by Phillip Yeatman
in Issue 122, March 2022
A man in shimmering robes of gold and silver plunged through the fog. The shadow of a ferry bobbed at the end of the road. Three figures followed at a distance and paused as he stepped aboard.
“This is your time,” said Sturya. She was the hammer. Bold, strong, and blunt.
“Rovanmoshon lacks confidence,” Manawek said. She was the scalpel. “In his heart he’s still a barley cropper’s boy from the edge of nowhere.”
Rovan went red in the face. He hated for her to use his full name. And she knew it.
“He cannot learn confidence untested,” Sturya replied.
The boy was molten steel. Burning hot, yet to be given shape. “I can catch her,” he said, because the man they chased was no man at all, but a fellow apprentice gone rogue. Her name was Gaimagh.
Townhouses and commerce halls, their tiered roofs tapering to spearhead points, loomed half-seen in the haze. A clerk materialized and hurried past the trio. Manawek watched him sidelong. She and Sturya had guised themselves as Kolkegwan men, clad in the knee-high oilskin boots and sun-bleached hair typical of dyke builders. That caste was above scorn, yet coarse enough to be overlooked by polite society.
Rovan had guised himself as a dyke builder’s apprentice. One apprentice was as good as another.
“If he fails, Gaimagh will set the kolkoaki on our heels,” Manawek warned.
“Is that not your idea of fun?” Sturya grinned. “But Rovan will succeed and prove his craft. Then it will be about time you removed his tether.”
“Will it, then?” Manawek purred.
Sturya leant over and spoke three words in the boy’s ear. “Now repeat it.”
“Ye-unda mayama maral,” he said.
“Good. That phrase is Gaimagh’s tether. It’ll sink her like a harpoon. When she wakes, she won’t remember anything since the tether was created. Not you, or me, or one slick thing about guising.” Sturya’s expression hardened. “Now, if anyone sees you with her when she falls, that’ll be a dire turn for you. So knock her out and run. If you can’t do that, and she escapes, that’s a dire turn for us all.”
“Remember,” Manawek said, “the standing bounty on guisers in Kolkegwa is very generous.”
Rovan responded with a sarcastic smile.
“What if I change her mind?” he asked. For over a year now he’d watched Gaimagh bloom into an artful young woman. Little secret that her smile had the same effect on him as a whiff of poppy smoke. He wanted no more to leave her unconscious in some back alley than to see her handed over to the kolkoaki.
“No,” Sturya said sadly. “It’s too late for that.”
“Too late,” Manawek agreed. “Go now, Rovanmoshon, go. Unless you want to sail back to Loshrom and beg the clerks on Watchtower Hill for the chance to scrub their shoes.”
Rovan swallowed his anger and set off toward the ferry. He had no strategy. He hadn’t been trained to think; the point of training was that he did not have to. A group of parked wagons gave him cover for a ten-count, and when he emerged from between them, he appeared a different person.
Clips pinned his hair short and putty redrew the contours of his nose and cheeks. A wreath of paper feathers encircled his neck. To seal the guise he invoked a handful of magical glamours, such that the gaze of onlookers would be as wind over a gull’s wing. They would think nothing of his tacky collar and cheap woollen clothes and instead see a Loshokese squire, dapper in a robin-feather collar.
He was Loshokese by birth. Manawek would have called that a lazy guise, but he would not risk error. Not when he had everything to prove, and everything to lose.
Mildew had blackened the ferry signage to a riddle. Pelicans perched along the jetty’s pilings like avian gargoyles and loops of tarred rope and broken netting lay scattered on the planks. The ferry creaked on the receding tide, waves slapping the hull. A flat, narrow vessel, with an enclosed cabin to shelter passengers, and a tall pair of oarlocks at the stern. An oil lamp beside the cabin door cast an amber aura in the fog.
The apprentice paused at the gangway and glanced over his shoulder. Sturya and Manawek were gone.
“You aboard?” asked one of the ferrymen as he hefted a mooring line from a bollard.
Rovan tossed the man a copper star and thumped down onto the deck, then entered the cabin. Six faces, lit by a single porthole, rounded on him like sails catching the wind.
He identified them subconsciously:
Chalakanhan male. Carrying a machete. Probably a mercenary.
