The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  “But chances are good that he already figured out a way in and went without us,” Lenk replied.

  Kataria folded her arms over her chest. “He’s a greasy little boy in a dirty little coat who spends more time trying to hide his erections than he does speaking. What use is he?”

  “He can fly,” Lenk said.

  “Ah.” She sniffed. “Well, he’s not here, is he?” She shuffled her feet, glanced to Gariath. “So… murder?”

  “No murder,” Lenk and Asper shouted at once.

  “Then let’s get back on the ship we came in on and forget this whole cesspool!” Kataria snarled.

  “We are not going back!”

  Asper’s eyelid twitched. She was aware of it, of course: the anger, the yelling, the hideously uncomfortable sexual tension. But she needed listen only for a few moments more. Meditatively, she counted down from ten breaths.

  Nine… eight… She held her breath. A faint smile crept across her face. Ah, there it is.

  The comforting numbness set in at the back of her brain, as it usually did when they started screaming. A marvelous self-preservation instinct, or maybe a hemorrhage that would someday kill her; either way, she wouldn’t have to listen anymore.

  Not that she didn’t care. She had cared quite a bit when she set out with these people. Like all good servants of the Healer, she had cared a tad too much. She tossed her concern around like a rich man’s coin, frittering it away on every problem she saw. Experience had taught her to be more frugal with her compassion. If they had a problem she could help with, she would.

  Lenk and Kataria’s particular brand of problem was not one of them.

  But it had been well past ten breaths now. Their shrieking was a faint buzzing noise in her ear. And in her meditation, she noticed Denaos, likewise oblivious to the ruckus as he tended his nails with a small knife.

  And an idea struck her.

  Nonchalance to obscenity was a façade he wore well, usually because it was rarely a façade. But she had seen his many masks, and she knew how to spot the tears in them: his jaw was clenched; his body was taut and wary beneath his leathers. But the most telling sign was the fact that he was leaning against a wall that separated him from a world of whores, liquor, gold, and other illicit joys, trying to pretend like he didn’t care.

  “You’re not looking well,” she said, approaching him.

  “You and I both know that I look amazing right now.” He cast a glance at her from beneath unruly hair. “But what makes you say that?”

  “I know you well enough, Denaos,” she said. “And you know me.” She glanced at his fingers. “Also, you’re trying to trim fingernails that you chewed away days ago.”

  “It’s rather unfair of you to use obvious evidence against me.” He hid his hand behind his back. “But then, I trust you’re not actually concerned about my well-being.”

  “I am. But I’m more curious.” Asper looked over her shoulder at Lenk and Kataria, as the former extended his chin, challenging the latter to take a swing. “You could have had us through the gate in no time. If you had been the one to lead the beet stratagem—”

  “Let’s not call it that.”

  “You could have gotten us past the guards in six words,” Asper said. “But Lenk went instead.”

  “He’s the leader.” Denaos cringed at the sight of Kataria leaping atop Lenk, teeth bared and snarling. “Supposedly.”

  “In battle, sure. In other things…” She shared his cringe as she heard a decidedly unmanly scream from behind her. “Not so much.”

  “Point being?”

  “Point being, you obviously know this city and how to get in,” she continued, “and you’re obviously not bringing it to anyone’s attention, so you obviously don’t care when or if you get into Cier’Djaal.”

  He said nothing. He didn’t have to. She could see his mask fraying at the edges, in the crow’s-feet of his eyes.

  “But why?” she asked aloud. “Past that wall lies gold, women, liquor… everything you’ve missed from civilization. If you don’t want to be in there, that must mean—”

  “May I make a counterpoint?”

  “Please.”

  “Shut up.”

  “That’s not a counterpoint.”

  “Will it make you shut up?”

  “Almost certainly not.”

  “Then what will?”

  Denaos was not without his own knowledge of her. She knew he could see the answer in her determined stare. He sighed and slipped his knife back into a hidden sheath.

  “Fine. I’ll get us in,” he muttered. He smoothed his tunic as he turned to walk away. “Tell the others to spread out and move in one at a time when I give the signal.”

