The City Stained Red

by Sam Sykes

  At this, he awoke.

  She left? Why had she left? He had paid, hadn’t he? He had had enough to pay for this night, just one night more. She couldn’t have left. Had she cheated him? Had she gone once he fell asleep? When? Where? She couldn’t leave. Not now.

  Not now, not now, not now, he thought, clutching at the cold sheets between clammy fingers. Please.

  He whirled at the sound of breaking glass and breathed a sigh of relief. Liaja stood at an open door, peering down the hallway. He pulled himself from the bed, came up behind her, dutifully ignored the fact that she was taller than him, and slid his arms about her waist.

  She started at the touch but grew soft in his arms, reaching down to place her hand in his. But her grip was tense, her body trembling beneath the flimsy silk robe she wore.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  She didn’t have to.

  Voices carried down the hall from the bathhouse’s parlor, hot with anger. He leaned out, saw more doors open, more girls peering along the hall. Beneath their kohl makeup, terror shone on their faces. The rattle of metal and the sound of flesh striking flesh echoed down the corridor. The girls shrank behind the paper screens of their rooms’ doors.

  “Soldiers?” Dreadaeleon muttered.

  “They didn’t come for girls,” Liaja replied. “And they won’t leave.”

  “Mm.” He smiled sleepily at her, gently kissed her neck. “Typical barknecks. Ignore them.”

  He leaned forward to kiss her again. She stepped away, her face darkening. He blinked stupidly.

  “What?”

  “Men with coin are civil, northern boy,” Liaja said. “When they take something, they leave something behind. Men with steel are different. When they take something, nothing is left behind.”

  Dreadaeleon looked into the hall. “They’re whores. Surely they’re used to men making demands of them.”

  “They give.” Liaja’s voice grew as cold as her stare. “Do you think they have nothing that can be taken?”

  He stared at her dumbly for a moment, at a loss for words. The look on her was as hard as a fist and struck him like one. He took a step backward, remembering the last time a woman had looked at him like that.

  Boy. Boy. Useless. Boy. Selfish. Cruel. Boy. Little boy. Boy.

  He shut his eyes, shook his head, and tried to fling the words from his thoughts.

  No. No. NO. I’m not a boy. I’m not.

  Something stirred within his head, sent electric anger racing across his skull, into his eyes. His palms itched; his eyes burned behind their lids. Other words came to him. Words much longer, much stronger than the ones that had been occupying his sleep.

  “Stay here.”

  He found his trousers on the floor, pulled them on, and stormed down the hall. The girls followed him with their eyes, peering out from their rooms to watch as he came into the bathhouse’s parlor. The glass from one of the windows lay shattered on the floor, voices carrying through the shards in the frame.

  “I don’t understand.” He recognized the voice of the girl who had met him here earlier. “This is a bathhouse. I’ve seen some of your own men here before!”

  “It is a den of filth and sin,” a deep, masculine voice answered. “It will be purged.”

  “The other soldiers left us in peace. Please, try to see reason. We can work something—”

  He heard a meaty smack and a shriek as a heavy hand struck a soft cheek.

  “Do not test me, whore.”

  Dreadaeleon swept to the door and pushed it open. The girl recoiled from a wall of soldiers in black armor, all lined up neatly with spears and shields. One in the lead, stare as cold and hard as the iron of his helmet, stood with torch in hand. He looked up to regard Dreadaeleon.

  “Collect your clothes and depart, civilian,” the Karnerian commanded. “No lives need to be lost that are not already damned, but Daeon teaches that strength comes from purity. This house must be burned.”

  Dreadaeleon met the man’s stare for a moment before looking at the girl. Her dress was torn at the shoulder. A purple bruise was blossoming upon her cheek. Tears brimmed in her eyes as she hid her face from him.

  “You have limited time, civilian,” the soldier said. “Do not waste it.”

  Dreadaeleon didn’t say a word.

  Not at first, anyway. Not when he looked back at the man and considered, carefully, the slope and ridge of the black helmet he wore. Not when he extended a hand, palm flat and fingers stretched out. Not when his eyes burst with the red light of Venarie flowing through him.

