The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  Stone shattered. Earth screamed. A cloud of sand and pulverized cobblestones went flying into the air and cloaked the many bodies that fell, the road torn out from under them like a rug.

  And Gariath was still alive.

  Or so he thought, anyway.

  Kharga’s blow had barely missed, but he felt the shock of it in his bones as he stumbled to the ground. The pain in his chest resonated with a dull ache. Maybe he hadn’t slept off earlier wounds. Maybe he was getting older, weaker.

  Or maybe Kharga was just that angry.

  That was easy enough to believe, even before Gariath felt a shadow fall over him. He narrowly tumbled aside in time to avoid Kharga’s foot as it came crashing down, sending the stones shuddering.

  Gariath clawed his way to his feet as the humans tried to find their footing. When he came up, he found himself snout-to-face with one of them. Eyes wide, hands trembling, the human made a grab for his spear, thrust halfheartedly at Gariath.

  “S-stay back.”

  The flimsy attack was an insult. Gariath thought he should have done more than just smash his fist against the human’s nose and send him unmoving to the ground. But, the dragonman thought as he reached down to pluck up the spear, he was in a hurry.

  “DIE, MONSTER!”

  Gariath whirled and saw it. Not the human leaping at him, sword drawn, mouth wide in a war cry. That, he barely noticed. Rather, Gariath saw something else. Something that made him duck low.

  Kharga’s ax swung wildly over his head with enough force to cleave through the human in midair. Two twitching pieces fell to the ground.

  A fine red mist mingled with the sand and dust in the air. The humans were screaming, some running, some grabbing weapons. Gariath didn’t care about that. Nor, it seemed, did Kharga. Their eyes were on each other, brimming with hatred.

  Kharga’s swing had left him open and Gariath leapt at him, hanging from the giant’s horn with one hand and driving the spear forward with the other. He drove it to the haft into Kharga’s collar. Thick hide split. Blood wept. The shaft shattered in his hand.

  And Kharga did not so much as flinch.

  Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to read emotions through a reptilian snout. Between dragonmen, scent was everything.

  And at that moment, Kharga’s scent was rage. There was no room for anything else: not the spear in his collarbone, not the blood weeping down his chest, not the foe hanging from his horn. A massive hand reached up and seized Gariath by the shoulder.

  And flung him to the ground like so much filth.

  He didn’t hear the sound of his body striking the stones. Nor the sound of the humans cackling. Nor even the sound of coughing as blood spattered from his mouth onto the ground.

  “Maybe they hate us,” Kharga rumbled. “Maybe they look down on us. Maybe we take their coin. But we are better for living with their stink than dying out there like you.”

  Even if Gariath hadn’t smelled the anger and desperation on the bigger dragonman, it was clear his words had struck deeper than any spear could. That would be more satisfying, he thought, if he could actually hear whatever Kharga was saying.

  His earfrills were filled with a ringing sound. His body felt numb as he staggered to his feet. His own scent reeked of fear, panic, pain. Agony tinged his senses and through it he could think of only one word.

  Run.

  It was only through that panic that he willed his legs to work, picking him up on a swaying stagger and sending him forward. Or at least, he assumed his legs were working. He couldn’t feel them moving under him. He couldn’t feel the pain in his chest.

  Nor could he feel the earth tremble as Kharga let out a howl and came charging after him.

  He hurt with every step he took. Blood worked itself back into his legs, sensation returned to sharp, agonized splendor. Without panic to cloud his thoughts, every stab of pain became all the more exquisitely pronounced.

  Good.

  Fear was poor motivation. It came and went of its own accord with no respect for who might need it the most.

  Pain lingered. Pain reminded. Pain taught a lesson.

  One Gariath was eager to share as he took a sharp turn down a nearby alley. The houses here were unfinished, their stonework stacked around lumber frames like granite skin flayed from wooden bones. Carts full of mortar and bricks lined the street. A large wooden crane hung over a taller building, toting a heavy load of stone and lumber.

  This was where Gariath chose to make his stand.

