When We Were Executioners (20 page)

Imam’s flock would never smell the stain as we do. The poison would accumulate, sicken, and destroy.

The trees are patient. What is our hurry? Let them be sick. Let their buildings fall. Let the woods return to this place. You make it sound like it is a holy thing to abandon them to such a fate.

It is not holy at all. I know. I know. In the morning, we will go after the greatest prize we have yet found.

Salvatore? Do you think you know where he is?

No. There is another demon skull to claim, an old one more terrible than any living. We will no longer be executioners chasing after a prize. We will be the fire that purifies this city for a thousand years. Let the rain come and cool the ash from our flame. We were supposed to be executioners. We were supposed to be hunters and killers of abominations.

That is why we came, and why Imam allows us among this city that is more theirs than ours.

Wolves need not honor the word of dishonest men. We do not belong here, and every moment in this city only makes me angrier at the ones who would keep us from our prey.
In the morning, we were going after the skull of Jona’s father, buried for twenty years beneath his burned out house. We had waited only long enough to follow the scent of the men who came for it, they who believed they could take it from us, who would dig it up at any cost and try to hide it from us. We knew their smell in the ground, the stain’s smell from the bones where they took it, and the fate of all their bones if the Blessings of Erin are upon us.

Do you think I could kill Rachel, after knowing her the way that Jona knew her?

Yes. I will if you can’t.

Then there is hope for us, yet, my love. Erin, be merciful, and let our task be swift in this miserable place.

In the morning, there will be so much fire, the city will curse Erin’s name for a thousand years.

Is that what you want?

We must obey Erin’s will. The ones who stand in our way…

Then, Salvatore and Rachel.

Sleep if you can.

I could not sleep. I might never sleep again if we are stopped before we can do what we must. Death is not like sleep. It is more like waking up.

CHAPTER III

Jona and Tripoli dragged in three men stoned and naked in mid-morning from the middle of the street. Real pinkers didn’t move much when they hit the pipes, but eaters

didn’t get strong enough hits to fall so far. They were just chewing on leaves, not smoking the old, dried dung-like balls of the weed heavy with the pink stain from the flowers. These three eaters were still naked. When they came down from bliss in the prison cell, they’d think about how to get home unashamed.

Tripoli led the three pinkers with their hands tied to the same long rope towards the interrogation room.

Calipari jumped up and grabbed the rope between two naked eaters. “Nope,” said Calipari, “Just toss them in the tank. The king doesn’t need to know why they’re are naked. We already know. Third cell’s open.”

“Aye, sir,” said Tripoli.

Jona stuck his thumb out at the closed door. “Got anything good, Sergeant?”

Calipari sat back down. He looked at the report he was writing. “Ugliest bird you ever saw in your life,” he said, “Tougher than you boys, too.”

Jona laughed. “Tougher than us? Who’s tougher than us? This is the Pens,” said Jona. He puffed out his chest. “We scare blood monkeys. Night King shivers from us.”

Calipari salted his page. He pushed the paper aside, and grabbed a clean sheet. “Night King’s just street talk,” said Calipari. “Real trouble coming when the Chief Engineer gets here to dig up everything. Don’t even know what he’s doing down here. Got a letter say he’s coming here to work. What I want to know is why now? What’s he planning? People like that don’t come here for real. Lord Sabachthani don’t come visiting, what’s this fellow like him doing? Troublesome stuff, that’s what.”

Jona reached over to a scrivener’s hand and swiped a quill straight from the scribbling fingers. Jona handed the inked and ready goose-feather to Calipari. The scrivener shouted at Jona for the theft.

Jona ignored the scrivener. “Who you got in the room?”

Calipari shushed the scrivener with one look. “Thanks,” he said. He scratched numbers on his page.

Jona leaned over the desk to see what precisely Nicola wrote, but all Jona saw were numbers.

“Well?” said Jona.

Calipari harrumphed. “Right,” he said. “Big Jess bounces down in this dive with a bunch of the sailor and slaughterhouse girls,” said Calipari. “Whores hear all kinds of stuff. So, Jess hears it. She’s no flower, our Jess. She’s a fighter, big as an ox.”

“My kind of girl,” said Jona, “What’s she singing?”

“You hear about a porter name of Umberti?”

“I heard he was running pinks for that Dunnlander on the side. What’s that Dunnlander’s name? He’s more gangly than ganger. Too pink to last long.”

