The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  The captain looked him over with a glare that Lenk recognized. Usually, he saw it only a moment before swords were drawn. But the captain’s stare was slow, methodical. He was sizing him up, wondering just how much trouble this was going to be worth.

  Lenk decided to give him a hint. He slid into a tense stance, making sure to roll his shoulders enough to send the mail under his shirt clinking and show just how easily he wore the sword on his back.

  “I don’t see any colors on your shirt,” the captain muttered. “I don’t see any badge at your breast. I don’t see coin at your belt. Which means you’re not someone I want in my city.”

  “You’re wise to be wary,” Lenk said. “And I advise you to listen to that wariness and cut a path for me, lest I show you why my name in the old tongues means ‘bane of death.’”

  The captain stared and repeated flatly, “Bane of death.”

  “That’s right.”

  He blinked. “You’re serious.”

  Lenk cleared his throat. “I am.”

  “No.” The captain clutched his head as if in pain. “Just… just no. Back to the harbor, bane of death. No room for your kind here.”

  “What kind?” Lenk’s face screwed up in offense. “A person of my… uh… distinct verbotanage must not be denied righteous passage into—”

  “Boy, I wouldn’t be impressed by this routine even if you weren’t as tall as my youngest.”

  “Look, I don’t see what the problem is.” The bravado slipped from Lenk’s voice in a weary sigh as he rubbed his eyes. “I’ve got business in the city. In fact, my employer got in shortly before I got here. His name is Miron Evenhands. We both came off the ship Riptide. If you’ll just let me find him, he’ll—”

  “Here’s the problem,” Dransun interrupted. “You’ve got no colors and no affiliation, but you’ve got a sword. So you’ve got the means to kill people, but not the means to be held responsible.” He sniffed. “Parents?”

  “What?”

  “Any parents?”

  “Both dead.”

  “Hometown?”

  “Burned to the ground.”

  “Allies? Compatriots? Friends?”

  “Just the ones I find on the road. And in a tavern. And, this one time, hunched over a human corpse, but—”

  “And that’s the problem. You’re an adventurer.” He spat the word. “Too cowardly to be a mercenary, too greedy to be a soldier, too dense to be a thief. Your profession is wedged neatly between whores and grave robbers in terms of respectability, your trade is death and carnage, and your main asset is that you’re completely expendable.”

  He leaned down to the young man and forced the next words through his teeth.

  “I keep this city clean. And you, boy, are garbage.”

  The young man didn’t flinch. His eyes never wavered, not to Dransun’s guards reaching for their swords, not to Dransun’s gauntlets clenched into fists. That blue gaze didn’t so much as blink as he looked the captain straight in the eye, smiled through a split lip, and spoke.

  “Human garbage.”

  “And that’s when he punched me in the face,” Lenk said, as he covered his blackened eye. “So, anyway, that’s why we’re not getting in through the Harbor Gate.” He added a sneer to the black eye he cast at his companion. “Your plans are crap.”

  “My plan?” Denaos’s neck nearly snapped with incredulity as he whirled upon Lenk. “My plan was for you—not the bane of death—to go up, to wait your turn in line, to tell him you were a beet farmer come to sell your wares, and to go in.”

  “But I didn’t have any beets.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Denaos threw his hands into the air. “You weren’t selling beets to him, you were selling the idea of beets.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Hence why you have a black eye. Look, it’s simple…”

  Denaos illustrated the plan with his hands, weaving an elaborate scene in the air as they pushed their way through the crowded harbor streets.

  “Cier’Djaal is a city right in the middle of the desert. Something as mundane as a beet is rare and exotic to them and worth coin. They invite you in, you tell them you have hired hands with the actual product, we all grab some crates, pretend they’re filled with the stuff, and follow in after you.”

  Lenk turned away from Denaos, looking over the bustling crowd that choked them and to the distant sea from which they had just arrived that morning.

