The Hidden City

by Michelle West

  And Finch said, in a quiet voice, a steel voice, “Some can’t run.”

  Rath nodded, as if he expected no less. He took one more look at them, and then he made his way to the door.

  “Don’t talk,” he told Jewel. “Tell the others: don’t speak. What they’re doing isn’t legal. What we’re doing isn’t either.”

  “But we’re doing the—”

  “Right thing?” He grimaced. But he said nothing else until they had filed out of the apartment, past him; until he’d locked the door at their backs. “Maybe,” he told her softly. Just that.

  Day felt like night, as they walked.

  People did not quite crowd the streets; it was a little too early for that. But buckets borne across bent shoulder and straight back alike were beginning to make themselves seen, and the sun’s light, faded, pearl and gray, colored clouds moved by wind. This was dawn, in the rainy season. The clarity of the day had passed, and the morning was cold.

  Cold against cheek and exposed hand, exposed throat. Cold in other ways. Jewel looked at Rath’s back as he led them; he walked more slowly than was his wont, but did so with a grace that belied impatience.

  She trusted him, and in ways that she had never thought to trust her father, when she had lived with him in the quiet and illusionary safety of their home. She could never have asked him for this. When her Oma had lived, she might have asked for a story that contained it, no more; she might have imagined, in the dark, humid confines of an evening bed, those ancient arms around her, that she could live in those stories, and be of them.

  But that was dream, and the waking was harder than she could have imagined. In dream, she was a great leader, an intrepid explorer, a woman revered for her heroism by the faceless, adoring masses. In dream, she could save not only lives, but baronies and kingdoms; she could sit by the right hand of the Kings themselves, or even between them; she could rove across the windswept sands of desert that glittered like golden death for as far as the eye could see.

  That was her Oma’s gift to her: the ability to dream. And yet . . . without it, she would not be here. She would not think of being here.

  Here was a place of death, or the fear of death. Here, Rath ahead of her in dark clothing, the finery of jacket set aside in favor of the absolute length of blade, she could imagine losing him, in ways that she had not—until the end—imagined losing her father.

  She had asked for this.

  Not in so many words. Never that. If she were entirely honest, she could say that he had decided it, and she merely followed.

  But if she hadn’t learned how to lie to Rath’s satisfaction, it was because she was simply no good at lying: she knew he would not be in this street, on this chill morning, without her. Carver walked by her side, to the left; to the right walked Finch. She wore clothing very much like Jewel’s—it would have to be, coming from Helen, as almost all clothing did—but she didn’t look at Rath’s back as she walked; she looked at her feet. At the weeds that passed beneath them. At the shift in the road as Rath turned a corner. There were no real shadows cast, not in this light—but had there been, Jewel was certain she would have looked at those as well.

  Rath paused. “Jay?”

  She whispered Finch’s name. Finch hesitated a moment, and then nodded. “I think this is the right way.”

  Rath’s nod was both the same dip of chin and entirely different. There was a curt certainty to the motion that spoke of purpose, not fear.

  Jewel wanted to be Rath, for a moment. To be older, to be that certain. She was his shadow, instead, and it galled her. But not so much that she was made stupid by envy or inadequacy. She couldn’t afford to be. He’d made that clear.

  So much else was unclear.

  Her father would have died before he’d parted with her. Her Oma would have killed him, had he tried to sell her; to bargain for her as if she were a thing, and not his blood, his kin. They would have starved, all three, and almost had, time and again—but they had done it together.

  Finch . . .

  She seemed so quiet, so fragile. Jewel had seen old women who seemed the same—but the fact that they were old, in these streets, said something; spoke to some part of her that understood how strength was measured. Was Finch that strong?

  She certainly didn’t seem it, to Jewel. Her steps were shaky and small; she moved so slowly, Jewel wanted to tell Arann to pick her up and carry her. Maybe another time. Maybe never. Because Finch was walking, and maybe that’s all that Jewel could ask of her.

