by J. V. Jones
The fly bit the tender center of his palm as he opened the door and stepped into the hall. Crope couldn’t really blame it, but it did hurt, and he decided to release the fly in the hallway and let it find its own way out. The house had four stories and he was standing on the topmost floor. “Fly down,” he advised as the insect buzzed away.
Crope took a moment then just to settle his mind. It wasn’t that he was upset or anything . . . just things got a bit much from time to time. The light in the hallway helped. Late-afternoon sun shone red and golden, warping floorboards and stirring dust. Quill said that the man who had originally built the house had been a sea captain who’d once plied the trade routes between the Seahold and the Far South. “Missed the ocean, he did,” Quill had reported. “So he built himself a ship.” With its round windows and plank decking the house did look a bit like a boat, but mostly it just looked like a house.
It wasn’t home, though. Crope couldn’t guess how long he would have to hide out in the cold and stony city at the base of a mountain. It made no difference: it would never be his home.
Quietly, he let himself back into the sleeping chamber. Entering the cool, low-ceilinged dimness was like passing into a cave. His lord could not bear bright light. Even in his sleep he shied away from it, screaming from his fever dreams that it burned. Boiled-wool curtains, dyed black and double-lined, concealed the chamber’s only window, yet some portion of light still got through. Crope used this to navigate the room as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark.
His lord was still sleeping. Baralis’ slight, misshapen body lay curled in a fetal position on the bed. The sour, grassy scent of fresh urine was leaking from the mattress and Crope fretted over whether it was better to let his lord sleep or waken him and strip down the sheets. Crope was not good with choices. Choices could lead to mistakes.
Dimwit, Halfwit, Nowit. Couldn’t pluck a half-bald chicken.
The bad voice was like an itch inside his head and he tried very hard to ignore it. His lord was sleeping quietly, at rest in his mind. Perhaps it was best to let him be. Crope could not recall many hours where his lord had simply slept. Mostly he shook and clawed the sheets and repeated the same word over and over again in different ways. No. No.
No.
Crope shivered, though the room was warm. Not hot, not cold. Lukewarm. His lord could bear no other temperature on his skin. His lord was broken and needed mending. Crope had experience with mending. He’d fixed chickens and dogs and squirrels before but there was so much profoundly wrong with his lord that he wasn’t sure it could ever be made right.
But it would not stop Crope from trying. Silently he crossed the room to where the driftwood table with the charred legs stood. The water he’d fetched earlier had now reached the same temperature as the room and he soaked some of it up in a heavy cloth. Cupping his free hand beneath the cloth to catch the drips, Crope moved toward his lord. As always when he neared him, Crope felt the anger knot in his chest. He did not understand how one man could have done this to another. During his first year at the tin mines he had pulled a digger from the rubble of a collapsed seam. The man had been smashed by falling stone, his body torn and punctured in a dozen places by sharp edges of quartz. A fluke upward shearing of rock had punched out his eye and replaced it with a shiny chunk of tin. His left leg had been disjointed at the hip and the tendons in both his feet had snapped. Unable to inflate his lungs, he had lived for about an hour. Crope thought of the digger’s broken body whenever he saw his lord.
Crushed, that was the word. And it was one thing for a lode-bearing seam of tin to do that to a man. Another thing entirely for someone to do it to someone else. It was evil, and Crope lived with the real and secret fear that even though he had killed the man who had harmed his lord the evil that had been created still lived on.
Crope was gentle as he dripped water on his lord’s brow. Baralis’ eyes were almost destroyed, the corneas folded inward, the whites scarred and crisscrossed with strange veins. Even the lids were scarred, Crope noticed as he washed his lord’s face.
“You are with me,” he murmured softly as Baralis stirred, “and you are safe.”
Eighteen days had passed since he’d rescued his lord; Crope knew this to be so because Quill kept an account. Quillan Moxley was a friend and thief. He was also a man of business, and Crope worried about the cost of hiding out in his house. Eighteen days of food, medicine and shelter added up—especially, Crope conceded rather sheepishly, when it was him doing the eating. Quill had asked for no reckoning, but Crope knew how these things worked. Obligation had been created, and obligation meant debt.
