Page 26

If you love someone, let them go. Except when that would be really stupid, like in a crowd and they’re two and you’re their mother.

Uncommon Sense , by Margery Taylor

Arpix

Arpix had no memory of losing his grip on Clovis’s hand or on Evar’s but as he staggered out from the seething light of a library portal into a cold mist it seemed that neither of the canith were with him.

A spiky bush immediately interposed itself into his path and tried to trip him up. Given Arpix’s disorientation it proved an unequal contest. He would have hit the ground hard but for the presence of a wet shrub that cushioned his fall, engulfing him in glossy leaves whilst a hundred twigs tried to stab him through his tattered robes.

For some time Arpix lay on his side in the damp undergrowth. The diffuse light pervading the fog told him it was daytime. The wall just beyond suggested that he was in a garden. The fact that the glowing portal in that wall hadn’t attracted any attention made him pretty sure that there was nobody close by.

The mist muffled sound almost as effectively as it shuttered sight, but enough noise still penetrated for Arpix to believe himself somewhere populated. Had that been a distant cry? And that the slam of a door?

He levered himself up, shivering. Going back to the Exchange was tempting, but the others had come with him. They would not be in the Exchange, and visits to that place carried the danger that years would slide between him and the others. Years that couldn’t be undone, and that he would not want to have missed.

With a degree of rustling and snapping that would have hurt Starval’s assassin-soul, Arpix began to follow the wall, stumbling over well-manicured bushes, picking his way around flower beds.

The others must have emerged from their own portals. Arpix’s fingers trailed the damp stonework. Hopefully Clovis wasn’t on the far side of the town. Or in another town altogether. He reached a corner and found a window, gracefully curving ironwork defending large panes of glass. The curtains disclosed the faintest suggestion of a glow behind them, a lamp perhaps, lit in defiance of the dreary day outside.

A sound drew Arpix’s attention, a sniff piercing the grey veil, a rumbled growl.

“Clovis?” He whispered her name.

Someone approached, crunching along a gravelled path that Arpix had yet to discover. He resisted the urge to run. Even if it wasn’t Clovis he was hardly going to hide amongst the dripping vegetation indefinitely. A sudden fear seized him. What if the Exchange’s intrinsic desire to join loose ends had delivered him into Oanold’s hands? What if it were one of his soldiers approaching?

Too late to run. A figure loomed through the mist. Tall. Too tall for a human. “Clovis?”

A heavy hand reached out, grabbed his arm, jerked him forward, and the face of a canith looked down at him. A stranger.

“Wait!” Arpix tried to forestall violence.

Instead, the canith glanced back the way it came. “Got an intruder. A human.” The canith drew Arpix forward, pulling him onto the path. “A rather ragged one. Another beggar. ‘Lost’ in the mist, are we?”

Arpix opened his mouth to deny it but didn’t get as far as speaking before two new pieces of information commandeered his attention. Firstly, that the canith was wearing what seemed to be a military uniform. And secondly, that the uniform bore an unsettling resemblance to those worn by King Oanold’s soldiers. Not the ones that went out to patrol the Dust or that marched up and down on the city walls, but the more decorated variety that guarded his palaces.

Struggling was going to be pointless, and Arpix had neither magic nor weapons to aid him, not that he believed in violent solutions in any case. He considered shouting for help but pressed his lips together, unwilling to provoke Clovis into premature action if she were close enough to hear his cries. Instead, he settled for doing what he had always done: gathering information. “Where are we going?”

“To the gate before the captain finds out about you. You don’t want that.” The canith sniffed again. “You don’t smell the same as the last vagrant we picked out of the bushes.”

“Thank you?”

“Don’t get me wrong. You stink, it’s just the wrong sort of stink. How long have you been in the city?”

“Ah. That depends which city this is, and how you measure these things.”

Another canith loomed in the mist. Behind him the fog revealed a building and a door. “Got another one.” The first guard shoved Arpix forward. “Talks like he’s drunk. Smells like he’s sober.”

“You know how it is. The streets take ’em ’cos they’re cracked. Or the streets crack ’em.” The new soldier ran a dark eye up and down Arpix’s length. “Skinny one. Still, can’t have ’em trespassing. Going to rob the stores, was you?”

“I assure you I didn’t—”

“Climbed the wall by accident, did we? Thought you lived here? Came to apply for the potentate’s army?” The first soldier laid a heavy hand on his shoulder from behind.

“Really…I…” Arpix looked around. The canith couldn’t be working for Oanold no matter what uniform they were wearing, or what tricks the currents of time had played in delivering the king to this place. Arpix had voluntarily jumped into the chasm in the library less than an hour after Oanold had fallen in with Livira’s book. The king couldn’t have fashioned himself a replacement empire already. Especially not with canith. “This isn’t Crath City? Is it?”

