No Return (11 page)

They disengaged somewhat awkwardly, and Jarres looked Pol up and down again, one eyebrow quirked.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

Blunt as well as ragged, Pol recalled. Yet it was oddly refreshing after his meeting with Ebn.

“I am here to ask a favor. Have you a place where we can talk? Somewhere private?”

A smile fought to reach Jarres’s mouth, and won. He closed his eyes for a moment and then said, “My shift is over in eighteen minutes.”

‡

Exhausted, they lay together on Jarres’s bed. Pol had thrown a leg over the man’s thigh, but felt otherwise content to dry alone. Unlike most eldermen, Pol enjoyed the feeling of fluid on his skin. Large bodies of water made him uncomfortable and he did not enjoy swimming, but the occasional bath was nice. Sweat was nicer. A uniquely human smell, sweat. He had come to appreciate it in the same way he had come to appreciate the smell of lake water.

Jarres blew a stream of pipe smoke at the ceiling. “Now that we’re relaxed, let’s have the truth. You’ve got a great many men to choose from in this city, which means you’re here for something other than a simple fuck.”

“True,” Pol conceded. “I am. Do you remember when you talked about the black market with me? You had a friend.”

Jarres turned his head away from Pol. “Yeah, I remember all right. They let Kolin go, Espe nearly went to jail, and I had to talk before the head surgeons—was forced to defend myself when I’d done nothing wrong. If you’re looking for that sort of thing, I think you better look someplace else. Thanks for the lay, but I can’t help.”

“I’m not asking you to start up a business, Eamon.” Pol laid a hand on Jarres’s lean stomach. “I need a few things only. Me. I need them. No one else will know what we are doing and no one knows how much alchemy the corpses have in their veins until you mark it down. You could do it. You said it yourself.” He inched his hand downward slowly. “Or were you just bragging?”

Jarres groaned—not in pleasure, but frustration. A bit more pushing and he would relent, Pol thought. He felt confident in his ability to reduce simple men to formulae, spells to be cast and then molded. His clawtips moved lightly through Jarres’s thatch of pubic hair. The man’s cock shifted, began to swell.

“I will be honest with you,” Pol said. “My research is at a standstill, and I have no friends at the academy. I cannot afford to pay you much, but you will have my gratitude.”

Jarres chuckled, and pushed Pol’s hands the final inch.

“Just your gratitude, huh?” he asked.

Pol smiled. “This is how I show my gratitude. But you need to do this per my instructions, Jarres. I need specific things.”

Jarres flexed his hips and sighed, this time with pleasure. “Yah, I can do that, I suppose. You have a list?”

“I will write it out for you afterwards. I know you must be careful not to arouse suspicion, but the faster you do this for me the more grateful I will be.”

“Understood,” Jarres said. He yawned and stretched out under Pol’s ministrations, clearly enjoying himself. “When you’re finished there, how about celebrating our new arrangement? Visit the docks, see a fight like old times?”

Pol considered. It had been some time since he had seen a fight, and even longer since he had seen a good one. The docksides attracted the best. Still, there was work to be done. Planning.

Before he could answer, Jarres spoke. “You’ve heard of Shav? No. He’s a quarterstock they’ve got fighting tonight. A close cousin of yours, maybe.”

Pol stopped considering instantly. He would go. He had never seen an elderman’s offspring, and knew no one who had. Though elder sperm fertilized any species’ egg, the product of the coupling was seldom fertile. On the rare occasion that it was, its offspring suffered extreme birth defects. This quarterstock Jarres spoke of was possibly such a one. Most likely, the whole thing was a hoax, but it could not be ignored on that basis alone.

Pol wondered why he had heard nothing of it. Academy biologists estimated the world population of eldermen to be less than one hundred thousand. They were expensive and risky to gestate, but highly valued for their magical facility. Surely the living child of one would be of interest.

Or perhaps even some use.

‡

The walk from Jarres’s apartment took them through two of the roughest neighborhoods in the eastern quarter of the city.

Composed of southern Ulomi and western Castan immigrants respectively, the populations of Donsiter and Torn would not brook the other’s existence. Tansot’s governors had on several occasions begun campaigns to turn the tide of sectarian violence, but to no avail. With the support of the city’s conservative Adrashi churches, the Ulomi of Donsiter were slowly gaining the advantage over their atypically militant Castan neighbors.