Still, Crope respected Quill. He was a man of his word. He’d promised to help Crope free his lord from the chasm below the pointy tower and had gone ahead and done just that. And Quill would never run to the bailiffs to settle a grievance. Men who enforced laws in this or any other city were not friends of Quill, and that suited Crope fine. Just the thought of bailiffs was enough to make Crope scan the room for likely escape routes. When a bailiff locked you up you never got out.
Jangly music rose through the floorboards as the girls in the floor below began to prepare themselves for the night’s work. Crope worried about the girls. Some of them wore too little and might catch chills. Others drank too much and Crope would find them passed out on the stairs in the morning. Quill called them prostitutes though the girls never used that name themselves. He rented out the two middle floors to them in return for a portion of their take. Crope was shy around the girls. They reminded him of wounded animals who needed mending, but he knew it wasn’t his place to try and fix them.
He required all his mending skills for his lord. Methodically over the past eighteen days he had tended Baralis’ ailments. Open wounds were the most pressing problem and Crope cleaned them with alcohol and rubbed them with a salve made from aloe and sweet fennel. The ulcers and pressure sores had to be washed with a tincture of calendula twice a day, and Crope was careful not to let his lord lie in the same position overlong else the skin break up and become worse. There was deadnettle for the bladder, horehound for Baralis’ weakened lungs, and butcher’s broom for his enlarged heart. Ewe’s milk so thick with cream it coated your hand like a glove helped restore his weight. Then came the potions that dulled the pain and dimmed the night terrors: blood of poppy, skullcap, devil’s claw. Crope tried not to think too long on their names; they were a warning, he left it at that.
What he could not drive from his mind were the things wrong with his lord that could never be made right. Bone had been broken, allowed to partially reheal, and then systematically broken again. What was left was a body that would never bear its own weight, a spine riddled with bone spurs, vertebrae that had fused around the neck, a femur with a head so misshapen that it no longer fitted squarely in its socket, finger joints that would not bend, a wrist that could not rotate, a rib cage that lay like the collapsed hull of a shipwreck beneath the skin.
It was something worse than torture, something that went beyond the desire to disfigure and cause pain. Crope was not good with notions, and he’d had to puzzle the evil for a long time before he realized its purpose: the creation of absolute dependency.
Baralis could not have lived without the aid of his persecutor. He had been stripped of the ability to fend for himself. Everything required for survival—food, water, warmth and clothing—had to be brought to him by another. Unable to draw a cool glass of water to his lips or move to ease the pain of the pressure sores, Baralis had been forced to wait in the darkness until his persecutor brought relief. Crope had lived in the sulfurous darkness of the tin mines. He’d been locked up in root cellars, back rooms and cages. He knew what it was to be frightened and alone. What he didn’t know was what it felt like to be helpless. He was a giant man, and when chains needed breaking all he had to do was take them in his fists and pull.
His lord could not have pulled; that was the thought that undid Crope.
Feeling the bad pressure b
uilding behind his eyes, he took a step away from his lord to calm himself. The giant’s blood in him pumped hard when he got angry and he had to be careful to keep his chest from getting tight. One of the last times he’d given in to the giant’s blood he’d brought down a tavern in a fortified town north of Hound’s Mire. Bringing down buildings wasn’t good.
The smell of hot grease distracted him. The girls downstairs were preparing supper: hare fried in duck fat, if he wasn’t mistaken. The girls had set up a little stove in the hallway and cooked whatever Quill or their customers brought to the house. Crope’s mouth began to water at the thought of crispy hare skin, which was mostly a good thing. Feeling hungry was better than feeling mad.
