“A boy,” A’Meer said. “Slight, it’s important. This boy is precious to me, and his life is in danger.”
“Precious to you, or precious to New Shanti?” A’Meer did not reply. Slight looked her up and down. “And you all tooled up.”
Kosar did not like her. She seemed too casual, too ready with a witticism, and all the while he sensed a wily mind working behind her button eyes.
“There are a few things about me I’ve never told most people,” A’Meer admitted.
“I’ve heard about Shantasi warriors,” Slight said, shifting her weight to one side and moving, slowly, toward a wall of curtains.
A’Meer looked at Kosar and shrugged. He frowned, trying to communicate his distrust.
“Girls!” Slight called. “Slight wants a word!”
“I’m busy,” a voice said, sounding as if it came from the next street.
“When you’ve finished, then, Honey. Don’t rush the gentleman; he’s paid his way.”
Shadows came first, appearing on curtains and drapes from different directions, slowly manifesting as women. They pushed through into the central room where Slight, A’Meer and Kosar waited. One of them was beautiful. One was fodder, fat and scarred with bites. One was with child, another looked half dead from rotwine and bad fledge, and the last was a fledger, tall and yellow-eyed.
“The boy a stranger?” Slight asked, and A’Meer nodded.
“Girls, my friend here’s looking for someone. A boy. You won’t have seen him before. Maybe he was on his own; or if he’s a stranger, someone in the districts may have picked him up. You seen anyone with a stranger? Anyone we know?”
“Hope,” said the fledger. “That mad old fucking witch-whore threw a sac of poison spiders at me. She had a boy with her, filthy little bastard farmer boy, scared.”
“When was this?” A’Meer asked, but the fledger stared through her.
“When was this?” Slight rumbled.
“Yesterday.”
“Where does Hope live?” A’Meer asked Slight, and the fat woman asked the fledger, and she told them.
“Street down south, Fifthborn Circle. Not too far from here.” The fledger addressed A’Meer directly for the first and last time. “When you find that old witch-whore, are you going to slit her throat?”
“No,” said A’Meer.
The fledger raised her eyebrows at Slight. The big woman nodded and her girls disappeared back through the curtains, their movement sending a whisper in every direction.
“Thank you, Slight,” A’Meer said.
The huge woman smiled. “And yet again, you owe me. You’ll have to come and work for me soon, Shantasi.” She eyed A’Meer’s weaponry, and through the fat Kosar could not be sure of her expression. Perhaps being inscrutable served her well.
A’Meer nodded, performed a low bow and then nudged Kosar out of the old machine ahead of her.
THEY HEADED SOUTH,
moving as fast as they could through the serpentine streets. Kosar kept one hand on the new sword at his belt. It banged his leg as he ran, uncomfortable and yet reassuring with its presence. He could not shake the feeling that they were rushing headlong into trouble.
When they reached Fifthborn Circle A’Meer strolled quickly along the street, looking at doors as if she would perceive a witch’s abode by its appearance.
“We’ll have to ask,” Kosar said.
A’Meer had stopped in front of a building, the door closed tight, windows shaded and mostly still unbroken. She stood back slightly and looked up at the facade, down at ground level, back to the front door again. “This is it.”
“How do you know?”
“A witch marks her ground,” she said, offering no more.
Kosar followed her gaze but saw nothing.
“She’s in the basement rooms,” A’Meer said, kneeling to take a look at the narrow slits piercing the building just above ground level. “Her signature is Willmott’s Nemesis root, I can smell it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
A’Meer stood and nodded. “Quickly, but quietly. And I’ll go first.”
Kosar did not argue. A’Meer stood with her hand on the door handle, paused, looked around at him, frowning.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Something—”
The door burst open, smashed from its hinges. It crashed past the frame and splintered wood stung the air. Kosar stumbled back as A’Meer was thrown against him. A shape burst from the opening, a Red Monk, its decidedly feminine mouth wide open in a frozen grimace of agony and shock. Kosar kept stumbling backwards, certain that his own feet would trip him, and the Monk trampled over A’Meer to get him. Its hood was snagged back by a spear of wood, and Kosar could see its bald head, veins standing out like worm-trail, red, leaking where they split the skin. Its eyes were wide and surely sightless, such was the rate of their expansion and the scarlet pooling of blood in their whites. Its hands stretched out, one of them grasping a sword that seemed to twitch at Kosar, smelling his blood.