  “The signal being?”

  “You won’t miss it,” he replied. “Will this shut you up?”

  “On this subject? Maybe for a bit.”

  “And do you ever stop to think about the ethical implications of getting things done by annoying people into doing them?”

  Asper turned about and saw Kataria on Lenk’s back, arm wrapped around his throat as he flailed behind him, trying to seize her to peel her off. She grinned triumphantly at Denaos.

  “Only for the first ten breaths.”

  THREE

  TO FLOW, AS THE RIVER

  It had taken a lot of lost time and lost blood for him to figure out the great lessons of life, but Lenk had learned a few. And the most important and painful of them was that when Denaos said he had a plan and didn’t immediately offer specifics, it was just wisest not to ask.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the best method of leadership. Certainly, such laxity wasn’t the best quality in a leader. Proper commanders—the great generals and merc captains—would have had a better plan and an iron will to guide unwavering loyalties, their troops flowing like rivers toward their purpose. But those were men. Respected. Honored. Warriors.

  Lenk was an adventurer. He had a thug, a priestess, a shict, an absent wizard… and Gariath. And between all of them, only one of them seemed to have a plan better than “run in and hope no one dies.”

  Perhaps they wouldn’t flow in. But rivers did more than flow. They seeped, they flooded, and, in the worst cases, they simply rushed forward and everyone else got out of their way.

  Not a good way for a man to lead.

  But for an adventurer? It wasn’t bad.

  He stood at the edge of the harbor, his eyes on the Harbor Gate, directly across the human-choked road. The Jhouche guards spared him not so much as a glance. They had no idea what was about to happen.

  Lenk would have taken more comfort in that if he had a better idea than they.

  Beside the Harbor Gate, two massive stacks of crates bearing the sigil of a local fasha—an emblem of a naked girl upon a bed of coins—had been arranged with painstaking delicacy near the end of the lines of petitioners. It was behind these crates that his companions loitered: Kataria and Gariath lurking in the shadows on one side, Asper pretending not to notice them on the other.

  And Denaos was nowhere to be seen.

  Maybe he’s not actually coming back. Maybe he’s going to rat us out to the guards and ask for passage as reward. He bit his lower lip. Not a bad idea, actually.

  He eyed the guard captain from across the way, the tall man with the hard chin, and wondered if he might be able to get that deal for himself.

  It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? I’m the one who wants out of this. I’m the one who needs the money. Asper can always go back to the clergy. Denaos won’t ever have trouble getting by. Dreadaeleon’s a wizard; he’ll never want for anything. Nothing could stop Gariath from doing what he wants. And Kataria…

  His eyes drifted to her at the shadows. He knew she was staring at him before he even saw her. Pale and stark in the shadows, eyes vivid and sharp as spears, leveled right at him.

  Even in the best of times, she always seemed to look at him the same way she would size up a chunk of roasted venison.

  These w
ere not the best of times. These were the times when all he saw was her scowl, her anger, her very large teeth bared in a snarl.

  “Forty breaths…” he whispered. His face screwed up. “Really?”

  “How much of a man do you suppose you can fit in a crate?”

  At the voice, Lenk looked up with a start to behold a man standing beside him. Though how a man such as this had approached him without him noticing, he wasn’t quite sure.

  Clad in robes so white and unsullied as to be surreal, he stood painfully close, hands folded delicately behind his back. His face was long and elegant, cheekbones fine and lips thin. His skin, dark like any Djaalic’s, was clean and free of blemishes, and his black hair glistened with a light sheen of oil.

  His appearance unnerved Lenk, and not just because of how filthy it made him look by contrast. He looked too perfect, too serene to be in the harbor at all, let alone to have appeared out of nowhere as he did.

  “You see how they all crowd around their possessions?” The man in white gestured over the harbor. “As though a man can take his heart, his lungs, his liver and wrap them in paper and stack them neatly atop each other inside a little box. As though, so long as those precious pieces of a man are in that box, he cannot be harmed.”

