by Heidi Belleau;Ally Blue;Kari Gregg;Peter Hansen;Laylah Hunter;Brien Michaels;Sam Schooler
He washed me tenderly and let me relax before he started asking more questions. No point lying, so I told him everything.
“You did all that for me?” He sounded stunned.
“Of course.” I touched a hand to his face. “I’d do anything for you.”
He helped me out, handed me a towel to dry myself. We went to one of the guest rooms. Tomorrow, we’d put this place behind us. But right now, I didn’t want to do anything but fall asleep in my lover’s arms.
Jason lay down behind me, and suddenly the entire night felt worth it. Nothing I’d seen, nothing I’d been through mattered now.
Jason started to snore before long, and I would have been close behind him, but I heard something. I strained my eyes against the darkness. There it was again, like something scratching at the floor.
I sat up in time to see a lone, green tentacle slither up the doorframe, into the hallway, toward the ceiling, and out of sight.
The man’s portrait was hastily drawn, scratched in sharp charcoal on a page from a book of devotionals. When Yordan traced the line of a cheekbone, his fingertip came away black. “This isn’t much to go on. If he’s so much as started wearing his beard differently—”
“Our agent put his life at risk to bring us this portrait.” The Father Superior reached for the page and set it on his desk, pinning it down with a lead paperweight. Afraid I’m going to smudge it further, thought Yordan, although he kept his face neutral. “She Who Turns the Page has spoken. This is the man.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t the man. I’m only saying I wish we had a better picture.”
The Father Superior quirked a thin brow. “What, you want him to stand still for half an hour while I take a tintype?”
“It would help.” Yordan leaned over the desk, studying the portrait again. The man was young, he thought. Younger, at any rate, than anyone else he’d taken. Thin as a blade, lips like a slash, beard cut close along his jaw. Even in rough charcoal, there was a keenness to his eyes that sent a thrill of anticipation down Yordan’s spine. “How long do we have?”
“The mother’s already been confined to her bed. If the birth is typical, less than a month. If the child comes early—and you know they always come early when we haven’t cut them a soul yet—”
“No need to trot out the lurid details. You could just tell me that time is of the essence and have done with it. You don’t have to paint me a picture.”
“Have you ever sat at a woman’s bedside while she delivers a soulless child, Brother Yordan?”
Yordan pushed the paperweight aside and picked up the page, folding it neatly into quarters and tucking it into his breast pocket alongside his coiled garrote. “No, but I’ve seen her carried out afterward. They had to make three trips to get all the pieces.”
The Father Superior’s smile was a length of razor wire. “Time is of the essence, then. Cut this man’s soul away. Don’t make me paint you a picture.”
Yordan presented his identification papers at the ticket counter, where the station mistress gave him a cautious once-over through the protective glass and said, “Brother Yordan Korvechi. You don’t look like a priest.”
“What’s a priest supposed to look like?” He pushed his papers under the glass again, but she kept her hands folded in her lap.
“I was raised in the church of She Who Winds the Thread,” she answered, tilting her head as though it had been a serious question. “The brothers all wore robes with gold braid, even out of the church. They always smelled like incense, even when you passed them on the street. That’s a proper priest.”
“Well, that’s the Threadmen,” snapped Yordan. “I’m a Bookman, and we’re too damn busy for incense.”
“Oh.” Her hands had started trembling; he could tell, even though she hid them under the counter. “She Who Turns the Page. Going to go turn someone’s page, are you?”
He had a knife up each sleeve and a slim pistol in his coat lining, a garrote in his breast pocket just aching to be unwound. From the way her gaze kept slipping toward the station guards, she had to know it. “Ticket, please. And I’ll have my papers back.”
“Just making conversation,” she muttered, but she returned his papers to him and handed him a ticket, and he reckoned that was better than conversation.
