The Broken (The Lost Words: Volume 2) (12 page)

It was as if some kind of balance was shattered. One moment, Ewan was floating in the void, sharing this mad dream with others; the next moment, it collapsed like a bubble of tar. He found himself in the real world, his mind plagued with worry, and a need. Whatever it was, it made Ewan feel uneasy and restless. Something tugged at his soul. Maybe those were the gods, crying for help. Maybe it was something bigger than the gods. He had to find out.

He reached the shore. No ship waited for him. He shrugged. Well, there was little else he could do. He plunged and swam, one stroke at a time. There was no cold, no fatigue. Only purpose.

Many days later, he reached Eybalen. From some distance away, the city looked unchanged. Up close, it was still no different. Ewan sat on an old, abandoned pier, letting his clothes dry, listening to the din of chaos and trade behind him. So many people, so many sounds. So simple and real. It would take some time getting used to.

Not far away, an old man was bleeding horseshoe crabs into a large bowl. They sold that blue blood as medicine, he knew, although he wouldn’t trust it to be healthy coming from those ugly armored things. Finished with one of the crabs, he tossed it away, then picked up another. A child would then pick up the discarded monsters and pierce their soft bellies with a hook. Ewan remembered. The fishermen used them as bait.

Taking a deep breath and ignoring the methodical crab carnage, Ewan rose and walked into the cauldron of smelly humanity. He avoided contact with people, keeping his eyes low, following a random pattern in the crowd. No one talked to him. No one confronted him. Cutpurses saw nothing of value about him and let him be.

After a while, Ewan got his first chance to see himself in a beaten plate of copper, resting against a pile of crates, waiting to be loaded onto a ship. The reflection that stared back at him was not perfect, but it was his old self. He had not aged even a day. He still looked like a somber child.

Perhaps no time had elapsed.

Encouraged, he started asking after familiar names. But the dockworkers just frowned at him. No one had heard of Captain Horace or the
Tenacious
. No one knew who the egg-headed Sirtai might be. With each question, panic grew deeper inside him, constricting him. He was soon gasping for air, his voice thin and barely audible.

He fled the docks and hid behind a butcher’s shop, watching half-mangled, blackened entrails rot in a gutter, assailed by rats and flies. The smell was pervasive, but it did not make him sick. He was glad he could smell the world. It made him feel more real. He stood thinking, but there was no escaping the one thought that formed in his mind. He would have to ask someone about the date. Ewan sought a likely victim, a content-looking sailor who would be willing to answer an innocent question and not try to clout him or ask for sex in return. Luckily, the harbor front provided ample game. He found his mark soon, a small, stocky guy from one of the Far South car-racks. The man answered him, all right. He told him what year it was.

The boy looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. Every sight looked new and alien. Eighteen years. Eighteen long years had elapsed. It was not the same world he had left. No one he knew back then would remember him. He would probably not even recognize them himself. Some might even be dead. He should have been a grown man by now.

He tried to remember his friends. Ayrton. Was Ayrton still alive? Where was he? What had happened in the war? How did it all end? What happened to Sarith? What happened to Vicky? A pang of pain lanced through his heart when he thought about the girl he had thought he once loved.

Did she still work at Wicked Filly? What a fool he was, he realized a moment later. How could she? Almost twenty years had elapsed since. No one employed old whores. They were bad money. Ewan wondered what had become of her. Had she married someone? Did she have children? Would she remember him if he showed up at her doorstep?

If
she were alive, he thought. An inner sense of wisdom he had not known he possessed answered all of the questions for him. Perhaps he had aged in the Abyss, only on the inside. Perhaps he had learned truths in a way no living human could. But he knew, with an agonizing conviction of a man all alone in the world, that his former life was gone. Ayrton, Vicky, Sarith, Armin, they were all gone forever.

There was only the pain in his belly, beckoning him. West.

He found employment in the docks easily enough. He was young and strong and did not tire easily. For the sake of the people around him, he shared their meals and breaks and pretended to hurt as much as they did. The pay was meager, but he saved all of it, since he needed no food or lodging after work.

He knew he could get by with very little, but he did not want to travel like a beggar, scavenging on the road. He wanted to look decent and respectable at least, even if he could not feel that way about himself. But financial freedom loomed far away, beyond his reach. Hauling goods back and forth around the harbor broke your back. It did not make you rich.

Soon, Ewan was working in three different places. He would finish his shift with one shipmaster and then walk across the harbor to another, where he would continue laboring hours without end. The
Tempest
, the
Black Wave
, and
Her Lady’s Cutter
all saw him scrubbing their decks, rolling barrels of spices down gangplanks, lugging crates of silk, and juggling urns of oils. He started making some money, but it was not enough. After a few weeks, he got bored with manual labor and decided to try riskier jobs. He volunteered to handle dangerous animals that came aboard some of the foreign ships—cats as large as a horse, spotted bears, and evil-looking monkeys that could strangle you in a blink of an eye. Dockworkers never liked those tasks, but he rushed forward, fearless, bored, even angry. He was wasting his time, and the sense of urgency grew by the day.

