Needle Rain

by Cari Silverwood

  If he watched the ships, he might gather clues about where the Sungese ship had gone.

  The first thing he’d done was to remove the metal struts from his arms using a stolen knife, The cuts were healing if lumpy. He looked like someone prone to injury. On a dock like this, knife fights would be a part of life when the workers had a drunken night out.

  Hunger came and went, scraping and pulsing at him from the inside until his stomach hurt. It became unbearable. He waded into the water, waiting, waiting. The water stilled and, at the first flicker of scale and fin, he lashed out. The fish thrashed in his hands but once he sank his teeth into its back the struggles lessened to mere quivers. Small bones popped and crunched. He swallowed and sighed with pleasure. Warm blood and salty juices ran down his chin into his new thin beard.

  Another bite. He stopped in mid-chew.

  Goggled-eyed, the children on the bank stared at him. He smiled past the fish, past his teeth in the fish. The children scrambled backward along the bank toward the sunlit area. Only one remained, white-faced and seemingly glued to the mud. Samos frowned and lowered the fish. So be it. If the gods were with him, the children wouldn’t tell their parents.

  The white-faced child – a young boy with spiky brown hair, eight or nine years of age, maybe – gulped and whispered, “I’m sorry.” His face quivered.

  Sorry? What did...

  “Wait.” Samos knelt, smiling. “Don’t be frightened. Wait.” He glanced downward. All the bigger fish had gone. Swiftly he scooped up three tiddlers from the shallows at his feet then tossed them wriggling into the air, and round and round – juggling the squirming fish in a small circle and doing his best to smile.

  The boy giggled and grinned. “Look!” With that the others crept closer again then two squeezed past, laughing, trying to get to the front. Soon they were gathered round him pointing and amazed.

  Samos watched the boy past the whirling circle of fish, wondering – would his child be like this – all clumsiness and innocence and beauty? He let the fish tumble gently into one palm and knelt, cupping his hands and holding them out. The boy gingerly took the fish as they slid across to him. After a moment of rapt contemplation, he opened his fingers and let the tiddlers slip through to plop one by one back into the water, where they flipped their little tails and disappeared seaward.

  When the children finally waved and went homeward, the loneliness stayed away for a long time.

  Just past sunset, a boat anchored at the end of the pier. The thump and scrape, on the timbers above, signaled the unloading of fish. In the flaring light of lanterns, he saw the name, Windcatcher. It was the boat Pela had suggested. He emerged from his hiding place and half-climbed the ladder to check for anyone suspicious. Hands in pockets, he strolled to the boat, making sure each movement was as “un-immolator-like” as he could make it, then he boarded and ducked through the hatch, going down into the under-deck.

  Pela was there, sitting at a table, with a scarf around her neck, accompanying her was her father Tarlos, her mother, Vera, and three men of the clan.

  He opened his mouth to say his speech of carefully considered words.

  The sorrow in Pela’s eyes rocked him, erasing his words.

  So instead he knelt, his knees thumping onto the floorboards, and he bowed his head. “I am sorry.” Then he waited, looking no farther than the feet of those before him.

  The silence stretched.

  “Father, please!” Pela cried.

  “Oh, all right, girl! Samos.” Tarlos sighed. “What are you sorry for?”

  He kept his head down. “For putting Pela’s life in danger. You have every right to turn your back on me for that, and I know it. If you do this, I beg you to help her raise our child as well as can be done. I will give you a letter stating that she is to have all of my possessions, if you think that will help.”

  “Truly?” Tarlos sounded pleased then his voice hardened. “I wonder how much the enforcers will give to the family of a traitor?”

  “Father!”

  “Pela! This is men’s business!”

  “Pah!” Pela fell to her knees in front of Samos, put her hands under his chin and kissed him several times. “Oh, Samos, you saved my life. Stop being stupid!”

  “Ay-yay-yay! Girl, he is a traitor! The enforcers, the Immolators, hells above and below, even the Imperator will be after him. We risk all just by speaking to him!”

