by R J Theodore
The gears of time were grinding on that salvage run. Heddard Bay was close to the border where Rakkar and Cutter territories met, and the Imperial decree was that all salvage in Cutter skies belonged to the Empire. No freelance. No prospecting. If Eneil didn’t find someone to run the contract for them, flotsam’s dextral spin would carry the Yu’Nyun starships back beneath Imperial skies, and they’d lose the chance at a legal salvage for another year.
Eneil was going to have a tough time finding anyone else at Heddard Bay with the experience to make the descent for their client. And Talis would have to keep busy at work that day to avoid second-guessing her crew’s decision while Im Ufite Rantor was still at dock.
It was still early, so Talis strolled along the beach to the edge of the harbor where a stone arch led around to the windward side. She wouldn’t have expected to feel so light after passing on the contract. That dark little voice still whispered what if at her, but she was able to ignore all its arguments about her fortitude and their situation, listening instead to the recollection of her crew voicing their support.
When she reached the arch, she checked the position of the sun and decided to head back to the harbor master’s office.
Nisa gave Talis a perplexed frown as she dropped off her sweater, clocked in, and refilled her clipboard from a stack of blank forms, and Talis realized she was humming one of the old chanteys that linesmen use to set their work pace. She didn’t know the title of it, but the words were familiar as sailing with the wind. She grinned and switched to singing the lyrics. The playful verse belied the morbid tale about marrying a mermaid—only she altered the words to call them zalika in her version. Nisa shook her head, bemused, and returned her attention to setting the ivory-keyed tabulator for a new day of entries. The other clerks sniffed in disapproval as Talis noisily exited the office.
The wind was refreshing on Talis’s bare arms, and for once its caress didn’t feel like a reminder of her old life. All day, she kept busy and went nowhere near Eneil’s private dock. She managed to put the contract from her thoughts and lose herself in the simple labor, which felt more worthwhile to Talis than all the contracts she’d ever run while she still had a ship.
She rolled her eyes when she caught herself thinking it. Five hells, woman, careful not to enjoy a hard day’s work too much. That’s no way to return to a smuggler’s life.
Such thoughts were a byproduct of the euphoria she felt, doing right by her crew. The danger was real, but there was no genuine temptation to settle down and actually behave for a living.
Before long, the sun had moved past its high point, swinging out from behind Nexus again. She’d missed her shift break. The broth provided in the office, though a bit on the thin side to avoid being over-generous, was usually the fuel that got her through her day. But she’d been too busy to keep track of the sun, and the docks were the only place she couldn’t feel the deep-earth ticking of the Lippen municipal timepiece.
She drove the dock’s tri-wheeled cargo shifter, loaded with crates of tanned leather and coils of dried sinew, up to the pickup containers near the city’s gates. After securing them for their new owner, she turned toward the office, intent on seeing if any broth remained. But a familiar shape was silhouetted against the sky as it descended to the dinghy dock. She altered her course, abandoning her work—she was owed that break, anyway—to cross the yard.
Onaya never missed an opportunity to spoil her mood, but as Talis strolled toward the far end of the beach, she felt certain the ex-goddess would have to put some real effort into it this time.
“You didn’t quit your dock job.” The four eyes in her chest blinked slowly in two pairs.
Talis sat cross legged, leaning her back against the dock pole opposite Onaya. “We’re not making the salvage run.”
Onaya lifted her wings partially and ruffled her feathers as if a stiff wind had blown them out of place. “Is that wise?”
“Short term? Maybe not.” Talis could admit it without losing her good humor. “But something was off about it. We’ll stick to the plan we had.”
“And what plan is that?”
Talis felt the rough texture of aged wood grain beneath her hands and the solid support of the pole along her spine. A gust picked up, tickling her face with tendrils of her hair. She tucked it behind her ear with a habitual, unconscious motion. “It doesn’t involve you. I promise, no need to worry about us.”
