by Sam Sykes
I can tell you what stops a man. But I can’t tell you what keeps them going. Maybe it’s money or Gods. Maybe it’s just a cold bed where there ought to be a warm body. Maybe it is killing.
I don’t know. But I need one of those things.
Leave a man but an arm, he’ll just keep dragging.
Leave a man but a blade, he’ll just keep killing.
FIFTEEN
HIGH SOCIETY
Red is for short war.”
Lenk remembered what she had told him, all that time ago.
“We wear red when we go to kill. My father once said we wore the feathers when we used to fight rival tribes. But we mostly just attack your people now. No offense.”
“None taken.”
He could remember saying that. At the time, she had shot him a long, askew glance. He imagined, now, how odd it must have seemed to hear him dismiss a declaration of war upon his race so nonchalantly.
“Black is for long war. When one of us wears black, it’s to tell Riffid that she’s got a grudge she won’t let go of until the source is dead. Hence, if she’s wearing black, Riffid can’t take her because her business isn’t done.”
“And what’s white for?”
“White is for loss. It’s what you wear when you mourn. You don’t take it off until you’re done.”
“Done mourning?”
“Just done.”
She had remained silent for a long, lonely moment at that point. He could remember the way she had looked down at the earth.
“That’s funny,” he had said. “I would have thought the white ones were for peace.”
Her grin had been big, broad, and far too pleased.
“That’s stupid,” she had said. “Shicts don’t have a color for peace.”
In the numb sprawl of his mind, her voice was an echo of an airy dream.
Waking, sleeping, Lenk could think of nothing else. There had been no dead men in his dreams last night. That would have been redundant. From the moment he had awoken, he had been granted the experience of being one himself.
His feet moved stiffly beneath him, guiding him through streets whose names he didn’t bother to look at filled with people with no faces. They were all too soft and unscarred to be distinct, all of them free of the dead dreams and broken memories that made a person a person.
After a time, he didn’t even bother looking up. He just couldn’t see the point in it. He devoted every thought to keeping his legs moving beneath him, knowing that if he stopped walking, he would be hard-pressed to find a point to that, either.
All around him, the people with gentle eyes spoke words he didn’t know in a language he thought was his own. Words like “the price of eggs,” “I loathe my neighbor,” and “I’m not sure where I’m going to get the money for it.”
To him, these all had the same answer and it was currently resting heavily on his back in its leather scabbard. Swords and violence, he understood. But merchants and stalls and streets and neighbors and eggs and pleasantries and morning teas and salutations and vendettas that required a man to smile politely and never once think about stabbing someone…
Every time he heard those words, he felt a little farther from the sun these people walked under. Every time he felt his hand shake, he touched the hilt of his sword to steady it. And every time he did, he felt the urge to pull it out and leave this city far behind and go back to her covered in blood with a smile on his face.
Of course, then, he’d have to throw away everything he’d lost her for.
And how terrible that would be, he thought as he moved along the streets. To throw away this glorious life of being a penniless, numb degenerate. The weight of his sword felt heavier, bent his back. Killing was what you were good at. These people aren’t yours. They have families, coin, things that you left behind when you picked up that sword.
He cast a glance around. The various people milling about their daily tasks didn’t do much more than look past him as he passed by something more interesting, like a merchant’s wares or a particularly affable-looking pigeon.
He didn’t merely not belong here. He was not here. He was a dead man, walking among the living on feet that couldn’t feel and listening to words that didn’t make sense.
But you can’t go back, either, can you? What would you go back to? More corpses, more dead men in your dreams, looking at your sword like it’s your wife until the day someone’s lucky enough to stick you in the spine and you end up dying in the mud with only a long list of bodies to remember you by.
Consumed with thought, he barely even noticed the crowds thinning around him and the cobblestones turning to paved brick beneath him as the road began to arch. When his legs couldn’t think of a reason to keep walking, he stood at the center of a long bridge spanning a wide river.
Alone, but for the single thought that echoed inside an empty mind.
What’s the point of it, then?
The only answer he received was the sound of rushing water.
He peered over the edge of the expertly carved stone. Beneath him, the river yawned. It flowed a lazy, meandering path through the city, passively taking in the sights of Cier’Djaal on an unhurried trip to the harbor.
Lenk wasn’t concerned with the speed of it. Unconsciously, he took in the numbers.
The river sprawled twenty-two feet beneath him. Twenty-three, if he stood atop the walled edge of the bridge.
It was only about four feet deep; he could just see past the murky water, a few rocks jutting from the sandy bottom.
And it was flowing fast enough that any man who fell—or jumped—would be swept out to sea in a little under two hours, leaving a city full of people who’d never remember him.
For a very long moment, Lenk stared into the river.
He closed his eyes. He sighed deeply.
We’ll call that “plan C.”
He had backed away only three steps when he bumped into something. Something big and soft, judging by the feel of it, and likely something he didn’t want to irritate.
