(Way back in 2011 I took part in the 3 Day Novel competition, and won… well, nothing, but it was a great experience anyway. Just for the hell of it, I decided I should post it here, chapter by chapter. I’m going through it to clean it up a bit, but it’s otherwise as written over one grueling Labor Day weekend in 2011. Not because I don’t think it needs revision–anything written in three days needs revision–but to keep with the jagged feel of its birth. I’ll post more as I go through it. Also, it takes place in the same world as the Kalis Experiments, the prologue of which is posted elsewhere here, but there is otherwise no connection between the two stories.)
Ranat Totz’s worn shoe made a sodden, squishy noise when he poked at the corpse with his toe. The sound was barely audible over the soft patter of the drizzle.
He glanced around. Somewhere beyond the low, rough slate of the clouds, the sun was edging its way over the horizon. People already thronged the narrow street behind him. This early in the morning it was mostly traders and merchants with their servants and hangers-on in tow, bustling down the Grace’s Walk, eyes on the wagons hauling bolts of cloth or lumber or smoked fish, or whatever else could be sold in the markets. Minds on wealth; their accumulation of it, or their lack of it. Spitting, coughing camels pulled the carts, snipping and grunting at anyone who stumbled too near. Beggars from the Lip weaved between the knots of merchants, their pleas riding across the din and rattle of the street: “Tin? Have a Tin? A Three-side? A disk? Even a ball? One tin ball? A draw from your cask, there?”
The thrum of it all was familiar music to the old ears of Ranat, but the last question, which carried to him before the voice was cut off by the bray of a disgruntled camel, made his mouth water. Not that he’d ever resort to begging traders. They weren’t generally known to part with their booze or their tin, anyway. Still, he could use a drink.
He made a furtive glance around again, and ran a long, weathered finger absent-mindedly down his jaw line, felt the steel wire tangle of his short, white beard. A tremor, the first of the day, shuddered through his fingers, taking on a life of its own as it fluttered down his arm. Yeah. A drink would be good.
No one was paying attention to Ranat where he hovered on the edge of the darkness cast between two crooked, windowless tenements, and no one but him had seen the corpse so far, which was mostly obscured by the moth-eaten sack of stiff, coarse cloth that had been thrown hastily over the body but had failed to completely cover it.
Ranat crouched down by the figure and tugged off the ragged shroud of burlap to get a better look. The alley was cobbled here, but close enough to the Lip to be coated in a fingers-width of black mud, slick and grasping at anything that sunk into it. A few paces further in, a soft, low belch rumbled from the ground. A brass release valve rigged to the Tidal Works began to sigh thick, white steam. The warm cloud churned over Ranat for a moment before some subtle shift in the air, unseen and unfelt, funneled it straight upward in a leisurely tornado, where it was almost immediately lost in the eternal grey ceiling that hung above the city of Fom.
It was a man. Face down. Black hair shot with a few dashes of silver. Well off. Probably a Church official, though what he’d been doing out here on the edge of the Lip before dawn was an interesting question. And recent.
Ranat took a deep breath, held it, let it go. Forced his hands to stop shaking. Then he went to work. The coat was nice—heavy, light grey leather dusted with a coating of fine, white hair. He worked it over the dead man’s shoulders and tried it on, brushing fruitlessly at the mud caked onto the front of it. It fit, mostly. A little big, but Ranat wasn’t going to complain about that. The boots were better than the one’s he was wearing now, too, but way too big for him. Still, he pulled them off and bundled them in the damp wad of burlap that had hid the corpse. He knew a guy by the arena that would pay cash for the leather if he couldn’t find another taker for them.
He suppressed a shudder as he flipped the body over and the mud made a soft, sucking sound as it clung to the man’s chest and thighs and face. The body was pudgy, but any other features except the color of his hair were masked with pasty mud. Just another body, he told himself. No reason it should be any different than the ones he normally picked from, except that this one wasn’t already buried.
The man’s shirt was black with old blood where it wasn’t crusted in mud. There was a tear, just below the heart, as long as Ranat’s thumb. Ranat shuddered again, looking down at the stains of his new coat. Just mud stains, he told himself, peering at them, not too closely, in the shadows of the alley. Definitely just mud.