“Perhaps you ought to have spent more time in your deliberation. Im Ufite Rantor is still in port. If you approach them in deference, they may choose to honor the offer you foolishly declined.”
Talis shifted her weight on her hip bones but suppressed the urge to stand up and walk away. “Look. Yes, of course, we want to run salvage on Wind Sabre. Yes, we want our fortunes to change. But at the cost of being manipulated? Of delivering Yu’Nyun tech into unknown hands? Of dealing with someone who knows too much about us, and what we carried in our hull?”
Smoothing a feather with her beak, Onaya seemed to dismiss their concerns. “You have sold out this world for less.”
Talis scoffed. It was a clumsy stab at her conscience. “Yes, I did. And learned my lesson about ignoring our instincts in favor of chasing profit.”
Onaya coughed, a racking raven’s vibrato. “You will work for me, in the end. There will come a day when you have no choice but to come begging at my altar, and I will not be so generous, then.”
With that, she beat her enormous wings, flashing purple, blue, and green, and took to the skies. The darkness swallowed her silhouette in moments.
Talis knew well enough what Onaya wanted: a simula so she’d have a body and the remaining rings so she could get her powers back and seek bloody vengeance against Meran. If Onaya Bone helped anyone else in this pursuit, it would be pure coincidence.
Rising to her feet, Talis spared a wry laugh for the uselessness of the gods, and sauntered back to work, singing the pumping chantey Crabs in the Bilge Pipe.
That day’s work ended on a rotation that coincided with Dug’s shift end, so rather than head straight back to their room, she decided to meet him and Tisker at the exit to the mining district and walk back with them. There wasn’t anything in particular she wanted to discuss—Dug didn’t need to know what a pill his creator was being—Talis just wanted to spend more time with her friends. They had been rushing to get nowhere ever since they’d arrived in Lippen. She missed the quiet evenings they used to share, just trading thoughts over glasses of strong rum or Dug’s home-brew. Seated atop the weather watch, back-to-back, letting the wind tangle their hair together and the stars crawl by.
Their old calluses had sloughed away. It was time to earn them again. It was time to get back to their lives.
She took a deep, mind-clearing breath and leaned against the archway, out from underfoot of the miners exiting the tunnel for the day. The whole crowd of them was coated in the same dust she’d grown accustomed to seeing on Dug each evening.
Whistling low and reedy—a medley of several forecastle songs whose individual threads had tangled a bit in her memory—she watched the gray faces, looking for her best friend.
There. She spotted Dug moving toward her, faster than the crowd, his pace urgent, as though he were late. Or being pursued. Her relaxation was forgotten. She stepped away from the wall, moving against the crowd to meet him. He mouthed her name when she caught his eye, before another Bone man stepped in front of him. Talis couldn’t see either of them clearly for a confused moment, obscured by the crowd, though she lifted herself on her toes.
Dug’s eyes were wide, his posture stiff. Their gazes locked again, and she glimpsed his terror. A terror she had never seen on him before. Not once in a thousand fights and brawls where they’d fought side by side and laughed through their pain. His back arched. As the stranger moved away again, Dug fell, falling backward to disappear beneath the crowd.
�
��Dug!” Talis pushed through the throng, earning insults from those she shoved aside. A few pushed back. She didn’t care. She stayed targeted on the place where she saw Dug fall.
A ring of miners, Bone and Breaker, had stopped around him. Talis squeezed through the shoulders that made up the perimeter. One look at her face, and those gathered stepped back to let her through.
On the tunnel floor, Dug’s blood—far too much of it—pooled around him, lapping at the sides of a plain-handled knife with a strange, notched blade where it lay on the ground at his side.
“No, no no, Dug.” She slid into the blood to reach him. Felt it soak, still warm, into the knees of her trousers. His eyes were squeezed shut, he was breathing, though his muscles were contracted with pain and his teeth clenched. One hand was holding the wound in his abdomen and blood seeped between his fingers.
