The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (2 page)

Stoakes sat a table, one of perhaps twenty, in the restaurant, eating a meal paid for with money stolen from some unfortunate passerby. Most of the establishment was open to the street. Stone columns at intervals supported the rest of the building, and Stoakes noted folded shutters of mushroom wood—all the furnishings were of mushroom wood—which could be drawn to secure the place during off hours. He was attracting a lot of attention because of his clothing, but this didn’t concern him. Indeed, his clothing—soft, charcoal in color, and loose except about his forearms and calves—was having a rather interesting effect. In a culture where there were no clothes, he was getting obviously lurid glances from two female patrons and from the woman behind the bar. The men sneered or shook their heads. Several grumbled when passing by his table. He heard one asking rhetorically what he had to hide.

At this Stoakes rose from his chair abruptly, pulled the Suicide Knife from its place behind him, and slammed it down upon the table. He raised both open hands before him in a gesture of submission and said in the language of the locals, “I’ve tolerated enough rudeness. See for yourself.”

The man stopped suddenly, his eyes wide with fear. He turned hesitantly towards Stoakes. “I’m sorry, mister. It’s just no one covers up unless they’ve got something to hide.”

Stoakes cocked his head expectantly. “I’m waiting. See for yourself.”

The man held his hands up defensively. “I don’t want any trouble. I was wrong to open my mouth.”

Stoakes relaxed somewhat. “Is this the hospitality you show to all visitors who come here?” he said, addressing the whole restaurant. With a dismissive nod, he sent the man away. Someone else from behind, though, was not so easily cowed.

“Yes, in fact, it
is
the hospitality we show to those who arouse suspicion.”

Stoakes turned to face the speaker, the Suicide Knife lurching of its own accord into his left hand as another man close by tried to take hold of it.

“You must know,” the speaker continued, “that this is Bek Ialo’s territory, and he is known far and wide to be very protective of what’s his.”

From somewhere within the restaurant came an ironic humph. Stoakes watched the new man’s eyes scour the room and then his teeth grind momentarily when the source could not be located.

“And who are you,” Stoakes said, sheathing the Suicide Knife.

The speaker’s eyes narrowed as four other men drew closer about Stoakes and his table. Each of these men had a sword in a harness at his hip.

“I am Alber Yosen. I keep things tidy for Master Ialo.”

“I’ll give you—and your friends—the same opportunity I gave that other fellow. He raised his hands once again in a gesture of submission.

Yosen smiled mirthlessly.

“It’s just. . .”

“What? Please inform us.”

“It’s just that you might not come away with all your limbs still attached.”

“Oh? Do you think you can pull that little sticker and cut us all before we can subdue you?”

“I don’t need ‘that little sticker’ to cut you.”

“Really? I say prove it.” Yosen nodded and all four men moved to grab him, the two furthest from him casting the table aside.

Stoakes smiled and shot backwards. He didn’t go Dark. He didn’t need to. His arms moved in beautiful, circling arcs, and the restaurant was filled with screams, shouts, and cries. He had moved back so that the four men made a kind of circle between him and Yosen. Each of the four gripped the blood-pumping stumps of their right shoulders with their left hands, while littering the floor in the circle they made was a collection of right arms.

Stoakes held his hands out before him, left before right, with his elbows bent at right angles, crossing at forty-five degrees so that the first two fingers of each hand, jutting forth to form the Secret Sword, made a the upper point of a triangle when viewed straight on.

Yosen’s upper lip quivered with rage. “It seems you
do
have something to hide.”

Stoakes shook his head. “Nope. I don’t care what you or anyone else knows about me. This—
you
—are merely a diversion. I get bored, you see, and then I dwell unnecessarily.”

The image of something began to issue forth from the center of Yosen’s forehead.

“Not here in the shop!” Stoakes heard the woman from behind the bar cry out as people started to scatter to the street and beyond.

