City of Night (11 page)

 

Terrick listened while the boy talked. Listened, seeing Garroc in him, and seeing, as well, the wife and mother that Terrick had never—and would never—meet. But the boy’s slow, quiet words were not Garroc’s words, and the intensity with which Garroc burned in his youth was also absent.

How it must have angered Garroc, to know that he had failed, and that he would remain, to the end of his days, an exile in these lands. And how it must have weighed on him to place that task on the slender shoulders of a boy who had never seen battle.

And who had, even now, only seen one.

“What will you do?” Angel asked, when the last of his words had trailed into silence.

“Work,” Terrick replied.

“I mean, what will you do now?”

“Work.”

“But why?”

Terrick shrugged. “Because I can. Because Garroc is not coming back. Because I don’t choose to serve another. Not yet. Maybe never.” He shrugged, and then added, “Work is something to do while you wait. If you can’t find answers, if you can’t find direction, it puts food on the table, a roof over the head.”

“And that’s all?”

“It’s not what I wanted when I was young, but we seldom get what we want.” He watched Angel’s face for any sign of comprehension. When he found none, which was oddly comforting, he said, “What will you do?”

Angel’s smile was wan. “Work,” he replied. “If I can find it.”

“And you will not search?”

“How can I?” Bitterness, faint but unmistakable, seeped into the boy’s words. “My father at least had the Kings’ Challenge on which to stand when he looked for someone—anyone—worthy. I have nothing; no money, no family, no land; I can hardly use a sword, and I don’t have many useful skills.

“Even if I knew what to look for, I have nothing to offer. If this worthy lord has guards, I wouldn’t get close to him.”

“You will not always be this young,” Terrick began.

But Angel frowned, and the words fell away. The silence was pointed and cool.

“But you won’t leave the City.”

Angel shook his head.

“Neither will I.” Terrick rose. “Lunch will end soon. If you need a place to stay while you settle in, I’m not moving.”

Angel nodded, his shoulders turning down toward the ground, the years falling away from his pale face. His hair was awkward; far too stiff, too defined, for his age. “I have to try,” he said in a low voice. “For my father’s sake. I have to try.”

“I know,” Terrick replied, equally quiet. The lunch horn blew, low and loud like a flatland cow. “Stay here if you want. Or meet me after my shift ends.” He turned, not expecting a reply, and made his way back to his wicket.

He didn’t know how long Angel would stay.

But he knew that he would wait for the boy. For Garroc’s son. He had waited, day after day, the Port Authority consuming his life in the slow march of hours, for Angel, although he hadn’t known it; he knew it now. What Angel had told him he understood in some small measure, and he resolved to practice with swords again; to build the type of endurance that battle required.

To be ready to face the endless night when Garroc’s son, the last of his line, finally returned to the Authority and bid him leave it.

A
MOMENT IN TIME, fixed and unchanging. He can return to it, and often does, trying to make sense of his life.

More often, it returns to him, sometimes as a whisper, sometimes as a shout, sometimes as a slap in the face. He’s never sure when it will come, and when it will leave, and sometimes it’s damn inconvenient—but not now.

Angel opened the windows. Which meant, in this case, grabbing faded strips of cloth—from an old shirt, maybe; it was kind of hard to tell—and tying them ’round both the shutter and the hook in the wall. It had to be done four times. There were actually two windows in this room, but the apartment had been old before Angel’s father had been born, so the shutters were warped; they liked to close.
It’d be a lot easier if people would move,
he thought. But if he were trying to be fair—and given this was the third shutter, he didn’t much feel like it—he’d have to acknowledge that there wasn’t much room to move
in.
Jay wanted the entire den in one room. They did fit, but not easily, and as usual she wanted everyone as close to the kitchen as possible. So they’d all congregated in one room, finding floor space to sit on or wall space to lean against—the wall was safer, unless you
liked
to be stepped on. Sadly, the windows were part of the wall, which made the chore harder.

He would have given up, but no one else cared, and Angel liked being able to breathe.

Now, people were talking in that half-shout they used when there were too many other people talking; the room, which wouldn’t have been large back home, was crowded with people sounds and people smells. Obviously, some idiot had told Carver to cook, because one of those smells was something burning.

Angel moved toward the bucket in the corner, just in case, and stood idle, leaning against the wall. This should’ve taken more thought than it did, but, well. It was Carver, and Carver was trying to cook. Which meant he was trying to own part of the conversation, an effort which demanded more of his time than the stove and the pot on it. Anyone who let Carver cook when it was this crowded
expected
to put out the occasional fire.

“Want me to watch?” Finch asked, standing on her toes and shouting in the direction of his ear; her breath tickled his collarbone. She’d probably asked the question at least four times, but the noise of colliding conversations was so damn loud it was easy to miss her. She didn’t have much of a voice, not compared to the rest of the den. Only Teller was quieter, but he had other ways of making himself heard.

Angel shrugged and watched her hover. Her eyes were so dark a brown, the dim light made them all black, but it was a warm black, infused by an immediate and urgent desire to be
helpful
that was so strong it was almost its own color. He liked Finch. It would have been damn hard not to like Finch, and in this, at least, Angel was lazy.

Jester muttered something, and his words made a wave in the eddies of other conversations, other gambits for attention; laughter followed, enveloping everyone except the sullen silence that was Duster. Duster habitually sat beside Jay, or stood by her shoulder, her hands in fists at her sides. She seldom smiled, and the only time she laughed? Not worth the cost. Today, everyone was crowded around Jay, and while Duster had her own special way of staking out space, when people started laughing, they pressed into it.

