I guess I prefer life in the gutter. Piking pretty men. When will I learn?
To judge by the tingle that ran down his spine when Rallant called for him, Linciard guessed never.
*****
Night did not exist in Oretcht'ke, the Shadow Realm. It had no sun, no moon, no stars, yet there was always light: its vast cavernous expanse was stitched by glowing pathways, and the Spindle at its epicenter radiated a dull ochre aurora, pervasive yet sourceless. Lanterns dotted the streets as well, leaving few places in all the Realm that could be called dark.
Enforcer Ardent of Taradzur-kai looked into one of them now, her shadowblood eyes straining against the blackness. She was at the outer limit of the Realm, where the air grew smoky with unmanifested eiyet-presence but had not yet solidified into an eiyenbridge or an umbral wall—the narrow dividing zone between Shadow and reality. The markings on the white walkway told her that this was where the bridge to Bahlaer-kai had stood before its destruction.
In its place, the quarantine chamber hung like an apple from a bough, a perfect sphere twice her height and connected laterally to the great black artery that extended from the umbral wall into the Realm. There were other chambers suspended at other angles, but most had shriveled away, their occupants dead or gone. Quarantine clusters like this were the eiyets' response to anything unusual being shoved into the Realm: a contagion, an enemy—
Or a victim, like the mangled figure she saw within.
With an exhale, she squared her shoulders and stepped from the edge. Eiyets assembled beneath her feet to bridge the gap. There were more here than there should be, teeming like wasps at a disturbed hive, and as she touched the thin cool membrane that surrounded the chamber, she felt the shiver of their mood. Spite, mischief, menace.
Then she was through, and the whiff of sweat and fresh waste filled her nostrils, making her grimace. As important as the quarantine chambers were for blocking pathogens and limiting the eiyets' blood-frenzy, their total containment was not kind to the trapped subject.
He lay there on a bed of malleable shadow: the infamous Shan Cayer. A scarred, thick-set older Illanite, unblooded and abominably truncated on the right side, both his upper arm and lower thigh capped with black material where they had been severed during his extraction. Except for them, he was nude, the shadows not concerned with prudery. At least he looked clean; someone had washed him after they cut him from his bloody clothes, and the bed took care of any excretions. It just couldn't banish the smell.
At the sound of her slippers on the whispering floor, he turned his head, weak human eyes unfocused in the gloom.
“Who is it?” he rasped, and the dryness in his voice had her reaching for her canteen in sympathy. “You piking bureaucrats have taken your time.”
“My name is Enforcer Ardent, and I am here to inform you of the disposition of Bah-kai,” she said, approaching his side. He followed the sound of her with the skill of a long-time Kheri, head turning to keep her fixed in his unseeing stare, and as she flicked the sparker on her hand-held lantern she saw him smile. It kindled after a moment, and she slowly peeled her fingers away from the eye-shaped cut-outs, listening for any warning hiss. When nothing happened, she exhaled in relief.
“Having trouble with the little darlings?” he said, squinting against the faint light.
“They are agitated. You understand.”
“Yes.” He tried to prop himself up to get a better look at her, but his remaining elbow kept sinking into the black mass of the bed. With a whisper of eiyenriu, she caused it to adjust into something more like a seat, and saw him clutch at it in alarm before he realized.
“My apologies,” she said. “I should have asked.”
“You should have...” He trailed off, weathered face nonplussed. She supposed he wasn't used to politeness from her kind. Then he gave her a raking look, and she held the lantern to one side obligingly, letting the eye-shaped lights fall over her Enforcer armor, her fighting sticks and killing blades, her black hair pinned back in the scorpion-tail style, her shadowmarks and scars.
“Young,” he said finally. “Padrastan?”
“Pajhrasthani. Not so young.”
He snorted. “Twenty? Twenty-five?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Less than half my age, girl. Not much accent... Realm-born?”
“Yes.”
