by Mike Shel
“No!” came a few shouts from the crowd.
“We want no part in bloody Willem’s schemin’,” Hurley continued. “Don’t wanna fight in his gods-cursed army! We want t’live free, like they do across the river! Our own Karne of Balowy! An’ Aelbrinth, Denshaw, an’ Paukeely! An’ the rest! Death to every bleedin’ ‘risto across Marburand and the whole bleedin’ empire!”
A roar went up from many in the crowd, though not all. Auric wished there was some way to make a quiet exit from this volatile scene. His eyes scanned the crowd, searching for his Syraeic companions. Kennah was still beside him, Chalca next to him. There was a tickle of panic, worry for Agnes and Sira, but he found both hidden by Kennah’s bulk. All of them were transfixed by the spectacle. Auric wasn’t sure if Qeelb had accompanied them from the tavern. He cursed himself for failing to drag the lot of them back as soon as he located them earlier in the square.
Constable Begwin tried to fit a hood made of sackcloth over Ahayla Upson’s head, but she jerked away from it. “No masks!” she croaked, emotion surging up in her. “We won’t hide our faces to spare you!”
“Let our faces haunt your dreams!” said Jonah Hurley.
The constable, all frown and protruding chin, stared at Hurley. The other lawman whispered something in Begwin’s ear, and he nodded, blue plume bobbing stupidly. Begwin’s colleague removed his helm, then walked over to the fateful lever. After a pause, but without ceremony, he yanked it down. The floor dropped out from under the feet of the three noosed prisoners, and they jerked and danced obscenely, eyes bulging, tongues protruding, the hideous performance lasting longer than anyone wanted. Finally, their futile struggles ceased, and there was no more movement from the bodies save for the strangely peaceful swaying, back and forth in the heavy night air.
The ominous clouds overhead chose that moment to open themselves up, and rain fell upon both the living and the dead.
24
River Eels
Jerking spasmodically at the end of knotted ropes, the three hanged revolutionaries danced with reddened faces before Agnes’s mind’s eye and prevented sleep the first night back on the river. She lay wide awake in the cool summer air, beneath her lean-to. Chalca was next to her snoring peacefully, and the sounds of the elementals propelling them up the Ironbell River were little more than watery whispers.
She thought back on that night. The downpour seemed to extinguish the fury in the crowd ignited by the condemned man’s speech, but they still made their way back to Maud’s Bounteous Table furtively, harried by her father, who played stern nursemaid to them all. She didn’t like being drunk, the loss of control, of her judgment. “What’s a ‘risto?’” she remembered asking Chalca, soaked head to toe and trotting beside her.
“Aristocrat, Agnes. For god’s sake, how can you be so thick? What else could it mean?”
She felt a fresh fool again, remembering his biting retort. A light rain pattered now on the canvas tarp overhead. The moon was waxing, a silvery fingernail behind thin midnight clouds. Lanterns hanging in the bow, at the tiller, and tiny cabin aft provided little illumination around her lean-to. She could barely make out the shore beyond the portside railing, rugged hills they had been moving past all that day. With its Ralsea cargo offloaded in Balowy, the elementals drove the barge up the Ironbell at a speed that matched her own sense of urgency to reach their destination. Of course, no speed was sufficient to match the water witches’ desire to be rid of their passengers.
“Are you awake, Chalca?” she whispered.
A pause. “I am now.”
“It’s raining again.”
He sighed. “What’s troubling you?”
Agnes stopped to think before she answered, realizing that she was troubled by a dozen or more things in addition to the hanged would-be revolutionaries rotting now in paupers’ graves many miles downriver. She was reminded of the young bandit she and Kennah had hanged on their way to Daurhim, the near rape in a Boudun alley, the bloody carnage in the Citadel’s Grand Hall courtesy of their broken sorcerer Qeelb, and the disturbing words of the Aerican. What was it he had called her? Saint to be?
