by Sam Sykes
But it wasn’t happening.
I lay there, no more breath for words, no more life in my limbs. That dark light inside me grew hungry again, began gnawing at my insides. A fever swept over me, made my vision go dim at the edges as the thug carried Dalaris out the door.
I knew, then, which god had been watching over me. And it was Norgorber all along. Letting me think I was going to make it out all right, then leaving me to die here on the floor … that was just the sort of thing that would make that old bastard smile right before he took my soul.
It was so cruel, I could have screamed.
But I didn’t.
As my vision faded into darkness and the fever swept over me like a tide, I resolved to save my very last breath so I could spit in Norgorber’s face.
21
Back-Alley Lullabies
I opened my eyes and knew something was wrong.
I mean, really wrong. I’d been in trouble before. I’d been chased by hounds through streets, held my breath as hobgoblins tried to sniff me out in tunnels, held my blood in with one hand and cut blood out of someone else with the other. I’d been in filth so deep that my feet couldn’t even touch bottom.
But I never thought I’d screw up so bad that I’d be back in Katapesh.
And yet, here it was. Sprawling before me like a dead serpent, I could see the dusty streets of the bazaar. All around me were the merchant stalls, people holding objects so shiny as to render their faces dark by comparison, leaning out and shoving their wares at passersby. The people of the streets brushed past me, pushed me aside in a river of skin and sweat flowing all directions at once. The symphony of the streets—the merchants barking, the customers haggling, the prostitutes propositioning, and all the cursing when a deal went awry—filled my ears.
It even smelled like home: the stale desert air chasing away the reeking facade of perfumes and spices and bringing out the more authentic odors of alley garbage and someone filthy smoking pesh.
This wasn’t right.
I had just been in a house. It was dark, incredibly dark. Yet I could feel the Katapeshi sun bearing down on me, the sweat dripping off my brow and into my eyes, and—
No! No, that wasn’t it. I was in a house. I was with someone. A woman … right? I shook my head. Yes, there had been a woman. There had been. It wasn’t a dream. She was real.
But, then, why couldn’t I remember her name?
I had it. I could hear it, almost see it in my mind, along with her face and the rest of the house. But it was fading, shrinking with every breath, becoming fuzzy and dissipating into shadows in the back of my head.
My head.
It hurt. Like something inside my skull was trying to burrow its way out. I could feel my temples throbbing beneath my fingertips as I clutched them, shut my eyes tight. The skin burned, hotter than the sun, so hot that it felt like if I could just carve a hole in my skull, get a little air in there, I might …
“Shy.”
My name. Spoken so fondly.
“Shaia.”
In a voice that made everything seem better just to hear it.
“SHY!”
Someone seized my hands. Something heavy fell into them. I looked down at the bulging purse in my hands, heavy with coin. I looked back up into a broad, familiar grin and a pair of green eyes offering me a sly wink.
“You’re up, champ,” Sem said. “If I were you, I’d run fast.”
And then Sem was gone, a skinny shape tearing off down the road and disappearing into curtains of pedestrians.
“Sem!” I cried after. “Wait!”
“There!” Another voice barked out, harsher and crueler. “There’s the money! Come here, you filthy rat!”
I turned, looked up. Men were barreling down the street toward me, wearing official-looking clothes and shiny armor, scimitars drawn and eyes wild beneath dark brows. They looked huge, effortlessly shoving complaining pedestrians out of the way.
And I was so small.
I turned, took off running. The streets were searing in the heat—they burned my bare feet. But only a little; my feet, they were already hard, even after only a few weeks of doing this. This wasn’t unusual, this running.
This was my life.
Mine and Sem’s.
“Get back here!”
Their voices were bellowing roars behind me, but I just laughed. I used to cry when I first heard them, but this was becoming easy now. They were so big and clumsy, always fumbling through the crowds as I darted through them. They pushed and fought to take even a single step as I darted between the skinny legs of the men and tumbled under the skirts of the shrieking women.
Sem was already long gone, would be waiting for me back at our little hideout. All I had to do was get there.
Easy.
I felt so light. No tears in me. No screams. No memories. I flew through the crowds, around the adults’ legs as they spat curses down upon my head. I tore down a nearby alleyway, the coins jingling a little song just for me. Pesh-smokers, distinguishable from the refuse only by their hazy eyes, looked up at me as I ran to the end of the alley where a low wall stood. I scrambled up the debris to the top of it, swung briefly as I got my balance, and looked out over the world.
My world.
Katapesh.
All its filthy alleys and rising smoke and rich, opulent spires in the distance. Up here, I could almost pretend I was the only one in the whole city, the girl who could outrun the guards and take its coin at will. I laughed long and loud.
“Shy?”
My name.
“Shaia.”
But not Sem’s voice.
“Shaia!”
A woman’s. Thick with suffering. The kind of intimate, short-supply sorrow that one only ever offers one other person in their life.
“Shaia, what did they do to you? Wake up! Answer me!”
I looked around. I was alone. I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. But I heard it so clearly, like it was coming from inside my own head.
“Still breathing … Hold on, Shaia. Please, just hold on.”
