The Fly Guild

The Fly Guild

Todd Shryock

Copyright 2011 by Todd Shryock

Third Edition

Chapter 1

The boy peered around the corner of
the ancient stone building, seeking his quarry. The youth of 12 or so years
pushed his long auburn hair out of his eyes and back over his ears. His hair
was matted and dirty, but this was of little concern to him, as the rumble in
his stomach demanded far more attention than the simple demands of grooming.
His dark blue eyes flicked back and forth, scanning the street for the right
person, but seeing nothing, he leaned back around the corner and sighed. He
took a deep breath and glanced the other way up the rough cobblestone street, a
stench of human waste starting to rise with the morning mist. But hidden
between the layers of stink was the sweet smell of bread; a smell that made his
stomach yearn for the soft, doughy texture of fresh-baked goods that would
quiet his insides, at least for a little while.

The baker set up his small cart to
entice early morning passersby to spend a copper for a muffin or bread slice.
The smells were irresistible, a scent of heaven arising from the stench of
human hell. Pay a copper, taste a better life. The boy glanced up the street
again and saw a large man carrying the tools of a mason walking at a slow gait.
Perfect, he thought.

“Quinton!” came a cry from behind
him. “What are you doing?” Quinton glanced behind him and saw Altil, a younger
street urchin who wasn’t as daring and was looking more emaciated each day as a
result.

“I’m getting me some food. Now go
away.” The other boy looked at him dejectedly and shuffled away. Quinton turned
his attention back to the large man coming toward him.

He let the man pass by, then
stepped out into the street, matching his pace. He was careful to keep the large
man between him and the baker, who was busily setting out the first of his
goods on the cart outside his shop, so that if he glanced up, he would only see
the mason.

As the man neared the cart, the boy
slid closer to the mason, and at the last second, stepped out from behind him,
grabbed a muffin and ran.

“Hey!” cried the baker. “Stop, you
little thief.”

Quinton glanced back and saw that
the baker hadn’t come in pursuit but had turned to look directly across the
street. The boy glanced over his other shoulder to see what the baker was
looking at. In a doorway almost lost in the shadows was a man in a dark cloak,
his face hidden in the folds of the hood. He looked at the baker, then at the
boy, and nodded. A hand crept from the sleeve and the darkness and entered the
morning light in the street. It pointed at the boy and flicked once.

The boy’s heart raced, as he
thought the man was putting a spell on him, but when he turned back around, he
saw instead that the man had been signaling two tough looking teenagers further
up the street who had been leaning against a building. At the signal, they
popped off the wall and started trotting toward the boy.

The boy turned right onto a side
street, taking a bite of the muffin as he ran, trying to swallow the luscious
bits of nourishment between breaths. His bare feet ached from the pain of
running on the rough cobblestones, but his fear drove him on. The toughs were
at a full run and gaining fast. The boy knew the city streets and alleys well,
and zigzagged through the maze of narrow paths and avenues, but his pursuers
were unphased. He headed for the place he knew best, a narrow alley that ended
in a dead-end wall. On the other side of the wall was an old building with
several holes along the street. He should be able to lie down in one of the
holes, cover himself with the abundant garbage and wait for trouble to pass.

When he reached the wall, the
toughs had yet to round the corner behind him. He stuffed the last of the
muffin in his mouth and scaled the old stone wall and its slick face with
uncanny grace. He grabbed the top of the wall and pulled himself over, his
heart pounding in his ears, held the edge tightly, lowered himself to the other
side and then let go to drop the remaining few feet.

Quinton spun around and took a
step, running right into the man in the dark cloak he had seen in the doorway
across from the baker. The man’s fist lashed out, catching him under the rib
cage, forcing the air out of his body and the rest of muffin out of his mouth.
The boy coughed and gagged as the food caught in his throat. He fell to the
ground, curling up to try to regain his air, the man’s boots filling his field
of vision. He heard a shrill whistle, and as his breath returned, he saw the
two boys come panting down the alley to stand on either side of the man. They
bent over, gasping for air, their stares showing a dislike for the boy who had
led them on the merry chase.

