Needle Rain (7 page)

Needle Master
- an acupuncturist who can use magience.

*****

The enforcers arrived a thousand years too late. Heloise watched their legs file past her in the corridor and go down the stairs. One of them stopped.

“Are you alright, miss?”

She stared at him.

“Are you alright? Is she?”

Heloise looked down at the child lying across her lap. She was cold, her lips blue, her hair draped in a tangled mess across her face. The pigtails had been blown apart by the blast shock.

“Is she dead?” the man asked.

The worst of it was that Leonie’s father had gone. Drager. Did he even know? To think that she’d been attracted to that man. If he’d left through the back door, he might not know. Sonja was dead too. And Marty and Tinman. Finn might lose his eye but was otherwise lucky. Everyone had a wound to show, except for her. Well, most of the blood was somebody else’s.

Heloise let her head go back until it hit the wall with a dull thump. She closed her eyes. All those dead and she was to blame.

Someone stood over her. She could see the shadow through her eyelids. Another enforcer.

“Miss? I’ve been told that you’re in charge. Are you? Because I need some sort of report. This will be going straight to the Imperator. There will be Immolators here soon. I need facts. Miss?”

Gently, she shifted Leonie’s head until she rested on the floor, then Heloise unfolded bit by bit, sliding her back up the wall, until she stood. Her mouth was sticky. She was dreadfully thirsty.

“Sir.” She straightened her back some more. “This has been a disaster. I have three people dead, four including the child, and you have a renegade Immolator on the loose. His woman – fiancée, lover, whatever she is – she’s alive and conscious. Why don’t you ask her some questions? Because –” She prodded the chainmail on the man’s chest. It hurt her finger. “Because...I don’t know what happened here except that the man who owed lots of money has gone, and...and you were way too late arriving.”

“Heloise. Heloise! Come with me.” It was Bull. He took her hand and towed her away, further along the corridor.

He looked at her and wrinkled his nose, which on his flat, broad head was like a boar sniffing. Every time she saw him she felt like running her hand across the bristles of his hair. Even now. Crazy. He would be affronted if she did. It struck her how lonely, how lacking he was, without Sonja by his side.

He held his arms out wide. “Don’t know about you, girl, but I could do with a hug.”

“Oh, Bull.”

They hugged each other, his arms wrapping round her and she felt warm and safe for the first time in ages. They stayed that way, breathing in time with each other. The tension in her body dissolved and for a while the world was outside the space where the two of them existed.

****

The enforcers took possession of the bodies then two Immolators arrived with twenty or so Imperial Guards. The entire property was sealed off. Everyone was searched before they were allowed to leave. Along with Bull, Finn, and Rabbit, Heloise found herself outside on the street. Someone flagged down a cart and they made their way back to the office. No one spoke.

For two hours Heloise waited in the downstairs dining room while staff padded about eating breakfast. The usually rowdy clink of cutlery and plates was subdued. People already knew what had happened and few would meet her gaze. That was okay with her. She didn’t think she ever wanted to talk to anyone again. The bug-spotted ceiling was the most exciting thing she wanted to contemplate but the night’s disaster refused to go away. She couldn’t stop replaying Sonja’s death and the moment when she discovered the child. Despair, anger, and guilt pummeled her, repeatedly.

Bull and Finn sat nearby drinking cup after cup of coffee. When at last Uncle began to call them in, Heloise found she was the last to be summoned.

He sat on his leather chair behind his desk. His eyes seemed sunken into pits of dark skin. A full cup of cold tea sat in one corner of the desk and stacks of paper covered most of the rest of it. A dagger was buried in the timber in front of Uncle Bruno. It hadn’t been there the day before.

If she hadn’t been numb already, the dagger might’ve alarmed her. She’d accept whatever judgement he made.

“Heloise, please, be seated.”

She pulled up a wooden chair and sat gingerly. Outside, a bird warbled a morning greeting from the balcony. Uncle held finger and thumb over the bridge of his nose, bowed his head and closed his eyes. He opened them.

“Heloise. I have reports in from enforcers and the Imperial Guard, Orders of Secrecy, and many other documents and pieces of information. What is your assessment?”

She cleared her throat. “It was a disaster. I take responsibility for it.” She spread her hands. “We should have held back and assessed the situation better.”

