Tola’s Waft

by Ranylt Richildis

in Issue 150, July 2024

Tola lopes down the boulevard, and those along his path veer off with a shudder. It’s not the outsized hands on his narrow frame or the bow across his back—turned for a mercenary by the most expensive master. It’s not his well-known name, muttered in the dimmest corners over exchanges of gold, or the great-lynx padding beside him, snapping at air. It’s certainly not his face, which has a pleasing structure, or his general alertness, which is natural in an archer. It’s Tola’s outrageous stench that sends other people scrambling, tripping over violet flagstones in their haste.

Vendors are countless in this floating city, but Tola has a favourite when he wants to sell his haul. His bag is of savage-leather and bulges with loot from his last assignment: there are fifty fewer cultists thanks to his arrows and great-lynx. The pay was sparkling, of course, but the mission itself was the draw. Tola’s body twitches when he isn’t hunting prey. He’s always the first to admit this with one of his languid shrugs.

A human woman stiffens and grabs her two small children when she’s hit with Tola’s waft. She turns with watering eyes, while the younger of her offspring yaps a cough. Her sun-pruned face adopts new folds as she wrestles with her disgust, hands clenching her children’s shoulders as she steers them from the miasma. 

The youngest points at the archer. It’s not Tola’s tapered ears, nearly as long as his forearms—people in the floating city are used to every sort. It’s not his copious, shimmering locks, which other species envy. It’s the fact of Tola’s odour that arrests the coughing child as its mother hauls it away to safer air. “Yoick!” the child expresses, batting at its sibling in joyous revulsion, but Tola is inured to these reactions.

The city’s vendors lift their collars against his smell, but they don’t close up their storefronts as he treads the boulevard. Several lock their gazes on Tola’s heavy sack, hoping he’ll approach with exotic goods—a heirloom weapon or enchanted piece of gear. One steps out of her shop and waves her arm at Tola, willing to endure his stench if he’ll add to her antiques. He has often brought her tokens he unearthed in caves or cellars, but today he shakes his head and lifts a shoulder as he strides on. 

His destination is fixed. It’s been weeks since he’s seen Mr. Azure. No one else can tempt him, and he only pauses when an urchin nears his great-lynx with idiot fingers. He levers the child—mostly gently—away from Anz, who lets out a growl, which turns into a yawn as Tola’s hand settles onto his ruff appeasingly. 

Children infest Dal City, which is prosperous and safe, except when mercenaries flanked by beasts drop in to trade. Tola paces its stones, which blush like a contusion and hang by magic in the ether. It has a citadel, a bank and an auction house. The first is mostly useless in this floating sanctuary, but it makes a gorgeous skyline on approach. There are three inns in the city, but only one of them interests Tola, who speeds his loping as he nears it.

The Leyline Lodge has propped its doors open for the afternoon. What escapes are the clinking sounds of dishes and the scents of cooking things: roasting meats and fennel breads and the cheeses of Dal City. The Leyline’s reputation isn’t great. Legerdemain is a daily fling among its clatter of tables, but the food is satisfying every time. So is Mr. Azure. 

Tola takes a bar-seat next to a doorway. He’ll cause the least disruption in that spot. Patrons shift to farther tables but never leave. They are used to unsavoury things at this particular hostel, and they are leery of Tola’s bow and growling familiar. No one barks at Tola as he dumps his sack on the bar-top and waits for Mr. Azure to approach.

That isn’t the other’s name—not exactly. It’s only what Tola calls him, for his eyes are like shallow water in the warmest shoals of the world. Tola watches him serving patrons at the other end of the bar, his great haft of yellow hair tied to one side of his throat, his white blouse loose and airy in the summer clime. He is one of Tola’s kind, hailing from Silmo City, the elfin seat that Tola misses but never visits. Mr. Azure is otherwise nothing like the archer. Untrained in weapons and repulsed by blood, he’s better suited as a barkeep in one of the dullest cities. With his stunted sense of smell, he’s also uniquely suited for Tola’s closeness.

