Rogues

THE MEANING OF LOVE

Daniel Abraham

The name Sovereign North Bank referred to a strip of land along the river Taunis within the great city of Nevripal, but not of it. It existed first as an accident of politics. When, centuries before, the wizards of the Hanish Empire sued for peace after the War of Ten Emperors, the lands surrounding the slow, dark river were ceded to the Council of Nestripon, but an exception was made for the Hanish winter palace and its grounds, which were the favorites of the Empress. In a sentimental gesture of good faith that often follows wars between monarchs who are also family, the land remained technically within the Hanish Empire, though no official or citizen remained there. The mayor and burghers of Nevripal, not sharing the familial fondness for their defeated enemies, declared that the Sovereign North Bank was, in essence, its own problem. With no Hanish to oversee it and no Nestripon willing to take responsibility, it became that rarest of all places: an autonomous zone where the law protected and enforced lawlessness.

Over the ages since, the north bank had become a curiosity. The detritus of a dozen cultures found their way there, or were forced to it when there was no other refuge. The sluggish, dark waters of the Taunis carried barges and rafts to the muddy shores. Criminals and debtors fled to it, refugees of wars national and domestic, the addicted and the poverty-lost. And like the vast and mindless organism that it was, the Sovereign North Bank grew.

That there were no magistrates did not mean there were no planners, no architects, no geniuses or madmen. Rather it meant there was no restraint to those who lived there and invented. Over the decades, the press of humanity and desperation drove the buildings higher. One story and then another rose up, built from whatever came to hand with the unofficial motto Good enough is good enough. Towers leaned and swayed and sometimes collapsed, grinding the men and women within them to blood and pulp, only to be rebuilt by the survivors or the next wave of refugees. Walkways of rope and wood were hoisted between the buildings until it was said a native of the place could cross from the boundary wall on the north to the sluggish waters at the south without ever touching ground. Shit and piss and trash were thrown from windows to the distant street until rain came to wash them away, and like plants in rich soil, the unstable, unreliable buildings rose, driven by the deep human desire to be the one least shat upon. The streets, such as they were, grew darker and narrower and sometimes disappeared altogether under plank-and-tar awnings that redefined them as homes and shacks.

As with any community, there were landmarks and centers all through it. The Temple at the root of the city that was said to be part of the original Hanish palace. The Water Market, built out over the river itself, where men and women exchanged trinkets and junk with the focus and ferocity of gem merchants. The opium dens against the wall where men slept themselves to death under strings of pale beads long since yellowed to amber by their smokes. There were neighborhoods and demarcations invisible to the untrained eye, but named by the natives: the Salt, Hafner’s Choke, Jimtown.

Two miles long, a mile and a half wide at its greatest, the Sovereign North Bank was home and hovel to fifty thousand people. What little order there was came from the crime lords for whom it was a refuge from the magistrates. What little food there was came from houses of charity in Nevripal whenever the gentry of the greater city felt magnanimous, or was stolen from the river traffic or fished from the filthy waters. The residents of the city-without-citizens ranged from squalid and starving babies who shat their brief lives away in the shadows to the dark-robed holy men in the Temple, from rail-thin addicts half-mad from longing and hunger to masters of crime and violence whose penthouses looked across the river at the lights of the respectable world like reflections in a tarnished mirror.

And in the depths of the city, not too near the wall nor too close to the river, neither at the exalted and uncertain heights nor drowned in the trash and offal that choked the lowest streets, there was a small room with a tin brazier under a thick clay-pipe chimney, filled with two ancient, stained mattresses. On one mattress lay Prince Steppan Homrey, fugitive heir of Lyria. On the other, Asa, who was secretly in love with him.

Despite the lateness of the hour, neither was sleeping.

“I love her,” the prince said, his arm thrown over his brow and manly tears beading in the corners of his eyes. He was ten days past his twenty-third naming day, and the older of the pair by half a year. “I love her, and she is going to be sold to the workhouse.”

A half dozen possible replies wrestled in Asa’s mind—You’ve seen her once, and from a distance and Better the workhouse than here and You may be confusing love for a different kind of longing—until a diplomatic victor came out on top.

“I’m sorry.”

“You should have seen her. She was like dawn on a winter morning.”

“Frosted over, you mean?”

“No,” the prince said. “She was pure and pale, and she shone like the horizon when it is almost too bright to look upon.”

“Ah.”

“I asked her name from a boy there. Zelanie, daughter of Jost. I would swear she has royal blood. If you’d seen her, you’d know what I mean. The way she held herself was like seeing a queen at her coronation. Everything around her was made bright just because she was close to it. I was meant to find her. I see that now. Whatever plan the gods have for me, I was meant to find her. And so I must have been meant to save her. You should have seen her father. He had the face of a butcher.”

Asa shifted. The mattress rustled and settled.

“You think I’m a fool,” the prince said. His eyes were red with weeping, and his face a mask of melancholy. Asa sighed.

“I think you’re being hunted by a stepmother who’d like nothing better than to see you facedown in a river. Your father is the prisoner of a Kyrean wizard, if he’s not dead. Half the people in your home country think you’re a murderer and the other half think you’re a fool. You’ve got a full plate without taking on anything else.”

“This isn’t something I asked for,” he said. “You see that, don’t you?”

Asa’s whole life had been spent in and out of the Sovereign North Bank, working as a petty thief, an acolyte of the gods, a grifter, a broker of information, and—like the city itself—an avatar and embodiment of whatever-needs-doing-gets-done. Becoming the unofficial protector of a political fugitive wasn’t the wise thing either, but it had happened.

Steppan had just arrived when they met the winter before, the fine stitching and well-carded wool of his supposedly unobtrusive cloak making him stand out like blood on a wedding dress. He’d worn a scowl that had been equal parts moral outrage at the misery around him and masculine self-pity, and he’d lost the coins carefully stitched into his sleeve within the first half day of coming down the wall. Even the priests would have thought twice before putting their fates with his, but here he was, months later, his hair longer and shaggy at the nape, his clothes the yellow-brown that everything washed in the Taunis eventually became, and staring across the room with tear-stained eyes like a puppy that had lost its boy. He hadn’t shaved in a month, and his black whiskers shone like they’d been oiled. He was the very image of not-something-I-asked-for, and so Asa had to allow him the point.