This did not make Donsiter any safer. Though its denizens strutted outwardly, inwardly they feared Torn’s increasingly desperate acts. More than this, perhaps, they feared being in the churches’ debt. The churches would remember and extract two grams of bonedust for every gram spent in assistance. In fact, they had already begun. The church soldiers stationed in Donsiter took what they pleased.

Torn, on the other hand, had peopled itself with criminals, men and women the seniors of the community hired to help wage their war. Murderers and thieves, out-of-work and disgraced soldiers of the Tomen border, Anadrashi reformists and scrabbling gladiators, all of whom took the money offered to them and caused trouble. The streets became a place to air one’s grievances with one’s fist or weapon.

After dark, a man took his life in his hands if he walked the streets of either neighborhood with less than two men at his side.

Pol and Jarres armed themselves accordingly. Pol carried his hand-carved liisau, a seven-foot tall ironwood staff tipped with a foot-long dagger blade and butted with steel. He had designed the weapon to suit his unique fighting style, which blended the staff arts common to eastern Knoori and the many bladed styles of Pusta.

Jarres carried nothing so exotic. Holstered over his left shoulder was a compound crossbow, an ugly little quickdraw that had probably cost him a week’s salary. Castans were famously skeptical of magic and the reliance on magic, often arming themselves with muscle-powered arms rather than the more common alchemical varieties. At his right hip swung a vazhe, a short, heavy broadsword held in contempt by nearly all Stoli swordsmen
. Better for chopping wood,
they claimed, glossing over the fact that vazhe-wielding Castans had kept Stol out of their border for nearly seven hundred years.

Pol’s staff-end rang hollowly on the hard-packed earth. He refused to slink in the shadows like an animal, and had not asked the other man’s opinion. Jarres did not appear overly discomfited by this.

Though he would not admit so, Pol found himself wishing for a confrontation. He had restrained his anger with Ebn. He had been patient with Jarres. He could not be otherwise, for his plans depended on Ebn’s ignorance and Jarres’s assistance, but the acts would never be enjoyable. Now, he wanted release.

Unfortunately, no one presented him with an opportunity. The night was quiet but for the rustling of scrawny sycamore trees lining the roadway. Before very long they arrived at Docksides Boxing, a large, low-roofed building on a floating platform at the end of two stationary docks. They stopped at the entrance to one, where a doorman waited under a single torchlight.

Pol became impatient as the sunken-eyed man held their entrance fee, a half-gram bag of dust, open under his nose.
As if the man could discern anything with such dull senses
, Pol thought. Academy studies revealed that most of the bonedust used as payment in the city tested below forty percent pure. Ground sheep bone was the most common filler. If properly trained, an elderman could smell the difference. A human? Never.

Jarres became impatient as well. “Satisfied?” he asked the doorman, whose skin looked like wrinkled parchment in the flickering light.

The doorman shrugged. “Suppose so. Smells okay. But this ain’t enough.”

“Not enough?” Jarres shook his head. “Put it on the scale.”

Pol grinned at the doorman’s expression. It was a serious insult, asking a money handler to weigh dust. The doorman spat at Jarres’s feet and then dropped the waxpaper bag on the scale on the stool beside him.

“I told you,” he said. “Half a gram. Not enough.”

Jarres laughed, but there was a definite edge to it. “The entry has always been half a gram. What are you trying to pull?”

“Not tonight, it ain’t half a gram.” The doorman folded the bag and held it out so that Jarres could either take it or add to it. “Tonight’s one whole, on account of the quarterstock we rustled up. Idiot’s fighting that bitch Stasessun everybody loves. She’s gonna kill him for sure. Biggest fight in a long time. So, one gram. Pay or leave.”

Pol took out a thin leather wallet. “Here,” he said, handing the doorman another bag. “Half a gram of pure, and if you insult me by smelling it I will probably murder you where you stand.”

The doorman looked unimpressed and started to open the bag. Pol stepped into the cone of torchlight and leaned forward, forcing the man to look into his eyes.

“Shit,” the doorman said, backing against the light pole. “Okay. Okay. I don’t need to smell it. Don’t touch me, please.”

