This is the latest installment of The Nameless Assassins, the tale of an assassins crew in a haunted Victorian city powered by demon blood. The crew consists of Isha, a spy who ran away with her family’s demonic sword; Ash, a part-demon, wannabe robber baron; and Faith, a witch who loves ruffly pink dresses and is just so, so bored. You can start reading about their adventures here.
In other news, I’m very excited to announce that my novel, The Magicists, is now available on Amazon! You can check it out here.
A New World Order
While Crow’s Foot subsided into a cautiously optimistic peace, Ash and I lay in our cots, fretting over how we were missing this chance to influence the new world order. Although Bazso stopped by my bedside on his flying visits to headquarters, he refused to discuss politics lest it worry me and slow my recovery (as if!), and Mylera never came at all. Isolated from the gang leaders, all Ash and I could do was harass the doctors for news and talk in circles with our fellow inmates. Once he felt a little better, Ash entertained the entire infirmary of equally bored scoundrels by holding classes for the Insect Kids.
Namely, he was training them to act as effective Skulks – and to parse complicated sentence structures in the process. At one point, he explained (to general chuckles and groans), “You’ll deliver messages, create distractions, scout, and otherwise support us while we carry out the main mission.”
By then, the children had figured out how to handle Ash and his vocabulary. Spider automatically referred to me: “Miss?”
I translated, “You’ll help us on scores. You’ll do things like what you did this time.”
“Ah.” To the amusement of the gang members around us, all the children nodded sagely. Spider asked, “Mister Slane, what should we do today?”
Ash pondered the question, then concluded regretfully, “I don’t believe we have any work at the present. At least, not work you are capable of addressing. Here, go buy yourselves a treat.” And he pushed some slugs at the children, who scampered off in search of anything sweet. That done, he turned to our presumably more capable crewmate. “Faith, Faith, Faith.”
“Aaaash, dear?” she inquired lazily from the cot she’d commandeered. Goodness knew why she insisted on staying in the infirmary – Sawbones, Danfield, and every last patient would have loved to kick her out.
“Faith, since you seem to be the only one who can leave this building at the moment, given our current injuries – ”
Outraged that anyone might try to outdo her at literally anything, she squealed, “I’m very sunburned, I’ll have you know! Look at how pink my skin is!”
A couple nearby Lampblacks pulled their blankets over their heads, muttering about how Sawbones and his fancy new assistant had better discharge them soon. A Red Sash groaned and hauled herself out of bed for a bathroom run.
Ash, however, didn’t miss a beat. “And it looks radiant on your being.”
“Awww!” Faith beamed and preened.
After giving her a minute to savor this triumph, Ash returned to the main topic. “Perhaps you have some way of dealing with the fact that we just overthrew the leader of a reasonably mid-tier organization in broad starlight.”
Testing and drawing out each word, she asked, “Aaaash, are you saying that your haggard soul hates the heat that we have hoarded?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a couple more inmates decide that standing in line for the bathroom was a lot more appealing than staying within earshot of Faith.
“Oh, Faith,” sighed Ash, noticing the same phenomenon. “Yes, something very much like that. Can you reduce our heat?”
“For you, Ash, anything!”
Leaving a sequined pink cushion in the center of her cot to “keep you company and remind you of me while I’m away,” she bounced off to track down the remaining Crows.
Word on the street held that the last, die-hard dregs of the gang – all six of them – had fought their way out of Crow’s Foot and taken refuge in Charhallow. Proving her capableness, Faith systematically located their flophouses and accosted each in turn. Since Bazso and Mylera were taking credit for the hit, she dressed up as a Red Sash and told Henry Bell that it was the Lampblacks who had killed Lyssa. Then she posed as a Lampblack to “Isha’s dear friends, oh, what were their names? Skinner, Stev, and Noggs?” and accused the Red Sashes of murder.
“They’re alive?” I interrupted at this point. “They’re okay?”
“Alive, yes…. But ‘okay’ is such an imprecise descriptor,” she protested slyly. “For example, are you referring to their physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual states?”
“Any. All.”
Something about my tone convinced her to ease off (a bit, anyway), and she gave a little shrug. “They’ve never been better. I explained that we know where they live, and wouldn’t it be so very unfortunate if something horrible happened to you while you’re at home, given how powerful we are now that we’ve taken over your turf? But we understand that there might be relocation costs while you adapt to your new lives, so here’s a fraction of a coin to make your lives a little better in these trying times.”
“Did they take it?” I demanded. I couldn’t picture Noggs accepting charity from anyone who was even tangentially responsible for Lyssa’s death.