“Bulldust. I left Sonja and Bull with clear instructions to take over if you made a bad decision. You’re not to blame.”

“You did? I disobeyed orders and, well...I still should have...”

“No! You’re only twenty-one. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. Now.” He sat back and heaved a sigh, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

And so she told him of the events the night before. He listened without commenting, even when she faltered, allowing her time to recover. When she finished talking, he put up both hands and ran them through his hair then down his face.

“Right,” he said. “That’s done. Unless the enforcers or the Guard want to ask you questions, that’s it. I had to pull some strings to keep you all out of prison. You cannot talk about this. Drager and this other man, Kengshee, are still out there. Heading for Sungea on that boat most likely. The navy has ships out chasing them.”

“Sir. I can’t do this anymore.”

“What?”

She shifted on the chair. “I can’t do this.”

“I can understand that you might feel that way, but this is the worst situation my company has handled ever. Ever. I won’t tell you that you have to stay.” He reached out and pulled the hilt of the dagger toward him then let it go. The dagger waggled back and forth. “If you go, well, I’ll help you, but don’t decide quite yet. Let time do some healing. Okay?”

“Okay. Thank you.” She rose to her feet.  Sadly, Uncle’s sympathy didn’t change anything. She was no less weary or devastated than when she’d entered the room. “But I won’t change my mind. Um, there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“When the funerals come round, make sure I get told. Especially the girl’s.”

“Drager’s daughter?” He halted, as if he’d thought better of what he was about to say. “I’ll make sure you know. Um, there’s a prayer dedication tomorrow for Sonja, Marty and Wallace at the Higher God’s chapel.”

“Uh. Wallace?”

“Tinman. That’s his real name.”

“Oh. Wallace?” He had a real name. Once upon a time, that would’ve been a point of amusement – something to tease him about. Now it was merely a sad fact. “Really? I’ll be there.”

She turned and left. Funny, but the girl’s death haunted her more than Sonja’s or Marty’s or Tinman’s. At least Sonja had chosen what she did, as had the others. Leonie was far too young to know who she was, let alone what she wanted to do. When she thought of the lost years of her life...the feel of her small hand and the cold, forever stare in her open eyes.

Heloise teared up. Head down, she stopped with her palm propped on the wall to her left, blinking to clear her vision. If anyone saw her weakness, she didn’t care. Leonie had trusted her. Someone should be at her funeral. Drager wasn’t ever going to turn up.

****

Exiting out the back door of the clinic, Thom had realized that Kengshee was following him. Luckily the man spooked and hung back when a band of late morning revelers staggered past him through the street.

Thom had hidden in the shadows and backtracked to completely lose him. He suspected almost anything would have deterred Kengshee at that point – he’d just lost all his men to a raid by debt-collectors. It would have been hilarious, if people hadn’t forfeited their lives.

After he’d stopped at his house to get Leonie the funny side of things waned. She was gone. How and when and where she’d gone...he had no idea. No clues at all. He collected a less ostentatious wardrobe and changed into brown trousers, a white tunic, and slip-on leather shoes. A backpack came in handy for storing dried snacks, a small knife, some coins, and twenty-five fine needles. The needles were the only reminder of his profession and he couldn’t bear to leave them. He needed to find out what had happened to Leonie then they’d head north and somehow survive.

Go north far enough and you hit Bloodmen Territory, where somm came from. It wasn’t just that though, he told himself. It was one of the least patrolled borders. The Bloodmen’s territory had been a protectorate for many years.

He wouldn’t leave the city until he found out about Leonie, but finding out anything was almost impossible. He was an outcast, a traitor, and a man with no trustworthy connections to anyone who might know anything. He watched his ex-assistant’s house for half a day, to make sure his daughter wasn’t there. Of course, she wasn’t. Then the addiction began to take its toll.

How could he think logically when the need coursed through his blood?

Taking his coin wallet out of his pocket to check the number of grints he possessed, left him staring at his shaking hands. The shaking brought on some sort of fugue state and an indeterminate amount of time washed past. When he recovered from the episode, he found himself squatting with a wall at his back. The wallet was missing. Someone had stolen the coins.

He’d make do. He had to. He’d steal if he had to, to survive.