  With Pela’s soft lips on his own it was difficult to concentrate, but it was true. He’d let emotion blind him. This meeting was pointless. He stood and gently pulled Pela to her feet.

  “Then there is no more to be said.” The men’s faces were taut and pitiless. Vera looked from her daughter to him with sad acceptance in her eyes. “I will go. Here.” He tossed the letter he’d written into Tarlos’s lap. “You never know, they may give it to you. Farewell.”

  “No! You are all being stupid and stubborn, and...and, manly!” Pela wrenched away from him, the skirt of her dress flaring. “My child will have a father!”

  “No. Look.” His voice had shook and he paused. Perhaps no one had noticed that sign of weakness. He undid the clasp at his neck to let his cloak slide to the floor. “This is me.” He raised his arms, letting the lantern light glint off the golden heads of the needles protruding from his arms. Jewelry to die for. “I can’t remove them and they mark me as an Immolator. I cannot hide for long like this. I cannot! And my life is ebbing faster than I care to think about.”

  Pela began to sob quietly.

  Gravely, Tarlos nodded. “You are a courageous man and I would have been proud to call you my son.” He rubbed his stubbled chin. “If only you weren’t so stupid.”

  Samos’s smile was mirthless. “Yes. I agree.”

  “You can write.”

  The statement was so unexpected and made in such a quiet voice that it took a moment before he realized who had spoken. “Vera? I can write, yes. I may as well have discovered how to do embroidery.”

  Vera lifted her head. Sitting between Tarlos and the other man, she was a tiny figure. Though her face was lined from old age and the years she had spent in the sun, the dark bun of glossy hair and the fineness of the bones of her hands hinted at Pela’s own beauty.

  “Embroidery has its uses.” For a few seconds, she put her hands together, the fingertips at her mouth. “You can write. It’s clear you can think better than our old Samos. Use it. How can you free yourself of the needles, clear your name or...or something?” She measured out the words like drops of blood. “Is there any way? Any answer at all?”

  He blinked at her. Slow to respond at first, his thoughts spun ahead of him. “I could go to Sungea...If they have the memory worm, they could do it, they might do it, or they might kill me. Most likely they’d kill me. It wouldn’t be worth the risk to them.”

  “What else, Samos?” whispered Pela.

  He looked at her. “I could find a rogue Trinketologist to remove the needles, but the only one who knows how is Thom Drager. Don’t think I’d trust him. And...” He took a deep breath. “...I could somehow get back into the good graces of the Imperator, get a pardon –” He held out his hands palms upward and shook his head. “That’s it.”

  Pela straightened, extended her arm, and poked her finger, hard, into his chest. “Then do it. Do it, Samos. For I won’t raise this child by myself unless you’ve tried everything. Hear me? Everything!”

  “Shh.” He gathered her to him, whispering soft words of comfort, looking at Tarlos over the top of her head and raising his eyebrows. Tarlos had remained silent throughout. He held Samos’s gaze then he nodded ever so slightly, as if to say: “Do it, if you can.”

  It was a hope, a chance, at least. He breathed in the warm, soft fragrance of Pela, knowing it might be the last time they would embrace. She was right. It was worth it. He must try at the very least.

  ****

  The first thing he must do was the most painful and the one fraught with the most immediate danger. He co
uldn’t continue to slink around the harbor with the golden needles sticking out where anyone might see them if his clothing slipped. They had to go and yet he could not remove them – after all, that was the reason he was in this predicament. The best he could do was half-way. He’d cut them off below the skin.

  The hours after he stepped off the boat were long and lonely ones. With night fallen, the richer warehouses and ships stood out in the bright blue or white glare of trink lights. The gentle amber glow of oil-fed lanterns enveloped the less respectable places, like the odd tavern and the fishing trawlers. If he avoided all of these and kept to the shadows, he could walk about without being remarked on.

  It was hard to slow his muscles. They thrummed with this new energy. With each step he took, he found himself calculating – the thrust of leg needed to reach a spot yards ahead on the ground, or to the top of a pile of boxes, or to a roof edge.

