Page 10 of Fate of the Argosi

Arissa grabbed me by the front of my shirt. ‘Hand me a blade. Now. Otherwise I’ll rip him apart with my teeth.’

‘The Argosi won’t let you slaughter me,’ the stranger said. ‘Their silly “Way of Water” forbi—’

Arissa shoved me aside, spinning on her heel and holding up a card. It wasn’t the disharmony I’d painted of her, but one of my razor-sharp throwing cards. Damn, that girl had not lost her touch! I hadn’t even noticed her picking my pocket. ‘I wasn’t asking her permission,’ she hissed.

Chedran didn’t flinch, just leaned even closer to the bars. Those copper-coloured tattoos danced across the lean musculature of his chest and shoulders as he moved. He lifted his chin and smoothed the dark reddish curls away from his neck, daring Arissa to cut him.

Back when we were running with the Black Galleon gang, I’d seen her bury a throwing knife in an oak door from thirty yards away. One flick of her wrist and she could’ve sliced the braggart’s throat wide open. Nothing in his manner revealed so much as an ounce of fear. It was like this was all some penny-a-ticket stage play and he was the only one holding the script.

Funny how people get stuck in their ways. Is it nature that makes us repeat the same patterns over and over? Or is the price of mastering a skill forgetting how to do anything else? I’d known Chedran all of ten minutes and already I recognised him as a con artist through and through, tone deaf to any music but that which he could play on people’s emotions. Even now, with Arissa poised to slit his throat, he preferred the pretence of being in control over confessing the simple truth that would save his life.

‘He’s not guilty,’ I told her, because calling him innocent would’ve left a bad taste in my mouth. ‘Chedran didn’t kill those children.’

Arissa took three steps back from his cell so he wouldn’t be able to reach through the bars and snatch the steel card from her hand. Only then did she turn her fury on me. ‘Heconfessed! Every night since they brought him here, he brags about how he murdered each of those kids. Repeats their names over and over, rambles on about what foods they liked, their favourite stories. All of it.’

‘That was just his fear talking, hiding beneath all that spite.’ I turned my arta precis on Chedran, my gaze tracing the jagged lines of malice etched into his features. Lurking in the grooves between his smug superiority and his disdain for me was an all-consuming anxiety over the awful things that might be taking place far beyond these walls. The longer I watched him, the more rigid his mask became, but he couldn’t hide the faint salty scent of sweat forming on his brow.

You would’ve made one hell of a poker player, friend, I thought.But not even the best card sharps can bluff an Argosi.

‘Chedran couldn’t risk anyone figuring out those kids are still alive,’ I told Arissa. ‘He must’ve dug up bones from a children’s cemetery far enough away that no one would connect the grave robbing to the scorched remains he left under the bedsheets for that noblewoman to find. Charred black so no one would look too closely and maybe notice the ages weren’t quite right. He laid a scene so grotesque that when the authorities captured him they were too riled up by the atrocities they’d imagined – not to mention his whole monstrous-villain act – to ask themselves why anyone would go to all that trouble just to murder a bunch of innocent kids.’

‘You’re saying . . .’ Arissa was practically shivering with rage. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she thought my explanation was nuts or because his deception made her want to throttle him even more. ‘You expect me to believe that this piece of craprescuedthose twelve runaways? Snuck them away under cover of darkness from some tender-hearted highborn lady who, by all accounts, had provided them sanctuary in her own home? You’re telling meshe’sthe monster?’

That parthadconfounded me for a minute. Why would a woman of such prominence and thus under constant scrutiny bring a group of strays into her home if she meant them harm? Despite the stories kids tell each other in orphanages, rich folks rarely go to the trouble of housing, feeding and clothing hapless urchins just to make soup out of them.

Arta tucois the Argosi talent for strategy, but Enna calls it pathfinding, because it’s like looking at a map and seeing all the hundreds of ways each place could connect together. On this particular map I saw Chedran, who feared for the children, and the noblewoman, who meant them no harm. Yet he saw her fondness for them as a threat. Fondness leads to attachment. Attachment grows from affinity, a sense of being alike, which is only possible through familiarity. Familiarity emerges from understanding, from learning more about some—

‘Who are those kids?’ I asked suddenly. ‘Why were you so afraid that noblewoman would discover the identities of a bunch of runaways?’

The look in Chedran’s eyes changed. Cold and callous they remained, but something else broke through. Bitterness. Loneliness. Resentment against me in particular even though we’d only just met. ‘Whowe are means nothing to the rest of the world,’ he said. ‘It’swhatwe are that gets us killed.’

Strange way to talk about oneself – like you weren’t a person at all, barely a human being . . .

Oh.

My reaction betrayed me, and Chedran saw it. ‘Fate brought you to me, Ferius Parfax.’ He spoke now with the fervour of a roadside preacher drunk on his own superstitions. ‘I heard you speak of your debt to this smug, self-righteous thief who is entirely guilty of the crime for which she was convicted. What about those innocents you abandoned seven years ago to whom you oweeverything?’

Arissa was watching me, suddenly suspicious. ‘What’s he talking about, Rat Girl? How does know your name when this is the first time I’ve heard it?’

I hadn’t found my name back when the two of us were running together. Chedran spitting it at her like that had stolen my chance to share it with her.

‘Oh, Ferius Parfax is practically a legend among my people,’ Chedran went on, smiling with so much venom and arrogance I might’ve mistaken him for a Jan’Tep lord magus – if I hadn’t already figured out what he really was. ‘That’s why she isn’t going to let you lay a finger on me. Instead she’s going to break me out of this prison and help me find those children before it’s too late.’ He pressed his face between the bars. ‘There are so few of us now after all.’

I cursed myself for having been so blind. There hadn’t been anything to see though. Not really. We don’t look so different from the children of other nations who came to this continent after us. Still, those wine-coloured curls of which Chedran was so proud should’ve been my first clue. We do tend to produce more redheads than most. Used to anyway. These days, there can’t be more than a couple of hundred of us left.

‘Those kids he snuck out of that noblewoman’s house are Mahdek,’ I told Arissa. I hadn’t said that word aloud in months; that’s how little I think about the people I left behind seven years ago. ‘Mahdek,’ I repeated, a penance or maybe a curse. ‘Refugees from a long-dead culture. Like Chedran. Like me.’

7

Unpaid Debts

We made a strange quartet as we climbed up winding stairs from the cold, crushing embrace of Soul’s Grave to a dawn sky so warm and gentle I felt her sun kiss my cheek. She burnished the desert a brassy gold while her brother the south wind sent a breeze that made the sand dance around our feet. An Argosi learns to take comfort from these moments, to hold them close and smooth them against our skin like newly woven silk. Such memories become a fine coat against the chills to come, armour to deflect the slings and arrows of callous voices that can’t let beauty be, not even for an instant.

‘How lovely,’ Chedran said, twisting the words to mean their opposite.

The blow hadn’t been meant for me. Arissa had been his target, punishing her for those first tears she’d allowed herself. The kind that can’t make us forget the pains of our past, but remind us that a kinder future might still await. Her right hand darted up to wipe away those salty, healing droplets before they could do their work, smearing the filth and grime of Soul’s Grave back onto her cheeks. Conch rubbed his muzzle against her leg. She shooed him away.

The Way of Water, I told myself, observing Chedran’s unconscious pride in the damage he’d done.Every desert has an oasis if you look hard enough.

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