As he washed his lord’s wounds, Crope noticed the sunlight begin to fail. The strange, circular marks on Baralis’ thighs and buttocks didn’t bother him so much now. Crope had imagined his lord being branded with hot irons and that made him mad, but Quill had said no, that wasn’t the case. According to him, Baralis had lain on his chains for so long that iron had leached through his skin and laid down pigment like a tattoo. Crope thought that Quill was about the smartest man he knew—excepting for his lord, of course.
A knock on the door made Crope freeze. What was he to do? Answer it? Ignore it? Hike out the window and escape? Quill had warned him many times of the need to keep a low profile. “Keep your head down, your door locked, and your mouth shut. You’re in the worst kind of trouble: you good as killed a king.” Crope had no argument with that. “Worst kind of trouble” could have been his middle name.
Frowning at the little circular window set at shoulder height in the west wall, Crope decided escape wasn’t going to be quick. Grease would be needed. Bulk of this magnitude didn’t go through openings of that . . . smallitude without a considerable amount of help.
“It’s me. Grant me ingress.”
Quill. Stupid, scuttle-brained fool. Should have known it was him all along. Crope nodded softly, relieved. The bad voice was usually right.
“A moment,” he called out. Bending deep at the waist, he attended his lord.
Baralis was in the half-world between sleep and waking. Blood of poppy pumped through his arteries, slowing the workings of his heart and liver, and clouding his brain. The terrors had been bad last night and Crope had been frightened that his lord might injure himself. Baralis had writhed on the bed, arching his spine and clawing at the shadows in front of his face. No, he had cried again and again. No. The blood of poppy had stilled him, but now, half a day later, he was beginning to stir. Crope knew his lord. He could tell from a few tiny movements—the flick of an eyelid, the contraction of muscle below the jaw—that Baralis was becoming aware.
Swiftly, Crope tucked pillows beneath his lord’s head and straightened the sheets. With the little whalebone comb he had carried with him all the way from the diamond pipe, he groomed Baralis’ night-black hair. There was no time to banish the sour smell of urine so Crope scooped a packet of dried mint from the table and crushed it hard in his fist. On his way to the door he scattered the pieces randomly about the room. It didn’t disguise the sourness exactly, he decided, reaching for the door bolt. Just made it smell as if someone had drunk a bucket of mint tea before pissing.
It would have to do. One quick glance back assured Crope that his lord was now in possession of his dignity, and he was free to pull back the bolts.
“Took your time,” Quill said, stepping through the doorway, his gaze shooting into all the dark spaces. “Sleeping is he?”
Crope nodded, thought, then shook his head.
Quill appeared to understand this and jabbed his chin in response. Medium height and lean as back bacon, he shrank to almost nothing when viewed from the side. His hair was dark and greased close to his skull and his eyes were an uncertain color that Crope could only describe as “murky.” As befitted a thief, Quill’s clothes were unremarkable in fit and color, offering no information worth repeating to a bailiff. Brown. Gray. Worn. It was his custom however to wear “a spot of cream.” Cream was gold that was nine-tenths pure, Crope had learned, and it advertised Quill’s status to others like him. Today he wore a heavy-gauge chain circling his left wrist at the cuff mark. You could see it only when he extended his arm in a certain manner . . . which was exactly as he planned.
Sliding himself against the far wall, Quill said, “Close the door. There’s business to discuss.”
Crope did Quill’s bidding, hoping Quill wouldn’t study the room too carefully while his back was turned. The rough plank walls had sponged up years of damp, and holes of varying sizes told of long-standing infestations: woodworm, termites, mice. A rug woven from bulrushes had partially unraveled on the floor, and overhead in the roof beams fiddlehead spiders had crocheted a killing field for flies. Crope tried to keep the room clean, but no matter how much he swept and scrubbed the shabbiness remained.
“Watch’ll be coming door-to-door tonight,” Quill said, flicking his gaze away from the figure on the bed as Crope turned to face him. “A carter hauling tallow up Lime Hill swears he saw a giant as tall as two men heading east towards Rat’s Nest at dawn.”