He boarded the train less than an hour later, shutting himself in his compartment and closing the three iron latches on the door. The leather seats were still new enough to squeak against his coat, and the maps in the pouch by the window were up to date. He spread one over his lap while he waited for the all-aboard.
The target had a summer home along Lake Liakra with a carriage house, a chapel, and a vineyard that had produced a decent bottle of red twenty-five years ago. He no doubt had a private hunting reserve in the forest, where he and his friends stalked the kind of beasts who looked on men with half-starved eyes and bared their broken teeth. The summer home meant money; the chapel meant old money; Lake Liakra meant his family preferred the silver bullet to the silver spoon.
Strictly speaking, She Who Turns the Page could call on her priests to cut any man’s soul away. But she seldom called for them to take anyone rich, anyone powerful—and least of all, anyone young.
Even with the charcoal sketch safely pressed between the pages of his prayer book, Yordan couldn’t entirely believe how young the man was.
They wouldn’t send me if they weren’t sure, Yordan told himself, while the conductor shepherded passengers aboard and the priests of He Who Loves Cold Iron readied their long knives at every coupling between the cars.
The train would pass through the forest on its way to Lake Liakra, and in that tangle of close-knit boughs, the iron rails were as much a palisade as a pathway.
Liakra Station was ringed with iron fences, but even so, few of the passengers unlatched their compartment doors there. A bone-thin woman peered out of a sleeper as Yordan passed, but the moment she caught sight of him shuffling down the aisle, she slid the door shut, and he heard three firm clicks.
He crossed the thin spit of gravel between the tracks and the gate, glancing from the hunter at his left to the Ironman on his right. He could barely pick out their features with the lamps along the rail at their backs. Only the hunter’s long nose protruded from beneath the broad brim of her hat; the Ironman’s chin was cleanly shorn and his pate shaved bald as an egg. “I hear there’s a chapel to He Who Loves Cold Iron near the lake—” he began, but the Ironman raised a thick-gloved hand to cut him off.
Only when the gate had swung closed behind them did the Ironman answer. “Don’t open your mouth outside the walls. No telling what will climb inside.”
“But there is a chapel.”
“So there is—right on the lakeshore. If you’re making a pilgrimage, I’ll take you in the morning. If you’re searching for lodgings, do yourself a favor and get back on the train. There’s no room for bumblers along Lake Liakra.”
“I have business with the chapel’s patron, actually. One Kardam Zavachi. His people in the city said he’d come this way, and the business can’t wait.”
The Ironman drew in a hissing breath between his teeth, then smiled like a man who didn’t mean it. “Tax collector, are you? I can’t think of anyone else who’d come all the way to Liakra to conduct his business.”
Yordan only laughed. He didn’t particularly mean it, either. “Can’t escape the collections agents. Are you still offering to take me to the chapel, or do I have to hire a horse and take myself?”
“I’ll take you, but only for the sake of the horse. Poor creature like that doesn’t deserve these woods.”
The Ironman pushed open the door of the station proper, eyes lighting as his fingers touched wood. Even before he passed over the threshold, that light told Yordan that the door was made of rowan wood. They’ve built themselves a fortress here, he thought appreciatively, and right on the heels of that, I wonder what kind of fortress Zavachi’s set up for himself?
He stepped in
to the warm light of the naphtha lamps and felt the heat of the station settle over him like a new skin. His joints ached at the remission of a cold he hadn’t particularly felt; his neck was as raw and cold as though it had been peeled.
There was a winery at one end of the station, but it was shuttered. There were lodgings at the other end, but a sign on a stanchion apologized that all of the rooms were currently occupied.
In the middle of the station, an iron stove radiated heat, and so Yordan curled up on a bench beside it and folded his coat around his knives and his gun and his book of prayers. He thrust the bundle under his head and willed sleep to come spell him.
The Ironman said nothing as he walked at Yordan’s side, which suited Yordan just fine. It was a cloudless day, cool without last night’s insidious, biting cold. The breeze off the lake was brisk but not brutal. On a long walk like this one, there were worse things to have than a silent companion.