“Of course they did! They fell at my feet, clutching the purses to their heaving bosoms and sobbing in gratitude. I think some of them even left lipstick marks on my satin slippers.” Stretching out her legs, Faith pretended to examine her boots.
Relieved into tolerance, I played along – “Don’t worry, your slippers look just fine” – and ignored her cry of, “Isha, you say the sweetest things!”
Even if they’d never forgive me, at least my friends had survived.
Meanwhile, egged on by Faith, the other inmates were beginning to tease me about how very often Bazso stopped by the infirmary for someone who was supposedly busy establishing himself as the ward boss of Crow’s Foot. Although his visits were a hopeful sign, I opted to reserve judgment until I could ask him in private whether he’d finished “thinking about things.” My chance came at last when Sawbones grudgingly gave me a semi-clean bill of health and liberated me. On my way out the door, I sent Moth to apprise Bazso of the development, and before I’d limped to the edge of the district, she caught up with a note inviting me to dinner in Charterhall.
“Will they have candles and roses, miss? And them musical ing-stroo-ments you put under your chin?” Moth asked dreamily. Even if I hadn’t taken the children to the theater yet, I’d explained the concept, and she was quite taken with the idea of dedicated music-makers. (Both the musicians and the instruments.) “Charterhall is super fancy, isn’t it?”
Given that the restaurant Bazso had picked lay just across the canal from Crow’s Foot, there was a limit to how posh it could be – although it would certainly be fancier than the Leaky Bucket. I refused to read too much into that, though. After all, the new ward boss of Crow’s Foot might want to flaunt his position, just a little.
Moth was still skipping along, peeking at me hopefully.
“Maybe. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“He likes you, miss,” she pronounced, with all the wisdom of her ten years.
I didn’t have the heart to explain that relationships – at least my relationships – were much more complicated than mere liking. All I said was, “I hope you’re right.”
As it turned out, she was.
Bazso had selected a sober, middle-class establishment off Imperial Avenue, where it crossed the ruins of the old city walls. He’d even bribed the hostess for a small table by the window so we could gaze across the canal at his new domain.
With the black water as a backdrop, he raised his whiskey glass. “You’re amazing.”
Automatically, I clinked my glass against his, ran through different angles of attack, and decided that I wasn’t in a subtle mood. With a bluntness that did him proud, I reminded him, “You said you needed time to think things over. Have you thought things over?”
His face growing serious, he folded his arms on the white tablecloth, leaned forward, and lowered his voice. “Yeah, I’ve thought things over. It was – it was a lot to process, you know.”
I set my glass back down in the precise same spot, aligning the facets exactly to where they had been. “I know.”
“But, at the end of the day, you were right,” he confessed, causing me to look up again. “And even though Mylera still harbors some weird suspicions that I don’t fully understand, I don’t really see how you can be a triple agent for someone who wants to maneuver her and me into a peace.” He cocked his head a little, inviting me to deny it.
“A triple agent,” I mused, too relieved to censor myself. “That would be interesting….”
One eyebrow lifted. “That’s not encouraging,” he warned, but he was mostly joking.
As was I. “No, no, no, that would be too complicated even for me,” I reassured him with an airy wave. Then I stopped, aghast. “Oh my gods, I’m starting to sound like Faith!”
Relaxing, he chuckled, “If people spend time together, I guess that tends to happen….” Then he, too, stopped at an appalling thought. “Don’t turn into Faith.”
Now I was scanning all my actions for Faith-isms so I could purge them. “I’m trying not to.”
“She is really cold,” pronounced the new ward boss of Crow’s Foot, who’d hired a crew of assassins to remove the former occupant of that position.
Cupping my hand over my glass, I twirled it restlessly and asked without meeting his eyes, “How much did you hear about what went down in that tower?”
“Enough. I do know why you’re not dead.”
“Yeah….” Continuing to fidget with the glass, I asked in a small voice, “Do you ever feel bad about someone you killed?”
This was not the sort of topic we ever discussed.
“What, like Lyssa?” Bazso spat out the name with distaste, exactly the way Mylera would have, and disclaimed any need for guilt: “Lyssa was a murderer.”
“So am I, so are you,” I pointed out, and he eyeballed me warily, as if wondering whether I were going soft or something equally unsavory. “It’s just – it’s just – we went into that room, and there she was, wearing a pirate hat and this military coat with random medals all over it – and she was just trying so hard. She was like a little girl playing dress-up, you know?”
Heaving a sigh and sagging against his chair back, Bazso admitted, “I do know. But Isha, Lyssa was hardly innocent. She ran what was, at the time, the most infamous of the Crow’s Foot gangs.”
