Chapter Twenty-two
Dag blinked. He had slept, somehow. Light, still the white early morning, slanted down from the crest of the pit. Dag peeled his hand away from the wound in his side, wincing as the gummed blood caused him to tug at the injury. Morning, and he had survived. That meant that they either hadn’t searched the pit, or that he had gotten lucky. Beyond lucky, Dag thought. Ishahb’s burning hand over me.
The knife he had held in his hand lay on the ground. Dag picked it up, sheathed it, and stood. Arms, back, legs—everything ached. He stretched and tried to get his body back under control. The nearest hovels of Driptangle were at least a dozen yards away, and everything was still. The Ocher at Dag’s back ran a good twenty yards more before it reached the end of the Driptangle. He had cornered himself rather effectively; it was a miracle Sammeen’s searchers had not tracked him down.
The Driptangle was quiet, too quiet for morning. In a place like this—places like Driptangle made good hiding spots, if one were careful, and Dag had seen variants of Driptangle in Ghiynmar, Jan-as-Subh, Baji, all the great cities of Jaegal—in a place like this, morning was the busy time, when the poorest of the poor went out to scrabble for the scraps left over from the murders and rapes of the previous night, before honest men had a chance to call for the watch, or whatever they bloody had in this city.
This early, the pit should have been abuzz, men and women going out to scour the beaches, the alleys, the fora, gathering the leavings of nature and man alike. But everything was silent.
Curious, and cursing his own curiosity, Dag crept forward toward the hovels. He drew the dagger he had just sheathed and approached the slanted dwelling of stone and half-cured hide. He pressed one ear up against a hide panel; exposure and time did their work, but the hide still stank. Nothing.
With one hand, Dag lifted up the piece of hide and peered inside. Empty. The smell was worse though. Not rotting hide, he realized. Blood and excrement. Death.
He tied back the piece of hide and crawled inside. Someone had been killed in here, and recently. The ground was still damp, whether with blood or urine Dag could not tell, and fresh scuff marks showed where the body had been dragged away.
Ice ran up Dag’s spine. There were men and women who took delight in killing, people who were mad and hunted other men like prey. One had terrorized Ghiynmar for a dozen years, taking the youngest children of noble houses, leaving the mangled bodies at crossroads and on highways. From what Dag had heard, when they found him, he had turned out to be a man barely thirty, married, wife with child. He had six children’s heads in a burlap sack behind a false wall.
That was the kind of man, or woman, who would come into the Driptangle to kill. No one else had any reason to bother—these people were dead already. But it did not have that feel; Dag had seen too much killing not to recognize the signs here. The death had been quick, efficient. A row of chipped stone mugs sat undisturbed on the splintered wooden shelf. The pallet lay slightly askew, as though kicked, but not enough to upset the pile of tattered blankets, carefully folded, that, anywhere else, would have been burned to ward off plague.
Dag crawled back out of the hovel. He crept down the line of shanties, peering in each one as he went. All empty. Most reeked of death. The loose stone and dirt of the floor of the pit still bore the marks of the bodies dragged out, spots damp and dark in the white morning light with blood. The trail of bodies led east. Toward the Driptangle itself.
Dag halted at the edge of dilapidated homes and crouched. He had no desire to walk into another of Sammeen’s traps. The broken crossbow bolts, visible on the ground in the brightening light, were reminder enough to make him wait.
Ishahb’s white flame burned for him, though, and the morning light outlined the bridge and rim of the pit perfectly. A few dark shapes moved along, men either early about business, or late about pleasure, but no one that waited and watched. After a good quarter of an hour had passed, Dag hurried forward, moving as fast as his injured side would allow.
When he reached the curtain of vines and seaweed, his heart was pounding in his chest, and not from his pace. He could smell death even here, where the foul, briny stench of Apsia seemed concentrated in a single spot. Cringing slightly at the feel of the vines, he pulled them back. Light fell on the face of a woman, prostrate on the ground, brown hair thin and falling across one eye. The other was fixed open. A few flies buzzed, desultory, around the wound above her breasts, as though willing to take their leisure in times of bounty.
Drawing the curtain back, Dag saw more bodies. Piled high, but carelessly. Men, women, children, babes. More than he could have ever imagined lived in Driptangle. The boil on Apsia’s white bottom lanced and purged. By whom? Why?
Dag staggered away, letting the curtain fall behind him. He had never seen slaughter like that; not even the Apsian massacre of the Jaecan soldiers at Loseatte compared, if only because the dead there had been soldiers, not the shriveled, malnutritioned poor of an entire city. The woman’s face floated in front of his eyes, staring back at him.
Had the bodies been there the night before? Everything had happened so quickly. Still, there were at least some sounds of life last night, some indications that people still lived. Had they been slaughtered while he slept?
He made his way up the slippery path and back out to the edge of the Gut. The only path into the pit. A tavern stood opposite the trail to Driptangle.
Dag pushed open the door and went inside. Tables, crowded with sleeping drunks, filled the front room.
“Hello?” he called.
A few groans answered him.
Picking his way around men sleeping on the floor, Dag found the kitchen. A quick search turned up a loaf of bread and a sealed bottle of wine. Dag left a couple coins on the counter and made his way up the stairs to the second floor. The first room held a large bed with a woman and four small children, all asleep. None stirred. He shut the door and moved on. The second held a few bunks, all empty, but had no window. The third was perfect—a window facing the path to Driptangle and a lot of crates and boxes, most empty and covered with rat droppings.
Dag cleared a spot near the window and settled in as best he could. The bread and wine were flavorless to him; he could not stop thinking about the overpowering smell of death, the bodies, that dead woman’s lone eye piercing him. Finally he stopped eating and watched.
It took longer than he expected; he dozed a bit, and almost missed the first man—dressed in a loose trousers, like a sailor, but with a finely woven shirt. Too fine. He turned and glanced back, and Dag leaned forward. A Jaecan. Light-skinned, maybe, like Sammeen. But definitely Jaecan—the cut of the hair, the shape of his face, his eyes. He motioned, and a pair of men moved up from the shadow of a building lower down the hill to join him. Not one of the three moved like a sailor—each had the particular, regular step of a soldier.
Over the next hour, Dag watched the Jaecan soldiers, disguised as Apsian sailors, enter Driptangle in small groups—pairs and threes, mostly. By the end of the hour, though, a good forty soldiers had disappeared into the pit. Forty in an hour. And who knows how long this will go on?
As he stood to leave, Dag caught sight of an old woman, her olive-skinned face wrinkled and shrunken, watching the Jaecan soldiers. She frowned and swept the stones, but her eyes did not leave the mouth of Driptangle once.
So I’m not the only one who sees something going on. If the old woman saw it, then there were likely a dozen sharper-eyed people nearby who did as well.
Dag hurried out of the tavern, his wound flaring up again at his speed. Jaecan soldiers had taken over Driptangle. Dag had almost been killed in Driptangle by a fellow Jaecan, the man organizing the city’s overthrow. Ishahb burn you, Brech, he though as he trotted toward the Triple Bunk. What did you get me into?