Where was Leonie?

The second night, the cravings reached a crescendo. He needed somm. He needed somm so bad. The twitching took over his body. But he never forgot Leonie. The second night, he lost the backpack, luckily the needles were in his pocket, next to his skin. He needed to feel the box. The needles were him, his identity. Without them he would evaporate into the void. He took to staring upward at the sky. Beautiful things were there.

It took a week for him to discover the most important fact.

He’d wandered close to his clinic and found two enforcers patrolling.

In a lucid moment, he heard one of them tell his partner about the night all hell descended on the clinic. The Night of the Debt Collectors, he called it. When ten people had died and an Immolator met his match. It sounded grand and Thom leaned against something-or-other chuckling and twitching – the twitches were becoming most inconvenient. And then the guard added one to the dead.

“Oh, and a girl died, the daughter of the clinic owner.”

They both deplored the loss of young life and moved on. Thom found his mouth was open. He closed it. The daughter of the clinic owner? Who was that? Distantly he knew it was important. A tear trickled down his cheek. He lifted a begrimed hand, whose he wasn’t sure, and tasted the tear. Salty. Like fish.

The face of a young woman floated into his mind. She was talking without sound, sneering at him, babbling on and on. Red anger prickled under his skin and inside his head. He wanted to hit her. She was to blame! Her!

Leonie was dead.

Dead.

Staggering, half-blind with fury, he bumped a wall with his elbow and turned to pummel it over and over with his fists. When he forgot why he was doing it, he stopped hitting the wall, put a knuckle into his mouth, and sucked away the blood. Yes, salty. Fish.

It must be ten o’clock, he decided, when the fish shop threw out the scalings and guttings. Free food. He ambled in a zigzag fashion up the street. Somewhere that way was the fish shop.

Samos sat huddled underneath Tunamen’s Pier with a rotting stump for a seat and the hood of his stolen cloak pulled up. High tide had been and gone and the mud layer on the sand was sticky but bearable. Only some blue-back crabs and a few of the neighborhood children ventured under here with him. Though the children gave him a wide berth to start with, once the cheekiest of them came over to say “hello” and he grinned back at the boy, they lost their fear of him. He ended up being the “ogre on the rock” in one game.

If he watched the ships, he might gather clues about where the Sungese ship had gone.

The first thing he’d done was to remove the metal struts from his arms using a stolen knife, The cuts were healing if lumpy. He looked like someone prone to injury. On a dock like this, knife fights would be a part of life when the workers had a drunken night out.

Hunger came and went, scraping and pulsing at him from the inside until his stomach hurt. It became unbearable. He waded into the water, waiting, waiting. The water stilled and, at the first flicker of scale and fin, he lashed out. The fish thrashed in his hands but once he sank his teeth into its back the struggles lessened to mere quivers. Small bones popped and crunched. He swallowed and sighed with pleasure. Warm blood and salty juices ran down his chin into his new thin beard.

Another bite. He stopped in mid-chew.

Goggled-eyed, the children on the bank stared at him. He smiled past the fish, past his teeth in the fish. The children scrambled backward along the bank toward the sunlit area. Only one remained, white-faced and seemingly glued to the mud. Samos frowned and lowered the fish. So be it. If the gods were with him, the children wouldn’t tell their parents.

The white-faced child – a young boy with spiky brown hair, eight or nine years of age, maybe – gulped and whispered, “I’m sorry.” His face quivered.

Sorry? What did...

“Wait.” Samos knelt, smiling. “Don’t be frightened. Wait.” He glanced downward. All the bigger fish had gone. Swiftly he scooped up three tiddlers from the shallows at his feet then tossed them wriggling into the air, and round and round – juggling the squirming fish in a small circle and doing his best to smile.

The boy giggled and grinned. “Look!” With that the others crept closer again then two squeezed past, laughing, trying to get to the front. Soon they were gathered round him pointing and amazed.

Samos watched the boy past the whirling circle of fish, wondering – would his child be like this – all clumsiness and innocence and beauty? He let the fish tumble gently into one palm and knelt, cupping his hands and holding them out. The boy gingerly took the fish as they slid across to him. After a moment of rapt contemplation, he opened his fingers and let the tiddlers slip through to plop one by one back into the water, where they flipped their little tails and disappeared seaward.

