by Adam Burch
“Who’s that?” I whisper, pointing to the fat official.
“Quiet!” Sookah slams his humbaton into my ribs, pumping me with sonic volts. I fall to the ground, writhing. “The Warden’s speaking.” Sookah pulls off his mask, revealing a rotted brown smile.
The Warden is short and squat. His greased blond hair hugs his skull, and his long mustache is waxed and curled at the ends. He reminds me more of a Combat ringmaster than a corrections officer. “Convicted of four accounts of assault with a deadly weapon against a Meridian security officer. Strong and powerfully built, perfect for the copper or iron mines in twelfth dungeon. Who starts the bidding?”
Men wave their hands and yell out bids. I don’t know what measure of currency they’re trading in, but it seems the ones bidding are leaders because they look the largest and most brutal.
It seems all levels of Tao society revere physical might, I muse.
“Sold at five hundred iron kilos to the Smelters!”
The prisoner is kicked off the pedestal, and the next man is brought forward. This time the charge is theft of government weapons. Sold. Next is espionage, selling royal documents of House Flanders to their enemies. He’s bought by the Diggers who apparently “dig” for burnable coal and precious metals. The next man? Speech violation. He led an antigovernment rally in his arcology near western Meridian.
The Wendigo is the harshest environment on Tao. These prisoners should be the harshest, too—murderers and maniacs too unstable to even let loose in the games. Yet the men being auctioned are political dissidents, traitors, and speech violators. This is not right.
I’m shoved onto the pedestal at the butt of a humbaton. “Edmon Leontes!” The Warden’s voice rings out. The crowd hushes, not with reverence, but with predatory hunger. “You know his pedigree, young and strong. He could surely last for years in the salt, copper, or magnesium dungeons. Who wouldn’t want the son of a Pantheon nobleman under his lash? Do we have an opening bid?”
The cavern erupts. Hands and fists wave. The Warden struts in front of the block like a trick dolphin. Objects start flying. Chunks of rocks and ice. A stone strikes me. The crowd erupts in laughter. I wince in pain but refuse to fall.
“That’s the spirit, pretty boy!” a large bear of a man with a bent nose and wiry beard catcalls. “Stand that pretty ass up. Yes, stand that pretty ass up for my crew!” He waves to make a bid.
“Three hundred from Bruul Vaarkson and the Haulers!” The Warden shouts. “Do I hear three fifty?”
“Three fifty!” a scarred man with a shaved head and topknot cries out.
“Jinam Shank and the Pickers for three fifty! Do I hear four?”
“I want those smooth cheeks for the Haulers!” Vaarkson cries again. “Three seventy-five!”
“Four hundred!” Shank raises a hand.
“Sounds like we have a bidding war, boys!” shouts The Warden.
“Four fifty!” Vaarkson calls out. The crowd erupts with oohs.
“You’re in for it, boy,” The Warden hisses through his waxed mustache. “Vaarkson never gives up once he sees a piece he wants to plow.” I grit my teeth at the jest. “Even if he loses the bid, the Hauler foreman’s marked you, and he’ll have you.”
I piece things together. Foremen are leaders of each individual faction. Each faction is a group with a specific task in this place. It’s just like the houses of the Pantheon, with The Warden in position of the emperor. They seem to be trading in their respective goods, ore for food, food for tools, tools for fur.
“Five hundred!” Shank makes another bid.
“Five ten!” shouts the big bearded man.
My eyes glance at the giant domed ceiling of the cavern. Stalactites drip down as if trapping us all inside a maw of razor teeth. I conjure a memory of Nadia in the warmth of the Tao star. Her dark hair cascading in the breeze, framing her face as she stands high on the cliffs above a green sea—nothing but the summer and the promise of an unborn child between us. I think of the words of an aria The Maestro once showed me: O mio babbino caro. Oh, my beloved daddy, he’s as handsome as a king . . . and if you still say no . . . I’ll throw myself below . . . What shivers, what a chill, poor me, I want to die . . . The soaring lilt of the soprano’s voice in my mind silences the cacophony of this place.
“Five twenty!” Shank shouts again.
“Do I hear five twenty-five?” The Warden responds. “Five twenty going once . . . going twice . . .”
