Somewhere in Voedale • The Rose
After Midnight on the 17th of Roalis, 2719
The old arata was drunk off his erse; they could all see that.
He’d been playing for hours. It’d been a curiosity at first – the way he’d swaggered in a quarter past midnight, talking to old Kendrick like they’d been friends for years. Drinking the piss he had on tap like it was something from Brayd County. He’d seemed determined to get shit-faced from the moment he walked in: he was a twig-thin little fox of a man, with his tousled, copper-red hair and patchy whiskers, but he was knocking back drinks like someone twice his size. Holding them, as Enitan had expected, not half as well, though perhaps no worse than Brynn and Arend ever did.
At the second glance, Enitan might have called him wika and put his suspicions away. He used Tek like a tsat, if not a spoke, and he was dressed simple enough. But when he sat down, the feel of the mona around him, buzzing and stirring in the air like water brought to boil, made every man at the table flinch. He hadn’t introduced himself, and nobody’d yet asked him to. Nobody was going to.
At first, Enitan had thought Fen would tell him to leave, but the wick must’ve seen what he had – must’ve seen his clean, well-trimmed nails. Hands that weren’t calloused, except for a little bump on the middle finger of his right one, where you’d rest a pen. Or maybe how the capital kept creeping into the way he talked, slipping through that poor excuse for an accent. Fen was as good a judge of men as Enitan, but less gentle.
And arata wanted to bet. All arata wanted to do, in fact, was bet. Generously.
There were five of them round the table tonight. Fen was the dealer, like most nights; they were Fen’s cards. Fenton Alder was a wick not much taller than the arata, lean and sinewy, with a slick of honey-blond hair he kept pulled back in a tight little bun. Pete Hale sat just next to him, a quiet, heavyset docker that Enitan thought, any time now, would be excusing himself to go home to his woman and his bochi – he was a safe man, so long as he was picking up shifts, and he made safe decisions.
Brynn and Arend were brothers in more than one way, and bad in more than two. If they were equally mung, they weren’t quite equally lightweight: Arend usually lasted longer than Brynn, but not by much. Two hands ago had been Brynn’s last; he was snoring and dribbling in his chair. That meant Arend was now the man directly to Fen’s right.
Aside from their little table, Kendrick’s was sparse this time of night on a seven. It was a small place, close and musty and dark, where the beams creaked and popped with the gusts outside and the lamps wavered with every draft. The table was a thicket of smoke and shadows, and there was a smattering of laughter whenever arata had to adjust his little gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose and squint at a card, leaning forward on his wobbling stool.
Once they’d all got used to that nasty field, the night started to feel more familiar. Enitan knew these men; he knew how they drank, how they talked, how they played. As usual, Arend hadn’t won a single hand, and Fen and Enitan had won several each. Pete had taken the pot once, but he never seemed to care much.
In rooks, it wasn’t so much your face that gave you away, Enitan knew, as the pattern of your choices. Arata bluffed poorly, but kept bluffing. That was fine with Enitan; he had the birds to lose.
But Enitan could feel a cold creeping up his spine. It wasn’t arata’s face that bothered him, after all. It was the pattern. He had tells he didn’t, or couldn’t, hide: the sneery curl of his lip, a faint line on his lean cheek that would deepen if he’d flopped something good – every single time, by Hulali’s floods – and a twitch that would shudder up through the left side of his face if he was distressed. He was twitching more and more now.
It was just a feeling Enitan had. Something about tonight felt off, and it had something to do with this desema. Sure enough, the third time Fenton won the pot, arata spoke through grit teeth, slamming his hand – a two of stars and an eight of sparrows – down on the table and holding the cards there with trembling fingers. His thin, pale face was blotchy with red underneath his freckles.
“Fucker was holdin’ out. I saw him.”
Except for the even rhythm of Brynn’s snores, the table was quiet. One of Fen’s hands hovered over the pile of curling paper and coins in the middle of the table, utterly still; the other had frozen halfway through bringing his cigarette to his lips. His narrow, dark eyes met arata’s pale.
Fen licked his lips, sucking at a tooth. He glanced over toward Enitan, and Enitan met his eye, inclined his head. Shook it once. That was all it took.
Fen seemed to relax. He put on an air of good humor – Enitan could tell – by the skin of his teeth. As he finally brought the smoke to his lips, he twitched his thin wrist delicately, twitched aside the hem of his sleeve. There was a tiny hand inked on the inside of his wrist, blue-black in the lamplight against his pale skin.
“Listen, dagka,” he said, pausing to take a drag, “you got some shit to work through, dze.” He shrugged through a cloud of smoke. “But this ain’t the time or the place, ye chen?”
Arata’s lip twisted. “The fuck’re you callin’ dagka?”