Anz stretches out his length, then moves to a water-bowl at the foot of the bar. Two dogs that were frenziedly lapping race away, their tails turned into curls between their legs. The great-lynx looks relaxed once the dogs have fled, cocking his big ruffed head to keep his whiskers out of the water. His drinking is as loud as the conversation in the lodge.

Mr. Azure frees a half-smile and moves to Tola’s end of the curving bar. “Hunter,” he says to Tola, for that was Tola’s training, and it’s more polite than calling the other mercenary. “Anz,” he nods at the great-lynx, who lifts his face from the water-bowl and blinks up mildly at the barkeep.

For a moment Tola forgets he has an excuse in the heavy sack that bulges on the bar-top. He twirls a spiral of hair mostly absently—it’s the darkest mass in the city around his fingertip. He is thinking, once again, about how the other’s eyes are the very blue of the gauzy veils that soften the doorways of Silmo City, a place of crimson walls and yellow-gem frescoes. It is a very blatant city, as his species is casually blatant about their beauty when they leave it. 

Mr. Azure pokes at the sack and cocks his head much like Anz. He wears his neutral dealer’s expression and ignores Tola’s curling lip. Tola knows to be patient. The barkeep plays a game of avoidance, not looking toward the staircase that leads to an attic room where he sometimes secrets Tola, while Anz lies at the door in the plant-filled hallway just outside.

“What fascinating ruinscape are you coming from today?” Mr. Azure digs into the sack, selecting items merely by touch.

“A darkened plain in another time-fold. The sun never fully rises, and mountainous crystals ring with a tenor that trembles the ears.” Tola pinches the very tip of one of his upright tapers, recalling the steady hum that filled that shadowy land—a monotonous tune that threatened to shatter his teeth.

“And what fell dead in your path?” The question is soft as Mr. Azure draws a circlet of beaten silver from the sack. It is set with the blackest stone, one with a promising glow. He glances a question at Tola, who can only shake his head. The enchanted thing still needs appraising by some kind of magic-user. There is no blood, at least, on this arcane, looted thing.

“Basilisks and boars with a natural, glistening armour. And a settlement of cultists who are better off removed.” Tola adds this last bit softly, less smug about his deeds when he speaks them to Mr. Azure. He waves a hand over the sack and gives a shrug. “First pick goes to you, but I can take it across the street if you’d rather not trade today.” He turns his head toward the staircase, which is Tola’s foremost purpose at the Leyline.

Anz thumps his hairy weight down on the floor by Tola’s foot. He gives a feline complaint and licks at a paw, eyeing the other patrons. A tableful of gnomes whisper as they watch the marksman and the great-lynx. A pair of fox-like adepts share a wine-flask and browse the bookcase. A slump of human warriors, having shed the worst of their armour, dominate two couches near the staircase. None will provoke another on this floating sanctuary, but cat and archer are attuned to every twitch in the fighters’ fingers, nevertheless.

As ever, Mr. Azure looks reluctant. About trading in blood-got goods. About Tola’s waiting body. Yet he never quite resists—he always succumbs to Tola’s half-smiles. To hasten the day along, Tola stands, throws back his hair and grapples in the sack for the curious goblet he took from the cultists—the one with the bright blue gems set into its stem. 

“One of these is a gift. No bartering accepted.” He withdraws the cup with a flourish. It would suit the ensorcelled shelf behind the bar-top, safe from the lightest fingers—a background for Mr. Azure’s matching eyes.

But before he can show the other, something calamitous happens: Mr. Azure flinches.

Tola knows that flinch at once. His gut drops out of his belly as he meets Mr. Azure’s gaze and the other’s flaring nostrils. Mr. Azure rears away. It’s hard to know which one is more appalled. 

“Is that what it’s always smelled like?” the other gasps, turtling back his head. His haft of hair catches on a button as he twists away.

“Do you…?” Tola starts to ask, to no account. “I think it’s been growing stronger.” His voice is faint as he eyes the hopeless staircase. 

Anz is on his paws, reacting to Tola’s tension. With a bound he is on the bar-top, then on the floor on the other side, slinking with a rumble toward Mr. Azure. But the great-lynx is only moved by commiseration—for the archer or the barkeep, it’s hard to know. His rough red tongue laps Mr. Azure’s palm and fingers, earning his huge ruffed head a shuddery pat.