“I know, it’s just….” Biting my lip, I confessed, “Earlier, when you talked about triple agents – I did want to talk to her. I just never got a chance to because she was holed up in her tower.”
After studying my face for a long moment, he reached his own conclusions. “You became friends with them, didn’t you?” he asked, sounding slightly amused but mostly resigned. “Those Crows you were hanging around with.”
I nodded at the tablecloth.
“Well.” Bazso ran through some mental calculations, then suggested, “I could always use a few extra scoundrels. If you think they might join the Lampblacks…?”
Almost before he finished the question, I was shaking my head. None of them would ever serve someone who’d murdered their leader and destroyed their gang.
And I would think the less of them if they did.
Reaching across our untouched menus, Bazso took my hands and said gently, “At some point, Isha, you have to pick sides.”
Feeling very whiny, I protested, “But what if I could bring everyone together into one big side?” It was a question that was absolutely unworthy of my parents, and Sigmund would have disowned me if he’d heard it.
Bazso only gave my hands a squeeze, which did nothing to soften his next words: “That doesn’t work. People don’t get along that well. Arguably, it’s what the Immortal Emperor tried to do with the Imperium, and look how well that turned out.”
Pulling my hands away, I twisted them together in my lap and forced myself to sit still. “I just – I mean, I know it was all three of us – and the two of you hired us – but in a way, I was the most direct cause of death….” Again I saw the balcony of the Crow’s Nest, the Crow clinging to Lyssa’s boot while she fought mindlessly to fling herself off the edge. I saw the blood that blossomed across his back when I shot him to force him to let her go….
“Yeah, but Isha, you’ve killed – ” Catching a glimpse of our waiter hovering impatiently in the background, Bazso broke off. “Look, I don’t know. This is not a thing I’m good at. I usually just wall all of that away and try not to think about it.” For a third time, he emphasized, “Lyssa wasn’t a good person. A lot of people are going to be a lot better off now.”
“Yeah…,” I agreed slowly. It was actually true. Lyssa’s death was the keystone to the peace that ended a war that had claimed scores of lives.
And yet.
The problem with dining in a real restaurant with real chairs was that etiquette dictated you sit across the table from your partner. Etiquette, I decided, could go jump in the nearest carnivorous-eel-infested canal. I scooted my chair to the other side of the table.
The waiter furrowed his brow at me.
Bazso did not. Putting a comforting arm around my waist, he pulled me close so I could press my head against his shoulder. “Hey, don’t let it get you down,” his voice rumbled, which I personally thought was a bit like asking an escaped ghost if it would kindly hop back into its bottle – theoretically possible, but wildly improbable.
I stayed plastered to Bazso’s chest for so long that eventually he reached for a menu, riffled through it, and ordered for both of us. Moth had been right: He did genuinely like me.
But I had been right too: Simple liking wasn’t enough to sustain a relationship, especially not one of my relationships. There had to be honesty too. Even Father had told Mother what he was, albeit after he proposed and she accepted (although she’d already guessed anyway). Honesty, from an Anixis, was a poisoned sweet.
Without turning my head, I mumbled, “Bazso, there’s one more thing I have to tell you.”
His shirt moved away, leaving cold air under my cheek. “Yeeees?”
Sitting back up, I flicked a glance at his face, which practically screamed, Don’t tell me you’re actually a quadruple agent! “It’s not like that.”
“Good.”
“It’s just…awkward.” The way incest – or at least the confession thereof – tended to be.
Drawing his own conclusions, Bazso asked swiftly, “Is it the problem that you say I can’t break the legs of?”
That was certainly one of describing it. Or him, rather. “Yeeeeah, it is….”
“Offer stands.”
If only this tangle could be solved in so straightforward a manner! Almost in a sob, I confessed, “I don’t particularly want his legs broken – I think that’s the problem….” Bazso just waited, his face arranged into very deliberate neutrality. “Remember how, a few months ago, I told you I thought I saw someone I knew?”
“I do. So?”
I fumbled for the appropriate euphemism. “So, um….”
“Isha!” he burst out, making the couple at the table next to ours jump. Silverware clattered all around the restaurant as patrons turned to glare. Our waiter scuttled into the kitchen to speed up our order before we scared off the bourgeoisie. “Isha, just tell me! For gods’ sakes!”
“It’s hard to say!” Especially when I didn’t even know where to start. With the history of my House? My parents’ marriage? My and my brother’s birth? His betrayal? Mine? “Okay. Um. The sword. It belonged to my family, and I stole it. And I ran away. To here.”
“Okay.” Bazso nodded once, thinking he grasped the enormity of my woes. “So…this bloke wants the sword back?”