“Where was she, again?”

“I saw her on the walk beside the one building that looks like it’s stooping. With the four pillars.”

“I know the one. And this was two days ago?”

Prince Steppan nodded, then he rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. “Will you find her for me? Will you carry her a message from me?”

“No, I will under no circumstances start announcing you to anyone I’m not utterly certain of. But I’ll look into the situation. See what there is to be seen. Zelanie, daughter of Jost? That, then.”

Asa knew the place. The building was the old tower with roots in the stables of the Hanish Emperor’s palace and a long history of minor collapse. A family living there was likely desperate enough to sell their adult children into the workhouses. Traffic in slaves was prohibited in Nevripal, but Sovereign North Bank wasn’t Nevripal. Asa knew of two places where legitimate businessmen met to make trades like that without technically breaking the law. And in truth, it wasn’t the worst thing a father could do with his daughter.

“Thank you for this, my friend,” the prince said. “I love her.”

You’d mentioned that, Asa thought bitterly but didn’t say.

When the sun first started brightening the eastern skies, Asa was already walking across the rope bridges between the buildings. The air stank of smoke and sewage, but no more so than usual. The sounds of voices came from bare windows and the streets below: shouting and cursing but also singing and laughter. Men and women in dark cloaks squeezed past each other on bridges no wider across than a single handspan, backs and bellies rubbing against each other in a way that would have been intimate if it hadn’t been routine. Every week or two, a bridge would collapse, spilling two or three people down through the filthy air, smashing their bodies through whatever roof lay below them. But then, more died from the flux and no one was doing anything about that either. The bridges would be rebuilt if enough people cared and had the rope to spare, or they wouldn’t. The paths of the city would shift and change like a slow river uneasy in its banks. It was part of what Asa loved about the city. But only part.

The old tower looked sad in the yellow light of morning. It leaned a degree to the east, and windows spotted its sides, knocked through the walls wherever convenience demanded until they looked like an architectural pox. Asa took a ladder and then a stairway made from driftwood logs nailed to the outside of the building, and emerged in the yard Steppan had described. Four massive pillars rose up from the ground, tall and proud as trees, and overshadowed. A few dozen men and women slept in the muck or made a show of waking up. At the far end, three boys played a game of chase with a dog no one had eaten yet.

“Looking for a man named Jost. Daughter’s Zelanie,” Asa said, touching a man’s shoulder. A head shake and a shrug, and then the same question again of the next person, and then on and on, one after another, until movements and words became rote. When, near midday, a woman nodded and pointed, she nodded and pointed toward the river. Asa cursed. That wasn’t a good sign.

The men from the workhouses were set up on the westernmost quay. They had well-fed faces and laughter that was made cruel by its context the way a gem could be made ugly by being set in tin. The pens weren’t finished yet, but a pair of local boys were hammering the walls in place, building the corral for their less fortunate compatriots. The workhouse overseer stood smoking a pipe at the waterside, looking out over the sullen gyre where the river shaved off a bit of its current. His desk was a plank between two piles of bricks with a purple cloth over it to make it seem respectable. A line of men and woman waited for the trades to begin. One of them was a tired-looking man perhaps twice the prince’s age with a pale-skinned girl at his side.

“Jost?” Asa asked, coming near.

The man looked over, and his daughter a moment later.

“Here,” the man said.

Asa smiled. “Then this would be the lovely Zelanie.”

She was a thin creature with dark hair that was a few degrees less lank than might be expected, more roundness in her cheeks and breasts than perhaps the average. Asa didn’t think she was a beauty for the ages, and certainly not the winter dawn translated to flesh, but pretty enough and capable of smiling. Her eyes had what might or might not have been intelligence but was at least cunning. If there was royal blood in her, it was well hidden.

“What is it to you?” she asked.

“In line for the workhouse?”

“If they ever open the table and start hiring,” her father said.

“Hiring? I’d have thought buying was the verb.”

“Well, no one fucking asked you, did they?”

Asa turned to the girl, but before he could speak, a familiar voice called from the alley behind them. Josep Red staggered out, waving his good hand and grinning like he’d just found a pearl in a night pot. “Excuse me,” Asa said, eyes locked on the girl’s in a way that might seem meaningful. She scowled, then smiled uncertainly and turned away.

“So, Asa, you wasted spunk,” Josep said as they walked a little distance from the line together. “I been looking for you.”

“Flattered.”

“You still in the market for news about hunters?”

Asa hoisted an eyebrow, and the old man cackled.

“Yes, I am still in that market. What have you got?”

“Two magistrate’s men came down the wall last night. They’re wandering in Hafner’s Choke, asking people about a picture.”

Asa spat, looked back at the line of men and women, the half-built pen, the girl whom Prince Steppan had decided he loved. Can’t expect me to do everything at the same time. Asa pressed a copper coin in Josep’s unscarred hand.

“How about you show me?”

The magistrate’s hunters weren’t dressed for subtlety. They both wore boiled-leather armor with the scales-and-axe sigil of the high council carved into the breast, and the swords at their sides would have bought food for a week to anyone with the courage to take them. They walked with a firmness that carried the right of way along with it, and they ignored most of the people on the street, accosting only the better-dressed men and women, and speaking even to them in sharp, condescending tones. Asa and Josep Red watched them for a time without being seen, and nothing that they saw made Asa think well of the men.

“Who’s the picture of?” Asa asked.

“Think they’d show it? Beneath their kind, me.”

“What are they asking people?”

“ ‘Have y’seen this man?’ ”

Asa’s belly sank. If the Council of Nevripal had taken it into their heads to side with Steppan’s enemies, things were about to become unsupportable. Josep nodded as if in agreement. Five escape plans already in place, Asa stepped smiling into the street and walked toward the hunters. Their eyes were as hard as slate and one of them put a hand on the hilt of his blade.