The second soldier shook his head. “He’s not all here, Hadd. You can see it by looking at him. Give him a smack and shove him out before the captain gets wind. You know what’ll happen otherwise. That business with the quartermaster this morning left her in a foul mood.”

The first soldier growled in his throat. “That’s what I was doing before you shoved your nose in. Come on then, twig. I’ll send you on your way with a farewell tap. Might lose a tooth or two, but we can’t have you thinking you can just come and go.” He started to drag Arpix along a path that led directly away from the building, out through the garden.

They got perhaps three yards before the sound of the door opening behind them brought Hadd to a crunching halt. “Shit.” Muttered under his breath.

“What’ve you got there, Private Hadd?” Another couple of yards and the mist would have swallowed them.

Arpix looked back to see a stern-faced woman in the doorway, dwarfed by the soldier still standing there, but wearing the same uniform. Where the two canith had short swords at their hips and some design of ’stick slung across their backs, the captain had a proportionately longer blade, no ’stick, and three crimson stripes on her upper right arm.

“Intruder, Captain. Was going to eject him with a physical reprimand.”

“Intruder? I see a thief, caught in the act.” The woman stalked closer. She looked to be in her fifties, sturdy, grizzled, hair iron-grey and short, coiled across a blunt skull. The eyes she fixed on Arpix were the same colour as the mist and held about as much warmth. “Looks like an Amacar to me. You an Amacar, boy?”

“I don’t know what an Amacar is. I’m not—”

The words “from around here” were slapped out of Arpix’s mouth. The woman’s blow left his face a strange combination of numb but stinging and deafened his ear.

“Amacar for sure,” she said. “Lies like one. Stinks like one.”

Arpix, still developing the bruises from the beating he’d been given by a different military, kept his mouth closed. He tasted blood.

The captain sneered. “It’s hanging day down at the Alarg. He can be strung up with whatever else they have for the gallows when the fog breaks. Make sure everyone knows where he came from. We’ll see how many we have to drop before that wall starts doing its job.”

“Yes, Captain,” Hadd said without enthusiasm.

“Damn straight, yes, Captain!” the woman shouted. “And get your backside back here as soon as it’s done. I know how long it takes to walk to the Alarg and back.”

Arpix found himself being frogmarched through an impressive set of gates and out into what he assumed was a square but felt limitless in the enfolding mist.

“You’re really going to hang me?” It didn’t feel real. And yet the first sliver of fear had worked its way close to his heart.

“Not me. But yes.” The guard pushed him to keep up the brisk pace. “What did you expect? Robbing the potentate’s barracks was always going to be a short trip to a long drop, no?”

“But I wasn’t…” Too late Arpix thought of taking them to the portal. It would have prompted a lot more questions, but execution would have been avoided or at least substantially delayed. He opened his mouth to say they should go back, then closed it. Hadd already thought he was mad. The guard wasn’t about to face his captain’s wrath on the strength of the least likely tale he’d ever heard: I didn’t climb the wall—I came out of it…

They reached a street between two sets of tall buildings. Arpix had never been anywhere other than Crath City, and, two hundred years later, to the barren plateau out on the edge of the Dust. The city around him could be the one in which he’d lived. Except for the mix of canith and humans cohabiting within its walls. They passed dozens, most just shapes in the mist, some canith tall, some human short.

Arpix wanted to know what an Amacar was. It had almost seemed that the idea he might be one was more of a crime than his trespassing. Livira would have found out already. She didn’t appear to have ever met a question she didn’t ask. Arpix wasn’t sure he’d like the answer though, especially if it was another blow.

The streets they followed had a general upward trend, and the altitude combined with a developing breeze began to extend the range of Arpix’s vision. He saw town houses, stables, a tavern. They arrived at a crossroads at the same time as the head of a column of troops, complete with limp banners and a drummer thudding out the beat for their slow march. Somewhere further down the line pipes wailed.

“I think we can make it…just.” Hadd hesitated, then decided. “Quick!” He dragged Arpix across, drawing a glare from the two officers just behind the drummer and the banner bearers. The double row of soldiers behind them snaked away beyond sight.

Hadd slowed down once he’d got Arpix past them. “We could have been there forever. I swear some of those parades are a mile long.”

“I’d have been happy to wait.”

“I bet. But Captain Biggie will be handing out latrine duties, the mood she’s in. Damned if I’m giving her an excuse.”

Arpix resisted sarcasm and couldn’t muster any sympathy without it. “You’re really going to let them kill me?”

“I really am.” Hadd nodded, though without enthusiasm.

“You could let me go.”

