by Del Law
“Really?” Ava’s eyes stay wide. “Do they mark you like that?”
Kjat nods. “For every dance you learn, you get one. You should have seen some of the other dancers. They were covered all over, even more than me.” She’s amazed at how quickly some of these things came off her tongue.
“I’ve never been to Tamaranth. My parents are from outside of Karandelh—we own a little farm out there.”
“Do you want to go back there some day?”
“After I’ve seen some things? Sure, maybe. It’s pretty boring there.”
“A warship is a funny way to see the world.”
Ava frowns. “That’s what my friends said, too? Back home? But you don’t really see the war down here, do you? Eeg’s not going to let us go out any place that’s dangerous, and the ship stops in lots of places to get food and supplies. It’s not like we have a lot of money and I could just hop on a podship. Besides. We’ve got the best navy in the world, and I just know Nadrune is the best Fleet-Commander. Who’s going to threaten an Akarii flag ship?”
“Who indeed,” Kjat says.
• • •
After a third bowl, Ava leads her back to the bath, and makes sure Kjat knows which bunk room is hers. “Third door on the right, remember. And it’s only an hour or so to lockdown, so don’t be too long.” She turns to go.
“What’s lockdown?” Kjat asks.
Ava turns back. “Oh. Unless you’re working nights and have a token? Everyone is supposed to be in their rooms, and the doors at the end of the girls’ corridors are shut and locked for the night. It supposed to keep us safe from the birds, but Ceri says that’s mostly just a story to keep us from messing around.”
“Birds? The Stona?”
Ava shakes her head. “First Family men, and some of the royal cousins. Upperdecks servants, sometimes? They come downbelow for…”
“For sport,” Kjat says, frowning.
Ava bites her lower lip and nods. “We call them ‘birds’ because they wear a lot of feathers. And they’re just like birds? You’ll see. If they catch you out, they’re supposed to get to do what they want. Some of the girls think it will get them somewhere? If they’re ‘caught’? You know, like they’ll get some guy to fall in love with them and get married and get to go live in a tower in Tilhtinon and make bird babies.”
“What do you think?”
Ava turns to the hall, and then turns back. “I’ve seen them sometimes, the couple of times I’ve gone to upperdecks. They’re so strange, Kjat. It’s hard to imagine what kind of guy is underneath all of that.”
Kjat nods. There are too many avians to keep track of. If she gets off this ship alive, and can find a way to deal with the featherwolves and the blackjackals, she will get herself a room down deep in the Warrens, where birds and Akarii don’t go, deep enough that the Disciples won’t find her again.
And she’ll get a cat, too. A big, hungry tom that eats birds. “See you in a little while, then.”
“Oh.” Ava frowns. “Um. I won’t be in tonight? In the bunks. But maybe if you could keep it kind of quiet?”
Kjat raises her eyebrow. “Of course. Is it Rehdr?”
Ava blushes a sharp crimson, and bites her lower lip again. She nods.
“You aren’t worried about getting caught out?”
Ava looks conflicted. “Rehdr says if we’re careful… He knows some secret places on the ship.”
Kjat nods. “I won’t say a thing.”
Ava smiles gratefully and shuts the door quietly behind her.
We’re within a few years of each other, Kjat thinks. So why do I feel so ancient next to Ava?
She strips off her clothes, careful not to pull the Buhr’s amulet off or to break its thin cord. She slips into the deep pool of steaming water. It’s extremely hot, and it sways some with the motion of the ship. It burns into her tired, aching muscles. She finds a cake of brown soap and a cloth and washes off the layers of dirt and sand and soot and smoke. It’s been weeks since she’d had a bath, and even that had been out of a lukewarm bowl in a seedy room in the Warrens. She rubs until her skin is red, and examines the new glyphs written there by the blackjackals. Skyr, demon of the northern wastes. Vjok, demon of the khytlewinds. Xxo, demon of the aetherpools in Balakaskai. Several that Pokh never taught her—maybe he didn’t know them.
Maybe no one does.