  He whirled. Kharga was not far behind. The dragonman was charging without roars, without words. His ax rose without a curse or a snarl to accompany it. Everything he had to say filled Gariath’s nostrils.

  Gariath forced himself to look away, despite how stupid it was to do so. He forced himself to ignore the scent of Kharga’s fury, despite how impossible it was to do so. He cast a look up at the crane, up to the yellow eyes that looked down upon him.

  He gave a brief nod.

  A blade flashed in the dark.

  And stone rained from the sky.

  There was a howl barely heard under the roar of falling earth and shattering wood. Dust and sand erupted in a cloud; Gariath shielded his eyes as it swept over him. When it dissipated, the giant dragonman lay unmoving, a two-ton child tucked ungently beneath a heavy quilt of bricks and timber.

  “Is he dead?”

  Gariath glanced up. Daaru hung by one long limb onto the severed rope of the crane, his blade in his spare hand. With simian dexterity, he swung to the crane itself and began to clamber down to the streets below.

  Despite the smothering stone, Kharga still drew breath, however faint, through twitching nostrils. His eyes were closed, his body was still, but he was, indeed, still alive.

  Admittedly, Gariath hadn’t expected this to work.

  At first, he hadn’t trusted Kharga to even take the bait. And when he had the spear in his hands, he hadn’t trusted himself not to drive it a little deeper and aim for the heart. And finally, when the stones fell, he hadn’t trusted even the crushing weight of hewn earth to stop the giant.

  But, he thought. It worked. I stopped him. Without killing him.

  “Waste,” Daaru said, casting a sneer down upon Kharga. “It’s these creatures that keep the other oids at bay. They’re not like Kudj, you know. Not simple paid labor. Their sole purpose is to spill our blood. Even one dead dragonman would improve the lives of every tulwar in the city.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why? He’s not one of us.”

  “He’s one of me.”

  He didn’t look at Daaru. He didn’t need to know the kind of resentful glare the tulwar shot him. Resentment, Gariath knew, born from not understanding. Gariath only barely understood himself.

  He did not know anything about Kharga. All his thoughts were pains, as keen and bitter as the dull ache lingering in his chest. And he knew that to kill Kharga would be to kill another dragonman.

  And that thought came with more pain.

  “Should have done it better,” Gariath muttered, mostly to himself. “Should have fought him.” He sighed, looking over the bricks. “This wasn’t the right way.”

  “No,” Daaru agreed. “Did you learn that from your humans?”

  Only then did Gariath look at the tulwar. And he did not know the look that Daaru turned upon him.

  “You heard that,” he observed. No question, no defense.

  “I was on the roofs, watching. Is it true?”

  “It is.”

  “Is all of it true?” Daaru asked, gesturing to Kharga. “What makes you any different from him, then? You hang around humans, same as he does.”

  “I don’t serve them.”

  Daaru’s lip curled back, exposing long canines. “You either kill them or you serve them. They don’t know any other way to exist with us. Or you.”

  “Mine are different.”

  Daaru looked back down to Kharga. “Maybe he thought his were, too.” He shook his head. “I
don’t know. Maybe yours are. But they’re only different for you, Gariath; the rest of us have to live with them as we know them.”

  And when he looked to the dragonman again, Gariath’s face was twisted into a frown, an echo of pain playing across his features.

  “You can’t be one of us,” Daaru said, “and be one of them, as well.”

  Gariath stared back at Kharga, unconscious and wounded. The humans—Kharga’s humans—would come searching for him eventually. Even now, they might be raving with tales of a ravenous dragonman, except small and red instead of a gray giant, to their fellow guards. Even now, they might be coming back, seeking the dragonman—their dragonman.

  Kharga had chosen his people.

  And Gariath hated him for it.

  But at least Kharga had chosen. At least Kharga had declared himself to stand with the humans instead of keeping one foot in their world and one foot in the world Gariath occupied. At least Kharga knew who he was.

  He growled. His chest hurt. His head hurt. Everything hurt.

  Daaru said nothing at that. Daaru had turned around and was already walking away, sheathing his sword.