“Morning. Heard you strapping young men were looking for something and thought I might be of use.”

“And you are?”

“Asa.”

The hunters looked at each other as if unsure whether to be insulted or amused. For a tense moment, no one spoke. The one took his hand from the sword and pulled a curl of thick paper from his belt. He held it before Asa’s eyes like he was pressing a scent to a hunting dog’s nose. Instead of Steppan’s thin nose and wide-set eyes, the inked face that looked back at him was broad and long and perfectly familiar. Asa’s eyes narrowed to cover the relief.

“Chancellor Rouse?” Asa asked, faking incredulity.

The hunters exchanged a look that meant they had just become rather more interested in Asa than they’d been before. “You know him?”

“Of him. Enough to say you’d be better off searching the graveyard. He died six years ago.”

“He didn’t,” the second hunter said. “Used a potion to feign his death and buried a servant in his place. Now we’re come to pick up where they left off.”

“Have you seen him?” the first asked. “Does he live here?”

“If he does, I haven’t seen him. And … All respect, but Chancellor Rouse defeated Sarapin’s army and killed seventy people with his own hands. If he were living around here, he’d be running the place by now, and we’d all be drilling in his army come mornings. At least, that’s the way I’ve heard it.”

The hunters looked at each other in disgust. “We’ve reason to think he’s here. And if he is, we’ll find him.”

“Godspeed to both of you,” Asa said. “I’ll ask around, and if I find anything … Well, if I do, is there a reward?”

Fifteen minutes later, Asa was headed back to the quay. The pens were built and the overseer squatted behind his purple desk. No slaves had taken their places behind the pen’s bars yet, but that would come soon enough. Zelanie and her father were nowhere to be found, and Asa had no way to know if they’d been turned down by the workhouses, if an agreement had been made, or if old Jost was holding out for a better price on his daughter’s future. For the greater part of the day, the line of men and women inched forward, but those particular two didn’t return. Eventually Asa gave up, spent a shaved coin in a filthy kitchen by the water, and went back to the little room carrying a burlap sack of cooked pigeons.

Steppan sat by the brazier, feeding the fire with twigs and tiny lumps of coal. The light flickered in his dark eyes as he looked up at Asa. The smoke and warmth gave the room an uncomfortable close feeling. From beyond one of the thin walls, a woman’s wailing came like the mating song of a great hunting cat. A gray cloth bundle lay on Steppan’s mattress. Asa dropped the feed bag and sat on the mattress beside it.

“How was your day?” Steppan asked.

“Interesting. I saw your ladylove. You’re right, her father’s looking to sell her.”

“And?”

“And Brother Rouse down at the Temple’s about to have a more interesting life. His past is sniffing at his heels again, though I don’t see how that affects us. Also I thought we’d agreed that should stay hidden.”

The prince looked at the cloth the way a mouse might eye a placid snake. “There may be a need for it.”

Asa drew out a pigeon and took a thoughtful bite. The meat was on the dry end, but it was spiced with pepper and salt that forgave it. Steppan took a bird for himself in one hand and unwrapped the cloth bundle with the other. The scabbard was green enamel and as ostentatious and gaudy as everything the hunters had worn put together. Steppan drew the blade.

“So, which need was it you had in mind? Planning to go slaughter all the workhouse crews? Or maybe her father?”

“She is being sold,” Steppan said, “and so I must be in a position to buy her. If I can better the price of the workhouses, I can claim her and set her free.”

“I don’t think you can sell it for that much. Not in our markets.”

“That wasn’t my plan.”

Asa took another bite, then put the bird’s carcass down on the mattress. Steppan looked away, caught between bravado and shame.

“Why don’t you tell me what the plan is, then?” Asa said, pronouncing each word carefully.

“Everyone knows Sovereign North Bank is the haven of outlaws and thieves. I can’t call it a crime to steal from the stealers. The crime lords meet in the Salt. That’s what you told me. Surely there would be enough gold there to buy her freedom.”

“No. That’s not going to—”

“Stop it!” Steppan shouted, and when he turned, the blade turned with him. The tears in his eyes stood witness to the fact that he knew how bad the plan was. “You have been my companion and my only friend, and I will be in your debt forever, but you can’t tell me to abandon her. You can’t tell me not to try.”

“You won’t help anyone dead. And there’s another way.”

“What?”

“I haven’t thought of it yet,” Asa said, and picked the pigeon back up.

Steppan’s mouth opened and closed like a marionette’s. The point of the blade slipped down toward the floor, and he laughed once and mirthlessly. They ate in silence while outside the sun fell and darkness crept through the filthy streets. The wailing woman’s cries turned to a shouting match in a language Asa didn’t know and then ended abruptly. Steppan fed the smoky little fire, went to piss out the window at the end of the hall, and then came back and collapsed onto his mattress. Asa sat up, resting against the cold and creaking wall.

The best plan, of course, was for somebody—anybody, really—to outgrow their naive illusions about love, but since that was going to be tricky to whistle up, they needed a fallback. Otherwise, Steppan really would do something desperate and florid and suicidal. The idea of buying the girl’s freedom wasn’t bad, but the part about how to get the coin was terrible. So perhaps there was another way. Across the tiny room, Steppan’s breath slowed and deepened, his hands folded under his neck like a child’s. In the dim glow, his cheeks were a lighter shadow, the curve of his lips all but lost in the darkness of his little beard. How much did the workhouses pay, anyway? Without knowing what the price would be, it was hard to think of a concrete solution. Asa thought of the hunters looking for the supposedly dead Councilor Rouse and the joke about a reward. For most of the people of Sovereign North Bank, life was pretty damned cheap.

Life was cheap, and corpses were inexpensive.

Steppan’s eye flew open. “What?”

“What what?”

“You laughed.”

“Did I? Well, I thought of something funny.”

Steppan’s smile was as much a sound as anything. “You thought of something?”