With each glyph written on her skin, she loses a little of herself, and they get closer, closer to coming through her and out into this world. How many more would it take? Back in the alley, she didn’t feel like she could hold them off much longer.
She lifts up the amulet and studies it again. How does it work? She’s got no idea, but it’s amazing how much of a difference it makes. She can hear the birds muttering way back in her head, trying to get her attention, but they’re so quiet that she can almost pretend they’re not there.
She can live like this, she realizes.
If nothing else changes, if no one can help her, she can live with them way back there, in the back of her head, just whispering.
She sinks down into the water, up to her chin. She feels full and sleepy. If there were bubbles in the water, it would be like one of the public baths she went to as a child, with her mother.
Only right here, right now, this one is all hers.
What’s she going to do now? She needs a plan. She has to figure out how to get tokens, somehow. Navigate this huge ship, find out where Blackwell is and what sort of shape he’s in, figure out how to get them off of it. And then what? Find a high-end mage who can deal with the blackjackals and the featherwolves once and for all? She’ll need money for that. And if she can get rid of them?
She can’t even imagine what that’d be like.
But maybe she doesn’t need to figure all of this out tonight.
Maybe just this once she’ll try and stop thinking, turn off her own voice in her head along with the blackjackals and get some rest.
Maybe she’ll be a maid for awhile, clean the ship, and talk about boys.
She climbs out of the bath and dries herself. She’s pulling on the nightshift when she notices a scuffling noise from the other side of the bath. It’s been going on for some time, she thinks, now that she pays attention to it. She pads in bare feet to the far wall, and pokes her finger forcefully into a small hole there in the tile. From the other side of the wall comes a muffled screech, followed by a curse. She kneels down and put her own eye to the peep hole.
“Stop,” she says. “Or you’ll lose more than an eye next time.”
It’s dark behind the wall, so she can’t really see him. “That hurt!” Croah, the guy from the hold, says. “You dirty skeck!” He sounds more surprised than angry. “Shit. I think I’m bleeding!”
She knees down and looks into the hole. He’s got a hand over his eye. “Don’t cross me, Croah. I’m not the kind of person you want to mess with.”
“Well, shit. What’s all that stuff written all over you, anyway. You’re like, covered.”
“Secret messages from demons.”
“Really?”
“Maybe. Are there a lot of places like that in the ship?” She points.
“Like what. Peeping holes?”
“Passageways. Spy holes. Secret doors.”
Croah is quiet for a minute. “Maybe. Who wants to know?”
“I do.”
“Why should I show you? What’s in it for me.”
Kjat thought for a minute, and then sighs and raises the hem of the shift up her leg, exposing the glyphs there. “Maybe I could teach you how to read.”
He catches his breath. “I can completely help you with that,” he says quickly.
19: Blackwell
It’s either a dream or the afterlife, but if it’s the afterlife I can’t figure out why my firstfather has no head, why my secondfather has big, round Talovian eyes that he keeps polishing with a cloth he carries in a small black bucket full of brackish water, and why Al Capone is wearing a pais
ley skirt and smoking a huge khar pipe that’s bigger than he is.
The four of us sit around a burial urn, next to a Hulgliev burial well. The Twin Sisters, these giant carved heads from Tamaranth, are up in the sky like moons. My secondfather and I are eating small shellfish. We pop off the heads and sucked the juice from the small black bodies, and then throw the shells into the urn. My firstfather gestures that he’s hungry, but then Al says You got no head, beast. Somebody knocked your block off good. He laughs and blows smoke. My firstfather gives him the finger.
So how does it feel to be a father yourself, my secondfather asks me.
I’m not a father, I tell him. I didn’t know how I could be. But my firstfather gestures silently to the tall urn, and I stand up and look inside. Curled at the very bottom of it is a small brown dog, motionless, its one visible eye staring at nothing. The jaw is partially open, and a tiny tongue hangs loose. I shake my head. It’s not mine, I say, but then I know I’m wrong. It is my child somehow, this dog, and something has gone very wrong. In the dream, I feel the color drain from my fur. My secondfather’s Talovian eyes look sympathetically at me. My firstfather says nothing, but hands me a rose.