The Iron Brethren had cut the trees well back from the road to let the sunlight stream in, and had lined either side of the gravel way with a heavy iron fence. Atop one of its polished spikes, a disemboweled deer still thrashed weakly. Something had come to gnaw the meat from her hind legs, and Yordan couldn’t help thinking that this something was about as tall as he was. The stench of her insides followed them well down the road.
“You’re not a tax collector,” said the Ironman abruptly, when they crested a low hill and the lake valley spread out before them. The leaden surface of it was irregular, cut across with waves, but it glittered in the sunlight.
“Whatever happened to not talking beyond the walls?”
The Ironman only glanced at the fences arrayed to either side of them and gestured Yordan to get on with it.
He shrugged and got on with it. “Debt collector. Kardam Zavachi owes a few gambling halls in the city, and given the reputation of the district around Lake Liakra, they’re not keen to see him pass on before he’s had a chance to balance his ledgers.”
The Ironman only snorted. “Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll assume the worst.”
“What, there’s something worse than a debt collector?”
“A Bookman,” answered the Ironman, thumb brushing the hammered pommel of his long knife. “If I should learn that I’d taken a Bookman to collect Kardam Zavachi’s dues, well, I’d have to balance his ledger. There’s got to be a child out there needing a soul, by their lights, and a Bookman’s will do if no one else is offering.”
Yordan laughed at that, letting his eyes squinch up small. It would be too much to clap the Ironman on the shoulder, but he did straighten up like a weight had come off him. “What, you’ve been thinking I was a Bookman this whole time? After Zavachi? The man can’t be thirty years old—what would a Bookman want with Kardam Zavachi?”
After a frozen moment, the Ironman laughed as well. It was a hard laugh, but at least it was a laugh. “Suppose that’s true.”
He had a smile like a charcoal slash, and suddenly Yordan knew the line of those cheekbones in that blade-thin face. A chill sliced down his spine.
Told the Father Superior I wouldn’t recognize him with a shave. Yordan stuck his hands into his coat pockets and kept his eyes on the lake. “I thought the Bookmen and the Ironmen did the same kind of work. Keeping us safe from the soulless. That’s what my priest said, anyway.”
“And an Ironman does it by killing the soulless; a Bookman does it by killing the living. Not the same kind of work at all.”
Kardam Zavachi hadn’t taken his thumb from the pommel of his knife, but that was all right, because by then Yordan had worked his pistol out of his coat lining. He didn’t even give Zavachi time to draw before he’d put a bullet through his neck, and then he bared a knife to finish the job.
He said the Prayer of the Last Word over Zavachi’s corpse while the wolves gathered along the iron fence, stalking the boundary line with their noses pressed close against the ground. Yordan had never seen a wolf before, and so he couldn’t have said if they were massive or if they just seemed it because they were close. He couldn’t have said whether their eyes were more than ordinarily keen.
He Who Loves Cold Iron kept the wolves at bay, although they followed Yordan all the way back to the station.
It was a perfectly clear day, a perfectly clean kill. As Yordan rapped on the rowan-wood door to be let in, he paused to take a last glimpse of the sunlit corridor that led down to the lake. At every side, the woods encroached on the nest of ferns and trailing raven’s-foot that had sprung up where the tall trees had been cut away.
“You’ll have to send a party to burn Kardam Zavachi’s body,” said Yordan when the station master swung the door open and let him into the warmth. “His page has been turned.”
Yordan slept poorly that night, even now that he could roll up his coat without his weapons inside it. He woke once at an hour past midnight, and once again in the dim hours just before dawn, and this time the hunter was sitting on the next bench and warming her feet by the stove.
She was an old woman—or perhaps only old before her time—with skin like cracked leather and hair as gray as slate. Her stockings had been darned over and over, until there was more of darning thread in them than stocking wool. “They’re scratching at the south door,” she informed him. “You can hear their nails scrabbling on the wood. Even their breathing, between scratches. All rough and panting-like.”