He fell, finally, still trying to draw the sword from his belt, and kicked up as the Red Monk came at him. His feet connected and the Monk staggered back, screaming at last. Kosar was momentarily pleased, but then the Monk stumbled quickly away, still screaming, the shriek high-pitched and ragged as if its throat was being boiled.
“A’Meer!” he shouted, but the Shantasi was already on her feet, one hand holding a sword, the other sporting a slideshock. Her eyes were wide and terrified, her mouth hanging open as if to gasp in air, and Kosar felt terrified for her.
The Red Monk was running along the street. People scattered out of its way. Its arms flailed, and blood misted the air as veins on its scalp began to burst. It fell suddenly and moved onward on hands and feet, jumping from one place to the next like a foxlion, still shrieking.
“A’Meer!” Kosar called again, running to her. She had splinters in her face, several of them drawing dribbles of blood. She looked at him and shook her head, unable to speak. “We have to go after it!” Kosar said.
She shook her head again and looked at the shattered door, stepping back as if expecting another Monk to come through.
Kosar drew his sword and stepped in front of A’Meer in a foolish act of bravery. Here he was, a lowly thief, offering to protect a Shantasi warrior. He would have laughed had he not been so petrified.
“Inside,” she said at last. “We have to check, quickly, and then we’ll follow. But be careful, there are things in there. I think it was bitten by a slayer spider.”
“Mage shit,” Kosar whispered. He had heard about these creatures. Right then, he was not sure which he would rather face: a Red Monk, or a slayer.
A’Meer darted around him and slipped through the door. Her arm twitched and the slideshock whipped out, hitting something in the dark.
Kosar ran in behind her and sidestepped the still-twitching spider on the floor, fat as an eyeball. “Is that it?” he asked.
“No, I’ve never seen one like that before. The slayer must still be around somewhere.” She headed downstairs to the basement rooms, Kosar on her tail. They were checking for Rafe, but Kosar was certain that his body would not be here. The Monk—inflamed by pain as it was—had also been clean. There was no blood on its sword, none splashed on its face other than its own.
“A’Meer, that Monk is on Rafe’s trail.”
A’Meer nudged open the door at the bottom of the stairs and went in, flipping her arm out and slicing a scorpion in two as it dashed from behind a cupboard. Kosar followed more cautiously, looking around, checking the walls to either side and above the door for any telltale shadows.
“Well, he’s not here, at least,” A’Meer said. “Stay alert, there are at least five smashed jars on the floor.”
Kosar checked around his feet amongst the smashed clay shards. Nothing there. He glanced at the shelves, lined with hundreds of other jars and leather containers, wondering just what else Hope kept in here. He had never known a witch, let alone been in the home of one. The hanging herbs, the jars, the charts, the paraphernalia disturbed him, perhaps because of how this place would be perceived by many: one step closer to magic.
“We have to go,” A’Meer said. She turned around, her eyes went wide and her arm flipped up quickly, the slideshock’s weighted wire lashing out and plucking something from Kosar’s shoulder. He felt the splash of its insides pattering his bare arm as the dead slayer spider dropped to the floor. “We really
should
go,” A’Meer insisted.
“I agree.”
They left the room to whatever was left alive, shutting the downstairs door in an effort to keep the dangers within.
A crowd had gathered outside. Children ran back and forth, collecting handfuls of the smashed front door to show their friends later as they bragged of what they had seen. Adults hovered farther away, their caution born of experience telling them that, really, this was not their business. And striding down the street, three militia rattled their swords with self-importance.
“Oh Mage shit,” Kosar said. “They’ll keep us talking till dusk.”
“Stay close to me, don’t say a word and try not to listen too hard to what I have to say.” A’Meer glanced back at Kosar. “Think of something else, how we can track the Red Monk. Just how do we do that?”