“And spend a year in the box if the captain finds out. Or, if she’s still in a mood, get my neck stretched instead of yours.”

“She wouldn’t find out. I’d—”

“Get caught again within a week doing something else stupid. You’re three-quarters starved. A sniff of food and you’ll be climbing over the next wall you meet.”

“I’ll leave the city. I’ll—”

“Hadd? Is that Hadd?” An exceptionally broad canith at the head of a patrol of half a dozen soldiers came to a halt in their path.

“It is.” Hadd agreed in a weary voice. “Hello, Janks.”

“Corporal Janks.” The canith tapped the single stripe on an upper arm as thick around as Arpix’s chest. “And who’s your friend?” The canith, taller than Hadd, as tall as Kerrol maybe, and quite possibly as heavy as any two of Clovis’s brothers, stepped closer, well into Hadd’s personal space if Arpix was any judge.

Hadd’s shoulders slumped a fraction. “Gallows meat.” He glanced at Arpix with a frown. “And we’re in danger of missing the drop. So, if you’ll excuse us…”

“Don’t let’s rush off on my account,” Arpix ventured. “I mean it’s bad manners—”

Janks’s hand closed around Arpix’s throat and sealed away his words.

“Let him go,” Hadd said without heat.

“You’re taking him to be hanged. No harm in a little foretaste, is there?” Janks shook Arpix in a playful manner whilst lifting him, with just one arm, to a point at which his toes barely made contact with the flagstones. “Hanging’s so quick after all. A hardened criminal like this one deserves to linger. Give him a chance to rue the day he crossed paths with Private Hadd of the Potentate’s Outer Guard!”

“You break him, you keep him.” Hadd stepped around Janks and made to continue on his way.

Janks dropped Arpix on his heels where he somehow stayed standing, gasping air in through a still-constricted throat. “Don’t be like that. We’ll come along and help you, Hadd. Don’t want to risk this dangerous criminal overpowering you and escaping.” His patrol, four canith and two men, lined up behind him.

Hadd shook his head and motioned Arpix forward.

They crossed another square, a large one where Arpix could see the buildings rising to left and right, albeit hazily. Stallholders had already set up shop around the margins but were only now starting to see much business, some rising from their chairs to deal with customers come to buy pans, pots, strings of garlic, beadwork, rugs, small cakes. Arpix’s eyes lingered on the cakes, remembering the recent glory of the butter cookies Celcha had created from her flask. He wished the ganar would come along now, spreading her peace out across this strange but familiar city he’d fallen into.

“Oh.” He saw the gallows now, their shapes resolving through the evaporating mist, the nooses hanging empty, waiting. He wanted to protest further, no matter how faint his chance of salvation. And he would have if Hadd had been his only audience. It felt ridiculous to hold on to pride or shame so close to being murdered in such a cold and functional manner, but Arpix couldn’t bring himself to plead with a bully like Janks looking on. Hadd contained a better nature, that much was obvious.

The patrol and guard escorted Arpix to the gallows. There were three nooses, each depending from its own timber frame. The whole structure of raw timbers crudely bolted together seemed to be temporary, designed to be assembled at speed and taken away just as fast. Eight prisoners stood roped together in a sorry line behind the gallows, two canith, six humans. Four of them had a broad red stripe across their faces, as if someone had carelessly trailed a paint brush from one ear to the other. These four stood at the far end of the line, an old man in an expensive frock coat, a young man and woman in simple garb who held hands like a married couple, and the shorter of the two canith. Fresh paint by the look of it…or blood…drips running down across their cheeks like crimson tears.

The crowd that had gathered before the platform showed a similar demographic to that of the prisoners. Young, old, humans, canith, rich and poor. Perhaps a hundred citizens distracted from their bargain hunting. Enough to acknowledge the hangings as a spectacle, but not so many that it might be considered a rarity. Arpix had seen more people assemble to hear one of the more popular singers on Trandor Corner. His death was to be a minor entertainment, with a crowd-pulling level that ranked somewhere between a skilled juggler and the sort of magician who snatched coins out of people’s ears while an accomplice tried to filch additional ones out of their pockets.

As Hadd brought Arpix towards the end of the line, two more canith guards, these in a dark and shabby uniform, came forward to take charge of him. A wiry man with wiry greying hair and narrow eyes came forward with a small bucket of what might be pig’s blood, and a dripping brush. “Amacar?” He raised the brush.

“Says he isn’t.” Hadd waved the brush away.

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” The man made to go around Hadd’s half-hearted defence.

“Of course he is,” Janks called with jovial malice from somewhere further back.

“Does it matter?” Arpix found himself saying. “Are they going to hang me twice if I am?” It was something Livira would say. Arpix wondered if staring death in the face had finally uncovered some courage in him.