Too late, she searched the crowd for whoever had done this, concocting a list of deaths that would be too good for them.
“Dug, I’m here. Who was it? Point him out, can you?”
He tried to open his eyes wide, to take in the crowd around them, but his gaze was unfocused. He brought up his arm weakly in the direction the stranger had fled, which she already knew. She cursed herself for not following him.
But how could she have, with Dug laying in a pool of blood on the floor?
His limbs relaxed, and his eyes rolled back under drooping eyelids. He’d passed out. The wound in his side flowed blood. The room rushed with sound: footsteps, running, concerned mutterings from all around her, someone calling for Lippen guards, a commotion of someone moving through the crowd. It all rushed at her in the space where Dug should have been telling her he was fine, getting up, and laughing it off.
“Cap!” Tisker appeared at her side and then seemed to freeze in place at the sight.
His gaze fixed on the strange knife. The blood it rested in. The blood on its blade. Talis could imagine what he was thinking. She’d been through brawls and battles with Dug, and she’d never seen him bleed this much.
She tried to feel the edges of the wound, get an idea of at what angle the knife had gone in, to know what had been punctured. Dug groaned in pain, and his eyelids fluttered.
“Sorry, Dug. Sorry.” She got blood on her prayerlocks as she habitually tugged them in thanks. It seemed the knife hadn’t hit anything besides flesh.
She turned back to Tisker. “Your shirt. Take it off. It’s cleaner than mine.”
“This is my work shirt.” Then he flinched at the useless statement even as the words still rang in the air. Two years of being more than careful with the starched white shirt. Hardly mattered now. Buttons popped off and hit the floor in a spray of tortoiseshell as he tore the front open, wrestled out of it, and handed it over.
Talis ripped a strip off, her hands painting the cotton red. “I’ll owe them for it.”
She made a clutch of smaller pieces and stuffed them into the wound. She packed it until Dug groaned again in pain, then packed even more until his eyes opened fully, and he attempted to push her away.
“Hey there, welcome back.” She knew she was hurting him, but they had to get him out of that tunnel, and it would be five hells easier if he could try to walk.
Then she tore a final long strip with what remained of the shirt, and Tisker lifted Dug by the shoulders so she could bind it in place around his abdomen.
Her forearms were slick with blood. Her pulse thrummed with anger. Dug had warned them about the new Bone man in the mines. They should have taken care of it.
“Tisker, help me get him up.”
An enormous hand touched her bare shoulder, so gently that Talis barely startled. “Allow me.”
She looked up at a Breaker stranger in simple but spotless trousers, shirt, and waistcoat. They were on the small side compared to a typical Breaker person, yet beneath the luminous, pebbled skin and behind the bright green eyes, Talis got a sense of tremendous strength. She didn’t dare assume their gender, but she could assume they hadn’t come to finish the assassin’s work.
“I can carry him to the hospital.”
A hospital would trap them. Expose them. Talis picked up the blood-covered knife. The notches in the blade were lined with the threads of metal that had shredded Dug’s skin. She turned it over, angling it in the dim tunnel light to look for a telltale of something else on the blade, then held it to her nose and sniffed. Nothing but the tang of blood.
“No hospitals.” Talis could barely say the words, so tightly was her jaw clenched. Had she breathed lately? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Dug.
“This man needs a doctor.” Their hand was still on her shoulder. Patient. The Breaker people were all so patient.
Tisker was beside her, too, one knee in the dirt and blood on the floor. “Cap, he does, though.”
“We can’t risk it, Tisker. As long as we’re here, the assassin might try again.”
As though someone had traced an icy finger down her spine, she suddenly became aware of how exposed they were. Was Dug his only target?
“Sophie.”
That was all it took to convince Tisker. He and Talis each got under one of Dug’s arms and started to lift. He groaned and cursed them both as the weight of his legs pulled on the wound.
