City of Night

by Michelle West

What had he asked of his father?

  His father had never said. But his father, Angel thought, had died certain that, in the end, he had failed both his lord and his charge.

  My father was not a failure. Angel’s lips whitened slightly as he pressed them together, his neutral expression taking on a watchful, angry edge. He’d eaten, and he’d slept, and if he’d slept on the floor, there was still a roof over his head; he had the energy, now, for anger. He might not have it later, but it was better to spend it here, where it cost nothing.

  He could hear his father telling him just that.

  And he knew, as well, that he would never truly hear his father tell him anything again.

  He waited while the sun edged up the horizon, watching the Ice Wolf as she sat in the bay. Watching, just as quietly, when she began to move. The Port Authority guards were more prominent on the stretch of dock that had gathered those men whose job it was to catch mooring ropes and secure them; Angel had watched them for three days. They were not the friendliest of men, but they reserved their curt words for people who were too stupid to get out of the way, and they stayed just as long as it took them to secure gangplanks, before drifting toward another dock and another incoming ship.

  After they had left, men and women in the teal of the Port Authority would join their guards and they would meet the first few people to leave the ship; they would offer these strangers papers and ink—the latter usually carried by a younger person who was also dressed head to toe in teal—and the strangers would make some show of reading whatever it was they were expected to sign. Often it was a poor show, and in the cases of The Ten, most of the paperwork was dispensed with entirely.

  But the papers, the ink, and the guards, adorned every single dock, regardless of the flags flown by the ships, and there were no exceptions made: The Port Authority had its laws and anyone who made port here was expected to follow them.

  This much, Angel had observed over the long three days. It didn’t surprise him to see three men emerge from the Port Authority building as its doors were at last pegged open. It surprised him slightly to see that one of these men was Terrick, but it shouldn’t have—Terrick could speak Rendish, and he doubted that either of the other two who walked just in front of him could say the same.

  The ship approached the dock, ropes were cast, caught, and looped around poles thick as old trees. Words were shouted—in Weston—from dock to ship; the words shouted back were Weston as well, but thickly accented, the syllables shorter and rougher.

  Terrick said nothing; the crew on either side were clearly old hands, and the words might have been in a language birthed by the sea and all its demands, rather than by two different countries. When the gangplank was lowered, a single man stepped down the narrow and—to Angel’s eye—wobbly incline, and he made his way to the flat of the dock at his own speed. He carried a staff; to call it a cane would be wrong in almost every particular—but had he carried a baby, Angel would have recognized him anyway, although he had only seen him once before.

  He didn’t know the man’s name. His father had pointedly refused to even hear the question when Angel had asked it, and Terrick had also, obliquely, refused to surrender it.

  The most senior member of the Port Authority now stepped forward, Terrick at his right; at his left, but lagging behind, a boy carrying an inkwell and a quill. The Northern man, his hair some sort of fierce crown over the pale honey of clear eyes, looked at both of these foreigners briefly, but it was Terrick who demanded his attention.

  And it was to Terrick that he inclined his head.

  Terrick raised a hand, an open hand, and held it in front of his chest, arm extended, for a moment. Angel thought it a salute of some kind, but he couldn’t be certain; when his father had taught them the use of the sword, he hadn’t bothered with gestures that had nothing to do with fighting.

  But the Northern man inclined his head again, and raised the hand that held the staff, drawing the staff from the wooden planks as he did so. It was perfectly straight as he held it in the air, parallel to the dock, and he held it for longer than Terrick had held out his hand.

  Angel could see Terrick’s back, not his face. He wanted to move, then, to get closer, to change the vantage from which he watched, a mute witness. He could see the way Terrick’s shoulders shifted, straightening his back.

  He could see the Northerner’s lips move, as the staff’s end came to rest, once again, upon wood. But he could not hear the words the man said.

  He wanted to.

