When We Were Executioners (23 page)

“No,” said Jona.

“Avoid it if you can,” said the Chief. “Makes this place smell like a rose.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Jona.

“I can’t just wall off the fullers with a canal. They’re up in the country past the wall, working along the beachheads. Ever been to the beaches?”

“Can’t say I’ve been anywhere, Chief,” said Jona.

“Well, the only place worth going in the whole city is Sabachthani’s estate. Nothing else is worth the trouble.”

Jona nodded.

CHAPTER VI

A maid drank too much in a tavern near the eastern wall. She thought Jona was a suitor sent by her father to spare her the horror of work. Jona walked in, saw her eyes light up, and sat down. If her suitor was coming, he’d have trouble finding her with another king’s man in front of her. She asked Jona if her father had sent him, and Jona said yes because she was dressed like a maid. She had blue eyes, pale as daylight, and she never seemed to smile. She drank and she told everything Jona asked about everything, drinking and drinking on Jona’s coin until she could barely keep here blue eyes open. She told Jona about Mishle Levi.

The chief engineer, Mishle Levi, had a weekly meeting with the king, which had become pure ceremony.

The chief engineer poured the king’s tea, helped the king drink his tea, and talked about the king’s sons as if the boys were still alive. The chief forged the king’s signature on anything he needed. He sent them to Lord Sabachthani, and if it came back, it was approved.

Every branch of service was like that. The Captain of the Guard answered to no one, not even Sabachthani, just clearing his budget with the tax officials. The generals trained their men in seclusion in the forests, while noblemen vied for the loyalty of the soldiers. The bureaucrats moved papers from one end of the city to the other, collecting stamps and coins and stamps and coins, passing the coins up into an unknown aether somewhere above their heads.

Foreign nations sent envoys to Lord Sabachthani. Nobles roamed unchecked in the streets, with no authority to pressure away their foolish intrigues.

* * *

Tripoli’s hands shook when he walked. The Chief pointed at Tripoli’s hands and Jona shrugged. Jona made the universal gesture of drinking alcohol. Jona took the hook off Tripoli’s back and carried both of the hooks for the grates, one on each shoulder.

Tripoli clambered down the steel ladders into the darkness carrying the knotted measuring rope to the bottom of the sewer. He had to stick his hand into the lowest point of the sewer. His arm emerged brown to the shoulder after the grate at the bottom of a hill.

After that sewer, he was coughing and choking and trying to crack a joke about what he had just done. He acted like he was about to throw an arm around Jona. Jona kicked Tripoli in the shin, and jumped away. Tripoli laughed, waving his filthy arm at the people walking past. They pulled away from Tripoli, some shouting curses to raise the dead.

Then, Tripoli walked hurriedly—no explanation—away from the men. Tripoli stepped into this alley between two larger pens full of cattle. He ducked behind a pile of bones and bloody papers. He threw his pants down to his ankles. He aimed at the fence.

Jona winced at the sounds—like a bucket dumping water from a high window.

Tripoli coughed and cursed.

Pedestrians—rowdies and gangers, all of them—shouted encouragement.

“You can do it! Don’t give up!”

“Breathe! You’ll get it out!”

“Be sure to name her after your ma!”

Tripoli shouted at the people to toss off. He cursed Imam and Erin. He cursed his mother, his father. He cursed his own name, then his wicked ways. Tripoli’s voice cracked in a raw scream. Tripoli fell over, clawing at the ground.

The engineers who had been trying not to look couldn’t help it, now. Tripoli clawed at the ground. His face looked like dying. His mouth gasped like dying.

And he was dying.

Jona ran to him.

Tripoli flopped in this puddle. A pool of pink blood collected around his ankles. His intestines, blown inside out, twitched in a purple shit blood stew from his body.

Jona cried out for help.

Tripoli clutched at Jona’s leg, gasping for air and bleeding. Wet shit and purple blood spurted out of the bloody funnels that hung out of Tripoli’s body like sausages being aborted.

Jona tried to hold Tripoli. Jona tried to pick Tripoli up and hold him, and hold him still so he wouldn’t bleed so much.

Then Tripoli was very still.…

Mishle Levi, the Chief City Engineer of Dogsland, pulled Jona away.

