The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  “But if you want me to go, I will.”

  The sand shifted as Kwar rose beside her. Her fingers began to slip from Kataria’s shoulder. A chill set in.

  And once again, both shicts were surprised as Kataria’s hand reached out, seized Kwar’s.

  And did nothing more than squeeze.

  She stepped out into the sunlight and walked among her people.

  Or so she had been told, anyway.

  They certainly looked like her. Their skin and hair were darker than hers, their eyes sharper, but the people going about their business around her were, indeed, shicts.

  There were grandmothers and grandfathers, weathered and gray, smoking pipes outside their tents. There were beast tenders, whispering soothing words to the horse-tall, hump-backed, snaggle-toothed yijis they guided through the sandy streets to picket-corrals. And the pups of shicts and yijis alike ran screaming and laughing through the streets in a singular, unruly pack.

  There were muscular young men and women returning with bows and blades on their backs. Hunters, she recognized by their garb and hungry leanness. But they carried no snare or bait; nothing but their weapons and the wooden masks covering their faces.

  Kwar had told her of them last night. A shict’s nature was to hunt, but there was no traditional game in the city. So they made their food through coin and they made their coin through mercenary work. Cier’Djaal, after all, was just a different kind of wilderness.

  And the kind of quarry that people paid to have killed was abundant within it.

  “Do you?” she had asked last night.

  “Do I what?” Kwar had asked in turn.

  “Kill people.”

  “Hm. It’s not easy to kill a human, is it?”

  “Not as easy as it should be.”

  “Yes. Very wily. It would take a terribly clever hunter to do such a thing.”

  “I thought you were terribly clever.”

  “Thank you. I thought so, too.”

  But they had spoken very briefly. That had been a night for dancing. These young hunters who came marching in, their faces hidden behind wooden masks, had been smiling last night, faces bright and alive with sosha-glutted vigor. Now, they scarcely looked like shicts.

  But they were shicts.

  And this was a shict camp.

  The wooden buildings of Cier’Djaal’s outer city had been burnt, smashed, or otherwise cleared away to open up a vast sandy field. Some sturdier timbers had been reappropriated to erect the tents or build pens for the yijis. The rest had mostly been used to fill in gaps in the walls segregating this section from the rest of the city.

  This was Shicttown. She was a shict. These were her people.

  So why weren’t any of them talking to her?

  They stopped and talked to Kwar, of course. Grandmothers would ask her how her brother was and she would assure them Thua was fine. Hunters would ask her what she thought of the coin they just brought back and she would say she had seen bigger. Children would ask her to chase them and she would tell them later, later.

  And every one of them looked at Kataria, managed a weak smile, then squinted as their ears twitched, and turned away.

  Without failure, deviation or alteration.

  “They can’t understand you.”

  She looked to Kwar, who gestured up to her own ears. Long, pointed, each length scarred with four neat, clean notches. A member of the eighth tribe, just like all of them.

  “They reach out to you with their Howling,” the khoshict said. “But yours is… strange. It screeches in a language they can’t understand.” Kwar sighed, smiling weakly. “It hurts their ears. So they turn away.”

  “Not yours?” Kataria asked.

  “It does.”

  So, why are you still here?

  Kwar froze, coming to a sudden halt as her ears pricked up, rigid as spears. For a short, curious moment, Kataria wondered if she had heard that thought. And for a much longer, terrified moment after, Kataria wondered what other thoughts she had heard.

  But it soon became clear by Kwar’s gaze, locked unerringly forward, that she had heard no thoughts.

  At least none of Kataria’s.

  She followed the khoshict’s stare. Thua stood before them, matching his sister’s intensity with a barefaced glower. Without his mask, Kataria thought, he looked quite handsome. But his jaw remained too square, his chin too strong, eyes too dark, still too much like a human.

  Still pretty, she thought.

  And quietly hoped that the intense stare he cast her way didn’t mean he had heard that.

