing the breath out of Birch. “You’ve gone too far,” he said, voice a rumble in his chest. He didn’t want to fight Birch, not out of anger, not because of mere words, but that accusation was enough to make his blood throb in his temples and fists.
Birch grabbed the edge of the table. For a second it looked like he’d flip it in a fit of rage, but he released a wheezing cough instead. His robe and tunic were dark with spilled wine.
Chagrined at his own loss of temper, Fang righted the cups and ineffectually mopped at the spilled wine with his old handkerchief. Birch recovered his breath as Fang poured wine again and took a gulp to steady his frayed nerves.
“You’re right. That was… that was over the line,” Birch said after a moment. He’d turned toward the window. Fang took a moment to study his profile, the way the muscles of his jaw leapt as he clearly struggled to choose the right words. Whatever the right words between them could be. “I’m frustrated. Your gang’s getting stronger. Decapitating the Knives wasn’t even the start. You’ve done your job too well. It’s getting harder to be patient.”