Pol straightened, pretending shock. “Surely, you do not think I want to?”

Jarres clapped him on the back and they entered Docksides Boxing. The tension in Pol’s shoulders began to ebb away as the smells reached him. Sawdust. Blood.

Sweat.

‡

The quarterstock Shav was not a hoax. Pol had caught glimpses of him through the crowd before the main fight began. Rolling his immense scarred shoulders, loosening his bullish neck.

In most ways, he seemed the perfect compromise between human and elderman. His skin was lustrous, a rich lavender hue, and Pol could see a fine sheen of sweat on his brow. Well over six feet tall, he must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. Thick slabs of muscle hid the slight skeletal and ligamentary anomalies of his build, but he stood with a slight forward tilt like an elderman, as if he were always on the balls of his feet. Any half-competent anatomist would be able to identify the subtle differences at first glance.

His copper hair was trimmed to stubble and his features were thicker, softer than an elderman’s. No sign of physical retardation marred his face.

One detail alone surprised Pol: two stubby horns sprouted high on either side of Shav’s forehead.

The victor of the last fight, still swaying unsteadily, announced the main event.

“Stasessun!” many in the crowd chanted. It grew as more picked up the call.

A tall, coffee-skinned woman of ambiguous ethnicity, heavily tattooed and clad in simple gauze wrappings, stepped from the crowd. Pol could tell from her walk alone that she would be a formidable opponent. Her limbs were thin blades of muscle and bone.

The whistle sounded. She came out fast and strong, swarming around the lumbering Shav, who ducked his head into two meaty fists and took the onslaught of jabs and knee thrusts. He did not attempt to fight back, and the crowd laughed. They clearly thought the fight a washout, the quarterstock a moron. At the end of round one, he looked flushed but unhurt. Stasessun rolled her eyes, and sat facing away from him in her corner.

She started taunting him in the second round. She spat, cursed, and laughed, all the while taking carefully placed potshots at his ears and shins. Most of the crowd laughed with her, but a few held back. Late in the round, having taken her abuse without fighting back for almost three minutes, Shav launched a slow but well-timed cross that glanced off Stasessun’s temple and sent her staggering. She snarled and came forward, landing a few rapid blows before the whistle sounded.

“I’m impressed,” Jarres told Pol. “I’ve seen only a few men go past the second round with her.”

Shav smiled as he walked to his corner. He bled from multiple cuts around his ears. Bruises pocked his forearms and shins. A few in the crowd crossed to his corner to offer words of encouragement. Stasessun’s fans looked on in annoyance. The mood had taken a turn.

The third round began. Stasessun came forward, unsmiling. She hopped from side to side as the quarterstock watched from between his fists, the unmistakable glint of calculation in his eyes. Her first punch got through, landed square on his chin. He shook it off but did not recover in time to block the two kicks that followed, landing on either thigh. He grunted and watched her, taking hits.

By this point the crowd was subdued. They watched Shav, and waited.

The moment came. Stasessun moved in close, following a right jab with a left shovel hook to Shav’s temple. He caught her fist halfway to its target and, quicker than Pol would have thought possible, caught her under the chin with an uppercut—a gracefully fluid move that lifted her off her feet.

The sound of bone breaking was clear and distinct in the silence.

She landed on the floor, neck clearly broken. Her life bubbled from her lips.

Shav tipped his head to either side, vertebrae popping loudly.

After a short pause, the crowd erupted. Pol yelled with them, cares for the moment forgotten. Men jostled against him, unconcerned that he was elderman and they human. Someone slapped his backside and he did not turn to see who had done it. He pictured Ebn there with him, back to back with the rabble, and laughed out loud. She would never understand the allure of violence, the intoxicating feeling of forcing another to submit.

“Hey!” Jarres yelled in his ear. “You want something to drink?”

“Yes,” Pol answered immediately. The response surprised him. When had he last been intoxicated in public? A year? Two? No matter. Surely Adrash would approve a sacrament in his honor. In return, he would bless Pol with wine and song and violence—perhaps even a new friend in the struggle to come.

“Yes,” he repeated, peering over the crowd to locate Shav. He had no intention of letting the quarterstock disappear without introducing himself. “I will definitely have a drink.”