Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  For now, he eased up on that hard grin and crinkled his dark-blue eyes. “I didn’t get you anything!” he protested halfheartedly, as he fastened the bronze clasp at his throat and felt the satisfying number of pockets. The cloak was heavy and solid and would protect him well in a fight; it had slits through the sides for his arms, so the folds wouldn’t get in the way during battle.

  “You got me out of this Goddess-forsaken pisshole,” Torrant returned, with more cheer than he’d felt in hours.

  “Good day, brother?” Aylan asked as Torrant led the way out of the back entrance. With a hand up and a heave, they both easily cleared the wooden fence that surrounded the little porch. Both of them instinctively shrank into the shadows of the alleyway behind the great, granite building.

  “Damned useless day,” Torrant growled, with feeling. Aylan could faintly see the glimmer of white fur at Torrant’s face and neck and tufts appearing at his hands. “What are they gathering for, do you know?”

  Aylan grunted a negative and tied the kerchief around his face. His bright hair was tucked up into his dark, brimmed hat already. He had no idea why so much force had spilled onto the streets of Dueance this night, but he was prepared to do something about it. Torrant and Aylan had made forays into the city for the year before this, and none of them ended peacefully. Aylan recently discovered, in the personal way of palms sliding on scarred skin, the cost his friend had paid for their moments of covert peacekeeping, and the thought of the flesh Torrant was willing to give in order to ensure that Rath’s men spilled as little civilian blood as possible was horrifying.

  The good news was that after their previous practice, tonight they moved as a team, sticking to the shadows and placing their booted feet soundlessly. They even had a rhythm: Torrant went first, because his snowcat eyes were better in the dark, and his sense of smell, even in a partially changed form, could pick up the odor of sweat-stewed chain mail at least fifty strides before Aylan could hear it clink.

  And Torrant’s improved hearing wasn’t bad either.

  Torrant stopped suddenly, shrinking back farther into the shadows, and Aylan followed his body language without question, straining his ears to hear what his friend could smell.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Torrant held up his hands, showing ten fingers, and then closed his fists and opened one hand again. Aylan’s eyes widened. Fifteen? he mouthed, and Torrant nodded. A hand went up to play with an elongating, tufting ear, and Aylan saw Torrant’s fingers move to the notch at the end. It was not a habit Torrant had when fully human, but when he was thinking like a predator, his fingers automatically moved to where he was first marked as one. Aylan had only noticed it when they’d gone hunting in the city.

  Torrant abruptly held up one finger—wait a minute—and just as abruptly ceased to be human. In a fluid, silent leap, the snowcat was up on the roof of the little gatehouse they were hiding behind, and only Aylan could hear his spit of dissatisfaction at the view. There was another leap, as Torrant moved to a windowsill, and then another as he moved up a level on the building. They had not moved far from the regents’ apartments, which in turn were nearly adjacent to the guards’ barracks. The guards’ barracks opened out straight into the Goddess ghetto, but this building was still a part of the consort-favored part of town. In fact, it looked like a bureaucratic office of some sort. Aha! This is where all the people actually work in the Regents’ Hall.

  Whatever it was, it was blessedly vacant as the giant snowcat worked its way up to the top and then prowled up there from corner to corner, licking anxious whiskers as he padded. The way down was just as fluid as the way up, and when he poured into a morphing form of skin and muscle next to Aylan, he was speaking almost before his vocal cords were fully human.

  “There’s over a hundred of them headed for the ghetto,” Torrant growled, “and fifteen of them coming our way.” Aylan sucked wind through his teeth, and Torrant went on, “Some of them have cans of paint, and most of them have shackles. All of them are armed….”

  “Cans of paint,” Aylan repeated blankly. Then: “Vandalism.”

  “Make the Goddess folk look like criminals, make the people happy to keep them confined,” Torrant finished on a subgrowl. Roughly, he rammed his head backward against the side of the building, hard enough to see stars. “This is because of me!”