Angel didn’t understand Duster, and mostly, he was certain he never would. But sometimes—sometimes he thought he might, and that was worse. It made him uncomfortable.

When he was uncomfortable, he remembered. A month, two months—no, maybe six now. Or seven. Whatever. The time didn’t matter; it just marked a boundary. Before it, this room and these people didn’t exist as part of his life, and after? Well, he was the one standing beside the damn bucket.

So he leaned against the wall, not that there was a lot of wall to lean against; he folded his arms across his chest, let his chin tilt forward toward his heart, as if it was the center of gravity. Who knows. He wasn’t a doctor and he wasn’t a healer—maybe it was.

A moment in time.

Where does it start?

Not in the Port Authority. Not in Terrick’s apartment, although the heat of the smithy permeates every memory of that place. Not in the Common, and not in the shade of its giant, unnatural trees (trees which, he has been assured, are entirely natural). For some reason people like to talk to him about the trees: the magisterial guards, the merchants coming to their stalls, the old women who seem to gird the Common with their daily presence (and if there’s a better way to tell time than Mrs. Gallaby’s tapping cane, he hasn’t seen it yet).

Maybe it starts with money. Or with having no money.

Maybe it starts with the job he also doesn’t have.

Maybe it starts with the streets of the City, because they stretch out forever, longer than fields, with no fields in sight. Yeah, maybe it starts there.

Angel knows what hunger feels like. But he’s never lived in a place where you can’t even
grow your own food
because there’s no land at all that isn’t part of your windowsill—if you even have that much you can call your own. He knows that most of your land is used to grow things that other people want—but having
nothing
that other people want? It’s something the City teaches him, daily. He doesn’t like the lesson.

There are other things he learns.

He learns that having no family is hard—he knew it, but he learns it again, over and over. He forgets, for minutes at a time, that his mother and father are dead. He forgets, for the same minutes, that he’ll never hear their voices, or see their expressions, or feel their arms, and when those moments pass, and he is alone again, he regrets bitterly the embarrassment he felt at his father’s open affection.
I’m not a child
echoes in the empty room when Terrick is at the Port Authority.

Sometimes he hates the echoes enough that he leaves. He goes exploring, as if he were a child again, without the strength to help his father in the fields.

The City is larger than anything he dreamed of as that child. There’s a river that cuts through the City, but it’s surrounded by buildings and bisected by bridges. People live on its banks when it’s warm. They fight there and die there as well. Far enough downstream, people don’t even blink when a body works free of the mud and rises, dragged along by the current. He’s seen it, once. He doesn’t want to see it again.

He discovers that there are a hundred holdings. He asks the old woman who tells him this how she knows which ones are which—and how he’s supposed to—and she shrugs. People just know, she tells him, nodding sagely. He doesn’t. There are streets all over the place, and the boundaries of the holdings crisscross them, claiming one part for the twenty-fifth, and one part for the thirty-fifth in a way that makes no sense.

But the boundaries mean something to the people who live inside them. As if these patches of city, invisible to Angel’s eye, are their fields, they roam the boundaries in packs, like feral dogs. They’re called dens, here. Angel doesn’t know why—it’s a stupid word for what they actually are. What they are? Dangerous. He watches for them, but the buildings and the alleys get in the way; he’s spent some time running from them as a result.

There are some days his life seems to be all about running.

Sometimes that makes him angry. It’s better than crying. It’s better than staring at walls and trying to figure out what there is to do in this smelly, hot, crowded, noisy corner of the Hells.

He spends a month being angry. He spends two months being angry. In the City there are so many things to be angry
about,
walking down the street is an exercise in fury; it’s like he’s wounded and every single thing he sees rubs at the wound, catching its edges and making it bleed more.

He can remember the first fight he gets into; he can’t remember why it started. Because after the first fight, there are
so many
of them. He does remember Terrick’s silence, and that’s harder; Terrick is silent the way his father would have been silent, at least to start. But Terrick isn’t his father, and the second time, the third, he starts to try to teach Angel the things his father didn’t.

He teaches Angel how to fight. There’s no honor in it, and no attempt to teach morals. It’s just about the fight itself, and that much, Angel can focus on. The morals? Not so much. Not when he can walk the streets and see people thin with starvation, begging, hands or bowls in their laps, all dignity lost in the face of hunger and their inability to make themselves useful to people who have money. Not when he can leave the Common and walk half a mile and be surrounded by buildings that his family might have used for firewood if the wood itself weren’t so rotten. Not when he can turn the wrong corner or cross the wrong street and come face-to-face with boys little older than he is, waving daggers, strutting across the landscape like roosters.

Not when right and wrong have become so damn blurred.

Sometimes he remembers that it wasn’t always blurred. Sometimes remembering helps, but it gets harder and harder to remember the
when,
and the why, he thinks, is buried with his parents. He doesn’t think about Weyrdon often. He doesn’t go to the port, doesn’t stand on the docks, doesn’t look for a glimpse of the
Ice Wolf
’s long shadow. He doesn’t replay the conversation about war and endless night—because in some ways, he’s already living it. Here, on the ground, as the heat fades and the sea air turns damp and chill. The beggars are desperate now, and he watches and listens until he
cannot stand
to listen to another word.