How to answer that question? How to compress a thousand wasted nights staring up at a slum house ceiling, crowded three to a bed, elbows jabbing at your sides, sleep endlessly disturbed by the labored snoring of the half idiot beside you? How to describe the realization that the world is quite happy to see you exhaust your strength in another man’s service, kill your spirit building a fortune you’ll never see? How to explain that the deck is stacked, and if you play straight you’ll end up broke?
“This is my chance. War changes things-it shakes up the order. Here I’m nothing, trash washed away in the rain. Over there?” I shrugged. “They’ll have to raise enlisted men to officer-there won’t be enough who can afford to buy their way in. I’ll make lieutenant-you can double down on that. And afterward? There’s room in the world for a man who can keep an eye open for his future.”
By the time I’d finished, Celia’s eyes were puppy-dog wide, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. It didn’t do to feed her infatuation. “I know you will. You’ll be a general before the war is out.” She blushed and leaped up from her bed. “I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you, shining fierce in the dark.” I was very conscious of her nearness, and the thin gauze of cloth that separated her body from mine. “I’ll wait for you-I’ll wait for you as long as I need to.” Her words broke through like water over a dam, syllables tumbling out one after another. “Or, if you don’t want to wait…” She wrapped her arms around me. “You have no lady-I know you’ve been saving yourself.”
I patted her on the back awkwardly. Best to do this quickly, one sharp moment of misery. “When I was thirteen I paid a dock whore two argents to take me behind an outhouse. That I’ve never brought a woman to meet you doesn’t mean what you think.”
I could not have created a more pronounced effect if I had struck her. She took a long moment to collect herself, then threw her body against mine once again. “But I love you. I’ve always loved you-we’re the same, you and I, don’t you see?”
Her face was buried in my chest and her slender arms were wrapped tight across my ribs. I put my finger beneath her chin and raised her eyes to meet mine. “You aren’t like me. You aren’t anything like me.” Her skin was slick with tears. I combed her dark hair with my fingers. “I gave you to the Crane that night to make sure of that.”
She pushed me away and ran weeping to her bed. It was better this way. She would hurt, for a time. But she was young, and it would fade, and in the years to come the memory would be nothing more than a faint embarrassment.
As quietly and swiftly as I could, I sprinted down the steps and out into the afternoon. Then it was back to my flophouse and two days of drinking and whoring, making sure to waste every copper of the meager bonus the Crown had distributed in recognition of my future service. When I stumbled to the docks forty-eight hours later I was piss broke and had a headache like a mule kick to the temple. It was an inauspicious beginning to an unprofitable enterprise.
As for Celia and the Crane, well, I sent letters and so did they. But like everything else in that damned army, communication back home was terrible, so I didn’t get most of theirs and they didn’t get most of mine. It would be more than five years before I set eyes on either of them again. By that time much had changed for all of us-little of it I suspect for the better.
When I awoke I was lying on a bed, staring up at a gauzy overhang and the four carved posts that supported it. Someone had stripped me of my wet clothing and dressed me in a plain white robe. The agonizing cold and terrible sensation of exhaustion were gone, replaced by a warm glow that emanated from my chest into each extremity.
“Am I dead?” I asked no one in particular.
Celia’s voice answered from out of my field of vision. “Yes. This is Chinvat.”
“I wonder what I did to warrant an eternity surrounded by lace.”
“Something wonderful, I would imagine.”
That didn’t sound much like me. “How’d you get me up here?”
“Magic, obviously. A minor use of my Art.”
“I’m a little slow on the uptake. Hypothermia will do that. I assume you hocus-pocused that as well?”
I could see her now out of the corner of my eye as she came to sit beside me. “Just a touch-most of it was getting you out of those wet clothes and in front of a fire. You’ve been sleeping for the last hour or so.” She shifted my head onto her lap. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting. I had an experiment going in the conservatory and foolishly didn’t foresee you coming to visit me half naked and freezing.”
“The second in command of Special Operations was offended by my hygiene. I decided I’d improve our relationship with a quick bath in the canal.”
“I thought you got Black House off your back?” Her charm dangled from the soft of her neck. She smelled of sunshine and cinnamon.
