The Throne of Amenkor

by Joshua Palmatier

  I went to my room, that had once been Joclyn’s—a servant’s—room, and stood inside the doorway. Nothing in the room had changed in the past few months except that now there were a few clothes folded in the chest of drawers. I moved to the chest and opened up one of the drawers, stared down at the pouches inside, pouches full of coins. Lizbeth placed them there on a regular basis, but I hadn’t used any of them. Borund provided everything I needed: clothes, food. I’d never needed anything else.

  Looking down at the pouches, I suddenly realized I didn’t like Borund.

  I closed the drawer, glanced once swiftly over the room, and then wandered out into the hall, turning toward William’s room without thought.

  William was sitting upright on the bed, sheets of paper scattered all around him. He smiled when I knocked and stepped inside the room.

  “Varis,” he said, his voice weary but light. Something had changed around his eyes though, something subtle. They were no longer wide and bright and open. Instead, they appeared pinched and dark.

  It could have been simple exhaustion, but I didn’t think so.

  His smile faltered slightly, troubled, but remained. He motioned me inside. “Come in. I need a break.”

  I moved a few steps closer, but didn’t approach the bed.

  “Borund wants me to kill Alendor,” I said.

  His smile froze, then faded. His shoulders slumped and he turned to stare out the window. He’d had the bed moved since that morning, so that he could see the harbor and the Mistress’ ships guarding the entrance to the bay.

  “And what did you say?” he asked. His voice was flat, without inflection, without judgment.

  I swallowed, standing rigid. “I’ll need to know where I’ll most likely find Alendor this evening. Borund said that you would know, that you know what inns and taverns most of the merchants frequent.”

  Silence. William didn’t turn, but after a long moment nodded, as if to himself, as if he were finally accepting something that he had not wanted to believe. In a voice a little rougher and softer than the first, he said, “Alendor will be near the warehouses tonight. He usually checks on his own stocks, then finds his way to the Splintered Bow for dinner.”

  I nodded, then hesitated, waiting for more, but William stared stoically out at the harbor, what I could see of his face hard and harsh, closed off. All traces of the smile were gone.

  I turned to leave, feeling a warm pain deep inside my stomach, as if I’d been stabbed and was bleeding on the inside. And the blood flow wouldn’t stop.

  I’d almost reached the door when William said, loudly, “Varis?”

  I stood still, looking out into the corridor through the open door. I could tell by William’s voice that he’d turned toward me, was staring at my back, but I didn’t turn around. “What?” I was surprised at how thick my voice sounded.

  “How . . . ?” he began, but he didn’t continue, struggling.

  I looked down at the floor and closed my eyes, then turned toward him purposefully. “When I was six, my mother was killed by two men when we were returning from a trip to Cobbler’s Fountain. We lived on the outskirts of the slums, near the Dredge. Or at least I assume so, since that’s where Cobbler’s Fountain is. I don’t remember much from before.” I paused, seeing again in my head the two red men, heard myself say in a child’s innocent voice, Look, Mommy. Look at the red men.

  Then I focused on William’s face again, on his steady, green eyes. “They killed her for what little she’d carried with her . . . some coin perhaps. They did nothing to me, left me with her body in an alley on a backstreet I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go, where to run to, so I stayed there, next to my mother’s body, until the guardsmen came.

  “They didn’t know what to do with me either. They were arguing about it, trying to decide, when a woman that my mother knew showed up and offered to take me in.” I shuddered. “The guards handed me over without much hesitation—what else were they going to do with me?—and for a while I lived with this woman. She wasn’t bad I guess, but she had five kids of her own already.”

  “But what about your father?”

  I thought immediately of Erick, of the white-dusty man, but grimaced. “I don’t remember my father. I don’t remember much of anything from before Cobbler’s Fountain and the night my mother was killed, mainly flashes of scenes, nothing significant. So I went with the woman.”