  But his gaze lingered on her only for a moment before flitting to Kwar. She held his stare there in hers, eyes narrowed to thin blades angled directly into her brother’s forehead. Without speaking, without moving, without blinking, they stared at each other for a very long time.

  Only their ears betrayed any sign of movement. They twitched, fluttered, trembled with skittish energy. Kwar’s expression flickered, her braids dangling about her face as her ears twitched violently. Thua’s jaw clenched, ears straining upright.

  They were talking to each other, Kataria knew, through the Howling.

  And she couldn’t hear them.

  When Kwar finally deigned to speak aloud, she was still bereft of words. Her ears folded flat against her head, her eyes were all but shut, and her lips curled back in an angry, bare-toothed snarl. She spat that noise, that anger, at her brother as she turned from him.

  Her gaze lingered briefly on Kataria for a moment and in it, she felt the lingering traces of Kwar’s fury turned upon her. Instinctively, as though just brushing the scantest hint of Kwar’s Howling, her heart leapt in her chest and she tensed.

  But just as quickly, Kwar’s features softened with the gentle smile she offered as she laid a hand on her companion’s shoulder and squeezed. She cast a final glower at Thua before stalking off, leaving Kataria alone with him.

  “Where is she going?” Kataria asked.

  “Away from me,” Thua replied with a sigh. “She always gets this way when she knows Father wants something.” He looked at her meaningfully. “And today, he wants to talk to you.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Well, given that you’re a pale shkainai from the north who came here after being chased by the city guards and he’s the chieftain concerned with our continued peaceable coexistence with the humans…” Thua shrugged. “Maybe he wants to borrow some smoke?”

  If he’s this sarcastic in the Howling, no wonder Kwar stormed off. At that thought, Kataria glanced over her shoulder. Kwar had found a ring of hunters and began to speak stiffly with them.

  “She’ll calm down, eventually,” Thua said. He turned and beckoned her to follow him as he walked toward a distant tent. “She always does.”

  “Right,” Kataria muttered, following. “It’s just that I…”

  “What?”

  I’m worried that I probably should have said good-bye to her just in case your father finds out I’m a human-sniffing, not-a-shict who can’t even hear the Howling and chases me out of your camp.

  He didn’t hear that.

  It would have been easier if he had, though.

  “I just wondered if I should have said something to Kwar,” she went with, instead.

  “You’ll have your chance. If she likes you, she’ll find you.”

  “She will?”

  Thua’s sigh was a little heavier. “She always does.”

  Sai-Thuwan was not the typical image of a shictish chieftain.

  For one, he was wearing a shirt.

  Her father had never worn a shirt.

  Her father had been more hatchet than man: short, compact, every muscle tense as a flint blade beneath endless maps of scars and war paint. He had plaited his hair in a thick braid and his feathers had been wild: red, golden, black. All war feathers. All victory feathers. He never once wore a white mourning feather, not even when her mother had died.

  And while Kataria had only known but one
chieftain before this moment, she had always suspected most of them would look as legendary as her father. But Thuwan was long, lanky, and weary. His body was younger than those of the grandmothers and grandfathers in the camp, but his wrinkles were deeper and darker. His skin bore no scars, but his limbs creaked as he settled long elbows on long legs. His hair hung in a messy tangle about his face and he wore just one feather.

  White.

  Kataria watched him intently as he fixed his stare upon the tent floor. She could see where Thua got his features from: the strong jaw that clenched about the pipe stem, the big chest that grew bigger as he inhaled. But nowhere in Thuwan was there any of the twitching hardness, the feral life of Kwar.

  This shict shrank with the force of his sigh. This shict’s long hands trembled as he passed the pipe to Kataria. This shict’s neck bent so low he didn’t bother to look up as he spoke.

  “The guards came back this morning,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “Ah,” she said, accepting the pipe. “I should have been there. Sorry, I was…”

  Don’t say “trapped between your daughter’s thighs.”

