Savage Legion

by Matt Wallace

  “I understand your mission here,” she says. “I really do. I can even appreciate it. But I can’t let you kill all these people—”

  “They’re not people, they’re Savages! They’re the weapons you’ve used and will use to destroy my people!”

  “They may be used as weapons against your country tomorrow, but tonight they’re just people. None of them chose this, and many of them don’t even deserve to be here, it seems. So I repeat, I will not let you kill these people.”

  “You know what they’ll do to me if you alert them. You know what they’ll allow your new brothers and sisters to do to me.”

  Evie nods.

  The Sicclunan agent drops her chin, pressing the flesh of her neck into the tip of the punch dagger until a droplet of blood forms, becoming a thin trail that runs down the center of the blade.

  “Then your choices are considerably narrowed,” she says to Evie.

  “I don’t want your life, either.”

  Evie curls her fingers around the woman’s fist and deftly pries the punch dagger’s handle loose. She grips the weapon between her own knuckles, holding it half an inch from the gently throbbing vein in the woman’s neck.

  Evie juts her head in the direction of the cellar window. “You go out through there. Now. This mission you’ve failed. There’ll be others.”

  She sees the resistance in the Sicclunan’s otherworldly eyes. Evie can almost hear the other woman’s blood rising in violent waves, calling to her to act, to kill this interloper and complete her mission.

  Evie’s fist tightens around the handle of the punch dagger.

  “Tell me your name,” she commands.

  The woman hesitates, but something in Evie’s eyes persuades her.

  “Sirach.”

  Evie nods. “Sirach. You can die trying in vain to complete your mission today, or you can live to kill Savages and Skrain tomorrow. Choose.”

  In the end, even Sirach must see it’s no choice at all. Her body relaxes and her fingers splay in supplication.

  She nods, stiffly.

  Evie slowly and cautiously backs away from her.

  Sirach reaches up and thumbs the blood from her small neck wound. She rubs it with her forefinger while regarding Evie.

  “You should come fight for us,” she says.

  Evie stops just short of laughing out loud. “I’ll take that as high praise, but unfortunately I’ve made other commitments. Lifelong commitments. You’ll understand.”

  “Not really” are the last words Sirach says to her.

  Evie watches her disappear through the window without a sound, just another shadow living in seconds and small expanses out there in the night. When she’s gone, Evie kneels and carefully tucks her newly acquired punch dagger inside the top of her boot, draping the hem of her stained, threadbare trousers around it.

  Rising, she walks over to the poisoned barrel, picking up the vial where Sirach laid it down. Evie doesn’t make the mistake or sniffing at or otherwise trying to identify the poison inside; it doesn’t matter what it is. She drops the vial and crushes it with the toe of her boot, grinding glass and viscous liquid into the wooden boards of the cellar floor.

  Evie reaches up and dabs a finger at the almost imperceptible hole in the top of the barrel. She runs her hand around its hammer-forged iron rim for a moment and then grips an edge. She brings her right foot back several feet and kicks clean through two boards at the base of the barrel. She quickly retracts her foot to avoid the tidal rush of wine.

  Evie watches the barrel bleed its fermented blood across the cellar floor, draining to almost the final drop. She feels a brief stab of sympathy for the rats that will no doubt venture out from the walls and be found dead on the cellar floor in the morning.

  She only hopes a few rodent corpses aren’t enough to raise suspicion.

  Evie slips out of the wine cellar with the same stealth she used to survey its interior. In less than a minute she’s rejoined the Revel without turning a single head her way.

  She finds her seat across from Spud-Bar awaiting her, along with a bowl of rice and a small plate with several cabbage cups on it.

  “Thank you,” Evie says.

  Spud-Bar, halfway through a bowl of sweet-smelling broth, nods.

  “Saw you chattin’ with the Professor before. I’d counsel you against that.”

  “Why’s that? Too much truth there?”

  Spud-Bar looks up from their bowl, genuinely baffled.

  “Truth?”

