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Karesh Ni: Chapter 8

Fidays
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Chapter 8

Tel Viv made several odd faces. She was wonderfully expressive, and she kept squinting and wrinkling her face, unsquinting and unwrinkling her eyes, and glaring at me like a new and unpleasant bug. I get that a lot, so she unintentionally put me at ease. Maybe it was intentional. I doubt it. She didn’t look someone executing a master plan. She looked like she’d been constipated all week, and things were starting to move unexpectedly.

“You’re a wheat merchant?” she demanded.

“I don’t handle it myself. I connect buyers and sellers,” I said.

She kept squinting. She needed a little more.

I continued. “The winter crop is already gone. I’m sure the Celephians have some in storage, but they’re going to fleece you. They might not,” I admitted.

Tel Viv interrupted, “Might not what? Have wheat in storage or fleece us?”

“Technically either, but let’s be honest. We both know Celephians. They’ll fleece you even if they don’t have any wheat in storage.”

“You don’t know that!” Tel Viv snorted at me.

Which was also technically true. “Okay,” I agreed.

She squinted again. I could see her deciding if she really wanted to defend the Celephians from charges of fleecing a customer.

“Let’s put that aside,” she said. “You’re not a wheat grower. Who do you know who is?”

“I won’t answer that directly, because you’ll try to go to my supplier and cut me out,” I replied. “But I did just show you a contract from the Truis.”
She sat back and crossed her arms. Her face closed.

I pushed. “We need to talk a little bit. I did just show you my last contract, but there are many suppliers in the world. I can talk to people. What do you need?”

She exhaled, but I think she thawed a little. I pushed farther.

“What’s your timeline? Are people starving in the streets? The winter crop is growing, so most merchants will have found buyers already. The first summer crop is harvested around midsummer. Is that doable?”

She sighed again but definitely thawed. “By midsummer, you mean solstice?”

“Depends on where, but yeah.”

“I’m not under an executioner’s axe. Midsummer would be fine. I could push to autumn if the price was right.”

My knowledge of the wheat trade wasn’t too deep, but I had picked up a little. “Autumn is a little far. You can get a commitment cheaper that far out, but it’s risky. Weather, drought, dust-storms, bugs, anything could throw you off. You save some money if everything works out in your favor, more if you pay up front.”

Tel Viv did a side-to-side nod. She didn’t like the thought but wasn’t reflexively arguing me. I smiled. We had a little connection.

“So you’re looking for something in summer or autumn?” I asked again, trying to get her talking.

“I’m looking for stable trading partners away from the Ashirai. I, we, are looking for bilateral relations.”

“Why away from the Ashirai?”

“Because the Empire is leaning on its connections to cut our partners. They don’t want anyone to deal with us but them. Your contacts in Kageran won’t help. Citi Kageran is a small place, and once the Ashirai got in, they just creep. They’re like pythons, throwing a coil at a time over their prey.”

“They’ll deal with you themselves?” I asked. That sounded odd.

“Their terms are unacceptable.”

“Okay. Does it have to be wheat?”

She looked at me like she didn’t understand the question. “What?”

“Down south, away from the Ashirai, there’s a lot of rice.”

“You can’t make bread with rice.”

“No, you eat it straight.”

And we talked.

She wanted food. The people of Whitefire traditionally ate bread, so while she thought in terms of wheat and medium grains, she was willing to talk about rice. More than anything else, she seemed intent on not-from-Ashirak. The empire galled her. Her jaw clenched, and she scowled when she talked about them. She spoke in terms of deep grievances she wouldn’t clarify, old grudges she wouldn’t explain.

She didn’t have as much time as she said. She needed something done, and she couldn’t do it herself. The Hierophant and other eparchs would be involved. But Eparch Tel Viv wanted to present a full plan by herself, and money wasn’t the biggest sticking point.

It was a sticking point. Money always was. But she was willing to pay to get someone talking to her.

She didn’t know it, but she was talking about Celephians. They cared nothing for Ashirai threats or pressure. Threatening Celephias across the seas was a bad, bad idea. The Celephians wanted money, Tel Viv had some, and things could be arranged. But Tel Viv didn’t trust them either, for good reason, and that put her in a bind.

I needed time. My immediate contract was to find Kyria, and Tel Viv pretty firmly told me she was dead. That would take some unravelling.

“So, what are your transport and storage arrangements?” I asked, fishing for a delay.

“We have a port,” she said so idly and flippantly she was bragging.

“From…down there?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Can I see it?”

“Easily.”

“And warehouses?” I added.

“Of course.”

“Can I see them too?”

“Will that take some time?” she asked.

“Days, at least.” It would take days, but I could pad a few days of spy work into there. “Maybe weeks.”

She nodded. “I’ll have someone show you around. For your stay, you are invited to take one of the guest rooms in the Sunset Basilica.”

“The Sunset Basilica?”

“This place.” She waved an arm around.

“Oh, I accept.”

“Good.”

“Am I still under arrest?”

“You mean bound and detained?”

“Yes.”

Tel Viv thought. “No, but you’ll have an escort. You aren’t detained provided you don’t leave,” she said finally.

I sorta expected that. “Food, drink, a bed?”

“We will provide all.”

“Oh, wonderful. I accept,” I said again.

“Good.”

They took me to a very nice white room that did have bars on the doors, but the guards didn’t lock them. I had a window, but it didn’t open. But I also had a bed, sheeted in silk, and several small cabinets and shelves. Eparch Tel Viv spoke with the hospitallers outside while I looked around and came in when they were done.

“You’re not detained,” she repeated. “But you may be here a while. Tell someone if you need to leave, and if possible, you’ll be escorted.”

Again, what I expected. “The necessary?”

She looked at me blankly.

“Out house? Hanging garret?”

“Oh, the water house. That door.” She pointed at a flat wall.

I looked at her, the wall, and her again.

She walked over, put one finger on several glowing red spots and pushed. A line of yellow lights appeared in the outline of a door, and the wall swung inwards.

“Just press any stars in the shape of the Door.” And then she frowned.

But I wasn’t paying attention. Through the hidden door was a bathroom. It had a sink. It had a toilet. It had a shower.

In awe, I examined the shower tap. Two little chains hung from a white bevel supporting a short, metal rod. I pulled the little rod down, and water fell from the ceiling. I twisted it, and the water steamed. They had hot, running water.

“Do you know how to use a rain closet?” asked Tel Viv condescendingly, but she didn’t bother me at all.

“Oh yes, Eparch. I do.”

And she left.

The guards outside smiled and shut me in. They didn’t lock the door, but I had no intention of leaving.

I took the first hot shower I’d had in years, and it felt like heaven.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 16

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Chapter 16

I’d finally run down Osret and in the moment of triumph, hesitated. He wasn’t ready to fight me. It would be murder. He couldn’t breathe, even in the thick, seashore air. He was probably one of those guys who did five minutes of sprinting spread over an hour fairly regularly because it got him cut. Good for him, but it didn’t help him outrun a murderer.

And it would be murder. But he deserved it.

Self, you’re not here for him. You’re here for the saber. Osret is secondary.

Get the saber.

This was a good thought, I judged.

“Osret, where is my sword?” I asked and some other voice interrupted.

“Hold, mortal!”

Oh, biscuits. Who was that?

I turned around, and some fop in silk and boots came up the road behind me.

The birds overhead were going nuts. They’d never really shut up, even for the night, but now they were raising a din.

He wore a designer sword with emerald fabric woven through the belt and scabbard. It looked mid-length and straight, long enough to fence with but possibly edged. He looked proud of it. He ran up and drew while outside my range before stepping in. The blade fell into line with my neck.

“Mortal, you are guilty of crimes against Mallens, Honor Him,” he said.

“Which ones?” I demanded.

“Deadly ones.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“He tried to kill me!” interrupted Osret, but the interruption of his panic-breathing set him coughing.

“Not you,” said the fop. “Worse. Treason.”

Oh, sickness and death, everything was ruined. They found out about the killing, they had traced an assassin, I was going to Hell until they could stretch my life out no longer in pain and all I could say was, “Could you be more specific?”

The fop could. “You have eaten honeydew and nectar, and it is treason for a mortal to take the sustenance of the gods,” and he looked so pleased with himself.

I went slack jawed. I had to deliberately shut my mouth.

“But I caught you,” he continued. “I will–”

I took off my belt and wrapped it around my off-hand forearm.

“Mortal, are you high?”

I blitzed.

My left opened the gate, catching his blade on the belt and shoving forward and down. His sword cut through leather like butter. My right shot past the fop’s head. He juked to the side, swung the sword wide and around, but my left, no longer blocking, got him dead in the guts. I got inside his counterstroke and threw the boxing cross.

I didn’t catch him cleanly in the jaw. I got him at an angle, but up close like that, I had the hip action double dirty. He hit a wall and bounced.

I threw the left again, a wide, stupid shot that’s worthless if they see it coming. But the fop was having a religious experience, an epiphany, and seeing nothing but himself. He wasn’t fated to win. He was other people, and I hit him so hard he fell out from under the sword.

I chased.

He hit the ground, rolled, and the idiot had great reflexes. He came up with a knife. He jabbed, I pulled back, and we circled.

