Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  Soon enough his blood covered his hands, soaked his leathers already darkened with his sweat. He could not speak for breathing. She exploited a weak guard and hit his sword so hard and suddenly that it dropped out of his slick hand, landing outside the circle.

  “Pick it up, Connas’q.”

  He stared at it dumbly, exhausted, before putting his hands to his knees to catch his breath.

  “Step outside the circle and pick it up.” Laun was breathing hard herself now, but she shone with sweat and triumph, at being able to answer this question she asked of herself.

  He spat, but it too was weak, most of it falling back on his chin, hanging over his throat.

  She looked at me and nodded. I raised my bow and put an arrow in his hip. I stepped forward and notched another arrow. He fell to his knees. These men were old, yet their past glories left them undiminished in their own minds. I put the arrow through his leg. He panted, unable to raise enough air in his chest to scream. I notched another arrow, gave myself a few more moments of his suffering. He stared at me then, the same way I remembered his stare in my father’s palace. He was lying in the banqueting hall at dawn with the others, his hand rubbing his whore’s breast as he watched me passing through, a thoughtful, absent look, as though this moment was beneath him.

  The final arrow went through his head. I shouldered my bow, walked over to Laun and embraced her, kissing the sweat from her cheeks.

  A subsequent letter to her brother, describing her continuing search for the Twenty.

  Written 669 OE

  Dear brother,

  I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to receive your messenger, and to hear more of how your daughter is growing. I cannot wait to meet her, I’m sure as well she is not half the terror I was to our servants and our father.

  Things are going very well for us. Marschal Laun has become most precious to me, a resourceful and capable commander. With her crew and the resources of the Post we have managed to find more of Kailen’s Twenty. Three are dead, with two more captured, Shale and Gant, and Kailen himself discovered in Hevendor. We have arrived here at a place called the Crag, intending to trap him. He is holed up in some slum. It makes little sense to me why he would be in a slum but we know it’s him.

  I had written previously of our killing Connas’q and Digs. The latest of the Twenty to die was Sho. I recall at least, as you may also do, his scimitars, how he used to slice the thinnest parchment with them as though he were wielding a razor. I killed him myself but there was one aspect of our execution of Sho that I found both unexpected and troubling, as you’ll see. I would have your thoughts on it.

  We had tracked Sho to the Virates, a place called Iltrick, the worst part of which was a warren of ratty subterranean runs they called the Burial Chambers deep in Povey’s Valley, cut down into the rock, dug to escape the sun of that desert-like Virate. Laun, Syle and poor Kolm, who didn’t make it out of there, had received their direction from the Post’s local Reeve, a man who was damp in every sense of the word. “Sword” Sho, as you might remember he liked to be called, was spending his purse in a khaat cooker’s joint. Khaat was a big import into Iltrick, according to my husband, and it helped to further impoverish a lot of already useless men, chewing and mumbling their grievances and hopes, getting nowhere.

  Despite his bulk and his uneasy shuffle from the door to the back of the alley where we waited, Sho still wore those two preposterous scimitars, stuck out from his belt at his hips like large silver feathers. We were in three nearby doorways, on the verge of entering the joint to get him out on a pretext. His appearance was a magist’s blessing. He shook his head as he planted his hand on the wall for balance and fumbled about for his cock. His head slowly lolled forward and he almost fell asleep as he pissed against the wall.

  Kolm drew a knife and stepped forward. I shook my head. A killing this easy I would do myself. As I drew my own knife and stepped out I instinctively glanced down the alley, only twenty yards till it forked away out of sight. At the fork stood a masked figure, cotton vest, loose leggings and a fieldbelt. He had paid the colour, the whites of his eyes standing out from a face mottled with colours too hard to make out in the half-light. I heard the stream of piss weaken and Sho mumble. I knew immediately that somehow this man was also here for him. I stepped forward, held my breath and stabbed Sho in the back of the neck, clean into his windpipe as Laun had showed me. Sho trembled briefly, but was gone in a moment, dropping to the ground.

  “Move!” said Kolm, drawing his sword. The figure was running towards us. Laun threw a sporebag at him, I threw another at the ground between us and as I did Kolm grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. “Get her out of here!”

  I turned and ran, Laun ahead of me, following the route we’d agreed should something go wrong. They were Agents for a reason. The chambers were a maze of passages surrounded high on all sides by the buildings made from the stone the passages were cut through. We wove or pushed through the people who were out; families eating, cooking and shouting in and out of their doorways, beggars playing flutes, gangs of boys looking for opportunities and weakness. We ran up steps at the side of one of the houses, carved out to give access to the upper floors, and jumped from there to a nearby roof. Laun signed for me to flatten myself to the roof while she crouched and looked over.

  “Stay here,” she whispered, “I’m going to alert the Reds back at the square and come back for Kolm. Don’t move until daylight, unless I return first.” She slid off the roof and was gone.