And, without knowing it, my lips whispered a name I didn’t know.
“Chariel?”
“There you are!”
Rough hands reached up, grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and jerked me back harshly. The coins fell from my hands—Sem would be so disappointed—and I fell backward into a pile of refuse.
And then I kept falling. Into a darkness so dank and suffocating I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth to draw in a breath, but only a scream came out as the darkness swallowed me up.
Silence.
And then … light.
Dim light. Tiny, fuzzy orbs dancing at the periphery of my vision. My body shuddered with the force of the breath I took, a sharp, painful rasp that felt like razors in my lungs. My head was swimming, my vision dark at the edges, but I could still see them.
Lights.
Lamps.
Street lamps.
They were whirring past me, sliding in and out of my vision as I slipped, weightless, down the street. I could feel something under me: holding me up, carrying me away.
“Shaia,” a voice unused to the terror it held whispered. “Stay with me. Look up. Look at me. Look into my eyes.”
Eyes. Staring down at me. No whites. Cold and blue as ice, Chariel’s were. A killer’s eyes. Weird that they made me smile, like they did now.
“That’s it, Shy,” she said. “Just keep looking at me. Hold onto me. I’m going to fix this.”
So big. So blue. Her eyes just kept getting bigger and bluer until they burst right out of her head and exploded into a vast, yawning sky over me.
And I was gone again.
Hot stone on my back. Warm wind on my skin. I had once found the breeze refreshing, a reprieve from the sun. But now, it felt like something stifling, a cage of heat and sweat that closed in around me a little more every time the wind stirred.
I watched the sun crawl across the
sky, turn it from blue to red to purple to black as it sank away. Down below in the bazaars, street lamps were lighting—coin never slept down here—making it hard to see the stars when there was so much light down below. Even the moon seemed smaller.
Somehow, every day I spent in Katapesh, everything seemed to shrink.
“Someday.”
And yet, that voice never got small. Even when it was a whisper, it was still so loud and clear.
I sat up, grabbed my knees and leaned back. Sem looked black against the night sky, right at home in the darkness. Sem had always been good at that sort of thing. I only ever visited the shadows, but they always reached out to welcome Sem back.
To me, Katapesh was both a home and a prison. To Sem, the city always seemed like just one more stop before returning home to the shadows. And it never seemed more apparent than that night.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” Sem said, looking down on the streets below. “Pulling coins out of pockets, breaking windows, stabbing people in alleys … I was made for more than this.” Sem looked at me, eyes bright and green like a cat’s. “We were made for more than this.”
“We were?” I crawled across the roof toward the edge. “Could have fooled me. I figure if I were made for big things, my mother wouldn’t have chased me out of the house with a knife.” I flashed a grin to my right. “Won’t she be kicking herself to learn that I was made for bigger things?”
Sem returned the grin. “Yeah, well, there’s no way she’d believe you. I’ll have to go down there and tell her myself.”
“Yeah.” I chuckled. “’Well, Mother, you may think I’m trash, but this other piece of trash says I’m not. So there.’” I laughed a louder, hollow laugh, as though my mother could somehow hear it. I looked down at my hands, resting on my knees in threadbare trousers. “I want to get out, Sem.”
“I know,” Sem said. “I told you we would one day, right?”
“Yeah. One day.”
I felt the hand before it even touched mine. Sem was like that, with a touch that things just responded to. Locks danced open, doors whispered shut, knives leapt like living things. And when I looked down and saw that dark hand on mine, the air no longer felt so oppressive.
Not even when I heard what Sem had to say.
“Two days from now.”
“What?” I felt numb, like the idea was too impossible to even hear. But when I looked up, Sem’s eyes were hard and real.
“Two days. I know how to get out.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear this. I couldn’t bear to realize this wasn’t real, that Sem was just talking nonsense. “No. There’s not enough money to get somewhere else, Sem. There’s not—”
“We do a job,” Sem said. “A quick one. And it gets us all the money we need to go anywhere, do anything we want.”
The words, the idea, the very possibility made my heart flutter, feel like a moth banging against a window trying to get out. And I could tell that Sem felt the same way.
But Sem wasn’t smiling.
“Shy. I’ve got to kill someone.”
I screamed.
The sound tore itself out of my throat from some place inside me where the darkness gnawed. I heard it echo against stone, repeat a thousand times over. I felt stone on my back, cold and slick with my own sweat. Cold stone surrounded me, candle lights burning like dying fireflies at the edges of my vision. But for all the chill around me, I felt like I was boiling with fever.
My breath came in short, ragged gasps, each one growing fainter, each one struggling to claw its way out of my mouth. And as they grew quieter, I could hear the voices.
“I don’t care about your gods-damned price, worm.” Chariel. Colder still than this stone. “The people I work for are the people you can’t afford to piss off.”
“It’s not a matter of price, but of possibilities.” Tessan. The priest from earlier, so long ago it felt like another life. I recognized his shrill whine, the terror in his voice. Chariel had that effect on people. “I don’t know what magic I’m dealing with here. Or even if it is magic. You say you just found her like this? What makes you sure she didn’t just have a bad night of drinking?”