Then everything changed. Hands up near the face, palms back, pushing straight shots with the quickest recoil I could, I moved back and let him come. He slashed with the knife. The knife was everything. He might eat a dozen, three dozen punches and win if he got one clean cut.

I feinted, feinted, he leaned back and came forward. He slashed overhead, and I kicked him in the inside of the thigh, right in the meaty part of the muscle. He tried to stab my leg but aborted when I threw that jab again. He blitzed, I faded back, he swung twice and I dodged everything to kick him in the same leg, this time the outside.

He pressured. I retreated and fell back, giving up a dozen good chances to deny him any. Now he chased. My belt was in half, one end flapping, and not long enough to block. I kept a grip on the tail of it in my left. I could block one or two with the off hand, but he’d lay the arm open for sure.

Sickness, I wish I’d taken the sword instead of closing.

He lunged, I retreated, we circled, I went for the fallen blade but he blocked me, I got another good leg shot, and fell back. He stepped forward, almost over the sword.

He was going to try to kick it up into his hands. He wanted it. I could taste his hunger for it. As soon as he did, as soon as all his weight landed on one leg, I was going to blitz so hard I’d knock his tastebuds out his back door.

And he knew.

He dropped onto both feet, even stance, right in front of the sword.

I rose up onto my toes.

We both knew.

He tried to body fake me. I didn’t fall for it.

He moved his off-hand out behind him, ready.

I breathed.

He body faked again.

I breathed.

He stomped one side of the handguard, the sword pivoted up, and he hooked a toe under the handle.

From outside range, I went. My right fist shot forward; my left followed. He swung the knife, I swung my left palm out and open with the folded up belt, smacked the blade, and he only cut the heel of my hand. I cleared his knife-hand sideways.

He caught his sword.

I got him in the throat.

His whole body went rigid, he dropped the sword, and I followed-up to his head. The bells of his temple rang, and the gods left. He dropped.

I looked back.

Osret was staring at me like I was the devil.

I picked up the sword, and the moment my hand touched its handle, I knew its name and lineage. This was the Drowning Breath of Ogden, made by Thorophus the Weapon Maker in his Eighth Testament. It had been forged of eight lesser blades that killed Ogden. His son, Aelon, had ordered this one of their steel and used it to avenge his father. I heard the words Thorophus whispered as he made it, and the dire hatred Aelon had spoken when he used it. It had been made for revenge, it hungered for revenge, and when I held it, the sword yearned.

I knew of this sword. I had had filed paperwork on it. It was a blade of Fate.

The fop was from Fate.

“He was from Fate,” I said out loud.

“Is from Fate. The Bureau of Sanction,” said a new voice, and a woman stepped from shadow to the ground. “You have not slain him yet.”

I looked at her and held the Drowning Breath.

She was tall and beautiful, hard but curved. She’d pulled chestnut hair back, wore white armor of moonsilk, and her boots were tall, laced things that reached the midpoint of her shins. Her jacket and pants were tight enough to move, but with moonsilk that meant nothing. It flowed like liquid silver. I could see the creases where her hips met her pelvis, the tightness of fabric across her chest, and the tiny dimples of muscles flexing on her rump. She had bright red eyes.

Around her shoulders flew a red and gold dragon, long as a python. It had no wings, but flames danced on its hide. It and she shared an eye color, red, but the dragon had scales too. Tiny flames seemed to escape from its lips as it slithered through the air, climbing on invisible things like a serpent might climb the roots of a great tree.

I didn’t know her. We’d never met. I would have remembered a hot dragon lady.

Well, hot because fire is hot…but no, sexy-fire-dragon-lady was definitely a thing. I had not known sexy-fire-draon-lady was a thing, nor that I was into it. I was. I would have known if we’d met.

We stared at each other, and the red of her eyes leaked out like tears. But her tears burned, and they leaped for the sky like candle-flames freed of their wicks.

“You may take him and leave,” I said.

She considered a moment. “No.”

I held the Drowning Breath of Ogden, and she wore a fire dragon like a scarf.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.

She didn’t move her feet but pulled her head back as if my words splattered crazy in her direction. “You’re asking me that?”

“Yes. If you run, I won’t chase you.”

“No,” she said again.

I raised the sword point until the blade stood between us.

Her dragon spiraled in and out, and she reached for it from one hand. The serpent turned to liquid fire from which she drew a long, single edged sword that danced in her hand. The flames of the dragon vanished, or perhaps its essence was merely made steel.

She had a dragon blade. If I did not know her, I knew of her kind. She was from the Bureau of Sanction.

I said something which had been said to me. “You think you’ll win, and you might, but this will not go well for you if you do.”

She smiled like I had in the House of Hemlin, where Zenjin had said that to me. Things had not gone well for me, but they’d gone much worse for him.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 15

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Chapter 15

The traitor dashed up two flights. His footsteps banged overhead. The stairs were folded and stacked, and he was only ten feet away if I could reach through the ceiling. But the fork wouldn’t go that far. I followed him up the first set of stairs, around a hallway to the next flight, and up the stairs again. At the top of this one, I saw him dive into a room, but I didn’t have time to throw anything.

By the time I crossed the little hallway, he’d slammed his door shut. It was one of those flimsy interior things. I went through it like paper, and Osret hadn’t even stayed to try to lock it. He was already running through a closet that opened into a bathroom.

The bedrooms on each floor shared a bathroom, and on the other side, he ran through an open doorway into a different bedroom. Again he tried to slam the door shut, but I threw the fork and stapled the door to the wall. Osret ran. I came after. He threw some suits off a rack and got back to the stairway. This time he ran down.

I jumped the stairs, hit him with both feet in the back, and knocked him across a wooden floor. He slid like the puck in a hammerslide game. Unfortunately, the stairs had been steep, and in jumping, I’d cracked my chin on the angled ceiling and landed on my rear end. He got up. I shook my head and rose. Footsteps pounded up the stairs below.

Osret turned to face me with his hands up in a boxing guard. I threw a straight right through his forearms, caught him dead on the chin, and lifted him off his feet. He did a backflip through the door behind him.

It was a little library, like a den or a workroom, and smelled like lemon cleaner. Stacks of wooden boxes collected dust in the corners, and the only light was the hall light coming through the door. It flickered as someone ran past.

I chased Osret, and as he tried to get up again, grabbed him by the expensive vest collar. The idiot wore a vest. I put my hip into it, threw him out a window, and he screamed as he broke the glass.

Apseto and Nurim appeared in the doorway. They’d got more knives, but they looked terrified. For a moment, they hesitated.

“He betrayed me and killed your friends. You have done me no harm. Good bye,” I said and jumped out the window.

We were only on the third floor. It was only twenty feet up. Osret wouldn’t have had a problem if he had jumped, not tumbled, but the tumbling and the broken glass fragments hurt. Still, he was up and running when I landed in a crouch. He fled, abandoning every pretense but speed, and raced along the street with his arms pumping. I ran after, my fingers clenched into fists.

#

He was a fit guy. He clearly ran for exercise, and everyone runs faster when they’re chased. But he ran wild, all adrenaline while gasping for air, not pacing himself, and while he nearly lost me in the first block, he had to slow down for the next. He missed a good opportunity to take a side street and maybe lose me. Then I had him in sight.

The streets were bizarrely empty. The day I’d arrived, there had been people on the roads and sidewalks. I’d slipped between them, trying to appear as an ‘other’ to everyone and had received no attention. Now no one else walked the sidewalks or waited at street corners. Even the people who worked outside, vendors, rickshaw cabbies, and buskers, all found other places to be. Osret and I had the city to ourselves. Clouds still filled the sky, and the thin light that made it through wasn’t strong enough to cast any shadows. If anything, the cloud cover was lower and boiled faster. More often lightning flashed without ever coming down.

The unnatural emptiness of the city lead to one moment I didn’t have the time to think about. While I chased Osret down a street with townhouses on each side, I noticed a figure standing on a rooftop, watching. Her long, black braids were pulled back, the braids showing the first hints of white hair. She wore one of those cape-things women liked. It looked like a long jacket without sleeves but with a thick collar.

Those cape-things are expensive. I don’t know why, but only luxury places make them.

Either way, she had no business standing on a rooftop, watching me chase Osret through the streets, and yet that’s what she did.

But chasing Osret took all of my attention, moreso when he realized he hadn’t lost me. He started taking fast turns, going right then left, cutting through alleys and hopping fences. I stayed on him but couldn’t close the gap.

Finally he tried to brute force out-distance me, skipping all the turns and shifts to head straight south, pounding out miles. If he hadn’t burned all that energy to begin with, he would have made it. But he’d never had a chance to catch his breath with the sprinting. While he stretched his lead as far as two blocks, I cut it in half and half again. When next he looked back, I was almost on him, less than a hundred feet behind.

He turned down some random road, and I don’t think he had a plan. The road lead to a blackstone rookery with basalt walls and limestone window sills. Gulls covered the roof. They’re noisy, chattering birds. Osret ran straight to the front door, tried it, and found it locked. He was gasping now. He pulled back to take it with his shoulder when I crashed into him from behind, kicked his feet out from under him, and he dropped.