“There’s an iron fence all along the road past the south door.”
“Must be a break in the fence, then. I’ll have them see to it tomorrow, unless you’re planning to stick around.”
Yordan yawned. “My train comes in the morning. Have to let the Father Superior know that I’ve finished my work.”
“Hmm.” She said nothing more, and as the hours wore on, she curled up on her side with one arm folded under her head for a pillow and her rifle laid close as a lover.
Something scratched softly at the door. Like a lost dog, Yordan thought, not like something trying to tear the thing off its hinges. Those nails sounded blunt on the polished wood. Nothing like he thought a wolf’s would sound.
More like a man’s.
He rose from his bench and drew his pistol, left his knives strapped to his hips in case he lost the gun. His footfalls were soft on the tile of the station floor. The three iron latches came undone without a sound. Behind him, the hunter didn’t so much as stir.
He could hear that rough-edged breathing now, like someone trying to draw air through a ragged hose, and for an endless moment, he remembered the way the gristle where he’d severed Zavachi’s windpipe had shone in the sun.
He steadied his pistol, then gripped the knob and turned, pulling the door wide open.
Outside, dawn was breaking, the sunlight just beginning to touch the horizon. There was no one at the door, man or wolf or little lost dog.
“Fuck everything,” muttered Yordan, closing the door and doing up each of the three latches.
His train arrived exactly on schedule, and the station hands rolled up the jointed iron sheet on the eastern side of the wall to let the carriages in. “All aboard for Dushelka, Kozla, and all points west,” the station master called, at which Yordan unbundled his coat and shrugged it on.
His heart jumped a little at the sight of the Ironmen along the track, but he didn’t let himself so much as slow or stare. It wasn’t his affair that he’d turned the page for one of theirs. He’d been called, and he’d served, just as Kardam Zavachi had when he’d been alive.
They could have told me he was a priest, at least.
Yordan caught the handrail and swung up onto the first step, shuffling into the carriage and showing the coach attendant his ticket. She studied it a moment, then smiled like a girl in a soap advertisement and handed it back. “We let off a whole crowd in Port Stopa, Brother, if you’d like to change your ticket for a sleeping car. The linens are clean, the meals are better, and the rail company sells its liquor by the bottle to passengers in sleeper cars.”
Yordan had slept so little that he only half-listened to the prices as she rattled them off. He vaguely remembered pressing a few banknotes into her hands and letting her lead him to the sleeping car nearer the front of the train, then peeling off another note to purchase a bottle of cherry brandy.
It was a small bottle, and the brandy in it tasted medicinal, but it made his head feel as soft and heavy as a bale of carded wool. I should do up the latches, he thought, but then the pillow was under his head and the loose ends of goose feathers were tickling his skin, and he couldn’t remember whether he’d done up the latches or not.
The blinds were down when he woke; they let in a dim, red light shot through with deep shadows. Someone was sitting on the edge of the bunk above him, bare legs dangling limp. He was humming a song that Yordan thought was a hymn, but to whom, he couldn’t have said.
“How long have you been here?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and stretching as far as the lower bunk would allow.
“Long enough,” answered Kardam Zavachi, with a low laugh that rooted itself in Yordan’s loins. He was still laughing as his blood soaked through the mattress to rain cold and thick on Yordan’s face.
Yordan woke smothering a scream, his head throbbing and cold sweat standing out on his forehead.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this hard.
The travelers in the next sleeping car—a Dushelkachi family on their way home from a seaside holiday—invited Yordan to join them for the evening meal, and it didn’t seem to concern them that he hadn’t yet had a shave or a proper wash.
“The coach attendant said you were a priest,” said one of the mothers, a plump, dark-haired woman with eyes like ice. “Are you a blessing sort of priest?”