“Apparently I evoke a level of hatred that renders the Old Man’s protection inadequate. Besides, I haven’t exactly held up my end of the bargain. Another child was killed.”
“I heard.”
“And Crispin too.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“How’s the Crane?”
“Not well. He’s in and out.”
“I should go up and see him. After I put on some pants.”
“It’s best if you don’t.”
“I always wear pants,” I said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without them.”
She laughed softly and shifted her body out from under me. “You should rest now. I’ll check on you in a little while. We’ll talk more then.”
I waited till she left the room, then sat up in bed-too quickly, as it turned out. My vision swirled and my stomach clenched. I lay my head back on the pillow and waited for my body to forgive me for this most recent round of bad decisions.
After a few minutes of penance I swung my feet to the floor and slowly pulled myself erect. My gut gave notice of its disapproval, but less forcefully than before. I grabbed my satchel from the foot of the bed, then slipped out the door and into the stairwell, ascending two flights to the top floor.
Inside the room was vacant, the windows shut tight, the fireplace filled with ash. I waited there for a while. The Crane was a man of boundless generosity and virtually infinite patience, but he was also very private. In the entirety of our relationship I’d never entered his personal quarters. But then I couldn’t very well walk home in the cotton robe I wore.
Feeling very much like an intruder I slipped into the Master’s bedroom. His chamber was smaller than Celia’s, holding little more than a bed and a night table, with a wardrobe in the corner. The wall sconces were unlit, and dark cloth had been stretched over the windows, blocking out what little illumination the gray day would have provided.
Celia had warned me of the Crane’s decline, and seeing him I couldn’t accuse her of exaggeration. He lay twisted on the bed, his body contorted in a fever pose. Most of his hair was gone, and what remained hung in loose tendrils down his neck. His eyes were glazed and unfocused, and his color was nearer to that of a corpse than the hale if aging figure I had spoken to only a few days earlier.
I wished I was wearing pants.
He didn’t react to my entrance, and when he did speak his voice was fractured and strained, in line with the decay the rest of his body had suffered. “Celia… Celia is that you? Honey, listen to me, please, there’s still time…”
“No, Master. It’s me.” I took a spot on a small stool by his bedside. He did not look better close up.
His eyes fluttered, then focused on me. “Oh. I’m sorry, I-I haven’t had any visitors lately. I’m not feeling very well.”
“Of course, Master, of course. Can I get you anything?”-hoping as I asked that he wouldn’t call for the decanter of green liquid that sat on the bed table. Every man has the right to choose the manner in which he meets death, but it was a difficult thing to be complicit in the erosion of the Crane’s fertile and imaginative mind.
He shook his head, more of a shudder really. “No, nothing. It’s too late for anything.”
I sat at his bedside for five or ten minutes while he slipped into a fitful sleep. I was about to get up and leaf through his wardrobe when it occurred to me I owed the man something, and I reached inside my satchel and set the horn Wren had stolen on a table next to the bed.
The Crane’s hand shot out from beneath the covers and grabbed my wrist, and I had to restrain a yelp. “Roan, you were right. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.”
In his delirium it seemed he had mistaken me for his old teacher. “It’s me, Master. Roan the Grim has been dead for half a century.”
“I tried to keep it out, Roan, tried to ward it off. But it got in-it always gets in.”
“Your wards hold, Master,” I said. “The people of Low Town remember, and are grateful.”
“There’s nothing to keep out, Roan. That’s what you knew. What you knew but what I couldn’t understand. The rot’s inside, it’s already inside.”
I tried to think of something soothing to say but nothing came.
“It’s always there. I understand that now. How do you build a wall to keep out what’s always been there? It can’t be done, it can’t be done!” He was nearly shouting now. “Erect a fence, dig a moat, toss up a barricade, and mine the approaches-it’ll do you no good! It’s already here! At the bottom there’s nothing but blood and shit!” He spat out the last words and I flinched back unconsciously. I had never heard the Master curse before, nor was he much given to displays of anger. I began to wonder how much of his abilities were left to him, and whether in his dementia he might not incinerate the Aerie and everything around it.