He didn’t even flail when he hit the ground. He just breathed.

I was finally going to get my sword back.

Did I kill him?

I stood still for a moment, unprepared for the thought. He had betrayed and shot me, he’d killed his cousins, but he lay at my feet. He couldn’t fight. Did I kill him?

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 14

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Chapter 14

I’d conspired with Koru, King of Rats, to assassinate Mallens, Lord of Creation, King of the Titans. We had not succeeded.

My job was handling logistics. I’d carried the bribes, distributed the weapons, and moved the paper. I’d volunteered for the kill-team, hadn’t been taken, and now the kill-team had been killed. I was the only link between Koru and the other high conspirators and the assassins, and my metaphorical fingerprints were all over everything. Right now, I worried that the weapons the killers had used, copies of Death’s scepter All Things Ending, could lead back to me. Hasso, the forger, had put a maker’s mark on them, and he would definitely tell anyone who asked that everything was my fault.

Most of the weapons had been destroyed, but some Celestials had found one. When I’d tried to buy it, one of the Celestials, Osret, had betrayed us. He killed his two friends and shot me. I should have died but didn’t. Now he had the secret I needed.

Leving Dr Lammet’s underground home, I found a new day overcast and gray. A short walk took me to a safehouse I’d set up less than a week ago for the kill team. With them dead, no one else knew it existed. A water tower rose among tall, blank buildings with yellow and gray walls of sandstone, behind cover of pines. The tower hadn’t been used in years. I climbed the ladder one-handed, jimmied open the trick door, and rolled into a round room with a flat floor. It had blankets, a sleeping pad, and a few sealed water jugs. By the look of it, no one had been here since I had.

I dropped my bag and did the honeydew vials like shooters. Then I poured a little water into each one, drank that, and finally sucked the empty glass jars like a pacifier. Medicine always comes in useless packaging that ruins half the stuff. Then I lay down and slept like the dead for five or six hours. Inside the water tower was a black hole, and I’d feel it shake if anyone climbed the ladder.

When I woke up, I ate another package of ambrosia and checked my arm. It moved sufficiently if not well, but the brace impaired my mobility. I took it off and stashed it in the gym bag. I’d put it on when I returned. The ambrosia gone, I went looking for more.

Before the hit, I’d hidden four packages of payoff money for the assassins, and they weren’t going to need them anymore. Each package had money, ambrosia, some fake documents, and a small weapon or good luck charm. One had been lost, Osret had taken the money from two, and I moved through Hyperion, capital city of Heaven, toward the last.

Clouds lay low and heavy in the sky. They were big, round-bellied clouds that promised rain but withheld it, and on top Mt Attarkus a spiraling storm of darker shades roiled with lightning. Sometimes lightning bolts crackled down to the lower skies, but it rarely struck the ground. Instead it crawled across the hanging bellies like disjoint-legged spiders.

The sun must be up but showed no sign. Light came from lanterns and house lights. Someone had turned off the street lights. Ion’s palace, usually a monstrosity of unnecessary lamps and bonfires, looked tame with a few bright windows and one small lantern shining over the front door. But its windows had lace curtains drawn, and the door lamp vanes had been turned down.

It took me a couple hours to go less than three miles across empty streets because I kept getting lost. Ultimately I fell into my destination. I had crossed a small footbridge over a storm runoff where lamplight didn’t go, feeling wet ground for a small path, when I stepped wrong, fell through cattails to the muddy creek bed, and chose to break my fall with my head instead of my bad arm. I finally saw stars under the cloudy sky. After a bit I got up and started poking around.

This was one of my better stash spots. An abandoned garden filled blocked drainage ditch. The garden’s walls were worked stone under a worked bridge, so the dryads wouldn’t tend it. However it was in a storm drain, so the Celestials thought it beneath them. Tall grass hadn’t been cut in years, cattails clogged the waterway, and privacy hedges hid the unsightly area from the neighboring palaces. I’d hidden the last package behind a stone in the garden wall.

Now, the rock lay in the middle of the drainage ditch. The stash space lay empty. I felt a worm. He didn’t say anything. I decided to call him Alphonse.

Okay but seriously, now my sickness had gone terminal.

Someone had come here, pulled the stone out, and taken the box.

That someone might have seen me hide it. Once I’d gone, they’d investigated, found one hundred and twenty five thousand sesteres free for the taking, and took it. Possible.

Agents of Mallens could have taken it. They could know everything I’ve been doing all along. They could be telling Mallens about me right now, and all my plans were too late.

They could be watching me right now.

It could be… self, what did it matter?

The package wasn’t here.

I went south to the house of the cousins Hemlin.

#

Their townhouse rose on two stubby legs with a corridor or tunnel between them. They’d shut and locked a gate across the tunnel. Around back, it had a courtyard with a little garden and some sheds, and abutted an alley. A tall fence enclosed the property, with a locked carriage gate, but they hadn’t taken their trash in. I eased up onto a closed trashcan and tested my arm. It hurt but worked.

I pulled my head over the rear fence. The courtyard was empty, the house lit, and privacy curtains pulled over the windows. I saw moving figures in the first floor.

I rolled over the fence and stole across the courtyard. Their main door lead to a tiny foyer in one of the legs, and up a steep flight of stairs to the second floor. The exterior door was a glass oval, but the interior door at the top of the stairs was an ironwood portal. That was their main level with the kitchen, dining room, and open area. I hadn’t gone upstairs, but had seen them go upstairs to change their clothes.

I poked around the backyard, found a building stone I could lift with both hands, and threw it through the glass door. Stained glass shattered and fell. I dashed through, took the stairs in two steps, and spoke Prothadeus Raln.

Prothadeus Raln changed qualities to quantities. They had locked the door. They hadn’t locked it enough. I hit the door with my foot, it shattered like the stained glass, and I entered the living room.

Apseto had been behind the door. He was falling over a couch now. Nurim ducked around the kitchen counter with cooking knives in either hand, and as I came in, he started slinging. I dove and rolled, cleavers thudding into the walls.

Osret had frozen in a main room, standing by the dinner table near Nurim. I charged him. He turned for the stairs and ran.

Nurim grabbed more knives, smaller ones they’d probably never used. I threw a chair at him, he threw knives at the chair, and the razor-sharp blades chunked through it. The seat-cushion caught their handles, and the chair hit him. He threw it down, but I threw a flying knee into him. He hit the cupboard, his rear-end burst through the doors, and I left him there with soup pouring down his legs.

Osret’s footsteps thudded up the stairs. I grabbed an eight-inch carving fork and raced up the stairs after him.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 13

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Chapter 13

Excuse me, but getting shot really hurts. It’s unfathomable until you understand. Yes, people get shot and run around, hopped up on adrenaline or anger, but those are simply more powerful things. The shock of taking a round, one round, astounded me.

I got shot in the shoulder, and to keep my arm from jiggling, I had to limp down the road. I felt ridiculous. Half a block away the parking lot fence ended at a narrow alley. On the other side a row of highrises had storefronts on their first floors. I ducked into the alley, limped past boxes, empty moving material, and three rows of hungry plants. When I slumped against the wall, they woke up and sniffed. Fat, gray tongues moved from green lips to taste the air. I could not rest here long.

I checked my arm. It was an in-and-out, with a tiny entry hole in the side and gaping exit wound in back. The bullet had made a right turn somewhere inside my shoulder. My collar-bone hurt across my shoulders. My fore-arm ached down to the elbow. I bled like a waterfall, like my shoulder had a spigot.

It wasn’t a clean, oh-golly-I’ve-been-shot-now-I’ll-fight-on wound. This one wound to one arm made me feel destroyed as a living thing.

Wow, I was in shock. I’d thought that took longer. My teachers had told me that it took a while, and they were not correct, which meant that Northshore–

Self.

I stared at my shoulder.

Make bleeding stop.

Yes.

I took my wet clothes out of the gym-bag, which I’d kept somehow, folded my shirt into a pad, and belted it to the exit wound.

I got distracted because I could see clouds. The sky was full of them.

I took my pants out of the gym-bag, made a long pad, and wrapped my whole shoulder. I tied it down with my socks. I kept fading in and out, getting sleepy, so I popped the half-eaten roll of ambrosia wafers. That woke me up like a bucket of water, and I checked the dressing again, fixing a few loose points.

What was I going to do?

You know what I was going to do.

I got up, and used my right hand to slide my left arm into Aesthus’s sweater’s pocket. It was one of those long, two-opening pockets over my belly. I tucked my arm in there.

Then I checked the sidewalk and didn’t see Osret. I couldn’t see much of anything. The heavy overcast had made an evening out of afternoon, and the streets were grim and quiet. Someone would come for the gunshots, but I had a very small amount of time.

I walked back to the parking lot, didn’t see Osret, went in, checked the space between carriages, and saw Aesthus and Zenjin. They both lay dead, eyes open in expanding pools of blood. The package was gone. The saber was gone. Osret was gone. There were footprints in the blood.

I left.

That was a dumb thing to do, self, but I didn’t waste more time in self criticism. I got out of there without leaving a footprint in the blood, and headed westward, away from the ocean. I thought I recalled a temple to Maya that way, and she took all visitors.

Hopefully.