The dull clatter of tin coins as he’d rolled the body had made him pause, and now he saw what caused it. The body was unlooted. A heavy-looking, once fine belt pouch pregnant with coins. He couldn’t have been laying here for more than a couple of hours, then, even this early in the morning. Someone would have at least taken the cash. Shit, Ranat thought. One hour in this part of town was stretching it. More like twenty minutes. He felt panic rise in is stomach, sure someone must be watching him, and he rose to check the street again, but amid the teeming mass of people Ranat was still alone.
Coin. He’d got lucky, then. The pouch bulged lumpily as Ranat fondled where it was attached to the dead man’s belt. Not just tin balls and disks, then, but Three-Sides. Ranat would be able to drink for a month. Maybe more, if he paced himself and stuck to the glog.
Ranat’s long fingers hesitated over the belt buckle he was trying to unlatch as his eye fell on it for the first time. He sucked in a little whistle of breath through the gap made by his two missing, upper-front teeth. Even through the greasy, briny mud, he could tell the buckle was precious. Crystals—or were they really diamonds—peeped through the seeping gaps of black ooze where Ranat’s fingers had scraped it clean as they fumbled. Other gemstones, green and yellow, formed the angular, stylized shape of a phoenix, with a singular, square ruby set as the bird’s eye. All of it was set into the metal of the buckle, itself. Metal. And not just copper or bronze. The thing held the grey, dull weight of iron.
Ranat finished tugging the belt loose and bundled it with the boots. Then he patted down the rest of the body. In narrow pocket along the inner thigh he found a letter, chucks of the broken seal of black wax still mostly attached to it. One edge of it was stained a dark and ruddy with blood. His heart lurched with excitement with that find, but he resisted the urge to read it yet. Better to wait until he was out of the rain. Better to get away from this damn corpse before someone saw him standing over it and got the wrong idea.
He took a few steps towards the Grace’s Walk, paused, and went back to the alley. He crouched down, one last time, this time to wipe at the mud on the dead man’s face with a handful of dripping, tattered rags heaped by a nearby doorway. The sheer wealth of the dead man was astounding, doubly so for where he’d ended up in the end, and Ranat half-expected to recognize the round, soft features, but wiped clean, there was nothing familiar in the face.
“Well,” he said to himself. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
He stepped onto the Grace’s Walk again, and crossed it to the unnamed streets beyond, still doing his best to pretend the uneven, dark stains on the lapels of his new coat really were just from the mud. He heaved the sack with the boots and belt over his shoulder, and every few steps double checked to make sure the pouch of tin was still secured under his threadbare linen shirt. He’d need to unload the boots and the buckle soon, if for no other reason than so he wouldn’t need to carry them around, but first, he needed a drink.
Noble sir,
Please consider this an invitation to discuss the new arrangement in a more informal capacity. While you’ll find me in accord regarding most details, there are a few fine points I’d like you to consider. Points that, until now, I was unaware.
I have reserved a booth at The Crow’s Marquis for the balance of the day, where I hope you will grace me with your wisdom.
With the utmost respect,
Your servant in Grace
Ranat drained his glass, and set it among the other empty ones lining the edge of the warped table, a leaning construction of driftwood and ancient, shattered pallets, fitted together and tossed with apparent randomness into the basement that everyone simply referred to as “the bar,” along with other similar bits of furniture.
He took a long pull from the next glass—the fifth on the table and the last one to be emptied—and examined what was left of the wax seal, the quiver in his hands thankfully absent now.
Black wax. An image of a tree, a crescent moon hanging over it, and some sort of creature seated among the stylized roots, though enough of it had crumbled away to keep what sort of animal it was a mystery, other than it had been one with antlers or horns.
Ranat read the letter again, savoring the shapes of the words as they panned across his eyes. He didn’t really understand what it was telling him. He’d never heard of The Crow’s Marquis. Still, it was a more interesting read than the usual manifests and shipping lists that he normally ended up collecting.
The note did explain a few things, though. Whoever the corpse had been, he’d been up to something. A Church official, maybe, trying to do some business on the side. Something shady. Something that had gone south in a hurry, and left the man a crumpled body in an anonymous alley in Fom, stabbed through the heart.