That’s it, says Al. That’s the ticket.
It’s a glowing, silver rose that has a bright red blossom on it cut from a single gemstone. It’s surprisingly heavy and full of aether, and I know I should recognize it somehow but I don’t.
My secondfather scrubs his eyes and then blinks at me. Now you are a man. Now you can say the blessing.
Now I can say the blessing, I agree, and with the rose in my hand some words come out of my mouth. I don’t know what language they’re in. The three of them nod approvingly, though, and then we all stand up and put the cap on the urn, and together we lower it into the well.
It’s extremely heavy for such a small dog and the rope begins to slip. The Twin Sisters spin in the air over our heads. I jump for the rim of the well, to catch the falling dog that is somehow my child, but I’m too late. I slip over the edge myself and sprout wings, but they aren’t large enough to hold my weight. The urn falls away from me into the dark.
The awful sound of shattering clay jerks me awake.
I’m in a bed, a human bed. Is it still a dream? It’s even got sheets on it. I’ll be honest—beds seem strange to me. Off the ground on some awkward, raised platform on stilts? Don't you fall off? And if you’ve got a blanket or something, why do you need another sheet?
This bed is thick and deep, though, and warm like a dirtnest. I guess I can deal with it, and as I lie there I realize I feel like dead wurf scat that’s been crumbling in the sun too long. My skin burns where the sheet is resting on it, even though someone or something has slathered me in some sort of gel. My muscles all ache, too, like I’ve fallen off a tower or been hit with a tree.
The canopy above me is embroidered with a hundred birds.
Herons, actually—herons drinking from fountains, herons in flight, herons with necks entwined, herons mating in a flurry of white feathers, herons pulling fish from small golden pools. On the sheet over me is printed a single white heron with its wings outstretched, and the walls are also emblazoned with herons and other birds and carvings of feathers.
It’s an Akarii room, that much is pretty clear.
Colored globes filled with mage fire are suspended from a low, polished ceiling, and they sway with an easy rhythm. A carpet with geometric patterns lines the floor. An elegant wooden table and leather chair (embossed with, you guessed it, herons) sit close to the larger of two doors.
I lie there for awhile. There’s a deep thrumming sound that I can feel in my gut. Engines, maybe? But I don’t feel any motion of rising and falling like I’d expect on a ship at sea. A gull crosses the view of a small porthole in the wall opposite the door, though.
I could get up and look out, but I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.
I’m not sensing any aether.
That’s strange, since it’s clearly in the lights hanging from the ceiling. And those engines are probably running on something, and I should be able to sense them from here.
I reach out, but there’s a blankness in my mind that’s a little frightening. Did they burn it out of me?
Lasser’s Prick, I’m sore.
There’s food on the table, a fancy tray of meats, cheeses, fruits. There’s bottle of what I really hope is bourbon but probably isn’t, and a cup next to a teapot in the shape of, yes, a heron.
I’m starving, probably literally, so I sit up slowly and groan. I swing my legs around to the floor with effort.
There’s a tightness at my throat.
The heron blanket falls away. I’m naked, and beat to hell. I’m charred significantly in several places, and a lot of my hair is burned away. Whatever the gel is, it looks like it’s probably helping. I hope it’s not alive. If my fur grows back, I’ll have a lot of white patches for awhile until it gets thick enough to pigment.
The tightness at my throat is some sort of collar, a thin band of some metal. I slip a finger underneath it and pull, but it’s not going anywhere.
Wonderful. Now I'm a pet.
I pull myself to my feet, groaning again with the effort, and then sit down again, hard. I push up again, struggle with my balance. I must have been out for awhile. I shuffle my way over to the table.
I inhale the meat, which is marinated, and eat some of the cheese. Smells bad, tastes ok. The fruits are things I’d never see in Tamaranth: meermeer and mango, kiwi and some sort of plum. The bottle is just water, and that goes down fast. I pour green tea into the tiny cup and drink it down in one gulp, realizing only after that the strainer on the side of the pot would have kept all of those leaves out of my teeth.