I heard the whisper of steel coming out of leather. I heard the sound of a cloth collar being seized. I heard a little man become a little boy.
“I wouldn’t come to you if I hadn’t found her collapsed in a manor with three corpses on the lawn. And I wouldn’t be ready to cut your eyes out over a night of bad drinking.” Chariel hissed. “It’s magic. Fix it.”
“I … I don’t know how!” Tessan all but squealed. “I have no idea what’s wrong with her! If I had the spellbook that caused it, perhaps, I—”
“You don’t have that. I don’t have time to find it. Your options are either to fix it, tell me how to fix it, or figure it out when your god tells you after I send you to him.”
I heard the soft, tender shriek that only a woman like Chariel could induce in someone. I heard Tessan scramble across stone, strike something hard.
“W-wait, there is something … a scroll. It can cure almost anything. But…”
“But what? Use it.”
“If it were that easy, I would have given it to you already. But each temple only receives one of these from the high church. If I use it, they have ways of knowing. And even your Brotherhood can’t threaten the Church of Abadar.”
Chariel fell silent for a moment. “How much?”
“I just said—”
“You said Abadar. God of merchants. He always has a price. I’ll pay it.”
Tessan almost laughed. “It’s … the cost would be…”
I felt Chariel’s eyes on me. I felt something cold well up beneath me. I heard her voice.
“I’ll pay it.”
I opened my mouth, tried to say something. To beg her to do it? To warn her not to? To ask her to just kill me and end this?
I didn’t know.
The chill was creeping in on me, reaching out to the fever boiling inside of me. I could feel my throat closing even as I craned open my mouth. I had no words. I just needed to scream. And yet, nothing would come out.
“Shy?”
Nothing ever came out.
I blinked. And there I was again, back in Katapesh. In a rich man’s home on a rich man’s carpet with a rich man’s son lying at my feet.
Bleeding out of a hole I had put in his neck.
“Shy?”
Sem’s voice in my ear. Sem’s hand on my shoulder. Sem’s knife in my hands.
And the rich man’s son’s blood on the floor.
That boy—he couldn’t have been older than sixteen, just a few years older than me—was staring up at me. His eyes were wide and attentive, like I had just told him a joke and he was waiting to hear the punch line. Hell, to look at him, I almost thought he hadn’t even noticed that I had stabbed him. His lips were trembling. And I thought, for some reason, that he had the most important thing in the world to tell me, but he couldn’t.
And then I wondered if that was what it’d be like when I died.
“Shy.”
I looked up. Sem looked back at me, took the knife out of my hands, covered them and all their messy bloodstains with a cloth.
“It’s not your fault.”
I stared down at the rich man’s son and his blood on the carpet and his blood on my hands and his eyes staring at me. I stared back and couldn’t say a damn thing.
“He was going to get the guards,” Sem said. “We had to. I should have done it myself. I should…” A pause. “It was what we came here to do, anyway. We had to send a message, right? That’s what they’re paying us for. Now we can get out of here, Shy. We can leave. Do you understand?”
I didn’t.
But I knew I would.
Sem took my hand. We ran down the stairs. We ran out the door. We kept running for a long, long time.
I closed my eyes. I drifted into somewhere dark, somewhere cold, far from Katapesh and far from Sem
.
And I understood.
After that night, killing became the way out for me. It started off defensive, with me lashing out with a blade whenever I felt threatened—and after that night, I always did. But then, as I kept doing it, I got better at it. And somewhere along the line, it became the easiest thing in the world.
I understood that now.
Just like I understood I was dying.
No Katapesh. No Sem. No Chariel. No Dalaris. They were all dreams, one way or another, fleeting things I could never keep ahold of.
All that awaited me now, as this darkness of mine poured out of my eyes and mouth and covered me like a shroud, was Norgorber. I’d open my eyes and find him there, leering at me, grinning like he was about to tell me whatever that dead rich man’s son had been before I cut open his throat.
Ah, well.
I had a nice run of things.
It wasn’t just the killing. There was other stuff there, too. Maybe Norgorber would look kindly on me for that.
Maybe.
I’d never know, though.
For in another instant, all that chill and cold dark vanished. The fever inside me became something altogether too hot and too bright to be contained. It burned through me like a wildfire, ate at the shadow as surely as the shadow ate me. I felt it sear through my flesh, burn through my veins, claw its way up my throat, and when it pulled itself out, it did so on a scream that lasted for what felt like hours.
But somehow, it burned itself out.
Bright light cleared away from my eyes. It hurt to blink, hurt to breathe, hurt to move. But it hurt in a way unlike whatever Vishera had done to me. It hurt in a way that told me I was alive.
I looked around me, saw the chamber of the temple I had seen Gerowan’s corpse in not too long ago. I lay on an altar, beneath the frowning stare of Tessan. A scroll in his hands turned to ashes, fell from his fingers. He shook his head at me and turned away, as though he couldn’t quite see the worth in what he had just done.
But someone else did.
I felt her arms wrap around me, pull me up, draw me close. I felt her bury her face in the hollow my neck. I felt the warmth of her breath and the tightness of her embrace and her slow, shuddering breath against my body.
