Had he simply strolled down the alley, the whore and her mark would have left him alone, and perhaps Mandalax’s gang would have too. Not that either of the adults, plying that particular trade in that particular neighborhood at that time of night, would have lifted a finger to save his life. Still, a witness is a witness is a witness.
Pristoleph didn’t want to see the source of those two shadows. He knew what they were and what they were doing, but not who they were.
He didn’t think the woman was his mother. He’d heard her clearly enough to have recognized her voice if she was, but still….
Pristoleph hadn’t seen his mother in two years and hadn’t lived with her for three. People in the ragged clutch of rat-infested hovels they called a neighborhood had told him she was beautiful, but Pristoleph could only see the dirt. They told him she was good at what she did, but what she did disgusted him. He’d heard she used to be rich, but used to be didn’t pay the rent. What she’d paid the rent for the first nine years of his life with her was her body. When times were good, when the nights weren’t too hot and commerce made the Third Quarter jingle with coins, she grew pudgy, voluptuous. When times were hard, and the nights too sticky for thoughts of bodies intertwined, she grew slim.
Either way, Pristoleph’s own ribs showed through skin stretched tight across them. His elbows and knees bulged, and his eyes were sunken and sallow. He was hungry all the time, regardless of the men coming and going, and his mother coming and going. He never remembered he and his mother eating together.
Which isn’t to say there weren’t the occasional good memories, few and far between as they may have been. They had spent one particularly stormy night sharing a lump of moldy cheese and stories of djinn, laughing. It was that night that she told him why his skin was red, and why his orange-yellow hair swayed on his head out of sync with the breeze, sometimes jumping over his scalp like a flame. She told him he wasn’t entirely human. She told him about the beast of fire that had come to her in the guise of a man, cloaked in the illusion of a customer. Where she might have told him the details of that brief moment they’d shared, instead her eyes had grown distant with the memory of pain and degradation even someone who had grown accustomed to pain and degradation had trouble remembering.
His father, the fire elemental.
His father, the rapist.
His father, the monster.
My mother, he reminded himself, the whore.
Pristoleph continued on, sticking to the alley directly under the wall, moving from crate of garbage to overturned barrel to pile of rotting timber. When he came within sight of a beggar asleep next to a tiny, sputtering fire he’d built of rocks and pieces of broken brick in a circle on the muddy floor of the alley, Pristoleph stopped. Mandalax and his gang would have to come to him.
He crouched under a big wooden box that looked like some kind of fish or crab trap that had been left leaning against a stack of similar contraptions. Water that smelled of rotting fish and brine had collected in greasy puddles underneath them, and Pristoleph kneeled in the muck without a moment’s thought to the stink soaking into his ragged trousers.
The beggar wasn’t snoring. Pristoleph wasn’t sure the man was even breathing. The crackle of his little fire was the only sound. Pristoleph concentrated on that.
He had only a few minutes to wait, then the first boy appeared. He was a head shorter than Pristoleph, thinner, and he moved in the dim firelight without the confidence of darkvision. Pristoleph could see the short, thin blade in the boy’s hand: a paring knife probably stolen from the back door of one of the Fourth Quarter’s unsanitary dives.
Still, it was a big enough knife to open a vein.
The boy stepped closer to the fire, looking down at the beggar then scanning the darkness for Pristoleph. There was a scuffle of feet, a tin cup accidentally kicked across gravel, and a second boy appeared at the edge of the meager firelight. Taller, sturdier, the second boy put a hand on the first boy’s shoulder and whispered into his ear so quietly, Pristoleph couldn’t hear even a hiss.
The boy with the paring knife moved closer to the fire, and that made Pristoleph smile. He set his eyes, all his concentration on the tiny flame.
“Lumps,” the taller boy said. His voice, barely above a whisper, sounded obscenely loud in the pervasive silence. “You got him?”
Fingers wrapped themselves in the loose fabric of Pristoleph’s torn, soiled tunic in the middle of his back, and cold metal pressed against the skin over his right kidney.