“What is that?” Mr. Azure finally questions, once the great-lynx and other patrons return to their business. Anz is back at Tola’s side, leaning his weight on Tola’s hip, like a dog over-bound to its master.

Tola only lifts a hand. He doesn’t know. He cannot smell it.

“I thought it would be offal or viscera.” Mr. Azure grates out a laugh that has no humour in it. 

“But I can’t name that.” He stresses the final word. 

By now the delicate tips of Tola’s ears must be pink as the dawn. He is far too battle-hardened to dew at the eye, but his chest holds an elemental spinning in havoc. He can only stroke Anz’s ruff and gaze at Mr. Azure in his grief.

The other approaches again. It seems his nose is still too weak to catch the miasma unless he is close. Most would consider this lucky. But Mr. Azure is curious—it’s why he polishes glasses at the Leyline, where novel faces can be seen, hour by hour, and far-fetched stories can be heard across the bar-top. 

Tola moves his shoulders up and down, creating a bit of a wind.

Mr. Azure retreats again, his haft of hair pressed to his face in consternation. “I am sorry for you.”

Tola knows the other’s pity isn’t just for the wretched stench that clings to his hair and skin no matter how often he bathes or changes his clothes, and no matter how he varies his diet. It’s the pity a peaceful soul has for a mercenary with no compunction against life-stealing—who roams in isolation among dimensions, but for a faithful great-lynx who can somehow stand the smell.

***

Several years before, in Silmo City, Tola met Ilemae with a grin. It had been weeks since he’d last seen her. Fresh from the hunters’ barracks in the Singing Woods, he dropped his bow and bag so he could grasp Ilemae’s waist with his oversized hands. She smelled her usual musk of smoky herbs, which she burned in a coppery dish to craft her potions. She still had a year to go in her alchemist training, but Tola had graduated. He had his seal from the hunters’ college and rousing freelance assignments.

He kissed her. He dug his nose in her milk-white hair. “Where’s Feharil?” he murmured, wanting the trio complete. The pores in his body opened wider at the thought of Feharil’s shoulders and the feel of Ilemae’s breasts beneath her robe.

“On his way. And you have time for a bath.” A nose under gilded freckles wrinkled slightly as Ilemae took herself out of their hug. “What have you been doing?” she asked her oldest friend. Her expression should have been arch, but it was downcast and perhaps ashamed as she moved away from one whose body always fit so perfectly with her own.

Tola had bathed before meeting his friends. He sniffed a pit and lifted a shoulder, agreeable. He smelled nothing but nutty soap in the folds of his shirt, but he angled toward the room that held the cistern, which connected to the flowing ducts that fed better houses in the city. His kind was fastidious when it came to play in the furzy cushions that every home seemed to collect. The ones on this floor were as red as Ilemae’s robe and very patchy. He knew that when his face was finally pressed on those pillows again, they would smell like ecstatic sweat, smoky herbs and Feharil’s hair.

“He’s been answering calls for blood-gold missions,” came Feharil’s voice, and Tola turned from the cistern with a stiffened back. “Or so the gossips would have it.” Feharil made for Ilemae rather than greet his friend. The arm he put around her looked protective.

Tola was caught off-guard. He even tripped over a cushion as he moved back into the hub-room of the house Feharil shared with Ilemae and Tola both, when Tola wasn’t hunting. “They’re not—” he started to say, then stopped, because they were. He stretched a hand toward Feharil, who remained across the room. “You know that’s my profession. I want to help pay for this house. Buy materials for your studies.” 

“You are a hunter—a provider of meat for the shops, and a defender should this city ever need it.” 

Tola’s head spun. It’s true he hadn’t discussed the finer prospects for making money—the far more stirring assignments than hiding in shrubs, waiting on a ruminant. Stealth and aim, after all, make an appealing blend for those with gold and political aspirations. It helped, Tola had recently learned, to be unbothered by the bloodshed—even stimulated.

He said nothing about that thrill to Ilemae and Feharil. The latter’s eyebrows were so knit, he was almost like a stranger. Feharil’s cheekbones, already cutting, looked like glaives as they glinted at Tola. Even his alchemist’s robe took on a darker hue, so that brow and hair and cloth—cloth like armour—dimmed the room. 

