Jay Lake - Green

The hot, close air within the rearcastle stirred. I heard for one moment the sharp peal of a child’s laugh. Was that meant to draw me on, or to send me away?

I walked aftward. No doors were marked, of course, but no one was about, either. The widest door at the back would be the captain’s, I supposed. I tried the one on my left, but it rattled, shut tight. An iron lock below the knob told that story. Stepping to the portside, I tried that. Locked as well. I heard a scrape within.

That was most likely him. I drew my bandit knife from the leggings beneath my robe and kicked at his door. It sprang open with a crash that was sure to draw someone to investigate.

My remaining time would be measured in seconds.

Curry was already rising to meet the threat. He was easy enough to recognize from Mother Vajpai’s description, though she hadn’t said that his eyes matched the eyes in his key-one was green, the other blue. He paused when he saw me, and the pistol in his hand drooped away.

“They send a boy?” he asked in Petraean, then laughed with the same cruelty that the Factor had, just before I slew him.

The capped well of my anger broke in a rush like lamp oil spilled over open flame. I would not be mocked.

Firearms were almost unknown in Kalimpura. Even those used on the Stone Coast were as likely to flash in the pan and blind their owners. Some of the best hand-built guns had another system of cartridges and shot, of which I’d been told by Mother Vishtha but had never seen for myself.

This pistol had no pan, so it was one of the new ones.

To cut my risk, I sprang straight toward the weapon. Mother Vajpai might have mentioned the gun, I thought, just as Curry and I collided. I snapped his wrist back, forcing him to drop the pistol as it fired. The noise slapped at my ears, but no bullet pushed me down. Curry tumbled over with a shocked expression, fetching up against a brass-handled cabinet behind his desk.

“You should have answered your summons,” I said through clenched teeth, using Petraean so he would understand me.

He glared as my bandit knife entered just behind his collarbone, striking downward. It took more pressure than I had expected-men had thinner skin than pigs, as I’d been told-but I knew when I’d pierced his heart.

In that moment, I learned I could kill at need, whatever my later regrets.

“You’re the one who…” he began. Then he was just so much meat.

“One who what?” I growled, but my words were moot. Voices rose in the corridor as I slid my knife free. Blood followed, but not in the rush it would have if he’d been still alive. I wiped my blade on his shirtfront, then tugged his key loose and slit its string of silk thread and pearls.

If I brought this home, whoever within the Bittern Court had engineered this man’s death would prosper. The law is the law, as they said. A Blade does not judge.

My knife popped his odd-colored eyes free of their sockets, one after the other. I severed the optic nerves, then slit a length of velvet from his sleeve to roll them tight in my hands. I then tore down the drape behind him. A porthole, as I’d hoped. I would not have to fight back to the dock, where a man was even now shouting Curry’s name.

The window was slender and square, relieved with leaded glass in the manner of a ship’s stern lights. I swept up Curry’s pistol and smashed out the glass with the butt. The weapon went into the harbor. Being slender myself, I followed it. His eyes I clutched tight in one hand, my knife in the other. The key I trailed in my fingers, so that the water tore it from me when I splashed hard a dozen feet below.

Much as I had done in my earliest childhood, I kicked like a frog to swim away from Crow Wing. I could pass under Arvani’s Pier where the stonework was arched to let the tidal swells through. This was less a bridge and more a sewer, but it was enough for me. I slipped into shadow with the garbage and the flotsam. There my feet found stone to cling to amid the tidewrack stench. There I cried for the death of a man I’d never known.

Yet somehow he knew me.

I waited in the shadows. A great deal of shouting went on above in both Petraean and Seliu. Whistles blew, and at one point I heard a clash of sticks and fists, followed by someone being thrown cursing into the harbor. Eventually the combination of being soaking wet and the rank odors began to irritate me sufficiently to risk moving. Besides that, something had tried to nibble on my legs.

Tucking away both knife and eyeballs, I slipped out the far side and clung to the stonework as I clambered toward the footings of the Street of Ships. I was forced to pass two close-moored vessels as I did so. The first hull towered above me, rocking less than two feet from the stone of the pier. A shadowed wall of mossy barnacles threatened my skin. I tried not to consider what would become of me if a swell pushed the ship toward the dock.

The second such passage terrified me as well, but it was already becoming familiar. I could not just climb up. Too many people with official business were on the dock disputing recent events. Surely the Bittern Court would send its word. Though not, I realized, until I returned with my proof.

I found a series of rotten grates in the wall below the street frontage. Clearly I was not the first to pass this way, for two had been twisted open. Figuring on the tunnels they covered being stormwater outflows for the streets beyond, I slipped in the first and followed the pipe at a low crouch. If I had been given to fear of tight places, that one might have panicked me, but in less than two hundred paces, I was inside a catchment. I knew from the distance and direction to Arvani’s Pier that I must now be under the Plaza of Broken Swords. With a deep breath, I found my bearings. There would be an access in the little park just north.

Once among the mango trees, I squeezed what water I could from my robes. I looked beyond disgraceful, but I still knew how to carry myself. Slipping out into the street, I slunk toward the Lily Temple. A few people stared. Most knew better.

When I passed a fireseller’s cart along the curb, I stopped. She was a woman of middle years, plain-faced and worn with the effort of her life. She was also visibly frightened at my appearance.

“I would have a black candle and a white one,” I told her. “And some punk or matches to light them. I… I have no money with me, but can leave my good steel knife as surety. The Temple of the Silver Lily will stand for it.”

“N-no, Moth-… sister…” Her fright deepened. Hands fluttered like birds as she began pushing candles at me. “Take what you will. I offer to the Goddess.”

I opened my mouth to thank her, but a whirlwind overtook my words, and left something distant and calm within her eyes. I nodded, claimed the box of lucifer matches and two candles that suited me best, and stepped into the next quiet alley.

Three boys rolled a drunk there, while a thin dog tied to a drainpipe barked weakly.

“Out!” I roared. Their sneers broke as they saw my face, and they fled. The dog whimpered as it tried to hide behind the pipe. The drunk just moaned.

I knelt in the stinking slime that scummed the bricks. There I scraped clean a patch with the edge of my hand and set out the two candles. I placed the sorry, ragged mess that was Curry’s eyes before them.

The black candle I lit first. “H-he violated the Death Right,” I told the alley. Curry’s shade as well, should the man still be listening. Perhaps his gods heard me, if they were not resting silently far away across the Storm Sea.

His surprise loomed large in my memory. Curry had not protested his death. Rather, he had thought to find it at a different hand. Perhaps there were games played here that went beyond strongboxes.