And then there was her godmother—or what remained of her godmother—hidden away in the cellars of the Citadel. Lenda’s disembodied head hovered before her mind’s eye now, sitting on its pedestal, fresh gore painting the torn flesh as though separated from its shoulders that very day. She so wished to unburden herself of that dreadful secret, but Chalca wasn’t the one with whom she could share it. She had considered speaking with Qeelb, but something kept her from broaching the subject. She believed the strange man was committed to their mission and would do nothing to harm them deliberately. But she feared him. And according to the sorcerer, she was right to do so.
At last she settled on a small subject with Chalca, so much safer than her other concerns. But as soon as the words came out of her mouth, she felt like an idiot. “I’m afraid Papa still thinks of me as his daughter. Rather than a colleague, I mean.”
“You are his daughter, Agnes. Pember’s frilly gown, you just called him ‘Papa.’”
“Gah! I know.”
“Other than him getting his codpiece in a knot about the way that ill-mannered captain aboard Sister Courage treated you, I think he’s done an admirable job of it. Don’t you?”
“Job of what?”
“Gods, Agnes! Where’s your head? Treating you like a big girl.”
If bringing up this subject was to deflect Chalca, it was failing miserably. She couldn’t even focus her mind on the topic; not with Lenda’s milky eyes staring at her. The words bubbled up in her.
“Everything’s a fucking horror,” she said, feeling a bit of the tension in her let loose when she spoke. “The hanging in Balowy was just the latest. Something’s wrong, Chalca. Something’s wrong with the world.”
The actor was silent. He knew she had more to say.
“There’re things I can’t tell you about…secrets I promised to keep.” She fought back tears. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she could see the dim outlines of the rocky hills they sailed past, remote areas of Marburand too rugged for agriculture and lacking anything that would draw the shovels and pickaxes of miners. They had passed a few more riverside towns along the way: Bromley and Susa on the Marburand shore, Helenas, Messing, and Kirdic in the Karnes. One wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from the water, whether each was under the jurisdiction of the nobility or another petty republic. Her mind echoed again with the words of the revolutionary.
“So, should we hang all the nobles?” she asked.
Chalca chuckled. “Most people are just trying to survive, Agnes. If I was living in a fine manse, eating rich food, with servants to wipe my ass, I imagine I’d think our system of government a splendid one. If I was living in a ditch, routinely beaten and robbed by the agents of wealthier men, well, I might think hanging a baron or two a grand way to spend an afternoon.”
“But you’re not living in a ditch.”
“No, Agnes, I’m not. I was born in one though, a right and proper Aulkirk ditch. My mother was a whore—she was driven to that line of work, if that matters to you.”
Agnes didn’t speak, toying with his curls instead, waiting for him to speak again. Her patience was rewarded after a few quiet moments. “The farm where her family lived and worked the land for generations got caught up in the middle of a dispute between two barons. One sued the other over who my mother’s family owed fealty, to which one they should be paying taxes and the lord’s allotment of crops. The baron who lost in court thought himself cheated, so he hired an itinerant druid to poison their wells. My grandparents and momma’s grandparents grew sick and died. Her two brothers as well.”
“I’m sorry, Chalca.”
“Don’t be,” he said, his words casual. “Everything turned out fine. I was told the baron who had it done was forced to pay a fine.” He sn
iffed. “I never knew them anyway, the ones who died. And if it hadn’t happened, I would have ended up a country bumpkin, shucking corn all my life. Can you imagine that, Agnes?”
Agnes smiled. “No, Chalca, I can’t.”
“My mother made the journey to Aulkirk, tried to find work. In the end, she had to turn to whoring. When one of my mother’s customers impregnated her, the owner of the brothel turned her out on the streets. She plied her trade in the alleys of Southend. It’s a grim neighborhood in Aulkirk, if you haven’t been there.”
Agnes hadn’t been to Aulkirk, but she could imagine it. Every sizable city in the empire had such districts. She put a hand on Chalca’s shoulder.
