by Zamil Akhtar
Kav...
That was it for Mezzin. Upon the sound of that name, the rage in his soul flooded his chest and arms until he couldn’t sit.
“Mam, I have to go. Mam, don’t for a second leave this house. You’ll be well protected here, okay? This place is safe. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
She frowned. “Then it’s back to worrying and praying. I wish Nur would take whatever hardship has befallen you and give it to me. I wish Nur would take all your problems and give them to me. That’s what I pray for every day.”
Don’t say that, Mam. What I’ve done should never come back to you.
What a weird dream. Kav would see sky, and then an ocean would drown him, deeper, deeper, till the sun was eclipsed by a thick veil. He would emerge, gasping for air, the sun summoning him back. And there were sailors holding his head, pulling him up, and they would freeze him by pouring rivers through his veins. Until he grabbed onto land.
Kav awoke; a faraway ceiling stared at him. It was familiar but he didn’t know why. Like the sky, it was blue, as were the sheets covering him. And the mattress, and the doctor’s uniform. And the doctor’s surgical mask and hair net.
“Rise and smell the salty sea air! We’ve cleared you for release,” the doctor said.
Wait, why am I here? There was no dot in the past to connect to this present.
“What happened to me?” Kav asked.
“De-hy-dray-tion! Nothing a little water can’t cure! We washed you’re clothes, so get changed and get out of here! This isn’t a hotel!”
Kav changed, and then the first dot appeared on the cloth of his memory. Saina. She was with him. He closed his eyes to find her in the world of sunlight, but found nothing but the static of his mind.
He noticed his empty aperture. “That’s not good...better get a twicrys.”
Beds filled with patients lined the room. The doctor scribbled on his pad while standing over another patient. Kav meandered through the doctors and nurses and tables of sharp things.
“Doc, can you tell me where the girl is? The one I was with?”
He stopped writing and tapped his pen on his pad. “Girl? Girl? Ohhh, she said she was going into town, but that was days ago. Ohhh, wow, she never came back did she?”
The doctor’s eyes were blue too. With the rest of his face covered by a surgical mask, it was all Kav could see of his features.
Outside, Keldan felt like four years ago. The ocean rim harbor brought salt and seagulls. Cicadas viscously chirped to the beat of the people. I’ve got to find Saina. This is a dangerous city. I can’t let her get hurt.
And then the second dot splashed onto his page of memories, like Kalamic calligraphy. My bond, I traded it for her. I should find it too, it’s all I had left of Layla...
The salty air dried his face. He rubbed his eyelids and swallowed the sourness in his breath. He felt like crumbling bread.
No, forget it. Layla’s not coming back. And the whispers are finally gone. Just...get on with life. You’re back home now, forget everything. I can’t go back to Devshirme, but I can blend in here. I’ll get a job. I’ll join a Way, become a better person. Doc Reyta was right. I have my life ahead of me, I don’t need to ruin it by chasing what doesn’t exist.
“Uncle? Is that you?” said a young Keldanese man holding a coil of rope. It took Kav a few seconds to realize it was Kahr standing before him.
“Uncle!” Kahr pounced. “Uncle Kav!”
A tackled Kav fell over. Pinned down, he couldn’t breathe. Overzealous fish doesn’t realize he’s coiled his rope round my neck!
“Oh! Sorry!” Kahr threw the rope off, but by now people were staring. “Uncle Kav, I just, I never got to thank you. You risked your life to save my family, and, there just aren’t people like you in this world! I have so many things to say, so does my wife.”
“What a marvel,” Kav said. “But I’m in a rush, so get off me.”
“No! I won’t get off you. Not until you agree to come over for dinner.” Kahr dragged Kav up by the shoulders and dusted him off. “You can’t say no. It’s not in our culture to refuse hospitality.”
Kav’s stomach growled. He imagined fish flavored ration bits raining into his mouth. “Well...”
An excited glare lit Kahr’s eyes. “That’s what I like to hear! I just got off work, so let’s get going!”