“I’ll look into it in the morning while you put that thing back in hiding, eh?”

“Of course. Thank you, Asa. For everything. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Die, most likely, Asa thought.

The Temple sat beneath the city, its deepest chambers dug into the damp soil of the riverside. A great net of ropes hung suspended above the building itself, and the trash and garbage and bird’s nests and dead animals that had built up on it over the course of the years blocked what sunlight struggled down through the taller structures surrounding it. Dim beams caught the dust and filth that hung in the air, and also glimmered off tilework of scarlet and gold, ancient and ruined glasswork, pathways of yellowed marble kept clean by monks and priests. The effect was often compared to being under the overhanging trees of a jungle, but Asa thought it looked more like something underwater. The ruins left beneath the waves after a vast and sludgy flood.

Torches and lamps heated the air, even at midday, and the vast central hall with the statues of seven gods smelled of sweet incense. The priests and physicians who peopled the dark halls and worshipped the gods in the dimness were an equal mixture of saints dedicated to serving the most wretched in the worst places of the world and monsters who had fouled every more pleasant nest. Sometimes—rarely—the two classes overlapped.

Asa sat in the back pew, watching the vast bulk of the priest as he made his way down the aisle. The years had grayed his hair and thickened his jowls, but anyone who looked closely would have recognized him as the man the hunters sought. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough as a landslide.

“Asa.”

“Chancellor Rouse.”

“That is not my name any longer,” the priest said, lowering himself into the pew in front of Asa’s and twisting around to look over his massive shoulder. “But you know that. And so I have to think you are saying it for effect?”

“I’m nothing if not affected. But I’m not the only one saying that name recently. I talked to a magistrate’s hunter yesterday in Hafner’s Choke. He had a picture of you.”

Rouse pressed his lips together and heaved a sigh. “I’ve heard.”

“Then I assume you’ve got some plan for removing yourself from danger.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps it is time to surrender myself to the judgment of the council.”

Asa laughed once. Rouse looked injured.

“You don’t think so, friend Asa?”

“I think you’re as much the ice-hearted killer now as you were when you were in power, and you wear the priest’s collar well because you never thought anyone less than a god had authority over you.”

“True. All true.”

“So you have a plan.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, if you don’t, I do. And the price for my help is profoundly reasonable.”

Rouse was silent for a long while. The seven gods stared back at them with empty stonework eyes. Somewhere not too far away, an unseen choir lifted their dozen voices in the midday chant. Asa fought the impulse to fidget. There were stories of Chancellor Rouse slitting a man’s throat and pulling the tongue out through the hole as punishment for interrupting. Chances were good it was an exaggeration, but the stakes were high if it wasn’t.

“What would you have from me?” Rouse asked.

“Your help in a problem I’ve got. Your expertise. Nothing you haven’t done before. And in return, I’ll help you pull the hunter’s teeth and get rid of them for you, and they don’t even have to know you were involved in it.”

“That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”

“I can be reasonable.”

“Tell me precisely what it is you have in mind,” Rouse said.

Asa did, adding fewer embellishments than usual along the way. Rouse listened with an intimidating ferocity. By the end, he was laughing silently and with a violence that left the pew creaking under him.

“They will be missed,” he said when he’d regained himself.

“Perhaps, but that was always going to be a problem. Be honest, you were going to kill them.”

“I was.”

“So they’d have been missed anyway. This way, they stop stirring up the deep mud, you aren’t implicated, and we both make a little money. And if they do make their way back to the world, the danger of it falls on me. No one even knows for certain you were here at all.”

The choir resolved the chant on an ambiguous harmony, as if the gods were better honored by something that stayed open and unfinished at the end.

“My way is simpler,” Rouse said.

“My way doesn’t kill anyone.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“You’ve killed a lot of people, friend, and it’s gotten you here. Not a resounding argument for the strategy.”

The man who had once driven nations before his whips sat with the thought.

“Someday it will all go too far. The magistrates will come. Or the soldiers. They will burn this all to the waterline and call the world cleaner for it.”

“Probably,” Asa agreed. “But they aren’t doing it today, so why talk about it?”

A moment later, Rouse sighed. “Let us try your way.”

The rest of the day was spent preparing. Rouse’s list of herbs and poisons was shorter than Asa expected and also harder to put hands to. Dried lobelia and apron grass, distilled wine and arsenic powder. Asa traded one thing for another, talked sweetly, made promises and threats, wheedled, begged, wept, and stole. By sundown, Rouse had everything he’d asked for and a bit more, and Asa felt like the rope in a pulling contest. But it was done for the moment.

Sovereign North Bank did not sleep, but it did drowse. The ruddy light of sunset deepened the shadows, reddened the towers and walkways. Fires began to glow and flicker in the windows and on the rooftops, smoke stinking of coal and wood and dried dung filling the air. Some nights, mist rose from the dark water of the Taunis and mixed with it, and Nevripal across the water faded into nothing. On those nights, Sovereign North Bank seemed to stand on the edge of an endless sea, shrouded and silent. Friends and conspirators gathered to sing or complain or plot their escape. Those without shelter begged for warmth and food or else died in the corners, unlamented. People fell in bed or fell in love, shouted and wept and danced. It was like any great city, only more so, and that was part of why Asa loved it, but only part.

Steppan wasn’t in the room, and neither was his sword. He wasn’t in the tiles hall where they would sometimes spend the evening playing against the old men with missing fingers and teeth. He wasn’t in the alley or the common rooms. The addict who lived in the room next to theirs hadn’t seen him since midday. Annoyance bit into Asa’s giddiness, but not so much as to erase it entirely. And the solution to the puzzle of Prince Steppan’s vanishing was perfectly clear, if only in retrospect.