  I clenched my jaw at the memories—resentment and pain held tight but still leaking out into my voice. “After about a year—a year of defending myself from the other kids when she wasn’t looking and fighting to get enough food to eat—I decided I’d be better off on my own. So I left. I ran away, moved deeper into the slums beyond the Dredge. I lived like an animal there, scrounging in garbage heaps, eating anything I could find, scraps you and Borund wouldn’t even feed to a dog. I was dying and I didn’t even know it. Then I ran into a street thug named Dove and his gang. They showed me that I could do much better if I was a little more daring. They taught me how to survive, how to steal, how to pick pockets, how to be quick and subtle, and how to distract. I was especially helpful to them for that. All I had to do was sit in the shadows of an alley and cry and someone would come in to investigate.”

  Some of the hardness had seeped out of William’s eyes, but for some reason that didn’t make me feel any better.

  “So what happened?” he asked after a moment of silence.

  I looked away from him. “Dove took one of the setups too far. One of the takes decided to run and it awoke something inside Dove that I didn’t like. I told him I wouldn’t help him hunt the woman down and so he abandoned me.” I winced, feeling again Dove’s fist as he struck me after I’d said no. “But it didn’t matter by then. I was almost eleven and I’d learned everything I needed to know to survive in the slums.”

  The room fell completely silent. I could feel William’s eyes on me, but did not look up. Strangely, the anger I’d felt had died, along with the tension in my shoulders, in my jaw. As if telling William had released me somehow.

  “So why did you leave the slums? How did you end up on the wharf, where we found you?”

  I did look up at this. I didn’t want to tell him about Bloodmark, about Erick. So instead, I said, “Someone pushed me too far. And I finally realized that I didn’t want to just ‘survive’ anymore. I wanted something else.”

  And now I found myself in the same situation, I thought wryly. I didn’t want to go on killing. I wanted something else.

  William said nothing, trying to understand, the intent clear on his face. “So you . . . grew up in the slums?”

  I laughed, the sound without humor. “I survived the slums,” I said with force. “Any way I could.”

  “But . . . how can you do it? How can you—”

  “Because it’s what I am. It’s all that I know.”

  A pause, and I turned to go. Then, in a voice much less harsh, he said, “But you have a choice now.”

  I tried not to sigh. “No. I don’t.”

  And I left.

  * * *

  I waited outside the Splintered Bow in a darkened side street, leaning against a wall. Outside the tavern, torches flared and spat in the breeze coming off of the water, and clouds roiled overhead, blocking out the stars and the moon. Winter clouds. The air tasted of rain, a cold rain, but it was still distant. Alendor had entered the tavern an hour before, with three others—another merchant, one I’d seen at Charls’ manse, and two men I didn’t know—and so I waited, trying not to think of William or Borund, Erick or the white-dusty man. I tried not to think of anything at all, submerging myself beneath the river, floating there.

  On the side street, no one tried to approach me. A patrol of palace guards on horseback sauntered by, but they said nothing, only watched me with contempt before turning and vanishing up the ma
in thoroughfare, heading toward the palace.

  The tavern door banged open and I shifted away from the wall as Alendor moved out onto the street. He stood straight, a cloak draped over his merchant’s coat. The other merchant followed a few steps behind him, like a mongrel. The remaining two men moved like guardsmen, casual and deadly, eyes always watching.

  I frowned, suddenly glad there were clouds. I’d need the darkness. In the warehouse district, there were few places to hide. I’d discovered that when trying to follow Borund.

  Alendor turned and said something to his bodyguards, then motioned back toward the warehouses near the docks. When they headed away from the tavern, I fell in behind them, far enough back that the guardsmen wouldn’t see me.

  At the same time, the Fire inside stirred. I’d been expecting it.

  They moved slowly, warily, deeper into the warehouses, taking side streets, doubling back once. I pulled back even more, allowed them to get farther ahead. I knew the main thoroughfares here from accompanying Borund and William, but Alendor wasn’t using the main streets. He used the narrows, the alleys between the large buildings.

  As I followed, the Fire continued to grow, tingling down along my arms.