#

I didn’t make it to Maya’s temple. I finally went down in a grove of cypress trees. They stood like teeth, elegantly sculpted into tall cylinders with pointed tops and rounded bases. All of them had their lower branches trimmed to hide the trunk, and low piles of mulch and tastefully arranged needles helped conceal the vulgarity of a tree rooting in dirt. Several offset lines of them followed a wide road. I was stumbling down the road when I fell over. I crawled away from the road and got somewhere hidden. All around me, silent trees pointed at the sky.

I fell asleep.

My dreams emerged from a peculiar blackness. I definitely dreamt of oblivion for a while. It wasn’t like a normal dream with images, houses like and not-like houses I’ve lived in, people I knew doing things those people would never do. I dreamt of nothing and blackness, an infinite stillness without fear, feeling, or thought.

And then images appeared like stars. They emerged in hints. It began with words my parents used to say, their accents, their sounds. My father had grunted a lot. He communicated with a bunch of ‘hmm’ sounds. My mother sang. My father actually sang pretty well too, and my mother always goaded him into singing more. Sometimes he sang under his breath and she would join the tune, and he looked like she’d caught him at something. And then she smirked, but he wouldn’t stop to let her ‘win’ so they sang a duet in the wagon or under it, where we lived when I was young.

Their voices appeared first in the darkness, and then came sights of the wagon. It was a big, boxy thing on four wheels with two horses. The horses smelled of sweat and animal, but they liked me so long as I approached from the front. The wagon had tall sides and a round top. It had a body of fabric and steel.

In my dream it rained and beat the roof. My parents and I took refuge inside, the horses grazed in the rain, and stars in lanterns filled the wagon with light and warmth. I was very young. My mom still carried me. My parents sang, and in my dreams, I fell asleep.

But inside the dream, the darkness didn’t return. For I dreamed forgotten dreams I’d dreamed as a kid, dreams of animals and plants. I dreamed of birds and goats, and they stepped from the real dreams I’d had, now remembered, to the dream I had under the cypress trees as I lay dying. Horses walked from inside out; fish swam through the air. In the way of dreams, things got fuzzy, and soon I lost the thread of which dream was which. People and characters moved without limits.

In the end, I opened my eyes and saw a man and woman, wrapped in trees and leaves. This was real.

I stared at them. They stared at me. We’d all surprised each other.

The two dryads were leafy people. They wore headdresses of laurel and clothes of ivy. They went barefoot. The woman wore many bracelets of wicker that rattled like windchimes as she moved her arms, and the man a torq of bamboo. They did not appear armed.

I put my hands up to show they were empty and said, “Hey.”

The dryads looked at each other.

“Hey,” said the man.

“How do you feel?” asked the woman.

“Pretty bad,” I said honestly.

“You got shot,” said the man.

I nodded.

“We were worried for you,” she said.

“We didn’t know if you were going to make it,” he added.

“I’m surprised I did,” I said.

They nodded.

The conversation hit a pause. I looked around.

They lived in a partially-underground forest house. Gnarled roots of something that smelled of pine formed a bubble overhead, one perforated with windows as the twisted roots passed from trunk to ground. A dozen windchimes hung from the ceiling, rattling when the tree moved in the wind. The air down here smelled of loam and old wood.

Two holes, doorways without doors, lead to other bubble rooms under the knurled roots of trees. One looked a lot like a kitchen and bath. A stream flowed through one wall to be diverted and split into a dozen lesser waterfalls and tubes. They all drained through a fault in the floor. The other had a bed. It also had some clotheslines, pegs, and several clean but organic shelf-structures. The shelves bent, the frames twisted, and the whole assemblies were packed tight against each other, placed in cunning and space-saving fashion. Her underwear piled on his. His shirts covered hers.

If they were anything like my parents, they were fighting for closet-space by stacking their stuff on each others. They weren’t angry-fighting, I bet, but they were definitely battling to see who’s shirts went on top.

My heart ached remembering my parents. I stuffed it aside. This wasn’t a good time to think about them, it was never a good time to think about them, but I slipped sometimes.

I checked my arm.

I’d been rebandaged. Uncarded cotton had been worked into smooth pads, no stray fibers emerging, and tied over the exit wound. They’d packed it deep in there. The entry wound was small enough they’d stuck a long, pointy leaf over it, one that stuck to the skin. It hurt like madness, and the cotton against the injury had turned reddish black, but there was still fluffy white stuff on top. They’d wrapped everything in some wide leaves and moss, likely for cleanliness.

I really didn’t know what to say. I figured I’d try to be polite.

“Thank you. How am I?”

The man made a face like he was stretching his mouth and stared at the ceiling, and the woman looked away. He sighed. She watched him and waited.

The man said, “You got shot. The shoulder’s pretty bad. Your humerus–” he drew his finger from elbow to shoulder “–-is broken at the joint, and scapula–” he pointed at the back of my shoulder “–is either bruised or fractured. The bullet looks like it bounced off the joint. You lost a lot of blood.

“You’ve got bruises and grip marks on your shoulders, sides, and hips. You had cold burns on your side, your knee was broken and you haven’t been staying off it well enough, multiple bruises in your hands like you’ve been fighting, and that shoulder. Ah, that shoulder.

“We operated, pinned, pegged, and set the bones. After that we cleaned that up, packed your arm, gave you stitches, and stuck you in a splint.” He degenerated into leafy babble, talking about the foliage wrapping my arm. The leaves formed a hard shell, reinforced with tiny vines and a peculiar mixture of moss. Wet and dried, it hardened into a carapace. He talked about stitches. He talked about my hands.

I hadn’t realized how many of the nereids had tried to take a chunk out of me. The dryad doctor drummed his fingers on a table. I tried to look innocent.

After several long seconds wherein the doctor obviously had a lot to say he was sorting through, he made a decision.

“You can imagine my surprise when I found you on my doorstep. Mortals are not allowed within Hyperion.”

I’d been waiting for that, trying to get ahead, and when he asked, I still had no answer. The first thing that floated to the surface in my head was, “Oh, this? Of course. It’s a disguise.”

That stopped him. “Disguise?”

“Yes, yes. You mean the appearance?”

“Yes.”

“I’m hiding myself.”

“Then who are you? You have the ears and eyes of a dryad, but not the color.”

“I wouldn’t be holding the disguise well if I told you.”

“What is your name, son?” he asked. He corrected himself. “What shall I call you?”

“Remus. And you?”

He was doctor Lammet and his wife doctor Melia. She was a pediatrician. He worked trauma care.

I’d passed out in an ideal place. Thanks be to Limatra. Or had I been lucky?

Either way, I thanked him. “I appreciate your help. So, in regular terms, how am I doing? I assume I’m going to live?”

He exhaled heavily. “You tell me. Are you going to go pick a fight and open up all your injuries again?”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

He snorted. It wasn’t my fault.

“You’re not out of the woods yet,” he said, adding partially to himself, “And I’m not quite sure what to do with you.”

“Medication, words of encouragement, and send me on my way.”

“How about a bill and you stop getting shot?”

“Sorry. Got mugged. No cash.”

“Of course not. This is Hyperion. Which pantheon should I send the bill to?”

“Dr Lammet, I’m in disguise. That’s exactly the sort of thing I can’t talk about!”

He looked at me like he’d just drank poison.

“I’m going to have to file with Saffron Skies, aren’t I?”

Saffron Skies was a bastion of the titan’s government. When you did work for Saffron Skies, you should be proud to wait for your lords. They work on Heaven’s time. This is why we’d tried to kill Mallens.

I smiled ingratiatingly. He didn’t look like I’d ingratiated myself.

“The problem is, Remus, that there are two different medication paths for you. I saw you had ambrosia in your pack, and it will help you. But if you’re mortal, it will also burn out your life. Those are good years you’ll lose. If you’re a spirit or Celestial, your string is long.

“So be honest. This matters. Are you mortal?”

I looked him dead in the eye. “No.”

“And this?” he waved at me generally.

I shrugged and looked innocent.

“Any medical history? Are your parents healthy?”

“They’re dead.”

His ears perked up. “Sorry to hear that. How?”

“Violence,” I said. “It’s not catching.”

“Says the man shot and beat up.”

“Doc, you’re being a little hostile here.”

“Because I’m tried, I’m just tired, of patching people up and seeing you go off and do the exact same dumb things that got you here in the first place. You’re wasting my work, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

“It always is. Stop getting shot, vessick.”

Vessick doesn’t really translate, but it means what it sounds like.

“Your bedside manner could be improved.”

“Your patient manner is shtuttick!”

Again, exactly what it sounds like.

I shrugged with one shoulder.

He sighed again, said something unfriendly, and went into their kitchen. I heard him going somewhere in there, but the small doorway didn’t show him. Dr Melia didn’t follow him with her eyes.

“You young men,” she said quietly.

I had no reply to that, and she didn’t pursue the matter. She turned her back on me to tidy medical equipment into storage, and we waited for Dr Lammet.

A short pause later, he reappeared with a cotton sack. We went through the contents together. Willow bark, to be chewed, bandages and dressings, to be changed, a pair of extremely nice scissors, ointments, pills, and antiseptics. He even gave me a small mirror.