Dark-skinned woman, broad features. A Na Seian woman.
Woman with jewels in her palms—sorceress, he guessed. Red hair, bronze complexion. A Rythite.
Short man, black cap. Definitely from Marazh.
A fellow Loshokman, broad-faced with a neat beard.
Veiled figure. White linen. Narrow frame. A Gundswoman.
Yet no man in silver and gold robes. Gamaigh must have donned a new guise.
“Som’s graces,” Rovan said by way of greeting. A shadow fell upon the faces of the other passengers. He’d known the remark might offend, but it was exactly the kind of gormless thing an unseasoned Loshokese squire would say.
“Forgive my landsman,” the Loshokman said. “This must be his first time abroad.”
Rovan blushed on command. “Have I spoken poorly?”
“Worse,” the Chalakanhan rumbled. “Bankrupt of sense. Don’t invoke your god to me.”
He’s only young. Need we be so critical?” the Marazhman said. His were a nation of pathological diplomats, sandwiched as they were between bigger and badder realms.
“That’s no excuse,” the Rythite said in a voice like candle smoke. “A boy from Rython wouldn’t spout crap like that.”
The Gundswoman’s veil fluttered. “Sometimes it is better not to speak,” she said, and there was a moment of confusion as the room tried to parse her meaning.
“Forget it,” the Chalakanhan said. Talk resumed of import tariffs and the growing list of contraband from the north. Rovan studied his companions. No suggestion so far that one of them was not what they seemed. But he would study them and seek the flaw in Gaimagh’s guise. Some cultural or ethnic identifier she’d misused, or perhaps a stereotype she’d mistakenly embraced. Chalakanhans, for one, were known for their bullishness. Was this one too bullish? Or was the Gundswoman too demure? The Rythite’s accent a touch too husky?
The Loshokman leaned in close and interrupted his calculations. “Care for a smoke, landsman?”
Rovan tensed as though slapped.
It had to be Gaimagh, trying to catch him by surprise. She must not have guessed he knew her tether–the power he had over her.
“Why not,” he said with a shrug. He buried his hands in his pockets to mask their tremor and followed the Loshokman outside. All eyes followed him.
Fog, thicker over the harbour than land, shrunk the world to a gray bauble of water and sailboats at anchor. Rovan tried to spot the ferrymen at the stern but the whiteness obscured them completely. If he knocked Gaimagh unconscious, he could dive into the water, and no one would suspect a thing until the ferry reached the harbour’s far side. Plenty of time to escape.
The Loshokman procured a tobacco pouch and rolling papers from his trouser pocket and fashioned a cigarette. Three earrings in his left ear were the mark of a Loshokese university education. Rose-barley stains coloured his fingertips pink and the third button of his coat was undone for good luck, just as Rovan’s own father had done.
Who knew Gaimagh understood so much about Loshok?
Rovan cleared his throat. “Ye-unda mayama maral.”
“Excuse me?” the Loshokman asked as he dipped the cigarette’s tip into the oil lamp by the door.
Rovan repeated the phrase.
Nothing.
“Never mind,” he muttered. With embarrassment came clarity. Of course it wasn’t Gaimagh. The guise was too damn good.
“I saved you in there, don’t you know?” the man said. “They’d have figured you out soon enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t be coy.”
“I’m only on my way to the fishmongery to pick up–”
“Guiser,” the man whispered, the word bitter as a curse.
A chill slithered through Rovan. He felt seen. Not as a handsome squire, but the truth beneath: a rag-clad rogue, clownish in hair clips and paper feathers.
“Do you know how I knew?” the man asked.
Rovan shook his head.
“You don’t smell Loshokese. I wasn’t sure what it was, at first, only that I was somehow uncomfortable with you. Racking my brain, it came to me. There was something missing in the air. We have an odour, you know–the wind and food and dirt of Loshok steeped in our very skin. It must wash out, after long enough, but you’ve presented yourself as a boy fresh out of Dobol Kine harbour. You ought to smell like it.”
Manawek’s voice taunted Rovan. Hadn’t she told him a dozen times? Odour, the neglected sibling in a guiser’s repertoire, but the biggest traitor.