“Turco,” said Calipari. “Turns out Umberti is pulling a little off the top of someone else’s stuff, and slipping it out on the side, and Big Jess heard about it from one of her girls who heard it from a stevedore who works it with Umberti. Word spreads quick on a skimmer, true or not. If we don’t pull Umberti soon, he’ll roll with no help from us, and we won’t get our hands on the Dunnlander fast enough to hang him.”

“We’re just rolling him to the noose for smuggling, right?”

Calipari shrugged. “Find Umberti before his bosses figure it out, and maybe we get some push. Nothing makes a good bird like the king’s shield. If he’s too tough, we’ll roll him to the noose with Turco beside him. If he’s smart, he’ll give us the foreigner.”

Jona cracked his neck. He looked over at the closed door behind which Big Jess and Geek talked about the streets. “Do I get to meet the contact?” he asked. Jona had a goofy smile on his face like begging.

Calipari rolled his eyes. “No, you don’t get to meet Big Jess. This is Geek’s show. You got that of-demon girl for Sabachthani and the Anchorites. That’s the stuff you need for the fleur-delis, Lieutenant Lord Joni. Geek just wants Sergeant stripes, and he needs this stuff for it. Foreign gangers hang for Sergeants, and no one cares but us.” A piece of paper moved from one side of the Sergeant’s desk to the other, full of numbers. “I want you and Jaime to hit Bone ’n Cleaver and the Dead Goat, for sure. Ask around for Umberti and Turco for Geek.”

“
Dead Goat?
” said Jona. He shook his head. “That’s no porter pub,” said Jona, “That’s deep in the pink. Too deep. You want riot bells, you send us in there alone.”

Calipari brushed off Jona’s words with a wave of his hand. “Jaime knows a fellow who’ll let you in back,” said Calipari, “as long as you promise only one guy and only talk. Talk Umberti—or Turco—to leave alone with our protection. Guilty or not, the word’s out. They’re both safer here than at the Dead Goat.”

“I’ll do it,” said Jona, “but I’m carrying two bells in case one gets palmed.”

Calipari nodded. “Hurry up, then.” He scribbled at his papers, and scribbled at his papers, and scribbled at his papers, and he didn’t say one more word. Jona heard laughter through the walls. It wasn’t a woman laughing. It was a man, in there, with a hard laugh. It wasn’t Geek. It wasn’t some woman from a brothel. The laugh was familiar, too. It could have been the carpenter. Sergeant Calipari was lying about the person in that room.

Jaime grabbed Jona’s sleeve. “Come on, let’s go. I ain’t going down there alone.”

Calipari wouldn’t lie without a reason. Jona looked over at Calipari, looking at him hard, trying to read him. Calipari shook his head. He pointed to the door with his quill before going back to writing, and shook his head.
Don’t.
Jaime was already halfway outside.

Jona and Jaime went out again looking for Turco and Umberti, but the Bone ’n Cleaver was empty during the day when porters and killers were working for their ale money at the Pens’ abattoir. At the Dead Goat—named for the dead goat on a pike rotting over the broken door, replaced weekly—the fellow Jaime used to know had been dropped bleeding into the river a week ago. The folks at the Dead Goat’s back door looked ready to pull teeth at uniforms asking after the dead.

Jona and Jaime backed off. Instead, they walked about the Pens asking people they knew about Umberti and Turco. Nobody heard a thing. They never did.

Then, a fight broke out beside a brothel. Then, this noble’s seneschal got lost looking for a particular warehouse and the two king’s men helped him find his way.

And that’s the rest of the king’s men’s day.

Most days were just a fuzz of faces passing through the streets. No one looked a king’s man in the eye. Everyone lied with their eyes, saying that they weren’t there with their averted faces. Jona stared them in the face, like he wanted them to look away. He was lying with his eyes, too.

The way Jona figured it, something was up with Jaime, or Nicola had heard about the things Jona had been doing for the Night King.

Jona had placed an unsigned form in the pile. It said only that the Night King was real, and hiding in an accounting ledger. Enclosed with the unsigned note was the ledger sheets from the desk of a dead man that Jona had killed because a carpenter told him to do it, and that carpenter was working for the King of the Night. All those people dropped into the canals and rivers, and none of the deaths made any sense to Jona. He had only wanted Calipari to make sense of all those deaths. Calipari was good at looking into books. That’s all Jona had wanted.

