by Sam Sykes
Women.
My name is Gorle. I never wanted to rob anyone, but I needed money.
But not people.
When he walked past them, they were just bodies. They were bloodred wounds scored upon lifeless flesh. They were cloven skulls and missing arms and split-open chests. They were dead eyes staring out endlessly into the long, cold dark.
My name is Henju. I watched you kill my brother. Then I died with tears in my eyes.
He didn’t stop to look at them. If he stopped, he would freeze to death. The darkness was cold. The darkness was everywhere.
There was nothing beneath his feet. There was nothing above his head. There was nothing beyond the rows of the dead marching in endless lines on either side. There was but darkness. Complete. Eternal. Cold.
He could see his breath as he trudged forward. He could feel it seeping up through his boots and into his veins. He could hear his skin cracking as his fingers went numb and turned black.
But he could not stop. If he stopped, he would freeze. If he froze, he would join them. He would forever be trapped in this cold, lightless hell, never again to have a warm body, to hear a warm voice. And so he kept moving.
And they did not stop talking.
My name is Waning. My name is Joge. My name is Kalri.
And they did not stop bleeding.
In the chest. Upon the plains. Couldn’t stop screaming.
He was not a murderer.
Watched you walk away while I bled out. Begged for my life. Cursed your name, even if I didn’t know it.
These were not innocent men and women he had cut down. These were villains. These were brigands, assassins, rivals. These were people who would have killed him just as swiftly. There was not an innocent among them.
My name is Arla. My name is Wil. My name is Gen.
But there were so many. Could they all have been guilty?
Could he say that his blade had never once been drawn in haste, that it had never once killed someone who didn’t deserve it? Could he say that he was the innocent one here, when it was his blade that had painted them all red?
A small twinge of heat arose in his breast. It burned shameful, violent, painful. It had a light. It had a voice.
They deserved it.
Those words weren’t his thoughts. Nor were they the voices of dead men. They were something worse. They were something—here where there should be nothing—heavy, meaningful, and terribly warm.
Their deaths meant nothing.
Ahead, a pinprick of light split the darkness with a searing white.
Nor did she.
It erupted into an angry wound carved into the void.
There will be more ahead.
It opened up, consuming bodies and cold and him.
This, I promise you.
Lenk awoke to a chill on bare flesh, a burning breath in his throat, and a vision of pastel fruit in his eyes.
“You are alive.” A voice strained to express surprise through monotone cadence. “You may erupt in rejoicement, if you so desire.”
It was not a man that stood over him as he lay on the cold marble slab. It was a something. Something morbidly tall, wrapped in a black shroud, four bone-white limbs sliding from many sleeves. From behind a framed picture of fruit in a bowl placed delicately in front of a hood, the voice came again.
“Uncertainty is a quality clients do not find desirable, but this one must confess surprise that the procedure worked. You will desire to lie still for the moment.”
Lenk disagreed.
His arms were numb and senseless as they flailed against the couthi’s robe. His voice was a painful, wordless rasp in his throat.
One of the couthi’s long limbs cradled his shoulders while another pressed a blue bottle to his lips. Water flooded past numb lips, cold in his burning throat.
“You have been without water for a day,” the couthi said. “Humans require routine oral quenching to avoid catastrophic shriveling. Our diagrams confirm this.” He released Lenk, leaving him the bottle. He turned to a nearby table rife with vials of varying shapes and sizes. “This one does not desire to push the limitations of human biology twice in one day.”
Had Lenk heard it clearly, he likely would have been worried about that statement. But his thoughts were focused on the bottle. Every bit of him was consumed with ravenous thirst, leaving no room for fear or for wondering where he was or what had happened.
That came an instant later.
He saw, at first, his shirt lying crumpled next to his sword in a corner of a small stone cell with high, narrow windows. Not a cell, he realized; the windows were glass instead of bars; there was an archway instead of a door; and the various tapestries, furnishings, and portraits hanging from the walls made for surprisingly tasteful décor, as far as prisons went.