The water looked suddenly appealing. He could dive in, swim for his life. Pull himself up on the rocks somewhere and stow away on the first ship out of Kolkegwa. To where or what, he didn’t know. As long as it wasn’t a headman’s block. And it would be the headman’s block if he didn’t, he had no doubt.
His face must have betrayed his panic. “Relax, boy,” the man said. “I’m a scribe, not a kolkoaki. My name is Hesharon. Tell me, what are you doing on this boat?”
“Traveling,” Rovan said.
Hesharon crossed his arms. “Steady now, we’re well past the ruse. What are you up to? You stepped into that cabin and looked us all up and down like we were prize salmon.”
“Looking for someone,” Rovan mumbled.
“Speak up!”
“One of our clan means to betray us and I’m trying to stop her. Her name is Gaimagh. She was the last person to board the boat.”
Shapes loomed from the fog ahead. A watchtower, overshadowing the harbour entrance, and a wharf, thick with boats. The dark mound of timber and canvas that was the fishmongery. Somewhere beyond lurked the stone edifice of the Kolkoanrama, where Gaimagh could yield the names of her three accomplices to secure a pardon for herself.
“Who are you?” Hesharon asked.
“Rovan,” he said.
“Of?”
“Nowhere.”
“Grow up. Of?”
Rovan fidgeted. “Loshok. I was born in Loshok.”
Hesharon’s face lit up. “A Loshokese guised as a Loshokese. Is that clever or mad, I wonder? That must make you a Rovanmoshon. And perhaps there is just the slightest hint of Tashfent left in your accent.”
The boy nodded. “Uh-huh. I grew up there. My father carved dancing staves for the Somsfestival every year. I still sometimes dream of the rose-barley fields shimmering in summer.”
“How is it a roselander boy has strayed so far in life?”
Lies sprung to Rovan’ lips. That he was an orphan. Bought and sold, perhaps—sometimes Machtezi warbands roamed that far west. Or he could say he was driven from home during the Dry Years, when the monsoons failed and so many fled. He swallowed these stories. Intuition warned him the truth would serve him better here.
“When I came of age I went to Loshrom to make my fortune,” Rovan said, “but I could only find work catching rats. It was hard, and it paid badly. So I learned to pose as a tax collector, and that went well enough, ‘til I ended up trying to cheat a guiser. She said she’d turn me in if I didn’t become her student. I knew the laws, and the risks, but it was better than catching rats. So here I am.”
“Now that, unfortunately, is a traditional Loshokese tale,” Hesharon sighed. “I confess to feeling merciful. Consider this: why not accompany me back to Loshrom to work as my assistant?”
Rovan’s eyebrows went up. A job like that had been his dream once, back when he still called himself Rovanmoshon. But that was for the history books.
“If Gaimagh sells us out, I won’t get through customs,” he said.
“True enough,” Hesharon said. “You said she boarded before you?”
Rovan nodded.
“Then let’s make a deal: I will tell you which passenger she is. In return, you will promise to seek me in Loshrom at your earliest convenience. My full name is Hesharon Ush Modol, and I have an office on Watchtower Hill.”
His kindness startled Rovan like a warm day in winter. “Can you trust me?”
Hesharon smiled. “It helps that you would ask. In any case, I’ve demonstrated I can see right through you.”
And that was a problem. Because Rovan knew he had to lie. Most people in his position, like Gaimagh, would gladly trade guising for a normal life. But with every day he only loved it more. He wanted to do things no one else could. To change his appearance like the weather, to take those jobs that demanded such a skill—a shadowy player in the endless maneuvering and backstabbing of the aristocracies of the world. He’d outgrown Rovanmoshon’s humdrum dreams.
“Well?” Hesharon said.
Rovanmoshon lives, Rovan thought. One last time. So I can kill him for good.
The boy he’d been came back to him. The ignorance, the optimism. That lingering tendency of his voice to break. He’d been a temple-goer. Well-behaved. Homely. A boy who missed his mother, who wanted to be like his father.
He took Hesharon’s hand, and his lip was trembling.
“I’ll come. I’ll come work for you.”
That was all he needed. No glamours or tricks. His best performance yet.
Goodbye, he thought. He already felt different. Like somebody new.
The scribe weighed him up for a long moment. At last, he clicked his tongue. “Good. Well. The last person to board before you was the Marazhman.”
There it was.