“Should have minded his own goddamn business,” Ranat muttered, glancing over the paper one more time before folding it back up and slipping it into the pocket of his new coat, careful not to break off any more of the wax.
“What was that? Shit, Ranat, I guess that’s not your blood, or you’d already be passed out with four and a half beers in you.”
Ranat looked toward the voice. He must have been focused on the paper for longer than he’d thought. The bar had filled considerably from the smattering of vagabonds that had been there when he’d first arrived at. The sawdust floor was almost completely hidden through the mass of legs, and the stone walls bled condensation from a hundred alcohol-infused breaths. The light seeping around the front door, loose and crooked in its frame, was the watery yellow of the glow lamps instead of the watery grey of daylight. Somewhere, beyond the gritty overcast, the sun had set.
The speaker was a pocked, wiry woman with sharp clear eyes and a knotted pony tail of sandy hair that looked like she’d tied it back weeks ago and ignored ever since. Her face was craggy and pitted, like an old woman drained of her beauty, though Ranat knew she was barely half his age. Life in the tunnels of the Lip was cruel even to those who it was kind to.
“It’s not blood, Gessa. It’s mud.” Ranat gestured to the chair opposite him, though the table there was cluttered with his empty glasses.
She shook her head. “Got no tin for beer tonight, Ranat. Surprised you do.” She glanced at the empty glasses. “Not skey or glog, neither, but beer at that.” She paused. “Five of them. So far.”
Ranat shrugged. “Made a find. You want something, it’s on me tonight, for once.” He shot her a grin, showing off his missing teeth. “Don’t expect that offer again anytime soon, either. If I were you, I’d take it, now.”
“‘A find?’ Who’s tomb you dig up now? The former Grace? The goddamn First Bishop himself?” But as she spoke she pulled out the chair, frowned as it wobbled under her, and pushed the empty glasses into the middle of the table.
“No tomb, this time,” Ranat said. “Though he wasn’t any less dead for the lack of one.” He waved over the waiter, a boy nine or ten years old, with a vicious, rough scar that traversed his shaved head from his right eyebrow to the nape of his neck. “Five more beer. And another one for my friend.” He reached into the coat and pulled out a triangular coin, slightly smaller than the palm of his hand, stamped with the relief of a dour old man on one side, and a stylized sun-and-crescent moon on the other. “And keep it coming,” he added as he flipped the coin towards the boy, who nodded and disappeared into the milling throng towards the bar.
Gessa’s eyes were wide. “A Three-Side? You did make a find, didn’t you?”
Ranat scratched at his tortured beard and smiled. “Told you. Looks like some poor sot from the estates got into something he couldn’t handle. You ask me, they should just stay behind their gates where they can feel superior and safe, like. It’s dangerous in the city. You hear anything about it, yet?”
“You mean about someone important turning up dead?” She shrugged. Not lately. Not yet, anyway. If he was big enough, I will. You know who he was?”
“Nah. Found some boots, though. Too big for me. And the coat. Oh, yeah. And this.” He reached under the table into the sack, and rummaged through the bottom of it until his fingers closed around the muddy belt. He pulled it out and draped it across the empty glasses.
Gessa’s eyes grew even wider, until her expression was almost comical. Two giant eyes like white and blue plates on a narrow rack of a face, dishes set out to dry. “Damn,” she said under her breath as she picked up the buckle and felt the weight of it. “Iron?”
“Seems like. Not to mention the stones. Recognize the work?”
“Nah,” she said. “Not specifically. Definitely someone from the Church, though. No one else can afford this. Well, maybe one of the merchants. Where you find the body, if he wasn’t already tombed up the way you like ‘em?”
Ranat scowled, but he ignored the jab. “Just yonder. A few streets from the Lip. Heaped in an alley.”
Gessa nodded. “Guess he was up to no good, then. Still, what an idiot. Gonna do business on the Lip, at least dress the part. Come slumming dressed like that, someone’s gonna shank you.”
He plucked the belt out of Gessa’s hands just as the boy returned with another tray of lagers. He struggled to find room for them on the already cluttered table.
Ranat spoke around the boy’s fumbling arms. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too, but he didn’t get shanked for his money. Whoever killed him, they just wanted him dead. That’s weird, too. If you’re going to murder someone like that, might as well at least make it look like a mugging.”
