Tim Lebbon - Dusk

Perhaps he had wanted to be caught. He had thought about this long and hard since it happened, trying to recapture his mind on that day, in that place, just to look inside and see exactly how it was working at the time. He’d had tellans in his pocket, having robbed a group of rich traders just a death moon before. He rarely used rhellim, because his drive in that matter had always been strong and balanced. And furbats themselves were not easy to transport in relation to what they would be worth. Perhaps he could have made away with a dozen at most, each of them worth six tellans, and he already had three hundred tellans in his backpack. There was no sane reason why he ever should have tried to rob those rovers. Trade with them, maybe. Sit around their campfire, talking of dark days and drinking bad wine, perhaps, if they had let him.

To rob them was suicide.

They had caught him as he slipped a furbat cage from the fifth wagon. The wagon was rocking as he stepped onto it, and he heard the guttural grunts of a couple fucking inside. They must have noticed the change in rhythm beneath them, however, because he was suddenly face-to-face with the two rovers: an ugly, tattooed man, and a young long-haired woman, both of them flushed and panting from rhellim.

The next few minutes would have been comic, were they not so painful and destructive.

The man had pushed him from the wagon and proceeded to beat and kick. Kosar had been in more than a few fights and he could look after himself, but this rover’s rage had been beyond anything he had ever encountered. Kosar fended off the first few blows, but then his rhellim-flooded attacker knocked him to the ground and, erection waving and glistening in the moonlight, started kicking his head. The naked woman jumped down to join in, and even through the pain Kosar noted her beauty. Others added to the beating, almost all of them naked and drugged. Kosar was beaten into unconsciousness by a group of naked men sporting erections and women glistening wet.

After the beating they strapped him down in the open and left him there for three days, remaining encamped nearby to observe his slow death. They watched with mild interest as wild animals took bites from his arms and legs. One of the women stripped him and forced a dribble of rhellim down his throat, laughing as he grew hard in the blazing sun, not following through on her implied offer. And then, feigning benevolence, the rovers had freed him.

They made him an offer: they would kill him quickly and painlessly, or he could brand himself a thief.

Kosar had done the cutting himself, sprinkling dried powdered Wilmott’s root into the wounds to prevent them from ever healing properly.

It had been harder for him to travel since then, more difficult to make friends. Even though he wore gloves, they grew bloody. Everyone knew what he was. Honest folk shunned him because he was a thief, and thieves shunned him because he had been caught. So he had traveled down the western side of Noreela, looking for a place to settle, realizing the farther he went that his life must now change.

He had stayed in Pavisse for several moons. His wounds had betrayed him there as well, yet in Pavisse that had seemed not to matter so much. The mining town had more than its fair share of criminals, and they formed something of an underclass, a society within a society. It was the last town he visited before finding and settling in Trengborne.

And now he was back, seeking to renew an old acquaintance.

SINCE LEAVING THEboy Rafe with his uncle, Kosar had wandered the bustling streets of Pavisse. Trengborne had sometimes numbed his senses with its blandness-the smell of dirt, the taste of cooked sheebok, the sounds of farming and families going about their mundane lives-but here they were opened up once again. The odors, the sounds, the sights of the streets amazed him for a while, worn traveler though he was, and he realized that his history had been gradually smothered by the constant glare of the Trengborne sun, and the idea that he had found his niche. The realization did not please him. He had been enjoying the life he had made for himself. There had even been a sense of reparation there, the idea that in a way he was making up for the damaged life he had been living. Not redemption, never redemption. Simply repair.

Now he was back in the world. He mourned Trengborne and its people, he was terrified and shocked by what he had witnessed and he needed to talk to someone friendly. This very fact proved just how far he had drifted from the life of a wandering thief.

He had spent only a few moons here but he had made friends, fellow rogues and vagrants who were happy spending their lives in taverns and food halls, exaggerating their exploits and commanding respect from like-minded exaggerators. Kosar had never embellished his past, nor glamorized it. Sometimes he had done his best to downplay what he had been, what he had done. Already, back then, he had been changing.

One of the friends he had made had been very special. He sought her now. He thought that she might know something about what he had seen back in Trengborne, the Red Monk that had slaughtered the village, what it all meant. She was a true traveler, a descendant of the Shantasi race that had been brought to Noreela in slavery thousands of years before. Their original home was long forgotten; some said it was an island to the east of Noreela, thousands of miles away across an uncrossable ocean. Others believed that the Shantasi had actually been brought into being by errant shades in the mountains of Kang Kang, their pale skins camouflage against the snow, their purpose to provide those incorporeal souls with premature flesh and blood homes. The Shantasi themselves were perpetually silent about their origins, but they could not hide one of their greatest gifts: knowledge.

A’Meer Pott had also been Kosar’s last lover.

The Broken Arm looked exactly the same as when he had last been there. The sign above the door showed a massive machine, its use or purpose clouded by the passage of time, its metal-and-flesh arm ripped and bent at one of its elbows. Bloodred wine flowed from the arm, or wine-red blood, it was not quite clear which. It continued to amaze Kosar that such an establishment had paid an artist a good amount for this piece of work. Inside, the absence of wealth was almost a theme.

Kosar nudged the door shut behind him and smiled slightly as the noise lessened, commotion slowed. He held his arms by his sides so that the patrons would not see his bloodied gloves, glanced around with feigned disinterest as if looking for the bar. He had hoped that A’Meer would call out from the darkness, but perhaps it was unreasonable to expect her to still be here.

As he took his first step the atmosphere in the tavern quickly returned to normal. He leaned on the bar and ordered a beer. The barman did not seem to recognize him from all those moons ago; there was a generous flow of travelers and criminals passing through all the time, and Kosar’s was just another face.

“Which one?” the barman asked gruffly.

Kosar raised his eyebrows. “You have more than one brew? You have gone up in the world.”

“Sarcasm will get you a face full of fist, thief. We have Port Brew, or Old Bastard.”

Kosar smiled and was pleased to see a brief response on the barman’s face. “Then a pint of Old Bastard, please.” As he poured, the barman-Kosar had never asked his name-launched into the endless stream of chat that Kosar remembered from his previous time here.

“So you been here before, then? I don’t remember your face, but then I wouldn’t, I’ve long since stopped seeing faces. I see tellans passed across the bar and that keeps me happy, that’s what I’m here for. I see the faces of pretty women, sometimes, but by the time they leave here they’re usually ugly. Always ugly inside, they have to be to come here, that’s what I’m told anyway. I don’t listen to a word. I like my customers, always have. No pretense amongst the downtrodden, no play at being civilized or rightful or law-abiding. Honest, that’s what these folks are. They know the way the world’s going and they don’t mind admitting it. And they get what they can out of it while they can, enjoy what they will. Like this.” He thumped down the jug of Old Bastard and stepped back, sighed, as if viewing a recently completed work of art. “That’s half a tellan for that. A lot, I’ll grant you, but wait till you taste it.”