Beyond the whole “waking up half-naked with a couthi poring over a table full of strange liquids” aspect, it wasn’t too bad. This likely explained why he wasn’t panicking.
That, he was sure, would also come later.
When he stopped feeling so nauseated, anyway. Every drop of blood in him seemed to flood into his bowels, churning violently and leaving his limbs barely strong enough to support him. He felt as though any movement beyond the act of sitting upright would cause everything inside him to erupt onto the floor.
“What… what happened?” Even the act of speaking felt as though it would make something burst.
“The response to the query would be a lengthy process not suited for what humans deem tasteful.” The couthi returned with a thin, purple vial. “It is guaranteed that your recovery is reliant on this one’s expertise and your ability not to express oral amazement.” He offered the vial delicately to the young man. “Consume.”
He eyed it before looking warily at the fruit picture, which looked as helpful as a painting of fruit could.
“It will assist with your nausea.”
A wary man, he knew, would think things through a little more before taking. A wary man who didn’t have the luxury of feeling as though his insides were not about to explode out of many orifices couldn’t be so picky.
He seized the vial and downed it desperately. A single swallow, yet the taste was unlike anything he had ever experienced. If one could bottle a dying man’s breath and his widow’s bitter smile, he imagined it would taste much like that.
The couthi placed a copper urn in front of him and turned back to his table. Lenk, gasping through a mouth suddenly quite dry again, stared at it.
“What’s this for?”
“That,” the couthi answered, “is for what happens next.”
And he didn’t have to ask.
His body screamed. The roiling of his bowels spread to the rest of him in an instant. His muscles contorted in agony. Blood rushed through him before suddenly thickening to a point where it felt stopped in his veins. His fingers knotted up, back arched, bones creaked. His pain had a life all its own.
Hurts. Hurts bad. Make it stop. Get it out. Stop stop stop. Not finished yet. So warm in here. So comfortable. Can’t leave yet.
It had a voice.
A scream came out on a river of illness as he leaned over the urn and emptied his insides in thick bile. It splattered violently into the copper urn before it came to a sudden, uneasy halt. Along with his screams. And his breath.
Can’t leave, can’t leave, too cold out there.
He felt something stick in his craw, something thick, alive, and wriggling greasily. As breath struggled to get in, he struggled to get it out, failing both as he retched violently into the urn.
Can’t leave, no, no, don’t make me.
A hand seized him by the shoulder, too fierce to be the couthi’s. Someone shoved him onto his back, pressed a forearm against his throat to pin him onto the marble slab. He stared up through vision blackening at the edges as the air left him. A pair of fierce eyes above a tattered veil stared down.
He had only a moment to recognize Khaliv. After that, he coul
d see only the thin metal calipers.
The two prongs slid past his lips, over his tongue, down his throat. He felt the wriggling inside grow fiercer as the calipers found something and took hold. Hand steady as a stone, Khaliv slowly withdrew the prongs from Lenk’s mouth. He felt something slimy slide up his throat and out between his lips as air rushed gratefully back into his lungs.
He caught a glimpse of it as it was drawn from his mouth and held high and wriggling in the calipers. It was thick and tuberous, like a maggot, black and glistening, like a tadpole. But unlike a maggot or a tadpole, it had a face.
And it spoke.
“No, no, no,” it squealed, “too cold, let me back, I must go back, I am not yet finished.”
Lenk could but stare in slack-jawed horror. Khaliv, for his part, seemed largely unimpressed. The saccarii dropped the writhing little… thing into the copper urn, plucked it up, and left the room with it.
The young man felt suddenly empty, as though the saccarii had just removed an organ instead of a… a…
“What the hell was that?” he gasped.
“It is considered rude among humans to ask questions as to the subject of what comes out of their orifices,” the couthi replied. “This one wonders if the inverse of the consideration applies to what goes in.”