  “Where are you going?” Gariath asked.

  “There is no work in this city. I must find another way to feed my family. And to do that, I must go back to them.” He glanced fleetingly over his shoulder. “Where I belong.”

  Gariath said nothing in response.

  For a long time, though, he looked at a fallen brick and thought, not for the first time, that if he flung it just right at Daaru’s head, it might kill the tulwar. That wouldn’t help, he knew, even if it would spare him future lectures. That which Daaru had said would still be said, no less true.

  And so, Gariath watched him go, leaving him alone with Kharga and the pain in his chest.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE LADY AND THE ROGUE

  This is how they trick you.”

  The house guard patted the hilt of his blade, the sword rattling against his armor.

  “‘Be a house guard,’ they say. ‘Serve the fashas! Good pay and you’ll have a sword handy if the Jackals come sniffing after you.’”

  He reached to the stove, plucked a satay of beef from the skillet, and took a bite out of it. He warned off the servant who looked curiously at him with a glare before snatching a bottle of wine from a nearby table and taking a long swig.

  “Lies,” he muttered through a mouthful. “Pay’s shit. Fashas’re shit. They don’t even let you use these swords. Put it in your hands, make you feel like a big man, but anytime there’s actual fighting to be done, they call in their dragonmen to do it. My uncle was defending Cier’Djaal in the Uprising, you know? Never even drew his blade. Dragonmen did all the fighting.

  “Worst part?” He looked around the kitchen warily and fell silent as another set of servants walked past the doorway, before leaning over and whispering. “This blade isn’t going to do shit if the footwar spills into Silktown. The Jackals have always had an understanding with the fashas, sure, but they’re still a pack of dogs. What do they do when they start getting squeezed by the Khovura like the curs they are? They’re going to turn on us is what they’re going to do.”

  The servant made a noncommittal hum beneath his veil, not looking up from his work of assembling a meal of satays and apricots from the sizzling stove. The house guard kept his glare upon him, regardless, as he took another bite from one of the satays he’d purloined.

  “Why you think I’ve been hired?” he muttered. “Teneir only hires saccarii, right? She and that freak Sheffu. But now she’s got a need for extra guards, just like all the other fashas. They’ve locked themselves up in their homes with their spiders. They want to be ready for the Jackals—or the Khovura, whichever comes knocking. No more parties, no more harems, no more feasts. Just my fucking luck, eh?”

  He took another big bite, another big swig.

  “Could’ve signed on with Ghoukha. He’s still spending money like it’s water. Hear his silk is stronger than ever. Huge demand from the merchants. Parties every night, slave girls running around naked.” The guard sighed wistfully. “Could be bending over some little thing right now instead of watching Teneir’s snakes slither around.”

  He fell silent as one of the saccarii servants came in and glanced between the servant, the guard, and the platter. In a thickly accented language that sent the guard cringing, he asked the servant something, who nodded briefly in reply. At that, the platter was collected and spirited away.

  “Snakes,” the guard spat again. “Can’t ever get around that accent.” He glanced at the servant left remaining. “What’d he ask you, anyway?”

  The servant said nothing, turning his attentions to the dirty dishes left over and beginning to scrub them. The guard sneered.

  “You think you’re better than me or something? Too good to talk to a human, oid?” He reached out for the servant’s veil. “You stupid piece of—”

  His fingers had barely grazed the cloth when he found a palm at his throat. And his mouth had barely opened to swear when he heard the click of a hidden spring.

  When the blade leapt from its hidden sheath beneath the wrist and entered his throat, he barely knew what had happened.

  Denaos was already cursing himself when he rushed to catch the falling guard. He seized a nearby cloth and jammed it up against the neck wound to halt the spurt of blood. Careful to leave not a drop upon the floor, he hurriedly hauled the dead man toward the pantry.

  The hell’d you do that for? Sure, he was an asshole, he told himself, sure, he was about to tear off your veil and blow this whole thing. But there had to be a better way.

