“And?” he said. “And?”
“And eventually the Monk fell down. I took its head off with its own sword. That Mage-shitting thing screamed as I did it, and it was still whining as I threw it out into the marshes. Then I dragged the body until I found a small gas vent and dropped it in. I stayed the whole morning to watch for the next venting. There were bits of the Monk in the steam storm, small bits. I had to make sure. I was utterly exhausted, hallucinating from the exertion, and maybe… maybe I thought there was even more to them than that. Maybe sometime in the night I’d come to believe it was immortal.”
“Why did it fight you in the first place?”
A’Meer smiled then, leaned across the table and touched Kosar’s cheek. “Gods, I’ve missed you Kosar,” she said. “And it took you a while to ask that. Getting old, yeah? Losing it a bit up here?” She tapped his head and sat back in the chair.
“Drink-addled,” he said. “And shocked. Imagine, my sweet A’Meer who likes it bent over a chair is a warrior, and probably the most dangerous person I know.” There was no humor in what he said; he did not feel frivolous. If anything he was drained, and tired, and perhaps a little annoyed that she had made this evening all her own.
“The reason it fought me is why I have to ask for your help, Kosar. It fought me because I’m a Shantasi warrior, and it’s our chosen cause to bring magic back into Noreela. And you have to help me because that boy you saved, the only other survivor from Trengborne, may be what I’ve been waiting for all my life.”
THEY LEFT THEtavern arm in arm. Kosar had a hangover, his inebriation driven to ground by A’Meer’s revelations. She felt light by his side, her arm thin, and he thought he could probably pick her up and fling her about his head with very little effort. Yet she was a warrior, and she had defeated a Red Monk in battle. Images mixed in his head; the Monk from Trengborne peppered with arrows, and the Monk in the Ventgoria marshes slashed and pierced by Shantasi weapons.
The streets were busy with drunks, prostitutes and drug dealers, yet Kosar felt removed. Here people continued their small existences, busy doing the same thing day in day out, busy doing nothing. He did not resent them that, nor did he look down upon them; they had to get by the best they could, and most of them were decent folk reduced by general decline. But although he was a thief, he was a traveler also. He thought he had seen many things.
Compared to A’Meer, he had barely left the place of his birth.
She had been born in New Shanti, a place where few non-Shantasi visited. She had been south of Kang Kang to The Blurring. She had traveled along The Spine to its very tip, a place that many believed did not even exist. And he suspected that she had been to other, even more obscure places she had yet to tell him about.
Kosar shook his head. “A’Meer, you amazed me so much when we were together, and you amaze me more now that we meet again.”
“I’m sorry, Kosar. It’s not something I wanted to keep from you-truth is, it’s not something I did consciously. It’s been a part of my life for so long that I really don’t think I’m out of the ordinary. That was the first and last time I ever saw a Monk, and since then I’ve just been wandering. Never seen any sign of the magic I’m supposed to promote, and in all honesty I stopped looking long ago. It’s not like this was an obsession. The Shantasi mystics gave us talents, and much more besides.” She trailed off here, and Kosar thought, Much more besides… That’s what she can never tell me. It’s that “much more” that makes her a stranger to me now.
“But it was never an obsession. ” It sounded to Kosar as if she was trying to persuade herself.
“So now?” he asked, wincing as a gang of kids ran past carrying screeching bats. His headache had rooted itself firmly now, and the piercing screams seemed to thump inside his skull and become trapped there.
“Now we have to find the boy,” she said. “But back to my place first. We can spend a while there, make plans. And catch up.”
“I think I’ve done enough catching up for one night,” Kosar said.
“I wasn’t planning on talking.” A’Meer’s voice contained none of the flippancy he had come to know, none of the mischievous glee. It was low, urgent and very serious, as if she knew that tonight might be the last of its kind. She wanted one more fling with normalcy before things changed forever.
They walked through the busy streets until they reached A’Meer’s home, a ground-floor flat in a block of three. A whore lived directly above her, A’Meer said, and the third flat appeared empty. No one ever came, no one ever left. Windows were covered day and night. Another mystery in a town that cared little for them.
Inside the flat they heard A’Meer’s neighbor going about her business. The floors were thin-only a layer of timber boards and whatever covering the whore chose to put down-and Kosar tried to ignore the sounds as A’Meer prepared him a warm drink. As he sat and drank, listening to the sated couple mumbling above them, A’Meer rooted beneath her bed and dragged out a big leather bag. She opened it up and began laying out weapons. Kosar knew some of them, and others he recognized from her description of the fight with the Red Monk. These were blades that had been slicked with a Monk’s blood. Here was a slideshock that had been buried in its neck. Each weapon was wrapped in oilcloth, and they were all clean and greased. Beside them she laid a selection of sheathes and scabbards, equally well maintained. And beside them, other things that looked like nothing he had seen before.
A’Meer came to him suddenly. She straddled him on his chair and kissed him, fiercely and passionately, as if it were the last kiss either of them would ever know. Within a few seconds they were ripping at each other’s clothes, revealing themselves to each other for the first time in several years. The familiarity was there, they both remembered what the other liked, and when A’Meer sank onto him Kosar saw the scar across her throat, put there by the Monk.
As they made love Kosar glanced across at the weapons and other fighting paraphernalia arrayed across her bed. The newfound knowledge added a chill and a thrill to the sex.
THEY LEFT A’MEER’Sflat just before dawn. It had taken her a while to dress and strap on the web of leather and fur belts, straps and pockets she needed to carry all of her weapons. She looked even slighter when she had finished. And in her deep, soulful eyes, Kosar saw something akin to fear.
“I’m leaving,” she said, staring around the room. “I’ve been here for years, and now I’m leaving. We first made love in this room, Kosar, many moons ago. I’ve been settled here longer than anywhere in my life, other than Hess. I have friends in this place. Pavisse is a shit heap, but some of the people aren’t bad. Some of them, believe it or not, want to make things better. Though most of them have forgotten how.”
“You’ll be back,” Kosar said, but as A’Meer offered a weak smile he knew how hollow that sounded.
“Curse it, I haven’t worn this stuff for ages,” she said, shrugging her shoulders to settle the gear better across her shoulders and hips. “I feel different already. Bastard things chafe and rub. And last night has worn me out. But there’s always a time to move on. The Monks will have followed him here, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We can’t let them find him. There’s a sick irony in the Monks’ existence, because their reasons are so justified. Nobody wants magic back in the hands of the Mages, if they’re even still alive. But madness informs the Monks’ methods, and all they can do is destroy. There’s no reasoning in them. This lad sounds more innocent than any of us.”
“They won’t know he has an uncle here. They won’t know where he lives.”
“Don’t you believe it. They have their ways, their methods. Come on, show me where you took him.”
A’Meer shut the door on her rooms without once looking back.
At this early hour the streets outside were quiet. A few drunks lay in the gutters or huddled in doorways, and there may have been more in other places hidden by darkness. The life moon was hidden by clouds, the death moon pale, and the only light in the streets came from weak oil lamps in windows and on hooks outside taverns and drug dens. There were a handful of people walking the streets, because in a town like Pavisse there is plenty of business carried out only at night. Some of them walked past Kosar and A’Meer without looking up, while others, perhaps catching sight of A’Meer in the ghostly light, hurried on or changed direction altogether.