  Carver’s hand was on his knife. He was taller than Jewel, and he looked older—but his eyes were dark and a little too round. He knew—probably better than Jewel herself—what they might face. And he had no reason to want to face it. He was an accident. Something that her curious vision hadn’t granted her.

  But she knew he wouldn’t run. Not here, not yet. Maybe not ever. She wanted to ask him why. Or why not. But she didn’t.

  Nor did she ask Arann, but it didn’t occur to her to ask Arann; he was almost as tall as Rath, and he was so utterly solid as he walked, Lefty to his left, the open street to his right. He watched Rath, but not the way Jewel herself did; his gaze often slid to the people that were beginning to fill the street, to make their walk less solitary.

  She almost tripped over Rath because she was looking at Arann. Rath’s pinched expression was all the admonition he allowed himself, but she felt it keenly.

  “Be on your guard now,” he told her, as she righted herself.

  She started to ask him why. Stopped. The answer was there, in the streets, creating as it walked—as they walked—a widening circle of silence and flight.

  Armor didn’t gleam in this kind of light, and besides, it wasn’t that kind of armor; it was pitted and dented and tarnished; hung in rings that could be seen through the gap of overcoats and over the thick, undyed padding beneath it. There were flat plates across the chest of one man, a man who wore an eye patch across a scarred face. His hair was the color of sand on the white beaches at summer’s height, and his skin was sea skin.

  He was the leader, she thought.

  She put out an arm; Carver walked into it, and stopped moving. Finch had stopped a few steps back, and Arann now towered over her, without a word, Lefty also cringing by his side.

  “Gentlemen,” Rath said, and Jewel privately thought a Weston word had never been so misused. “Well met.”

  The pale-haired man with the odd beard and a single eye spit to one side. “I’ve seven,” he said grimly.

  “And the eighth?”

  “He’ll recover.”

  Rath shrugged. It wasn’t friendly; Jewel guessed he knew who the eighth man was, and didn’t much care whether he recovered or not.

  “Who are these?” The stranger said, almost snorting. Like a bull. Or a stir-crazy horse.

  “They know the holding,” was Rath’s evasive reply. “And they may prove of some use.” He paused, and when the man’s face failed to shift into something like acceptance, added, “They’re mine.”

  The man’s shrug was almost the same as Rath’s had been.

  These are the people we’re supposed to hide behind if we need protection? She almost said it. Had to bite her lip to stop the words from tumbling out, one over the other in a heated rush.

  But she put a hand on Finch’s shoulder, and Finch stilled. No one spoke.

  “Well, they’re quiet enough.”

  Rath said nothing. He might have been one of these towering, ugly strangers. Except for the dirt and the obvious scars.

  “Finch,” Jewel whispered.

  Slowly, Finch began to walk.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ARMOR MADE NOISE. The wrong kind.

  Jewel had to speak loudly in order to be heard, and as she was speaking to Finch, she had the tendency to lower her voice, not raise it. She wanted to tell the men to either go away or stop moving for a minute, but when she turned, Rath’s sharp look made her teeth snap shut.

  Finch, however pal
e she was, nodded. To Jewel. And to Rath. Rath listened to her quiet voice, reading her lips and their motion; there was no way the sound could carry to where he stood. But what he gleaned was enough; he turned to speak curtly with the man who wore the eye patch, and the man in turn barked at the others.

  If they were supposed to be approaching quietly or without notice, it was an utter failure; the streets were now empty for as far back as Jewel could see—which, given the bodies of armored men, each taller than she was, wasn’t perhaps as far as usual—and as they rounded a corner, it cleared in front. Sort of like the movement of a gigantic broom.

  She hated to cause that fear in children, because she knew it so well herself. Her gaze grazed Lefty, but Lefty was almost Arann’s shadow; she couldn’t see his face, and his hands were still shoved in pockets. By no means did all of Helen’s tunics have them; Helen must have noticed the way Lefty tried to hide his right hand.