  This much was true. Even as Denaos hid the man behind a few barrels and stacked some sacks of rice atop the body, he knew he had just turned an hourglass upside down. He had only between now and the moment someone found the body—which might be anywhere from two breaths to two hours, depending on whether anyone got a craving for curry—to locate some evidence linking the Lady Fasha Teneir to the Khovura and, hopefully, Miron’s disappearance.

  He wiped his hidden blade clean and tucked it back beneath his sleeve by drawing the latch back until it clicked into place. He adjusted his veil, walked out of the pantry, and emerged from the kitchen with the quick, poised stride that would be expected of a servant.

  No one looked twice at him as he moved through the carpeted halls of Teneir’s manse. No one ever would.

  In the mind of the common man, infiltration was an art form. Stories were rife with tales of unseen assassins and shadowy thieves, moving like ghosts from shadow to shadow, hidden from sight until the time came to strike and they would leap from the darkness like creatures from hell to slay their targets in a single thrust.

  Those stories were popular for a reason.

  Because in the mind of the practical rogue, hiding in shadows to get into a rich lady’s home was a bunch of horseshit. For one, there weren’t any; rich people could afford lights in every corridor. And besides, this was Cier’Djaal, where wealthy people had accountants to tally every coin with cold-blooded covetousness. These people were always wary of thieves, always ready for assassins.

  A shadow in Cier’Djaal would have a thousand eyes on it.

  But no one would ever think to look twice at the help.

  He heard the sound of armor rattling as he turned the corner down another hall. He had only a moment to catch a glimpse of the cluster of house guards, armed with blades and spears and clad in mail and silks, before he fell to his knees and pressed his head to the floor in dutiful obeisance.

  When they passed, he had a moment to look up and see the slight figure they guarded. Legs hidden behind skirts laced with gemstones, face and hair cloaked behind elegant crimson veils, the Lady Teneir was a silken scarf wrapped about the hilt of a blade. Where her bodyguards stomped, she floated. Where they scowled, her austere stare never wavered. And wherever she walked, her servants bowed in genuine reverence.

  You wouldn’t think some
one like her would support the Khovura, would you, he mused to himself.

  Honestly, he hadn’t expected that any fasha would be in league with them. They were as old and established in Cier’Djaal as the Jackals. And like most well-to-do families, the thieves and the nobles tended to have much in common. With the tacit understanding that the fashas’ considerable assets would never be levered against the Jackals, the rogues agreed to keep their distance from the fashas’ operations.

  It was a contract penned in blood a long time ago.

  And it had plenty of fine print.

  What made the alliance between the Jackals and the fashas so elegant was the understanding that both were predators. Either one would watch the other die in a fire if it meant earning a few more coins. And for a long while, this had been a prosperous situation: the fashas would covertly send the Jackals against each other, thinking themselves rulers of the thieves while the thieves saw themselves gradually weakening the only rival power in the city.

  And as with any deal between predators, everyone was keenly aware that there would come a point when one partner saw the other as meat. And it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a fasha seeing an opportunity in the rise of the Khovura. Predators were beasts of opportunity, after all.

  Even one as elegant as Lady Teneir.

  He listened until the sound of clinking mail faded entirely, then took off down the hall toward the houn. Not much longer now, he knew. He had to be quicker about getting out than he was getting in.

  To a fasha, there was no more important room than the houn. An older Djaalic word for “boast,” it was the room where they greeted every petitioner, broker, and fellow noble and, thus, the room that would send a statement to the world.

  That statement would usually be “Look at how much more money I have than you, you stupid, poor bastard.”

  Teneir, however, seemed intent on saying “Look at how much more money I have than you and how much more pious I am than you, you stupid, poor, blasphemous, possibly ugly bastard.”

  The rugs were woven to display a river of humanity crawling across the floor on their bellies. The pillars were carved to resemble people twisting into columns, hands extending to support the walkway on the upper floor. The sigil of Ancaa, a wreath of human hands bound together by each other, was everywhere. In every tapestry, in every sculpture, in every graven image: a forest of limbs in silk and steel and stone.