“And you've come from the Realm to tell me about my own city? Or are you planning to enforce something upon me?”
Sour talk from a broken man. Not unexpected. “I am your replacement,” she said. “As such, I—“
He swiped for her suddenly, a snarl on his lips, but she stepped out of range and then caught his good arm. Another hiss made the bed obey her, canting backward to sink the man deep as she shoved him into it. He tried to heave out again but it wouldn't let him.
“Replacement?” he roared in the close confines, making the walls shiver in agitation. “How dare you try to replace me with your kind!”
Watching him thrash about, she reflected on her Regent mother's warning. Half a century ago, Shan Cayer had marched out from the worst of Bahlaer's slums on a mission to unite its warring gangs under the Shadow banner. Bahlaer hadn't been much more than a bump in the road back then: a warren of refugees squatting in the ruins of the Jernizan-Serpent Empire wars, listless and plagued by banditry. With the backing of the Kheri, though, the Hound of the Dregs and his crew had kicked life and organization into the populace, and when the next war sparked up between the two heavyweight empires, a city was there to profit from it—under the aegis of the Shadow God, whom the Serpents respected and the Jernizen feared.
All the city-states of Illane had rebuilt themselves on the backs of people like him: stubborn, independent, apolitical and fed up with their neighbors' antics. But what worked in times of strife had faltered once peace came, for the Kheri were not allowed to rule.
And, due to his association with them, neither was Shan Cayer. Once the city shucked its Shadow allegiance in favor of a broader, secular mercantile worldview, he had been shunted to an advisory position. Worse, he had been informed by the Regency that the most he could control, as an unblood, was a single kai.
He'd been an ambitious man once. A thug, a reformer, a priest.
According to her mother, he hated shadowbloods now. Envied their gifts, their afterlives and their authority in the god's absence. He surrounded himself with unbloods, catered to them—had even declared an unblood newcomer as his successor. All to spite the 'blooded hierarchy.
In his face, though, Ardent read a different story. Anger, yes. But not envy, and not spite. No, he looked insulted.
I am not your enemy, she wanted to say. I have no intention of keeping your kai. My job is to analyze the situation and recommend fight or flight—and if I choose fight, to start one.
But Cayer wasn't stupid. He would never fight again, and with Bah-kai in shambles it would be an ideal time for the Regency to put its own agents in place. Ardent didn't consider herself one; she had joined Enforcement to get away from the insular politics of her aunts and cousins, had even taken a shadow-name to disavow her Regent mother's influence. Alas, she doubted she could convince him of that.
“I've already been in contact with your surviving lieutenants and the outer cells,” she said instead. “Only the Shadowland was attacked, and only the block that held your headquarters. A few levels of basement and sewer were breached, with rubble forced into the goblin entrances, but nothing below was damaged.”
Not that it made the destruction any more bearable. She had walked the ruins last night to verify the reports, and found fires still smouldering in the depths—a slow cremation for the Kheri and civilians who had been in the Merry Tom Tavern and its associated block. A greasy layer of soot covered everything, the air thick with the smell of woodsmoke and charred meat.
She continued, “The goblins are considering our proposal on open warfare. The metal elementals have already sided with us because of the ma
gical nature of the attack.”
“Of course they sided with us. They're our allies,” Cayer snapped.
“You may have secured their friendship, but there has never been a military pact between us. We are negotiating one now.”
“Get me out of here and I'll have that negotiation done in a twinkling. Better yet, get Lark on it. Pull her back.”
“Lark, your designated successor.”
“Yes.”
“She has already been informed of the situation, but we have chosen not to recall her. She is doing important work with the Guardian vessel—“
“That idiot boy? No. You get her back here immediately—“
“To do what?” Ardent stared down at trapped old man. By the way the muscles jumped in his shoulders and chest, he was trying to pull free from the bed, but its substance gripped him tight and would not release unless she willed it. “Is this Lark a war-leader? Because your reports speak of her as a diplomat, a go-between for you and the goblins and the street-level teams. Have you even introduced her to the governor's council? No, you're not ready to step down yet, not ready to groom a serious replacement. We will not recall her; she would be no use to us.”