  “Drunk.”

  Good job.

  Thuwan might not have heard her. Thuwan might not have cared. He waved a hand dismissively, but the smoke around him lingered.

  “They left,” he said. “We gave them sosha and hides and they did not press the matter.”

  “Thank you for that.” She drew the pipe to her lips, tasted the weed in the wood. “For all of this. For last night, for the sosha, for the tent. I’m sure it would have been better for you to just turn me out into the city again.”

  She inhaled. The smoke was harsh; it burned her mouth and stung her throat as she held it in lungs that screamed at her to cough it out. She didn’t, though. A real shict wouldn’t do that. She was determined not to, either.

  “It still would be.”

  Not until he said that, anyway.

  The smoke came out in a hacking cough as she pounded her chest with a fist. Thuwan might not have noticed. Or he might not have cared.

  “It took a lot of hides and a lot more sosha.” Another sigh, growing in weight and weariness. “We have plenty of both, but it was still more than I preferred to give. They wanted you, shkainai. Badly.”

  She considered aplogizing. But it was more important, she knew, that she did not. Not for Thuwan, nor for his children or tribe. But for herself. She refused to apologize for not being given away to men who treated her like an animal.

  “But it’s only skins and liquor.” Thuwan looked up for once. Dark eyes, sharp as blades in the deep scars of his wrinkles, peered at her as he smiled. “And there are too few shicts.” He reached out for the pipe. “The price of living alongside the humans.”

  “So, why do it?” she asked, handing him the pipe. “Why live here?”

  “They own the land. Outside of Cier’Djaal there is only desert.” He shook his head as he took another puff. “Not only desert. There are tulwar. Some vulgore. Bandits, too, of all races and whatever else there is that wants to kill us. We would have to fight them for the desert, which gives nothing without a fight in the first place.”

  “There are no other shicts?”

  “We’re the eighth.” He gestured to his ears. “The seventh and ninth are out there, somewhere.”

  “So why not band together? Take the land from the humans?”

  “A bloody war that would leave both of us dead.”

  “So it’s better that you’re dead?”

  “We’re alive.”

  “But you live with them. You share their land, you pay them to be here. How long before you become them?” There was desperation in her words, as unstoppable as the words themselves. “You can’t have both their land and your people. You can’t play by their rules and still be a shict. You have to choose.”

  Like I did.

  He paused mid-inhale. He held the smoke in his mouth thoughtfully as he considered her across the firepit. When he spoke again, wisps of gray trickled out his mouth to rise delicately to the roof of the tent, veiling him in smoke.

  “You are sixth tribe,” he mused. “From the Silesrian? Who do you fight?”

  “The humans,” she replied.

  “Which of them? There are many.”

  “Muraskans, Sainites, Karnerians. Any who touch the borders of the Silesrian.”

  “The Silesrian is called the Sea of Trees. There are tulwar tribes out there, as well.”

  “We have fought them.”

  “And the couthi?” he asked.

  “Them, too.”

  “With the fourth and the fifth tribes?”

  She shook her head. “Just the sixth.”

  “And what have you lost?”

  “Nothing.” A twinge of pride came creeping into her voice, growing bolder with each word. “Not a handspan of land has been yielded to the humans. The sixth holds.”

  “I am not talking about the sixth.” Thuwan leveled the stem of his pipe at her. “I am talking about you, shkainai. The Silesrian is vast. Three tribes touch it and never see each other. There is room to wander, to roam, to disappear. But you are here, in your pale skin, among my people. So, I ask again…” He fixed eyes upon her. “What have you lost, Kataria?”

  Her mouth hung open, bereft of words.

  Because not a word entered her mind. Only a color.

  White.

  Like the feather they had handed her to weave into her hair when her mother’s war band came back short one. Like the feather her father had refused to wear and never told her why. Like the feather she had left in a pair of hands and turned her back on and tried to ignore the last time someone stared at her the way Thuwan was staring at her now.