“The whole family wants the sword back, and they’ve sent him to retrieve it.”
“Okay.”
“And kill me.”
Bazso’s face hardened. “You know,” he remarked lightly, “this really seems like the kind of problem that we could solve for you.”
“But that’s the problem! Because it’s my brother. And he doesn’t actually want to kill me. He hasn’t even told them that he’s found me yet.”
“Okay.” Bazso processed that. Then he processed it some more. “Yeah, okay, maybe this is less of a problem we can help you with,” he agreed. “So he found you…. Hmm. So the problem now is that you need to craft a lie to have him send back to your family that…he hasn’t found you, and the sword fell into a volcano?”
“I actually think I have that part covered. I have a plan.”
“But it’s still bothering you, for some reason.”
“Um, well, not that part….” No euphemisms were coming to mind, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak the word. Just hearing it might traumatize the patrons of this fine establishment. “You see, our relationship is really really complicated?” Biting my lip again, I cocked my head and tried to give him a meaningful look.
“Uh huh.” Bazso stared at me as he tried to figure out whether he’d put all the pieces together correctly.
I stared right back as I tried to figure out whether he’d put all the pieces together correctly. After a moment, his eyes widened just a bit, and I gathered that he had. But as I’d hoped, he ascribed it to cultural differences and tossed it into the melting pot of ethnic diversity that was Doskvol. In any case, he had a more pressing question: “So what happens after you take care of the sword situation?”
All along, I’d avoided thinking about that. As Sigmund had accused when he held me at swordpoint in the railcar, I didn’t have a grand plan. I’d never had one. I’d assumed – hoped, really – that reconciling the gangs of Crow’s Foot would miraculously present me with a panacea, but everything felt more muddled than ever. I had friends in this city now, duties. A passel of children. And, as Mylera had pointed out, U’Duasha was far away and grew ever further with each passing year.
“I haven’t thought that far,” I said at last to one of my many, many complications.
From the expression on his face, that was not the answer he’d wanted to hear. “Are you leaving then? When you have things…resolved?”
“Do you want me to?” I countered.
“No, of course not,” he replied immediately. “I – ” All of a sudden, he froze. Then, in a hushed, awed tone: “You’re her daughter, aren’t you? The Maiden of Lockport. The one in the songs, who left Skovlan forever for love of an Iruvian.”
There seemed to be no reason to deny it. “Yes.”
“I never thought of her as a real person,” he marveled. “She moved to U’Duasha, had children. Had you.” Almost wistfully, he asked, “Was she – is she – happy there?”
It seemed somehow disloyal – to Bazso, to Mother, to the entire weight of Skovlander cultural yearning – not to answer, “Yes.”
And she had been – right up until her daughter ran away with the family sword, her son was dispatched to kill said daughter, and the salvation of her new home forced her to foment rebellion in her old, in full knowledge that it was going to be annihilated.
In my terse response, Bazso read the true answer, or perhaps an inkling of it, and he said hesitantly, “I mean, Isha, I want you to stay, but I also know that, even as the ward boss of Crow’s Foot, I can’t offer you what you had in Iruvia. And I don’t want to make you miserable because you stayed….”
From someone atop the pinnacle of his career, it was a magnanimous gesture. And I repaid it with truth: “If I’d been happy in Iruvia, I wouldn’t have left.”
“That’s a good point. Are you happy here?”
Hating Doskvol had become such a deeply engrained habit that it took a moment for me to realize that there were things I’d miss if I ever left. In fact, that might have been part of the reason I hadn’t fled to another isle, or at least another city, when Sigmund popped up at the Iruvian Consulate.
Another part of the reason was watching me with a carefully hopeful expression.
Was I happy here? “Yeah,” I replied in a wondering tone. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay.” His response came out in a whoosh of relief. “Well then, okay. Okay.” As the waiter stalked over triumphantly with our order, Bazso wrapped his arm around my waist and squeezed. “I don’t know anything about politics or your family, but I do want to reiterate that if there’s anything the ward boss of Crow’s Foot – ” he puffed up a little, still proud of that title, and the waiter froze – “can do, you just have to ask.”
“I know.”
Darting glances at a real live ward boss, at one of my tables, imagine that! the waiter set down our plates very respectfully and scurried back into the kitchen for a gossip-fest.
Bazso and I, meanwhile, enjoyed a pleasant meal of fish-and-mushroom pasta plus complimentary dessert, during which we chatted about what he planned for the Lampblacks and how he might move soon. No ward boss of Crow’s Foot, according to him, should have to live in a townhouse with peeling wallpaper.
I heartily approved.
Ariane d'Artagnan 