“Try to have a medical professional change your bandages. They’re mostly on your back, so you won’t be able to see them. But if you do have to do it yourself, use the mirror.”

“Thank you.”

He held up two vials of tiny slices of honeydew bathed in nectar. He didn’t give them over.

“Remus, honey dew is illegal for a mortal. They will catch you. Are you mortal?”

“No,” I said again.

He stared into my eyes for a while before handing the packages over. I put them in the gym-bag with everything else.

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 12

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Chapter 12

I had a moment of peculiar introspection. Maybe not even introspection. Recollection maybe.

Less than an hour ago, I’d considered killing all five of them for the blade. That would have been a bad fight, but I was desperate. Now, I had the sword, they stood to let me take it, but I’d have to pay them nigh everything I had.

Two hundred and fifty thousand sesteres was a lot of money. I told myself not to get wrapped up in comparative value. They had a nice house, probably worth a million or more, and it made the quarter ton I’d offered them look light.

Forget all that. The assassins would have been paid a million, half up front and gone, half on completion. Half-a-million sesteres lay in cases I’d hid around the city, a lot of money, and if this deal walked, I’d walk away with a quarter ton. If I was smart with it, smarter than the idiots I knew or the fool I had been, I could stretch a that a long way. I knew people who knew money. Northshore had a finance department, and I had friends. I could do well.

But I didn’t pay them, with all four drops I’d have more, and I could do much better. That’s the way money works. More is a lot better than what you have.

All the risk was front-loaded. Draw now, kill everyone, leave. It nicely silenced any talking mouths too.

That was what Koru had meant to do to me.

It wasn’t any complicated ethics I thought of. I thought of people: Koru, Astras, Hoarfast, and Seraphine. Seraphine had let them try to kill me. They had done unto me what I considered doing onto these others. There are rules and laws about killing. We had religions like cow turds on a ranch, and some variation of ‘Don’t kill people’ seemed present in all of them. I didn’t care about any of that.

I thought of Koru.

I warned Apseto. “I’m going to point this toward that wall.”

He moved clear but stayed between me and the windows.

I rotated the blade, keeping the tip away from him and avoiding anything that could be interpreted as a slashing motion.

The edge was flecked with stars. They moved inside the steel, floating like dust specks in water. A lighter type of steel, almost milky, made up the cutting surface. The metal body was darker but polished like a mirror. I saw distorted images of myself and the Hemlin cousins. The straight edge was as thick as my pinky finger, and just forward of it ran a groove on both sides. Up and down it dripped shadows, a slow dissipation of darkness into air.

The bottom had a fake stamp, artfully forged. A flower crossed a scepter, and below it stood three runes. No one read runes any more. I didn’t either, but I’d memorized these three: All Things Ending.

Badly-engraved writing on the hilt said, ‘Saber by Hasso, Twenty Fourth of Messidor.’

Hasso had left a maker’s mark on a forgery. I contemplated that for a moment.

“Sleep forever,” I whispered, and the sword glittered. My words ran down the blade like a wave breaking through a tide of phosphorescent algae. Star-fragments sparkled under the fluid of shadow and went still.

I put it down on the table and wrapped it in their table cloth. Anything they hadn’t already seen, I didn’t want them seeing now.

“It’s real. Decide who’s coming. I want to leave Hyperion tonight.”

The room exhaled again.

“’You taking the table cloth?” asked Nurim.

“I’m taking the table cloth.”

“Take the table cloth.”

A number of lower intensity negotiations happened. I said I’d stay away from the table provided no one else came close. They agreed, but Zenjin said he’d cover me. I agreed but wanted him to put the gun away. They hashed out who was coming with me and decided on Zenjin, Osret, and Aesthus. I ate the rest of their bread. That I wouldn’t tell them where the money was didn’t bother them. They expected that. Likewise, I expected their refusal to leave me alone for any reason until they’d been paid.

“That includes using the water house,” said Zenjin, waving his finger. “If you’ve got to drop a package, we’re going to be in the stall with you.”

I nodded. If three of them joined me in a stall, we’d better be really friendly, and we were not that friendly. But none of them were going to go alone.

I thought of them as one entity, the cousins Hemlin. That entity would stay close until paid.

They’d also eaten and snacked. We left Nurim and Apseto, and headed out into the city.

I carried the saber, and Zenjin walked behind me. Osret walked with him. Aesthus took at my left side, and I carried the saber in that hand. Osret had given me a gym-bag for my wet clothes, which was quite clever because now I had a bulky thing in each hands. The saber was too long to fit in the bag.

They weren’t stupid. They’d made a few mistakes, but they were smart people trying to think their way through hard problems with very little warning and no experience. I felt better that I was going to pay them and leave.

The first drop had been a little lending library in the Anentine neighborhood. The Anentines, a collection of insecure new gods that coalesced into a pantheon to stop other people from making fun of them, built immense, empty palaces with tiny backyard houses. They threw a lot of dinner parties, spent fortunes on candles for their unoccupied mansions, and lived in their tiny houses. Most were nature aligned in some way. The little lending library I went to had stood on a small pole mostly engulfed by a wild hedge, an idiotic bit of gardening fashion that I found quite useful. The hedge was no longer wild.

It wasn’t anything. Nor was the lending library. Mallens had stomped it into a hole through the crust of the earth. I saw sandstone and lime, thicker marble, black basalt, and deeper bedrock until vast drive gears loomed underground like hidden shapes.

The cousins Hemlin observed me looking at the crater. Eyes narrowed. Frowns hardened. I did a little mental trig. The library had been in the center of that crater.

“Keep walking,” I said and set off quickly.

I felt the cousins glancing between each other, watching me, looking at the buried hole. I felt like the empty houses hid dozens of watchers. I had to fight down the notion that the Hemlin cousins were going to figure out I had lied about everything and they’d know what I’d done. I kept walking.

The next drop was much simpler. I’d wrapped the package in wax paper, waterproofed it with more, and dropped it into a horse trough. They say the stables of Hyperion are always clean, but this one had some algae growing in it. Rain gutters fed it from the stable’s roof.

The trough was arm-deep, so I dropped the gym-bag, held the wrapped saber, and stuck my arm in. Without words, Aesthus kept a watch, Zenjin watched me, and Osret watched them.

The package was there, but it had gotten stuck. I had to use some muscle. The Hemlins were big guys, and any of them could have done it easier. I didn’t ask, and they didn’t offer.

I yanked it out, took the gym bag, and we ducked into the stable. The horses didn’t care.

“Somebody got a knife?” I asked.

Osret did. “Give me the package. I’ll open it.”

“Just let me use your knife. I’ll open it.”

Glances shot between them. Aesthus nodded. Osret ignored him. Zenjin finally nodded, but Osret refused him too. I really didn’t want to use the saber.

“There could be anything in there,” argued Osret.

“There’s money and my stuff. It’s not weaponry or dangerous, but it’s mine,” I said.

“I’ll just open it–”

“Don’t do that,” said Aesthus, for the first time sounded tired and short. “If it’s booby-trapped, I want it to go off on him.”

Osret froze. “Is it booby trapped?”

“Of course not.”

I didn’t even fake lie. They weren’t going to believe anything I said anyway.

Unhappily, Osret gave me a stubby pocket knife. I’d sealed the package well, so I had to scrape sealing-wax aside. Zenjin moved out at an angle, standing by a tack rack, and drew that piece of his again. He kept it down, but I was getting quite tired of the way he went for it everytime something happened.

Maybe he’d just bought it.

I put the box on the ground so everyone could see it, squatted, and opened the wooden box. It had a sliding lid, the outside of which was damp. Inside, packed in cedar shavings, rolls of silver coins lay in wax rolls. Each coin bore Mallens’s seven-pointed crown, the points capped with glittering fragments of real stars, and the edges rippled with alloyed adamant. Each coin was worth five thousand sesteres, and I’d packed five rolls of five.

Without uttering a word, I gave all five rolls to Osret.

He unrolled one, inspected the coins, and gave them to Aesthus. The two of them went through each coin. Zenjin watched, and I could see his shoulders clench. He kept leaning forward when they picked up a silver piece and held it to the faint light of the stable. But he stayed cautious, back, and tried to look everywhere at once. Osret offered him a roll of money. He declined to keep both hands on the gun.

The package also had four wax-paper rolls of ambrosia. I took one out, opened it so they could see what it was, and offered them a wafer. It had dried out. They declined. I popped one, chewed and swallowed, and hid the rolls in my clothing or in the gym-bag.

I took out four sets of passage documents and hid them in the gym-bag. The package also had a tiny idol of Limatra, the Autumn Goddess of Good Luck and Found Wealth. She was four inches tall, standing, with one hand out, two others clasped, and one loose at her side. The loose one was a hidden switch for a spring-loaded blade. I showed her as well before putting the idol in a pocket.

The package also had a dead rat. I hadn’t put it there, and it worried me immensely. I threw it to a hungry plant, which woke up long enough to eat the rodent corpse. On a hunch, I threw the plant the box too, as well as the wax paper and as much wax as I could scrape off the ground.

“That was one twenty five. Of the next package, I will give you one hundred and twenty five, and our business will be done. Do we all agree?” I asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go,” said Aesthus.