A burst of laughter cut through his words like a knife, through the smoke in a flash of Arend’s teeth. Enitan started to laugh, but he saw Fen wasn’t laughing, and neither was Pete; he saw Arend staring hard at Fen, now, his grin turned snarl. “Oes,” said Arend, still laughing, even though his eyes weren’t. “Ain’t you ought to call ’im da?”
There was a hard look in Fen’s eye Enitan didn’t much like. “Adame,” he said. He glanced round the table, meeting each man’s eyes in turn. Arata wouldn’t meet his; he was staring at Fen, and there was something almost like a smile on his face. Enitan massaged a temple, frowning.
“Let’s not spill sap, lads,” said Pete.
Suddenly Fen smiled back, raising his brows. “One more hand. Oes? Benny?”
Arata sniffed, shrugged, and smiled wider at Fen. Pete again: “Fenton, mate.”
“Ne.” Fen shrugged again, showing them his palms. “Ne sap.” He swept up the flop with his long fingers, swept all the cards together; he split the deck and started to shuffle. “Ne sap tonight.”
Three of rooks and queen of stars.
They were macha cards, Tom’d thought from the start. The way the lamplight licked over them, licked their faded paint into the shapes of moving, starry skies, towers wreathed in smoke, sparrows whirling round their windows, leaping from the arms of white-robed evera. They were hand-painted, Tom’d realized by the second hand. Shaky, at that, figures with lopsided faces, the colors muddled with age. That only made them more beautiful. Smeary in the dimness, in the haze of all that drink – full of motion. Full of secrets, but beautiful secrets. Mysteries.
Tom wondered, in a part of his mind that was still thinking, if Fen’d painted them himself. What precious things, he kept thinking, not knowing whose voice it was said that. Precious, precious things.
The cut was uneven enough that a clever eye would’ve been able to tell them all apart, back or front. For all his bluster, though, Tom didn’t much care about that. He was sure he’d seen the wick slip something into his sleeve – felt sure the little Mugrobi to his left had seen it, too; the kov was watching everybody like a godsdamn hawk – but he didn’t care about that, either. Not really. The kov to Fen’s right, the one they called Arend, the awake one of those tsuter twins, looked about as invested as Tom.
By Tom’s reckoning, they were both there for the same reason. He hadn’t known exactly what he wanted when he walked in, but he had by the time he sat down, and the drunker he got, the surer he got.
He wanted to fight.
So it was fortuitous, maybe, that they never finished the hand. Tom’d flopped a full house, but he never got to bet. There was a funny twist of a grin on the Arend’s face, an embarrassed flush to his cheeks, when he called Fen, and the sight of a grim in the hole was all it took.
The Anaxi human shoved up from the table. It creaked, the legs wobbling with the strain of his weight; all the glasses rattled. Pete was the first one to move after that, taking a clean step back, yelling, “Wo chet!” But Arend was already halfway round the table, and his brother’d woken up and was getting his bearings, and the Mugrobi was getting up out of his seat, too.
It was all so fast, and Tom felt slow. But the blood’d all rushed up in him, and he could hear his pulse in his ears, pounding, too fast – somehow something’d pulled him to his feet, and he felt fire in his limbs, like he used to.
Before the natt had a chance to raise a hand, Fen whispered a tangle of poetry, rapidfire and wild but clean and well-pronounced. Tom knew the spell, sure as he knew it’d been used on him once. A thin mist of sand spewed from between his teeth, clouding in Arend’s face; he yelped, clutching with his big hands, staggering back. For a splitsecond, there was a satisfied gleam in Fen’s eyes.
Then Tom’s bony fist was in his face.
Tom barely knew what he was doing. He felt it like a crack of thunder through him, then a crack across his hand, reverberating through his bones. He did it like he always had, and it was a good swing. A lucky swing, more than anything.
Not lucky enough. He felt Fen’s nose pop under his knuckles, but then he felt something pop through his hand. A white-hot, freezing pain flooded through his joints. When he jerked his hand back, he felt warm blood running between his fingers. He was trembling – couldn’t draw in enough air – didn’t know if the blood was from him or Fen or both – knew he should dust, had to, but more than anything, he wanted to throw himself at the wick again, throw himself at this laoso marked by them that’d made a vreska of hama –
He felt a hand grab him by the shoulder and yank him back, easy as if he’d been a boch’s doll made out of rags. “Yar’aka,” breathed a voice near his ear. “If you want to live, you will be still.”
“Havakda,” spat Tom.
Wheezing, he twisted in the natt’s grip, then wrenched his elbow back, found something soft with the edge of it. He heard a grunt behind him, but it wasn’t enough. The grip on his shoulders was still firm, and now he felt something pressing into his lower back. The tip of a sharp.
Meanwhile, Arend seemed to have recovered himself, but not quickly enough. Tom could see Fen’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear anything over the clamor in his head. The air around them thickened, grew heavy.