  He spoke only after all this: a single word with a single meaning that the soldier could not understand.

  Not at first, anyway.

  It only became clear once Dreadaeleon drew his hand into a fist, clenching all fingers together. The air rippled around the soldier’s helmet and suddenly it, too, clenched.

  There was the crunch of metal twisting, there was a crack of bone, there was the patter of blood as a great crimson fan burst from the helmet’s eye slits. But there was no scream. For when the soldier fell to the ground and the torch clattered to the floor alongside, the fist-sized crumpled wad of metal that had been his head had no room left for screams.

  “Consider this bathhouse under the protection of the Venarium,” Dreadaeleon said. “Consider what just happened here very carefully before you decide what to do next.”

  With a ripple of metal and a cry of alarm, the soldiers broke their rank, stepping backward and looking warily at one another. Only one remained forward, huddling behind his shield as though it would protect him from whatever Dreadaeleon might do next.

  “The… the Venarium are neutral!” he stammered. “There are oaths! There are—”

  “You do not know about the oaths,” Dreadaeleon interrupted. “You do not know their depth, their implication, or whether or not they allow me to do what I just did.” His eyes burned bright, the red light leaking out of them to dissipate in the air like so much smoke. “What you do know is that I just crushed a man’s head with a word. And whatever you do next, know this.”

  He folded his hands behind his back, stepped lightly over the dead man’s body, and approached the soldier. The Karnerian flinched backward, staring down at Dreadaeleon over the rim of his shield.

  “I have many, many more words.” Dreadaeleon growled through clenched teeth, “Leave.”

  The soldiers exchanged nervous glances, backing away steadily. Maybe it was pride or merely good military order that kept them from turning and fleeing outright as they disappeared around a corner. Maybe they would go to the Venarium and find out that what Dreadaeleon just did—using magic to interact in a non-sovereign military action—was in violation of all those oaths. Maybe they would return with Lector Annis, a dozen more soldiers, and an execution warrant that should have been served the first time.

  Maybe.

  Like a muscle tensed too long, his brain began to hurt. The light left his gaze, leaving behind eyes tired and mapped with red veins. His shoulders stooped and his body sagged as he dragged himself back to the bathhouse.

  He didn’t care about soldiers. He didn’t care about the Venarium. He didn’t care that the girl looked at him with more horror than she had at the man who had struck her.

  All he cared about was soon in his arms. His lips were on her neck, her sigh was in his ears. But her body was still tense.

  “What happened out there?” Liaja asked. “I heard screaming.”

  “There was screaming,” Dreadaeleon confirmed. “Now there isn’t.”

  She held him at an arm’s length and looked at him intently. “What did you do, Dreadaeleon?”

  He smiled lazily, reached into his trouser pocket and produced a broodvine seed.

  “Please,” he whispered, popping it into his mouth, “call me ‘northern boy’ again.”

  “You remember what he used to call himself? Back when we first met him and we weren’t even a g
ang with a name?”

  Denaos sniffed and instantly regretted doing so. The embalming tar had done little to curb the stink.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “He called himself ‘Fearless Fenshi.’”

  “Fearless Fenshi.” A pause. “Bit of a prick back then, wasn’t he? We’d always lay down the game, watch the marks, plan the heist, make sure we weren’t stepping on any other gang’s toes…”

  “And he’d go charging in, sword swinging and screaming like it was a contest to see who could fuck things up the most.” Denaos chuckled. “You remember what he called himself after we made it?”

  “‘Fenshi the Feared.’ Had himself a new sword made and everything. Remember how he went around with that thing on his face?”

  “Yeah, that stupid half-mask.” Denaos laughed, trying to ignore the smell. “‘So that my enemies may know only the barest hint of the legend who struck at them.’ What an idiot.”

  “That mask, yeah.” A sigh. “He always wanted to be a Jackal.”

