The Darkness Comes (The Second Book of the Small Gods Series) (23 page)

***

Most of the streets of Sunset were behind Stirk when he caught his first whiff of the sea.

The sack stuffed full of prince dangled over his shoulder, the joint aching, his fingers knotted. On his stealthy trip, he’d passed women offering their bodies, men seeking to sell him stinkweed and powdered sea serpent bone to sniff up his nose, as well as a tiny woman no taller than his waist who offered him services the sound of which made his skin crawl. He stopped to speak to none of them, nor did he stop to find a place to let the prince off his shoulder and snap his neck to release himself and his mother from their problem.

He didn’t stop because someone was following him.

Stirk wrenched his head to the left, looking back over his shoulder. No one behind him, but his ears detected the faint jangle of chain mail, the vague whisper of boots creeping across flagstones. The roil of worried nausea in his stomach increased and Stirk quickened his pace, the muscles in his thighs burning.

He swept past the last of the two-and three-story buildings at the outer edge of Sunset and crossed a wide boulevard into Waterside, with its low, flat-topped warehouses. A wagon driven by a tall, thin man seated beside a squat fellow rattled by, the driver yelling at Stirk to watch where he was going, but he ignored him, eyes fixed on the far side of the street.

The large buildings led toward the water, lined by the taller buildings of the shipbuilders, then the docks. Somewhere in these labyrinthine avenues, Stirk would be able to lose his pursuer—the one-armed man, to be sure—and get rid of his problem forever.

Part of him lamented they’d receive no gold for their troubles and he’d lost his hand for nothing, but he also relished the idea of wrapping his fingers tight around the whelp’s throat, squeezing until his windpipe popped and his breath ceased.

Stirk tried to smile at the thought, but effort and worry kept the expression from his lips. Sweat ran into his eye and he wiped it away with his stump. Rather than leading a chase through the twisting streets and getting himself lost, he headed straight for the horizon, where he knew he’d find the sea.

Shoremen seated on crates set on end eating their lunches of pickled eggs, cured meats, or wilted vegetables, watched as he passed. Other men he guessed to be sailors waiting for their next ship wandered the streets in groups, laughing and singing, most of them intoxicated. The majority of them headed back the way Stirk had come, doubtless to spend their recent pay on narcotics and whores, or the dark delicacies he didn’t want to think about.

Every few steps, Stirk glanced back, searching the street for a man with one arm, or guards dressed in the garb of the See-Gees. Nothing of the sort. Only the backs of drunken sailors or the eyes of the shoremen staring after him, likely wondering his destination carrying a lumpy sack.

The thought made him worry the split in the side of the sack might have grown, that a princely arm or leg protruded from it. A sailor or shoreman might tell the tale of a fellow hurrying toward the docks with a man in a bag if a one-armed king’s man inquired.

Stirk lowered his head and stopped looking at everyone he passed, pushing himself to go faster. Three blocks from the docks, he stumbled, wrenched his ankle. Twisting as he fell, he hit the ground hard with his left side, then cursed himself for not falling on top of the prince. He scraped his shoulder on the cobblestones spotted grayish-white with the shit of the gulls wheeling in the sky overhead.

“Shit on a stick,” he cried.

With the sack lying in the dirt beside him, he sat up on the street and rubbed his throbbing ankle, eyes closed tight against the pain. Knots cramped his fingers; one shoulder breathed a sigh of relief for no longer lugging the prince, the other cried out in discomfort from being dragged along the street. Stirk rocked back and forth, holding his leg, wishing for the discomfort to disappear.

“Hey! Hey you!”

Stirk’s eyes snapped open. The voice came from behind him, back along the street he’d just walked. He moved to climb to his feet, forgetting his missing hand and jamming the stump of his arm on a sharp stone. Breath whistled between his teeth.

“Hey, mister.”

He didn’t turn to find out who called to him—he knew. If he looked, he’d find the one-armed man hurrying toward him, ready to use his fancy sword to punish Stirk for carrying the heir to the throne in a torn burlap sack.

Stirk didn’t want to be punished.

Heart racing from more than exertion, the big man gained his feet and jerked the sack, intending to pull it back onto his shoulder. The pain in his back and shoulder stopped him. Instead, he started out along the street, limping and dragging the sack behind him.

