Page 5 of Fate of the Argosi

‘How can you know for sure unless you plant a seed now and then?’

Sometimes, I swear, I prefer the slithering hisses of the Scarlet Verses to the memories of that man’s gentle laughter.

I slumped down next to the vicious brute who’d tried to kill me and had already admitted to killing plenty of others before me. I’m not as good as Durral at this. He always said myarta loquit– my eloquence – was the best he’d ever known. But this? This was beyond my talents. I wasn’t even sure where to start.

‘You believe in miracles?’ I asked.

The Daroman’s eyes were cloudy from loss of blood, but he was conscious enough to turn and stare at me like I was an idiot who’d apparently failed to notice the hell in which we’d found ourselves.

‘Fair enough,’ I conceded. ‘The Berabesq claim that only their god can do miracles anyway.’

He gave a soft snort. A bubble of spit appeared between his lips.

‘Yeah, I feel that way about the viziers sometimes too.’ I leaned back against the rough stone wall, searching for words, searching for strength. ‘But what if – and I’m just asking here – what if a man who’d descended into this pit of hate and despair, who’d come to delight in the misery and suffering of others because that’s what this place had made of him, were to spit in the face of not just the clerics who put him here and their six-faced god, but fate itself?’

Confusion and suspicion spread across features now ashen and clammy. ‘N-nature,’ he managed to cough out, along with more spittle.

‘Sure,’ I said, knowing I was losing the fight. ‘Nature. Nobody can do such evil as you’ve done here unless the seeds were already planted long ago. Born a killer, die a killer. But let’s pretend a moment. Let’s imagine the guy who climbs out of this prison defies both his nature and his destiny. What if he chooses a path better than fate intended? What would we call a person like that? Wouldn’t we have to call him a . . .’

I let the silence hang between us. First lesson Durral ever taught me in arta loquit was that you never utter the word a person most needs to hear. Give them the space to find it themselves.

‘Mmm . . .’ he mumbled. His eyes were blinking shut now. Too much blood lost too quickly. He fought the shadows coming for him and tried again. ‘Mmm . . .’

I knew what he was trying to say, and I sure as hell didn’t want to hear it come out of his mouth. But I’m trying real hard to be an Argosi, and my path, the Path of the Wild Daisy? It’s all about flowers growing where nobody believes they should.

‘Go on,’ I urged him. ‘Say the word.’

He did better than that: got five of ’em out, all in a whisper and too late to do the world any good. I’d wasted my aquae sulfex after all.

‘Eighteen’s kinda young to be so bitter, don’t you think, kid?’Durral would’ve asked.

‘Tried your way, Pappy. Traded righteous anger for a handful of seeds wasted on dead sand. Didn’t do anyone a lick of good.’

‘That so?’

Sometimes I can almost feel the battered second knuckle of Durral’s forefinger under my chin, lifting it up a little higher. This time, though, it turned my attention towards the five other guards down on the floor. Bewildered gazes drifted from me to the dead Daroman, their glassy eyes were filled not just with tears, but something else too.

Hope.

‘I could’ve been a miracle.’ That’s what the Daroman had said as he died. That’s what his fellow guards had heard.

Sometimes you plant a seed in the desert because nobody, not the Berabesq clerics, not their god or anyone else’s, not fate or even your own heart, knows for sure what might grow there.

3

Fifty Yards

I sat there a few minutes longer, finding my breath, awakening my arta forteize. Can’t say that the Argosi talent for resilience has ever been my strongest suit. At times like these I always feel like I’m made from brittle glass, so I draw my strength from elsewhere.

Enna Brown, now there’s a woman with arta forteize. Punch her, starve her, leave her out in the freezing cold . . . One time some crazy girl she’d taken into her home and loved like her own daughter stabbed her through the lung with a smallsword. You cannot keep that woman down.

That’s a sort of privilege, I think. A kind of wealth – no, an inheritance. Knowing someone like Enna, seeing how all those limits people impose on their own bodies and spirits don’t have nearly the power we believe? That’s gold in your pocket right there.

I spent a few of those coins getting to my feet, sliding on my pack. The guards on the floor didn’t look like they were going anywhere soon. Conch must’ve dosed ’em with a bigger blast of his belly gasses than he’d given me earlier.

‘Come on,’ I told the spire goat as I turned towards the tunnel. It wouldn’t be far to go now; we were already in the lowest depths of the prison. Based on the information that silvery-white stallion had bought me, the cell I was looking for was maybe fifty yards away. Not far at all.

Conch butted me in the back of the leg with those stubby horns of his on account of how I hadn’t moved yet.

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