The stranger moved toward Dug, non-threatening despite their size and strength. “Allow me to carry him for you. I have an office nearby, and an emergency kit.”
“I can—” Dug paused for a ragged breath to collect himself. “I can walk.”
Talis wanted to believe it. Needed to believe it. But new blood seeped from beneath the dressing she had done. She nodded, but not to Dug.
The Breaker stranger scooped him up in their arms, cradling him like a child carried off to bed.
A distant shrill whistle announced the constabulary was on its way. They didn’t have time to get tied up in questions.
“Tisker, get to Sophie and seal yourselves up in the room; get everything ready. We need to go.” She handed him the knife. They had no weapons in Heddard Bay. Just the blade that had been used on Dug and a few table knives.
Tisker nodded, took a step backward, still obviously shaken.
“Go. Now.”
He tucked the blade under his arm, turned, and retreated back up the tunnels.
“Madam, please, this way. My name is Catkin.”
Talis had to jog to keep up with Catkin’s long strides.
“Talis. He’s Dug—Dukkhat Kheri. Sorry for this trouble, Catkin. And for any other trouble it might bring your way.”
Catkin dismissed the apology with a small sound. “I am grateful to have the opportunity to help. In here, please.”
Their office was in the back of an unadorned room with rows of flat, bare tables. Beside each was a shoulder-height floor lamp. There was a sharp, pervasive smell of rock dust, and motes of it danced beneath the lights that Catkin turned up as they entered. The illumination was brighter than in most places in Lippen.
Talis looked around, realizing where they were. “This is the lapidary office.” Catkin worked for the mines they were going to rob, though if things had gone right, the gems they stole would never have made it here to be faceted and polished.
“Yes.” Catkin placed Dug on a table and turned the lamp on. “I need to get the kit from my office. There is a washroom if you would like to clean up.”
Dug made a face that might have been an attempt at a smile, but it was furrowed with pain. “You are a mess, Talis.”
She looked down at herself. Most of the blood soaked into her clothes was beginning to dry and harden, and the dust that mingled with it transferred to the back of her hand, sticky with blood and dirt, when she tried to brush it off. She could only imagine what her face looked like. Her eyes stung. Had she been crying? She had no idea.
Catkin was covered in as much of Dug’s bloo
d as she was. A Breaker stranger was the most trustworthy person when life and death were the stakes. They would always choose life. And they were large enough to protect it. Long-lived as the Breaker people were, though, they must have witnessed more death than even Talis in all her years of running toward trouble instead of away from it.
She bit her tongue. Dug wasn’t dead. The assassin had failed.
But she stayed by Dug as Catkin fetched their emergency kit. “You are a bit of a wreck yourself, you know.”
He reached for her hand and gripped it. Hard.
Catkin returned, and Talis fought to take her gaze off Dug to address them. “Thank you. I’ll pay for your clothes, supplies, and your time.”
They shook their head and smiled. “Not necessary, but thank you for the offer.”
Dug squeezed her hand again as Catkin worked on his side. Talis flushed the wound with the spouted wash bottle Catkin handed her so they could see what they were doing. A large, curving needle and strong sinew pulled his side back together with a row of neat, puckered stitches. They cleaned off his skin and dressed the stitches with cotton and gauze.
“He will be weak until he replaces the lost blood. I can give him something for the pain until you can see a proper physician.”
Dug shook his head before Talis could speak up. “No drugs.” He struggled to get his elbows underneath himself and ease off the table.
Holding out a steadying arm for him, Catkin nodded. “Please take care not to jar the stitches.”
It was as if they could imagine the hurried exit Talis and her crew were about to make from Heddard Bay. Talis held out a hand. “Thank you for everything. You’ve been more help than you can possibly know.”
Catkin shook her hand, the grip gentle despite their obvious strength. “I am happy to do what I am able to help. Please take care of each other, Talis.”
Talis wedged herself under Dug’s arm to help him as they left to regroup with Tisker and Sophie.
Chapter 14