The buildings appeared the same on both sides of the street—plain wooden doors, no signs, bars on the windows. Narrow alleys clogged with refuse ran between a few, but they didn’t offer enough room for Stirk to get away from the man chasing him. At an intersection, he took a right, then the next left, heading closer to the docks.

One block from the sea, the droppings of squawking gulls and terns painted the streets dirty white. Stray feathers littered the walks and birds perched on every roof top, calling out to each other, yelling at Stirk.

“Shut up,” he cried and waved his stump over his head.

Another left, then a right onto a narrow street devoid of any other foot traffic. In the close space between warehouses, the sound of the birds weighed on Stirk’s ears, blocking out any other sound. Did the one-armed man still follow him? Had he lost him? Did he give up?

The birds’ cacophony continued, passed from one to the next as he progressed toward the docks. He spied the wharf now, a block ahead. Beyond, the sea sloshed and undulated, a froth of foam washing against pilings and the sides of boats at anchor.

Stirk paused to peek back, find out if his pursuer still followed, and his breath caught in his throat. He didn’t notice anyone, but the dragging sack had pushed aside rocks and bird shit to form a trail a blind man could follow.

“No,” Stirk breathed.

His gaze flickered between the rut left by the sack and the last corner he’d come around, expecting a one-armed man to appear at any moment. The soldier must be close, biding his time, waiting for Stirk to make a mistake and reveal the contents of his sack.

I won’t do that.

He hefted the bag, throwing it over his shoulder with a cringe of pain, and hobbled toward the docks.

The bastard won’t see what’s in my sack.

Stirk passed the end of the final warehouse and the bird shit-covered street gave way to a bird shit-covered wharf smelling of creosote and brine. Men moved about, shifting crates and loading ships. Stirk paused, scanning the docks for a place to hide, a spot to give him enough cover to kill the prince and be finished with the whole affair. If the one-armed man found the heir to the throne dead, but didn’t know Stirk had done it, that would have to be sufficient payment for losing his hand.

Stirk wended his way between rows of crates labeled with words he didn’t possess the ability to read. He assumed they named their contents, or said to what port they were bound, but he didn’t know for sure. He’d never learned his letters or his numbers, same as his Ma. Amidst a maze of wooden crates of different sizes, Stirk stopped again, surveyed the area.

There’s too many people.

He stretched up on his toes, his twisted ankle flaring pain along his leg, and a man came onto the docks along the same street he had. Stirk ducked before counting how many arms dangled at the man’s side or what kind of sword he carried.

“It’s him,” he whispered and let the sack slip off his shoulder. “I ain’t going to have time to kill you.”

Forgetting his hurt ankle, Stirk planted a kick against what he hoped was the whelp’s ribcage, then cringed at the pain it caused him.

“Damn you,” he growled. “Everything you do hurts me.”

Stirk stood, keeping his head ducked to avoid the man coming onto the docks, and glanced around. A tower of small crates was stacked to his right, larger ones to his left. He snagged the top of the sack and dragged it toward the big ones. If he hid it between them, at least he’d have time to get away.

A gull circled overhead and a man called out. Stirk ducked again, breath shortening to harsh pants. This wasn’t working how he’d planned. He dragged the sack into the midst of the larger crates, and decided this place would have to do. One more kick to the prince—with his uninjured foot—Stirk released the sack and started away.

He stopped when he located an unattached crate top leaning between two boxes. He crept up beside it and straightened, peered into an empty container large enough to hold a man.

Stirk laughed.

Another man called out, but Stirk didn’t hear what he said. He wiped sweat off his brow with his stump and limped back to where he’d left the sack, grabbed it and dragged the prince to the open crate.

With an effort that sent a sharp pain jolting through his shoulder and into his chest, Stirk lifted the prince-laden bag off the ground. He slipped his stump under it for support and hefted the sack up and over the crate’s edge. It balanced on the lip for a second before tumbling in, hitting the bottom with a meaty thump. Stirk wrestled the top into place, regretting he didn’t have time to nail it down, then crept away without waiting to find out if anyone had seen him.