The militia stopped, standing side by side so that they blocked the street and the route Kosar and A’Meer had to take. What had she meant? They would track the Monk easily. There would be a trail of people in the streets, chattering about what they had just seen, how much blood there had been:
Did you see that thing, it was running like a dog, a woman, it was a woman you say, but where did all that
blood
come—
“Urgh!” One of the militiamen was holding his ears, and the others, cowering back against a fence on the opposite side of the street, looked so terrified that A’Meer may as well have been the Red Monk itself.
“Kosar, come on!” she called. She ran past the militia, and Kosar heard her mutter a gentle apology.
“What was
that
?” he asked as he followed. She did not answer. They ran to the end of Fifthborn Circle and turned left, following knots of startled people that were still drifting in the street like sparrows bobbing in the wake of a passing hawk. People stepped quickly out of their way and Kosar tried to smile at them, to tell them that there was nothing to fear. But suddenly, in the distance, there was. A scream, high and loud and enraged, not from a human throat. From much farther came a similar response, winging across the rooftops and startling birds and giant moths into flight.
“What in the name—”
“Shit!” A’Meer cursed. “There are more. It’s calling them.” She paused, panting, slideshock hanging from one arm and dragging in the dust. “If we keep following we’ll come up against other Red Monks.
Unless
we catch it in the next couple of minutes, take it on, take it down and then get away.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Kosar said, expecting her to offer him another quick, easy way out. He was only a thief, after all.
“I’m scared.”
Kosar reigned in his surprise. “So is Rafe, I suspect.”
A’Meer lowered her eyes, examined the dust-caked mass still stuck to her slideshock. Then she nodded and set off again, running, expecting people to get out of her way. They did not disappoint her.
The trail was easy to follow. The dried road dust held splashes of black blood, but even had they not been there, the expressions on the faces of those around showed the way. The streets were lined with stunned people, some of them shocked at the sight of the bleeding, screaming woman, others—those few who perhaps knew the true nature of the Red Monks—even more terrified. Rumor of the Monks’ presence must surely have spread throughout Pavisse by now, but seeing one agitated and in action drove home the mortal danger that the town was in.
A’Meer went first. Kosar watched her black braids bobbing as she ran, the weapons in their slings, belts and scabbard tied in tight to her body so that they did not rattle and shake.
What did she do back there to those militia? A few muttered words and she had them whimpering like babies. What power, what talents could do that?
The Monk screeched again ahead of them, closer than before.
“How long ago?” Kosar asked a startled sheebok herder. He stood with his herd pulled in tight around him, as if they would offer protection.
“A couple of minutes.” He glanced down at Kosar’s sword, still unsheathed and warm in the thief’s hand. “You’ll need more than that.”
Kosar ran fast to catch up with A’Meer. “It’s close!” he called, but she did not need telling. They skirted around a huge old machine, its tendrils long since fossilized into broken stone spurs that still reached in vain for the sky. On its far side a man was lying on the ground, holding a heap of slippery intestines in his lap. He too was looking to the sky. A small girl was hugging him and shouting. She had her face buried in his neck. People hovered around, not knowing what to do.
“Come on,” A’Meer said quietly over her shoulder, as if afraid that Kosar would stop to help.
Kosar glanced at the man as he ran by and for a second their eyes locked. He looked away quickly. There was nothing that could comfort a man about to die with his daughter’s tears wetting his skin.
The Monk screamed again and was answered by several separate cries. The complex warren of streets and alleys misled the echoes, confused direction, until Kosar was sure that they were surrounded by Red Monks, closing in quickly and ready for the fight.
We could die here,
he thought.
We probably will. A’Meer is terrified of one injured Monk, and now there are several closing in, almost as if they’re herding us.
A’Meer ran fast, and it was not long before Kosar began to feel his age. The summer heat sucked sweat from him, soaking his shirt and trousers and fusing them to his skin. A’Meer seemed not to tire. It was as if she were eighteen, not over a hundred.
Another Shantasi mystery,
he thought.
They came to a courtyard filled with milling people, and sensing the urgency, a few of them pointed the way. A’Meer ran into the mouth of a small alley, glancing down now and then at the blood spotting the ground, and Kosar followed. They passed a line of wash hung out to dry, and he saw spray patterns of blood across the lower edges. Either the Monk had caught someone here, or its veins were still bursting from slayer venom.