Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3) (17 page)

Evkit turned his head and met Idisio’s eyes, his expression flat and dangerous. Idisio bit his tongue and hastily looked away, making a tiny gesture of apology with one hand.

Deiq snorted softly and steered Alyea towards the center of the forming camp.

“He is tired,” Evkit said, watching them go. “He is dangerous, tired.” He slanted a sharp glance at Idisio. “Ha’ra’hain always dangerous when exhausted. You too, ha’inn. You rest. You sleep. Give him wide circle. Room. Yes?”

“Yes,” Idisio said.

Evkit nodded, seeming satisfied, and followed Deiq and Alyea into the camp.

Give him room. Dangerous when exhausted. But Idisio had been worn out and exhausted any number of times over the years, and nothing had—

Red hair tangled with black—the smoky fug of a dangerous tavern—
redling,
someone said with a wagonload of contempt in their tone, and swampy mud splattered nearby—

Idisio staggered sideways, dizzy; caught his balance and straightened, breathing hard.

“Just tired,” he muttered to himself, and forced the panic quiet. “Just tired.”

The rounded tents the teyanain called
shalls
were already popping up around the fire pit. He walked into the camp, a little stiff-legged to keep his knees from buckling. Evkit caught his eye and pointed him towards one of the
shalls.

“Thanks,” he muttered, barely aware of the frowning glance Deiq aimed his way. A shiver worked through his body; he dropped his pack to the ground beside the
shall
and crawled inside with only a vague wave of one hand to the elder ha’ra’ha.

A faint pressure passed across the back of his skull: Deiq checking on him. It eased a moment later, and the elder ha’ra’ha said, indulgent,
Get some sleep. It was a long day.
He sounded smug about something. Almost inaudible under his words ran others:
I may be getting old, but I have better endurance than you yet.

Idisio rolled his eyes, bewildered and indifferent all at once, then dropped into the darkening spiral of trance-sleep without even thinking about it.

Some time later, he emerged into awareness, feeling oddly restless. He lay still in the chill darkness, listening. Deiq and Alyea’s voices murmured near at hand. Teyanain shuffled about, sorting themselves out for bed. The fire popped and hissed.

He could taste the lingering aroma of dinner: something sour and fermented and oily. He thought about digging through his pack for a piece of trail jerky, but he didn’t want to move, and didn’t feel particularly hungry, either.

“—still scare you,” Deiq said, his voice clear as though he sat next to Idisio. Alyea said something blurred in response. Idisio’s breath roared in his ears.

“I’m
not what you ought to be scared of right now,” Deiq said.

A long silence. Then Alyea said, “Of all the things that—”

His own pulse thundered through Idisio’s ears, drowning out any other sounds. Heat flushed through him, banishing the chill. Now it felt like a comfortable summer night, not the freezing cold of the high desert.

A lizard ran over the sand half a mile away:
skitterskitterskitter.

“Damnit,”
Idisio muttered, curling into a ball, and stuck his fingers in his ears. He tried to ease into an aqeyva trance, but for some reason couldn’t focus properly.

Somewhere in the camp, two men grunted in rough and all-too-familiar rhythm. Idisio curled tighter, his eyes squeezed painfully shut.

“They couldn’t wait until they got home?” he said aloud, uncurling, and flipped over to his other side. A desert owl’s passage overhead came to his ears as a hissing, feathery mumble.

Deiq eased into Idisio’s growing disorientation.
Think about your breathing,
he said. Idisio felt as though a large hand closed over one of his shoulders, steadying, reassuring, and all without any of Deiq’s usual cynical amusement involved.
Breathe. One breath in, one out. One breath in, one out. Breathe.

Noises faded into irrelevance. Deiq withdrew, and Idisio followed the thread of calm into a surprisingly peaceful sleep.

So many
people,
so many lives, so much light—Ellemoa couldn’t endure it. She was forced to skulk in shadow, to flee from the daylight she’d craved so badly, until her eyes grew strong enough to handle more than weak moonlight. The noise, the smells — after an eternity of silence and unchanging rankness, they overwhelmed ears and nose alike, and sent her whimpering into hiding, over and over. Carriages and wagons rattled through the streets at all hours of day and night. Drunks and fools sang their unsteady way along the sidewalks, pissing in the gutters, fucking like dogs in the pale night.