“She died when I was five,” he continued, staring out into the darkness. “She caught the laughing sickness, lingered at a shrine to Belu for four months. They couldn’t help her. A troupe of acrobats took me on from there. I was a quick study, but changed hands a number of times. A young boy is a valuable commodity on the circuit.”
“Commodity? Slavery is—”
“Illegal, yes. Nevertheless, I was bought and sold half a dozen times until I managed to run off with Kellian’s troupe.”
“The Blessed of Pember. Kellian is the one who was ill?”
“The same. He died later that morning, a couple hours after you headed off to Boudun. He was near seventy-five. A lovely man. A gifted man. He’d had a good run.”
Agnes tilted her head into Chalca’s shoulder and hugged herself against him. After a few moments, she spoke. “So, you still haven’t answered me about hanging aristocrats.”
“I’ve had two lovers with noble blood. Both were sweet boys. A few ‘ristos have gotten rough with me. There are some who are kind, some who deserve hanging. Or at least a good kick in the balls. But you could say that about just about anyone, no? Honestly, I’d like to spend more time in the Karnes to know how those republics of theirs work before I got up to tying nooses.”
There was a splash to port. Agnes turned her head, looking at the shadowy silhouettes of the hills on the shore. Then something closer, something that looked like a human figure, skulking past in the darkness. She reached for her rapier and put a hand to Chalca’s mouth.
“Something’s amiss,” she whispered to him. “Get your weapon.”
Chalca shifted silently on his pallet and she caught a glint of feeble moonlight off the polished metal of a dagger. Agnes wrapped her fingers around her weapon’s grip and drew it noiselessly from its leather sheath, eyes still trained on the space where the crouching figure had moved past. There were no more suspicious sounds. The midnight labor of water elementals was all she could hear.
Then a silhouette: a figure, hunched over, with a curved blade raised perpendicular to the body. Agnes shifted to her knees, then readied herself to leap at the intruder, for it had to be an intruder. Didn’t it? A tiny, nagging doubt made her hesitate. If she launched herself at the figure, she must strike to kill—it would be folly to attempt to disarm him in the dark. If she missed her chance she was just as likely to find his steel in her gut. She felt a squeeze on her right shoulder and Chalca whispered: “Strike true.” It was enough.
Agnes leapt up at the figure, feeling the point of her blade meet small resistance before piercing what felt like padded armor, then flesh, a sharp hiss of pain escaping the intruder’s lips. The force of her attack drove him backward, slamming him against the barge’s port railing, but he managed to get a hand up. His palm was rough like a sailor’s and he dragged nails across her face, drawing blood. Then his fingers found her throat. Both Agnes and the intruder were down on the deck then, his frantic fingers closing around her windpipe. The panic as her air was cut off enabled her to slam a forearm into his face, and she pushed her blade in deeper. The intruder gurgled and spat; his blood and spit sprayed on her cheek and mouth—she had gotten him in the lung. She twisted the rapier and his fingers loosened, allowing her to draw in a great gulp of air.
“Eels!” came a cry from the fore.
And then from the aft, “River eels!”
Agnes pushed herself up from her target, drawing the blade out as she rose. Chalca was next to her, a hand on her shoulder. “I can barely see a thing,” he said.
She looked aft, at the lanterns that hung by the tiny cabin and the tiller, and saw them both wink out, one after another. Agnes reached for her pack and rummaged through it for the alchemist glowrods she had there. It didn’t make sense. Their attackers had lost the element of surprise, so why snuff out the lights? Everyone would be equally blind in the darkness. Her fingers located the cluster of rods, bound together with twine. She pulled out two, cracked one to life and handed the other to Chalca, whose face was lit by her glowrod’s chemical radiance.
“Agnes!” she heard her father cry to her left.
“Here, Father!”
Her father’s ghostly form solidified as he approached them, the glowrod casting a faint green tint on his features. He brandished the Djao blade. Its inset gems flared, and the blade itself shimmered, as though it were its own light source.
“Aft!” he shouted at her. “Kennah and Qeelb have headed to the bow. Sira with them.”