I’m coming for you, Gaimagh.
“Thank you, eldsman,” Rovan said, using their native honorific. He reached for the cabin door and re-invoked his glamours.
“Wait,” Hesharon said. “One more thing. Guisers are infamously paranoid. Maybe sending you alone is a trick to cover your master’s escape?”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Rovan said. But he wouldn’t entertain the idea. Even as cold as Manawek’s blood seemed to run. She wouldn’t do a thing like that.
Inside the cabin, the Marazhman was explaining a deal brokered between Rython and Kolkegwa. Now Rovan knew the truth, Gaimagh’s glamours had no effect on him. He saw her plainly. Round face, poppy flower lips and large blue eyes. He looked away before she noticed him staring, and took a seat.
The more she spoke, the more he realized how poor her guise was. The way she pronounced the letter a was mostly Marazhish but sometimes not; and the pattern on her square cap wasn’t symmetrical. Small tells. Easy to overlook. Yet it was curious to Rovan she had yet to raise any suspicion at all.
Very curious.
The ferry bumped to a halt against the pier. One of the ferrymen opened the door and bid them safe travels to wherever their day might end. The Chalakanhan left first, stooping through the doorway, and one by one the rest followed. Rovan exited last and found Hesharon lingering on the prow.
“See you in Loshrom.”
The scribe nodded. “Good luck.”
Rovan went across the gangway and nodded to the Chalakanhan and the Rythite on his way past. The rubies in the sorceress’ palms flashed with inner light. He glimpsed Gaimagh making a quick getaway into the gloom of the fishmongery and set off after him. Once under the cover of the sagging canvas room, he broke into a run.
The fog reduced visibility within the market to shades of gray. Mounds of seafood covered every stall. Fish—mostly snapper and jacks—and freshwater eels, sea snakes, shellfish, shark fins and eggs, bundles of dried seaweed. Dead eyeballs and fish scales glinted in the murk. Rovan pinched his nose shut and closed his eyes as he burst through a curtain of eel carcasses on hooks. A narrow alleyway between brick warehouses awaited him on the far side. At the far end stood a small and neglected temple, its dome stained by a patina of verdigris.
Gaimagh stood in the doorway, still wearing her square Marazhi cap. “You almost have me, Rovanmoshon.”
A quick glance at the rooftops assured Rovan he hadn’t stumbled into an ambush. Yet Gaimagh was too cocky not to be hiding something. He had to hope he was capable of handling whatever it turned out to be.
Statues of humanoid crustaceans scowled down at him as he followed her into the temple’s antechamber. A wan ray of sunlight slid through dome’s oculus, illuminating Gaimagh and a patch of mosaic tiles beneath her feet.
“Where are they?” she asked. “They wouldn’t send you alone.”
“They trust me,” he said. Another glance at his flank. Still no one—friend or foe. He looked back at Gaimagh. What struck him was how little he felt for her. There had been a time when he would have sweated blood to find himself alone with her like this. She’d changed, somewhere along the line. Then again, so had he.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “They’re lurking around here somewhere.”
He prayed that were true. Hesharon’s warning echoed in his head.
“Why betray us?”
She smiled. “Informing on an apprentice will get me nothing but a pardon. But if we bring you in alive, then we’re talking some pretty respectable bounties.”
Reflections moved across the surface of her eyes. He spun around to find the Chalakanhan and the Rythite from the ferry approaching along the alley. The mercenary had brandished his hooked machete, and the woman’s dress rippled like flames.
“He says he’s alone,” Gaimagh called out.
So they were in league with each other. That’s why no one had questioned her guise on board the ferry. The Chalakanhan and Rythite were shills, there to lend credibility to her performance. Guisers worked in pairs and groups for the same reason.
Rovan once more scanned the rooftops. Now, rather than an ambush, he sought friendly faces. Surely Sturya and Manawek had prepared for this.
A ploy to cover their escape, Hesharon had said.
Som, he was stupid.
“Where are the other two?” the Chalakanhan boomed.
“Cowards,” Gaimagh replied.
Rovan turned to her. “I’m sorry.”
She offered him a puzzled look, then her eyes widened and she reached to cover her ears.
“Ye-unda mayama maral.”
Down she went, rigid as a bamboo stalk.