The Chief tried to light fire to the body with anything he could find. “That’s strong as demon fever,” said the Chief, “Typhoid, and bad. Worse than plague, that strong.”

Jona’s stomach turned. It was because of him. “He must have picked it up from that girl we found, the nun,” said Jona, his stomach turning thinking about every time he and Tripoli had handed a flask between them.

The Chief patted Jona’s back. “Maybe. Jona, you’d better burn that uniform tonight and bathe alone. Go find a temple and see if you can get some holy water or something to bathe in. We all will soon as we can.”

One of the journeyman engineers produced a small keg of kerosene. He poured it all over the ruined body. Jona didn’t watch them burn the worst of the stain away. The mess burned like wood, but it was meat and it shouldn’t have burned like that. What remained, blackened and unrecognizable, was still whole, still human. That’s what a demon stain can do to a man, a real man, if there’s too much of it inside of him.

The Chief sent for Sergeant Calipari, and pulled Jona away from the alley.

Jona’s hands shook. His eyes were closed. He was thinking about all the times he and his fellows had handed a flask between them, and how many times someone had gotten a little sick but not really gotten sick enough to matter.

And now Tripoli’s blown inside out, and burned on the street like a rabid dog.

* * *

Jona and Rachel were taking a break from dancing, and Jona was sweating, and Rachel was using her Senta winds to wick the sweat off her body before it started to pool in her clothes, melt them faster than they would otherwise melt from her demon stain. She hated how she smelled when she was sweating, like she could smell the clothes burning a little.

Then the song changed, and they both needed a drink, and they went to the penny pot. One penny down, and they could drink as much as they could from this big rubber hose without stopping for air. Before they got drunk, they didn’t take the hose because they didn’t want to make anyone sick. After they got drunk, they figured everyone drinking at the hose was already drinking themselves sick, so why not drink at the hose?

Rachel went first, and got enough down to make her eyes water. Jona didn’t drink much right then. He was trying to keep his head together.

Jona tried to tell her she was beautiful.

She smacked his arm. She told him to cut that out. “Why?” said Jona.

“I just want you to, okay.”

“Something else, then. Did you hear the criers? Big ship went

down in the bay. Foul play suspected.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said, “What happened?” Jona flung another penny at the barman, and handed the tube to Rachel. She listened while she drank.

Jona looked past the bar, to the water far beyond the smoky room. “This big ship was coming in loaded down with all kinds of fancy wood. Somebody started a fire. Whole thing down in the bay, and everyone on board a dead man. King’s men in the Low Sticks were pulling bodies out of the water all morning. The sailors wouldn’t go down with the ship. They jumped— most of them on fire—right into the water, but they couldn’t swim far all burned up like that. No one was going to risk getting close to a burning ship, so nobody saved them.”

Rachel choked, and shoved the tube spilling cheap alcohol at the barman. She wiped her sleeve over her arm, and gasped for air. She said, breathless, “No one got out?”

Jona smiled, sadly. “No,” he said, “It was fast. Spread real quick. She must’ve been covered in something. Looks juiced, you know, but the ship never even anchored in the bay. Ship’s owned by foreigners. We checked up on the sailors a bit, and the people who were expecting some nice wood. Didn’t find a thing.”

“That’s it? You just ask a few questions and all these sailors died?”

“People die all the time for nothing,” said Jona, “So, I’d rather talk about how beautiful you are, okay?”

Rachel threw another penny down, and shoved the rubber hose at Jona’s face. “Only if we’re red drunk,” she said, “Red, red drunk!”

Jona bit the hose with his teeth. “You’re beautiful,” he mumbled.

* * *

Tripoli’s folks came in from vineyards in the north hills. Tripoli’s father built casks for new wine. When Tripoli’s father got to town, he already had a casket for his son’s ashy remains, handmade from solid oak, and far bigger than the blackened bones needed.

The Lieutenant got some of the other districts to cover the Pens, so all of Calipari’s boys could attend the service.

Tripoli’s parents were Imam’s folks. An Imam Priest preached of paradise, and ashes to ashes, water to water, and bliss. Each soul that fell away from the flesh returned again to life, until the lessons of immortality taught the paradox of the Breaking, where the heavens tore to pieces while the earth remained whole.

