CHAPTER 5
Twice merciful to Numanew.
She should have known better.
No one could say he had not been clearly warned.
When Serpent, the sleek freighter (and definitely not a privateer the man had said and she said she didn't care), had taken on the anxious young woman at Ninewelldoor, Numanew, a fat silver-eyed man from Old Nesgoh, had swaggered up to her with his busted up, dirty smile and greasy hair and offered to carry her bags. The small, pretty green-eye with long brown hair and a pristine, silk dress (how could her parents have been so foolish?) had whisper-stuttered, "No," and cast worried looks about her like a mouse in a hawk nest.
Blood in the water for certain men. Wenamun watched her board hungrily. His limbic and endocrine system warred to control displaying arousal, his amygdala flared with abnormal patterns akin more to rage and violence than sex.
Rina had done nothing. First mercy.
The girl, not unwisely, had burrowed into her private cabin, not leaving even for food. Now, early on the fourth and last day of her journey with the freighter (not privateer), she emerged, and looked shaking awful.
Her blood pressure was low, her hear-rate fast, even accounting for fear. Her neurochemicals were erratic, reflected in her slow reactions. Evidently she'd brought some water aboard with her, but had been dry for days.
Rina was already irritable. She had accepted her current assignment with. . .great reluctance. She’d employed its paramount, necessary secrecy as an argument to not intervene.
Gam, the less violent of her two great teachers, would have kicked her. Handle the Archives well, kid, or cast them away! What in the Archives was clearer than helping for the helpless? "Ante’s king fight for the poor, aid the needy, crush the aggressor.”
Numa, as the crew called him, unwisely had failed to forget the girl. Before she could fill her bottle, he pinned her into a corner of the mess.
The others laughed and shook their heads, as if watching a beloved dog who pissed in the house. One reminded her there was no mommy or daddy out in the wiild world. Another muttered something about uppity narokk green-eyes.
Just then the captain moved into the mess, and the girl’s eyes implored him. He blew his nose into his sleeve, and sat down to eat. Not a single other man, and they were all men, so much as looked up from his plate.
Rina felt all of them. Not in the cold, distant way of a doctor, a readout of abstruse medical terms and numbers and data, but in the way Gam had taught her. Her shine wove an invisible, delicate line through the room like a lazy eel, and it told her of them. Some were cowards, their hearts tapping faster as they agonized between the knowledge that they could, should, but wouldn't
Some of their neurons danced like Ligan around Ligandr's water-fires, and screeched for viscera. The closest to Numa had a great amount of scar tissue sheathing his left knee, the second closest was deaf in his left ear, the farthest was overdue for a heart attack.
In the time that she did this, Numa took the girl’s trembling shoulders into large hands. "Just a kiss, little babe. A small one, babe.”
She threw a plate to distract, and when Numanew turned, Numanew’s body split the wooden table when her foot planted between his shoulder blades, a dozen meals flew. She had his arm as he gasped, and Rina twisted and Numanew screamed like an ass she’d once heard braying in the blue hills high above the Hill. Spiral fracture, humerus, shoulder ripped from joint. Muscles tearing. Numa’s blood flooded with adrenaline.
The closest tried to stand, but she collapsed his knee by trapping the foot against the ground with her kick. Tendons shredded, ligaments rent. Screams.
Rina stood in front of the weeping girl, not a day older than fourteen, held the large man by his ruined arm, and from the darkness given her face by the corner of the black room looked over her shoulder and said, clearly, "I’ll kill him. Keep him away.” Then she dropped the crying man, and took the child to her cabin.
Second mercy.
The captain found her praying at the aft.
"Messed him up,” he growled. "Iat, too. Good hands, and for what? Some spoiled little narokk bitch?”
She kept her back to him. "Didn’t mind her wealth when you took it.”
"Nothing but hungry mouths now.”
"For a good, long while I hope.”
"Money I don’t have.”
Rina was silent.
"Woman, face me when I speak!”
Rina continued to pray, annoyed but unprovoked. When she stood half an hour later, she was alone.
She was only marginally surprised to find Numanew slamming his one good arm into her cabin’s door upon her return.
"Ah, you're a fool."
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He turned with the shining edge of a knife in his hand and smirked half-mad, half-terrified. "No whore tells me 'no'. Ever, tells me 'no’!” Bestial breaths. "Rather be dead.”
Some guys just are trash, Addiv. Maim, her more pugnacious teacher had once said. Think of Conflagration, the town of fire, before the Break. Shatter every bone, gouge out both eyes, maw, rip their nuts off. . .They’re so far gone from Ante’s Rule they’ll roll their sightless half-corpses over one another toward evil just to say through toothless, tongue-less mouths they did as they wanted.
A soundless minute later, she threw Numa’s corpse over the rail and into the sea. Some shine required, but know one noticed.
A crowd had encircled her, the captain pushed his way through, cursing, threatening, swearing by the Serpent Deep.
Rina had ignored the horrid tattoos of dread Ligandr when she'd boarded. She’d been tired of walking.
The twisted twins coiled down around the captain’s head so their vile, razor-lined mouths opened almost entirely around his eyes, lapzu sky-blue of Ante’s Contract.
Her eyes.
Not her eyes.
Ligan, the breachers.
"Sebi cow,” was all he got out before, smooth as moonlight upon grass, Rina threw back her coat and drew Doe of the Dawn, pressed the elegant short skeel sword against his neck.
"You didn’t mind my wealth either, Ligan. I will gladly feed you to your rokk as well. A refund, matter of fact.” She saw in her periphery more than a few of the surrounding men take quick looks across the water to the ever-receding corpse. "He received two. You, all of you, will only get just this one.”