“I got him,” the boy who’d grabbed him said, his voice dripping with self-satisfaction.
Pristoleph didn’t concern himself with the knife at his vitals. He spun as fast as he could, and that would just have to be fast enough. He threw his left elbow up and around behind him, catching Lumps in the temple hard enough to send a numbing shock through his own arm. Continuing his spin, Pristoleph punched the already stunned boy full in the face with a wild roundhouse. Lumps fell heavily onto his behind, his rusted kitchen knife whirling away to clatter noisily at the foot of the city wall.
The boy with the paring knife stepped into the firelight. His feet apart, he appeared ready to spring forward at Pristoleph. He took one step closer first, his bare toes touching one of the broken bricks that ringed the still-unconscious drunk’s makeshift campfire.
Pristoleph gave the little flame a glance, a sharp moment of his attention, and the fire flared to life. The nearly pitch dark alley flashed with yellow light and the boy with the paring knife fell back into his taller friend—and it was bright enough for Pristoleph to see both of them. The boy with the paring knife, blinking, was naked but for something that almost looked like a diaper. His skin was stained black with the soot of his victims’ chimneys. Startled by the burst of flame, he still hadn’t dropped the little knife.
The taller boy was cleaner, better dressed, and looked at Pristoleph with hatred.
“Mandalax,” Pristoleph said. “What do you—?”
Pristoleph stopped talking when he had to throw another elbow in the face of Lumps, who’d come at him again from behind. Lumps went down with a broken nose. Pristoleph could tell by the sound he made when he hit the ground that Lumps wouldn’t be getting up for a while.
“Kill that freak!” Mandalax shouted, and footsteps echoed from everywhere.
Pristoleph kicked hard behind him and took another boy, one who’d come running up from the darkness behind him, in the knee, There was a loud crack and the boy went down screaming.
The rest of the boys—Pristoleph still couldn’t tell how many—stopped short. They obviously weren’t prepared for a fight. They were weak. They knew it, and Pristoleph had been the one who was waiting for them.
“You and me, Mandalax,” he said.
The boy with the paring knife looked back over his shoulder and up at the gang leader. Mandalax, shaking, trembling, took a step back.
Pristoleph smiled.
The boy with the paring knife, covered from head to bare feet in soot, stabbed back, underhand, and sank the short-bladed knife into Mandalax’s groin. The boy’s scream was high-pitched and ear-rattling but stopped short when the paring knife turned and cut deeper.
“Sorry about the fire, Wenefir,” Pristoleph said. “Can you see all right?”
“I don’t need to,” the soot-covered boy said.
Pristoleph had met him a tenday before, and considering what Wenefir had lost working the chimneys for the sadistic, tyrannical Mandalax, it hadn’t taken long to turn him. The rest of Mandalax’s gang, with the exception of his unconscious brother Lumps, just watched as Wenefir took his pound of flesh in revenge. By morning, all but Lumps and his castrated brother belonged to Pristoleph.
3
23 Tarsakh, the Year of the Leaping Dolphin
(1331 DR)
NETHJET, THAY
Marek blinked three times in rapid succession the second he made eye contact with Nesnah. Though Nesnah, at eighteen, was two years Marek’s senior, th
e older boy had long since come under Marek’s influence. Both still students, not even yet gifted with the tattoo focus that would soon mark them as Red Wizards, the two boys had found a bond of mutual ambition that had brought them both to the head of their class.
Nesnah didn’t give any indication that he’d seen Marek’s signal, and that was as they’d rehearsed. They both waited the count of two breaths, then Nesnah started to slowly sink to the floor.
Of the nine young apprentices in the transmutation seminar, three had already drifted to the ground. Three, including Nesnah, appeared able to continue levitating for a considerable time longer. Marek could feel himself beginning to weaken and simply would not be among the bottom half of the student mages.
