Ariah (42 page)

Both of us tempted fate. Busking is not illegal in the Empire, for the sole reason that it is not done. Disturbing the peace, though, did get Sorcha hassled. He did a lot of running from lawmen. He never could play more than one song in one place and never did get any coins from passersby. He liked the running, and he liked taunting the policemen, and there were a few sardonic or brave shopkeepers who would harbor him when he needed to drop out of sight. Myself, my constant watching of the slave market got me noticed. The fact that I constantly scribbled notes while I watched the trade of live goods drew questions. An elf among the buyers there is noticeable. When the Qin agents demanded my papers and saw I had no work assignment there were threats to put me on a factory line. I showed them my injuries and pleaded for time to recover. It worked at first, but it was a temporary excuse, and it was clear I needed a permanent position.

Two and a half weeks after my return to Rabatha, Dirva got me an assignment. I served as a secretary to a minor Qin bureaucrat in the Office of Foreign Relations, a former military man who was placed in Rabatha to issue or deny trade permits to merchants looking to strike out for the Droma grasslands in the east. The first rail to Ma-Halad had been built by the Qin Army a year before, ostensibly to open trade, but the reality was that the only merchants he approved were those that served military supply lines. The Qin Army was gearing up to expand the Exalted’s borders. My job was to transcribe his interviews with Rabathan merchants into documents for later perusal. I was good at my job, and after a week or so, he seemed to forget I was there. He had a loose tongue. The merchants’ tongues were even looser, and none of them noticed me when they came in for their interviews. I might as well have been a piece of furniture. Many of the merchants seeking eastern trade permissions were slavers looking to partner with the Qin rails for easier transport. Some wanted to buy entire cars for transport and were willing to split the profits with the military. It was hard to make a profit, the slavers said, since so many of the live goods died in the trek across the desert. With the rails, more would survive, which would lower prices on slaves generally, and wouldn’t it be something, they asked my employer, if your average middle-class Qin household could afford a slave? I was good at my job, but it was not an easy job for me to have.

Despite the fact that I had little choice in the matter, I had qualms about taking the job, chief among them that Sorcha was left to his own devices while the rest of us were out. It didn’t matter how many times I told him the Empire was not like the City. It was a thing, clearly, he had to learn on his own, but I didn’t want him to have to learn it. I listened to the merchants with disinterest. My mind drifted often to Sorcha—to what he might be doing, where he might be doing it, who he might be doing it with. Sometimes I wondered about Shayat, but that was a placid and docile thing, where the thoughts of Sorcha were terrible and anxious. I must have seen him die a dozen different ways every day. I knew him well enough to know he would not sit patiently waiting in the house for the rest of us to return. And I was right to worry.

I returned home after work to find a yellow notice taped to the front door. My heart dropped from across the street. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said, but I read it anyway. The note stated he’d been arrested for indecency and lewd acts, that he was being held at the 23rd precinct house, and that bail was set at two hundred fifty marks. According to the time stamp on the notice, he’d been in there for seven hours, which meant he must have been arrested not long after I left for work.

I had, to my name, thirty-seven marks. Dirva was not home, and I had no idea where he kept his money. The lack of good options and a wide margin of desperation drove me to Parvi’s shop. He opened the front door with a tape measure slung around his neck and a length of linen draped over on arm. He smiled when he saw me. “Ariah! Shayat said you were in town. Come in!”

“
Is she here? I need to ask a favor of her.”

“
Yes, she’s here. Come in,” he said. He yelled her name at the stairs. “You look well, Ariah.” He thumbed the edge of my vest, which he had sewn for me years ago. “I’m glad to see my work has held up.”

I stared anxiously at the stairs, willing her to come down. Parvi asked me if I was all right. “I…yes, I am. A friend is in bad straits.”

“
Shayat!” Parvi yelled again. “She’ll come down. Come by again when your friend is in better straits, yes?”

“
I will, Parvi. I promise.” He clapped me on the shoulder and left me in the hall.

I heard Shayat before I saw her. The door to the attic creaked open and slammed shut. “Papa, I’m in the middle of…” She saw me. She frowned. We stared at each other for a handful of seconds, and then she waved for me to follow her up to the attic. When we were in her room, she closed the door and leaned against it. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“
Sorcha’s in trouble. I’m sorry, I am, but I have no money. He’s locked up in the 23rd.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “The 23rd?”

“
I know.”

“
Really?”

“
Yes! Yes, I need money for bail. Shayat, he’s been there for hours.”

She chewed her lip. “How much?”

“
I need two hundred thirteen marks.”

“
Lewd acts?”

“
And indecency. Will you help? I’m sorry to barge in like this, I am, but he’s there, and I have thirty-seven marks. I can’t, Shayat, I can’t just leave him there. He came here for me, and now he’s at the 23rd!”

She held out her hands. “Ariah!”

“
I knew this would happen. I knew it. I never should have asked him to come with me.”

“
Ariah!”

“
Mercy knows what they’ve done to him. I’ve…I’ve heard stories about the 23
^rd
, and…”

Shayat took me by the shoulders. “Ariah, we’ll get him out. I have it; I have enough for bail. You can have it. You’ll get him out. All right?”

I nodded. My heart beat bloody and wild in my chest. “All right. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

She unlocked a chest and counted out the coins. She dropped them into my hand and curled my fingers around them. I thanked her again, breathless and pathetic. “Get him out,” she said. “Make him be more careful.”

“
I’ll try. Thank you. And I’m…I’m sorry for coming here. I am.”

“
Just get him out,” she said.