We left. Our walk was a little easier, significantly less tense. Payment breeds loyalty, and while they gave me no loyalty, I had bought a little trust. I popped a few more ambrosia wafers.

Ambrosia’s the stuff. If you want to really put on mass, you lift heavy, eat ambrosia, train, eat ambrosia, and lift heavy again, all in the same day. You can get huge, and you don’t get the aches and pains of low-lifting. I used to do strength circuits every morning, four hours of combat in the afternoon, pop ambrosia, do it again, and sleep like bliss. I hadn’t worked out hard in a couple of weeks as that assassination thing had been taking up my time, but the ambrosia did its work. I was feeling better than ever.

The next drop point was a similairly waxed package, hidden in the dirt under some flowers. They formed a small garden, not two feet wide, that ringed a large flower-shaped fountain, one that spouted like pedals. It was a little park, mostly out of the way, and not exactly hidden but not easily seen either. I had worried about this one, because the dryads who tended such gardens could easily have found it. They hadn’t.

I took the package, the four of us dipped into a parking area, and hid between two carriages. The carriage horses, mules, goats, lions, or whatever had been stabled elsewhere, and the leading harnesses stripped. The carriages were tall, four-wheeled things, capable of carrying four important passengers in comfort and perhaps half a dozen servants on varying benches, platforms, and fold-away chairs. Not only was the carriage yard concealed by a tall wall, through with there was only one gate, but no one in that direction could see us through the carriage anyway.

I held the package up so everyone could see it too was thoroughly wrapped in wax paper. I asked for the knife, and Osret refused.

“No. I’m opening that one. I don’t know what your game is, but you’re up to something. Give it to me.”

Sickness take me, I should have given it to him and left. But there was ambrosia, and I needed it. There was an idol of Arya who hid secrets, and I thought I might keep her around. So I stayed for a bunch of stuff when I could have just given them the box and ran.

He took out his knife to cut it open and stopped. “Would you back up a little bit? You’re in my space.”

I wasn’t—well, I was in his space, but the space between the carriages wasn’t that big. I backed up.

“And you,” Osret said to Zenjin, who’d pulled his Puritan again. “Watch him.”

“I am watching him!”

“Not enough! Watch him like the Sun. Point the gun at him or something. He got a little loose last time he opened one of these.”

“Oh, blisters on you,” snorted Zenjin. He glared at me.

Aesthus looked like he wanted to avoid an argument, so he took a step away too.

Osret crouched down but shifted the box to his knife hand. He put his other hand on the bottom. I looked away for a split second at Zenjin, who was almost flagging me with the Puritan, and noticed some movement in Osret’s hands. I looked back.

With gun in his other hand, the one concealed underneath the package, Osret shot Zenjin twice in the chest. Something banged like sledgehammers on steel and blew Zenjin’s ribcage out his back.

Aesthus screamed, and Osret shot him too.

I bolted from the carriages and ran for the road.

Osret ran around the other side, tracked me across the parking-lot with his holdout gun, and sent rounds after me. Two missed.

The third did not.

For a holdout gun, that thing kicked like a horse.

He got me in the shoulder, I dropped and skidded on my face, and Osret walked me down. The saber fell a dozen yards away.

Before shooting, he said, “Sorry, Remus. I don’t know who you are and don’t care. If it makes you feel better, I don’t think you’re a bad guy. But I can’t have people knowing what happened here.”

Glory, I wish I had that forged sword. It was right there. But Osret was closer, and he drew a bead.

I flicked the hidden switch on the idol of Limatra, the spring-loaded blade shot out, and stabbed him through the center of the forehead. Luck was with me. He blasted wide, emptying his cylinder into the wall by the saber.

But I wasn’t there. I’d gone the other way, out the gate, and fled the parking lot. Everything was wasted, and I still didn’t have the sword.

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Timeline

Karesh Ni is the sequel to Bloodharvest. It’s comparatively ‘Modern Day’ in Pallas.

Twilight in Heaven is in the dawn ages. It’s part of my Silmarillion.

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Karesh Ni: Chapter 7

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Chapter 7

The front doors looked like the outside thirds of an oval shoved together. They were round and tall, and came together at a point. On either side hung a lantern on a silver cord, glowing with red, blue, and white light as if many different fires were confined to one small vessel of glass. Inside the floor was polished, and yet my feet could tell where the floor was smooth marble and where it was slicker quartz. But it was warm, and my breath no longer steamed. My hostess had me lead to another office, one with frosted glass walls and a glass roof, two floors up from the entryway to the building. She dismissed the guards at the door.

“Are you sure?” asked one of the guards when she told them they could leave us alone.

“Yes. You hospitallers may go,” she said.

“If she tries to escape?” asked the guard, a hospitaller apparently.

My real captor looked at me, the glass walls, the star-filled sky above, and back to him. “She can try.”

That ended their conversation. The guards left. She sat behind her desk and looked me up and down. Without taking off the ribbon, I couldn’t sit down. She put her knuckles to her lips like she was punched herself in the mouth very gently and sighed.

“Would you mind, please?” I asked. I held my hands out to her.

She stared at my hands, either lost in thought, cold and numb, or something else. I couldn’t tell. Suddenly she reached out and caught the ribbons with one index finger and pulled. The ribbons fell off.

When I was younger and had assumed serial killers would play a much larger part in my life, I’d learned to get out of handcuffs and ropes. I hadn’t started working on these yet, but I’d poked at them. I figured they were doable but tricky. They were not loose pieces of ribbon. They should not come off with a one-finger pull.

She got up, walked around the desk, and pulled the ribbon off my ankles the same way. Taking both, she returned to her seat while I transferred my coats to a hook on one wall. She looked at the binding, looked at me, and her face told me nothing. Her hands shuffled the ribbons back and forth as if she’d forgetten they were there.

“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” she asked.

“Astrologamage Elegy.”

“Astrologamage?” she repeated in a voice that didn’t imply she wanted a response.

I took off my first three jackets, left the last one on, and hung my various clothing, bags, sacks, and gear against the wall. I sat down. The room was pleasant and warm, brightly lit with more lanterns. They cast the same multi-hued glow. There were no drafts.

Like a frozen ship breaking out of the ice, my brain took a while to get back to that point.

She had lanterns and no drafts.

I looked around the room: no fireplaces, no vents, no holes in the ceiling. The room was warm and dry. There were no smoke trails on the glass, and the clean marble didn’t have soot trails. I stared at a lantern and saw twinkling white lights behind glass.

“You use stars in your lanterns?” I asked.

“Welcome to Whitefire,” said the woman, opening her hands to display her empty white desk and bright office. “The name means starlight, and we’re rather familiar with it. Now Astrologamage, star-sage, drawer of horoscopes, and reader of the future, why have you come to Karesh Ni?”

“I’m here to see Amon Tim,” I said.

“But you have not come to Hierophant Amon Tim, you have come to Eparch Tel Viv. Why do you wish to speak to the Hierophant?”

And that was the real question. I had actually thought about this, but my cold, confused brain wasn’t working. I had that feeling where I knew I knew something and couldn’t say it.

The first thing that came to mind was, “I’m looking for the previous hierophant, Kyria.”

Tel Viv rolled her lips around like she was tasting my words. “Why?”

“I threw her numbers, and she’s at the peak of my ascending fortune. The Treasure Chest favors her.”

“Bad news, girl. She’s dead.”

“My horoscope says she’s not.”

“We fed her to a dragon.”

“I believe.”

She didn’t really shake her head, just cocked it to the side like a half-shake. “Good luck.”

Our weird half-argument ground to a halt.

“Why did you ask for Amon Tim if you’re looking for Kyria?” asked the eparch.

“He is the hierophant. She was. He might be able to help me.”

Tel Viv gave that little half-shake again.

She sounded confident. She also wasn’t overcome with sadness. Alyssa had said Amon Tim and his eparchs, and Tel Viv called herself an eparch, had deposed Kyria. Also, just now, the eparch had said, ‘we fed’ of Kyria’s death.

“Why did you–” I wasn’t quite sure how to finish. I blinked a few times. If I could just start thinking, she was saying things I needed to know!

Tel Viv answered anyway. “Treason. Consorting with dark powers. Murder. If you want specifics, she summoned the dragon, we turned it away, and summoning dragons tends to end with someone getting eaten. Someone happened to be her and she deserved it.”

After a few seconds she continued, “You’re rather openly associating yourself with a dead traitor.”

And she jumped ahead of me. I hate the cold.

“I’m not associated with her yet!” I said quickly and just as quickly added, “Or at all if she’s dead. I can’t associate with her if she’s dead. I had no idea about any of this.”

Tel Viv looked at the ceiling. “Yes, I’m getting that impression. Well, Astrologomage, your astrology seems to be as useful as one would expect. I doubt the dead traitor is going to bring anyone to the Treasure Chest, or ascend through your Treasure Chest, or whatever. As a practical matter, I don’t think you’ll find anything you want here. We are the true followers of starlight, and you’re not impressing me much. There is no fortune here for an astrologer.”

“Oh.”

She thought I was too incompetent to be a traitor, which was good, I guess?