Behind the smaller of the doors is apparently my personal bathroom. The walls look like they’ve been lined with porcelain or something similar, and when the door closes behind me it looks watertight. There are showerheads attached to the wall inside a glass cubicle for water, dirt, and a series of nozzles that look equipped for a gaseous wash, probably for a Kruk. A small but deep stone tub takes up the other corner, a human toilet is tucked next to it, and in between are a strange variety of devices that I can’t make much sense out of: three suction hoses of varying lengths, two wall sconces filed alternately with water and some sort of green gelatinous substance, a tall, narrow spike with padding all along its upper end, that rises somewhat ominously from the floor and turns slowly when I stand next to it. There were three handles attached to straps from the ceiling over a shiny silver globe that stands as high as my knees. Out of curiosity, I press one of the seven buttons that are spaced evenly around the top of the globe and a circular hatch springs open and a loud grinding noise makes me jump and press the buttons again in fast succession to try and make it stop. It doesn’t. The grinding continued, and the globe begins to sweat a red jelly that smells like mold, and then it begins to glow very hot and bright. The room quickly filled with the stench of the jelly that scorches on the globe and then it oozed out into a growing puddle on the floor. What hair I’ve got left stands up on my neck ridges in alarm, and I grab a towel and hold it over my nose. Cursing, I pull a spray nozzle from the wall and wash down the globe with water that quickly turns to a pink steam.
Somewhere, finally, a fan comes on when I hit the right button. It pulls the smell, and most of the smoke and steam out of the room, and another button collapses the hot sphere back into itself and drained the whole mess down into the floor.
I sigh, spray more water, and let it drain.
I now know more, and somehow a lot less, about non-Hulgliev anatomy. I wash off in the fine-grained dirtwash and hold my head under the spray for a long time.
Did Kjat make it out of the port, I wonder? Did Mircada and the other Kerul? Were they hiding in the hills now, or holed up now in some dark cellar? Maybe on some ship bound for the Choroleos after all.
And then there’s Capone, who will be wondering when I’m getting back to the d
rop point with that ship. I’m not sure what his people on this side of the corpse roads will do when I don’t show up.
I can guess, though. I don’t think I’m going to like it.
I shake myself off. I’m wondering, too, about what Kjat did in that warehouse. It might look like just another trick to you, if you’re not used to how aether works. But I’d never seen anything like it. That wasn’t manipulating aether.
That was like she was opening up a hole in the world.
Frankly, it scares me.
Back in the room, I look around for clothes but don’t find any. I wrap myself in the large heron sheet, and check the door. It’s surprisingly unlocked.
Out in the hall is an older human male. He's dressed in an Akarii uniform of elaborate white strips of cloth that are wrapped and tied about his torso and limbs in a series of loops and bundles and knots that I guess must tell something of his rank and status in the Akarii Family if you know how to read these things. A skullcap of fine silver mesh covers his forehead and stretched back to the top of the neck, and his thick topknot of greying red hair sticks up through it. The man’s long sideburns are combed and oiled—they stretch back and cover his ears, coming together at the base of the neck in a small braid. Another strap of white cloth holds a knife in a ceremonial scabbard on the man’s chest.
If he’s a guard, he’s not a very good one. He’s leaning back into the wall and snoring quietly to himself.
I close the door and think about this for a minute. I open it again. I reach out and tap the guy on the shoulder. The guy jumps and his eyes startle open. The skullcap falls to the floor revealing a shaved head underneath it, and he bends down, grabs it, and places it back around his topknot. His face has the crimson glow of a blush as he turns to me.
“Khalee,” he says, bowing head and shoulders carefully. “My deepest apologies.”
I clear my throat. “Are you my guard?”
“Your guard?” He grins, though he tries to hide it. “Khalee, I’m your servant, if it pleases you. For the length of your stay.” His eyes are different colors—one of them brown, one of them blue. I didn’t know Humans could pigment that way.
