“You walked here?”
She shined the light in his face this time, and he winced. “Of course I walked. How else was I supposed to follow that light? Drive through the trees? Not sure what kind of car you think I got, and I don’t ride a bicycle. Never did learn. It ain’t natural, running around on two wheels like that.”
“Pretty sure it’s … pretty natural,” he argued with a grin. She offered him a hand for the sake of show, but he pushed himself to his feet without her assistance. “Is that how you found me? You followed the light?”
“Better than the star of Bethlehem.”
He was only half-serious when he said, “Hush your mouth, ma’am.”
“Oh, sure. You can ask the pagan holdouts for a handout, but I can’t tease a bit about astrology. Fine. You big fat hypocrite.”
He dusted himself off and felt around for any broken bits. All in all, he felt pretty good. Tired, but good. “I’m a big fat lot of things, but that’s not one of them.”
“Well then, maybe you’re only confused. Whoa now,” she said, and stepped in to steady him. It worked, mostly because he didn’t want to fall down on top of her. “Take a moment if you need it.”
“Not sure what’s wrong with me,” he muttered. “I didn’t do anything. I asked for help, and it came. That’s all.”
She patted his arm. “No, darling. That wasn’t all. You were right,” she told him, guiding him by the crook of his arm, back up the hill toward the Jolly Roger. “There was life in this place. A lot of life. Your life. And my Old Man,” she said with a wink. “He borrowed a bit to make his point. You did a good job, calling him back.”
Kilgore frowned down at the small woman with the fierce grip on the meat of his arm. She carried on, straight ahead.
“I knew if I asked you outright, you’d never do it. Not in a million years. Bless Him, He’s got the time, but you and I don’t.”
And as they walked, the flicker in her eyes didn’t come from the flashlight, or the moon.
Daniel Abraham
Daniel Abraham lives with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is Director of Technical Support at a local Internet service provider. Starting off his career in short fiction, he made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere, some of which appeared in his first collection, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Turning to novels, he made several sales in rapid succession, including the books of The Long Price Quartet, which consists of A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring. He’s also written The Dagger and the Coin series, which consists of The Dragon’s Path, The King’s Blood, and The Tyrant’s Law. He also wrote Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, as M. L. N. Hanover, wrote the four-volume paranormal romance series Black Sun’s Daughter, and with Ty Franck, writing as James S. A. Corey, the space-opera Expanse novels, consisting (so far) of Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate.
In the worst of bad neighborhoods, where life is cheap and usually it’s everyone for himself, it’s good to find a friend whom you can count on—and sometimes they’re to be found in the most unexpected of places …
THE MEANING OF LOVE
Daniel Abraham
The name Sovereign North Bank referred to a strip of land along the river Taunis within the great city of Nevripal, but not of it. It existed first as an accident of politics. When, centuries before, the wizards of the Hanish Empire sued for peace after the War of Ten Emperors, the lands surrounding the slow, dark river were ceded to the Council of Nestripon, but an exception was made for the Hanish winter palace and its grounds, which were the favorites of the Empress. In a sentimental gesture of good faith that often follows wars between monarchs who are also family, the land remained technically within the Hanish Empire, though no official or citizen remained there. The mayor and burghers of Nevripal, not sharing the familial fondness for their defeated enemies, declared that the Sovereign North Bank was, in essence, its own problem. With no Hanish to oversee it and no Nestripon willing to take responsibility, it became that rarest of all places: an autonomous zone where the law protected and enforced lawlessness.
Over the ages since, the north bank had become a curiosity. The detritus of a dozen cultures found their way there, or were forced to it when there was no other refuge. The sluggish, dark waters of the Taunis carried barges and rafts to the muddy shores. Criminals and debtors fled to it, refugees of wars national and domestic, the addicted and the poverty-lost. And like the vast and mindless organism that it was, the Sovereign North Bank grew.
That there were no magistrates did not mean there were no planners, no architects, no geniuses or madmen. Rather it meant there was no restraint to those who lived there and invented. Over the decades, the press of humanity and desperation drove the buildings higher. One story and then another rose up, built from whatever came to hand with the unofficial motto Good enough is good enough. Towers leaned and swayed and sometimes collapsed, grinding the men and women within them to blood and pulp, only to be rebuilt by the survivors or the next wave of refugees. Walkways of rope and wood were hoisted between the buildings until it was said a native of the place could cross from the boundary wall on the north to the sluggish waters at the south without ever touching ground. Shit and piss and trash were thrown from windows to the distant street until rain came to wash them away, and like plants in rich soil, the unstable, unreliable buildings rose, driven by the deep human desire to be the one least shat upon. The streets, such as they were, grew darker and narrower and sometimes disappeared altogether under plank-and-tar awnings that redefined them as homes and shacks.
As with any community, there were landmarks and centers all through it. The Temple at the root of the city that was said to be part of the original Hanish palace. The Water Market, built out over the river itself, where men and women exchanged trinkets and junk with the focus and ferocity of gem merchants. The opium dens against the wall where men slept themselves to death under strings of pale beads long since yellowed to amber by their smokes. There were neighborhoods and demarcations invisible to the untrained eye, but named by the natives: the Salt, Hafner’s Choke, Jimtown.
Two miles long, a mile and a half wide at its greatest, the Sovereign North Bank was home and hovel to fifty thousand people. What little order there was came from the crime lords for whom it was a refuge from the magistrates. What little food there was came from houses of charity in Nevripal whenever the gentry of the greater city felt magnanimous, or was stolen from the river traffic or fished from the filthy waters. The residents of the city-without-citizens ranged from squalid and starving babies who shat their brief lives away in the shadows to the dark-robed holy men in the Temple, from rail-thin addicts half-mad from longing and hunger to masters of crime and violence whose penthouses looked across the river at the lights of the respectable world like reflections in a tarnished mirror.