***

Stirk chose a different route home than he’d taken during his flight to the docks. He made good time, too, stopping only briefly to give the woman who came up to his waist a try.

Though his twisted ankle hampered him, the lack of the prince’s dead weight made him feel lighter as he hurried past Waterside’s warehouses, Sunset’s pleasure dens, and back to Riverside. He breathed a sigh of relief when he reached the familiar streets with their broken cobblestones and stinking alleys.

Arriving home’d never been so good.

A block from the tanner’s, he stopped and peered along the street, convinced the one-armed man would have left See-Gees behind to keep watch in his absence. He saw no one out of the ordinary. After a short time, Flenge exited his workshop, pausing to lock up before heading down the avenue.

Stirk took that to mean it was safe to return.

He peeked around the corner and along the alley leading to the storeroom he shared with his mother. The broken boards Enin had nailed across their door still stuck out at odd angles, but the alley lay empty otherwise.

Stirk hobbled toward home, relief filling his aching joints. He hadn’t made the prince pay for him losing a hand, but he’d gotten rid of the whelp, and no one’d ever guess he and his ma had anything to do with the heir to the throne’s disappearance. Bieta might not be happy at losing out on the ransom, but she’d have to be proud of her son for getting rid of the problem so well.

“I’m home, Ma,” he called before reaching the open doorway. “You ain’t got to worry about our problem no more. I got rid of him where no one’ll find him.”

He reached the broken lintel and stepped inside, the interior dark and shadow-filled while his eyes adjusted. When they did, the prideful smile on his face melted away and a confused thought crept into his mind.

How’d he get here before me?

Bieta stood against the far wall wearing a frightened and concerned expression as one armored man held each of her arms and another peered down into the cellar. She looked like she might have been crying, but it was the other man in the room who concerned Stirk.

The one-armed man stepped in front of him, the tip of his fancy blade leveled at Stirk’s throat, his eyes burning with anger.

“Where is Prince Teryk?”

XXII Ailyssa - Prayer Garden

Ailyssa detected the scent of lemon first. It floated along the hallway, coaxing her toward the prayer garden with her Daughter leading her by the arm.

Claris. My Daughter.

How long since the Matrons separated them in the name of the Goddess? Many turns of the seasons—she’d counted the deep scores in the wall of her chamber time and time again. Claris hadn’t blooded until she’d seen the seasons turn fifteen times—a late bloomer—which meant nineteen summers since her Daughter had been taken from her.

Has she been here all this time?

Ailyssa gripped Claris’ arm tighter but didn’t ask. She didn’t know who else might be nearby and thought such discussions better kept private.

“Are you taking me to the prayer garden?” she asked instead.

“Yes, Mother. The courtyard is beautiful, and few Sisters will be there now.”

The sense of relief filling Ailyssa at the idea of visiting the prayer garden surprised her. Since waking with a blur of white replacing her view of the world, she’d beseeched the Goddess, begged her, even cursed her, but her daily habit of communing with her had been the farthest thing from her mind. In her fear and distress, she hadn’t noticed how abandoning a life-long ritual had left an empty ache in her chest.

Claris opened a door and a breeze touched Ailyssa’s face, the aroma of flowers and shrubs carried on it. The perfumes combined into one rapturous fragrance, none of them easily identified on their own, and Ailyssa closed her unseeing eyes and inhaled, letting the scents that always reminded her of the Goddess fill her lungs.

Perhaps the Goddess hasn’t deserted me. Jubha Kyna is not ideal, but I am alive, and now I have my Daughter.

Claris guided her across the threshold then paused; the door clicked shut behind them.

The glare of her blindness brightened with the quality of light, and the sun warmed Ailyssa’s cheeks, calmed her spirit. Amongst the floral aromas, she detected a faint whiff of rain, as though a few drops had fallen overnight. Somewhere above, birds sang, and Ailyssa imagined them to be sparrows hopping from one branch to another branch of a magnolia tree, their brown and white wings standing out against the tree’s faded pink blooms. The image soothed her as much as did the sun’s rays.

Claris led her away from the door, their sandals scuffing along a dirt path. The gurgle of running water reached Ailyssa’s ears and she gasped with delight—a stream or a fountain. The garden at Olvana had been peaceful, but hadn’t had water.