“You know where you’re gonna unload?” Gessa asked, ignoring the boy entirely, who’d finally gathered all the empty glasses onto his tray, and was now waiting for a break in the crowd to take them back to the kitchen.
“Meh. The boots I think I can take to Han. Even if he doesn’t want them, he still owes me for the time I pulled half his inventory out of that fire. Not sure about the belt. Don’t know anyone who has the kind of tin lying around to pay up front for something like that, and damn if I’m gonna take less than it’s worth. Shit, even without the stones, the iron is worth as much as the sack of cash the poor bastard had on him.”
Gessa chewed her lip in silence for a minute. “I know a guy, maybe.”
“Some smuggler from the Lip?”
“Nah. He’s legit. Pays his Salvation Taxes and everything.”
Ranat scowled. “Then why would he deal with me?”
“Because he knows he can pay you less than that thing is worth and you’ll still walk away happy, because it’s more than you’ll get anywhere else.”
“Business first, faith second, eh?”
It was Gessa’s turn to shrug. “Isn’t that always how it works?”
“So, I guess you’ll be wanting a cut, then, if you tell me where this guy is.”
She smiled, reveling teeth the same color as the sawdust floor. “Thirty percent?”
“Ha!”
“Fine then. Don’t need to be like that. How about fifteen?”
Ranat laughed, genuinely this time. “Shit woman. I’ll make it ten, and throw in a lesson or two on haggling, since you seem to be so bad at it.”
Gessa frowned fiercely at Ranat, but managed to make the expression not unfriendly. “Fine. Ten. But you owe me, Ranat.”
Ranat’s smile didn’t fade. “What do you mean? I already bought you a beer.”
It was late when they finally left the nameless bar, cold enough outside to condense the constant drizzle into a light rain.
“I suppose this mystery merchant of yours doesn’t keep night hours,” Ranat said, turning up his collar against the chill.
“Naw,” she said, and looked as if she was going to add something else, but instead fell silent.
“Well,” Ranat said after a moment. “No use standing in the rain. My place ain’t far from here, you know.” He gave her a look.
She smiled a little. “Yeah. I know. Let’s go.”
They made their way together through the narrow, winding streets of Fom. Two and three story buildings of limestone and narrow, cobbled streets gave in to single story shanties of driftwood and even narrower alleys of mud. Here and there, hidden valves to the Tidal Works opened with soft clicks and whistled excess steam from vents and copper pipes jutting from the bases of the walls that crowded along the lanes. These gave out, too, when they crossed into the Lip, and the dim yellow glow lamps were replaced by guttering torches and the greasy, faint light of oil lamps.
The Lip was what everyone called the north western quadrant of Fom–a dense collection of shacks and lean-tos massed along the cliffs, and riding the slowly rotting wooden platforms that lined the limestone face, all the way down to the high-tide line and the thrashing waves. The bulk of the Lip was under their feet, now, in the warren of tunnels, caverns, quarries and tombs carved out of the rock, that elsewhere in Fom were filled with the machines of the Tidal Works that powered the city.
Gessa was a native of The Lip, born and raised, and Ranat knew she was more than capable of navigating the three-dimensional maze that lay below them. He suspected that, like language, it took a childhood knowledge to ever truly become fluent in The Lip. He’d come here almost forty years ago, and still dreaded descending into the tunnels without a guide.
Ranat’s home was on the surface, or near enough, in the basement of a squat, single-story tenement close enough to be able to hear the constant churning of the sea, and far enough that it was impossible to tell what direction the sound was coming from. The entrance to his single room was concealed by a stack of moldering wooden beams that seemed to serve no other purpose, and held closed by a simple ceramic lock.
Ranat entered first and made Gessa wait outside while he tiptoed through the stacks of books, letters, and scraps of paper to the oil lamp mounted on the wall, which he lit with a flint hanging next to it on a bit of twine. The high, paneless windows along the ceiling, only a hand’s width thick, didn’t let in any real light, even during the day, and were draped with heavy, mildewed, camel hair blankets to keep out some of the damp.