“Sorry,” he muttered, turning around. “Sorry about…”
His apology trailed off into a bewildered curse. His eyes widened to unblinking circles. His jaw hung open with primitive awe. And, staring back at him, were eight faces aping his slack-jawed horror reflected in obsidian orbs.
If he knew how stupid he looked, he didn’t care.
Nor, either, did the horse-sized spider standing before him.
Its knobby, chitinous head canted at him. Its mandibles clacked softly, making a chirruping sound that would have sounded like a question had he been just a tinge more unhinged at that moment. At his astonished silence, it hissed a wordless demand for an answer.
The spider was trying to talk to him.
That, he figured—as any sane man might have—was reason enough to turn around and run screaming like a child.
Something hard struck against the base of his skull.
Light exploded across his eyes. He felt the embrace of stone as it rose up to meet him eagerly. Breath leaving him, darkness closing in around him, the last thing he saw was eight reflections of himself, sixteen eyes closing all at once.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” she had begun.
She had let that thought hang, as he had hung from his fingers at the edge of the cliff. She had peered over her legs, dangling over the edge, down at him as he had struggled to find another foothold to haul himself up as she had.
And he had hung there, as her thought had hung, glaring up at her.
“Yes?” he had asked.
“You said your family’s dead,” she had said, “and that explains why you’re not with them. But it doesn’t explain why you’re out here, doing…” She had glanced at his fingertips, embedded in the soft earth of the cliff, desperately trying to hold on. “This.”
“Because you won’t help me up,” he had replied.
“And that’s my point,” she had continued, pointedly ignoring the accusatory tone
. “Why here? Why with a shict? Why not with other humans?”
“I guess I’d never thought about it too hard,” he had said through strained grunts as he reached for a nearby rock. “To me, it never seemed too difficult a choice.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. Shicts don’t get along with humans, you know. You’re a disease.”
“Me, personally?”
“Well, by association. Point being, shouldn’t you be with your own kind?”
“Should I be?”
“Well, why aren’t you?”
“Because the world has no shortage of people who want to kill me.” He had grunted, trying to pull himself up enough to seize the rock. “Or at least, wouldn’t care if I were dead. And by that standard, one race seems as good as any other.”
“So”—she had let that thought hang a little longer—“why me?”
And he hadn’t had an answer for her. He had grunted, strained, reached for the stone. He had wrapped fingers about it. She had looked at it and shaken her head.
“That rock’s not going to hold.”
“It will.”
“The soil’s too soft.”
“It’s hard enough.”
“You’re not going to—”
He hadn’t heard her over the sound of his own cry of surprise as he toppled backward and landed hard on his back. He had stared up at her as she had peered down at him and smiled.
“You make a lot of bad decisions, huh?”
The last traces of her voice vanished from his head. The last cloud of darkness fled his vision. His eyelids fluttered open to take in a face he knew well.
Not the bearded Djaalic scowling down at him: Lenk had never seen this man before in his life. But he knew the twisted-frown, furrow-browed expression of anger that bore down on him like a lead weight.
Intimately.
“Nobody,” the Djaalic said sternly, shaking a shepherd’s crook at Lenk, “but the shepherds may touch the fasha’s spinners. Not peasants. Not oids. And certainly not northerners.”
Lenk craned his neck up and looked down along his body and past his feet. The horse-sized spider seemed to be fascinated at its reflection in the running water below, apparently not a thought for the injury it had just caused him.
“You know what it’s punishable by?” The Djaalic seized his attention, thrusting his crook back in Lenk’s face. He wore the garb of a servant, a fasha’s sigil embroidered on his vest. “Do you?”
“I’m guessing death?” Lenk replied.
No other punishment seemed worth quite this much fuss.
“That’s right, death,” the Djaalic said, sneering. “If I got one of the fasha’s people out here right now, we’d cool our dinner with the breeze made by your corpse swinging from the gallows.”
“He’s not from around here. He couldn’t have known.”
The face that appeared over the Djaalic’s shoulder Lenk knew as well. The man it belonged to, though, he knew only slightly better. He remembered that neatly trimmed goatee, those bright, curious eyes, that haughty, ever-present smile of the man from the harbor.
The man in white.
“There’s no excuse,” the Djaalic muttered, not looking over his shoulder. “This spider, it is my charge. I have raised it well. With the Khovura, the footwar… the fashas would have my—”
“There aren’t any fashas here,” the man in white whispered into the Djaalic’s ear. “No one will ever know.”
“I’m supposed to…” A faint sheen of sweat appeared on the Djaalic’s brow. Traces of belabored breath crept into his words. “The fashas said I…”
“You did all you were required to. Be at ease.”
The Djaalic stiffened up suddenly. He clutched his crook tightly and mopped his brow. He opened his mouth as if to say something more to Lenk, but nothing came out of it but a few smacks of lips suddenly dry. He turned to the spider and, with a couple of gentle prods, guided it across the bridge.