No, it was definitely bad. It was bad and better at the same time.

“In fact, unless you happen to be a wheat merchant, I think there’s really nothing for you here at all.”

I stared at her like a dog confronting a doorknob until the logjam of my thoughts cleared. “I just sold a contract of ten cargos of winter wheat to the Truis of Kageran.”

Tel Viv stared at me so blankly I think sheer incomprehension blocked her. She obviously thought I was lying, lying so badly she couldn’t believe it.

I kept going. “The buyer is House Ossaria of Elvenhome. The Celephians cleared the contract. Strike price is confidential. Baroness Alyssa and her consort Satre witnessed it. I have the contract in my bag.”

After several more long seconds Eparch Tel Viv said, “Show me, please.”

Because obviously, obviously I was lying. Obviously!

Except I went into my bag, pulled out the contract, and showed her. I even showed her the deposit receipt the Gesphains gave me when I deposited my loot. Satre had escorted me and insigned the receipt too. I don’t think he really trusted me, and I definitely believed he didn’t like this whole operation. Putting his stamp on the contract probably gave him a feeling of agency. But none the less, I had all the paperwork, and I hadn’t forged any of it.

Tel Viv couldn’t believe it or me. She kept shaking her head and unblinking like she was fighting sleep.

While she was staring at this incomprehensible truth, I scooted forward so I could put my hands on her desk. The chair complained when I dragged it.

“Tell me,” I said. “Do you need wheat?”

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Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 11

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Chapter 11

How expensive was their house?

It was a nice house. They had space. The couches didn’t butt up against the walls. They had artistically arranged chairs. Glass lamps rose over the softer chairs for reading, and bookshelves stood between the windows.

I read a few titles with big print: The History of Modern Airship Racing, Paint the Sky: The Gods of Dawn, and Lumina and Beauty.

I bet the cousins hadn’t read any of them but thought they impressed ladies.

The Hemlin cousins returned. Nurim had brought a plate with him, moshu fruit and a cracker, and he finally sat down. I mentally gave him two minutes before he got up.

“We have a counter offer,” said Aesthus. He paused. The rest of them watched me.

I waved him on.

“Five hundred thousand, but we’ll kick you back a hundred thousand.”

I opened my mouth, closed it, and exhaled the breath I’d taken to reply.

“You’re not paying us,” said Aesthus. He wore a hint of a smirk. “Your customer is. I won’t give you a receipt, but you can tell them the price was half a ton.”

I said, “Now that’s very interesting.”

They were a lot smarter than I had given them credit for.

The mere fact I was snow-jobbing them something fierce didn’t diminish that. In fact, it meant they might be able to see through my plans if I gave them time. I had too many lies. The structure of them was flimsy. These cousins would start pushing, testing, and if they pushed too hard on anything, the whole structure would come falling down.

I had a moment. Call it clarity, caution, or cowardice, I suddenly understood that while I was winning right now, I could lose very quickly.

“Three hundred, same kickback,” I said.

“No,” blurted Apseto.

Aesthus shook his head. “No. We need more than that.” He spoke as if Apseto hadn’t.

Apseto nodded.

That wasn’t a counter-offer, but I’d done the same thing when Zenjin had asked ten million.

I was winning. Take the saber and run, self.

What number were they thinking of?

I’d gone forty two thousand for no particular reason. They probably wanted at least forty two each. That meant two ten. No self respecting grifter would lower his own bribe, so I had to add one twenty five. Round up.

I said, “Three fifty, but mine is one twenty five.”

This time Apesto didn’t speak. Neither did any of the rest. They looked to Aesthus, who watched me like a card player.

I looked away, ate something, but when I finished, Aesthus was still thinking. I locked eyes with him and waited. It became a challenge. He wouldn’t look away, nor would I, and I didn’t know what out he was looking for. After several seconds, his pride wouldn’t let him blink.

I’d made this mistake before. I’d gotten into a contest with someone, a contest I didn’t need to win, but the strain of it grew weighty in my mind. A throw-away fight became a matter of pride. I locked eyes with the Celestial, born of the line of Tollos, sister of Mallens, Lord of Creation, and tested him. He didn’t look away; he invested in our challenge.

His cousins did not interrupt.

But he had to win.

“Three seventy five,” he said. He flicked his fingers between us. “Same, same.”

I looked away.

Nurim was eating moshu. Moshu are soft little fruit with a shell like a walnut. The fruit inside has about the consistency and sweetness of an apple. Normally people open them with a nut cracker, and the skill is breaking the shell without squishing the fruit. People who eat moshu with sticky fingers look childish.

Nurim saw me looking and put down his cracker. He took out a knife. Tapping a fruit against the plate to show me the shell hadn’t gone stale, and without holding it, he sliced the fruit open cleanly with the knife. He didn’t touch it at all, merely drew the blade long-ways across it.

That was, in all honestly, simply astounding knifework. He was doing it to show off, but I was impressed.

“You laughed when I said there were five of us,” said Zenjin quietly. “You think you can win. Maybe. But not as easily as you think you will.”

Self, let them win. Get the blade, destroy it, be done.

I made sure there were no misunderstandings. “The price is three hundred and seventy five thousand sesteres, and you will pay me one hundred and twenty five thousand sesteres of that.”

Aesthus nodded. “Agreed.”

I nodded. “Done.”

The room exhaled.

“Do you want to shake on it?” Aesthus asked.

“No.” I shook my head. “But we have a deal. The money is hidden a few places through the city. I’ll need to collect it. Does one of you want to come with me and bring the saber?”

“Yes. Does the blade have a name, other than saber?”

“You don’t need to worry about that. That sword, that one right there, is the one I want.” I pointed at it. “But I want to inspect it. Now.”

They all exchanged glances.

There were five of them, but I’d be holding the weapon. That was a sword for the killing of gods. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but they knew enough.

But I wasn’t going to go any farther and find out that by some unimaginable coincidence, this wasn’t the right weapon.

“Go ahead,” said Aesthus. “Right now.”

All five of them got ready. Zenjin drew the Puritan, laid a finger along the slide, but held it down, pointed at the floor. Nurim stood up with the knife. Osret moved around to the other side, and Apseto shifted so he stood between me and the windows. We’d drawn the blinds when we came in. Aesthus waited by the foyer. He looked ready to run, but for safety or for a gun, I didn’t know.

I got up, moving slowly, and lifted the blade from the table. The room breathed again, inhaling after its previous sigh. This breath it held.

There were five of them, but I had a blade made to kill the Lord of Creation. I could take them.

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Karesh Ni, Chapter 6

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Chapter 6

As I descended, I thought about Whitefire. After leaving the Baroness’s office I’d asked about them because I’m super curious and definitely not just nosy.

Whitefire followed Starlight, one of several Celestial elements (Alyssa knew another, Lightning). They were lead by a Hierophant and four Eparchs, Kyria having been Hierophant before and Amon Tim being the Hierophant now. Hierophant Mal Set had built this fortress up among the stars, their source of power, after they fled in exile. It was called Karesh Ni, the Silver City.

When asked why the Ashirai empire ordered broad sanction against Whitefire, the Kagerani had generally agreed that nearly a century ago, Ashirai Emperor Thullus had married a young woman, Aryce, who’d already been engaged to Maurius, a Whitefire initiate. Royal Ashirai weddings are three-day affairs where the couple don’t sleep together until the third day, the first day of celibacy representing a sacrifice to their gods and the second a sacrifice for the people. By tradition the groom stays awake partying while the bride gets some sleep so the whole world can attest to their celibacy before heaven. Thullus had caught Aryce and Maurius breaking celibacy during God’s Night.

Before dawn he’d dragged them to the Gold River that runs through Ashirak, and before being cast in, Maurius had cursed him and all his people. Thullus had heaved him into the rapids himself, and within those waters, Maurius had been drowned or beaten to death on rocks. Aryce had begged for mercy, but when Thullus lifted her as he had her lover, she cursed him as well. She followed Maurius.

The romantic ending of the story is the lovers found each other down there. I don’t know.

But that didn’t cause the Maurite Prohibition. That came later. During the somewhat subdued feast of the People’s Night, Thullus had a bit too much to drink and went to the Gold River’s canyon wall to taunt their ghosts. The canyon wall gave way, and Thullus fell to his death.

The Empire left without an emperor, the Baron of Dylath-Leen, the Saffron Prince of Tyr, and Duke Larange, a cousin of Thullus’s, all went to war for the throne. The legions stayed out of it, and the Prince of Tyr won. However the oaths the Red Guard swore were to the ‘Emperors of Ashirak, born sons of Jermaine, Kings of Kings,’ and a matter of bloodlines precluded the Saffron Prince from taking the seat. When he tried, the legions threatened mutiny.

Prince Eigen of Tyr, the Saffron Prince, apparently told the Reds to kick rocks. Two legions marched on Tyr, and on the morning of the battle when the Prince realized that he was going to have to fight the Red Guard, the Swordsmen of Ashirai, he suddenly discovered a willingness to negotiate.

In the play Birthright of Gods the Red legions send their lowliest foot solder, Ve Therrin, to challenge the entire Tyrian military to a series of single combats. After seeing his forces ruined by one man, the Prince sued for peace. Pretty much everyone agrees that didn’t actually happen.