Near midnight, Asa stepped onto the street beside the river that overlooked the quay. Steppan sat with his legs hanging out over the water, his gaze fixed on the pens. Where the workhouse overseer had been that morning, torches like flares lit the bars and the captives. Ten men and six women ranging from hardly out of childhood to approaching dotage huddled together, property of the workhouses now. There would be more before they shipped out. Asa had seen the pens so packed that there hardly seemed room enough to breathe. Seven guards stood or sat, laughing with one another, water and fog making their voices seem close and far away at the same time.

“We’re too late,” the prince said.

“How do you figure?”

“She’s already sold.”

Standing at the pen bars like a bird in a menagerie, Zelanie, daughter of Jost, for all the good that had done her, looked out toward them. Her gown was yellow-brown but had probably started out as pink or white. On the river, a barge hove into sight. A smuggler or a cadre of young men from the city in search of adventure. Asa’s exhaustion and pleasure and anxious anticipation of what was still to come bubbled up in laughter. Steppan’s expression was as stark as a slap.

“It’s uncomfortable for her,” Asa said, “but it’s temporary. And we can’t get her without going through this part.”

“What?”

“Think it through,” Asa said, sitting beside him. “Take her before she’s sold to the workhouse, and we’re stealing from her family. They live here. They know people. If they held a grudge, it could cause real problems. But if she’s sold, her father’s been paid. Whatever brothers or sisters or aunts needed the money already have it. When she goes lost now, it’s the workhouse that’s losing her. They can stand it better, and they’re less likely to know who’s behind it, and even if they do, it’s a small loss to them and a small risk to us. They’ll be taking a hundred people at least on their barges by the end of the week. One less they’ll hardly notice, and even if they did, they come here three times a year for a week or less each time.”

“You planned for this?”

Asa clapped an arm around Steppan’s shoulders, grinning. The despair in the prince’s eyes shifted first to disbelief, and then something like admiration. The expression was sweet as honey and intoxicating as wine to Asa, and it justified the whole day’s effort.

“All this and more, my friend. I planned all this and more. But I need rest, and so do you. Tomorrow’s a long day, and I’ll need my wits about me. So come back to the room. I won’t be able to sleep if I’m worrying where you’ve gotten to.”

They rose together, and across the darkly turning water the girl stared out at them. Drunk with cleverness, Asa raised a hand, hailing her like a friend, and after a moment, she waved tentatively back.

Finding the hunters was easy enough. They hadn’t come to be subtle. Sending a message to them was hardly more difficult. Half a dried apple was enough to buy a dozen street couriers. But until the men stepped out onto the rooftop court, Asa hadn’t been sure they would come.

It was a low, gray rooftop, no larger than a peasant’s bedroom would have been on the other bank of the river, but palatial by the standards of Sovereign North Bank. It huddled beneath taller buildings all around it, so that even though it was technically open to the sky, there was only a tiny square of dull blue above them. The view was mostly of walls. Drying laundry hung from gray, unglazed windows, and someone had built a dovecote across the alley below them that filled the air with alarmed coos and the stink of droppings. A squat iron brazier belched out a thin, foul smoke. A girl no more than nine years old bowed before the hunters, jabbering in the tongue of Far Coiris and pointing them on toward the table where Asa sat, waiting with three cups and a stone bowl of cider.

The men walked with the ease and grace of those accustomed to violence.

“We talked to you,” the one with the paper in his belt said. “Asa, you called yourself.”

“Good to be remembered. Please, sit down.”

The men exchanged a glance, then sat, arranging themselves so that no one could approach unobserved.

“Seems I recall you didn’t know anything.”

“No one on the north bank is ever what they seem,” Asa said, pouring cider from the bowl into all three cups. “I wasn’t sure then what made the most sense for me. I know where the chancellor sleeps, you see. And that he’s not a man who is safe to cross. I spoke with him yesterday.”

The hunters both tensed. Asa gestured at the cups of cider, letting them choose first and then drinking the third almost dry to allay any fear of poison.

“And what was it you said to him?” the one with the paper asked.

“That you two were here and hunting for him. Oh, please. Don’t look at me like that. As if he didn’t already know! Likely, he had word of it the moment the pair of you came down the wall. I also convinced him not to kill you, and you’re welcome for it. I sold him a scheme to rid himself of the pair of you at essentially no risk to him. He believes that I’m on his side.”

“And yet here you sit with us.”

Asa nodded. “It’s a sad fallen world, filled with bastards and confidence men. I weep for it.”

“What’s your price?” the other hunter said, then coughed and shot an angry glance at the foul little brazier.

“Right to the point,” Asa agreed. “I appreciate that. I want letters of amnesty. Two sets, and signed by the mayor.”

The second hunter laughed once, but the first leaned forward. Neither one had touched the cider.

“You’re asking a lot, friend Asa,” the first hunter said.

“Why are we having this talk?” the second one asked. “This freak of nature knows where Rouse hides. Break a couple fingers, and we’ll know too.”

“But you won’t be able to get him out from his protection,” Asa said. “I’m not only offering information. I’m your partner now. He won’t put himself in a place to be caught unless someone he thinks is his ally draws him out. You can walk the bridges and streets for the rest of your lives and not find him. Or you can do as I say and be home by nightfall.”

Somewhere below them, a man’s voice rose in an angry shout, and another answered it, syllable for screaming syllable. Asa took another sip of cider and waited.

“How would you draw him out?” the first hunter asked.

“Ah. An excellent question. I’ve already made my first contact, so he’s already prone to view a note from me as legitimate. Once we’ve picked the right place, I’ll send to him. And when he comes, I’ll poison him. Nothing that would kill him, of course. But something that will take his strength and his will, at least long enough to put him in chains, yes? No fighting. No violence. Everybody wins.”

The second hunter laughed, coughed, and shook his head.

“You’d poison a poisoner?” the first hunter said, fidgeting in his seat. His face was growing pale.

“I’m not saying it would be easy,” Asa said. “There would have to be some sort of misdirection. A plate of honeyed dates, for instance. Something like that. A suspicious refreshment he could be wary of and avoid. There’s nothing like keeping out of a trap to make a man feel safe. And then, with his guard down …” The second hunter coughed out another laugh, but his eyes were having trouble focusing. Asa smiled and went on. “And, of course, I’d take something to counteract the effects before I sat down.”