Instead, Tola saw. He recognized it at last: his beloveds were now a duo folded as two in wrenching exclusion. Between them, hands were clasped as tight as a lock on a single unit. Their fingers shared in herbs, potions and cryptic fires—and in judgment, it was clear, now that Tola thought to look.

He moved toward them, desperate. This time he didn’t trip. His kind were rarely clumsy, even in distress, and both Feharil and Ilemae avoided catching their toes on cushions as they backed away in tandem from his approach. Tola’s hands were both outstretched, trying to grab back their affection, for he couldn’t risk any words in this dire moment. All he could do was plead for understanding with his gestures.

The delicate wrinkle returned to Ilemae’s nose. With the hand that wasn’t balled up with Feharil’s, she covered her face with a sleeve and looked at her remaining partner, sharing her offence. Feharil jerked back his head. He smelled it, too, and seemed to shudder. He pointed at Tola’s bag then at the doorway. 

“You are unwelcome, if that’s your new pursuit. And I don’t know what sort of ichor you’ve rubbed in your hair, or what you are guttling on your missions, but you reek.”

***

Tola suppresses that throbbing recollection. He ignores the more recent stab of Mr. Azure’s rebuff. Instead, he strings his bow in absolute silence, one knee on the stony ground. There is phosphorescence in the cavern walls, but he doesn’t need it to see his target. His eyes are nearly as fine as Anz’s in the dark, and so are his ears, which hear the furtive shifts just ahead of him in the tunnel.

The sound has a moistness to it. These creatures won’t be rodents or kobolds or giant spiders. They’ll be lumpish things that share the dampness of this cavern, which Tola and the great-lynx breached through a waterfall in the grimmest part of a forest. He has already wrung the water out of his clothes and glorious hair, and Anz has shaken the droplets from his pelt. They pad in coordination toward the clammy things around the bend, Tola’s bow prepared with several arrows.

There. Four mycelic masses start to glow a pungent yellow as Anz surges out ahead and leaps toward the nearest. The great-lynx tears out chunks with full abandon, while Tola perforates other mushrooms with a casual multi-shot and a satisfied sniff. He loads another four arrows without any conscious thought, but the fourth may not be needed, for Anz’s mushroom has lost its roundness and its motion. The great-lynx attacks another, and in moments the cavern is scattered with fungal debris, and there are no more humid noises up ahead.

They might have avoided this skirmish, but the manse of Ontologous Dollop is sealed with some enchantment that masks its front from callers unless they are invited. It was carved into a cliff-face by Dollop’s sorcery. The last time Tola was there, he had been summoned, swanning past the portico with its set of mossy pillars. It was Anz who alerted Tola about a possible back passage behind the manse. As Tola discussed contractual terms with Ontologous Dollop in the study, there came a feline growl at a suspect panel. Tola remarked the bolt-hole while Dollop drew a map to his newly commissioned target.

Dollop needed Tola on that last visit. He coveted a rival’s signet and paid good gold for a hired death. Now Tola needs the enchanter and feels no guilt as he creeps through the tunnel while Anz licks mycelic juices from his maw. He will force his way through the panel and convince Ontologous Dollop to cure his pall.

There’s no need to hunt for the ingress into the manse. As the strangling tunnel widens, the walls begin to glow with more than phosphorescence, and Tola hears laboured breathing from a heavy figure. Anz lifts his prowler shoulders and lowers his head. The flicker of candlelight in terrific excess assaults their gazes as they arrive in a yawning chamber of stone and crystal and oily creeks trisecting the floor. There are symbols all around, and oaken tables full of books, and something that looks unpleasantly like an altar. 

In the centre of this ritual chamber rears Ontologous Dollop, an utterly titanic human who must have ettin blood in his lineage. His girth looks unfathomable under his ink-black robes, where bulges vie for space as he puffs at Tola and Anz. Candlelight limns his face, so waxen is his skin, and his hair is as dark as Tola’s and tonsured around his head. There is a mushroomy gloss to the enchanter, as if he were part of the cavern, but Ontologous Dollop is just a very ugly human. 