A pretty young flower girl, basket filled with white roses, stood at a street corner. Ellemoa stood in shadow and watched men come by, exchange coin for a bloom, and leave again. After a time she realized every man who bought a bloom went into a nearby building; emerging, some time later, with a distinct stink drifting from their clothes.

Not sex, that smell, but something earthier and more subtle. A smoky smell, a sour perspiration: drugs. The sort of drugs Kolan and many other victims had been fed to keep them docile. She’d tasted it on their breath, as they writhed in her grip; licked it up with their sweat, their tears, their blood.

The drugs had names. She remembered a few of them:
Aesa. Esthit. Dasta.
The aesa had rendered victims slow of mind and prone to laughter. She’d liked that. The esthit had made it easier to reach inside their minds and take anything she wanted; Rosin had asked her to do that often. And the dasta... That had made them willing to do things they would never have considered, sober.

A moment’s focus pulled the information from the girl’s mind: the men were going into a
hopam,
which translated, more or less, to “dream-house”; which translated further, to these stupid humans, as a place to take illegal drugs.

She’d thought all those drugs Rosin had employed were only ever used as instruments of torture. But these humans were
paying
for the chance to haze their minds and distort their physical reactions. These ordinary, free, untouched humans thought it was
pleasant.

They had no idea how vulnerable the drugs made them. Had no idea what was watching them from the shadows, and how easily they could die—or worse—this night.

Their stupidity was
sickening.

Rage rose, out of control in a heartbeat.

The flower girl turned, too late, her eyes widening: flung up a hand in belated protest and whined at the pain of the first blow, like a pitiable child. She was young—so young! Barely older than Ellemoa’s son would be—had the girl known him? Ellemoa knelt beside the nearly unconcious girl and reached without hesitation to sort through memory. The girl’s whine turned into a bubbling shriek: Ellemoa crushed her vocal cords with an irritable gesture and kept searching.

The girl’s mind was hazed with a lifetime of fear and pain and despair, her recall blunted by the many drugs she herself had taken over the years. If she had seen Ellemoa’s son, it didn’t stand out among the blurred and greyed threads of a useless life.

One memory came through:
My son. I lost my son.
She’d had a child herself, a son—and something had happened: a moment of carelessness, or unluck, or black fate. It didn’t come clear whether the drug use had been part of the moment. It didn’t matter. She was a mother. She’d lost her son.

Just like me.

But the girl was dying, bubbling breath by bubbling breath: Ellemoa couldn’t reverse the damage done. Not, on consideration, that she particularly wanted to. Having a son didn’t make one exempt from consequence: the girl had chosen to walk into a trade that caused irreparable stupidity among humankind. She’d chosen to use the drugs herself, to block out memory and absolve herself of responsibility for the death of her child.

Not like me at all. I won’t ever forget,
Ellemoa thought as she absently tucked the girl’s body into a more compact bundle and covered it with a cloak to hide it from casual passerby.
I won’t hide from the responsibility of taking care of my son. I won’t make that mistake.

As she stood to leave, she saw the basket of flowers, dropped and tilted on its side in the wake of her initial attack. Something about the innocent white of the blooms set her fury raging again: it was so wrong, to use such beauty for such evil. The dappling of red across the white only highlighted the wrongness. She grabbed the basket and smashed it to bits. Puffy white blossoms rolled and tumbled in a wide arc across the dirty cobblestones.

Someone shouted, a distance away; Ellemoa faded into shadow and night instantly, without waiting to see if the shout had been aimed at her.

I won’t forget,
she thought as she eased clear of the area.
I’ll never forget. I have to save my son. He deserves so much better than this. He deserves real beauty, not the evil falsehoods humans pass off as truth. He will get what he deserves.

I’ll make sure of that.

Architecturally, Bright Bay could be divided into distinct sections: the southwestern buildings were heavy block, thick-walled and wide-windowed, inviting in the sea breezes swirling from the west and south. On the eastern side, especially the southeastern, buildings had thinner walls—often wood—and fewer windows, nearly always on the west face of the building in a hopeless effort to avoid the swamp-muck stench that permeated the far eastern edge of town. The streets tended more towards mud, sand, and shell fragments than the bricks and cobblestones of the western sections.

