Never Knew Another (6 page)

Jona ran from the scene as fast as he could, slowing as he neared the merchant’s shop, where he ducked into the back door, and changed back into his uniform.

The merchant didn’t seem to care if the job was done or not. He paid Jona for his time with a blank face. He patted Jona on the back without a word.

This was the beginning of Jona’s second life, when nightfall meant walking in shadows, following men and women, sometimes killing them. Before that, at nightfall, Jona did nothing at all. He read until he ran out of candles. He swung his sword aimlessly on the roof of his house until he ran out of moonlight. He let his mind wander until he ran out of darkness. When the sun rose, he pretended he had spent the night asleep like everyone else in the world.

Then, the Night King came, and filled the empty hours with blood, and hunting.

***

I pieced together some of the murders, but not all of them. They were so sudden. Most of the time all that lingered was the anticipation, and the way the knife felt in Jona’s palm when it punctured someone else’s skin. Jona remembered standing in a corner and staring at a door with a knife hidden in his shirt sleeve. He remembered trying to walk casually through a crowd, searching for a woman or a man or both.

There was one I studied closely, scenting at the place where it had happened because Salvatore went there before Jona knew to look for him. Jona was underground, pushing through the Nameless’ illegal temple, the crowd jumping to the huge drums, other music somewhere beneath the drum, pushing into each other right at the edge of where the sewer fell into the bay. Their hair was all spiked and green from clumps of lime. They reeked of sweat, and lime. They were so ugly, in rags, and so proud to be ugly. They smiled with phosphor smeared on their teeth and laughed and laughed and danced ecstatically pressed into each other.

Jona pushed through the crowd, found his mark pounding the drums at the center of the sound.

He slipped a knife from a pouch up his sleeve.

Thrown, his knife went straight into the drummer’s eye. The man’s head whipped back. He fell backward, gasping. His trembling hands reached for the handle, too surprised to wonder from where it had flown. He tried to stand.

Jona raced up to the drum and leaped on top. It gave a little under his boots, but the leather head didn’t tear with his weight. He tugged his bat from his back, and smacked the drummer’s hands away from the knife. Jona clubbed the man in the head, knocking him back again, and jumped on top of him. He swung the bat. He kept swinging. Blood and bone, he kept swinging. Jona closed his eyes and didn’t stop. It made him sick to think about it, and what he saw.

When he finally stopped, Jona realized that the drumming had long since stopped. It shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did. No one had tried to stop him.

Blood and bone and brain crawled in the crevices that snaked through the stone to the sewer water. In that bad light, the water in the sewer was dark red, like death.

Jona turned to the Nameless’ dancers. They stood still, looking at him.

“What?” said Jona. “Night King sends regards. Stay out of my way.”

Was Jona wearing a mask? I don’t know. Sometimes he covered his face when doing the Night King’s work where people might see. Sometimes he didn’t. Corrupt king’s men were nothing new. If anyone recognized him, what could they do with the blessings of both the city’s kings upon his deeds?

The crowd pulled back. Retracing his steps to the main sewer lines, Jona felt their eyes on him the whole way.

Jona now got most of his work from a carpenter that didn’t mind speaking. When Jona got back up to the surface to report on the job, the wrong name slipped from his tongue. For a second, the carpenter was furious because he thought the wrong man had been killed. Jona described the man, and it was the right one, but the name was off. It was hard to remember everything he was doing in the night.

Home, in clean clothes, he came downstairs where his mother cooked breakfast. She hugged him hello.

“Long night?” she said, making conversation.

“I just went out and about. Didn’t find anything at all. Didn’t even look.”

“Have fun?”

“Eh, not really,” replied Jona. “It gets boring pretty quick when you aren’t rich, and you have all night to remind yourself that you aren’t rich.”

“We’re still nobility. Don’t forget that when you’re getting bossed around all day. Porridge?”

“Thanks.”

He sat down to eat. She joined him at the table, but didn’t eat anything. She never ate breakfast with him. She just watched.

Spooning the porridge into his mouth, he tried again to remember the dead man’s name. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t conjure it.