Gessa hovered in the doorway, looking around the room in the faint, flickering light. Floor and walls were carved from limestone, cut directly from the bedrock Fom was situated on. The ceiling was wood, brown and unfinished, and a little warped from the relentless moisture. Naked support beams sprouted haphazardly from the walls, shouldering the load of the slowly sinking floor above wherever they could be squeezed in.
In one corner, beneath the lamp, a wad of blankets and rags denoted Ranat’s bed. Makeshift shelves of driftwood and brick lined the rest of the room, entirely crammed with old books, letters, and stacks of paper. More books and documents lay heaped about the room. Despite the randomness, she suspected there was an organization to the place that made perfect sense in the mind of Ranat Totz.
“In or out, then,” Ranat said. “But I want to close the door.”
Gessa stepped in, and shut the door behind her. “I see you haven’t changed things much since last time I was here,” she quipped, looking around for a place to sit. Her eyes rested on a lopsided stool, and she moved the stack of paper that was occupying it before sitting down, resting it carefully amongst the others scattered across the floor.
“What’s there to change?” Ranat took the letter he’d found on the body from his coat, took another glance at it, and filed it carefully on one of the shelves.
“Why you have all this stuff, anyway? Shit, can you even read?”
Ranat sat down onto his pile of rags with a groan. “Didn’t you ask me that last time you were here?”
“Yeah.”
“And what did I say?”
“You said it was a story for another day.”
Ranat grumbled a laugh. “Did I? That’s a shit answer. Sounds like something I’d say, though, doesn’t it?”
Gessa didn’t bother responding.
“So,” Ranat continued. “You want to know, or what? And to answer your question, yeah, I can read.”
“Raised in a temple, were you?”
Ranat shot her a glance, but he could tell she was being sincere. “Fair enough question, I suppose. No, I wasn’t a temple boy. Grew up on a vineyard, actually.”
“Your parents were vintners?”
“Paw! That’s a good one. You think I’d live like this? No. Indentured servants. I’d still probably be there if I hadn’t run away.”
“didn’t that just increase your parents’ debt, their kid leaving like that?”
Ranat shrugged, looked away from her, focused on nothing. “I was young.” His voice became soft.
Gessa cleared her throat. “So, how does that explain all this?” She gestured around vaguely.
Ranat looked back at her. “I was, hell, I don’t know. Nine, maybe. Eight. Realized I couldn’t fathom picking grapes for the rest of my life. Had this idea to teach myself to read, so I started stealing books from the wine master. Whatever I could get my hands on. Mostly manifests, accounting stuff. Some Church scriptures. Didn’t matter. The words were what fascinated me. That those scratches on the page all meant something, and when I put them all together, they meant something else. I couldn’t get over it. I think I taught myself how to read through sheer force of will, more than anything else. I needed to know how all those symbols worked together.
“It came easy enough after a while. Eavesdropping on some conversations between the master and his bookkeepers helped me get over some bumps. After I left, came to the city, I discovered there were other languages out there. N’naradin I’d mastered on the vineyard. Now, suddenly, Skald, Valez… Other puzzles to figure out.” He trailed off, looked around his home. “I guess it stuck.”
“And the grave robbing?” Gessa asked.
Ranat winced, but again, there was no malice or disgust in her voice. Merely curiosity. Even so, Ranat found he still couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze.
“Burials are public domain,” he said quietly. “Easy enough to find where the high-ups are interred, if you can read.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question.”
He sighed, and finally looked at her again. Really, he thought, she doesn’t look that old. He wondered how he’d first gotten that impression. “Doesn’t it? Well, life is hard for a kid new to the city. Whether or not he can read. I was too proud to beg like those poor bastards teeming on The Grace’s Walk. Too good to steal.”
“You steal from the dead.” Once again, no malice rode her voice. It was just an observation, and she was oblivious to how it might cut.
It was an argument he’d won within himself long ago in any case. “Can’t steal from those that need nothing, Gessa.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
He studied her. It was her turn to avoid his gaze, and her eyes wandered the room, looking at everything that wasn’t him. No, he thought. Not old by a long shot. Just… weathered. Like he could complain about that.
“Anyway, you can spend the night here,” he said. “If you want.”
For an answer, she crossed the room to him, and turned down the lamp.