CHAPTER IV

The prison was a repurposed warehouse and still looked like a warehouse. The windows had bars. Archers on the roof congregated near mounted bells. The archers were bored, hot, sitting in the sun, and didn’t even glance up

at Jona walking towards them. Jona waved at one that looked familiar. The archer waved back. In training, Jona had failed archery. Veterans recommended failing it, so the new recruits wouldn’t get stuck on a roof in the sun. Jona would rather be in the Pens every day, where the close buildings kept the streets in shadows and every horse trough was good for a splash of water on the neck.

The prison guards didn’t even make Jona leave his gear at the door. A Pens guard should be able to take care of himself with locked up men, and some girl that hasn’t done anything but cry and bleed infected blood from a broken nose. He kept his bell. He kept his club and meat pie.

Jona had brought her food.

In the prison, Aggie was in this cell at the end of an empty hall. She was in this cell because Jona had to put her there to protect Salvatore Fidelio from the consequences of his own actions. Salvatore worked for the Night King, somehow, and somehow Salvatore was a child of a demon, like Jona. Somehow, Aggie had loved him enough to burn at the stake to protect Salvatore, even if she didn’t know what her beloved really was. Light slipped in from a few slivers in the ceiling where sun and sometimes rain poured in from the sky. The heat was awful. The whole room baked behind the bricks.

Jona brought her some pinks hidden in the slits of a blood pie. He had hid a few drops of his own blood in the pie, as well, to pass on the demon-stain and keep it in her. She might be tested again. He didn’t know if it would work like that, but it might. She had survived so long with the stain from Salvatore’s lovemaking that she might live longer with only some smoldering blood. From his perspective, no one had died, yet. Besides, she hadn’t eaten anything for two days. Demon fever and gangrene had her body now, but they weren’t as dangerous as starvation, now.

Her eyes were sunk into her face. Her lips were grey as charcoal. Her nose was still bandaged up, but nobody had changed the bandage in a week. The cloth was a green and black, like a snail in a burlap shell on her face. It wasn’t demon stain infecting her nose, just gangrene.

She growled at Jona.

Jona put the pie in front of her. “Best blood pie in the Pens, for you.”

Aggie stared at the pie. She looked up at Jona, with this terrible fear all over her face.

Jona pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “Next time I come down here, I’m bringing something for your nose, too.”

Aggie didn’t say anything at all. She clutched at her stomach. She rocked forward and back.

Jona reached for her face with the handkerchief over his hand.

She backed away, slapping his hand.

He snorted. “Not much I can do to you now.” He reached for her again.

She pulled away from him.

Jona huffed at her. “I wanted to make sure you had a nice bite and a clean bandage. Looks like they haven’t brought you any new bandages in a while. It’s like that here. Nobody cares if you live or die, and nobody wants to expose themselves to the demon stain.” Jona rubbed at the thin wrappings under his own black glove.

Her eyes closed.

“There’s this friend of mine, I think you know him. He says I should come by and help. He’s a good fellow to me,” said Jona. “I spend every day chasing after cut thieves and rollers and rapists and killers and smugglers that’d drown you and your mother over a bag of nothing. Foreigners coming here, causing real trouble, crowding out all the decent folk in the Pens. Small timers like him are nothing to me. Sabachthani’s sure going red over this, right? A stupid dog, and he wants to burn you for it? Search me on that one, girl. And this foreign friend of mine, Salvatore Fidelio, he’s asked for my help.”

Her hands clenched hard at her own body. Her eyes remained shut.

Jona’s hand finally reached her face. He peeled the putrid bandage off her skin.

Her teeth clenched, but she didn’t fight him.

Bits of greened wool tore off from the stained bandage. Her nose stank of rotting flesh stronger than the stink of the cells.

“I’m going to get you some hot water,” said Jona, “and we’ll talk about how we’re going to help you when I get back.”

Air moved over her aching, infected nose. Her jaw dropped. Her eyes opened and rolled in pain. Tears turned to mud at the corners of her eyes.

Jona went up to the kitchen, and got the cooks to boil some water for him. He asked if they had any medicine for a prisoner. They told him they didn’t. Jona handed them coins one at a time until they had a bottle of wicked alcohol so cheap a whiff watered Jona’s eyes like a strong onion.