Boot heels clapped the tiles and Rovan whirled to find the Chalakanhan bearing down on him. The butt of the machete was hefted to strike a blow.
“Steady, apnu, you wouldn’t hurt a fellow namwa, would you?” Rovan cried out in his best Chalakanhan accent. It was enough. The machete paused mid-swing, the mercenary’s brow furrowed with surprise or confusion, or both, affording Rovan time to dive backward to where Gaimagh lay. He snatched the knife from her hand, then slipped from within his sleeve a vial of deep red liquid.
“Don’t play games,” the Chalakanhan said as he advanced.
“You won’t take me alive!” Rovan shouted with mock theatre. He feigned cutting his throat with the knife and popped the vial simultaneously. A fountain of red sprayed his clothes. One of the first tricks Manawek ever taught him. He crumpled on the tiles and gasped his tragic, dying breaths, soaked in what appeared to be his own blood.
The Chalakanhan loomed over him with a wary expression.
“He slew himself?” the Rythite said from somewhere behind.
“Crazy sranat,” the mercenary said, and then Rovan impaled the toe of his boot with the knife. The Chalakanhan made a sharp intake of breath, and his whole body went rigid. Blood welled from the hole. Rovan performed a rising handspring onto his feet and dashed at once for a small wooden door set into the temple wall.
As he made the final lunge, a beam of scarlet light locked him in place. The Rythite sorceress had leveled her palm jewels at him, each one pulsing like a hot coal. “Got him,” she said. “Grab the girl. We’ll turn them both in.”
The mercenary grunted. A red pool radiated from his foot. He knelt down to scoop the girl into his arms.
“I told you we’d be cutting it close,” a familiar voice said from the temple doorway.
“Look, he’s fine.”
The beam of light snaring Rovan wheeled away and he hit the floor. He glimpsed Sturya barreling into the temple, bracers crossed to deflect the Rythite’s next ray of witch-light. Shards of it twinkled across the domed ceiling. Then Sturya’s hammer was in her hand, rising and ready. The sorceress shimmered. Faded. Vanished altogether like a snuffed flame as the steel head swooped through the spot she’d only half a second before stood.
Manawek came next. Feline, dancing on the balls of her feet. She had the Chalakanhan in her sights, something slender and burnished in her hand. Her smile was innocent. The mercenary knew better. Despite the wounded foot he charged forward to meet her. He was quick. Quicker maybe than she expected—she only narrowly ducked beneath the deadly arc of his machete. Then she was in close and at her best. Twin spurts of blood erupted from just above his collar bones, and then he collapsed, as lifeless as Gaimagh beside him.
“Tell me you didn’t kill him, Manawek,” Sturya said as she helped Rovan to his feet. Murder drew too much attention.
“Please,” Manawek sniffed.
“I thought you’d abandoned me,” Rovan said.
“You, our sole companion?” Manawek said. “I’d get bored of Sturya within the hour.”
Sturya grimaced. “Likewise.”
Manawek touched the boy’s shoulder. “You did well, Rovan.”
Just Rovan.
His brief tingle of pride soon faded. “Someone caught me on the ferry,” he said.
“Yet you found a way out,” Manawek said with a shrug. “That’s all that matters. When I first went it alone, a pair of militiamen stopped me during a break-in. I panicked and mixed up all my languages. Luckily, they sent me to the infirmary with a suspected head injury.”
“But now’s not the time to reminisce,” Sturya said, gesturing to the two bodies beside them.
“True,” Manawek said. “Let’s dash.”
“Give me a moment,” Rovan said.
He fished a scrap of paper and a nub of charcoal from a pouch within his shirt, then wrote:
Go to Hesharon Ush Moffol
Wachtower Hyll, Loshrom.
Saye the boy from Tashfent sent you.
And that hes sorree.
He tucked the note into Gaimagh’s trouser pocket. If the Rythite did not come back, and no one else stumbled upon her, she might wake in two or three hours a free woman. One who’d forgotten her own sins. That version of Gaimagh, he thought, deserved a second chance.
“Good luck,” he whispered, then accompanied his fellow guisers out into the thinning fog.
©March 2022, Phillip Yeatman
Phillip Yeatman is an emerging writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in the anthology Story Hunters, Vol. II. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.