  Denaos stared down into Fenshi’s eyes, shut tightly behind stray globs of embalming tar. They had made him look as peaceful as one could with one’s head severed and one’s hands chopped off and one’s belly hollowed out. At the very least, they had removed the various dead animals the Khovura had attached to him.

  Still, laid out on the table in the back room of a cutter’s office in a gutter in the Sumps, it was hard for anyone to look peaceful.

  But those eyes, sealed so tightly, looked as if they were going to spring open at any moment and Fenshi would start cracking some kind of crappy joke.

  Something like “Hey, this is no way to get a-HEAD in life.”

  He’d have liked that. Fenshi liked shitty jokes. Only ones he told, though, because he always thought they were brilliant when they came out of his mouth. Arrogant turd.

  “I’m going to miss him,” Denaos said.

  “And Rheniga? Headhigh?”

  “Them, too.”

  “What about Stacco? Mahdula? Easy Erstwhile?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “The Candle? The Scarecrow? Rezca?”

  “They’re not dead yet.”

  “And what about me, Ramaniel?”

  He turned to regard a face like a shattered mirror. Anielle’s visage was cracking with every moment his eyes lingered upon her. At the edges of the eyes, the corners of the lips, the cheeks paling steadily, she forgot everything about the woman she was supposed to be and became, for once, embarrassingly honest about who she really was.

  A small woman standing next to her dead friend, feeling alone and terrified.

  “Are you going to miss me when I’m gone?” she asked, voice trembling. “Because it won’t be long now. They got Fenshi. They got Rheniga. They’ll get us all. Maybe slower, now that they can’t hunt us on the street thanks to Rezca fucking with the mediations, but it’ll happen.”

  The woman staring up at him was not the woman he had met those nights ago in Teneir’s manse. She was not the woman who had pulled Asper out of the fire. She was not the woman who had played the Kissing Game with him and helped bring down the Houndmistress and plunge this city into riots.

  This was not Anielle looking at him.

  But he recognized her now, from so many years ago, when they were gutter trash on the streets of Cier’Djaal. He recognized the cracks in her face where the cocky little girl who looked like a boy had sometimes sat up at night and cried when she thought he was asleep and punched him in the throat if he asked what the matter was the next day. He recognized the face now as the one he had seen long ago, when he and she had stopped being trash and started being murderers.

  “It’s not going to happen,” he said.

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “I’m not promising, I’m stating. This isn’t going to happen.” He stared down flatly at her. “I owe this city.”

  She shook her head, trembling. “No. You can’t make up for what you did just by killing a few thugs. Don’t tell me you’re going to.” She pulled a knife from her belt, held it by the blade. “You do this, you do it for us. Not for the dead. Not for your friends. No one else.”

  He looked down at the blade and saw that it was newly forged. Its leather scabbard was still stiff and rigid from being boiled recently; the polish on its wooden hilt was buffed to a high gloss; the crosspiece was perfectly free of any dents or blemishes. It was a virgin blade, one he’d never seen before.

  Yet already he could feel how it would fit into his grasp; he could already feel its weight in his hand and hear the leather hiss when he would draw it out to cut a throat.

  That sound, he could hear it in his sleep. No matter how much he drank, no matter how much he lied, no matter how many times he looked in the mirror and saw a woman with a slit throat standing behind him, he could never stop hearing it.

  So maybe then, it was time to just stop pretending he ever could.

  This was what he did. Maybe he’d do it for Anielle, maybe he would do it for the city, maybe he’d do it for the dead girl in his dreams who smiled at him through her neck.

  He highly doubted the blade cared.

  And when he held his hand out, palm up, and accepted the hilt Anielle laid upon it, it fit within his fingers exactly as he thought it would.

  Some of them swore aloud. A few of them stepped out of the way or held their children a little closer. But most of them simply continued walking, head down and dragging whatever cart or sack or children they could as they trudged through the gate.

  No one tried to stop him.

  As he strode among them without his cloak, wings spread wide, head held high, teeth bared, and claws twitching, they didn’t even think to look at a Rhega and know fear.