The man in the dark cloak pulled
back his hood, revealing a human in his thirties, but whose eyes showed an age
far beyond that. His hair and full beard were the color of the sand along the
riverbank near the edge of town, and his deep brown eyes showed no emotion as
he addressed his two companions.

“He would have escaped had I not
been here to bail you out,” said the man, his voice soft but stern.

“Sir, the little bugger is fast,”
panted one youth, his black hair slicked back on his head with an oily
substance.

The other one, a burlier lad with
curly red hair who looked as though he ate very well, agreed. “I don’t know how
he got over that wall, it’s slick as a fish’s puss.”

The man with the sandy hair stared
at the boy, who had pushed himself back up against the wall and slowly stood
up. The boy’s clothes were rags. They were clothes that had once put him in
with the city’s middle class, but that was some time ago. He had the look of a
wild animal now, his eyes alert, even now darting here and there when he
thought they weren’t looking, hoping for a chance to escape. The man looked at
the wall behind the boy. Its rocks were smooth and covered in slime and moss.
The roofs of the nearby buildings dumped all their rainwater onto the wall,
keeping it perpetually wet in the deep shadows of the building, never drying
out.

“I assigned you a task, but yet you
failed,” said the man to the two boys. “You will be punished. That is our law.
The baker is paying us for a service, and to fail in that service means we fail
our reputation. Without our reputation, we will be nothing.”

The youths showed a flash of fear
at the mention of punishment, but their faces quickly turned to anger as they
stared at the boy.

“Now,” said the sandy-haired man in
a slow, methodical voice, “show this lad what happens when you steal from
someone protected by the Fly Guild.

Quinton recognized the threat in
the man’s voice and made one last desperate move. He had felt out a small
foothold in the wall with his hand while the man was talking to the boys.
Making a move so fast that even the sandy-haired man was surprised, the boy put
his foot in the small hole, reached up the wall and desperately reached for the
top edge to pull himself over. Feeling the edge of the wall, he shoved up with
his foot and almost got his knee up to the top that would have allowed him to
swing over to the other side.

But the man was quicker. He grabbed
the boy’s other foot just before he pulled it up and yanked him down to the
hard stone street. Pain shot through the boy’s shoulders and head as he landed
with a thud, sending the air from him once more. Before he could even think
about what to do next, the two boys were on him in a flurry of fists and feet.
He felt blows striking every part of his body, and the pain was soon
overwhelming. They dragged him to his feet, his back to the wall, and while one
held him up, the other unleashed another round of fists to his head and chest,
and then paused to kick him in the groin and legs.

After a while, the pain just went
away. With every part of his body damaged, the overload of signals to his brain
became too much to sort out and almost all the pain was turned off. Both of his
eyes were swollen shut to the point he could only see darkness. He was having
trouble breathing, because every time he inhaled, several parts of his chest
retaliated with what felt like daggers stabbing into his lungs. His arms and
legs were bruised and aching, and he was having trouble feeling anything in his
left leg. He could hear the boys trying to catch their breath. They had
pummeled him to the point that they were exhausted. He couldn’t tell whether
the man was there or not, but suspected that he was. Quinton knew he was
finished. One way or another. If they didn’t kill him, he would be unable to
survive in his broken condition. The rats would eat him tonight in a slow,
tortuous death.

“Shall we finish him?” asked the
thinner of the two boys, who was recognizable by his higher voice spoken
between heavy breaths.

There was silence. The broken boy
assumed the man would end his life with the simple signal of his hand. It
didn’t really matter. No one would miss him. There was no one left to miss him.

“Sir?” asked the boy’s voice again.

There was another pause, the broken
boy listening for any sound of his final verdict. The only sound he heard was
the other boy exhaling loudly and footsteps coming near him again. He wanted to
turn his head to protect his face from another kick to the nose but was unable
to move. He was helpless.