  And as if Terrick could hear that thought, Terrick himself turned to face Angel, unseen until that moment by any other on the dock. There was nothing at all in Terrick’s face that could be called an expression; his lips, his eyes, the lines etched in his skin—they might be stone, for just a moment, a mask. Something to hide behind.

  Angel understood.

  He composed his own face in a similar fashion, although he felt he had nothing to hide. He then left the shortening shadows he stood in, and made his way down the dock.

  Terrick turned back to the Northerner. Beyond the man’s back, the Rendish sailors were busy; Angel could see them moving and hear—at a distance—the shouted Rendish curses they leveled at each other in their haste.

  But he didn’t watch them for long; the man was watching him, his gaze unblinking, his face as much a stone mask as Terrick’s. A cold one, for a cold people and a land of ice and snow. It was hard to realize that his cold, clear gaze was gold—but it was merchant’s gold, not wheat’s gold.

  Angel stilled for just a moment, and wondered bleakly if the man’s eyes had always been gold, and he had failed to remember it, being caught by the strangeness of his hair, and the oddly veiled hostility with which he had been greeted.

  No matter; they were clear now, and Angel knew that he gazed upon one of the god- born. He was not afraid of the god-born; indeed, as a younger child, he might have stood in awe of them, had he realized what they were.

  But he couldn’t afford awe today. He could afford only what he had been given, since the day his family had died: walking, one foot in front of the other, from Evanston to Averalaan, to this port and this dock.

  By the time Angel reached the stranger, a second man had come down the planking, and this man carried papers that he handed to Terrick. Terrick took them and made a show of leafing through them; the young assistant clerk stepped forward with his ink and his quill, as the Portmaster proffered a different set of documents to the second man. He in turn took them and made the same show of leafing through them as Terrick had done before he nodded briskly.

  Angel waited in silence, as did the first stranger, the man he had seen once before on his father’s farm. The Northerner waited in the same self-contained silence, although his lips were compressed in a slight frown. Clearly, the paperwork required by the Port Authority was both foreign and beneath his notice.

  But it was completed, and when it was, the Portmaster bowed and signaled an orderly retreat. Terrick, first to arrive, was last to leave, and as he left, he briefly touched Angel’s shoulder. That was all.

  Angel stood on the dock with the Northerner, the sea lapping at wooden bow and round, thick pole. The man with the pale spire and the long staff watched him, as if waiting. Angel could play the waiting game forever.

  Forever was, in this case, five minutes, and Angel knew this because, in his mind, he performed a simple farm chore, putting everything but his body in motion. Five minutes. He could mark time in longer ways, and in shorter ones, but when he waited, he always chose some way of keeping track of time; it was like keeping score.

  The older man cleared his throat. “You are Garroc’s son,” he said—in Weston. His eyes crinkled briefly, as if the light on water had struck them unexpectedly.

  Angel nodded. “And you are?” He also chose Weston, as it came more naturally to him.

  This caused a pale brow to rise, and one hand to tighten on the staff. But Angel didn’t move, and he didn’t speak again, and
after a significant pause—feed for the chickens entering the bucket—the stranger’s lips curved in a cold smile.

  “I am Alaric,” the old man said, in Rendish. “I advise Weyrdon.”

  “I’m Angel,” Angel replied, in the same tongue.

  “Weyrdon is waiting for you.”

  Angel nodded, unsurprised. He shouldn’t have been, but it didn’t matter. In some way that defied logic, it made sense to him that his long trek from the ruin of the only home he had ever known would be significant enough that Weyrdon, in the remote North, would somehow know.

  He approached the plank, but it was the old man’s turn to play games. He did not move or step out of the way, and Angel knew better than to slide sideways around him. He didn’t like the idea of wandering around on a ship trying to find Weyrdon, and he didn’t think the welcome he would receive, without the permission of this grim stranger, would be worth the effort.

  “Who do you serve,” the man said at length.

  Angel said nothing.

  “Do you serve Weyrdon?”