  He turned to Lenk. His eyes were alight with a curiosity that belonged on a dirtier man. His lips curled into a smile.

  “For what else is there to harm once a man is in his box?”

  Lenk blinked. He slowly looked for whom the man might be talking to, wondering if perhaps he had unwittingly come between two eerie, philosophy-spewing pretty men. With no such luck, he realized that the question had been posed to him.

  “Uh,” he said, “I suppose once that happens, a man starts looking to his box. His… box full of guts.”

  “And if there were no box? If it were far away or buried elsewhere?”

  “Then… he can’t be harmed, I suppose.”

  The man in white nodded carefully. He swept a thoughtful look from Lenk to the Harbor Gate, choked with people.

  “You wish to enter?” he asked.

  Lenk’s first thought was not to answer. He was, presumably, supposed to be acting nonchalant enough for people not to assume that.

  “A lot of people do,” Lenk settled on saying. “There are a lot of boxes past that gate.”

  “A lot.” The man in white spoke the words softly, tasting them. “So many lives tucked away in so many boxes. How many do you think?”

  “A hundred, at least,” Lenk replied, looking over the crowd.

  “And they all funnel to that one tiny point guarded by three tiny men.” The man in white made a gesture over the spanning Harbor Wall. “Seal this up, make it a wall with no doors, you will find men climbing it, burrowing under it, breaking through it in half the time that it takes to walk through it. Put one tiny hole, offer them that one escape, they’ll go through it, no matter how long it takes, ignoring the many other entries.”

  Lenk let out a thoughtful hum, considering them. He scanned the crowd briefly for Denaos and found nothing. He had just begun to reconsider not trying to sneak in when he became aware of another stare fixed upon him. He turned to see the man in white, eyes brimming with something brighter than curiosity, darker than malice.

  Lenk blinked and looked around.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Do strange men come and offer you cryptic advice as a matter of routine?” His smile piqued. “Are you not at all alarmed by this, my friend?”

  “Well… I mean, a little, sure.”

  “Only a little?” The man in white chuckled. “Am I really that dull? Are you not utterly mystified by my presence?”

  “Look,” Lenk sighed, rubbing his eyes. “In case the scars and the sword aren’t suggestion enough, I’ve lived a strange life. So strange, in fact, that I just don’t have the energy to be utterly mystified by every weird thing I come across anymore.”

  He met the man in white’s stare, and something within those dark eyes spurred him. He saw something steady, something that suggested it could handle what he’d wanted to say for a long time. And Lenk, without really knowing why, took a deep breath, and said it.

  “I don’t even think I can remember how many I’ve killed,” he spoke. “People. Men. Women. Monsters, beasts… demons. Things that shouldn’t exist. But they do. And I’ve killed them. I’ve killed… so many of them.”

  It wasn’t until he said those last words, he wasn’t aware of his heart pounding, of his breath gone short, of the drop of sweat forming at his temple. Images of them, his many enemies, the many bodies, their many faces, flooded his mind. He was aware, briefly, of the ache in a palm used to the grip of steel.

  And then he let his breath out. He wiped away the sweat, told himself it was the noonday sun. And he was aware of the strange look the man in white affixed on him now.

  And he remembered why he was here in Cier’Djaal.

  “And when I told her… when I told them, they had exactly that look,” Lenk said. “So, you’re something that shouldn’t be, or you’re like me. A killer pretending not to be. Either way, I don’t have the energy for you.”

  He turned back to the crowd. Before the man even spoke, Lenk could feel his smile boring into his neck, like a knife.

  “You think you won’t find blood in this city?”

  He turned. A knife, it turned out, was an apt description for his smile. His lips were a small scalpel with a dirty edge, one used by a gutter-healer to cut arrowheads out of criminals.

  “You think all these people, all the gold they trade behind those walls will make them less violent?”

  “What?” Lenk asked.