He’d been playing for hours. It’d been a curiosity at first – the way he’d swaggered in a quarter past midnight, talking to old Kendrick like they’d been friends for years. Drinking the piss he had on tap like it was something from Brayd County. He’d seemed determined to get shit-faced from the moment he walked in: he was a twig-thin little fox of a man, with his tousled, copper-red hair and patchy whiskers, but he was knocking back drinks like someone twice his size. Holding them, as Enitan had expected, not half as well, though perhaps no worse than Brynn and Arend ever did.
At the second glance, Enitan might have called him wika and put his suspicions away. He used Tek like a tsat, if not a spoke, and he was dressed simple enough. But when he sat down, the feel of the mona around him, buzzing and stirring in the air like water brought to boil, made every man at the table flinch. He hadn’t introduced himself, and nobody’d yet asked him to. Nobody was going to.
At first, Enitan had thought Fen would tell him to leave, but the wick must’ve seen what he had – must’ve seen his clean, well-trimmed nails. Hands that weren’t calloused, except for a little bump on the middle finger of his right one, where you’d rest a pen. Or maybe how the capital kept creeping into the way he talked, slipping through that poor excuse for an accent. Fen was as good a judge of men as Enitan, but less gentle.
And arata wanted to bet. All arata wanted to do, in fact, was bet. Generously.
There were five of them round the table tonight. Fen was the dealer, like most nights; they were Fen’s cards. Fenton Alder was a wick not much taller than the arata, lean and sinewy, with a slick of honey-blond hair he kept pulled back in a tight little bun. Pete Hale sat just next to him, a quiet, heavyset docker that Enitan thought, any time now, would be excusing himself to go home to his woman and his bochi – he was a safe man, so long as he was picking up shifts, and he made safe decisions.
Brynn and Arend were brothers in more than one way, and bad in more than two. If they were equally mung, they weren’t quite equally lightweight: Arend usually lasted longer than Brynn, but not by much. Two hands ago had been Brynn’s last; he was snoring and dribbling in his chair. That meant Arend was now the man directly to Fen’s right.
Aside from their little table, Kendrick’s was sparse this time of night on a seven. It was a small place, close and musty and dark, where the beams creaked and popped with the gusts outside and the lamps wavered with every draft. The table was a thicket of smoke and shadows, and there was a smattering of laughter whenever arata had to adjust his little gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose and squint at a card, leaning forward on his wobbling stool.
Once they’d all got used to that nasty field, the night started to feel more familiar. Enitan knew these men; he knew how they drank, how they talked, how they played. As usual, Arend hadn’t won a single hand, and Fen and Enitan had won several each. Pete had taken the pot once, but he never seemed to care much.
In rooks, it wasn’t so much your face that gave you away, Enitan knew, as the pattern of your choices. Arata bluffed poorly, but kept bluffing. That was fine with Enitan; he had the birds to lose.
But Enitan could feel a cold creeping up his spine. It wasn’t arata’s face that bothered him, after all. It was the pattern. He had tells he didn’t, or couldn’t, hide: the sneery curl of his lip, a faint line on his lean cheek that would deepen if he’d flopped something good – every single time, by Hulali’s floods – and a twitch that would shudder up through the left side of his face if he was distressed. He was twitching more and more now.
It was just a feeling Enitan had. Something about tonight felt off, and it had something to do with this desema. Sure enough, the third time Fenton won the pot, arata spoke through grit teeth, slamming his hand – a two of stars and an eight of sparrows – down on the table and holding the cards there with trembling fingers. His thin, pale face was blotchy with red underneath his freckles.
“Fucker was holdin’ out. I saw him.”
Except for the even rhythm of Brynn’s snores, the table was quiet. One of Fen’s hands hovered over the pile of curling paper and coins in the middle of the table, utterly still; the other had frozen halfway through bringing his cigarette to his lips. His narrow, dark eyes met arata’s pale.
Fen licked his lips, sucking at a tooth. He glanced over toward Enitan, and Enitan met his eye, inclined his head. Shook it once. That was all it took.
Fen seemed to relax. He put on an air of good humor – Enitan could tell – by the skin of his teeth. As he finally brought the smoke to his lips, he twitched his thin wrist delicately, twitched aside the hem of his sleeve. There was a tiny hand inked on the inside of his wrist, blue-black in the lamplight against his pale skin.
“Listen, dagka,” he said, pausing to take a drag, “you got some shit to work through, dze.” He shrugged through a cloud of smoke. “But this ain’t the time or the place, ye chen?”
Arata’s lip twisted. “The fuck’re you callin’ dagka?”