  “I just mean—”

  “You do as you like. But of all the types here, that’s the one I’d tell you to ride clear of.”

  Evie doesn’t know what to say to that, and so she doesn’t.

  They eat.

  A high, agonized scream cuts through the idle chatter and off-key music a moment later.

  It belongs to a voice on the other side of the pleasure curtain, and there’s no mistaking the bloodcurdling pain in it.

  Evie springs from her seat, largely on instinct, and she’s one of the first to reach the curtain, tearing it back and stepping inside, bodies quickly crowding around hers as they flock to do the same.

  There’s a small common area on the other side composed of a plush rug, mounds of pillows, and a few wine-stained tables. The rest of the space is smaller, private curtained-off stalls.

  They’re standing in the middle of the common area. The Professor, his back half turned to them, is embracing the young man who flirted with him and Evie earlier in the evening. She thinks they’re dancing drunkenly at first, and then the Professor turns their bodies toward her and she sees the blade of the carving knife he’s half buried in the boy’s throat.

  The shock is enough to momentarily paralyze even Evie. She simply can’t process what she’s seeing, not after the moment she shared with this same man not an hour ago.

  “Lecherous whore!” the Professor growls through a clenched jaw, and opens the boy’s throat half a foot across.

  In the next moment the boy’s slight, bare chest is awash in his own blood. The Professor lets his victim’s body slump to the floor at his feet.

  “There!” he yells at the boy’s motionless form, waving the carving knife with abandon. “Is that what you want? Did you get what you wanted?”

  Laython nearly bowls Evie over as he crashes through the crowd. The towering taskmaster of the Savages barrels down on the Professor without hesitation, easily avoiding the wild swipes of the man’s knife hand. Laython ducks behind the Professor and clamps him in a vise-like grip, restraining the Professor’s arms and controlling him by the back of his head and neck.

  Laython flings the man to the ground with his full weight atop the Professor, immobilizing him, though he continues to struggle in vain.

  Behind them, half naked and totally naked Savages and sex workers have abandoned their coupling and private stalls to investigate the commotion.

  “Why must they come to me?” the Professor demands in a voice Evie doesn’t recognize, the hysterical shrieking voice of a madman. “Why must they always come to me for it? I did not ask for this! I never asked for any of it! I only give them what they want! I only ever gave them what they begged me for, I tell you!”

  He ceases struggling then and begins sobbing, like a child. He does his best under Laython’s mass to pull his knees into his abdomen, attempting to curl up as he continues to wail.

  Laython doesn’t even loosen his grip.

  Two of the Skrain soldiers push their way through the gathered crowd a moment later. Only then does Laython relinquish his hold on the now broken man contorted into a damp ball on the floor. The Skrain lift him easily with one hand apiece and carry him back through the curtains.

  Hands resting against his torso high above his waist, Laython looks down with stormy, disturbed eyes on the bled boy.

  It’s the first wholly human emotion Evie has seen express itself on the man’s face.

  Evie turns, finding Spud-Bar standing a shoulder’s lengt
h away.

  “What…” Evie’s mind is still reeling. She has to shut her eyes tight to focus through it. “What just happened?”

  “Why do you think he’s here?” Spud-Bar asks her. “The Professor?”

  “He said… he told me the state accused him of subverting his students.”

  Spud-Bar snorts. “More like eviscerating his students. Five of ’em, that’s how many he killed, mostly young fawns with schoolgirl crushes on ’im. Seems any time a pretty young thing turned that kind of eye on ’im something inside that man broke apart and couldn’t come back together as long as the beholder in question was alive.”

  “But that’s… how is that possible? I mean, I never heard anything about any murders at a Crachian university—”

  Spud-Bar laughs, but there’s no levity to it, nothing mirthful or genuine.

  “My dove, if we don’t exist anymore, you and I and the rest of this bunch, why do you imagine there’s anything Crache can’t hide from its people? Especially when whatever or whoever it is goes against the idea that we’re living in a peaceful paradise?”