Word quickly got round. They named him Ewan the Terrible, and he soon became the one man everyone sought for suicide missions. He played with snakes and scorpions. He let them stab impotently at his iron-hard skin. He wrestled sharks, and he retrieved lost goods from the bottom of the murky harbor channel. Whenever a valuable item fell off the gangplank and vanished in the gooey soup called Eybalen Harbor, Ewan would dive in, daring death. It was not that he had a death wish. He just knew that fate had something far more sinister in store for him. Even the Abyss did not want him.

One day, after rescuing a sunken culverin that had snapped its ropes and killed two of the crew, Ewan sat on the dock, water dripping off him, thinking. He could become famous and utterly rich. He could fight in bear pits and do stunts no human would hope to survive. He could rule the world. But he had no dark ambitions. He did not think any less of his ordinary human fellow workers. He wanted nothing to do with power. He just wanted to belong.

Less than a month later, he had enough gold to buy a horse, decent clothes, weapons, and still have some left for any unexpected costs. And it was enough. Eybalen was a sweet trap. He could stay there forever, hiding in the shadows, playing god to people who could not read or write, rot in the comfort zone of invincibility and ignorance. But the black hole in his stomach would not let him be. It pulled on his soul like a restless child, its tiny, clammy fingers invasive and relentless.

It was time to leave. It would be extremely simple. He would just vanish one day and never show up again. Eybalen ate people for breakfast and shat their bones in the evening.

He had a room in an inn called Flotsam Luck half a mile from the docks. It was a simple place where he could keep his belongings, a point of sanity he could refer to. It told him to stop laboring endlessly and take a little break, sit back, and relax and think. But now, he was leaving that place, too.

He walked the horse toward the West Road. The clatter of hooves soothed him. Dawn was still an hour away. Only drunkards, madmen, and the City Watch walked the streets now. No one paid him much attention. He was just another desolate, undigested merchant in an overcoat, vomited by Eybalen for having been found unworthy of its lures.

Yes, he could rule the world. He could be the perfect assassin, the best sword fighter, the tireless hunter, the unsung hero of coal mines, and the crown champion in a faraway kingdom. He could do it all. But he always remembered his friend Ayrton, his simple, humble ways, and knew that he belonged in the small, insignificant world with everybody else. Glory happened to other people.

A rat skittered across the rain-wet cobbles, its long, fat tail wobbling. Something clanged in one of the side alleys. Ewan paid no attention. Then, there was another clang. There was a moment of silence, then a sound like a whip. A faint moan, almost like a whimper. A scraping noise. Unnatural sounds for a drowsy early morning.

Ewan looked toward the alley. He could see nothing. But he could feel a presence, the heat of chaotic life bunched up. He shrugged. It was none of his business. Eybalen was history.

He stepped past the alley and heard a groan, a wet thud. More scraping. Some sort of a chatter, but then it could have been hushed human voices talking very rapidly. He backtracked toward the alley’s mouth, staring down its black, sore throat.

“Anyone need help?” he offered gallantly. What else could he do? He tied the horse’s reins to a rain pipe and stepped carefully into the alley, half blind, minding his step.

He moved away instinctively. A metal rod zipped past his ear and smacked into the brick wall, chipping stone. His assailant grunted, cursed, and swung again. Ewan let the weapon connect this time. The other man wailed as the recoil of the blow shot up his arm, and he dropped the rusty bar. It clanged onto the cobbles, too loud for the surreal, wet morning.

The same thing had happened to him eighteen years ago. Some things never changed.

The first attacker retreated, obviously terrified. But a second man lunged at him, nursing a short knife and stabbing rapidly. The thin blade snapped in two, cutting back through the owner’s palm. The man’s scream exploded into the night.

Ewan’s eyes slowly got accustomed to the dark. There were five of them, two others still bent over someone or something behind a pile of debris and trash. They were looking at him now, gauging their chances. The only way they could escape the alley was to run past Ewan—or through him.

Ewan was no fighter, but he was familiar with the terror his phenomenon invoked with humans by now. He was not interested in bloodshed. He did not want to hurt anyone. He just wanted to be left alone.

He pointed behind him, toward the main street.
There you go
, his gesture signaled.
Leave. Go away. I have no quarrel with you. You don’t want me to hurt you. Just go
.

They might be criminals and street mongrels, but they were not stupid. The five men knew they had been given an opportunity that would never come again. They understood mercy, even if they had never shown it to their victims. Slowly, they shuffled past him, backs pressed against the wall, keeping their distance as much as they could, beady eyes glazed with horror locked on him, watching his every move.

Once they hit the clear road, they broke into a run, never looking back. The crazed patter of their feet soon faded into nothing. The night remained cold and wet and empty. Ewan stood, staring at the debris heap, listening to the weak pants and sobs that came from the far side. He hesitated. What should he do? Go there? Who knew what he would find. He did not really want to know. He was no hero. He could not go about saving everyone everywhere. It was pure chance that he had walked by this alley.

But his body moved of its own volition. Like a puppet, he marched into the alley, his steps wooden, his heart hammering in his chest.

Behind the rubble, a small form cowered, curled into a ball, trembling. Whoever he or she was, it had its clothes torn. There was blood all over them.

“Don’t hurt me,” it whispered.

“I am here to help you,” Ewan said in a weak, frightened voice. He did not know what to do.

The thing stirred and looked at him. It was a girl, most likely. It was hard to tell under the massive swelling of her face. Her nose was broken. Some of her teeth were missing. One of her eyes was closed shut. She had been beaten badly.