“What …” the first hunter slurred. He stood suddenly, trying awkwardly to draw his sword.

“It was the smoke,” Asa said, gesturing toward the brazier. “If you were curious.”

When the hunters had collapsed, Asa brought out the lead-sealed vial Rouse had given him, straddled each sleeping man in turn, and dropped the black oil into their eyes and down their noses. The girl came close, her hands knotted together in anxiety and pleasure.

“Stay back from the fire, dear,” Asa told her. “It’s not good for little girls.”

The hunters lay quiet and still for a long while, and then—as the chancellor and priest had said they would—each man began to tremble and shake. White foam formed at the corners of their mouths, and their eyes rolled back in their heads. Asa stripped the two men quickly to their skins and then doused the herbs in the brazier with the last of the cider. When the air cleared, the girl scuttled forward to collect the swords, belts, and armor.

“Encancú atzien,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Asa replied, fastening the slave chains around the hunters’ necks. “Try to get a good price for them.”

The line at the quay was longer. Word had spread that the workhouses had come. The desperate and the expendable came out of the overpacked, stinking buildings like juice from an orange. The hunters squatted at Asa’s side like a pair of dogs. The black oil stained the whites of their eyes a greenish brown and the one who had carried the paper shook his head from time to time as if he were trying to clear it. Their nakedness seemed to cause them no discomfort, nor the black iron collars or the chains with which Asa gently encouraged them on.

The overseer at the purple table scowled when Asa’s turn came, looking over the two hunters with a buyer’s eye.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Bad batch of cider,” Asa said. “I told them there was something growing in it, but they didn’t listen. Been like this for months, and I can’t take care of them anymore.”

“Why the hell should I, then?”

“They’re strong. Tractable.”

“They’re mindless.”

“Hey,” the second hunter said, and then seemed to lose the thought, sitting on his bare haunches.

“It might take a bit longer to train them,” Asa allowed. “But they won’t get bored and they won’t talk back. Good teeth, good backs, and no complaints. If that’s not what you’re looking for, I’ll find someplace else to sell ’em.”

The workhouse man drummed his fingers on the purple cloth. In the pens behind him, the captives had swelled to four dozen or more. As many again stood in the snaking line behind Asa and the hunters. As the workhouse overseer hemmed and hawed, Asa caught sight of the girl, watched her work her way to the edge of the bars, pressing her body against them. She waved a little, and there was a desperate hope in the gesture.

“Twelve for the pair of them,” the overseer said.

“Fifteen.”

“Twelve or keep them.”

“Twelve it is, then.”

The overseer counted out two lines of tiny silver coins, six to a line, and Asa scooped them up. Two of the guards came to take the newly sold slaves back to the pen, and Asa made an alarmed noise.

“What?” the overseer said.

“You didn’t buy the chains. These are my chains. I’ll lead them back to your cage if you like, but the metal’ll cost you another four.”

“Keep dreaming.”

Under the watchful eyes of the guards, Asa led the two hunters to the pens. Zelanie followed every motion with ravenous eyes. Her mouth hung half-open with unspoken words. Asa pretended to ignore her. At the gate to the pens, guards and captives alike stood, laughing at the naked men while their collars were removed. The magistrate’s hunters seemed vaguely aware that something distasteful was happening to them, but they made no move to cover themselves and spoke no word of protest. Asa slid back, leaving both chains and men to the guards. No one had any attention to spare, except the woman. She took the black vial without any sign of surprise, hiding it in her sleeve with the practiced flicker of a pickpocket.

“Drink it at sundown and be free,” Asa said, then stepped away before she could answer or ask. “Hey, those chains are mine. You can buy your own.”

At the edge of the quay, Rouse leaned against a crumbling stone wall, chewing thoughtfully on a wad of tar. Asa dropped the chains in a pool at the huge priest’s ankles.

“Thank you for the loan,” Asa said.

“Welcome.”

“Any idea how long they’re going to be like that?”

“They will never be the men they were before. What does return to them will come in … four months. Perhaps five.”

“Well, hopefully they’ll enjoy their new positions. The last job they had seemed a little risky.”

Rouse nodded, paused, used the nail of his pinky to dig a bit of blackness from between his teeth, which he then flicked out into the water. “We’re done until tonight.”

“It’s not that I don’t enjoy your company. But I’d best get back to my rooms before my dear friend gets word from some other place. If he thinks she’s really dead, he’ll likely do something dramatic and bloody. Fall on his sword or some such.”

Rouse chuckled as he wrapped the chains around one thick forearm. “And to think, someday he may rule a nation.”

Asa froze, then forced an easy smile. “The world’s an unjust place.”

“So it is,” the chancellor said, rising. “So it is.”

Joy radiated from the prince like heat from a fire. His smile was so wide, it seemed to creak, and he walked with his arm around Asa’s shoulder as they passed through the crowded marketplace. High above them, the sky was white and featureless, and held no hint of the coming twilight. There were hours still before anything had to be done. Asa tried to share in his delight, with little success. Now that the game was almost won, the headiness that had been so rich before seemed thin and unsatisfying. The weight of Steppan’s arm annoyed, and the glances that his gaiety drew held something between dismay and menace. Not everything needs to be so damned loud.

“Wine, my friend,” Steppan half shouted. “Wine and the best food we can find. And smoke if you want it. There is nothing in the world too fine to lay at your feet today.”

“Promises, always promises,” Asa said.

If there was an edge to the words, Steppan missed it. Laughing, he steered them into a narrow alley of planks laid between two buildings and fifty feet above the distant ground. The old woman who claimed the place nodded at them in greeting, just as she had the night Asa had first brought Steppan there. The wine was terrible, but one of the tiny silver coins from the workhouse overseer would pay for a week’s worth. Steppan lifted the clay mug in a toast.

“To Asa!” he declaimed. “Champion of love.”

“God, not that! Pick something else.”