  No. He must be slow. A human walked like this. He slumped his shoulders and trudged. Yes, that was it.

  The distant laughter and cheering, or the occasional yell of anger or camaraderie, surrounded him with a humanity he could not touch. He was other than human, an outsider, or so it felt. That Pela could still find something in him worth waiting for astounded him. Yet it was so. He loved her the more because of this. The past was gone. He would not, must not, disappoint her.

  As the witching hour drew close, groups of drunken sailors took rowdy and meandering routes back to their ships. The sober ones were more predictable. Samos found refuge in a deserted dock worker’s hut full of stores near a newly-built warehouse.

  The morning sun woke him by dancing light upon his eyelids. He squinted. Speckled shafts of gold filtered through the rear wax-paper windows. He rolled off his bed of hessian sacks and stretched his arms until the joints cracked. The sharp tang of sea salt lent a freshness to the day.

  A new day. A time for things to be done. Hunger prodded him. He’d never been so hungry as he’d been during these past few days.

  He hauled out a sack carefully hoarded from last night. Potatoes, four skinny fish caught under a jetty, a news-sheet paper wrapped around the leavings of a fish and fritter meal. His mouth filled with saliva. He could gulp all that food down in seconds. He made himself sit and eat slowly then wiped the grease from his beard. Water might be more of a problem than food. This close to the sea, wells would be brackish. He’d have to see what he could find and keep a bucket here, as well as a drinking flask.

  His hair, including the beard, had grown inches overnight. Perhaps a good disguise? Yes, it could stay. He’d trim it as neat as he could with a knife.

  To business. Two seagulls perched on a packing case, watching him through the half-open door with great curiosity. Their heads tilted from one side to the other. He took out the metal snippers he’d found and laid his arm on top of a pile of timber bollards. There was no point in messing things up and redoing it over and over. He focused on the first needle at his wrist, willed his heart to calmness and wiggled the point of the snippers below his skin, opened the tips a bit and snapped them shut. The pain each time was as bad as the night he’d reinforced his arms – worse, as the flesh around each needle was overly sensitive.

  At the end he surveyed his handiwork, rolling his limbs in the ray of sunlight coming through the door to check. Arms, legs and stomach were good. The ones on his back and temples he could only judge by feel. No gobbets of flesh missing to betray the fact that needles were still beneath the surface.

  He’d lost some blood but it was nothing compared to the loss he felt knowing the Sungese ship sailed further away with each passing moment; that bled him dry and pulled at his soul. And if they could escape the whole Imperial navy, how was he to catch them? How was he to do this? It seemed impossible.

  Enough. It did no good to drag out his fears and roll in their stink.

  It would be two days before the pattern of those wounds would be faded enough for him to pass as a normal man in the cramped quarters of a ship. He must spend those hours learning.

  As the first day wore on Samos pulled on hooded coat and long pants and wandered onto the wharf, pretending to doze drunkenly in the shade whenever he found a likely group. Quartermaster’s, sea clerks, stewards, dockworkers and sailors – all were fair game. If he swigged at a bottle a few times and walked with a list, they ignored him. It was a risk but he desperately needed information.

  A young boy, barely in his teens, started to dog his footsteps. Perhaps one of those from under the jetty? He stayed a few yards away – a distance that apparently satisfied his curiosity while far enough away to be safe. Samos didn’t discourage him – a drunk wouldn’t have bothered. When he sat in the gloom under a jetty and ate a paltry lunch of the tiny blue-back crabs and some stale bread, the boy squatted nearby. His greasy mop of hair was mud-colored and his skin almost the same due to smears of dirt. His clear gray eyes tracked every movement of food.

  Samos hesitated. The boy smelled of cooked fish and worse things. “Here!” he said and tossed over two of the crushed and raw crabs only for the boy to shake his head and throw them back.

  The boy smiled – his teeth were uneven, his face and limbs gaunt, yet he pulled a brown paper package from beneath his grimy shirt and unwrapped it to reveal a piece of battered fish.

  “Holy...” Samos found his mouth flooding with drool. He swallowed.

