Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

Nedra snorted with laughter – which helped keep her from smelling the noxious brew. ‘For now, please, draw a bucket of water and extinguish whatever it is you’ve set aflame in my oven.’

Brexan spun back to the stove, as if remembering her pastry shells for the first time that morning. ‘Rutting dogs,’ she spat, ‘I’ll be setting the whole house on fire.’

‘And Brexan, take whatever it is in that pot and dump it below the high water mark, please. I don’t want the occupation forces thinking we’re burning dead bodies.’

‘They won’t,’ Brexan giggled. ‘Burning bodies don’t smell this bad.’

Later that day a fogbank crept over the marsh. The icy cloud swallowed everything in its path as it rolled up over the Falkan shoreline and froze solid. Brexan sat outside the Topgallant, watching as the waterline disappeared into the grey haze. The whole of the northern district was wrapped in a heavy, grey blanket and no one ventured out save for the few neighbourhood strays sniffing through the streets for scraps of food. The city was nearly silent.

Brexan breathed deep, tasting the tang of salt and low tide at the back of her throat. She listened. From somewhere on the harbour, bells began to ring. The fishing boats were still out on the water, bringing in the day’s catch, and they rang bells or shouted, or whistled, each distinctive noise alerting others to their whereabouts, so the harbourmaster could pinpoint exactly where they were and what anchorage they had chosen to weather the fog.

It was the bells that Brexan found unsettling.

Searching the fogbank for any visible sign of the fishing fleet, she felt an invisible fist close over her heart. Wondering if this was what one felt in the moments before a heart seizure, she took another deep breath and tried to calm down. It’s just nerves, she thought. You need to get hold of yourself, relax.

The bells rang again, some high-pitched and clear, others clanking like cast-iron pots. Brexan shuddered, recalling Jacrys and the bell rope. He had stared at it, though he was bleeding like a stuck pig, spitting vermilion bubbles through blue lips; that horsecock had seen the bell rope and had somehow – how? – dragged himself across the room to it. She and Sallax had left him for dead, stabbed in the heart, one lung punctured – and yet still he had managed to pull that gods-be-damned bell rope, and as she had escaped from the barracks, Brexan had heard it clanging above the din, rousing an entire platoon and reminding her that Jacrys, despite being so badly wounded, was still alive.

The fog was a swirling cauldron of milky-white stew. Just one boat, for all the gods’ sake; let me see one whoring boat.

She could see nothing through the gloom.

Brexan knew the bells were some distance away. She had sat here coaxing Sallax back to sanity, morning after morning, watching the fishermen come and go, from the deep waters offshore to the harbour, headed for the southern wharf, if they were heavy vessels with big hauls, or to the northern wharf if they were smaller boats hoping to offload their catches to the locals. Today they seemed closer, just off the marsh where she had discovered the cleanly picked remains of Brynne Farro. They rang out more clearly in the fog; they had to, of course. They were never normally this loud, this intrusive, never usually so reminiscent of so many painful things.

It’s fishermen, Brexan told herself, just fishermen. Jacrys is dead. He couldn’t possibly have survived. Let it all go now. Plan the party; get refocused. It’s all right for you to let it go. Nedra’s party; what a time everyone will have. Forgive yourself and move on.

She was lost. Forsaking Malakasia and her commitment – her oath – to the army had been a decision made in a moment of anger. Jacrys was a cold-blooded murderer; he had killed those people in Estrad and he had murdered Lieutenant Bronfio outside Riverend Palace, and for those acts, he needed to be brought to justice. But she had deserted. She had stripped off her uniform and left her platoon without permission. She had fallen in love with the enemy, a partisan, and taken up arms against Malakasia – she had erased nearly two hundred Twinmoons of her life. She had no home to go back to now, no proud parents to boast of her army career. She had no skills, save perhaps for espionage; she couldn’t even make a decent stew. What did she have to show for two hundred Twinmoons of life? Nedra Daubert and the Topgallant Boarding House. Versen’s memory – sometimes, not when she truly needed him. The Eastern Resistance? Try as she might, Brexan was embarrassed to admit that she still couldn’t find them, no matter how hard she looked. She laughed, if only to keep from crying.

Out on the harbour, voices exchanged their melodic foreign cries and bells rang out, alerting any captain brave enough or idiotic enough to attempt navigation under such conditions.

Brexan buried her face in her hands.

Jacrys was alive.

You need to be the one to kill him.

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, pulled her cloak tight around herself and went back inside.

On the harbour, the bells continued ringing.

Inside, Nedra was pouring out tecan. ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘You’ll get sick sitting out there, and I’ll be left to plan my own old-lady party.’

‘You’re not an old lady, Nedra.’ Brexan blew across the top of the goblet and sipped.

‘Then why are we celebrating my getting older? I don’t need a party.’

Brexan started crying again. ‘I guess I do,’ she murmured through her tears.

Nedra wrapped an arm around her shoulders. ‘Then we’ll organise a great, drunken, sloppy Twinmoon fest for an old woman as she clings to life by a greying hair.’

‘A grey hair,’ Brexan corrected, a sob turning into a hiccough. ‘There’s no greying about them. I want to have music.’

‘Yes, of course, bring in the occupation army band; those old imperial songs always help me move my bowels – and at my age, a good bowel movement can mean the difference between a fine day and a rutting waste of sunshine.’

Brexan couldn’t help but laugh through her tears. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘You don’t need to know, Brexan. You’ll learn, hopefully earlier than I ever did, that if you go a few Twinmoons without a compass, eh, it’s no great loss. I’m telling you that my worst days, my toughest struggles were invariably what led to the next wonderful turn in my life. But you can’t force anything. So you’re not a spy, or a killer. Who cares? I certainly don’t. I like you better knowing you’re not a killer. I sleep better at night.’

‘But what Jacrys did was-’

‘Jacrys will pay for his actions one day, and maybe you’ll be there to see it happen and maybe you won’t.’

‘I would like-’

‘And maybe you won’t,’ Nedra repeated. ‘I would like that even more. Don’t allow a wicked man to dictate who you become. Pursuing him across Eldarn is not a healthy undertaking for anyone, not even for the best of reasons.’

‘But I have to tell them what I know. I have to tell someone about Carpello and his shipments.’

Nedra sighed deeply. ‘That’s true; you do.’

‘But I don’t know where to find the Falkan Resistance; it’s as if anyone who knows anything about them has been sworn to secrecy, or has no idea where they’ve gone. I can’t even find a pocket of disgruntled old men.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Nedra said. ‘Finding a pocket of old men in this city, disgruntled or not, has been my goal for quite a while.’

Brexan laughed. ‘You old slut.’

‘Ageing slut, my dear. I’m an ageing slut; I’m not old yet.’ Nedra finished her tecan. ‘You’ll find them. There’s a wonderful vein of gossip running right along our street, as reliable as the tides. Some of it is nonsense, pure grettan shit, but you’ll hear something, catch a word here or a gesture there, and you’ll reconnect with your friends; I’m sure of it. But you can’t make it happen.’