And before he knew it, Kav was standing outside that same little shack.
“So I messaged my wife to get ready and prepare and such. She seemed really excited to be having you over.”
What a nothing shack. The roof was blue tin, rusting to the smell of rain water. There was a little garden on the side, but Kav could barely get a look at the flowers before being dragged through the door.
“Hena! Our guest is here and he is hungry!”
Hena was standing at the stove, her blue hair touching her shoulders. She turned to greet him. Her smile filled him with honey and fire. Oh Nur, her hair, eyes, smile, face, figure, teeth — she’s a damned copy of Layla. Why didn’t I notice it before?
Here was a new dilemma for Mezzin, one he always feared falling into. Like a hole in a road that he walked over every day, with the worry that one blind step and it would devour him. But it wasn’t blindness that brought him to this dark place; it was nothing less than the force of his will.
I’ve stolen 3000 twinsen of Sons’ money and spent it on my mother. And the 3000 will be going toward the Settlement economy. And that old man with the books never moves, and then there’s Bayer, he doesn’t skimp on a single detail. Shit. I took the Sons’ money. Money that was supposed to go toward medical supplies or weapons. 3000 twinsen! Had I used my head, I would have given the doctor much less!
But he’d used his head. He knew if he died today, there’d be no one to support Mother, and that 3000 would go a long way past his expiration.
I’m the leader here. They won’t suspect me. Besides, there’s no time to go on a thief hunt. Shit. Of the fifteen that went toward us from the latest slave auction, they aren’t going to just ignore the missing three!
A knock sounded on the door. Mezzin froze. There was another knock.
“Yeah, come in,” Mezzin said.
“I finally found a translator for that Almarian language.” Bayer stood, hips bent, leaning under the doorway. “And we got some more auction returns. There’s something weird among it all, so have a look.”
Weird? Have they already noticed the missing shards?
Mezzin went to the basin and doused his face in cold water. It was so cold it hurt. Like the blood in his veins running hot became broken chips of ice. It reminded him of that girl, the one he was about to break — that cold girl.
“Just get it over with.”
In the basement, Mezzin had the girl wait in one of the rooms. The translator, a young Almarian sucking on a mint leaf, stood outside. It was not uncommon to have Almarians, especially imported workers, dealing with the Sons. After all, at the end of the day their cause was a common one.
“This is gonna be quick,” Mezzin said. “I just want to find out who the guy is, if he poses a threat, if it’s safe to release him, or if more painful measures have to be taken, got it?”
The translator nodded and spat his chewed leaf.
The pale Almarian intruder was brought downstairs, his hands bound by twine. Bayer ushered him into the room and shut the door.
He was pushed to the floor at one corner. The girl made sure to be in the opposite corner, curled up as if protecting herself from him.
“What’s your name?” Mezzin asked. The translator repeated the question in the Almarian garble.
The intruder gazed at Mezzin. His eyes were fearless and filled with ease. “I am Merv,” he said, forcing it out in Shirmian.
“What’s your relation to this girl?”
The translator then translated.
Again, Merv answered in forced Shirmian. “Her brother.”
At that, the cold girl became hot with agitation.
She shouted something fiery in her language.
“She says that he’s lying,” the translator said, “that they aren’t related at all.”
“Ask her who he is and why he smashed his way in here for her.”
Upon hearing the question, she was mute, her eyes cast away to the wall. Merv seized the opportunity, speaking on and on while shining a disappointed gaze at her.
“He says he just wants her to come home, and that her family really misses her and need her to come back or else they’ll die of worry.”
The girl chuckled, then said something under her breath.
“Family? What nonsense he’s made up,” the translator translated. The girl laughed — the laugh of someone at ease.
What’s with the lack of fear? I hate this lack of terror. When you face me, you should be scared of coming out with your bone structure intact.
Mezzin wanted to brutalize someone. Should it be the girl, for laughing and being so repulsive? No — this sly, cool-headed, pale-faced Almarian; he needed to know he may never see the sun again.