  And lifted his chin, meeting the old man’s appraising glare. “I don’t know,” he said calmly. He could; the docks were Imperial, and he was still standing on them.

  Again, the man’s hand tightened on his staff.

  A minute passed, two, five; the sailors were now standing loosely near the dockside of the ship, watching.

  The old man offered Angel a second glimpse of his winter smile. “A fair answer,” he replied. “But not for one who styles himself of Weyrdon.”

  “I serve my father in this,” Angel said softly. “And it was his request. If it offends, I apologize.”

  “But you will not change it?”

  “No.”

  The old man surprised Angel, then. He laughed, and the expression shifted the lines of his face, robbing them of the dourness of age. “You are Garroc’s son, indeed. Not as bold, not as aggressive—but it’s in you, boy.

  “We accept the mark as the honor paid to our dead, and we will allow you passage upon the Ice Wolf.” He paused, and the lines of his face smoothed out once more. “But we accept it because you have lived in exile and understand it only as a mark of filial devotion. Beyond this, no exception is granted. Come. Weyrdon is waiting.”

  * * *

  Angel had never been on a ship before; he had sometimes taken rafts—of dubious durability—out on the rivers and the lake a few miles from the farm, but that was the extent of his knowledge. There, the water had been clear and warm; here it smelled and tasted of salt.

  It was the salt that had surprised him the most when he had first made his way to the port; he could taste it on his lips, and feel it in the minute scrapes and cuts that he couldn’t even remember getting. That and the smell of the City—all of it layered so dense it was hard to separate individual scents. He tried now.

  Sweat, certainly, on these decks. The Northerners weren’t clothed for the weather, as if heat were something to be disdained, a temporary inconvenience. They were bearded, but they did not—to Angel’s eyes—look like barbarians or the savages that filled the colorful stories of traveling bards. They had scars, true, some visible across their arms and hands, some across their faces—but men had scars, his father had once told him; they were a type of writing.

  He had seen the truth of it, even in Evanston, where many of the farmers had come from service to the Houses in the Imperial wars. He had seen missing limbs, had heard old war stories, or more common, the absence of war stories, the way the men turned a distant stare upon a random tree before they shook themselves, smiled, changed the subject. He had been young then; young enough to ask without a thought for their privacy or their pain. He had had no wooden sword, although he often picked up sticks, as young boys did, and the only time he had asked his father—who worked with wood in his spare time, because he disliked idle hands—to make him such a sword, he had seen the ice of the North in his father’s eyes.

  Swords are not toys.

  His mother, tight- lipped, had commandeered the lecture, as she often did, but Angel didn’t need to hear the rest of it to know that this was not a gift he could ask for again.

  These men, these men were like the old soldiers—and the young—who came to the Free Towns; like and unlike. They wore their history across their bodies, each mark a story waiting to unfold—or more likely, a story shared only briefly by those who had been some part of its making. He was not a child now, and he did not ask.

  Instead, he followed Alaric, past the men who stood, arms folded across their chests, eyes almost unblinking, as he passed.

  But when he had almost reached the great, spiked wheel that stood beneath the mast at the height of the ship, one man stepped between Alaric’s back and Angel. His hair was dark, which was unusual—a bear’s brown, thick like winter fur.

  “Boy,” he said, using the Rendish word. “What news of Garroc?”

  What he had not expected, Angel realized, was to hear his father’s name spoken upon these decks. Not after speaking to Terrick, and not after listening to his father. The day his father had taught him to plait or wire his hair, there had been a lot of listening and very little questioning; his father had a look about him that discouraged curiosity when the cost of satisfying it was too high.

  He almost didn’t recognize the name, until the man spoke again, the syllables slower and more distinct, the name utterly clear. Angel gazed at this dark-haired stranger’s scarred face, took in, at a glance, the fold of his arms as they rested to either side of his broad chest. His face was soaking—ocean spray or sweat, it was hard to tell—and his expression was completely neutral.

  As if this were a test.