  Carver seemed a little less lost than she was, as if he knew the neighborhood. Given the expression on his face—or the utter lack of one—Jewel guessed that whatever he knew wasn’t worth sharing. She’d told him his life before Taverson’s didn’t matter, and inasmuch as she could, she’d told the truth. But she was curious. Rath said it was both her strength and her weakness, and he hoped she lived long enough to be able to tell exactly when it was one or the other.

  She had seen Rath draw his sword once. She had seen him fight twice. She was aware, as they walked, that she really didn’t want to see a third time. The stories of old—her Oma’s grand stories of life in a sea of sand—had somehow failed to mention the brutality and the swiftness of death. The glory of causing it, yes, because that was Right. Funny, how wrong Right felt when she could actually see it.

  Her dagger hadn’t managed to cut skin. She’d tried.

  And she wondered how she would feel if somehow she’d succeeded; if it would haunt her. Wondered if today was the day she’d have her answer, and regret her question.

  The streets widened out as they followed Finch’s directions—directions that were becoming quieter and more hesitant with each step she took. She was reduced, in the end, to pointing, and her mute nod, her mute shake of the head, should have caused pity.

  In Jewel, it caused the beginning of something like anger—except that it grew, and grew, and grew. Someone else had brought Finch along these streets. Someone else had given her to the men from whom she’d barely escaped.

  Jewel reached out and caught Finch by the hand. Finch’s hands were shaking—it was cold and damp—almost as much as Jewel’s. But not, Jewel thought, for the same reason.

  The buildings they passed grew wider, although they were still tall. Fences began to line the street, but they were a legacy of older times; they were broken in places, and rusted in others, and whole sections leaned in toward the ground. Although the streets were wide, they could barely be called streets in places; there had been stone laid here, once upon a time—but it had cracked, and whole patches of weeds, which had summered and grown, stood waist-high where carriage and wagon wheels had failed to crush them. Rainfall made patches of mud, where stones had been pulled up or removed entirely, and in those patches, deeper puddles had been formed by the fall of heavy feet.

  This much she expected, although she skirted the edges, mindful of the fact that she now held onto Finch.

  The buildings began to flatten, sometimes literally, but more often figuratively; the fences in one or two areas were, if not new, then at least kept up. Not that the grounds—such as they were—beyond those fences were cared for in the same way; there, with no wagons and no running children to squash them down, they looked like a wild harvest, some city version of farmer’s fields gone bad.

  Still, there were trees that had grown up on either side of the road, and no one had yet been enterprising enough to cut them down for Winter wood. She wondered at that; they wouldn’t have survived for long in the holding where Jewel had spent almost all of her life. They were not so tall or grand as the trees that marked the Common, but then again, no trees were—and no one with half a wit about them tried to take an ax to those trees.

  She looked at Rath.

  Rath looked at Finch, and Finch swallowed.

  He lifted a hand, and the movement rippled backward, as the men who followed came to a slow halt, fanning out in the street. Across from the fence that was in passable repair were houses tightly packed together; small houses, with narrow fronts and even narrower stairs.

  They seemed almost fine, to Jewel, but not compared to the large house that hid behind gates and weeds, rising above them in the distance.

  “Here?” Rath asked.

  Finch managed a nod.

  Rath looked at the man with the eye patch, who frowned a moment, as if he were thinking. Then he nodded.

  “Jay.”

  Jewel looked up at Rath.

  “We’re about to take out the gatekeeper, if there is one. You will stay back with your friends until we’ve entered the building. Is that understood?”

  She nodded.

  “Carver,” he continued.

  Carver’s nod was a lot stiffer. It was also really minimal.

  “We cannot be entirely certain that all of the men we’re looking for are in that building. They may well reside in the smaller residences across the street.”

  Carver nodded again. Slow nod, and measured.