He watches the encroachers hop over a rivulet and come to stop. Tola drops his bow to indicate harmlessness. Anz sits down on his haunches, taking Tola’s cue to look impassive. This despite the presence of two large men-at-arms who stand on either side of the ingress into the manse. They wear bands of toxic green around their arms, and their chest-plates and half-helmets are starting to rust. Their poleaxes, however, look well honed. Tola’s arrows will have to fly toward their eyeballs or their throats if those weapons are lifted. 

“I remember your bouquet,” Dollop says as he shambles forward, resting a hand on a table to steady his unwieldiness. The enchanter looks unwashed, for a greasiness coats his features, but Tola smells nothing foul as Dollop wheezes. The height and shoulder-breadth would intimidate any human—to one of Tola’s kind, Dollop looms like an escarpment, blotting out his guardsmen.

“That’s why I’ve come here.”

“You might have sent off a pigeon and dodged the waterfall. And whatever lurks in that tunnel.”

“Not quite as many now.”

Dollop wheezes a laugh. “My little quester. Have you ever regretted a slaughter? No,” and he waves a hand, erasing his words. “Have you ever even felt one?”

Tola can’t be bothered to give an answer. “I am feeling the revulsion of someone close to me now. My aroma seems to have worsened.” He repeats his shoulder-dance, stirring the air around his frame so that Dollop can catch a waft.

The other waves a hand again. “It eats away this humidity, like a poison spell.”

“What can you do about it? You have quite an arsenal.” Tola makes a show of glancing around the chamber—at a rack of arcane staffs, a shelf of cloudy orbs, a cabinet full of phials boasting every shade in the world. One of them luminesces the blue of Mr. Azure’s eyes, and Tola would aver that Dollop sees the bolt of longing that flashes through him.

“So Tola the Dispatcher is lonely, all of sudden. That you feel.” Dollop’s bulges give a tumble under his robes in his amusement. “Well, indeed. A first obsession can be throbbing.”

Tola’s gaze drops to the ground. He watches oily water moving through a floor-rift, pulling along sinister fish that Anz won’t even paw at. They are invisible in those depths, but Tola knows they are in there, for Anz is captivated by the rivulet’s surface.

He doesn’t speak it. He won’t give the truth to Dollop. Ilemae and Feharil wink in his mind, but he won’t let their faces surface in the presence of the enchanter.

Tola sniffs and raises his head—cranes his neck to look at the other. “It’s my turn to hire a service, and I will pay you. Gold, if you prefer, but I can also offer a favour. Something like the last one, should you have another assignment.” 

Dollop studies Tola. He is lost in contemplation and takes his time responding. Sensing Tola’s impatience, Anz releases a half-roar, the pelt along his spine rippling fast like the oily creek.

At last the huge enchanter waves another hand, as if the request were nothing. “I have the means to help you. An embedded illusion, perhaps. A neurolfactatomic effect to overlay your stink and trick the receiver’s nose into thinking you smell like cedar. Or something equally pleasant and nature-born.” He waves a hand again, gesturing at the archer. “The very obverse of whatever it is that you’re emitting, which is not of any dimension I have travelled.” 

“No one seems able to name it.” Tola wonders if that’s what makes it so foul. “It’s not the smell of blood or rotting things,” he murmurs at the brooklet. “So I’ve been told.”

“The perfumes related to death. That’s what they expect.” Dollop makes a rictus of his mouth. “But we all know death, you see. That is something we fathom.” He draws an arc with his hands, as if describing the promise that surrounds every living thing.

The nose of Ontologous Dollop finally succumbs to Tola’s waft. It bunches up, like muscles about to do battle with the odour. It looks nothing like Ilemae’s delicate wrinkling. This nose is as lumpish as the mushrooms Tola wrecked back in the tunnel, and it seems to be testing something, or verifying a theory.

“You can’t just simply remove it?”

“I could. If you would let me. The price would be much higher than whatever random assignment I’d have you undertake in return for the cheaper illusion. Which can only last a season.” He considers Tola some more, as if digging as deep as he can into hidden knowledge, then wags a bloated finger. “I know what it’s attached to, as you do yourself. I must pull it out by the root, and that will take something else that I suspect you prize too much.”