Interrogating the couthi, obviously, was not going to be productive. Punching the couthi in his fruit bowl, likewise, would only be merely satisfying. While violence was almost certainly the solution, Lenk knew he needed to apply it selectively.
So he leapt off the slab, seized his sword and shirt, and stormed off after Khaliv. A marble hall, its opulence and portraits smothered by a thick layer of age, stretched before him as he strode down it, following Khaliv’s footprints across a carpet of dust.
“Ah, there you are.”
Even in a haze of rage and confusion, Lenk recognized Mocca’s voice. He found the man in white at his side a moment later, hurrying to keep up.
“I trust everything went well in there?” Mocca asked. “I heard the most awful retching sounds.”
“And you didn’t come to see what was going on?”
“Me? No. Looked a tad creepy in there, what with the vials and calipers and the weird fellow wringing all four of his hands over your unconscious body.”
Lenk came to a halt, stared at Mocca incredulously.
“For future reference,” he said slowly, “when I am half-naked and unconscious, lying on a slab in front of a thing with a picture of fruit for a face, you have both my explicit permission and wholehearted encouragement to come in and ask what’s going on.”
“I trusted you were in good hands,” Mocca said, hurrying to catch up as his companion took off. “This is, after all, the house of Fasha Sheffu. Bit of a reputation for eccentricity.” He chuckled. “But then, what saccarii isn’t eccentric? They only get a reputation for it when they have money.”
Lenk was only half-listening now. The tracks in the dust took a sharp turn to the right and he followed the path past an antechamber and into a small parlor.
“Where are you going?” Mocca called after him.
“To get answers,” he growled back.
“Ought you not put a shirt on first?”
And now, Lenk was not listening at all. His eyes were sweeping about the room and its dusty bookshelves and dusty cabinets, settling on the three figures assembled at the center.
He recognized immediately Khaliv in his tattered clothes as the saccarii set the copper bowl upon a table beside a dust-covered chair. The small urchin wrapped in filthy rags, too, he remembered from the streets of Silktown.
The saccarii in blue robes wearing an elegant indigo veil across his face, though, was new. He was cleaner than the other two saccarii, though not by much. His garb looked as though it had once been exquisite, but was now frayed at the edges. His veil was weighted with brass jewelry that had long grown tarnished. And his eyes, the color of petrified amber, looked too weary for a rich man.
He was clearly old, clearly tired, and clearly weak.
And here, Lenk thought, he was about to have another problem.
“There are ten feet between you and me.” The young man leveled his blade at the saccarii. “You have that long to tell me what you just did to me.”
The urchin let out a frightened squeak, slipping behind Khaliv’s legs. The saccarii in blue, however, offered only a nonplussed stare.
“Tell me,” he said, his accent thick, “I pull something like this out of you.” He gestured to the copper urn. “And you still turn your blade upon me? Exactly what does it take to earn your trust?”
Lenk took exactly two steps forward. “A good place to start is by not kidnapping me and doing… whatever the hell you just did.”
“All necessary,” the saccarii replied. “Or at least, all expeditious. The procedure needed to draw this abomination from you was costly and required several concoctions of liquids far stranger. Administering them while you were unconscious was easier than explaining it to you.” He sighed, settled in his chair. “Though, since I’m doing that, anyway, one wonders if that might not have been the more efficient route.”
“Horseshit.” Lenk took four steps forward. “How do I know you didn’t put that in me to begin with? How do I know what that is? How do I know what the hell you did to me?”
“You do not. I barely understand it myself. I had but ancient texts to go by to formulate the alchemical concoctions needed to draw out the taint.” He gestured to the vast collection of old-looking books around him. “The Bloodwise Brother I hired was only scarcely able to make sense of them—and not cheaply.” He glanced at the thing wriggling in the urn. “Still, at least we know they work.”