When the children finally waved and went homeward, the loneliness stayed away for a long time.

Just past sunset, a boat anchored at the end of the pier. The thump and scrape, on the timbers above, signaled the unloading of fish. In the flaring light of lanterns, he saw the name,
Windcatcher
. It was the boat Pela had suggested. He emerged from his hiding place and half-climbed the ladder to check for anyone suspicious. Hands in pockets, he strolled to the boat, making sure each movement was as “un-immolator-like” as he could make it, then he boarded and ducked through the hatch, going down into the under-deck.

Pela was there, sitting at a table, with a scarf around her neck, accompanying her was her father Tarlos, her mother, Vera, and three men of the clan.

He opened his mouth to say his speech of carefully considered words.

The sorrow in Pela’s eyes rocked him, erasing his words.

So instead he knelt, his knees thumping onto the floorboards, and he bowed his head. “I am sorry.” Then he waited, looking no farther than the feet of those before him.

The silence stretched.

“Father, please!” Pela cried.

“Oh, all right, girl! Samos.” Tarlos sighed. “What are you sorry for?”

He kept his head down. “For putting Pela’s life in danger. You have every right to turn your back on me for that, and I know it. If you do this, I beg you to help her raise our child as well as can be done. I will give you a letter stating that she is to have all of my possessions, if you think that will help.”

“Truly?” Tarlos sounded pleased then his voice hardened. “I wonder how much the enforcers will give to the family of a traitor?”

“Father!”

“Pela! This is men’s business!”

“Pah!” Pela fell to her knees in front of Samos, put her hands under his chin and kissed him several times. “Oh, Samos, you saved my life. Stop being stupid!”

“Ay-yay-yay! Girl, he is a traitor! The enforcers, the Immolators, hells above and below, even the Imperator will be after him. We risk all just by speaking to him!”

With Pela’s soft lips on his own it was difficult to concentrate, but it was true. He’d let emotion blind him. This meeting was pointless. He stood and gently pulled Pela to her feet.

“Then there is no more to be said.” The men’s faces were taut and pitiless. Vera looked from her daughter to him with sad acceptance in her eyes. “I will go. Here.” He tossed the letter he’d written into Tarlos’s lap. “You never know, they may give it to you. Farewell.”

“No! You are all being stupid and stubborn, and...and, manly!” Pela wrenched away from him, the skirt of her dress flaring.  “My child will have a father!”

“No. Look.” His voice had shook and he paused. Perhaps no one had noticed that sign of weakness. He undid the clasp at his neck to let his cloak slide to the floor. “This is me.” He raised his arms, letting the lantern light glint off the golden heads of the needles protruding from his arms. Jewelry to die for. “I can’t remove them and they mark me as an Immolator. I cannot hide for long like this. I cannot! And my life is ebbing faster than I care to think about.”

Pela began to sob quietly.

Gravely, Tarlos nodded. “You are a courageous man and I would have been proud to call you my son.” He rubbed his stubbled chin. “If only you weren’t so stupid.”

Samos’s smile was mirthless. “Yes. I agree.”

“You can write.”

The statement was so unexpected and made in such a quiet voice that it took a moment before he realized who had spoken. “Vera? I can write, yes. I may as well have discovered how to do embroidery.”

Vera lifted her head. Sitting between Tarlos and the other man, she was a tiny figure. Though her face was lined from old age and the years she had spent in the sun, the dark bun of glossy hair and the fineness of the bones of her hands hinted at Pela’s own beauty.

“Embroidery has its uses.” For a few seconds, she put her hands together, the fingertips at her mouth. “You can write. It’s clear you can think better than our old Samos. Use it. How can you free yourself of the needles, clear your name or...or something?” She measured out the words like drops of blood. “Is there any way? Any answer at all?”

He blinked at her. Slow to respond at first, his thoughts spun ahead of him. “I could go to Sungea...If they have the memory worm, they could do it, they might do it, or they might kill me. Most likely they’d kill me. It wouldn’t be worth the risk to them.”

“What else, Samos?” whispered Pela.