  I looked over from the roof I was on to the window of a room overlooking me, a candle somewhere inside offering a dull, wavering light and from it the sound of a woman singing to a child a rhyme of some sort. I did not understand the language, though parts of it were just notes her voice made. It cut through the echoing chatter of the people moving through the alleys below, cut through my trembling as I came to terms with the kill, and whatever story was being sung had moments of triumph and despair in it. I’ve longed ever since to know what she sang, for my own snatches of the tune were unfamiliar to anyone I’ve since met.

  Then I heard shouting, a few alleys over, someone screaming and a commotion going up. The militia announced themselves, and there was a swell of noise as people in the buildings around us heard the shouting and gathered up to go and look after their own. This was a place of the desperately poor, and I knew well the law held scant respect for them.

  A while later, the excitement of whatever had gone on gave way to the increasingly drunk or cooked soaks. Laun then leaped the gap to my roof. She startled me, and shushed me as I fumbled for my dagger. She was out of breath, wheezing, and she fell to her knees. She gestured weakly to her face and belt. Then she looked up, and I saw her cheeks and forehead were lumpy with white blisters, her eyes swollen.

  “Fulva, pressed arnica.” I knew what was needed; both to be mixed in water, making a jelly, which I rubbed into her face and neck. She was in some pain, her skin never fully recovering, despite the quality of plant we carried. We sat on that roof in silence for the better part of an hour while the mix soothed and drained out the blisters.

  “Kolm’s dead, four of the other Reds too. Even risen on plant we were nothing to him. If it weren’t for one of his bags hitting a little girl that happened to run out of her door between us, we’d all be dead. A few of those nearby saw it happen and went for him. Five of us turned to fifteen in moments when she fell down screaming. Poor child, her own brother it must have been that ran her through to stop her agony. But he killed them all as easy as breathing, and the bag he put down sent most people back into their houses. Then some others started throwing stones and whatever else they could find at him, from windows above, and the militia heard it and joined. I tried to put a few darts into him but he dodged them, as quick to us on our brew as we are to those not on any brew at all. I gave chase, for I knew then that Kolm must have been killed, but there were too many, and I think, well, I think I would not have stood much of a chance against him
, sword to sword.”

  “Why was he here? Why after Sho?” I asked her. I put more of the powdered arnica into an alka cream and worked it into her wounds as she kneeled.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Below is an account Galathia gave me of the assault on The Riddle, the tavern where she believed Kailen himself was hiding out, at a place called the Crag.

  Goran

  I was with Laun in the slums at the Crag. Though I was paying her to do my bidding, she, with the command of seven Agents, had no qualms about disagreeing with me.

  “Syle and Faré have not reported in. I’m concerned that our mystery assassin is here now, intent on killing Kailen. We barely escaped in Iltrick, this is much too dangerous for you to come in on.”

  “You’ve trained me for over a year, Laun, the gangers don’t have the plant or the poisons to trouble us and I can control the brew. I have to see him. You have the command, I just want to help.”

  She looked down at the stone floor, conceding to me. “I must leave. The Crag militia’s captain is going to get us all killed if I leave him in charge of his men. Those gangers, the whole Quarter, have been attacking militia and Reds on sight. If you come in with us, you will not engage anyone on a fightbrew. If you do I will knock you out myself.”

  “You worry unnecessarily, Laun, I have no intention of dying just yet, and certainly not in a slum.”

  She gave me the merest hint of a bow and left.

  I picked at the spiced lamb on the table before me. I was nervous, though such nerves would vanish once the fightbrew got hold of me. I looked at the backs of my hands. My skin was no longer the white of my people, but grey, the once blue veins darkened by the training brews I’d been given recently.

  The first time I paid the colour, my very first training brew, I finally understood why soldiers taunted each other so little, why among their ranks there was a commonhood, an intimacy that those of us more used to ordering them around than living with them could not possibly understand.

  Laun and her letnant, Letnant Syle, had washed me and cleaned me as my belly burned and I lost control over my movements that first time I drank a brew. I was fearful of their mocking me, that their initiation had gone the better for their being soldiers. I feared also being naked with them, particularly the men, but as I drowned in the fever and shook myself to pieces Syle sang to me as my own mother or father never did.

  “Galathia of Filston?” Someone at the door, a knock.

  “Yes.”

  A boy entered, no more than ten or eleven summers, a limp and a way about him that told me his life was spent trying not to be noticed.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I’m to give you this.” He held out the letter, trembling and frowning at the floor, as though I was making his duty more difficult for asking questions. In the moments I took trying to catch his eye he dropped the letter on the table, desperate to be rid of it.

  “I should give you some pennies. What do you think?”

  He raised an eyebrow enough to glance at my boots, my legs crossed before him as I sat on the dining chair. A whipped dog might at least have wagged its tail.

  “A copper sixpence.” I rolled it along the table. He bowed, a short bob he must have been told to do for the woman that was once a princess. It looked like a spasm.

  “Take some lamb, eat it before you get outside.” This got more of a response, his eyes locked onto the plate as I slid it over. He pushed pieces into his mouth rapidly, a frenzied breathing through his nose as he crammed it down. I got another bob, his eyes tearful with the sudden pleasure. He shuffled out, curving inwards on himself. I recalled how it felt, that greasy hot rabbit meat that the old hunter gave me when he found me near dead, whispering what I thought were my last curses in the world, all those winters ago.