  “You’ve said you know how to use that dagger. I trust you meant it. If you need to use it, you’ll know. Watch that row,” he added. “If more than one man comes out, it is not the right time.” He turned to Arann, met his gaze, and then offered him a nod.

  “Jay.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  “Good.”

  The man with the eye patch lifted an arm; it was a signal. Without another word, Rath and his friends drifted down the street, following the line of the fence until it came to a gate. If the gate was locked, it didn’t seem to matter; they opened it somehow and then charged out of the street.

  There should have been yells, or horns, or something; there was only the sound of armor and heavy feet. Even breath didn’t make much sound, although she could see it rise like a thin, thin mist, in their wake.

  “Where did you find him?” Carver asked her, after they had gone.

  She shrugged. “In the streets. On the way to the Common.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone near him.”

  “I was hungry.”

  “Begging?”

  She snorted. “What do you think?”

  He laughed. But she saw that his eyes were on the thin houses that stood too close to the street; that they flickered over the shuttered single windows that stood beneath their steep, peaked rooftops. “I’ve never been hungry enough to try to steal anything from someone like him.”

  She shrugged again; she wasn’t proud of what she’d done, but it didn’t shame her completely. “I knew he didn’t need the money. He wasn’t going to starve if he lost it.”

  “And that mattered?”

  “To me. Then. It probably wouldn’t have made as much of a difference in the Winter, though.”

  Lefty said, loudly enough to be heard, “Liar.”

  She glared at him.

  And then, before she could speak, she heard what she’d been waiting for. What she hadn’t known she’d been waiting for.

  The loud cries of men. They all froze then, their words lost a moment to fear.

  To Rath’s surprise, there had been no guard at the gate. Perhaps the early hour worked to their advantage, in this; the clientele that were attracted to a building such as this were no doubt men who traveled at night, and by magelight; they were not poor men.

  The building was not new, and it was not well maintained, except in the loosest sense of the word. It was, clearly, occupied. At one point, perhaps two centuries ago, it had been a very fine building. Now, it possessed the squalor of all fallen things, grace turned on its edge, its dingy glory a reminder that all things of value
must fade.

  Not a welcome reminder. Never that.

  The doors were not as old as the building itself; nor, Rath thought, were the shutters that graced several windows that had once held glass. The walk from the gates to the steps that led up to the door was also newer, and it had been laid out in haste, or by incompetent craftsmen. The steps, however, were solid stone, and if they sloped in the middle, they were not obviously cracked or broken.

  They bore the weight of armored men, and they were wide enough that those men could fan out at different heights. They wanted to be as close to the building as possible; some of the windows weren’t barred, and the most obvious defense—the crossbow—was probably lying beside some sleeping thug’s bed. None of Harald’s men relied on crossbows, probably because they couldn’t afford them.

  The doors were locked. Rath thought they were probably barred as well, and from the inside. He took the time to pick the lock, and tried the door to confirm his suspicion; it didn’t take long.

  “Can we break it down?” one of Harald’s men asked.

  Harald cuffed him across the side of the head. “Only if we use your thick skull as a battering ram.” He looked back at Rath. “Left or right?”

  Rath considered the two large windows—real windows—that fronted the manor. These, too, seemed newly added. He could see the drape of drawn curtains, and between these, a glimpse of something that resembled a parlor. Not even a poorly appointed one at that.

  “Left,” Rath said quietly.

  Harald shrugged.

  The windows themselves were not level with the ground; they were level with the height of the stairs, whose gentle slope was deceptive.

  “Sorn!”

  A long-haired man—braided hair, no fool—stepped up; he was carrying a club. A large club. Harald knelt, cupping his hands together. “Darren.”

  Another man, with drawn sword; he sheathed his weapon with a grimace. Rath knelt, facing Harald, his hands also cupped. He grunted at the weight he was forced to bear; he’d gotten used to Jewel and she was probably a quarter the size.