My eyes cast down from the ceiling and rest on a strange dark man standing apart at the back of the crowd. He hangs in the shadows, calm, silent, and watching everything. His skin is darker than that of any islander I’ve ever seen. His hair is tight and curled, tinted the oddest shade of red. His cheeks are decorated with some kind of tattooing that I cannot make out at this distance. His appearance reminds me of something from my deep past. The audience with Old Wusong! It suddenly clicks in my brain. I remember seeing the foreigners from off-world, a starship captain who had the same strange coloring that this man does. Is this man, too, an off-worlder? His stare is haunting, his eyes opaque, milky-white. He’s blind, I realize. He stands relaxed, like a victorious fighter, but no one pays him any mind, as if he’s invisible to all but me. I’m unsettled.
“Sold to Jinam Shank and the Picker Gang!” The Warden shouts.
A guard grabs me by the manacles, unlocks the cuffs, and shoves me into the crowd.
“Get along, little prince,” he snarls.
I’m engulfed by the crowd. I feel pinched, prodded, and poked at by grubby, foul-smelling hands. “Settle down!” commands Jinam Shank, the foreman of the Picker Gang. “Don’t shit in the crib!”
The hands reluctantly stop as Pickers turns their attention to the next auction.
“Toshiro Kodai! From Meridian, by way of the Isle of Conch!” Toshiro, skinny and wretched, shivers on the block holding his injured leg. The crowd mutters with apathy. “Toshiro is wanted for participating in a protest rally at the Hall of Electors following the Wusong-Leontes wedding. Shall we start the bidding at twenty-five kilos?”
A protest after the Wusong-Leontes wedding?
No hands go up. “All right, how about twenty kilos?”
I work my way through the crowd until I’m standing behind the scarred man with the topknot, Jinam Shank. The back of his neck is tattooed with the symbol of a pickax, denoting his status as foreman. I tap him on the shoulder. He whirls around, eyes narrowed and shiv in hand.
“Lord Shank?” I bow my head in deference, trying to play the game. “May I suggest bidding on that next prisoner?”
“Shut your hole, fish,” he hisses. “I just spent more than my share of ore on you, mainly to spite Vaarkson. Your job is to wield a pick and do what I say. That’s it.”
I nod with as much obsequiousness as I can muster. “But, sir, I know that man. He may not look like much, but he can mine five times his weight in ore a day.”
If Toshi’s arrest was something to do with my marriage to Miranda Wusong, he’s here because of me. Besides, I need an ally.
Shank’s knuckles land in the very spot my ribs are broken. I feel them crack again. I drop to the floor, wheezing.
“I told you to shut your hole!” He bares his teeth. “Wasn’t born with the name Shank. It was given to me here. I’d rather not kill something I just paid for.”
I stand, pain shooting down my sides. I glance over and see Bruul Vaarkson, the grizzled foreman of the Haulers, staring at me across the crowd. He’s a full head taller than anyone, so he’s hard to miss. His stare is hungry. His lips curl into a sickle shape. I shudder with revulsion.
“Sold! To the Hauler Gang!” Toshi cries out in pain as he’s pulled from the block and thrust into the pack of Haulers. “That ends the bidding. Return to your bunks. Work resumes at oh-four-hundred.”
The Warden and his cadre of prison guards vacate the cavern, leaving us to our own devices.
“Where do they sleep?” I turn to a Picker with a scar
on his lip that pulls his expression into a perpetual frown.
“Warden stays in barracks almost a mile down. Much warmer for their fat noble asses. You’d know something about that, wouldn’t you?”
The man spits fully in my face. The spittle dribbles down to my chin. He smiles. The scar on his lip makes it look twisted. He’s testing me, I realize. I need to prove myself now or forever be branded a coward in the gang’s eyes. My ribs throb, and I feel the aching of my muscles after the climb from the surface. I’m not ready to fight. Death doesn’t care for ready. Alberich’s words are in my head.
When will it ever end? I wonder. Fight after fight until they kill me. Or I kill them.
The crowd forms a circle around us. The anticipation of bloodshed crackles in the frost like electricity.
“You don’t want to do this.” My warning sounds lame even to my own ears.
“Oh, I don’t want to do this?” the man with the twisted mouth mocks.