Four more steps. Lenk was across the room, the blade was at the saccarii’s neck, and every drop of patience had fled from his voice.
“You poisoned me”—he forced his voice through grit teeth—“you brought me here; you have done… something to me. You either tell me everything right now or you tell my blade.”
He could only see the other two saccarii out of the corner of his eye. He caught only glimpses of Khaliv’s hand protectively shielding the urchin, only flashes of the terror in the little girl’s eyes, only whispers of the words she called him.
“Demon.”
He returned his attentions back to the saccarii in blue. There was no fear in this one’s eyes. He barely even blinked as he looked down at the tip of the blade without moving his neck.
“Interesting,” he said. “It would be too typical to level your blade at my throat. Dramatic, yes, but one slip and I can tell you nothing. So you point to my collarbone. You could cut a little and still not kill me.” His eyes widened in appreciation. “You wield a blade well. Did your father teach you before he died?”
At that, Lenk wanted dearly for his blade to have a “slip” and end that question and the saccarii with it. And he might have, if he weren’t quite so shocked.
“How did you know that?” he asked numbly.
“No, he did not,” the saccarii continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “You were talented with it from the moment you picked it up, no? Though you had not so much as touched steel before you saw this blade, it felt easy in your hand. Comfortable. Made for you.” He tapped his veiled chin. “What were you before you and this blade found each other? Merchant? Laborer? A soldier’s son?”
“Farmer.” Lenk found the word tumbling out between numb lips. “A farmer’s son… before…”
“Before they all died. Horribly. Murdered in flames and fire, yes? I have read this before.” He nodded slowly, glancing at his books. “Different beginnings, same ending. It does not get less tragic with repetition.”
“How?” Lenk asked. “How do you know this?”
“A long story,” he said. He rose easily, gingerly pushing Lenk’s blade aside with a single finger. “One I intend to tell you when you have eaten, what with most of your food now sitting in a copper bowl.”
He laid a h
and on Lenk’s shoulder. His blue sleeve fell back, exposing gray skin with a sickly sheen.
“Welcome to the house of Sheffu.”
If Silktown was where money went to live, Sheffu’s courtyard was almost certainly where it went to die. The trees were bare and sickly. The lawn was brown and parched. Cobwebs of aged silk hung everywhere, a single ancient, hairy arachnid making its way slowly across the courtyard.
While he had been assured that Sheffu, like all fashas, did own property in Silktown, Lenk found it hard to believe. The manicured lawns, glistening gates, and palatial manors he had seen seemed like a dream. This massive, ugly thing on eight legs seemed like a waking nightmare.
Free-ranging spiders were not only encouraged but mandatory in Silktown, he had been told. It was against the law to cage them, to interfere with their daily roaming, or—if one was poor enough—to touch them at all. Apparently, there was no law against keeping particularly depressing specimens, though, for Sheffu’s solitary spider seemed as though it might just give up and die at any moment.
As a solitary upside, the scenery was so magnificently depressing as to keep Lenk’s mind off the hunger pangs gnawing at his belly.
At least, until he smelled the food.
Khaliv set a steaming plate of rice and scraps of baked meats before him. Lenk had already started devouring it before he became aware of the fork that had been delivered with it. And by the time he was aware of that, he was also aware of Mocca, sitting in the other chair, looking horrified.
Lenk smacked lips stained red with sauce, noting the empty space before his companion. He made an offering gesture to his plate, which Mocca politely waved away.
“Are you sure?” Lenk asked. “It’s pretty good.”
“It’s terribly rude to speak ill against one’s host,” Mocca replied. “Though not half as rude as lying. I can tell just by looking at that that it’s less food and more war crime.”
Lenk looked down at the dish. The rice was slimy. The meat was burned. The sauce had some kind of chunks in it that would probably raise a lot of questions later. But, considering that everything he had eaten over the past two days now lay within a copper urn along with some kind of wriggling demon, he was willing to accept it.