  “It was easier out there,” he sighed. “In the wild parts of the world, chances were anything you stumbled across was an enemy. And even if it wasn’t, you could solve most of your problems with it by jamming a sword in it. No rules, no laws—”

  “No toilets,” Denaos interrupted.

  “Still.”

  “This is Cier’Djaal, Lenk,” the tall man said. “People here don’t have to kill for money. That’s what you wanted, right?” At Lenk’s meek nod, he sneered. “Then you should have stuck with the plan.”

  “Well, if this is all so easy, why didn’t you do it?”

  Denaos scowled at Lenk through eyes sharpened by suspicion and worn by drink. Or rather, scowled down at Lenk. The man stood infuriatingly taller than Lenk, with a long and limber body wrapped in the kind of black leather that usually accompanied drinking problems and knives in the dark. The fact that Denaos was frequently in the company of both meant that he wasn’t the right person to deal with law-abiding folks like guardsmen.

  “Fine,” Lenk sighed. “My fault, then.”

  “So, Miron is somewhere over that wall with our money.” Denaos gestured over the crowd. “And you fucked up our best chance of getting in. What are you going to tell the others?”

  The shrug Lenk offered didn’t satisfy either of them. It was too hot to think. Even as the sun beat down overhead, the crowd at the harbor grew ever more oppressive. Sun-skinned, sweaty, smelly, stretched, scorched, scarred, the press of human traffic was a noose tightening around the two men.

  Sailors pushed their cargo up and down gangplanks, across harbor stones, over slow people. Guards of the Jhouche stood at the periphery, brandishing logbooks like blades at shrieking merchants. All of this done to the jaunty tune of prostitutes, beggars, and cutpurses plying their trades in a laughing, wailing symphony.

  Ruffians, thieves, scum; Lenk had seen worse. He was an adventurer, after all. His were eyes used to noticing danger. But every time he did, he found that danger had already noticed him.

  Tulwar, thick gray muscle left bared by their orange and red half-robes, scowls shooting down long faces knotted with gray folds of flesh, strode fearlessly through the berths the crowd gave them. Dark khoshicts lurked at the mouths of alleys and atop piles of crates, peering out from wild manes of braided hair with bright eyes and grins sharp as the necklaces of teeth they wore. Each one they passed gave him a look he knew well. The oids saw him as he saw them: weapons first, people last.

  “So many of them,” Lenk muttered.

  “Of what?” Denaos asked.

  “You don’t see them? The tulwar? Shicts?”

  “What of them?”

  “I guess I hadn’t expected to see so many of them here. You always hear tales of shicts stalking in the night, tulwar rampaging across the country. You never see them loitering.”

  “Teats get to choose who suckles them,” Denaos said, grunting past a knot of sailors. “Carcasses don’t get to choose what flies eat them.”

  “It just makes me wonder,” Lenk said. “Why do they choose to be here instead of among their own kind?”

  Denaos cast a sidelong smirk to his companion. “A little hypocritical of you, isn’t it?”

  Lenk narrowed his eyes on the man, even if it hurt the black one. “I’m allowed to be hypocritical about that particular subject.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I know why Kataria chose me.”

  He hadn’t intended that to sound as bitter as it had.

  TWO

  VERBAL DISEA
SES

  Kataria drew in a slow breath. She closed her eyes against the glare of the sun. She felt pale skin grow pink under its heat. Under the braids of her hair, both of her ears—long and pointed as knives, three notches to either length—rose into the air.

  She listened, growing anxious.

  She shut her eyes tighter, held her breath, bit her tongue, denied her every sense but the most important one.

  For three long breaths, she listened.

  And still, she could hear nothing.

  “Son of a wh—”

  She couldn’t even hear herself curse.

  She could hear everything else, of course. A towering wall with spiked crenellations separated the tall ships and their docks from the Souk. Humans clambered to somehow cross over that wall and get to the trade on the other side. And the round-ears flowed, like a noisy tide, into every crevice of the harbor. She could hear that just fine: all their slurs, their curses, their jokes about genitalia. All their wasted words on stinking breath, she could hear everything.