Crope felt his face grow hot. He had been out last night, walking in the chill air and watching the stars fade as the sun rose from behind the big mountain. He knew it was a risk, being out at dawn, but seventeen years interred in the darkness of tin mines and diamond pipes changed a man, and there was no one alive who could keep him away from the light.
Quill studied the color in Crope’s face before nodding shrewdly with understanding. Perhaps he’d been locked up too. “Here’s what we know. The watch has had their drawers in a dither ever since the night the tower fell. They don’t look good. The Splinter comes crashing down, destroys half the fortress, wakes up every doomed and deluded soul in the city, and covers every rooftop, walltop and tabletop with a layer of dust as thick as me thumb. Eighteen days later and they’re still pulling bodies from the wreckage. And to make matters worse they haven’t found the Surlord.” Quill paused to give Crope a speculative look. “All things considered it’s a fuckup of historic proportions. Half the city’s scared arseless and the other half’s busy as bees trying to fleece them. We’ve got grangelords running wild with their hideclads, Rullion’s whitenecks igniting one unholy fire under the faithful, and Mask Fortress under siege.
“Blunders left and right. Bollockings for all. The watch needs to be seen doing something. And that something, my friend, is finding you.”
Crope looked at his feet. “Not as tall as two men,” he said.
Except for blinking a few times, Quill ignored this. “Rumors are running like cheap ale. The mountain moved, ancient evil’s awoken, the Surlord’s in hiding, the Surlord’s dead. Only one man alive knows the truth of what happened—and I’m looking straight at him and it ain’t a reassuring sight.”
Crope stared at his feet. Chicken-brained fool. Brought down the whole henhouse now. “Go away,” he offered, “take lord and never come back.”
Tutting impatiently, Quill peeled back the curtain and glanced down at the street. “As I said, hardly reassuring.” He seemed to be speaking to himself. Letting the curtain drop he spun around to face Crope. “Look. Leave the city and you might as well light a signal fire and holler at the top of your lungs Come get me. Last time I counted, giants hauling cripples on their backs were few and far between. Dozens saw you that night. Now granted some may have exaggerated your considerable charms, but there’s two things they all agree on. One, that the man seen escaping from the collapsing tower was an unnaturally big bastard. And two, he’s as guilty as sin.
“Every watch brother, bounty hunter and bailiff in the city hold is looking for you. You’re as easy to spot as a pig in a snake basket, and neither you nor his lordship there should be going anywhere anytime soon.”
Once again Quill’s gaze rested upon Baralis. The thief was deeply interested in him, Crope had noticed, but pretended otherwise. Baralis lay silent and unmoving, his eyes clo
sed, breath hissing faintly from his lips.
Listening.
Quill continued. “Matters may have died a death if the carter hadn’t sang his song with you as chord and chorus. Now the watch is at our heels and they’re knocking door-to-door. They’re going to be on that stoop this very night and unless we do something sharpish we’re all gonna hang.”
Crope knew some kind of response was called for, but he was having difficulty keeping up. Quill spoke fast and fancy, and the word bailiff had been spoken and it was getting hard to think. “No hang.”
“Too right no hang.” Quill was beginning to get animated. “I haven’t sneaked these streets for twenty years to get a necking for mischief I didn’t make. Abetting a friend of a friend, I was. The King of Thieves himself, Scurvy Pine. That’s the way things work in the back alleys: you help someone, I help you, and when time comes when I require a little assistance meself my dues are paid in full. Course the system starts to break down when one good deed turns into an ongoing concern. I have to ask myself ‘What’s in it for me?’ and from where I’m standing now—between an eight-foot stack-o-hay and death on two sticks—it ain’t looking good.”
“No good,” Crope echoed in deep agreement.
This response appeared to exasperate Quill, who began to pace the room. “So all the time you hauled rocks in the diamond pipe you never stashed a little cream for yourself?”
Morose now, Crope shook his head. “Had diamond . . . lost it.”
“And what about his lordship there. Lord of what? Lord of where? Has he holdings, land, goods?”