Later that morning, Jona was working with Jaime in the Pens. Some weed smokers had been stealing goats, and smuggling the stuff sewn into dead animals. They wouldn’t bother anyone if they hadn’t stolen the goats first. Jona and Jaime found a man they knew had done it. They pushed him against a wall to get names out of him of anyone else helping him. The man was terrified. A name hit Jona like a brick wall.

“Grigora,” he said, out of nowhere, almost under his breath.

“Who?” Jaime turned his head. He had the smuggler by the hair against a brick, names pouring from his lips like water.

Jona shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “this fellow I met last night, is all.”

Jona looked out at the horizon, wondering where he was going that night. He had heard that Grigora had a few friends that had gone sour over his death, and the Night King was already making plans for Jona to take care of them, too.

When the smuggler’s confessions were done, Jaime punched Jona’s arm. “Wake up, Jona. Need you sharp.”

“Yeah,” said Jona. That’s all he said to Jaime. If Jona had said the truth, he wondered who among the guard would turn him in and who among them were doing the same thing he was, working late into the night for the kind of people that they spent all day trying to find.

***

Jona sat with his mother’s co-workers at the dress shop, all women as old as she was or more, and all of them chattering like Jona wasn’t even in the room. That suited Jona fine. It was Adventday, when people visit neighbors, and they’d come to drink bad mint tea and talk about dresses. The dressmakers loved to come to the Joni Estate—what was left of it. They loved to see how a noble lady wasn’t rich anymore, once proud and now making dresses with calloused hands from so many needle-pricks, and the special way the lips moved after years of pinching threads down. There but for the mercy of Imam, went all of the snotty children that wore the fine gowns they sewed.

When they finally noticed Jona, too quiet, one of the dressmakers asked him politely about his work with the king’s men. He smiled. He knew the story to tell them. He told them about the time he beat a confession out of a young man just to keep one of the noble women that wore the fancy dresses happy. The noble lady had been offended by a brute because he had nabbed a purse from her coachman. Of course, the coachman was wearing his fat purse like a peacock’s tail down in the Pens and expected his noble seal to keep him safe. This noble girl begged Corporal Jona, Lord of Joni, to beat the petty thief until he confessed to stealing everything he ever stole in his life. He confessed to so many coins, a fistful at a time. Calipari kept track in a ledger. Once it got to be enough, the guard could hang him. They carried the thief to the gallows with two broken legs, and a face smashed into meat. Beautiful girl, that one, with the bluest eyes and looks so good in a low-cut dress with her calves sealed in ribbons and she dances like a lark. Last time Jona crashed a nobleman’s ball, she deigned to dance with him. She was a solid kisser, too, but he urged the dressmakers not to tell her fiancée about that. He might want to beat a confession or two out of Jona if he ever found out.

Jona took a long, loud sip of his tea in the silent room. He reached for one of the Adventday sandwiches on the other side of the table with his dirty hands, and sat back down with a deep slouch.

“I say something?” Jona grunted with his mouth full of food. Chunks of sandwich showed in his mouth when he talked.

The little old ladies touched red cheeks with pale fingers. When the conversation began again, the women talked about the last dress they sewed for the girl, and all the special things she had wanted embroidered into the hem, as if anyone noticed such small details but dressmakers.

Jona’s mother shared a brief smile with her son, and poured more tea into his cup. “When are you meeting Lady Ela Sabachthani for tea, Jona?”

The dressmakers fell silent.

“Couple weeks. Wants advice about the crime in the districts. Wants me to tell her what she can do about it. Nothing to be done for it, is what I’ll tell her. Burn the whole place down, and kick everybody out.”

“She invited him for tea,” said his mother. “He’ll be going to nobleman’s balls when the rains stop. He’ll dance with the women who buy our dresses. Isn’t he handsome in his uniform?”

The other women didn’t say anything. Some of them put down their cups. One of them got up to leave. “Now you’re just making things up,” she said.

Jona poured more brandy into his tea. They couldn’t afford sugar, so they had to use cheap brandy to take the edge off the cheap, bitter mint. The more he thought about it, the more brandy he wanted to add.

Lady Ela had tea with everybody. If you were of noble blood, you could count on it, eventually. The last time it happened, it took Jona five minutes to get politely shown the door.