A thin, misty drizzle began as Tank crunched along the shellrock road into the southeastern market square. The booths stood empty for the most part, whether from the earlier drenching downpour or some local holiday he wasn’t sure. A scattering of stubborn holdouts huddled under colorful cloth tents, their wares raised high on sturdy benches and tables, themselves seated on stools or standing on sandy piles of shellrock that barely crested the mud in some instances.

He paused, squinting through the drizzle, trying to remember the layout; glanced around at the surrounding buildings for reference points, and finally squish-gritted over to one of the occupied booths. A lean man with murky, lank brown hair watched Tank’s approach with barely masked wariness.

“Bread today,
s’e?”
he inquired as Tank stopped in front of his table. His gaze flickered to the hilt of the sword over Tank’s shoulder. “Fresh rolls, baked this morning.” He drew back the corner of a thick cloth to show seven roughly circular lumps of bread beneath. “Best in the city.” He didn’t sound particularly convinced, himself.

Tank cleared his throat. “Was there... a woman, not long ago? Running this table? An older woman. A little on the stout side.”

The man’s face went cold as the drizzling rain. “My mother,” he said. “Gone.”

Tank didn’t ask how; the vendor’s expression said it all.

“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I wanted to thank her. She was kind to me, once, and it meant a lot. I wanted to pay her back.” He fumbled in his belt pouch and withdrew a half-silver piece, his hand shaking.

The vendor shook his head and waved the coin away. “That’s what got her gone,” he said, bitterness pervading his tone.
“Kindness.
She got gutted for helping some damn fool hide from the guards. Two days before Ninnic went out. Two
days.”

Even though Tank knew it hadn’t been his fault—she hadn’t helped him hide, only given him a piece of bread—sour guilt over the timing raked through his stomach.
Two days.
Maybe scant hours after he’d seen her.

He wondered who she’d given her life to help: street thief or escaping nobleman.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

The vendor drew the cloth back over the bread and regarded Tank with a flat, unforgiving stare.

Tank laid the silver half-round down on the table and retreated. The man made no move to pick it up. His glare burned along the back of Tank’s neck the whole way out of the market.

“Ssss,” someone said as Tank cleared the perimeter of the market. He looked to his right and found the street-rat he’d met earlier in the day watching him. Her hair, slick with moisture, might have been a dark blonde or a light brown; the drizzle cut muddy trails through her skin.

“Ssss,” he said back, a little wearily. “What now?”

She stared at him for another moment, then pointed back into the market. He followed the path of her finger and saw a form huddled beneath one of the tables, so still and grey that he’d walked past without a second glance. Not dead; the shoulders moved in restless sleep.

Tank looked back at the street-rat, frowning, puzzled; but she was gone. Of course. He hesitated, scanning the area for potential ambush, then shook his head and walked a few steps back towards the huddled figure.

Closer, a random branch beside the sleeper clarified into a heavy walking-stick. Tank’s stomach sank in sudden suspicion, and he turned to glare back into the mist.

“Who the hells
are
you?” he said out loud, suspecting that she’d hear him, and received only silence by way of an answer.

The sound of his voice roused the figure from sleep. It rolled and shoved upright, very nearly catching its head against the underside of the table. The rough blanket fell away to reveal a face once broad and strong, now pinched and pale; the boy stared at Tank for a long moment without recognition.

Tank backed up a step.
Sorry
choked in his throat this time, for multiple reasons.

“You,” the boy said at last.
“You.”
The word was a curse.

“Blackie... .” Tank drew a breath, trying to bring out more words; failed, turned, and fled.

He slowed to a walk after less than a block, breathing hard, but kept his pace rapid, his head bent, his shoulders hunched in a ferociously defensive posture. Nobody stopped him. People moved well clear of him, allowing him the straight-line path.

After another block he stopped, glaring at the ground. A splash of pale color caught his eye: a white rose, wilted and ragged, heavily flecked with brown, lay tucked up against a nearby building. He stared at it for a moment, oddly uneasy, then turned, examining the area with care. A few people hurried by, cloaks drawn tight and hoods up against the rain. Nobody spared him a second glance.