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Rina watched foamy breakers smash against the rockface that sat just set of Port. Behind was the beach, dotted with many green and pale blue-eyed Firsts enjoying the end of the bright day. Before her the cliffs became steeper and rockier as they rose higher and higher terminating at First’s southern seawall.
She had managed to keep herself from violence until she was mere hours from the twin cities. Only once in an entire year. Had to count for something. Not for the first time she wondered why the TorLord had made Nameless so full of violence only to direct his own so often against it. One of the great tensions of the Archives, kid. Gam had said.
Maybe it was more than that. She’d done the right thing on the boat. There’d been no other way. She’d done violence before. Lots of it! Why now was she so. . .uncomfortable?
Mother. The word came unbidden so often. The word held so much of her, was so important to who, to what, she was. Yet Rina wasn’t a mother. Not really.
So many years on your cursed back, she thought angrily to the sea. Even as they had been well-mixed with blood and loss and tears, in a strange, slightly morbid way, she missed them. Violence had made sense back then.
From behind, there came a tug at her coat. She turned to find Anvi’s green eyes sparkling. Rina was not a tall woman, but the girl was shorter. A new, red striped and sparkled dress glinted in the sun, complemented by ruby sneakers and large, dark red bow, the ribbons of which danced in seawind.
"Red,” Rina laughed. "A lot of red.”
The girl laughed. "They have a surplus of red clothes from Wordheal. Got something to do with their weirdo rokkism.” Anvi pulled down on her eye and stuck out her tongue.
Rina smiled. "You’re the weirdo. I’d never tell a Given, but red’s my favorite color.” A silence fell between them. The sound of two lives separating, two paths unwinding. Happy. Sad. She knew it well. "I’m glad you came out to see me off, Anvi.”
"I don’t know what to say Rina,” Anvi choked, green eyes shined. "I can’t give you anything. Not for the money, the clothes, not for what you did for me on. . .on Serpent. . .I don’t know why they even bothered with me. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen!” She sniffled. "I wish I had black hair like yours! I hate blonde!”
"No more about it,” Rina rubbed a tear from the girl’s cheek. "I'm no one to emulate. You go on and become a fine, happy and intelligent, uh world-weary, woman. And you are much prettier than I.”
"I wish you’d just come to First with me,” Anvi sniffled again.
Rina looked beyond Anvi, up across the rolling hills that separated little Port from First proper. Far in the distance, so far that it looked as if she were viewing it through a dirty spyglass, sat Worldheal.
Whoever the shiner was, for that sort of power does not occur naturally, they could just as easily be in First as in Wordheal. But in her mind, when she prayed to the Rokk, the spliter of continents that Sebu would be free of Old Nesgoh, all she saw was Wordheal. Ridiculous, Rina thought, I’m not a reed, or the daughter of one. The maw do I know? She’d never sought the way Suzerain had. She prayed, fasted, gave, knew Rule better than most. She also never expected to see the wonders from the Archives in the real world. Too many perspectives, so many hours with Gam going over the reeds and teachers and names. She rubbed her temple. Old headaches.
"Rina?”
"I’m sorry Anvi,” even now she knew, as in old battles when she saw without seeing where Ligan forces were weakest, when she’d understood without thought from where their attack must come, "but it’s Wordheal for me.” She hugged the girl and prayed Ante follow her.
"But my da used to say that the Wordhealers are crazy,” the girl wailed. "That they worship a rokk of blood. They enjoy pain! Pain!”
"People all over the world worship odd rokkae.” She didn't say, but who more odd than Ante? BeforeOne. Who makes slaves reeds and kings.
"They’re all mad! Primitive child stories that have no place on modern Nameless. But, Rina, a whole city!” The longer she spoke the wider her eyes and shorter her breath. Rina knew that fear-conditioning well. "Rina,” she said, "they’re dangerous. Just like the brutes on the ship. They shouldn’t exist!”
"Anvi, if you remember any one thing of me, let it be this: the world is bigger than your parent’s thoughts. People do things you don’t understand, things that seem silly and useless. That does not give you right to declare them expendable. My own have been so deemed many times.” Rina had not meant to sound angry, but evil memories tainted her voice, for the child flushed.
Rina pulled her twisted dagger from beneath her cloak. The ugly, crooked Ligan blade had been with her since her first training session with Maim.
"I’m not one open to much change, but I’d like you to take this. An old saying from my home: 'Never brave tall grass alone.’” She looked at the great skyscrapers of First. "Tall grass.”
Anvi accepted it without protest.
"Thank you, Rina. She tucked the dagger into her bag, hugged Rina one last time and then turned and ran. "I hope I see you again!”
Rina should have spoken to the girl more of Ante, His contract. But converts were for Given and Rockmen. Sebi resented the recruitment. Ante made his contract with the Signators, after all. Not pale blue or silver eyes.
Two cities that hate each other. Same song, different tune.
Rina found she wanted to argue with her own mind. "The Ligan deserve,” she thought of what she’d said to Anvi. It had seemed so wise then. ". . .Deserve our hated.” The wind pushed violently from across the sea against her back and sent long raven-black hairs flying into a million ribbons before her. She began to walk.
Inside the crunching and grinding cerulean cliffs and plates of the planet that was her gauge, her shine pulsed azure, begging to be released. A shine-powered run and she’d arrive in minutes.
Rina pulled gently from her gauge, spread a thin, imperceptible shine curtain across the valley.
Nothing in the valley, or either city.
She sighed. "Better safe than sorry." She adjusted her satchel and blade. "So more walking. Yay."