  “Think much of yourself?” Aylan asked, but he felt a chill. It was too much of a coincidence, wasn’t it? Ellyot Moon makes his grand appearance at council that evening and by the height of the three moons there are a hundred guardsmen hurrying to harass a sixteen-block square of city that most folks tried to ignore.

  “We need to stop them,” Torrant said, stating the obvious, and then added the catch. “And we can’t kill them.”

  Aylan made a definite sound of outrage that he squelched at his friend’s terrible blue-eyed glare. Even he could hear the sloppy movement of armed men in a hurry. “We can’t what?” he mouthed.

  “They’re out there to prove that the Goddess folk are savages. They’re going to vandalize the quarter, they’re going to imprison some of their favorite dissenters, and they’re going to prove, once again, that the people in the ghetto aren’t really people. We can’t let them do it, but if we leave a string of bodies this time….”

  “We just prove them right.” Aylan sighed, still sotto voce. They were drawing close to their own little back-alley corner of the city. “So what do you recommend?”

  Torrant grinned, his sharp incisors protruding over his thin cat’s lips. “Watch my lead,” he growled and then leapt out in front of the oncoming squad of surprised soldiers.

  Aylan always loved watching Torrant in action. Full snowcat, full human, or anything in between, when the boy was fighting he moved with a tumbler’s grace, a gymnast’s fearlessness, and a dancer’s fluidity. Much of it was training, but the way he could (dodge, duck, feint to the right, clock the enemy in the head with the hilt of his heavy dagger) move in the field was, Aylan was often convinced, nothing shy of the Goddess’s violent poetry in his soul.

  Tonight was no exception.

  He watched as time slowed down, and Torrant kicked out sideways, taking an opponent in the chest. As the man stumbled back, Torrant lashed down, catching the man’s thigh plate and forcing it down onto an unprotected knee. The wounded soldier grabbed his dislocated knee and screamed, rolling into another man, who went down hard over him. That was when Aylan stepped forward and brought his sword hilt down on the back of the man’s head.

  And now that he was in it for real, the fight sped up.

  He and Torrant were a whirling, fluid, determined dervish of knives, solid hits, dislocated shoulders and knees, and the occasional concussion. By the time they were done, fifteen men lay groaning at their feet, and, wonder of wonders, all of them would live.

  To make sure the unconscious men wouldn’t come following, they gathered up as many manacles as they could find and set about randomly cuffing the men to each other. They threw the keys in the river on their way past as they headed for the heart of the ghetto where the rest of the city guards were. The night was far from over.

  They had the advantage of knowing where the enemy began its campaign and where the destruction had to end. The guards’ barracks opened out almost right behind the regents’ apartments, and the guards needed to fan east, through the northeast portion of the city, wherein lay the so-called Goddess folk. It was not a label that existed before Rath had come into power. Anyone gifted enough to have the telltale streak of white hair had first been “offered free quarters,” and then herded into them, and then the appellation had grown. Midwives had come next, then healers in general, then any woman who had given birth to a child without a mate. Women whose children had died within a week after they were born were added, as were the men who chose not to abandon their mates.

  Poets came next, then painters and singers whose songs were too close to the truth. Old storytellers who still told stories of the Goddess were take
n from their houses, put into the middle of Goddess square, and told not to return to their old homes. Children whose voices were too eerily sweet to be real were told not to sing or pushed into the quarters, and so on.

  When it came time for the “sexual deviants” to be thrown into the now crowded, squalid, tiny patch of cobbled-together, stucco-walled hell of disease and disenfranchisement, the solution was simple. Rath had looked at the living conditions of the people who had been unlucky enough not to escape the city as he’d tightened the noose of their damned bad luck and personal choice around their throats, and he had sentenced “those people” to death automatically.

  It was bad enough being aligned with the Whoring Moon by accident; what he considered to be choosing that path apparently made one simply evil.

  The guards percolated through the ghetto like fetid swamp gas, and Torrant and Aylan snuck up behind them, leaving gobbets of guardsmen in a manacled daze like chunks of carrion from a vulture’s mouth. It was a good system, and Aylan was feeling particularly proud of the two of them as the dawn played coy with the Old Man Hills, when a sudden shout from above rent the air.