“Give it to that noble ass-rag!” someone shouts.
“Show ’em, Grinner,” another catcalls.
Grinner. The man’s name is Grinner. Fitting.
“Make a move,” he calls.
“You first.” I refuse to be the one who starts this.
He charges. I twist away from his oncoming fist. The movement explodes bolts of pain through my rib cage. I deflect another blow. Grinner’s momentum carries him forward, hurtling at great speed. His back foot trails behind him. I hook my own foot to his to trip him and hasten his fall. He slams to the ground full force. His temple meets a stone jutting up from the cavern floor and cracks his skull like an eggshell. The sound reverberates through the cavern. The crowd goes silent. The fight is over before it even began.
Grinner lies dying, arms and legs twitching. I try not to register the shock and horror I feel. I got lucky, but I can’t show weakness. Not now. If I do nothing, he will die slowly, horrifically. I’m here less than a day, and I have already killed a man. I lift my foot and bring it down decisively. The man’s brains are dashed onto the ice. A quick death is a kindness, my father once said. Maybe he was right.
I feel the anger radiating off the crowd. This wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted me beaten slowly, humiliated. They wanted fun. I just ended the party. This is where I deserve to be, I think. My father has won. I’m a killer.
It was an accident, but it is done.
“Anyone else?” I say.
The crowd peels off one by one. One lingers. The giant foreman, Vaarkson. “You got lucky, little boy,” he says. “But luck won’t save you from me.” He strides away.
I grab one of the Pickers skulking off. “What was his name?” I ask, pointing at the man I’ve just killed.
“That there was Grinner,” says the Picker.
“No, his real name.”
“Don’t know. He had no other name than Grinner.” The man yanks his arm from my grasp. I stare at the corpse, his true identity as lost as his life. Grinner had a mother.
Maybe he had a Nadia, too, who knows?
This universe doesn’t care, and maybe it never did.
The crowd disperses, all except for the mysterious dark man I saw earlier. His milky eyes stare at me. I get the feeling he understands; he understands the self-hatred that passes through me. Then slowly, he, too, moves off.
I sit apart from the fires and tents of my gang. The Pickers do not consider me one of them yet. The killing of Grinner has afforded me a wide berth and respite from any hazing I see the other new fish go through. However, I know I won’t be safe indefinitely.
Jinam Shank has climbed a ladder to his foreman’s nest, a tiny apartment carved in the ice of the cavern wall dozens of meters above the main camp. Heat rises from the ground floor, making his shelter slightly warmer. From the alcove, the foreman can see the cavern and his gang below. The general population huddles in lion-seal skins around the fires.
Each gang seems to have its own village staked out within the larger camp. There’s no plan behind the layout. It’s a haphazard smattering of tents and makeshift structures that have been erected over the last few decades. I’ve been given no furs, so I grab my sides and shiver in my neoprene suit. I chew on a ration stick that was tossed my way during the bonfire lighting. The place is savage, recalling some ancient barbarian past.
It is two hours until lights out, then five more until the work whistle. The pain in my torso abates to a dull ache. I know I’ll survive thanks to the bone grafting from Talousla Karr. Part of me wishes he had never changed me. I would be with my mother and wife and child in the great Mother Ocean by now.
I finish the last bite of the chalk-tasting ration stick, but my stomach still growls. I try to take my mind off the hunger and all that has happened by imagining the fingerings of a flute and the lessons of Gorham from when I was a child. I hear the beat of his drum in the pumping of my heart, and my fingers tap the imaginary notes. I can almost hear the melody of the Eventide feast in my mind. Music could always transport me to another world.
“Edmon?”
I turn at the whisper. Toshi has snuck into the Picker camp. I’m new to the Wendigo, but I get the impression that he definitely shouldn’t be here. His presence is a risk, and I’m already not on the greatest terms with my new “friends.”
“What are you doing here?” I whisper.
“You looked cold.” He drops a pile of rags at my feet. “The man you killed—I’m told you get to claim his possessions.”
His face looks sunken. He should be taking care of his leg, not visiting me to chat fireside.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” I respond.
“Don’t be a fool.” Toshi’s breathing is ragged.