  “I just thought… I thought I was getting a handle on all this,” she says. “The Professor… whatever or whoever he is… he was making sense.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Spud-Bar says gently, as if speaking to a small child. “Now, come on. Your food is gettin’ cold, if someone hasn’t already swiped it.”

  Again, Spud-Bar carefully takes Evie’s arm and urges her away from the curtain, back to their seats at the end of the feasting table. Evie settles there, staring at a half-eaten cabbage cup with absolutely no appetite.

  “What will they do with him?” Evie asks. “The Professor, I mean?”

  Spud-Bar shrugs, slurping the rest of their soup without complaint. “They’ll let him fight tomorrow. Probably load ’im into a suicide tumbler. If he doesn’t die, then they’ll execute him tomorrow night. Rules is rules. Savages can’t be killin’ folks off the field.”

  “Right,” Evie says, thinking about the lives she’s saved this evening, including and especially the Professor’s. “Where would we be without rules, after all?”

  SHAHEEN

  LEXI HAS NEVER TRULY EXPERIENCED hunger, nor seen its effects up close. She doesn’t understand why the little girl’s belly is so bloated if it’s empty.

  “This is what happens when one is starved, Te Gen,” Taru explains gently, and only for Lexi’s ear. “I imagine it is much like feeling warm though one is freezing to death.”

  Lexi is speechless.

  The child can be no more than four or five years old. Her name is Char and her mother tells them she hasn’t been able to feed the girl in four days. Char’s mother cradles her under the hole-pocked eave of a disused building in the Bottoms. Like many of the abandoned buildings here, the wall of this one is marked by red paint with a symbol that designates that the Capitol is going to repair and reuse the structure for a new purpose. Taru has already explained to Lexi that this rarely occurs, and many of these old buildings have stood empty for years. Despite that fact, Aegins who patrol the Bottoms are instructed to keep the insides of every marked structure clear of vagrants. They perform regular sweeps, and anyone found squatting is often violently beaten from the buildings, while others are even arrested, and some never seen again.

  Taru escorted Lexi from the gleaming, bustling veneer of the Capitol into the portside shadows of the Bottoms. It didn’t take long for the pair to come upon the young woman and her daughter, both wrapped in filthy rags. The girl’s mother looked up at them briefly with unafraid yet defeated eyes before returning her gaze and attention to her daughter. She was attempting to soothe the barely conscious girl, who awoke to convulse painfully every few moments.

  Lexi managed to ask the girl’s name before the full import of the scene truly struck her. Char’s mother had told them in a whisper without looking up from the girl.

  The color has been drained from Lexi’s face. She removes the Gen Stalbraid pin from the breast of her wrap and practically shoves it into Taru’s gloved hand.

  “Go to the nearest steamer’s and bring back as much rice as they will give you,” she instructs her retainer.

  “Te-Gen, I cannot leave you unattended—”

  “Go!” Lexi orders them. “Now! I will be fine.”

  Taru hesitates for a moment longer, but the steel and fury in Lexi’s gaze is undeniable, even to the hardened retainer.

  “There is a shop just past the edge of the Bottoms,” Taru informs Lexi. “I will only be a few moments.”

  Lexi watches them turn and quickly tromp away with the determination of a soldier double-timing it on a march. She gathers the flowing portion of her wrap and slowly crouches until her eyes meet the level of the woman’s.

  “What is your name?” Lexi asks the young mother.

  “Does it matter?” she whispers back, raggedly, still ignoring Lexi with her gaze.

  “It does to me,” Lexi assures her.

  “Shaheen.”

  “My name is Lexi, Shaheen. May I ask, do you have any family?”

  Shaheen’s voice becomes hoarse. “Just her,” she says of the girl in her arms.

  “Were you born here, in the Bottoms?”

  Shaheen shakes her head. “I was a scullery maid for Gen Vang. They put me out after… after she was born. No other Gen would take me in to serve them. I had no way to leave the Capitol.”

  Lexi suspects the child’s origins are an entirely other and more disturbing tale, but she doesn’t press the young woman.