  Ahead, Alendor and his group turned into another alley, this one half the width of the street we were already on. I waited to see if they would double back, one hand resting on the wooden wall of the warehouse to my left.

  After twenty slow breaths, I sidled forward in a crouch, shifted around a rain barrel and glanced down into the alley.

  Nothing but a stack of broken crates. They’d already moved out the far side. Or entered the building through a door I couldn’t see.

  I ran into the alley, already searching for Alendor’s scent.

  The Fire surged, burned down my arms to my fingers. I kept moving, thinking the sudden blaze was a reaction to Alendor’s disappearance. I didn’t realize it was something else until someone stepped out from behind the stack of crates into my path.

  I slowed to a halt, the figure five paces away. I didn’t recognize him, his face shadowed, dark with a trimmed beard and mustache, shaved head. A few scars marred his cheeks.

  The Fire flared even higher as I plunged myself deeper, drawing my dagger, and I suddenly felt more men.

  I spun, slipping into a crouch, as three more stepped out of the darkness into the end of the alley. Without turning, I felt more behind me, stepping up to join the man with the beard.

  The Fire churned in my chest, and my stomach tightened, a different sour taste flooding my mouth: fear and despair, dark and wet and acidic.

  It tasted of the Dredge.

  My gaze flicked to the alley walls, looking for an alcove, a niche, a hole, a darkness. But this wasn’t the Dredge. The buildings weren’t crumbling to ruin, full of empty doorways and shattered walls.

  The desperation clawed at my throat and I shifted my attention back to the three men before me, face hardening. My nostrils flared.

  Then someone behind me laughed.

  My head snapped back to the bearded man, to the two men who’d joined him. I thought it was the bearded man laughing, but it wasn’t. Someone else stepped into the alley, wearing a cloak.

  Cristoph.

  I felt a sliver of surprise course through me. I’d expected it to be Alendor.

  “It’s not just me and a friend this time,” Cristoph said. His voice shivered through me. I remembered it from the alley on the wharf so long ago, from that first kill in the real Amenkor.

  The men began to shift forward, and Cristoph removed his cloak as he said, “Careful. She knows how to use that dagger.”

  I blew out a harsh breath through my nose and then dove deeper.

  They came all at once, crowding into the narrow alley, laughing, bodies rushing. I felt them surge around me, felt their movements, tasted their blades, but there were too many of them. It became a mad rush and I spun, slicing out with short arcs, dagger gripped loosely because I had no real target, only a shifting, startling world of reds.

  The dagger cut deep as hands grappled me and I cried out. The river was suddenly flooded with the stench of blood. And then even that was overwhelmed with sweat, with raw grunts and curses and shouts. I flailed, felt my dagger connect again, a shallow cut, heard someone bellow and felt emptiness as they pulled back, but then someone shifted and closed in and the river broke, became nothing but a wild current of sound and scent and rough skin.

  The first punch caught me on the cheek and I gasped, growled low like an animal, and dug my dagger down and into someone’s side. A scream and more copper-tasting blood, hot and fluid, and then a fist connected with my side, my shoulder, another to my back, low, and pain shot up through my spine. I cried out again, felt hands grappling with my arms, felt wetness against my side—someone else’s blood—and then there was only weight, pressing me down, hard.

  I hit the cobbles of the alley with a grunt, on my stomach, my face to one side, bodies crushing my legs, my chest, a hand splayed over my head. It gripped and lifted and thrust my face into stone, pain shooting down into my neck as my lip cracked and split, blood flooding down into my throat, coating my tongue. Someone laughed and then the weight shifted off my body.

  I bucked, but there were too many on my legs, too many holding my arms, and then any thought of movement halted as a foot connected with my stomach from the side.

  I gasped, sprayed blood and spit onto the cobbles from my lip, and couldn’t catch my breath, my chest seizing. A sheet of white pain spiked into my skull, blinded me, and after a horrifying moment something in my lungs tore and I heaved in air.