They sat with their legs curled beneath them, a position Marek found increasingly uncomfortable as he continued to gain weight. He’d never been interested in athletics and had become quite accomplished at avoiding the mandatory physical training that seemed to keep the other apprentices lean but tired. Beneath him was five feet of empty air then the clean sand of the practice yard.
The master had been walking around the circle of levitating apprentices, carefully eyeing each of them, since they’d chanted the incantation in unison and all together lifted up to a uniform height. He stopped walking when he saw Nesnah begin to descend. Everyone knew that Nesnah was one of the most, if not the most, gifted student at the academy, with a particular talent for transmutation. Though the purpose of that morning’s session was to show to the master precisely how long each student could maintain the spell, he was understandably surprised by Nesnah’s disappointing results.
When the rest of the class likewise began to descend the master grew first more then less puzzled. Marek assumed that the master was beginning to think he’d simply miscalculated the time—surely, he must have been thinking, more time than seemed to had gone by.
Marek tried not to shake in the air. The effort of maintaining the spell, especially with the distraction of seeing his plan working, was getting far too difficult. He’d wanted to stay aloft longer than anyone else, but two of the apprentices were sinking too slowly, and soon Marek was closer to the ground than they were. He could take solace, at least, in the angry glance Nesnah shot at them both.
In the end, Marek was the second to the last of the nine apprentices to feel his behind touch the sand.
Sweat beading on his forehead, Marek breathed heavily but resisted the considerable temptation to wipe his brow. The master stepped behind him and Marek grimaced when one, then another, then a third of the apprentices who’d been part of his little play looked up at the wizard with barely disguised guilt.
“How you do it, Marek Rymüt,” the master said, “is still a mystery to me.”
Marek cleared his throat but didn’t turn around. His left leg had gone to sleep and he wanted nothing more than to stretch out on the sand.
“Well?” the master asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Master,” Marek replied.
“I will not waste my breath explaining the purpose of this simple exercise,” said the Red Wizard. “If you interfere with it one more time …”
Marek waited for what felt like a reasonable space of uncomfortable silence then said, “Master?”
The older man sighed so heavily Marek could feel it ruffle the hair on the top of his head.
“You are a mediocre wizard at best, boy,” the master said, “but I can see that you have other talents. Perhaps transmutation is not your field. I should think you would have better results with enchantments.”
That made Marek smile.
“Yes, Master,” he said.
Marek could feel more than one of the other boys tense and skillfully avoided meeting Nesnah’s gaze in particular.
Marek had a talent for enchantment indeed and didn’t always need the help of the Weave.
The master began to drone on again about the proper cadence of this incantation, the preferred weight of the other material component, and Marek’s legs began to hurt worse and worse. He feared that in another minute or so he’d simply have to stretch his legs, whether the master approved or not.
Marek started thinking of an excuse the Red Wizard would accept.
4
11 Flamerule, the Year of the Blazing Brand
(1334 DR)
FIRESTEAP CITADEL
Pristoleph watched the lieutenant approach, knowing full well why he looked so angry. It wasn’t often that the officers deigned to mingle with the men, and they generally only came to harass or punish. Pristoleph expected a bit of both.
As the lieutenant made his way quickly and deliberately through the rows of tents, soldiers who had been lounging on the grass or on whatever makeshift seats they’d arranged for themselves stood and saluted or at least nodded as he passed. Once his back was to them, some would scowl or offer a rude gesture, but most would go back to what they were doing, unconcerned and unimpressed.
Pristoleph started out unconcerned and unimpressed.
“You will stand when you address me, soldier,” the lieutenant said.
Pristoleph smiled but didn’t move from his comfortable canvas folding chair. From the tent behind him drifted the sounds of gasps and groans, then a woman’s giggle.
“Stand, damn you,” the lieutenant said, his voice low and tight, his mouth curled in a furious grimace.
The officer wasn’t much older than Pristoleph, a lean, pampered youth with the dark, almost black hair common in Innarlith. His skin was a bit paler than usual, undoubtedly from years spent in the cloistered halls of private schools and society galas. His soft skin had never seen a moment’s battle, despite his rank.