“Why not that?” Steppan asked. The planks beneath their feet left gaps as wide as a thumb. Too narrow to slip through but enough to see how far the fall would be. For a moment, it seemed thick with significance.

“People love their fathers. Their sisters. People love dogs or songs or poems. If I’ve got to be the champion of something, make it something that doesn’t change what it means every time someone says it.”

Steppan laughed as if it had been a joke and drained his cup. His hair was wild and dark and glossy. If his skin had a pock on it, Asa hadn’t seen it. The man was joyful and bright and full of hope. All the prince’s troubles were forgotten because a girl he’d seen once at a distance probably wasn’t going to die or be sent to the workhouse. It was like watching a child getting an unexpected rock of honey, and it weighted Asa’s heart like lead.

“You don’t understand what love is,” Steppan said, wiping the back of his hand across his beard.

“And you do?”

“Love is like recognition. It’s the moment when you catch sight of someone and you think There is someone I have business with in this life. There is someone I was born to know. Has that never happened to you?”

“It has, but I never took much comfort in it.”

Steppan waved the old woman closer and held out his cup for her to refill. At this rate, he’d be snoring asleep before twilight. Which might actually be the best thing. Asa wasn’t looking forward to finding a reason that Steppan couldn’t come to this last part of the plot.

“Love is like a baby sleeping on its mother’s breast,” Steppan said.

“Inchoate and likely to piss itself?”

“Ah, you can play at being a cynic, my friend, but I’ve known you too long. You’re a romantic at heart. You’re in love with the world.”

“I’d say I’m inchoate and likely to piss myself,” Asa said, trying not to smile. Steppan’s pleasure was simple and unfeigned and infectious.

“Fine! Fine, then love isn’t like a baby. Love is like falling from a window and discovering you can fly.”

“Unlikely to happen and dangerous to try.”

Steppan’s laughter was a howl. Asa saw the men passing below them look up, curious, and didn’t feel impatient any longer. The foul mood had passed for the moment. It would come again, but for now it was gone. That was a gift.

“Love is like the burst of sweetness when you bite into a strawberry.”

“Brief for you and painful for the berry.”

“Ach! Love is like beautiful music played in a ruin.”

“Give me a minute. No, just a minute. I’ll think of something.”

And the game went on with the hours and the wine. Asa tried to forget what had come before and what would come next. It was a long pleasant afternoon, just the two of them and the city beneath their feet. A golden moment that could wax and wane. By the time darkness fell, Steppan could barely walk straight. Asa had matched the prince cup for cup and felt sober as a judge. There was still work that needed doing, and a thousand things to go wrong.

Workhouse captives died all the time, of course. Usually, they had the grace to do it after they’d spent months or years behind the high gray walls, but some lucky few would die on the quay, and in those cases, the workhouse men would do the same thing they always did: fling the corpse into the river and forget it. Asa poled the little boat out just beyond the quay, tied it to a rotting stonework wall built by hands a hundred years dead, and waited. The Taunis was a dull river, predictable and deliberate as a plow horse. The children of Sovereign North Bank knew the places where wood and corpses came to rest on its banks the way in other cities they might know which corners had the sweet shops. The river stank and muttered against the side of the boat. The splash of something heavy being dropped from the quay would have been easy to miss if Asa hadn’t been listening for it.

The girl’s body lay facedown in the water. Her shoulders were a dim gray in the moonlight, her head a knot of ropy black. Hauling her in set the little boat tottering, but not dangerously. Her face was mottled ice white and bruise purple, her tongue swollen until it pressed out past her lips, and her eyes, open in slits, were still as stones. Asa had never seen the dead look deader.

At the shore, a little hand truck waited, and Asa was glad to have added it into the plan. Zelanie, daughter of no one any longer, was waterlogged deadweight and felt like she’d been filled with sand and lead. That the hand cart didn’t have a cover was an oversight to keep in mind for next time, but it wasn’t as if hauling a corpse through the lowest streets would attract much attention. Stranger things happened all the time.

Rouse waited in the tiny workshop at the back of the temple. Shelves of salt and dried herbs covered the walls and ate into what little space there was. Together, they lifted her onto the low slate table more usually employed for preparing the dead. Rouse stripped off her river-soaked clothes with a steel knife, washed the filth and river scum from her, and folded a warmed blanket of wool that covered her from toes to neck. He placed heated stones along her body, and then drew a tiny flask from the shelves and carefully placed a single crimson drop on her tongue. The chancellor grunted with satisfaction.

“She’s all right?” Asa asked.

“She is as I expected her to be. After this, she should wake, not as one does from sleep, but from a wound to the head. She may wake sober, or she may be confused. Or possibly violent.”

“And what do we do about that?”

“I tell you that she may be confused and violent, and you watch over her while I sleep. That is what we do,” Rouse said, putting the flask back in its place.

After Rouse left, Asa leaned against the wall, watching the woman’s face by the light of the single candle. As slowly as the stars turning in the night sky, her skin began to clear, the blackened, monstrous tongue grew smaller and retreated behind her teeth. Asa watched the changes without knowing quite what they meant. Considered for long enough, she went from pretty to plain back to pretty, and then settled into a kind of visually interesting that was in its way more compelling than beauty. It became possible to believe that a man such as Steppan might have his heart swept away by glancing at her at a fortunate moment and in the proper light. Her eyes shifted under their lids and she began to tremble like a child left too long in the cold.

When she gasped in her first real breath in hours, Asa started back like she’d shouted. Her eyes opened, bright and wild and uncomprehending, and a moment later, she laughed, deep and wild and satisfied. When she stretched, a half dozen stones fell from her blanket to the stone floor. Her gaze found Asa, and she lifted her chin, grinning like she was greeting a dear friend.

“Who are you?” she asked languorously.

“My name’s Asa. We have someone in common.”

“Do we?”

“Well, you don’t know him, but yes.”

She shook her head, blinking, and laughed again. It took a moment for her to bring her focus back, but she didn’t seem fearful or prone to violence so much as drunk and happy. Asa sat at her feet.