A spasm of hate crossed his face. “That's it, then. You steal this from me—my kai, my position. You swoop in like an avenger, as if you didn't stand by and watch the Crimsons kill us!”
Her eyes narrowed. She hadn't been one of the responders, but she had reviewed all the reports. “We had no more warning than you did, but I apologize on behalf of the Regency anyway. The situation warranted a stronger response than it received, but our prior dealings with the Crimson Army did not lead us to anticipate such—“
“Hog-crap, hog-crap! I know about the reports from the coast! You knew things were going to shit, but you did nothing—you didn't want to break your precious agreement with the Empire, even after the first time those pikers rampaged through my tavern! What, did you think you could just throw some supplies and prisoners at them and they'd go away? What do you think happens to the people they catch? They piking die!”
“I don't set policy,” Ardent responded stiffly.
“Gonna hide behind that, are you?” His fingers dug at the soft material futilely, his teeth gleaming in the lantern's light. “Policy and nonintervention hog-crap and treaties that aren't worth the handshake they're made over? No, let me tell you the truth about your precious Regency. They don't give a shit about us on the outside—about the cities, the kais, the unbloods who rely on them. All they care about is the benefit to the family, to themselves—“
“Shan Cayer,” she said sharply, “I am not here to debate the ills of the Regency. I am here to evaluate the Crimson threat and either eliminate it, or end our presence in Bahlaer.”
“End it? We're abandoning the city?”
“It is an option.”
“You can't— We're not— All my life, you bitch, I've—“
“I know your history, and we owe a debt to you. To your generation and all the Kheri you have brought up behind you. If we do pull out of Bahlaer, we will re-home you in any of our cities or retire you to Hjaltar with honors—“
“What worth are honors to the dead!” He lurched again, spitting with rage, and the way the cords stood out in his neck made her worry for his health. He must have put pressure on one of his stumps, because he immediately fell back with a sound of pain, chest heaving. “We called for you,” he rasped. “We trusted you to save us, but you let it happen. You let it happen!”
“You know that the Shadow can not penetrate magic,” she replied sternly. “We were able to rescue you because you were already in contact with the eiyets, but even that was not enough.”
Cayer bared his teeth again, but then the pain mastered him and his face slumped, his shoulders sinking deep in the black material. It made him look small and frail, a battered codger with two stick-limbs and two stumps.
“You could have saved them all,” he rasped. “The bar-flies, the waitresses, the families... It wasn't just us in that block. I wanted Bahlaer to love the Shadow like I once did, so I rented the housing cheap, I fed the beggars, I halved the protection tax, and people came. They felt safe there; they wanted to be around us even if they weren't a part of us. We had the biggest above-ground Shadowland in the north, and it was great. It was working. People raised their piking children there. Oh lord, the children...”
She didn't know how to respond to the sudden wet streaks on his cheeks. She had never been much for family or friends—her mother always away on Regency business, her father an unknown, her youth spent in private tutelage under emotionless eiyensuriel. Though technically just shadowbloods who had lapsed into the god's realm upon death, the eiyensuriel held half the Regency seats and most of the Office of Oversight, and thus dominated the rule and education of the Realm.
Ardent might become one when she died, though it was uncommon for a second-generation shadowblood and vanishingly rare for anyone lower. She didn't really care either way. While she respected them, she wasn't enthused by the idea of an eternal afterlife; the eldest had seen millennia pass, which made them distant and cold.
Emulating them had served her well as a lieutenant in Taradzur-kai, and as an Enforcer, but not so much personally.