“Is there a problem, sir?” Wenefir asked.
He’d appeared, as Wenefir usually did, as if from nowhere, stepping out from behind the tent. The lieutenant was surprised and confused, but his breeding and arrogance quickly calmed him.
“Is there a problem, soldier?” the young officer asked Wenefir. “Yes, I should say there is.” He turned his attention back to Pristoleph. “This … man. Is he a friend of yours?”
“He is,” Wenefir replied.
“Then you shall both—” the lieutenant began then was interrupted by a loud groan, almost a wail, from the inside of the tent and the woman laughed instead of just giggling. “For Innarlith’s sake,” the officer pressed on, “this is a military camp not a … a … a brothel! What could you possibly be thinking, the both of you?”
The young officer made a move toward the tent, and Wenefir stepped sideways, meaning to put himself between the lieutenant and Pristoleph. Both of them stopped short and again the young lieutenant had to mask his initial shock and intimidation with the haughty arrogance demanded of his position.
A small crowd of soldiers started to gather behind the officer. Pristoleph could read in their glances and the way they whispered to each other what they were thinking, and he recognized an opportunity to put on a show that would have benefits for a long time after. The men started shifting position, growing increasingly anxious, and the young officer’s face tightened further.
“Do you feel that?” Pristoleph asked, pitching his voice in such a way that at least the first few rows of onlookers would be able to hear him.
The sounds of mumbled conversation and giggles from inside the tent came to a shushing halt.
“I’m quite sure I have no idea what you—” the lieutenant started.
“Sure you do,” said Pristoleph. “A child could sense it—that moment when the air begins to charge with a feeling of imminent danger?”
Pristoleph let a relaxed smile drift across his face. Always careful to keep the sun behind him, Pristoleph didn’t have to squint up at the lieutenant.
“I should say so,” the young officer replied. “The penalty for this sort of gross dereliction of—”
“It’s a feeling,” Pristoleph interrupted again, “that I grew up … what’s the word?”
He glanced at W
enefir, who offered, “Immersed?”
“Immersed in,” Pristoleph finished with a smile.
The lieutenant narrowed his eyes and Pristoleph would swear the man wanted to take a step back but was fighting the impulse with all his might.
“That was on the streets, you understand,” Pristoleph added. “The Fourth Quarter, against the wall.”
Pristoleph held his eyes still while the lieutenant studied him. He was confident that his face betrayed nothing, and by doing so, told the young officer all he needed to know.
Still, the lieutenant wouldn’t allow his position to abandon him entirely and he said, “I will thank you not to interrupt me again, soldier. Do so one more time, stay seated in my presence, and continue this ludicrous conversation one more breath and you will find yourself standing tall before the man.”
“What in all Nine Hells is that supposed to mean?” Wenefir asked with a sneer and a quiver in his voice that almost made Pristoleph nervous.
Wenefir edged a little closer to the lieutenant, who twitched ever so imperceptibly away, and Pristoleph stood. He held up a hand and Wenefir backed off, but he kept his steely red eyes locked on the young officer, who was subtly beginning to squirm.
“You’ll have to excuse my comrade-in-arms, here, Lieutenant,” Pristoleph said. “He can be sensitive sometimes. Is it any wonder, after what he’s been through?”
“I assure you,” the lieutenant said, “I have no—”
“He used to climb down chimneys,” Pristoleph went on. “That was how he made his living, if you could call it that. You know what a few years of that does to you? It poisons you. The soot, the black grime inside a chimney when it’s scraped into every crevice of your naked body … eventually he had to be emasculated. The soot warts, they call them. Nasty things. They’ll kill you if you leave them alone, if you can suffer the pain. Can you imagine pain so bad you’d rather castrate yourself than endure it another moment? That’s my friend, here. He’s got nothing between his legs, but he’s still a better man than most.”
Whisper of Waves Page 2