  If they were smart, they would. They would be out with whatever swords they could scavenge. They would grab the spears of fallen guards and soldiers and come at him. They would look at him, at all his teeth and his claws and the hate in his eyes, and know they had to kill him, for he surely intended to kill them.

  He was Gariath. He was Rhega. And he would kill them all, someday. Or save them all.

  If they knew that, they would look terrified.

  But they didn’t know that. They didn’t know him. They didn’t know the word Rhega.

  Here, in the slow-moving stream of refugees leaving the city, he was just another oid.

  At a closer glance, the crowd wasn’t even mostly human. Many were tulwar, carrying swords upon bent backs. More were shicts, leading great, hyena-like beasts by leather reins. Many saccarii, many couthi, even a few vulgore added themselves to the stream.

  Many races. Yet to a one, their heads were bowed low, their backs were bent, and their possessions were meager.

  There were no other dragonmen here. No Drokha strode among them. Gariath had heard they remained behind in the city, bought up as mercenaries by fashas who could afford them.

  Perhaps Kharga was among them, Gariath wondered, cleaving humans apart for human coin. Gariath could see the Drokha in his mind, blood-slick ax blade, striding through the bodies hewn and heads smashed.

  It was not hard to imagine one of those heads bearing a mane of silver hair matted with blood.

  He snorted.

  It was this city. This city made proud dragonmen fight over coins. This city made humans eat each other alive and not think it vile to do so. This city bent backs, bowed heads, made strong people weak, made weak words strong.

  And no one else seemed to give a shit but him.

  Fine, he growled inwardly. That’s fine. Always it’s been me to solve this. They’re too weak: Lenk, Kharga, the others. All too weak. They need me to save them again. They need me to solve this.

  He carried this thought with him long outside the gates, as he walked across the sand and crested a high dune. The city was so far away from here, something small and dark with a big, ugly spire jutting from it like a cancerous growth.

  He would solve this.

  He was the strong one.
>
  Like always.

  A harsh wind kicked up, carrying many scents with it: distant smoke, burning wood, ebbing fears. None were quite so strong, though, as the scent of meat cooking nearby. Pain gnawed at his stomach in protest, bade him to seek out the scent. He followed it over a few dunes before arriving at the site of a small campsite with a big occupant.

  A vulgore sat hunched beside a rather dismal fire attempting to heat a rather intimidating pot. He swung a great, horned head up as Gariath approached, but did nothing else. Gariath couldn’t remember the face, but he recognized the smell.

  The vulgore, it seemed, didn’t know any other Rhega to confuse him with.

  “Kudj welcome wayward squib,” Kudj grunted. He held up massive hands. “Kudj no want fight, if squib come bearing grudges. Kudj got no job no more, striking out to forge own destiny.”

  While Gariath did not outright deny that he wanted a fight, he made no move to attack. Seeming satisfied with this, Kudj gestured to the other side of the fire.

  “Come, squib, sit with Kudj. Engage in beautifully awkward hospitality.” He reached into the pot with a large finger and stirred whatever was inside. “Stew not hot. Fire not big enough. Squib is welcome to some anyway.”

  The stew smelled of old meat, old vegetables, old water. It felt lukewarm in his hand as he scooped it up. It tasted vile on his tongue as he shoveled it into his mouth. But food was food. He had no idea when he would eat next.

  “Squib smart, like Kudj,” Kudj said. “When human squibs get the jibblies, they always take it out on oid squibs. Oid squibs always hang around to get money from human squibs. Such is price of unspoken economic-induced caste system. Good to leave now, come back later when jibblies gone.”

  Gariath continued to eat the stew silently. Kudj stared at him, squinting.

  “How far squib going?”

  “Far,” Gariath replied.

  “Where squib going?”

  “Away.”

  “Ah. Kudj see. Kudj have great appreciation for dramatic tension.”

  This, apparently, meant Kudj would fall silent as Gariath finished eating. After he swallowed a mouthful of stew, Gariath rested his hands on the rim of the pot and stared down into the broth.