He looked at her. “I could find a rogue Trinketologist to remove the needles, but the only one who knows how is Thom Drager. Don’t think I’d trust him. And...” He took a deep breath. “...I could somehow get back into the good graces of the Imperator, get a pardon –” He held out his hands palms upward and shook his head. “That’s it.”

Pela straightened, extended her arm, and poked her finger, hard, into his chest. “Then do it. Do it, Samos. For I won’t raise this child by myself unless you’ve tried everything. Hear me? Everything!”

“Shh.” He gathered her to him, whispering soft words of comfort, looking at Tarlos over the top of her head and raising his eyebrows. Tarlos had remained silent throughout. He held Samos’s gaze then he nodded ever so slightly, as if to say: “Do it, if you can.”

It was a hope, a chance, at least. He breathed in the warm, soft fragrance of Pela, knowing it might be the last time they would embrace. She was right. It was worth it. He must try at the very least.

****

The first thing he must do was the most painful and the one fraught with the most immediate danger. He couldn’t continue to slink around the harbor with the golden needles sticking out where anyone might see them if his clothing slipped. They had to go and yet he could not remove them – after all, that was the reason he was in this predicament. The best he could do was half-way. He’d cut them off below the skin.

The hours after he stepped off the boat were long and lonely ones. With night fallen, the richer warehouses and ships stood out in the bright blue or white glare of trink lights. The gentle amber glow of oil-fed lanterns enveloped the less respectable places, like the odd tavern and the fishing trawlers. If he avoided all of these and kept to the shadows, he could walk about without being remarked on.

It was hard to slow his muscles. They thrummed with this new energy. With each step he took, he found himself calculating – the thrust of leg needed to reach a spot yards ahead on the ground, or to the top of a pile of boxes, or to a roof edge.

No.
He must be slow. A human walked like t
his
. He slumped his shoulders and trudged. Yes, that was it.

The distant laughter and cheering, or the occasional yell of anger or camaraderie, surrounded him with a humanity he could not touch. He was other than human, an outsider, or so it felt. That Pela could still find something in him worth waiting for astounded him. Yet it
was
so. He loved her the more because of this. The past was gone. He would not, must not, disappoint her.

As the witching hour drew close, groups of drunken sailors took rowdy and meandering routes back to their ships. The sober ones were more predictable. Samos found refuge in a deserted dock worker’s hut full of stores near a newly-built warehouse.

The morning sun woke him by dancing light upon his eyelids. He squinted. Speckled shafts of gold filtered through the rear wax-paper windows. He rolled off his bed of hessian sacks and stretched his arms until the joints cracked. The sharp tang of sea salt lent a freshness to the day.

A new day. A time for things to be done. Hunger prodded him. He’d never been so hungry as he’d been during these past few days.

He hauled out a sack carefully hoarded from last night. Potatoes, four skinny fish caught under a jetty, a news-sheet paper wrapped around the leavings of a fish and fritter meal. His mouth filled with saliva. He could gulp all that food down in seconds. He made himself sit and eat slowly then wiped the grease from his beard. Water might be more of a problem than food. This close to the sea, wells would be brackish. He’d have to see what he could find and keep a bucket here, as well as a drinking flask.

His hair, including the beard, had grown inches overnight. Perhaps a good disguise? Yes, it could stay. He’d trim it as neat as he could with a knife.

To business. Two seagulls perched on a packing case, watching him through the half-open door with great curiosity. Their heads tilted from one side to the other. He took out the metal snippers he’d found and laid his arm on top of a pile of timber bollards. There was no point in messing things up and redoing it over and over. He focused on the first needle at his wrist, willed his heart to calmness and wiggled the point of the snippers below his skin, opened the tips a bit and snapped them shut. The pain each time was as bad as the night he’d reinforced his arms – worse, as the flesh around each needle was overly sensitive.

At the end he surveyed his handiwork, rolling his limbs in the ray of sunlight coming through the door to check. Arms, legs and stomach were good. The ones on his back and temples he could only judge by feel. No gobbets of flesh missing to betray the fact that needles were still beneath the surface.

He’d lost some blood but it was nothing compared to the loss he felt knowing the Sungese ship sailed further away with each passing moment; that bled him dry and pulled at his soul. And if they could escape the whole Imperial navy, how was he to catch them? How was he to do this? It seemed impossible.