  Everything except them.

  They stood two hundred paces away. Two of them, tall and limber, their ears long and sharp as spears, skin dark and hair black. Humans had cruder names for them, as they did for her: savages, beasts, oids.

  She knew them by the name Riffid had given them.

  Kho.

  Shict. Like her.

  They were standing right there. She could feel their dark eyes fixed upon her as she sat atop a stack of crates. They were but a quick stride away. And yet, they may as well have been across the ocean.

  Their ears twitched like the antennae of insects. They were reaching out to her with the Howling, the language without words, the communicative instinct shared between all shicts as breath.

  “Hu’aish, pale sister,” they were saying. “How far from home are you? There are no trees here. Come and let us embrace you. Come and be away from these reeking kou’ru. Be amongst family. Be among your kind. Come to us.”

  At least, that was what she imagined them saying.

  She could feel the intent in their stares. They were trying to speak to her. And she heard nothing. And, feeling the red-hot shame in her own face, she pulled her broad-brimmed hat over her head and looked down.

  No one could say why a shict lost the ability to use the Howling. It wasn’t something anyone ever talked about in her tribe when she left. There were theories, of course: consumption of black herbs, a weak bloodline, prolonged contact with humans. That was the most popular theory.

  To breathe their air was to drink toxin. To take their gold was to invite infection. To feel the chill of their skin against the warmth of a shict’s own vibrant flesh…

  Well, she already knew what happened when she did that.

  She hopped off her perch and disappeared behind a stack of crates. A flutter of movement caught her eye and she had to restrain herself from starting.

  Gariath had been standing so still, his black cloak blending into the shadow so seamlessly, she almost forgot he was there.

  One didn’t notice Gariath in the same way one didn’t notice a tree. One never really appreciated a creature of his size until he came crashing down on someone’s head.

  “No sign of them yet,” Kataria said. “Hope you don’t mind staying here for a little while longer.”

  “I didn’t.” Gariath’s voice rumbled out of his hood in a deep growl. “Until you came back.” Kataria glared at him and he snorted. “How much longer?”

  “Infiltrations take time.”

  “Grabbing a rock and bashing someone’s head in takes only moments. But for some reason we’re trying to sneak in like rats.”

  “No one asked you.”

  “If they had, we’d be in already.”

  Kataria’s sole response was an irate scowl. But it wasn’t for Gariath; she didn’t have the muscle for the kind of ire that he would warrant.

  Her irritation was for the fact that, despite the roaring curses and hateful mutters of the human tide, she could hear the sound of footsteps. Light, wary strides moving quickly across stones.

  His footsteps.

  That she could always hear him might have given some other girl comfort. One who wasn’t deaf to her own people.

  It just infuriated her.

  “I smell failure,” Gariath muttered. “They’ve returned.”

  “I resent that.”

  She turned to see Lenk approaching. She didn’t know what failure smelled like—she suspected fish and lemons—but he didn’t look successful. The differences in his moods were subtle and it freshly irritated her that she knew them.

  “If I smell like failure, it’s only because I listened to him.” The young man gestured behind him.

  “A plan is only as brilliant as its executor,” Denaos said, following after. “If you had just stuck to the story, we’d be in.”

  “You didn’t go with beet farmers?” Kataria asked, quirking a brow. At Lenk’s sheepish grin, she sighed and rubbed her eyes. “You did the ‘bane of death’ thing, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, come on,” Lenk protested. “I figured that intimidation would be quicker than treachery.”

  “Yes, but all good intimidation is steeped in treachery,” Denaos pointed out.

  “And you have the height, mass, and silky locks of a little girl.” Kataria plucked a single silver strand of hair from his head. “Terrifying.”

  “If he were a girl, we wouldn’t have this problem.” Denaos’s eyes slipped over to Kataria with practiced appraisal. “In fact, perhaps the guards might be better persuaded by…”

  He took her in with a few quick glances, from her bright green eyes to the lean archer’s muscle left bare by the crop of her dusty leathers. He let out an approving hum, a plan coming to life behind his eyes.