Relax. Cool that fire. Save it for the Shirmas holed up in the Settlement, who’ve lived their entire lives shitting all over us and pretending they were doing us a favor.
That brought Mezzin back to the immediate business. “Ask him if he’s willing to buy her for...5000 twinsen.”
Merv nodded slowly while responding.
“He says their family should be able to afford it, and that they’ll pay to have her back, but he’d like to be released so he can go back and tell them.”
“Then it’s settled,” Mezzin said.
In the other corner, Zauri scowled. She blurted out something as Bayer helped Merv off the floor.
“She... she says that if you release him, he has no money, and that he’ll fight and kill everyone here for her sake.”
She shivered; the sunshine from the ceiling pane projected the pale Almarian’s shadow onto her.
“That’s ridiculous, he can’t fight us all,” Mezzin said. “Why’s she so afraid of him?”
The translator asked and she answered.
“It’s because...she says he hasn’t been disarmed of his twicrys.”
Bayer chuckled. “I disarmed him myself. This girl is full of it. She prolly ran away from her family ‘cause she’s a stealing bitch and will do anything to keep from going back.”
She continued speaking. The translator jittered. He glared at Merv, studying him from head to toe, and delayed his translation.
“What did she say?” Mezzin asked.
“Uh...she said the twicrys on his wrist is only a decoy, the real one is...is inside him, near his jugular.”
Inside him?
Guards manned the door outside. Bayer’s blade was unsheathed and Mezzin’s was in quick reach. Merv was silent — his eyes staring into the cold girl. And then he spoke.
“He says she has a wild imagination and is prone to lying, and that she’s sick and needs treatment and can’t stay here much longer.”
A knock at the door interrupted the tension. “It’s me.” Nesmith’s moldy voice. “I need to talk to Mezzin upstairs — privately.”
Have our orders come in? Mezzin messaged Nesmith.
That’s not it. There’s something else.
What?
I’ll tell you, come upstairs.
Mezzin needed to get rid of the girl today, and 5000 twinsen wouldn’t be bad. He had a plan, one that would fix his own problem.
At the doorway of the house, he made sure he was alone with Merv. Before cutting the twine that bound him, he grabbed his ear and whispered, “Not 5000, I want 8000 — you understand?”
“8000? No, 5000.”
“I said 8000 — or you won’t see your sister again.”
Merv nodded and in one motion Mezzin cut him loose and pushed him into the bustling street. How rotten everything was. The sun lit a broken world where bums slept in alleyways amid puddles of broken glass, barely surviving the throng of trampling people. And it all smelled of rot, as if Keldan was the trash heap of the world. Everything Mezzin saw, all the colors and figures, bled and rusted while the cries of beggars were its endless chorus.
This is the last day that this world will exist. It won’t go on any longer. I will die, or this world will.
“Please — take care Zauri,” Merv said. And then he disappeared among the sea of filth and humanity.
I can understand. A brother, a sister, family — it’s all you’ve really got. In a better world you would never be apart. But this is not that world. This is a world where you can smell heaven while sitting in the fire, and where even in the shade the sun still burns you.
“Even if you’re in the shade, the sun still burns you.” A line from a poem Kav said was stuck in his head. Every day, he would go to the entertainment quarter; there, poets stood on wood crates while onlookers threw emrils at them whenever they said something witty. It was where the wealthy went to enjoy the pleasures of this world and where beggars could grovel for leftovers if the thieves didn’t get there first.
Kav didn’t know poetry and lacked the humility to beg, so he joined the Sons of the Deep. He had the strength to be one, and it was this strength that protected Mezzin. Once the wrong people found out Mezzin’s mother worked for Shirmas, it became too dangerous to go to school alone. And Kav never went. So he went with Kav, lying to Mother every day about where he was and what he was doing.