He felt the thinner boy pick him up
for another round, the final round, of punishment. His arm snaked around his
back and he placed his arm around his shoulders. He then felt the bigger boy do
the same on the other side. Together, they dragged the boy down the street, the
tops of his feet being torn and cut on the rough stones of the street. The
broken boy strained to see through his swollen eyes but could only see
darkness. They would throw him in the river, and that would be the end of him.
He took one more conscious breath, then passed out.

In the darkness of despair, the boy
felt a warmth and saw a blue glowing light before him. He walked toward the
orb, feeling the pain drain away from his body as he did so. Quinton walked
into the orb, and the light shone so brightly he had to close his eyes to shut
out the blinding rays. With a whisper, the light was gone. He opened his eyes
and saw himself in the past, a past that seemed nothing more than a dream. He
was on a ship with his parents, their faces fresh and clear here in the dream,
unlike the fuzzy memories they had become in his life of survival. The ship
docked at an ill-kept wharf in a city, situated with the ocean on one side and
a great swamp on the other. He knew this place; it was his home, Star Gleam
City. They had fled religious persecution to this new land of promise and
freedom, but the city didn’t look like anything they had heard. They had been
told of a beautiful city at the mouth of a river, with buildings that sparkled
of gold and silver where people were free to do as they pleased. But what they
found instead were ramshackle huts, broken stone buildings, filth and disease.

It was the sickness that first
claimed his father, who had taken work on the wharves, for there wasn’t much
demand for a scholar in a town where few people read. He went with his mother
as she dragged his father on a makeshift litter to the steps of the nearest
church, but there were so many pleading for aid that the priests would only
lend their healing hands to those who could afford to pay. Dejected, they took
their father and husband home to die.

And die he did, six days later. His
mother went off to find work and told him he would have to do the same. She
found him a job running errands for an invalid old woman who lived in one of
the better homes in town, a three-story town home supposedly owned by a local
crime boss. Why she was there, who could know. But the boy earned some
much-needed food and an occasional coin for his services along with some
clothes. He fetched bread for her from the baker, kept the place tidied up and
helped her walk to the balcony on the third floor to watch the city’s bustle
below. Eventually, he was allowed to sleep in the kitchen, curled up on a small
blanket the woman no longer used. His mother worked all night, but she wouldn’t
tell him doing what. Whatever it was, it aged her rapidly. Her bright young eyes
quickly faded, and her smile was replaced with a blank stare. She hardly talked
to him, and when she caught him looking at her, she quickly turned away as if
in shame. The old woman wouldn’t allow her to come into her house, so each
morning, the boy waited for his mother at the front door and then walked with
her for a bit before starting his daily chores. One day, she never appeared.
The boy felt a great sadness in his heart and knew that she was never going to
come again.

Time passed, and he continued his
existence helping the old woman. He was happy for the roof over his head and
the scraps of food. She was grateful to have someone she could depend on to
help her. Then one day, the boy came home from his errands and found the woman
face down on the floor. Her heart had stopped. He dragged her out to the
street, and several men with a cart came along and took her body away to be
dumped in the river, where it would be washed out to sea. There wasn’t enough
solid ground in the swamps to bury anyone. If you interred someone there, the
spring floods just washed them right back up again, so the dead were fed to the
sea. No one had the ambition to bury anyone, anyhow.

Quinton lived in the house alone.
He found a small stash of coins that he used to buy some food when needed, and
the house kept him warm and dry and away from most of the disease-carrying
insects and vermin that were thick in the lesser parts of town. One bright fall
day, a man came to the door and inquired about the old woman. The boy told him she
was dead. The man’s puzzled look turned to one of understanding and he left and
returned the next day with several other men. As the boy watched, the men
emptied the house of all the furniture and rugs and loaded them onto several
ox-drawn carts, their long tails swatting at the flies, patiently waiting on
their masters to finish. When the men were done, the man who had come to the
door gently guided the boy out the door, pulled the door shut behind him and
locked it.