  Just as the snarl she shot him killed it dead.

  “Think they’d like these?” She ran her tongue across a pair of overlarge canines. “They can strip a deer’s femur in forty breaths.”

  Kataria fixed her scowl on Denaos as she reached up and pulled her hat from her head. Unkempt blond hair laced with long, dirty feathers tumbled to her shoulders. Her pointed ears shot up, rigid like arrows in a carcass.

  “Or how about these?” They flattened against her head as she bared her teeth at Denaos. “What can I do to get us into this festering wound of a round-ear nest? The sooner we can get our money and are rid of each other, the better; am I right?”

  “Pretty mu—”

  Lenk cut Denaos off with a raised hand, looking warily at Kataria.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Lenk, I go into a spitting rant as a matter of routine,” she snarled at him.

  Lenk coughed. “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a routine, but—”

  “Never mind.” She jammed her hat back on, tucking her ears beneath it. “At this rate, I’ll be dead of old age before we get in and this won’t be a problem.”

  “There is no problem,” Gariath rumbled from his hood. “There are only three walking stacks of meat between us and your gold.”

  His black cloak parted with just a flash of dull crimson. A pair of clawed hands, broad and heavy, tightened into sledges of scarred flesh and trembled with all the wrong kinds of excitement.

  “Let me shed this pathetic disguise and I’ll finish this for you.”

  From beneath his hood, the dragonman’s blood-colored snout split into a smile full of sharp teeth.

  “We’ve discussed this,” Lenk said with a sigh. “This? This stuff you say? This is why you have to wear the cloak.”

  Gariath’s arms dropped.

  “We never get to do anything I want to do.”

  “Because all you ever want to do is kill people,” Lenk shot back. “And we’re trying to stop doing that. That’s the whole point of getting in there. Once we find Miron and our money, we’re done.”

  “We never agreed to anything. One of us decided that,” Kataria snorted. “You didn’t ask anyone else.”
>
  “As you damn well noticed, adventuring isn’t getting us anywhere and I’m not the only one who would say so.”

  “Oh yeah? Who else?”

  “What about Asper?” Lenk asked.

  “What about her?” Kataria demanded in reply.

  “What about me?” a third voice chimed in.

  The assembled went silent at the appearance of a tall woman in their midst. Though her robes were dusty and workmanlike and her long brown hair was wrapped in a businesslike braid beneath a blue bandanna, she carried with her an air of authority. Partly because of the silver phoenix pendant about her throat, a sigil of her station as a priestess of Talanas, but mostly because of the suspicious glare she shot them.

  “You all went quiet very quickly. What were you talking about?” She must have seen something in their forced nonchalance, for her eyes widened. “Oh, for the love of… were you planning a murder?”

  “Discussing,” Lenk said, holding up a finger. “Discussing a murder. Not planning.”

  “We’re not even in the city yet!” Asper protested. “You’re not allowed to get us executed before we at least see the Souk!”

  “It’s not a crime until you actually do it,” Denaos muttered. “And we entertained other options first.”

  “What happened to the beet-farmer plan?” Asper asked. “I was out trying to find crates we could use for it. I liked that plan.”

  “Most of us did,” Denaos said, angling a sidelong glare at Lenk. “But now we don’t have beets and, like most men deprived of edible roots, we turn to murder.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re serious or not and that always makes me uncomfortable.” Asper tugged at her pendant. “I’m a priestess. A respectable member of society. I’m in.”

  “You’re in,” Lenk said. “We’re still out here. And they’re not going to believe we’re with you.”

  Asper surveyed them: the short man with the sword, the tall man with the knives, the shict with the fangs, and… Gariath.

  “Probably not,” she said, sighing. “Well, maybe I could go in and find Miron and bring him back out? Or…” Her eyes lit up. “We could ask Dreadaeleon.”