(Rachel frowned when Jona told her that. “The false breaking,” she said, correcting him.)

Jona stared at the casket. Jona wondered if his soul would be reborn among the demons, deep below the skin of the earth, over and over, until he understood the true power of evil.

Tripoli’s father led the cart with his son down to the water. His wife, wailing beside him, didn’t exist to that old man. His jaw—he looked just like Tripoli, too—clamped like a steel trap against the grief. He stared off to where the water dropped below the horizon.

The casket shoved off from the funeral dock near the temple. The priest lit the arrowhead on fire. The priest drew his bow, aimed up, and loosed the arrow. The shot arced like riding an invisible rainbow. The arrow smacked the casket on the first shot. The arrow trembled. The casket rocked. The fire crawled down the arrowhead like falling down a mast. Then, the deck of the casket burned all over the top, and then down to the center of Tripoli’s ashen body.

Jona glanced at the priest. The priest couldn’t hide his satisfaction with the shot. Usually took priests a few to get a hit, and sometimes they couldn’t hit it at all, and the casket just rolled away into the water.

Jona frowned at that. People shouldn’t look proud now.

* * *

Tripoli’s landlord never showed his face for the ceremony, or in the flat afterwards. After what happened to the furniture, no one had expected him to show his face.

Thieves had already stolen everything inside the apartment. Landlords liked how fast sneak thieves worked. A word here or there with the local toughs, and a room unlocked in the dark, and the room’s ready to rent again in hours.

Tripoli’s parents didn’t seem to mind.

Everybody had brought some kind of food, and Calipari put his coat on the ground, so they’d have somewhere to spread the food out, like a picnic. People ate, but nobody talked. Tripoli’s folks didn’t know these city toughs and these city toughs didn’t want to really talk about Tripoli in front of his parents. They all just ate.

The dingy yellow walls echoed every little sound. Jona was afraid to eat too loud. He didn’t want to be heard.

After the food was gone, everybody went into the street. The old man walked through the king’s men, shaking hands and thanking the boys for looking out for Tripoli when he was alive.

Then, the old woman leaned on her husband’s shoulder. She reached up to old man’s stony face.

And that got him.

The man, standing by the funeral dock, crumpled into his wife’s arms like they were holding each other up now, but neither one should have been standing at all because both were broken.

Jona turned away. He thought about how beautiful Rachel was by candlelight. He thought about how it couldn’t have been his fault because Tripoli had gotten a little sick now and then, but never this sick.

But it was Jona’s fault.

* * *

The boys were drinking hard for four nights and tossing any street toughs hard. Word spread fast that king’s men were in a black mood. The district was dead quiet.

Private Pup became Corporal Pup.

A new private showed up a few days later, fresh from the guard posts along the southern frontier and ecstatic to be back in Dogsland. Two days scrivening, and he wasn’t ecstatic anymore.

Three weeks later, Jona looked around the station house at morning muster, waiting for the graveyard crew to cut back and report out. Everybody was there, laughing and up for a kick except for Tripoli.

Jona couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine what it was like to have Tripoli there instead of Pup. Black tears swelled in Jona’s gut thinking about that. Jona clamped the tears down until the urge passed.

His tears were poison, after all.

* * *

Chief Engineer Mishle Leva didn’t stop on the day that Tripoli died. Jona had to take over the sewer diving while a kid from an alley was paid to get the Sergeant. Another kid stood over the smoldering body to keep the ragpickers off the toxic corpse.

The rain was gone for such a short window, and no time could be spared over just one death. Jona understood that. (In his mind, he thought about how the Night King might want the Chief Engineer killed.)

Underground in his first sewer dive, tired men looked up at Jona from pallets spread on the damp ground. They didn’t say anything. The light slanted down from the open grate onto the shriveled heads and the men there looked like bones in burlap.

Jona tossed them a few coins. “Things are changing, soon, fellows. Find somewhere new.”

One of the men picked up the coins from the ground. This fellow used both hands to hold the coins up, one at a time, like touching something holy. He passed the coins, one at a time, back to the other men.