  I picked up the note. “Shale Gant secure.”

  Good. Three more of the Twenty taken care of, once Kailen is beaten.

  The sum he paid the Indra Quarter Crew must have been staggering, for they were dying rather than giving him up. Reeve of the Post Infis Kulam, the Post’s chief administrator here at the Crag, waved away our concern over some regrettably over-cooked horsemeat. He knew the “scapos”, as they called those who ran the gangs here; had favours to call in.

  “This time tomorrow evening, we will be dining with the four scapos who run the slums. One of them has this Kailen. Your generosity could not be ignored even by men far more powerful and wealthy than these… brutes.”

  The following evening we dined alone, the slight to this Reeve making him an insufferable host.

  Kailen had used the Post to put messages out across the Old Kingdoms and no doubt he had also seen the posters my husband had put out along the Eastern Sar coast, offering a rich reward for news of Kailen’s Twenty. Kailen had also been looking for his old crew, and our contacts within the Post had alerted us. Alon, my husband, responded, saying we had information and that we would meet him here. I quietly expected that Kailen would introduce himself before long. Alon made sure his visit to the Crag was known, for it was him to which all contact would be directed.

  The reason why the scapos did not show that night became clearer in the subsequent days, however. On the night we dined with the Reeve, two of the gangs lost some of their senior members. The following night all four main gangs lost men. While the Reeve’s delight was obvious, I despaired. Laun and I were convinced that this was the assassin.

  Then the Reeve lost an officer and three of his Reds. All were in the slums at his behest, looking to bring the scapos to heel. Of course, the Post looks after its own, and Reds came in from the Post Houses in the surrounding districts looking to help find the killer. The Reeve leaned on the Crag’s Master Cleark as well, to ensure its militia focused on this.

  So, the Reds and the militia started cracking heads together until the Slums clammed up and shut down.

  Finally, yesterday, with the family of Scapo Darin in the cruel hands of the Crag’s Master Drudha, along with two of his captains, he told us the Indra Quarter Crew had Kailen, holed up at a tavern called The Riddle, widely known to be where Scapo Ostler, head of the Indra Crew, held court.

  This was at the back of the slums. The Reeve and Laun were pleased, as the Indra Crew’s district backed onto the walls, and was cut off by the Alnar River east. Only two ways out.

  The one captain of the Indras we managed to catch watched his woman die, before himself dying under torture without saying a word. Good torturers are harder to come by than one would think.

  The Reds and the militia, however, saw a chance to strengthen their hand, if they could clean out the Indras and get a more amenable scapo in there. But I have seen how men and women fight when their children are threatened. The quarter was silent now, the other gangs leaving them to their fate. Soon we would go in, a hundred at least, to kill or clean them out until they gave Kailen up.

  I checked over my belt again: waxes, pastes, leaves, sporebags, limebags, caltrops, powders, guni sticks and a knife greasy with poison; a fat, short blade given me by a man called Nielus. His gift had saved my life as a girl.

  Laun returned then, Midgie with her.

  “We found Syle and Faré. Beheaded, stripped bare and shit on,” said Laun. She was breathing hard, determined to control herself in the face of our engagement at hand. “There’s something wrong here, because together, there’s nobody outside my crew in the Crag that could lay a hand on them.”

  Midgie, the only other woman left in her crew with Syle gone, had been crying. She wouldn’t look at me. She’d always wanted to be tougher, unmoved and calm no matter what. She’ll learn.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I had come to know them too, I was shocked, but before I could make a gesture to comfort Laun she had somehow changed, and held me firm with a stare that I could not read, either an accusation (for this was my purse) or a grim resolve.

  “It’s time,” she said.

  I undressed. Laun a
nd Midgie helped me with the cotton shirt and leggings from a satchel where they had been folded through with sheets of cork pregnant with alka, the cotton damp with it, to resist the spread of poison from any cuts that got through the leathers I would wear over them. As she prepared me, Laun whispered the plan to herself over and over.

  She led us, the rest of her crew and the fifteen or so militia that her drudha had brewed up out of the inn I had kept us at, and up to the wareshouses on the eastern edge of the Indra Quarter. We gathered at the back of one of the large sheds and waited for the signal to go from our spotter squatting on a roof ahead of us. He was waiting for the other Reds and militia to start their own assault from the far side of the Indra Quarter. Within a few minutes he signed for us to move.

  The rest of the Post would be moving in from the west slums to the Indra Quarter, intending to use the force of numbers to get into the Linney Lanes, a warren of hovels famous in decades past for being the birthplace of two scapos of old. Our group would move in from the east, through the dockside wareshouses, towards The Riddle, the tavern at the heart of the Indra Quarter where the Quarter’s scapo had his hideout and where Kailen was likely to be hiding himself. There were a handful of us, so any spotters for the scapo’s crew wouldn’t see a pincer.

  We ran fast and quiet like a pack of wolves, putting a fright on any that saw us as we flew through the wagons and the few dock workers oblivious to what was about to happen. I understand how one might get addicted to this, to the brews, the jeopardy.