  “I’ve seen a great many things myself. A man used to killing is one I’ve seen often. The twitch of your muscles, the flex of your fingers, the way your voice raises just slightly when you think words are about to become blades…” The man in white’s voice escaped on an unnervingly whimsical sigh. “Don’t worry. It’s not something you should be afraid of. Just something you should be aware of.”

  “What is, exactly?” Lenk asked.

  The man folded his hands delicately behind his back again. He looked to the rivers of humanity crossing through the Harbor Road and smiled.

  “Men don’t become less violent when they store their guts in a box; they just become bolder. Men don’t become civil when they’re offered a hole through; they just become desperate. Men who can live without violence, without blood or gold, recognize the same thing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Lenk’s breath caught in his throat, his mouth suddenly too dry to speak; he was aware of just how bad he wanted the man in white to answer him.

  And the man in white looked at him. And the man in white smiled broadly.

  “That there’s only one way to live,” he said, “and that’s without boxes or holes.”

  He walked out into the Harbor Road, floating like a specter. And like a specter, he moved with an unsettling grace. He didn’t brush against a single hairbreadth of filthy, sweaty skin. His robes barely stirred at the press of people that seemed to part before him like a river before a ship.

  And when he came to the Harbor Gate, he simply walked through. He looked at no one and nothing more than a simple glance was cast his way as he strode through the gate and disappeared into the Souk beyond as though he had never even been.

  That, Lenk thought, was something strange.

  Certainly not the strangest thing he had ever seen, though.

  He was about to see that, or something close to it; he was certain. For at that moment, he spied Denaos walking toward the Harbor Gate.

  Among the human tide, no one looked twice at him. Lenk, however, held his breath. He wasn’t looking at Denaos, either.

  And neither, Lenk saw, were Denaos’s targets.

  He spotted the tulwar right away; a gap that wide in the human tide was impossible to miss. Amber eyes set firmly forward peering out of the gray folds of his simian f
ace, the brutish creature seemed to take no heed of the great swaths of humanity surrounding him, let alone the lanky, black-clad man who brushed past him.

  Lenk tensed; no plan involving a tulwar was one he wanted to be a part of. But Denaos kept walking past the brute. Lenk felt his jaw and ass unclenching. He felt the urge to act passing.

  At least until he saw the khoshicts.

  Two of them, stalking down the Harbor Road, the crowd giving them an even wider berth than the tulwar. Lenk could see flashes of dark skin bearing dark tattoos beneath dark cloaks, shiny black hair braided wildly and woven with feathers. Behind their hoods, he could see their eyes, wide and white as their sharp-toothed grins.

  Lenk cringed. They reminded him unnervingly of Kataria’s own teeth. Still, they weren’t quite as unnerving as the wink Denaos shot his way as the rogue brushed against the tallest khoshict.

  His pulse quickened. His eyes widened. He felt his ass all but weld itself shut. Denaos stood between the tulwar and the sandshicts as they moved in opposite directions, a triumphant smile on his face. He held up a hand, a pilfered shictish dagger dangling between his fingers.

  It happened too quickly for Lenk to notice. With a snap of his wrist, Denaos sent the dagger flying. Wordlessly, the rogue mouthed: “Trust me.”

  No one would have heard him, anyway. Not over the howl of a tulwar trying to dig a hurled dagger out of his shoulder.

  The human tide ebbed. The berth around the oids widened. Eyes awash in inappropriate excitement and horror looked on as the tulwar groped and grabbed blindly at the hilt jutting from his shoulder blade. A thick hand found it, pulled it free with a wrenching sound and a spatter of blood. When the creature whirled around, bloodied blade in hand, his eyes were alight with rage.

  “SHICT!” His roar split the crowd, exposing the two creatures.

  The casualness with which they turned to face him was almost insulting. One of their hoods fell back, revealing an impish female face piqued with curiosity. The second, taller, cocked a head at the tulwar. Ears, long like spears and notched with four deep ridges in each length, rose out of holes in his hood and twitched attentively.

  “I assume you’re talking to us?” A distinctly masculine, if hollow, voice rang out from beneath his hood.