“Shank will kill me if he finds out you’re here. Does Vaarkson know?” I ask.
“Edmon—”
Whatever he’s about to say no longer matters. He collapses to the ground, convulsing. “Toshi!” I shout a little too loudly. Several other Pickers look my way.
“By the twisted star, Leontes!” A thick, stocky man steps forward from the pack. “That’s no Picker. Get him out of here now or Shank will skin you!”
“His name’s Toshi, and he’s my friend,” I snarl back. “He was shot by the sniper after we were shoved out of the transport sondi.”
“I don’t care if his mother shot him. He’s a Hauler. Shoulder goes to the cold now, Leontes, query?”
“He’s a human being first and needs help. Query?” I mock his slang. “I’m not asking you to tweeze the bullet from the leg yourself. Just tell me where I can find someone who can.” The men shift uncomfortably. “There must be someone here, a healer?” I ask again.
“What about Faria, Carrick?” says one next to the stocky man.
Carrick, the stocky man, hesitates.
“Carrick,” I try to reason, “if you want to take sides, Pickers, Haulers, fine. But gangs are just a way to keep you from seeing the real enemy: The Warden and the guards. It’s us versus them.”
I only suspect this is the truth. I remember Phaestion’s war games in the arcology of Meridian. It’s the common people, the multitude, pitted against the few with wealth and weapons. This is a conflict they will understand, I hope.
“You’re making a mistake,” Carrick mutters uneasily. “Haulers don’t get into our camp without someone from their side knowing. Why he’s here is a question you might want to ask yourself. You want to save some scraggly grass to remind you of home, be it on your head. Seek Faria the Red.”
“Faria the Red?” I ask.
“Dark as night, reddish hair.” Carrick describes the dark man I saw standing on the outskirts when I was auctioned off.
“Where can I find him?”
Carrick points into the village of shanties. “Other side. Maybe a kilometer. Igloo built into the cavern wall. You won’t miss it.”
I waste no more words. Toshi groans in delirium as I hoist him onto my shoulders. My ribs hurt like the nuclear fires of a star, but I’ll endure. Tos
hi may not be so lucky. His skin blazes with febrile heat. I feel it through my suit. I selfishly welcome the warmth as I trudge through the narrow, muddy-ice avenues of the camp. Tents and shacks serve as meager dwellings and storefronts for various gangs of the Wendigo—Smelters, Welders, Loaders, Sifters, Haulers, Pickers, Trainmen, Foodies . . . I draw stares from them all as I step one lumbering foot in front of the other. Finally, I arrive at the igloo. No door, only a small portal dug into the ground to crawl in and out of. The flickering of firelight emanates from within.
“Faria?” I call out. “Faria the Red?” No answer. Toshi groans. He’s burning up. I lower him gently onto the ground. “Faria!” I call again. Damn this. I get down on my knees and crawl through the tunnel. I don’t care if I’m invading his privacy. My friend is dying.
I find myself in a room with a small cabinet and a sleeping pallet against the wall. A fire crackles in the center of the chamber. The dark man kneels on a rug before the flames, his eyes closed. His skin is the color of pitch, making the tattoos of limestone-white etched into his face jump out in contrast. I’ve never seen such markings before. The hair on his head is so tightly curled one couldn’t run a finger through it. It’s a remarkable shade of red. Not quite like Phaestion’s, but certainly startling. His appearance is otherworldly and frightening.
“Faria?”
He raises a hand, silencing me. I pause, pulled in by the power of his simple, wordless command. Then I remember Toshi dying outside. “Faria, listen—”
His eyes snap open, milk-white with cataract. He stares directly at me. The effect is terrifying. “You come uninvited and violate my home with a demand,” he says in a rich basso. “I don’t end lives on whims, but if I did, you’ve certainly given me cause.”
“I’m sorry.” I bow my head abjectly. Everyone here forces you to abase yourself or face death it seems. “My friend is dying. I was told you could heal him?”
“You must be mistaken. You have no friends, and I will not heal him,” the dark man says. He closes his eyes and returns to his meditation.
I’m stunned. I’ve never known a healer who refuses to heal and would let the suffering of an injured man continue. Then again, he didn’t say that he couldn’t heal Toshi, only that he wouldn’t.