Agnes turned in the direction her father commanded, holding her glowrod before her to light their way. As she started aft, she glanced at Chalca, who had traded the dagger he had pulled out beneath their lean-to for the short sword from the Citadel armory her father had insisted he carry. The instant she turned back, a menacing figure sprang from the darkness: a wild-haired, wide-eyed man, a foot-long curved blade in his right hand, a small battered buckler clenched in his left. Agnes brought up her rapier just in time to counter his attack. The blades’ steely voices screeched along one another’s lengths until silenced at the crossguards. Agnes tried to bring a knee into her assailant’s groin, but before she connected, his buckler crashed into the side of her head, sending her against the port rail. A starburst of pain erupted before her eyes.
The attacker descended on her as she skidded down the barge’s rail and landed on her backside. She raised her sword to ward off a slash intended for her neck, but she knew she was too slow—it was as though her arm dragged a great weight with it. But Chalca sent her enemy’s attack off-target with an awkward swipe of his own sword, catching her assailant in the cheek with his fist rather than the edge of the weapon. The wild-eyed man swung his buckler again and struck Chalca above his right eye as Agnes reached back for the rail to pull herself up. A steel-gray length of a sword sprouted from her attacker’s mouth, accompanied by a bloody splash of gore.
In the next moment her father was picking her up from the deck, the blade of Szaa’da’shaela slick with the intruder’s lifeblood. “Are you all right?” he shouted.
Agnes nodded, though the scene before her was still swimming. Chalca appeared again, his right eye swelling already from the blow he had received. Auric glanced at the actor, who nodded so that Auric needn’t ask him the same question.
“Stay close by me, lass,” said her father, a look on his face containing both worry and determination. “And guard yourself.” He turned back toward the barge’s aft, which was still swathed in darkness. Agnes, grimacing with embarrassment, staggered after him. She realized this was the first her father had seen of her in a real fight. Did he think her a neophyte in the practice yard? She ignored the throb in her temple and held her glowrod high to light her father’s way as best she could from behind.
Agnes saw her father bring his weapon around in a wide swing before the two men coming at him were fully illuminated. Her glowrod’s light just touched the faces of those mace-wielding intruders as the great arc of the Djao blade cut through both as though flesh and bone posed no serious challenge to the antique weapon’s keen edge. She and Chalca passed by the remains of the two men lying on the deck, in four separate pieces. Her father advanced before them, as though he didn’t need her light. She called after him.<
br />
“Papa! Wait!” He continued to race forward, showing no sign that he had heard her.
Another intruder presented himself, a big brute with dark tattoos on his face so that it seemed a great predatory bird was ready to descend on her father, gripping a cudgel in his meaty hands. Auric ran straight at the towering man. Agnes was appalled by her father’s reckless attack and cried out: it was as though he advanced on a straw-stuffed practice dummy rather than a heavily muscled adversary ready to stave in his skull with a single blow. The big man swung his cudgel to deflect the careless piercing attack of her father’s sword, but instead the blade cut the club in two. The point of Szaa’da’shaela caught the hulking fellow in the chest, passing through the man’s breastbone as though he was that straw-stuffed dummy back in the Citadel practice yard. Her father’s momentum drove the blade right through the man, dead where he stood.
Part of Agnes’s mind told her that she should be elated by the lethal potency of her father’s Djao weapon: nothing could stand before him so long as he wielded the ancient thing. But instead, a sick, greasy horror climbed up her throat, threatening to send the contents of her stomach spraying out onto the deck of the barge.
An assailant screaming his attack from starboard startled Agnes from her revulsion. He was a toothless fellow with patchy hair and a grotesque, yawning eye socket, made menacing by its emptiness. She easily parried his lunging, inartful attack and brought her blade up into his throat, then Chalca’s steel took him in the gut.
Agnes caught sight of the sickened wonder in Chalca’s eyes as he withdrew the blade sunk in their attacker’s belly. But it wasn’t the wet sound the dead man’s insides made as he pulled the sword from the wound that so disturbed him. “What in the living fuck is that thing your father fights with?”