  At first they were afraid the guards had gotten smart enough to keep a lookout from the rooftops, but then they heard the words “Fire! The school is on fire!”

  “Goddess!” Torrant swore. The children in the Goddess’s ghetto weren’t allowed to attend school, but a small, unprepossessing wooden building had been used for the last two years, along with a stash of contraband books and materials (donated by Lane Moon, of course), to give the youngsters the basics of reading, writing, poetry, and hope.

  “Would they be in there at this hour?” Aylan gasped as the two of them made ready to sprint the block east toward the school.

  The sound of jeering and a terrible scream answered the question. At least one child was in there, and the guards who had set the fire weren’t letting her out.

  Torrant’s howl of fury was no longer remotely human, and the fluid form of the snowcat sped into this new fray.

  By the time Aylan arrived at the scene, sucking in as much air as his exhausted body would allow him, the fight was nearly over. This time the three bodies crumpled on the ground in front of the tiny wooden shack would not arise again to lie about what they had been doing. Aylan watched, with his heart in his throat, as the snowcat played swipe-and-parry with what must be the last two guardsmen.

  The building had been covered in paint thinner, and it was burning with gusto and fury. Although the flames had not yet caught completely, the scream of the child trapped inside (he learned later she had spent the night there, hidden by her parents when word of the massive purge had gotten out) had grown hoarse and weak from coughing.

  Aylan took a good look at Torrant and thought his brother-in-arms could handle this lot on his own. He launched himself through the weakened wooden door, hoping to break through it. As he was going he felt a weak stab; one of the guards Torrant was battling had turned and taken a good swipe at Aylan’s back end as he went through. He thanked the Goddess for the thick cloak he’d been sweating under for the whole warm night. Outside, he heard the shrill cry of the snowcat, cranked up beyond sound, as he assumed his friend went in for the kill. Aylan’s own eyes were on the terrified child crouched in the center of a room that was now entirely alight with terrible flames.

  In a swirl of black leather he enveloped her, protecting her already-blistering skin from the heat of the flames and smoke. In three steps he bounded out of the room, trusting Torrant to have taken care of any dangers outside. The child whimpered in his arms, and he could hardly bear to look at her as Torrant partially changed form beside him. Furry hands came out to take the girl, and Aylan gave her willingly, listening as Torrant’s soothing growl told her that everything would be all right.

  There was no crowd in the almost gray of the morning. No one would have dared draw attention to their neighbors by facing the guards vandalizing the ghetto. There was nobody to hear Torrant’s broken voice as he crooned over the little girl in his arms, who was raggedly and weakly coughing blood.

  Aylan risked a look at her and swallowed his gorge. Her skin had blistered. It was, in fact, peeling from her face, hands, and from her scalp in clumps of charred hair. It had been hot in the room, but Aylan had only spent seconds—she had been there for minutes as the accelerant had taken flame, and it had been too long. Torrant’s murmuring growl continued, and Aylan realized he had been mistaken. His brother was not telling her she would be all right.

  “My brothers will be there to greet you,” he crooned, “and they will teach you to dance, and you can swim in the family swimming hole and get all the soot and ash from your clothes, right?” There was no response as her screaming breaths shuddered painfully in her chest, and he didn’t wait for any. “My mothers will be there, and they will dress you in pretty dresses, with ribbons, and Ellyot, my brother, will teach you to dance when they are done. And when you have danced until your feet are sore and you have laughed until your sides hurt, my fathers will hold you on their laps and read stories to you until you fall asleep. And you will be warm and loved and happy, forever and ever under the light of the stars.”

  The painful breaths stuttered to a halt even as he finished, and Aylan could hardly bear to look at his brother, knowing what would be etched in his face, human or inhuman, as the child died in his arms, and the tiny school of hope burned itself out between the brick buildings behind them. Into that silence sounded the thudding of bells as the clock tower by the Regents’ Hall claimed the morning hour.