***

Jona was sitting in on an interrogation with a candle maker whose tax ledgers looked funny to Calipari. He rolled his eyes while Nicola questioned the man. Jona had seen the books, but nothing worth all this interrogation.

“And the capital expense was…?” Sergeant Calipari questioned and questioned, waiting for some admission that hadn’t come, yet.

Jona stared out the window past the heads of the two men. He wanted to go home, take a cool bath, open a bottle of wine, and pretend like he was taking a nap. That’s what everyone else said they did after a long day at work.

Sergeant Calipari snapped his fingers. Jona nodded. He raised the hidden mallet from his lap up over the table in a smooth motion, and slammed down upon the candle maker’s thumb before he could think to pull it away.

The candle maker screamed. He sucked his thumb in his mouth, whimpering like a child. His nail cracked and bled.

Jona turned back to the window again. He thought he saw a bird fly by, but it might have been anything blowing in the wind. He wanted to take a long, cool bath with that wine he just got as a bribe, and maybe afterward he could buy some better sausage with the money he kept hidden on the roof. His mother didn’t know about the money on the roof, or where it came from. All she ever saw of it was better food.

Jona looked down. He frowned. The candle maker was still there, holding back tears and clutching his broken, bloodied thumb. He was listing all the names he could scrape from his head. Jona didn’t listen.

Calipari carefully transcribed this new list of names. He’d give them to scriveners for warrants, and all the tax evaders would be arrested for their crimes, except for the candle maker. The informant was free to go, until an informant was needed again, or unless his crimes were too serious for that. Had Calipari told him he could go? Calipari went out to see the scriveners, and Jona was alone with the weeping candle maker.

He looked in terror at Jona.

Jona lifted the mallet. “What?”

“Please…” the candle maker was crying.

“Get out of here. Don’t look back at me, or I’ll crack your face, too.”

The candle maker bolted for the door.

Jona went back among the cells. He wasn’t sure if Calipari wanted the candle maker arrested or not, but Calipari wouldn’t let the candle maker leave the station if he was supposed to be arrested. Jona, still unsure, left the empty room. He went back in the cells to check and see if the candle maker was there. Jona found Tripoli in one of the empty cells, and no sign of the candle maker. Tripoli was drinking. Together the two corporals traded a flask of cheap whiskey until it was empty. Tripoli fell asleep on a pallet.

For a moment, Jona thought about locking Tripoli in, on a lark. Instead, he returned to the main room with the scriveners to ask about what happened to the candle maker. Calipari wrinkled his nose at Jona’s whiskeyed breath and ordered him home. Before he left, though, Jona showed Calipari where Tripoli lay asleep. Cursing, the sergeant locked the cell and kicked the bars. Tripoli didn’t even stir.

Stumbling home, a chill of dread hit Jona. He shouldn’t have shared the flask. He told himself it was all right, just this once, to share a flask. Tripoli’d be feeling ill a few days. When it had happened before, no one had died. No one would put two and two together as long as it didn’t happen that much. It would be all right. Tripoli would be all right.

It was so easy to forget that he wasn’t like these men who were his friends. He had to be more careful.

***

Jona snuck into most of the better dry season parties because it’s what his mother had done to meet his father. It’s how people met when they couldn’t officially meet. His official meeting seemed like she was biding her time until she needed a king’s man owing her favors.

How little he understood. Lady Sabachthani already owned the king’s men. She already owned him, and he didn’t even know it.

Jona’s mother had bragged about the invitation to tea among the dressmakers, and had fluttered about the house to get him ready for this. His uniform was clean and starched. His hair was cut close and combed into place with lard to hold it down. If she could have personally, she would have walked with him all the way to the door of the parlor room of the third or fourth cousin, twice removed, that was chaperoning. The distant cousin had just been engaged to marry Ela’s distant cousin, and Ela was visiting, nominally to celebrate the engagement. It was a ruse, and explicitly described as one on the invitation. Ela wouldn’t meet nobles like Lord Joni in her own house, no matter what Jona’s mother said to the other dressmakers. Lord Joni was unmarried, and so was she. Decorum still applied. But Lady Ela Sabachthani had tea at least once a year with every noble in the city, even Jona. She made up excuses about important issues, and found an excuse that merited a meeting in someone’s house, for tea.