  But those eyes had been blue.

  She spoke no words. And Thuwan heard none. But his ears were upright, listening to something she spoke with another voice in another tongue. A language he understood. A language she thought she had forgotten.

  “Ah.” His ears lowered. “I see.” He sighed and took another long inhale. “Just one. But far too much, isn’t it?”

  He blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “We came here, once, as shicts. I was young, then. Kwar and Thua, even younger. And their mother, she was fierce. This is why she was chieftain before me. She traded with the humans, demanded their gold, their weapons for our hides. And she would never think to let them on our land. For their city was smaller, then. But humans hate small things. It reminds them of how small they are.

  “So they came for our land. We fought. We fought their soldiers; we fought their dragonmen. My wife, Kwar’s mother, she…” He lowered his head once again, clutched the back of it, as though he sought to drive it down and bury it in the earth. “So we lost ours. We made Shicttown. We trade with the humans in different ways. We trade lives now. We trade wars. For hides, they don’t fight. For sosha, they don’t come here.

  “Thua does not blame me. But Kwar does. She hates me. She has not spoken to me in years. And every day I wake up and she does not speak to me, I know that I was right to do what I did. Because she is still alive to hate me and I still wear only one feather instead of two or three.”

  “But can you live with that?” Kataria suddenly became aware that she was only barely in her seat, ready to fall off. “How? How can you trade with them, be with them, and still be a shict? How can you live by their ways?”

  “I don’t. Not completely. No human has set foot in Shicttown since we created it. They never will. Because Shicttown is for shicts, not humans. I do not live for the humans, to kill them, to seek revenge. I live for my people, my wife, my Thua, my Kwar. Because we negotiate instead of fight, because we value lives more than pride, because we define ourselves and don’t let our enemies or our fellow tribes do it, we are alive.”

  He was sitting straight as a spear now, his back rigid like an arrow. His eyes burned bright, alive, piercing the fog of smoke that hung between them.

  “And we are still
shicts.”

  But only for a moment.

  “I will mourn for their mother until I meet her again in the Dark Forest,” he said, collapsing back down. “And there was a time when I thought I could not stay here, without her. But I refuse to let the humans make me live for hate. I will live here. I will forever be a thorn in their side. My children will grow and live. And they will be more thorns. And soon, they will bleed enough to satisfy my wife.”

  But for as much as he shrank, for as weary and beaten as he seemed, she could sense something within him. A sound, the last noise of a dying animal. No words. No language. Nothing but instinct and emotion.

  The Howling.

  She could hear it.

  So faintly, though.

  Was it been because she had spent time in the company of shicts? Or was Thuwan right? Had it been there all along, waiting for her to realize she could use it, no matter whose body lay next to her in bed, no matter whose eyes stared at her?

  Could she have been simply too convinced she wasn’t a shict to realize she was, no matter whom she walked with?

  Her head hurt. The smoke was too thick in here. She rose up with scarcely a word and walked to the flap of his tent. Without looking after her, Thuwan called out.

  “Should I ask where you’re going?”

  She turned to him, stared silently. His ears pricked upright, hearing her.

  He nodded once, turned back to his pipe, and proceeded to fill the tent with gray smoke as she left.

  TWENTY-THREE

  GENTLE NUDGES

  Lenk knew their names.

  My name is Aetros.

  Because they were telling him.

  I bled out in an alley and stained the mud red.

  He knew how they died.

  My name is Hargassus. I cut my fingers trying to pull the sword from my chest.

  Because he remembered killing them.

  My name is Langen.

  He could remember their faces, twisted in fear and in pain.

  I fell while running from you and you put your foot on my neck.

  He could remember the wounds he painted on their bodies.

  My name is Checho. I died screaming for my wife.

  Men.

  My name is Sharla. I tried to strangle you with my last breath.