The man with the brush slapped at Arpix, and, partly deflected by Hadd, ended up scoring a wet red line across Arpix’s chest. The blood—it smelled like blood—looked black on Arpix’s faded robes rather than red.

“Enough,” growled the nearest of the executioner canith, and jerked Arpix forward by one arm. With practised ease, he secured Arpix’s wrists behind him using a short length of rope which he proceeded to tie to the much longer rope joining the prisoners.

Arpix resisted pointing out that they would just have to untie them all soon unless it were some kind of joint hanging. It all seemed suddenly absurd to him, funny in the bitterest of ways. To die here, impossibly far from all he’d known, killed for no reason by people who didn’t particularly care. When Hadd turned away Arpix called after him, “You’re not staying to watch?”

The canith looked back with a frown. “You’ve got a bigger audience than most of us get.”

“But I don’t know any of them.” Arpix realised he was babbling. Already his prediction was coming true. The three prisoners at the front of the rope were being untied and the crowd’s chatter had stilled to an expectant hush.

“You don’t know me .” Hadd turned and shouldered his way past Janks, who apparently had no better place to be.

Arpix stood, shivering despite the midday sun now tearing through the remnants of the mist. One of the executioners read the crimes of the first three condemned. The words washed over Arpix. He scanned the crowd, hoping to see Clovis or Evar there. Starval would do. Even Mayland. But there were no familiar faces, no friendly eyes. It seemed no time ago that he had been watching a different sea of faces without compassion. There had been no kindness among Oanold’s soldiers. United in their togetherness, they had become something other than human, substituting a mob’s instincts for those of a person. And here again, the simple mathematics of us and them had given a crowd licence to chew pasties and joke among themselves while they watched the living become the dead.

The creak of a lever shook Arpix from his reverie. Three bodies dropped through trapdoors and came to a juddering, devastating halt beneath them. Arpix nearly vomited. His breath came in short, horrified gasps.

Voices in the crowd expressed their disappointment. All three necks had broken. None of the criminals had danced for their audience. Someone pointed at Arpix. “Skinny’s gonna kick. Ain’t got the weight to snap ’is spine.”

The next three went up. Boos from the crowd, abuse hurled, stones too, aimed at the couple with the bloody stripes. The executioner announced that the criminal to the left, a heavy-browed man sneering at any who met his eye, was a street robber, and that the couple had been caught poisoning a well. The young man’s protests of innocence were drowned out by the audience’s rising anger. “Amacar filth!” “Conspirators!” “Child stealers!”

Under a barrage of insults, the last adjustments were made and the trio dropped. The couple, Arpix noted with horrified detachment, had shorter ropes, but whatever the executioner’s intention, both died almost instantly. The citizens of the still-nameless city shouted their disappointment, cursing the executioners, a stone bouncing off one of the canith’s broad shoulders.

Arpix looked around for an escape route, only to find Janks grinning at him good-humouredly, almost inviting him to try to run. And before he knew it, rough hands were guiding him, the well-dressed old man, and the last canith up the steps.

“It can’t end like this.” Arpix had been thinking the words, but it was the old man who said them out loud. He looked younger close up, perhaps not even sixty. Both his hands were shaking to a degree he’d empty any cup before it reached his lips.

This is where they save me. Arpix’s lips muttered the words without sound. This is where they save me. It had to be. Where Clovis and her brothers emerged from a side street, swords in hand. But that wasn’t how it worked. It wasn’t how real life worked. People didn’t turn up in the split second you needed them most: they were a week early or a day late. Even now, under the shadow of the gallows arm, Arpix couldn’t shake off the shackles of his rationality. Statistics didn’t lie, they were just misunderstood. A million-to-one shot might not even happen if you took a million tries.

Impatiently but without malice, one of the executioners positioned Arpix on the trapdoor where an “X” had been helpfully scorched into the planks to mark the spot. The noose descended around his neck, prickly, rough. Arpix fought to keep a ridiculous complaint about it being too tight from his lips. This is it. They have to save me now.

It had to be now. Once they dropped him, he was dead whether his neck broke or not. His throat would be crushed. Undoing the rope wouldn’t save him. It had to be now.

“And this one…” The executioner paused, looking at his list. “What’s his name?”

“Skinny,” Janks called out.

“And Skinny, of no fixed abode, guilty of trespass and attempted theft.”

“A filthy stealing Amacar!” a woman shouted.

“Hang them all.” It sounded like a child.

“Wait!” Arpix said.

The executioner walked to the lever, a length of wood over a yard long, hinged to the platform. Throwing it would release all three trapdoors together.

“Don’t…” the old man whispered.

But he did.

The drop was more like misstepping off a curb than a proper fall. But Arpix heard his neck break.