  A foot stomped down onto my back, flattened me to the cobbles, and I lost my breath again, coughed it out with a hacking wheeze.

  A pause, but the hands on my arms tightened and the weight on my legs didn’t move. I heard footsteps approach, realized I still held my dagger in one hand in a death grip.

  Someone leaned down close, breath against my neck.

  I strained, struggled to move, neck straining with effort. Someone chuckled and I spat out blood in frustration.

  “This is for Bellin,” Cristoph whispered into my ear. “And for Charls.”

  He shifted away, but not far.

  A hand closed around my neck, tightened as I gasped and tried to pull away, then held me still.

  Cold metal touched my throat.

  In the chaotic roil of the river I tasted the blade, gasped in the sharp scent of lantern oil and straw: Cristoph’s scent.

  He hadn’t had one before, but he did now.

  I sobbed, the sound thick and distorted.

  The blade began to press down, and then I scented something else.

  Oranges.

  “Let her go,” someone said, voice calm and cold and dangerous, like the Dredge. And I felt a blade slip through the currents, swift and smooth, another dagger, distant—

  And someone screamed, a gargled, bloody sound.

  The knife at my throat jerked back suddenly, and Cristoph roared, “Kill him!”

  And suddenly the weight holding me down released, pulled back sharply with the sounds of scuffling feet and grunts and the focused intensity shifted away from me, one step, two, down the alley.

  I tried to roll onto one arm, felt pain sear through my chest from where the men had kicked me, and choked on my own blood. Pushing the pain away, I drew the river close, pulled it in tight, and concentrated on the struggle only three paces away.

  Cristoph and his men had surrounded Erick. One man lay slumped to one side, his throat cut, but there were still six men left.

  Too many for Erick to handle. Too many.

  I rolled onto my side and gasped at the renewed pain but dragged myself up onto one arm, to one knee.

  I still held my dagger.

  I pulled myself into a crouch, turned toward the fight. T
he men were closing in.

  And then Erick saw me. “Run!” he barked. His voice cracked with command, the voice he’d used to train me, to drill me, more a growl than a shout. His eyes flashed and he shouted again, “Run!”

  One of the men turned—Cristoph—and I spun, stumbled, caught myself, and ran. I obeyed without thought. It had been drilled into me.

  Behind, I heard a clatter of blades, heard Erick cry out in pain, heard someone roar in triumph.

  And then I was in the street, fleeing down narrows and alleys I didn’t recognize, running without a place to run to. Pain flared at every step, in my stomach, in my chest, across one shoulder. My face throbbed, and blood trailed down from my lip, down my neck.

  I stumbled to a halt, gasping, in a narrow a hundred paces out when I realized no one was following me, leaned over near a wall, one arm out for support, and coughed. My eyes burned and my hair was tangled and matted. My lip throbbed with a pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before, and there was a thin sliver of cold pain up along my neck from Cristoph’s blade, but the pain in my chest receded as my coughing fit ended, each breath no longer so piercing. I didn’t think anything was broken inside, just bruised.

  I drew myself upright, suddenly fourteen, back on the Dredge all over again.

  And then I heard William’s voice: You have a choice now.

  My breath caught and I stared out into the black street. I choked, coughed hoarsely, and spat more blood, winced at the bruising in my chest, and thought about Erick, about Alendor, about Cristoph.

  Suddenly, the pain in my chest didn’t seem so harsh. Because I wasn’t fourteen anymore, waiting for the next kick, the next shouted “whore!” Because I didn’t have to listen to Borund . . . or Erick.

  I shoved myself away from the wall, staggered back toward the alley. By the time I’d reached its entrance, I’d let the writhing snake of anger inside me uncoil and drawn the river and the Fire up around me like a cloak. It subdued the pain, pushed it into the background. But it was going to cost me. I could feel the nausea rising even now, a nausea I hadn’t felt in over a year, since Bloodmark. But I’d never pushed myself this deep for this long into the river’s depths since then.