The image was still emerging, becoming. . . reptilian, but he didn’t wait to see what shape it would ultimately take. He shot his right hand forward, his two fingers cutting through the air audibly. When his arm snapped to complete the strike, a noise—a sonic boom—punctuated the motion and a hole, deep and wide enough to accommodate Stoakes’s two fingers, opened up in the middle of Yosen’s forehead with a great eruption of bright red blood. Stoakes had not changed his position, and yet he was clearly responsible for Yosen’s condition despite the fact that they were separated by at least three meters. Yosen remained standing for a moment, random muscles in his face twitching to give him a variety of strange expressions until he finally toppled over backward.

Nearly all of the patrons were gone, the rest leaving. The lady came out from behind the bar and shouted to the waitstaff—three young women and one old, bow-legged man—to help her. Stoakes watched her appreciatively as she set about closing the wooden shutters with the rest. She looked to be about forty with hair like shining graphite. Her ornaments did little to hide her figure, which was, for Stoakes, just the right combination of firm and soft. He felt like an adolescent fool entranced as he was by the sway of her heavy breasts. When close to finishing with the shutters, she told the four helping her to go home and not come back until she sent for them. She passed him on her way to the final shutters, and brought him to full attention when she said to him in a low voice, “You’d better kill them four, too, mister, else Bek Ialo will come sooner rather than later.” She stood at the exit and nodded reassuringly as the waitstaff passed out of the restaurant.

Stoakes turned his eyes to the four. Two were prone, with eyes glazed, and clearly in shock. One sat amongst them, his feet kicking out, slipping on the blood-slick floor as if he were absently trying to stand. The last was breathing heavily and staring murder at Stoakes.

Stoakes shrugged. “You heard her. You’re all going to die anyway. You can draw your sword if you like.”

The man glanced at Yosen then looked to Stoakes. Stoakes shrugged again. He shot the Secret Sword forward again with a loud crack, punching a hole in the man’s chest from a distance. He sighed. “Sorry,” he said, meaning it.

“Have I compromised you and your position within this community?” Stoakes said to the restaurant woman.

She looked over her shoulder as she locked the last of the shutters and smiled enigmatically at him. Stoakes heard her humph the same humph that Yosen couldn’t identify. He smiled back at her.

Stoakes had two bodies stacked on each shoulder. This was his second trip down to the basement, having brought Yosen—and the arm collection—down first when Kira Suska had started to drag him down herself. Leaving Stoakes to it, she had started to clean up the blood, but seeing how strong he was and how much more quickly this would go, she wiped her hands, and followed him down the stairs.

As he reached the bottom, she emerged from behind him and moved ahead to a post that rose one and a half meters from the floor. It was dark down here in spite of the electric light, but Stoakes saw her work a number of small levers jutting from the top of the post and then shifted his eyes to the floor, which started to rumble. Two plates of heavy steel began to slide apart, revealing a red glow from three meters below. He walked to the edge of the nearest plate once it had stopped, and looked down into bubbling lava.

“This is your sewer?” he said somewhat incredulously.

She nodded. “Most every block has access. You’re lucky that I run a business. Stuffing them down toilets would have been more difficult.”

“Is there any ceremony you’d like to observe?”

“For them? Not hardly.” She gestured, with a nod, for him to toss the bodies down, and he did. “No one will miss Yosen and his crew except for Bek Ialo.”

Stoakes went over to Yosen’s prone form, wrapped his fingers around the deadman’s neck, and carried him one-handed to the edge of the fiery sewer pit. “What about him? What was that that came out of him?”

Kira cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, but she was intrigued, not suspicious. “That was his Shield. It would have ruined the whole place if he’d managed to bring it out. I owe you for that.”

“Is it recoverable? Might you be able to make use of it?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s inside him and I don’t want what he’s got. Little good it did him. No, the lava will burn him, leaving the Shield. The Shield will ride the flow and find its way back to Chan Fa.” She paused for a moment, staring at Stoakes, trying to understand the impossibility he represented.

“You really are a visitor here, and by here I don’t just mean Ialo’s territory,” she said.

Stoakes tossed Yosen down and watched him sink slowly through the viscous surface, burning on contact with a fire no more visibly intense than that of several candle-flames.

“You are correct,” he said meeting her gaze, the red flickering glow lighting them both from below.

She shook her head. “Where did you come from?”