Tola stiffens and refuses to glance at Anz. 

Dollop throws back his head and rattles out a laugh. “No, your beast would be a bad trade. It would pine to death and be utterly worthless.” The huge white face lowers down again and gazes pointedly at Tola. “What would I do with a great-lynx? Here,” he gestures again, requesting Tola approach so that Dollop can remain supported by the table.

Tola obliges, not without reservation. The enchanter places a thumb against Tola’s forehead. It feels like a pat of dough that has been warmed by a baker’s kneading. Something squirms inside him—livened by Dollop’s seeking. A memory from his childhood wriggles out of the sediment that forms the adult Tola. He sees it, all of a sudden, and he knows Dollop sees it too: the small grey cat, still mostly a kitten, which lived across the lane when Tola was still a youth in the crimson, azure and mustard city. There it crouched on the neighbour’s steps, trembling before the bird it recently killed, terrified of itself and the instinct that guided its pounce. Child Tola knew at once that the cat had just been driven to a first kill. There hadn’t been any choice or any self-control, or even an understanding of why it was savaging birds. The cat, after all, was pampered with a lavish dish of food whenever it liked.

An expulsion that sounds like ah escapes the enchanter’s mouth, but Tola senses this is no revelation for Ontologous Dollop. The doughy warmth, now slightly sweaty, shifts across Tola’s brow, as if it wants to lodge in another part of his brain. The scene in Silmo City falls back into the depths, taking the trembling cat with it. Another bursts into his mind—this one recent. He is back on the shadowy plain with the droning crystals, nocking arrows into his bow and aiming at a clutch of cultists who glow demonic. The arrows pierce their flesh with satisfying thunks. That sound livens Tola’s blood and feeds him over and over. He feels a pulse of power with every death—the only power he can hope to have in his lightweight frame that knows no magic.

“I could not get a copper for your stench, but some would pay for your iron talent and lack of remorse. Could you trade it—your gore-drenched life? The odour and the instinct are indivisible. I think you already know that.”

Tola recoils from the doughy touch and avoids the other’s gaze. His ways of being and meaning are not guided by a spell or inspired by a potion. What would he do without them? Retire atop a spire in a rounded, cane-skinned hut with a potbelly stove, counting off his days on the lake below, fishing meals for himself and Anz?

“You may as well extract my bones,” he finally says. He is bewildered as he blinks at the enchanter. He can’t see how this charm could even be accomplished.

Ontologous Dollop scoffs, then points at the cabinet of phials. “You’d be surprised what can be bottled, little dispatcher. There are others in this world who lack obsessions. They would tolerate the stink in exchange for your lethal aim and callousness. You can keep your beastly familiar. With a bit of luck, your cat is all the protection you’d ever need atop that pillar.”

Tola recoils again, unmoored by the other’s spying. There’s a bump against his hip as Anz leans hard against him. The great-lynx knows some words in the common language, but he can’t follow conversations. It’s Tola’s wretchedness Anz senses—the implications of a dilemma.

But it’s no dilemma, Tola determines as he drops a hand on Anz’s ruff. He glances at the azure phial, nearly potbellied as the stove he envisions in the cane-skinned shack atop an aerie over a lake. Its sapphire gleam tugs at his groin, but it wouldn’t fill a void left in his person. 

Though he doesn’t retrieve his bow—he won’t stir the men-at-arms waiting near the sliding panel—he imagines its silky wood against his palm and the tension of the bowstring when it’s poised to release its arrows. He thinks of the power-pulses that quicken his sap, and the gratifying drop of hapless targets. He turns from Ontologous Dollop without a word, as he turned from Mr. Azure back at the Leyline. Now that he’s shown his back to the men-at-arms, he can stoop, sweep up his bow, and canter into the tunnel with the great-lynx keeping pace without a sound.

©July 2024, Ranylt Richildis

Ranylt Richildis a writer, editor and teacher based in Ottawa. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, PodCastle and Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, introduced by Margaret Atwood. She’s the founding editor of Lackington’s, an online SFF/H venue devoted to stories told in unusual or poetic language. This is her first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.