“You saved me?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“For love.”

“Of me?”

“No.”

She shifted forward, wrapping herself with the blanket as an afterthought and with only partial success. Her hand found its way into Asa’s, the fingers like frozen sticks. She was still very cold.

“Your friend, then?”

“Yes.” The answer could have meant Steppan’s love of her or Asa’s love of him. Both would be true.

“You have saved me,” Zelanie said softly, smiling her beatific smile.

“I did.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Actually, yes. I like being clever, and I got to be very, very clever. So that part was nice at least.”

She made a pleased hum and shifted forward. Her hair smelled of the river. Her mouth was soft and tasted of copper and dirt. When her hand slipped under Asa’s clothes, the feeling of skin against skin was like pouring water on a burn. The longing to be touched—at first by Steppan but eventually by anybody—that had lain ignored so long rose up like the heat of summer. When Asa pulled back, she brought their twined fingers to her mouth.

“You’re drugged.”

“I am a bit, aren’t I?”

“You aren’t yourself.”

“I’m not someone else.” She lay back on the slate table, pulling them together as she did. Her hands tugged at the stays of Asa’s cloak. “Anyway, how would you know who I am?”

“I’m … Before you do that. I may not be quite what you’re expecting.”

Her tongue—pink as pearls now—showed its tip between her teeth. “No? Let’s find out.”

A half dozen possible replies wrestled in Asa’s mind—Please stop and This is a terrible mistake and All right. The stays came loose. Her hand moved gently. Asa’s eyes closed.

“All right. Let’s.”

“You bedded her?” Steppan said. His eyes were wide, his mouth slack. His cheeks were actually gray with shock and horror.

It wasn’t the only answer he could have made. Asa could think of at least a dozen others. Did you enjoy it? and I’m so happy for you, and, best wished for, Wait for me next time. But the prince’s shock was profound and unfeigned. This was a thing he could never have imagined happening, though compared to a thousand other events in Sovereign North Bank in the last week alone, it was common as mud. All Asa’s dreams and hopes vanished in that moment as if they had never been, a bubble popping. The beautiful man, desperate and noble and romantic, was a naive little boy, disgusted by anything he didn’t expect. The pain was less powerful than the relief.

The cruel response floated on the back of Asa’s tongue. She’s no more a virgin now than when you saw her the first time, you dunce.

“Of course I didn’t. I was joking.”

“You were …” Steppan said, and let out a long, stuttering breath. Color came back to his cheeks in two flaming circles of scarlet. They both laughed, but unknown to Steppan, they didn’t laugh together.

“She’s waiting at the Temple. The apothecary says she may be weak for a time. Days at least.”

“We can bring her here,” Steppan said. “Watch over her while she recovers.”

Asa suppressed a grin. There was a terrible idea.

“I think not. There’s another problem. One I hadn’t foreseen. The priest knows who you are.”

“How?” Steppan asked.

“Couldn’t say. He slipped, and I pretended not to notice, but if he knows, others may also. Sovereign North Bank isn’t safe for you. Not anymore. You and Zelanie have to flee, and tonight’s better than morning.”

Steppan’s expression was solemn. He put a hand on Asa’s shoulder. “Will you come with us?”

“Better that I do not. We’re known companions. And in truth, my place is here.”

“Then, thank you, my friend, for all you have done. I will remember you.”

After Steppan left to reclaim his blade and introduce himself to his lover, Asa lit a fire in the little tin brazier. Through the thin walls, the sounds of voices filtered in as if from a thousand miles away. Someone was playing a mandolin. On the other side of the small room, the empty mattress still held the shape of Steppan’s body. Asa rose, hauled it over, and stacked them. They were more comfortable that way.

Morning found Asa on the rooftops eating hot almonds from a rag pocket. To the east, the bridges of Nevripal went slowly dark as the night’s torches were doused in anticipation of the dawn. Carriages lumbered down the riverside streets, the clatter of hooves and wheels barely audible across the water. One by one, the stars faded, giving way to blue. The sluggish breeze stank of coal smoke and rotting plants. Nearer in, the Salt was busy with bodies in rest or motion. The rope bridges teemed with people going from one place to another within Sovereign North Bank, as if the change of a few hundred yards would make any difference. The little city within a city didn’t care, and it didn’t judge, and of all its thousand aspects, that was what made Asa love it most of all.

Somewhere out there, Prince Steppan Homrey, fugitive heir of Lyria, and his beloved stranger Zelanie were likely fleeing his stepmother’s assassins. Asa could only hope Zelanie was competent enough to see them through it. The sky was beautiful regardless.

Rouse’s footsteps were slow, plodding, and unmistakable. He cleared his throat.

“Good morning, Chancellor.”

“Friend Asa.” The priest walked over and sat at Asa’s side, squinting into the growing light. “I trust you’re well.”

“I don’t know.”

“No?”

Asa chuckled and held out the rag pocket. Rouse took a small handful of nuts and chewed them placidly. The poisoner unafraid of poisons after all.

“In the past few days, I have stolen a girl from the workhouses by killing her, hauling her body out of the river, and bringing her back to life; worked with an acknowledged mass murderer, no offense—”

“None taken.”

“—to poison and enslave two agents of the law; and performed glorious if intoxicated sexual acts with my dearest friend’s lover on a corpse table.”

“Busy.”

“It has occurred to me that I may not be a good person.”

“I have no insight to offer on the question.”

For a long moment, they were silent with their private thoughts.

“Love,” Asa said, “is like a pigeon shitting over a crowd.”

“How so?”

“Where it lands hasn’t got much to do with who deserves it.”

The priest made a deep sound in his throat and frowned. “I think you may be confusing love with a different kind of longing,” he said, and Asa barked out a laugh. “You know why I’ve come.”

“Your share of the workhouse money,” Asa said, holding out a small purse. It clinked in Rouse’s hand.

“You won’t take offense if I count it,” Rouse said.

“With me, friend? You’d be a fool not to.”