A burst of laughter cut through his words like a knife, through the smoke in a flash of Arend’s teeth. Enitan started to laugh, but he saw Fen wasn’t laughing, and neither was Pete; he saw Arend staring hard at Fen, now, his grin turned snarl. “Oes,” said Arend, still laughing, even though his eyes weren’t. “Ain’t you ought to call ’im da?”
There was a hard look in Fen’s eye Enitan didn’t much like. “Adame,” he said. He glanced round the table, meeting each man’s eyes in turn. Arata wouldn’t meet his; he was staring at Fen, and there was something almost like a smile on his face. Enitan massaged a temple, frowning.
“Let’s not spill sap, lads,” said Pete.
Suddenly Fen smiled back, raising his brows. “One more hand. Oes? Benny?”
Arata sniffed, shrugged, and smiled wider at Fen. Pete again: “Fenton, mate.”
“Ne.” Fen shrugged again, showing them his palms. “Ne sap.” He swept up the flop with his long fingers, swept all the cards together; he split the deck and started to shuffle. “Ne sap tonight.”
•
Three of rooks and queen of stars.
They were macha cards, Tom’d thought from the start. The way the lamplight licked over them, licked their faded paint into the shapes of moving, starry skies, towers wreathed in smoke, sparrows whirling round their windows, leaping from the arms of white-robed evera. They were hand-painted, Tom’d realized by the second hand. Shaky, at that, figures with lopsided faces, the colors muddled with age. That only made them more beautiful. Smeary in the dimness, in the haze of all that drink – full of motion. Full of secrets, but beautiful secrets. Mysteries.
Tom wondered, in a part of his mind that was still thinking, if Fen’d painted them himself. What precious things, he kept thinking, not knowing whose voice it was said that. Precious, precious things.
The cut was uneven enough that a clever eye would’ve been able to tell them all apart, back or front. For all his bluster, though, Tom didn’t much care about that. He was sure he’d seen the wick slip something into his sleeve – felt sure the little Mugrobi to his left had seen it, too; the kov was watching everybody like a godsdamn hawk – but he didn’t care about that, either. Not really. The kov to Fen’s right, the one they called Arend, the awake one of those tsuter twins, looked about as invested as Tom.
By Tom’s reckoning, they were both there for the same reason. He hadn’t known exactly what he wanted when he walked in, but he had by the time he sat down, and the drunker he got, the surer he got.
He wanted to fight.
So it was fortuitous, maybe, that they never finished the hand. Tom’d flopped a full house, but he never got to bet. There was a funny twist of a grin on the Arend’s face, an embarrassed flush to his cheeks, when he called Fen, and the sight of a grim in the hole was all it took.
The Anaxi human shoved up from the table. It creaked, the legs wobbling with the strain of his weight; all the glasses rattled. Pete was the first one to move after that, taking a clean step back, yelling, “Wo chet!” But Arend was already halfway round the table, and his brother’d woken up and was getting his bearings, and the Mugrobi was getting up out of his seat, too.
It was all so fast, and Tom felt slow. But the blood’d all rushed up in him, and he could hear his pulse in his ears, pounding, too fast – somehow something’d pulled him to his feet, and he felt fire in his limbs, like he used to.
Before the natt had a chance to raise a hand, Fen whispered a tangle of poetry, rapidfire and wild but clean and well-pronounced. Tom knew the spell, sure as he knew it’d been used on him once. A thin mist of sand spewed from between his teeth, clouding in Arend’s face; he yelped, clutching with his big hands, staggering back. For a splitsecond, there was a satisfied gleam in Fen’s eyes.
Then Tom’s bony fist was in his face.
Tom barely knew what he was doing. He felt it like a crack of thunder through him, then a crack across his hand, reverberating through his bones. He did it like he always had, and it was a good swing. A lucky swing, more than anything.
Not lucky enough. He felt Fen’s nose pop under his knuckles, but then he felt something pop through his hand. A white-hot, freezing pain flooded through his joints. When he jerked his hand back, he felt warm blood running between his fingers. He was trembling – couldn’t draw in enough air – didn’t know if the blood was from him or Fen or both – knew he should dust, had to, but more than anything, he wanted to throw himself at the wick again, throw himself at this laoso marked by them that’d made a vreska of hama –
He felt a hand grab him by the shoulder and yank him back, easy as if he’d been a boch’s doll made out of rags. “Yar’aka,” breathed a voice near his ear. “If you want to live, you will be still.”
“Havakda,” spat Tom.
Wheezing, he twisted in the natt’s grip, then wrenched his elbow back, found something soft with the edge of it. He heard a grunt behind him, but it wasn’t enough. The grip on his shoulders was still firm, and now he felt something pressing into his lower back. The tip of a sharp.
Meanwhile, Arend seemed to have recovered himself, but not quickly enough. Tom could see Fen’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear anything over the clamor in his head. The air around them thickened, grew heavy.