“From the lights in the night sky.”

She took his hands, which were remarkably clean of blood, in hers and drew him along with her towards the stairs. She reached out casually and without looking to flip the levers on the post to close the sewer doors. “Help me clean up and when we are done I will show you
true
hospitality.”

Stoakes lay in Kira’s bed with Kira tracing her finger over the hard angles and countless scars of his body. “Tell me about the Shields,” he said. “You said that if Yosen’s had come out it would have ruined your restaurant.”

“They’re big. Some can alter their size, but in general they’re as big or bigger than a city block.”

From what Stoakes had seen, that meant thirty to forty meters for a start.

“Those with strong ones hold territories; those with weaker ones serve the stronger and hope to someday steal the territory for themselves. Bek Ialo did that.”

“Did he become so strong?”

“Not particularly. He’s called the Shadow Thief and for good reason. His Shield lets him take anything he wants. He was shrewd, at least, to succeed with his coup, but we’ve seen no benefit under him.”

“How many are there in total?”

“A hundred maybe? I don’t know.”

“How many more like Yosen does Ialo have?”

“None.”

“What will Ialo do when he realizes Yosen is missing?”

She shrugged. “Come here. Ask questions. Make threats. Take some things he decides he likes.”

Stoakes nodded and rolled over on top of her. “Kind of like me.”

She grinned. “Kind of like you.”

Kira stood at the window. Her small suite of rooms on the top floor of the building afforded a good view. She stared at the storm-front mass in the sky heading towards the city. It was hypnotic in its way, Stoakes thought as he came up behind her.

“Should we be worried about that?” he said, placing his hands upon her shoulders and nuzzling her neck.

“No,” she replied, smiling at his sudden closeness. “It’s just the cloud sea. It’ll shut down some businesses and make everything disgustingly warm and wet, but it’ll bring water. It’s good timing, actually. The weather will be bad enough to dissuade Ialo from coming to investigate Yosen’s disappearance. In fact, it may even postpone his finding out.”

“Good,” Stoakes said. “When do you plan on opening up again?”

She shrugged. “I was thinking this afternoon. The restaurant makes a nice temporary refuge from the direct spray of the cloud sea for those who can’t just drop everything when it comes. The sooner we open back up, the less likely there’ll be any chance for speculation on what might of happened to Yosen and his crew. We open up with spotless floors and no corpses to be found and it’s like it never happened.”

“I’m impressed.”

“
That’s
what impresses you?” she said, turning to face him and pushing him back towards the bed. “I haven’t been trying hard enough then.”

“By all means, continue your endeavors.”

The cloud sea arrived late morning and by afternoon had submerged the city in swirling humidity so thick that it was hard to believe that breathing was still possible. Stoakes had never seen anything quite like it. There was the handful of planets that had spawned water-breathing humans, and there were the countless planets that harbored no civilization or sentient life where atmospheric conditions ran the gamut of strange, but this was akin to lowering an ocean from the sky onto a city. One more reason for clotheslessness, he thought.

Stoakes had no real issue with his own nakedness, but living nearly a thousand years does a fair job of instilling set routines. Besides, he had nothing to gain by abandoning his clothes. His pale skin would have been just as much an indicator of his alienness, and he wasn’t interested in blending in with a population that was about to die out. He was adept at hiding in plain sight. When stealth was required, no one would be able to detect him.

So he dressed and accompanied Kira downstairs to help her open the restaurant for the day. After they opened all the shutters, she promptly called a foot messenger passing by and sent him after each of her employees. The chairs were still stacked on top of the tables, and no one seemed interested in taking a meal just yet, so Stoakes wrapped his arms around Kira and took her behind the bar, the dark end not clearly visible from the street.

“I’m going out for a while,” he said, pressing himself into her so that she felt something stir beneath the fabric of this clothes.

“Why? Where? I don’t want you to go,” she said frowning.

In her eyes, he could see the depth of her illogical attachment. Clearly she’d been attracted to him from the start and further excited by his easy handling of Yosen, further still by her true belief that he was an alien. He was her secret, one that she didn’t want to share or lose.