A brief visit to Os Penitens, the Mouth of War, today. I’m clambering through too many strands of writing and editing at the moment, so here’s a fragment of dark fantasy from a longer work which may become a full tale in its own right with time – or may not. The Gynarch alone knows.

It’s my favourite character of that city – the unusual Nemors…

The Place of Nine Despairs

 

These are not the hands I will use.

These hands are old. They do not straighten, nor do they grip with the strength that will be needed. And my daughter would ask me: Most noble father, is that murder, the shadow which clings to your fingers?

What would I answer? I have never lied to her.

“Yes, child. I have made murder on the enemy of my heart.”

It would not do.

So I go to the Place of Nine Despairs. I go to a meeting which no man should want, which most must surely regret…

#

She stood on the precipice, the heels of her boots on stone, the toes on air. Lichen-mottled strongholds loomed behind her; a three hundred foot drop lay before her. Down there, choked with travellers, the road called Isaine’s Sorrow snaked through the district of Deuseptis and did its duty.

The Nine Despairs was a terrace of worked stone, less than a spear’s throw wide, but longer than ten brigantines. Looking down, she noticed that the fall-nets were still tended, centuries after the last death here. History paid prentices to scramble up the crags and re-knot the ropes, clear out the nesting gulls, for history remembered cowards and honourable people. There were few of the latter now.

These days there were entertainments at the Nine Despairs, amusements for the sons and daughters of the gens. The iron baskets which had once held watch-fires were stacked high with perfumed woods, and children climbed on the ballista mounts, scraping their knees on rusted bearings.

She turned from the edge. It was late in the Hour of the Grey Snake, and tendrils of cloud were gathering in the east, talking amongst themselves of a dawn which was soon to come. Soon, and they would be grey no longer.

A time and a place for meeting strangers.

And here was the stranger coming, his cloak clutched tight, his head low.

I have need, he had said at a gin stall on Isaine’s Sorrow, five hours ago, and pointed up to the heights. When the Grey Snake ends, he added.

She had no objection to need. It tended to pay well.

He limped as he came, joining her near the edge but not so near. He was keeping to a section where some of the carved stone parapet had survived.

“You are Nemors?” he asked, letting his cloak fall. An old face. A sunken face, knots of muscle withered at the corners of his lips, shadows under almost colourless eyes.

“I carry no mark,” she said.

“No, you wouldn’t. Not if you were her.” He coughed, wiping spittle from the corner of his mouth with his cloak. “Nemors is not like others.”

“You will know who I am later,” she pointed out. “When you pay me.”

“Yes, of course. It concerns…. concerns the gens Malphebes.”

Nemors had nothing to say. The pointless, convoluted politics of the great gens held little interest for her.

“My name is Urien anIscales.” He showed her the intricate pattern of silver etched on the back of his right hand, the pattern which matched him to his name. In Os Penitens, anyone could hide behind a face.

A cousin of a cousin, without even inheritance rights in the gens Iscales. Her time was being wasted.

“There are others,” she said, and turned to leave. She had no interest in the small vendettas and grievances he was no doubt about to raise.

“I have mirifics, some of great age.”

Her robes of ochre and grey swirled as she faced him again.

“What is a great age?” she asked.

“The Thirteenth Year of the Lammergeier.” He coughed again. “And some from the time of Heresen Imperator.”

“I see. You have provenance?”

He smiled for the first time, a bitter twist of his mouth. “If you really are Nemors of the Last Blessing, then you will know them. Would parchment and book really help?”

The Tower of Falling sounded the end of the hour. Its knell was taken up a moment later by the thousand shrines and towers across the city, the brass mouths of guild bells, the horns of militia at the district gates, a wave of time which washed over the city until it was spent. In Os Penitens, there was no single moment, only fragments which followed another’s lead.

The Thirteenth Year of the Lammergeier. There were certain items of that period…

“What do you wish me to do?”

He came closer. “My daughter has been dishonoured.”

“Malphebes will no doubt pay recompense. They’re used to doing that.”

“You think that I would seek out Nemors for a matter of some foolish copulation?”

“It has happened,” she said, beginning to lose interest again.

So he told her why he needed her. She listened. It was a common tale, in its beginning, but it twisted as it went. When he had finished the telling, caught in a racking cough again, she swept back the hood of her cloak.

“Your daughter is alive, at least.”

The old man managed to look at her face.

“We are nothing to them. We are stripped of rights and dignity.”

She tasted rain on the dawn breeze, considered Os Penitens laid out before her. The first few drops of a long morning spattered her face.

“You wish this man, this Tetherian, dead?”

“Exposed, shamed.” he said. “Brought to some sort of justice. The magistrates will not act.”

“This might be done.”

He leant against the nearest crumbling section of parapet, his hand hardly keeping him upright.

“The mirifics,” he said, “Are our last treasures.”

“I heard you.”

“What else must I do?”

“Comfort your daughter, I suppose. I would not know. Tell her that all will be well.”

“Will it? Will all be well?” he asked, tiredness replaced by a sudden eager tone.

“I imagine not. But as for your dishonour, I will consider the matter.”

“Do you not care?”

“Not unless I am paid to do so.”

He levered himself up right.

“They say… they say that you are no longer human.”

They stood in the grey-pink shadows of the dawn. Eventually she smiled.

“Good.”

#

She was not as I had expected. A hard voice, and a harder face, yes, but she was not so greatly different in height or build from my Cristia.

I could not see her eyes, though. I had heard that there are colours in those eyes which no longer belong in this world, Gynarch protect us. I do not understand this, but I am relieved not to have seen such things.

I must beg the skinbinders. My chest is worse, and they raise their prices every month. There is little money and little honour left to anIscales.

One of these at least might soon be remedied.