She rubbed absently at the scar that marred her lips. It had been given to her by another unblood—a fellow Taradzur Kheri who'd been offended by her indifference to his philosophizing. She couldn't remember the argument now, only that he'd been drunk and insulting and finally pulled out a knife. She'd broken both of his arms, but not before he'd gotten a cut in that opened her face from chin to cheek. He'd told her later, after paying the medical fees and fines, that it suited her; it gave her some expression, even if that expression was a sneer.
“It's too late now,” she said. “The dead are dead, and the decision is in my hands. I came here not as a courtesy, Shan Cayer, but because I would know of Bahlaer—its people, its government, its threats. Your reports cover the basics but I need to plumb the depths.”
He raised his head, jaw clenched, cheeks wet. “You'll never understand, Realm-born. You're not a person, you're just a tool of your aunties, and when you fail, my city will suffer.”
“Then help me.”
Again that baffled look, as if he didn't know the meaning of the words. She pressed on, “We can not permit mass bloodshed in the shadows; it would be catastrophic. But neither can we back away from this. I need your help to find a livable solution, something that doesn't create a new shadowless circle in Illane.”
“Like in the Heartlands?” he rasped. “Like all those other cities you abandoned?”
“We were locked out, and we still don't understand it. If it is magic and they've started another one here...” She shook her head. “We don't go to war lightly, but perhaps it is time.”
He made as if to scoff, but the noise caught in his throat and became a wracking cough. Pulling her canteen from its web, she moved to his side and pulled his good hand free, then helped him guide the water to his lips. He drank like a man fresh from the desert.
“Get me out of here,” he croaked once he came up for air. “Let me return to Bah-kai, and I'll help how I can. Piking quarantine won't even let me stand up to piss.”
She looked down at his missing leg. “I'll put in the request, but I can't guarantee it. If it doesn't happen...“
Blowing out a breath, he said, “Fine. You asked pretty nice for a stiff bitch, and you're an Enforcer; I can respect that. Promise me one thing.”
“Yes?”
“You get word to my girl Lark. You tell her I'm alive, and the kai is hers when she comes back. And you mean it. Or else you get nothing from me.”
“I'll have to run it past my superiors,” she said, “but I have no quarrel with your line of succession.”
“Good. Now open your ears, because we've got a lot of city to cover.”
*****
The next morning, Lieutenant Erolan Linciard squinted into the C
ivic Plaza and wondered when he'd suddenly become old. That was the only explanation he could fathom for having a hangover after so little whiskey.
Maybe it's the curse of officership. Or maybe I've broken my brain with all this piking reading-and-writing.
He had a roster in one hand, the names swimming before his achy eyes, and the act of matching them to the men who jogged in circles around the central fountain was about as much as he could handle right now. Yet Sergeant Benson was at his elbow, droning on about requisitions, so he forced himself to pay attention.
“...to run the kitchens, so Shield-Sergeant Kirvanik has taken them over for the moment. Apparently he's a passable cook,” Benson was saying. He was their bursar, quartermaster and all-around money man, a ruddy-faced, barrel-shaped former merchant who had been drummed out of the Gold Army after nosing around in his superiors' finances. According to him, he had been sent here 'to fall off a horse and break my neck', yet he'd become a passable rider in his time in the Crimson. Still a terrible lancer, though.
Linciard wondered how their old captain Terrant was doing without him, or how Sarovy had pried the man from his grip, because everyone knew the only reason their company ran as well as it did was Benson's hard work. Certainly it wasn't the backing of headquarters.
“Gejaran, isn't he?” said Linciard, feeling he should participate. “Are we eating Gejaran food now?”
Benson looked up at him with humorless black eyes. “We are eating whatever he can cobble together from the supplies the militia didn't steal. Most of the shops will sell to us, but the mark-up is ridiculous. I've been trying to hammer out some deals, so, like I was saying, I won't be purchasing anything nonessential until I get the prices down. Food included.”
“Doesn't that seem a bit unwise?”
The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) Page 8