  “Where are her parents?” Torrant rasped. Aylan took a good look at the charred body and made a rough guess.

  “About two blocks over. Let me take her, brother.”

  “I should….” Torrant heard the last chime of the bell and grimaced.

  “You should go prepare for a long day,” Aylan replied with a grim attempt at humor, reaching out for the unbearable burden in his arms. Torrant rewarded him with an equally grim smile but did not relinquish his hold.

  “Good hunting tonight, brother,” he commended, looking dazedly at the dead guards at his feet over the head of the dead child. “I’m sorry I forgot myself here.” A sudden shudder racked him, and he clutched the tiny body closer to him, his muscles shivering like lute strings as he attempted to get himself under control. A shutter somewhere opened, and a low growl sounded in the back of his throat, an awakening noise.

  “Here, brother,” Aylan repeated gently. “Let me take her. I’ll see to her properly.”

  The growl turned to a mewling sound, and Aylan swallowed, hard.

  “You need to go fight for us all, Torrant,” he whispered, not wanting the name to chime like a clock tower across the city. “You’ve been Triane’s Son. Now go be Ellyot Moon, yes?”

  “Yes,” Torrant murmured, finally giving his terrible precious burden over without looking at the cracked, blistered little face. “Absolutely. Dawn’s here.”

  Aylan smelled the charred flesh and hair and the burnt fabric of the little cotton dress even as he felt the dead weight, feather dry and light in his arms. He fought the urge to fall to the ground, retching and weeping. When he recovered he looked up to see that without another word, “Triane’s Son” was limping toward the nearest alley, blood from a wound on his back flank dripping down the back of his breeches.

  Something about the placement of the wound bothered Aylan immensely.

  It niggled at him, even as he slunk along the alleyways to the child’s house, although the thought left him for a moment in all the chaos and agony that followed his knock upon that door. “I’m so sorry. It caught so fast. We were too late…. I’m so sorry we were too late.” His words, weak and sad, were hardly heard as her mother and father—older folks, who’d had five children before her but loved her no less for all of that—wept soundlessly for their tiny one.

  He wanted words to tell them about Torrant’s beautiful benediction and how she had died seeing a family of strong b
rothers, kind mothers, and gentle fathers who would guide her in the light of the stars, but they had been Torrant’s words and not his, and his own words simply failed. When a neighbor knocked on the door and rushed in with familiarity and her own tears, Aylan simply kissed the still, cold, and sooty forehead, bowed, and left. He slunk along his own shadows until he found the partially destroyed building that housed his modest little room.

  Torrell, the young widower who had first employed Torrant and Aylan’s assistance in dealing with the sadistic guards and vicious priests who ravaged the trapped victims in the Goddess ghetto, had been happy to help Aylan furnish his room the day before. It had an ugly, old green couch for sleeping on, a small chest to hold food, a chamber pot (and a hole in the floor near the rubble wall that led to the alley privy ditch outside for dumping it in), and a big, tough, ugly, green-gray carpet between the bare, warped boards and Aylan’s feet. The flat was protected by the rubble wall and a pile of ruined wood on the side near the street, and it shared the outside wall of the building next door.

  He entered it through a thankfully low window from the small alley on the other side. The alley was the only way to get into the tiny courtyard behind the derelict building itself. Torrell kept a garden back there; the white streak over his brow made his green thumb a sure thing.

  Today, Aylan wanted his lumpy couch, the pile of old throws Bethen had sent with him, and a dreamless sleep. He paused in that goal to slide out of that magnificent cloak—the one he was sure had literally saved his arse—and threw it over the couch. His eyes widened when he saw the score across the back of the cloak. The score itself was closed, as though it had reknit, like flesh. Around the edges were flakes of crusted blood.

  Abruptly, that niggling little doubt exploded into his vision. The picture of Torrant limping away, sporting the wound that had been rightfully incurred by Aylan himself, blinded him. His legs gave way, and he fell into the couch, clutching his knees to his chest and holding back the urge to howl.