Anyway, without the bloodline to take the throne, the Prince Eigen ordained himself king, demoted everyone else to less-than-kings, a custom which continued to Alyssa’s ‘royal baronacy,’ and the legions declared obedience to the king of Tyr. End of that, right?

Of course not. Perhaps you see the loophole? If not, let me give you a hint. Duke Larange had a daughter, Hnoss, who at this point was eight. The Prince Eigen of Tyr was fifty three and married.

The Emperors of Ashirak were ‘sons of Jermaine’ and drew their birthright from direct descent from one of the gods of old. He couldn’t take the throne of Ashirak, but he could give it to a son, provided the mother of his son was Larange’s daughter.

His wife Tamora did not agree. She murdered him and Hnoss (the eight-year old!), the legions murdered her, and the Baron of Dylath-Leen took the throne, swearing the same oaths to respect the line. The throne was ‘given back to Jermaine’ since no one lived of his lineage to take it.

The Baron blamed the whole thing on Maurius and Aryce, because clearly their curses led to this affair. Rumor escaped that followers of Whitefire were to be rounded up and beheaded, their mouths stuffed up or tongues pulled out, and none of them stayed around to find out if the rumors were true. On pain of death, the followers of Whitefire were exiled from the lands of Asharai for the evil power of their curses.

The killing of Hnoss is the part that really got me. It was a hundred years ago, so I suppose it’s just history, but there was no reason for that! She was eight!

Kageran had joined the Ashirai Empire about twenty years back. Queen Alyssa had become Baroness Alyssa. Citi Kageran had accepted the Maurite Prohibition. Many Whitefire refugees who had lived in Kageran at the time disappeared. The people I’d asked hadn’t known where they’d gone, nor about this place. Alyssa and Satre had but seemed to have kept their mouths closed. The feeling of having secret knowledge, that I was one of the elect, pleased me. In spite of the cold, I hurried down the stairs.

Several hours later, that feeling of being special was really struggling to keep up with the desire to feel my toes.

I decided to give up. At the time, I was several hours into the murderously cold descent and had stopped to huddle on the stairs and eat another flat. I’d been walking in a trance, concentrating on keeping my footing on the wide, flat, and smooth stairs. Since I couldn’t feel my feet, every step had an element of hazard to it. I wouldn’t know I was slipping until too late. A low balustrade ringed the stairway, intricately working in white marble, and I sat by one of the balusters. For a while I looked out at the world, the skies undimmed by clouds, and wondered why I wasn’t overwhelmed.

I was too cold to be overwhelmed.

That was it. If you’re too cold to appreciate the vastness of space, the world laid out like a painting, and mythical architecture, you are too cold for anything. I ate my flat. I gave up. I slouched over to tie my shoes and happened to look down, past the stairway.

The island that hung below was a brown island about a deep cone. From an outer triangle, it rose to a vaguely circular ridge, and inside the ridge a deep pit sank into more white stone. Houses, buildings, roads, and clustered on the ridge like white crows sitting on rooftops, and two greater palaces stood on either side. One of the white stairways descended to each of them. The gold rope sank into the very center of the central pit.

The mountainsides were grim and dull, covered in the naked trunks of brown trees. Yet between them grew a few evergreens, dark enough to look brown or black themselves. At the center of the pit bubbled a white froth, and mist flowed through cracks in the right to fall down the slope. Cloud rivers fell off the sides of the island like smoke rises from a candle yet in reverse, descending smoothly in straight lines until they began to fold and curl up before catching the winds and spreading. They blew east, the direction Pallas passed far below. A wide band of milky white light flowed underneath the island.

I ate another flat.

Okay, fine, I thought, and I un-gave up. It was right there. I had to be almost done. This was one of those darkest-before-the-dawn moments.

It wasn’t. I wasn’t even close. I had to go twice as far as I’d come before. It turned so cold my eyes hurt. My eyelids froze shut, and I couldn’t see. I had to thaw them with my fingers, which made my fingers freeze, and then I had to thaw my fingers with my breath.

I got stubborn, kept going, did an awful lot of whining, said some very, very unfriendly things about Alyssa, Satre, people in general, and used a bunch of language that would not make Prince Aehr swoon with desire.

Did elves swoon?

They’d better. Someone was swooning after all this, and it wasn’t going to be me.

Honestly, I was getting pretty tired and felt like I could go for a swoon.

I couldn’t swoon now. I’d fall over the railing.

I kept walking.

#

The bottom of the stairs flattened out on a wide landing. On either side, the landing looked like it ended in cliffs, but that was because the landing was perched on one of the high points of that central ring-like ridge. There were paths and lower buildings below on both sides. Forward and behind more buildings rose from the crest, some of them geometric with windows and doors, some botanical like alabaster flowers, and some oddly shaped like spirals or points, all made of that same white marble.

Two stood out. One, a huge white orchid, stood by itself, and the body of the building resembled a closed flower, just in the act of unfurling. Between the petals, a red and gold light escaped. The other resembled a dragon’s skull and was the only animal-looking thing around. It perched on the crest of the ridge some distance behind me. It was a little bigger than a house.

I squinted at the dragon skull when the stairs passed overhead. It could be real. Dragons did get that big, and the skull was grayer than marble. The eyes, nostrils, and mouth had been blocked up with stone, making the difference obvious. But a skull that big would need a body even bigger, and I didn’t see any half-mile dragon carcasses lying on the island.

I didn’t see many people, and those I did see moved quickly. They usually had white cloaks with pointed hoods, ornamented with stars or silver bands. Many of their clothes looked quilted, with plenty of white designs sewn into white jackets, coats, and pants.

I don’t think they had much dye. That catches me by surprise sometimes, even as long as I’ve been here. People generally work with whatever color thread comes off the sheep or plant. Kageran is so unusual in its colors. Here, I spotted embroidery, but it was all the same white thread as the basic garment.

They didn’t look prepared for the cold. Most had little white shoes with turned-down cuffs no higher than the ankles and no gloves. They hustled, outdoors and walking quickly down a street, to return indoors again with a slammed door behind them.

I also spotted stair guards, and they looked miserable.

Sitting in a little hut facing the stairway were three people. Each one wore two or three of those white cloaks, but the same tiny shoes. Two had their arms folded with hands inside their armpits, but one’s sleeves hung floppily empty. I saw little pink fingers poking up through her collar as she breathed on her hands. The man on her left was frowning so hard his wrinkles looked like creases, and another man had his head down against his chest.

I was about two circuits up when one bumped another and pointed at me. They spoke among themselves, and someone ran off. I couldn’t very well turn around now, so I kept going. Before long several more guards arrived with one among them who seemed in charge, a dark-skinned Malician woman with her hair done up like two cacti. They stood informally at the bottom of the stairs, waiting.

Half a circuit up, I paused, tried to shake off the cold, and decided what I wanted to say. I adjusted my clothing and gear into the most comfortable manner. Then I walked down with fingertips on the railing.

The waiting party said nothing as they stood at attention, watching.

On a hunch, I stuck my both hands into my pockets as I stepped down onto the wide marble landing, and the lady in charge said, “On bound law, do not move.”

“Okay.” I did not move my hands out of my pockets.

“I am Eparch Tel Viv. Who are you?”

“Astrologamage Elegy.”

Official people tend to like following their own rhythm, so I let her go.

“Astrologamage Elegy, you have entered Karesh Ni. Do you have a mark of passage?”

“No.”

“Then you are detained and shall come with me for questioning. Do you have any remarks?”

“I’m here to see Hierophant Amon Tim,” I said.

She gave me side-eye while the guards stared straight ahead or turned their necks to stare at me.

“We’ll see about that. Hospitaller Ain Var, bind her hands and feed.”

The original lady guard, there were three there now not including Tel Viv, said, “Ma’am,” and took some white ribbons from her pocket. She looked like she’d been holding them while she waited.

Detaining seemed much like being arrested. They searched me and found the knives in my sleeves, belts, and boots. They missed two. We didn’t talk. The guards in the hut rotated, and Tel Viv lead the rest away.

We passed rows of sterile white houses with dead lawns out and empty gardens. Frozen watercourses, dry fountains, pristine white pathways swept of old leaves branched off the roads we followed, looking like they’d been carved of ice. The whole city, glorious, elegant, and polished, looked like some abominable dream in crystal. I was so tired.

People had told me about this. I didn’t listen. Mountaineers, Malicians, the incomprehensible people who voluntarily live even further north than Malice: they talk about how the cold wakes you up at first but then puts you to sleep, confuses your brain, and makes you stupid. I’m not stupid, so I’d just ignored them when they said the cold does it. But I was suffering the cold now, and it wasn’t some brutal, anguish of suffering. I wasn’t being cut by blades or burned with irons. I was just cold, miserable, dumb, and I hated it. The only way I could fight back against the cold was not complaining, so I walked along as silent as everyone else, as silent as the ghost-shaped people who watched from the rowhouses, as silent as the houses themselves. We entered the white lotus palace, veined with glittering quartz, and shaped like a blossom opening to the moon. It was, I would learn, the Sunset Basilica, and it had been made by humans imitating elves.