  The boy carefully broke the fish into two pieces and offered the smaller one to Samos.

  “Oh. No. I couldn’t. I’ve got enough.”

  With that the boy edged over and laid the slice of fish across Samos’s hand.

  “Um.” Samos looked at it. The eagerness in the boy’s face decided him. “Thank you.”

  They sat side by side eating for a while.

  “Are you...” His voice surprised Samos – it was deep and rumbling with early maturity. “I mean...you’re him, aren’t you?”

  What was he hinting at? Samos’ heart beat faster. “Who?”

  “The Immolator.” Only innocence shone from the boy’s eyes.

  He glanced sharply. “You should be off with the other kids.”

  “They don’t like me.”

  “Oh? Then do something else. Instead of pestering me.” If he let this almost-child go, would he talk? He couldn’t kill a child, no matter what. “Go have a bath. You stink.”

  Immediately the boy rose and hauled a pile of stuff from his pockets. “Could you hold this?” Dumbfounded, Samos found his lap cluttered with a penknife, a lopsided ball of string, two shiny round fennigs – the smallest of the copper coins, and an onyx pendant of a fat fish. Then the boy waded out a few feet until he was at knee depth and splashed and scrubbed his arms.

  “Don’ you lose the fish stone,” the boy yelled. “It was my da’s!”

  Stunned, Samos sat there holding the meager possessions, feeling as if he’d just committed the worst of crimes and yet warm with the trust implied. Were they all this boy owned? What in the hells was going on this child’s head?

  His name was Joss. He had no relatives, none living anyway, and definitely no kin among the fisher folk or the dock workers. Samos couldn’t figure out why he was scrounging about the docks but whatever the reason, he became Samos’s shadow. Joss followed him most of the time, sometimes he gave advice on places to forage or people he knew. Sometimes he spoke nonsense.

  The boy was simple in the head, Samos decided, but harmless as long as he spoke about Immolators to no one else.

  He couldn’t watch the boy forever, though he tried for a while. Nobody seemed inclined to chat to the boy. Briefly, sadness tugged at him. He sighed. Life was a risk.

  With that thought, Samos went back to his task. He roamed in broad arcs around any guards – and there were a few of them patrolling in pairs. None made as if to stop him after he smeared the putrid remains of some rotting creature on his boots.

  Once he had to duck away quickly and pretend to retch into the sea and not because of his boots. A tall woman
in matching red leather cuirass, leggings and boots strode past. Her bob of gleaming hair was also brilliant red – dyed, he guessed. An entourage of four men followed closely. One, from the elegant speed of his movements, was an Immolator. A quick inspection told him the woman was an Imperial Investigator. Flowing from her shoulders was a silken black cloak embroidered with the Investigator’s symbol: a liger above a gold eye.

  The five of them briskly boarded a rakish three-masted ship, the Freespear, that looked as if it had seen days as a corsair. A burnished gold strip ran from stern to bow, after which the strip flared out and extended forward into a ram that cut the sea at waterline height. Scouring the hull of barnacles were several frypan-sized muckers – the crab-like cleaning trinkettons. Midships, a dockyard crane swung boxes of supplies aboard.

  He knew the woman from reputation. Tatiana Ironheart – a flamboyant name to match her attire. There were rumors that she was a man-eater and in debt to the Imperator over some past favor. But the most flamboyant thing about her was not her clothes – she had a trinketton heart.

  How repulsive to have inside you a contraption created of metal and the gods alone knew what else. Unnatural. Cold wormed inside his belly.

  This woman, investigator or not, was best avoided entirely. He’d keep a sharp eye out for her and her Immolator.

  Samos went back to prowling the docks in search of interesting conversations. The last had been from some men spending their lunch hour playing Round the Deck.

  A group of dockworkers proved to be as loquacious as old women gabbing about a piece of family gossip. The Night of the Debt Collectors was a hotly chewed-over topic, second only to what Luscious Lana at the Brewed Barnacle was doing on her days off.

  He settled in to listen.

  “Hsst!”