  Taru returns in impressive time with a small bamboo bowl, the rice piled within it releasing tantalizing steam into the alley.

  Taru kneels and offers the bowl to Shaheen. “Feed her very small bits at first,” the retainer instructs her. “You will make her worse otherwise.”

  Shaheen accepts the rice with a surprised expression on her face. She seems to really look at the pair of them for the first time.

  “Thank you,” she says quietly.

  Lexi looks down at the small bowl, then moves her gaze to Taru.

  “The steamer said if I wanted more than a single meal you will need to submit an official request for catering,” the retainer informs her.

  Lexi frowns heavily.

  To Shaheen, she says, “I will return tomorrow with more food for you and your daughter. All right?”

  She can see clearly from the noncommittal way Shaheen nods that the young woman doesn’t believe her, and somehow that only heightens every ill emotion Lexi is feeling.

  Taru stands and waits. A moment later Lexi slowly rises and turns away from Shaheen and Char.

  “Te-Gen,” the retainer begins carefully, “I appreciate how you feel, but this is a dangerous proposition. There are countless families here like this woman and her child, and Gen Stalbraid does not possess the food allotment to feed even a small number of them.”

  “Then we will do what we can for as many as we can,” Lexi proclaims resolutely.

  Taru frowns. “It could cause a riot if we try to disperse small amounts of food—”

  “Being unable to solve a problem in its totality is not a reason to do nothing.”

  “Very well, Te-Gen.”

  They walk away slowly, and in silence. The mixture of confusion, anger, and sorrow is practically radiating from Lexi’s every pore. She stares straight ahead, seeing nothing, lost in her own dark thoughts.

  Taru waits as long as they can contain themselves.

  “Forgive me, Te-Gen, but are you truly so surprised? Did Brio never share with you the condition of the people here?”

  “He told me they were forgotten by the Capitol and Crache, but I never… I simply didn’t understand what that means, I suppose. Perhaps I would not allow myself to understand.”

  Taru only nods.

  “I should have insisted on coming with Brio,” Lexi says, obviously speaking more to herself than anyone else. “I should have done… something to help—”

  “T
e-Gen, you helped Brio. You served as you were trained to serve. Like any of us.”

  Lexi is shaking her head before Taru has even finished speaking. “It’s no excuse. No excuse at all.”

  Taru frowns, deepening the perpetual lines in their face cultivated by their usually stern expression. “I should not have brought you here—”

  “Yes, you should!” Lexi snaps at them, looking up at the towering retainer, her brow even more troubled. “You most certainly should have.”

  Lexi returns briefly to her silent, contemplative staring.

  Then, “How does this happen, Taru? How can this place exist? How can these people be allowed to live like this? Here, in the Capitol of all places? How can the rest of the city and its people thrive while these people have nothing? At every state function we praise our glorious nation and how we live free of things like hunger and poverty and violence. How can such a lie live?”

  “Brio knows more about the history of the Bottoms than me, and I was born here,” Taru informs her wryly. “Apparently at the tail end of the Renewal, the newly formed Protectorate Ministry oversaw all the… unwanted residents of the Capitol herded like pack animals into this area of the city. Brio imagined it was to be a temporary measure, simply to allow the state to clean up the Capitol. Yet here they remained, and their children’s children and so forth inherited their burdens. As long as they remain out of sight and do not stain the rest of the city or its citizens, there is no reason for Crache to deal with them.”

  “I understand Brio’s frustration now,” Lexi says thoughtfully. “His restlessness and what became his crusade. When he complained that no one in the Spectrum listened to him, or wanted to help him, or grant him the requests made for aid for the Bottoms.”

  “He has always done what he could as their pleader,” Taru insists. “As did his father. He argued for what little he could to help the people here.”

  “I simply cannot accept that with all we have, Crache cannot cure this ill.”

  “Brio began to suspect this place was actually being used as a resource by the state, like everything else in Crache. Raids and arrests by Aegins increased. Many people spoke of their friends and loved ones disappearing in the night. That was what sparked his… investigation.”