Back then, there was this girl Kav had his eye on. She was the daughter of a tea maker and would deliver tea every day to shops in the quarter. Regular Keldanese girl of the shy flavor, who nodded and smiled every time she completed a delivery. Kav would follow her along her daily path, through crowded alleys, rice fields, and the beachside. And so they hatched a plan, because along the beachside there was a rocky area where few would go. Where the waves hit a cave perched like a mouth on the shore.
“This is it, you ready?” Kav said.
Mezzin wasn’t. He felt dragged along, his heart growing thorns.
“Mezz, get a grip. We have to do this. After today, we can say to everyone that we’re men. Men take what they want, and don’t ask anyone. That’s strength. We do this, you and I, and we can both be made Sons. We’ll own this world — together.”
Mezzin knew nothing could stop it from happening. Nothing could kill Kav’s determination when he wanted something and saw it unguarded.
“Just tell me, why her?” Mezzin asked. “Why her of all people? She’s done nothing wrong, so why her?”
Sand was everywhere in Kav’s hair, specks of earth glowing amid dark trails.
“I feel like...I’d enjoy this one, that’s all.”
“She doesn’t deserve it,” Mezzin said.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s just like us. She’s just trying to get by. She wakes up every day and delivers tea for her father. And she does it happily, as if she doesn’t hate her life. Haven’t you seen her smile? It’s like the smile of a child who doesn’t know what a crappy situation she’s in because she doesn’t know anything better. Do you really want to kill that smile? How many of us are there that still smile? So why do we have to take it out on her?”
Kav was still as he watched her walk into the sun, until she was a speck and then nothing.
“Then who?” he said. “Who do we take it out on?”
Nesmith drank from a cup of frothing strawberry juice and ice. His leathery face twitched as he turned the pages of his beloved accounts book.
“I know what you did,” he finally said to Mezzin. “You pocketed 3000 twinsen. I know.”
Shit. Strength alone is gonna get you out of this.
“Yeah? What you gonna do about it?”
The tired old man glared at Mezzin. “I don’t intend to get in your way. But you know it’s betrayal, and the punishment for that is death. It’s an important time for us, and the cause needs every shard we can get. Strange time to steal.”
How many have I punished for be
trayal? Shit.
“You think that’ll make me feel guilty?”
Nesmith’s eyes were cool, unfazed. “I told you I won’t get in your way. Just tell me, why’d you do it? 3000 is an awful lot, and if it was anyone other than me tending these accounts, you wouldn’t get away with it. What are you gonna spend all those shards on?”
“You really want to know? Alright then, I’ll tell you. Might as well. You seem trustworthy. See, I have this house in the outskirts of town. It’s not a big house by any stretch, but I go there once in a while. When I’m there, I like to pretend I’m a different person, and just enjoy life.
“So, I buy the best clothes, the most expensive wine, and throw parties every night. And I indulge all my girlfriends by buying them jewelry from the mines of Sogd and clothes made of Abistran silk. And carpets — the finest Almarian carpets like the kind we auction now and then. And studded pillows and rosewater and things you’ve only dreamed of.
“It’s not the first time I’ve stolen, you see, just the first time I’ve been caught because now I have to deal with someone with an eye like yours. There’ I’ve confessed — you get all that?”
The blankest stare stretched over the old man’s face. “I don’t believe a single thing you said.”
“You think I care what you believe?”
“Listen,” Nesmith said. “I told you earlier, I have a girl. I got a daughter, and my daughter, my girl—”
“Say it.”
“I won’t tell the others about what you did, so long as you let me borrow too. My girl, she’s older than you now, but she ain’t on her own. She’s got some kind of bladder disease, doctors say she needs surgery. Tough to pay for that kind of thing, ‘specially with what we make. So, you see what I’m asking?”
“I don’t.”
“You turn away when I take a few shards, just enough to fix her up, and I’ll turn away from what you did.”
I let this shit start and it’ll never end.
“How about this,” Mezzin said. “You simply shut your mouth, because the answer is no fucking way.”