“
Thank you,” I said

I ran to the 23rd precinct with Shayat’s coins rattling in my pockets. I was covered in sweat and panting like a dog when I got there. The stitch in my side made it hard to speak. I stumbled up to the main desk. The Qin clerk sitting at it cast a wary look to the lawmen milling around behind me. I threw the notice and the money on the desk. “Get him out,” I said.

The clerk watched me for a second. He smirked and plucked up the coins. I grabbed him by the wrist. The air went very still. I felt the shadows of the lawmen lurch to attention, felt the burn of their eyes as they turned to look at me. “Do not steal from me,” I said. It came out a scratchy growl. “Call the keeper before you take it.”

The clerk wrenched his had out of my grasp. “Let me see your papers.”

I slammed them down on the desk. “Call the keeper, and let him out!”

“
Watch it, tinker,” one of the lawmen said. “You’re a hair’s breadth away from landing down there yourself, with a mouth like that.”

His was not an empty threat. I swallowed down the defiance as best I could. I held up my hands and stared at the floor. “My apologies to the Exalted.”

“
Apologize again.”

I dropped to my knees and bowed, forehead to the filthy floor. A boot landed on my neck, pressing down just hard enough to suggest what kind of damage could be done to me. “My apologies to the Exalted,” I said again.

The lawmen laughed. One of them grabbed me by the collar and jerked me upright. He was a big man, a slab of muscle and fat. His hands were huge and calloused. A cigarette was planted between his teeth, and when he spoke, the words fought their way through clouds of smoke. “You counted it?”

“
All there,” said the clerk.

“
Give me the notice.” The keeper read it and handed it back. He shoved me forward.

“
Wait!” I said. “Wait, my papers!”

The keeper held out a hand for my papers. The clerk stamped them and handed them to the keeper, who dropped them on the floor and knocked me to the floor a second after to fetch them. I fell hard and split my lip. He grabbed me again by the collar and sent me flying through a doorway and down a flight of stairs to the lock room.

I had been arrested before, but never in the 23rd. I’d been arrested for being an elf in the wrong part of town, for having eyes the wrong color, but not for something I’d actually done. I’d been taken to lockup at the 12th and the 7th, held for two or three hours with a dozen other quietly-seething elves, and released with orders to pay my own fine. The 23rd was different. I stumbled down the stairs into a pitch-dark cellar. The keeper laughed; it was a mocking, vicious laugh that ricocheted off the stone walls. A man began to cry at the sound of it. The keeper lit a torch—an actual torch, a thing of bright, violent flames—and brushed past me. “He’s with the other ghalios,” the keeper said. “Follow me.”

He led me past cells, some of which were occupied, and some of which weren’t. They were narrow, small things built of metal wire. They were not wide enough to lay in and not quite tall enough to stand in, even for an elf. I call them cells but really they were cages. Some of the prisoners shook the doors of their cells and pleaded with the keeper for freedom. Some of them slunk into the corners of their cells, away from the light. “Nahsiyya! You’re wife’s here for you.” He whistled. “She’s angry. I see why you strayed from such a nagging shrew.”

Up ahead, just out of the reach of the torchlight, I heard the sound of a body slam into the metal meshwork. “Ariah?”

“
I’m here!”

“
Oh, sweet mercy. Trees and streams. Spirits and sanity.” The keeper swung the torch at Sorcha’s cell. Sorcha cried out in pain. “Let me out, you bastard!” he roared.

The keeper laughed. “That’s getting close to disruption of public order, ghalio. You keep on, and I’ll leave you in there. And this one, he might play wife to you but he’s a man on his papers. Might have to throw him in lockup, too, if you keep on.”

Sorcha caught my eye. I gave him a slight, tense shake of my head. He clamped his jaw shut. The keeper laughed his acid laugh again and unlocked the cell door. He grabbed Sorcha by the wrist. Sorcha screamed and fell to his knees. The keeper dragged him out, and Sorcha scrambled upright, drawing shallow breaths. His shirt was torn. His boots were missing. I guided him out onto the street as soon as we were in the lobby, stopping only long enough to retrieve his papers. I didn’t get a good look at him until we were a block east of the precinct. I’d been walking as fast as I could without it properly being called a run. I had hold of his arm and pulled him along with me. I heard the unevenness of his breath, but I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t think much of anything just then besides getting him back to Dirva’s.

“
Ariah,” he said. His voice was razors and tears. “Ariah, hold on,” he said.

I turned and found him collapsed against the wall of a shop. He leaned his full weight against it, his cheek pressed to the rough adobe bricks. His eyes were pinched closed. Blood oozed from a ragged hole in his left ear where his earring had once been. His neck bore dark purple bruises, unmistakably the shape of large hands. He cradled the swollen, bruised fingers of his left hand with his right, but his right hand was in bad shape, too. It bore the shiny, blistered burns of the torch. I sucked in a lungful of air. I had no idea what to do or what to say. “I think my hand’s broke,” he said. “Something’s wrong with my knee. Got to go slower than that.”

“
I’m sorry.”

“
It’s all right,” he said. He peeled himself off the wall slowly, one bone at a time. “Just got to go slow.”

I did most of the walking for both of us from there on out. I held him up, half-carried him the two miles back to Dirva’s house. Dirva and Nisa were home. Sorcha’s condition was met with wariness and concern. Dirva pulled him into a silent hug; Sorcha burst into tears. Nisa asked me what had happened under her breath, but I had no answers. Dirva gave me money to bring the healer and helped Sorcha up the stairs to the attic.