The man in white stood beside Lenk, hands folded politely behind his back as he watched the shepherd and his many-legged charge skitter off down the road.
“Had he paused for but a moment, he might have noticed the sword on your back,” the man in white mused. “At which point, he might have realized he was about to throw his life away on behalf of a fasha who likely doesn’t even know his name. He probably would have just left his spinner here and fled back to his family.” He clicked his tongue. “The spinner, meanwhile, would have taken off into the city, been stolen by thieves or a rival, and the fasha would have torn the place apart in a bid to get it and its precious silk back.”
He turned to look at Lenk and smiled.
“Had that man paused to think about what he was doing for even an instant, this city would have been in flames by nightfall.” His grin broadened ever so slightly. “Wouldn’t that be interesting?”
“Yeah. Right up until I burned alive,” Lenk muttered. He held out his hand to the man in white, who stared at it curiously for a moment. After a long, awkward moment, Lenk sneered. “Thanks.”
The young man hauled himself to his feet and dusted himself off. Surprisingly little sand came from his clothes, though. He hadn’t noticed until now just how clean the streets were.
“Well, I just saved your life.” The man in white paused, a thoughtful look on his face. “Or at the very least, saved you from a slight inconvenience. You can’t very well go asking a slight inconvenience of me. You’d owe me two debts, then.”
“Khetashe forbid,” Lenk said.
“Three, in fact, if I point out that you dropped something.”
The man gestured to a white feather upon the street. In hindsight, Lenk realized that the speed and vigor with which he leapt upon it were a bit odd. But at that moment, he could think of neither his dignity nor his company.
There was something about the way the man in white raised his brows at that reaction. There was something that peered too deeply, saw too much. There was something that made Lenk uneasy.
“Has she been gone long?”
And that was it.
“How the hell would you know anything about that?” Lenk didn’t bother to hide the ire in his voice, nor the movement of his hand as it slid to his sword.
“You leapt upon that feather as a starving man leaps upon a dead rat,” the man in white replied smoothly. “Hence, I deduced you either had a lost lover, a dead relative, or a very special avian friend.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a ‘her’ involved.”
“True.” The man in white looked thoughtful. “Has he been gone long, then?”
“That’s not—” Lenk flailed briefly, as though the man’s words were gnats to be swatted away. “Just… stay out of my head. I don’t need anyone reading my thoughts right now.”
“Are you so unused to observation that you instantly assume mind-reading?”
“I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. It usually saves time to assume the weirdest.” He furrowed his brow at the man in white. “I’ve got this weird, annoying pain in the back of my neck when I look at you, but I don’t think I’ve found a name for it yet.”
“If it will lend enough significance to your suffering, perhaps my name would do?” He tucked one hand behind his back and made a long, sweeping bow with the other. “My friends call me Mocca.”
“All right,” Lenk replied. “Unless I think of something more accurate, I’ll use that.” He cleared his throat. “So, thanks, Mocca. I’ll see you around, maybe.”
He had taken only a few steps when Mocca called after him.
“Do you always walk away from someone of potential use to you? Too proud to accept help when you need it?”
“Exactly what is it you hope to help me with?” Lenk didn’t bother slowing down.
“You’re in unfamiliar territory, my friend. What manner of man ventures into the unknown without a guide?” An edge of bemusement crept into Mocca’s voice. “Or hadn’t you noticed where you are?”
He ha
dn’t.
Even when he looked up, he wasn’t quite sure where he was. The squat stalls and cobblestones that had begun to grow somewhat familiar were replaced with towering buildings and smooth roads. The boiling oppression of the Souk was gone, replaced by a lofty, arrogant openness.
There were great houses of smooth stone here with glistening lawns and green gardens. There were stables for horses and hills that hadn’t been flattened to make roads. The gentry who walked the streets were dressed in clothes finer than all the wares he had seen for sale in Souk. Certainly, they were much finer than the retinue of servants trailing them. Even a few giant spiders could be seen ambling leisurely up and down the streets, tended to by small clusters of servants of their own.
Everywhere there was the scent of people too wealthy to act as if money mattered with only the vast encircling walls and gates and the roaming gangs of guardsmen wearing house colors to contradict that notion.
“Silktown. Where even arachnids live better than most.”
Suddenly, Mocca was right beside him, matching the area’s austere arrogance with a reserved smile.
“But why wouldn’t they? They do make the silk, after all. You’ve shown up to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest city in the world.” He cast a sidelong glance at the young man. “I trust you came here for a reason?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“And you only brought a sword,” Mocca chuckled. “This is civilization, my friend. They use different weapons to get what they want here.”
“And you’ve got them?”
Mocca’s smile took on a nostalgic quality, something that would be whimsical on a man with less dignity.
“All I’ve ever known is these people,” he said softly. “Reason enough to trust me, I should hope.”
“Maybe. If I know what you get out of it.”