  A test, and his father’s name some way of passing it or failing it. He had been nervous since he had approached Alaric; he had spent his brief anger on the docks while waiting.

  Or so he had thought; it flared, now, and it was sharp and cold in the summer heat. Of all games to play, of all the games he was willing to play, this was not one, and would never be one. He could hear his father’s voice, the echoes of a life that was ended, urging him to be cautious, but he ignored it. Northern honor had had meaning to his father; Angel’s honor, however, was of his own choosing.

  Alaric paused and turned; Angel could see the fall of his robes shift. But he could not see the older man’s face.

  Nor had he need. “He died fighting raiders and defending his home.” The large man nodded. His expression did not shift or waver; his gaze was the unblinking gaze of a bird of prey. Or a vulture. Angel couldn’t tell. But he had come here to honor his father, and he would not be afraid of his father’s name. Not here. Especially not here.

  Still, the man did not respond.

  “He killed five,” Angel added, the edge in the words unmistakable. A challenge. Tell me, he thought, his hand moving to rest inches above his father’s short sword. Tell me that he was a deserter. Tell me that he was a coward. Tell me that he was forsworn.

  But the man merely nodded again; his hands did not stray and he offered no response to the challenge that laced Angel’s words, giving them a bright edge. They stood thus for minutes—and they were long minutes, although Angel could not force himself to think of farm chores as he usually did to mark time’s passage.

  But when the silence broke, it was the stranger who broke it. “You are his only son?”

  Angel forced his hands to his sides. He couldn’t quite relax, but the tone of the man’s voice offered no cruelty, no mockery. Drawing breath before exhaling an inch or two, Angel replied. “I am. And it is to bring that word that I have come.”

  “Then deliver it.” The man stepped out of his way. But he had not finished, not quite. “He was Cartanis’ man, boy, and Cartanis knows his own.”

  Angel felt his throat constrict at the words—the unexpected kindness of a stranger. He would have swallowed the sudden tears that choked words and filmed his eyes, but he knew it wasn’t necessary, here. What had his father said? Men know how to
grieve. In the North, men cry—but the women are harder and colder. He had grimaced at his wife’s back as he said this, and she had risen from her chores to glare at him.

  “Do the women fight, in the North?” Angel had asked, when it had become clear that the glare was tinged with the usual affection.

  “They fight in the South,” his father had replied with a shrug, speaking of the Empire as if it were a foreign country, as he often did. “We all do what we must to protect the things we care about. Sometimes it isn’t enough, but we’re defined by how hard we try. Your mother wasn’t raised to a sword, but she’d put a rake through a man’s face to defend you.”

  Angel nodded, knowing it for truth. “But men cry?”

  Garroc had nodded, lifting his head a moment at a passing breeze, an echo of spring in the growing heat. “Men cry.”

  “Why?”

  And the silence that followed his question was the silence of old soldiers come from war who wish never to return to the truth of it. It was girded by a smile, by large hands ruffling Angel’s hair—but it wasn’t answered. Not then.

  Now? He let the tears trail down his face. He did not sob; his mother was in him, and she had, in her way, been the more reserved, the more private, of his parents. But he met the stranger’s gaze without shame or demur, and in answer—another act of generosity, so unexpected it could rob one of breath—like tears trailed down the dirty face of a sailor. A warrior.

  “None but the men of the Ice Wolf know,” he told Angel. “None. But, boy, we know. Your father was Weyrdon. And Weyrdon is waiting.” He turned, then, and he let Angel go.

  But even the parting words were a gift, of sorts, for he spoke the name Weyrdon with a respect and a certainty that not even his father had done, and it robbed Angel of some of the fear that he’d been holding onto so tightly. He’d hidden it, of course—if the Northerners knew how to cry, they knew better than to show fear. To them, fear was weakness, a lack of commitment.

  Alaric was waiting; he had turned, and he had listened, but he had not spoken or interfered. When Angel met his eyes, the older man nodded. “Your father was much loved here,” he said gravely.