butcher.
“I know I can’t go you stupid girl,” Anto spat. “It is well beyond me.”
The bell here needed to be rung if an executioner were here. In five minutes, if there was no reply, the call would go to someone else.
In a way, that dying ring would signal the death of our family. Without Anto’s occasional income, we would have to sell the small house and the land. And then we would become little better than the refugees around us.
I watched him lie back down into the bed, gazing up at the thick ceiling beams. “Where is Jorda?” Anto asked.
“Sleeping,” I said.
“Drunk,” Anto spat. “Useless. Addled.”
I had nothing to say to that.
Anto’s jaw set, and he said, “I have always answered the call. Always come back with the Mayor’s coin to keep us alive as the bramble creeps into our useless field. I’ll slit my own throat right here and now before I hand over the executioner’s bell. It is all that keeps my miserable bloodline flowing.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Anto coughed. “The gods hate me. Had I a son, he’d be on his way right now instead of bothering me with this.”
My voice jumped in anger. “Well, I’m not your son. I’m your daughter. You must live with that.” And then I added, “with what little life you do have left.”
Anto nodded. “This is true. This is true.”
And then he crawled out of his bed. The blankets slipped off to reveal his liver-spotted arms.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He stumbled out of the kitchen to the door, stick-like legs quivering from the effort.
I realized what he was about to do and moved to stop it, but with a last wily burst of energy, Anto staggered forward and rang the executioner’s bell before I grabbed his arm.
As the single, clear note rang out and filled the back of my throat with the faint taste of old magic, he crumpled to the floor in a heap of bones and skin, laughing at me.
“Now you have to go in my place, little daughter of mine. Now you have no choice.” He panted where he lay, staring up at me with eyes sunk deep into wasted, skeletal sockets. “The Mayor would execute both of us if you try to tell him what we just did. He is not a forgiving man.”
“When you face Borzai in the Hall of Judgment, he will banish you to Zakia’s torture cells for eternity,” I told him. “When I hear your spirit groan in the night, tortured by dark gods, I will laugh and pretend I didn’t hear it.”
He flinched at that. “Do you hate me so?”
I trembled with outrage. “You bring me nothing but pain and drudgery and burden.”
He thought on that for a long while. Longer than I’d seen him consider anything. “You must go just this once, then. After this, you can turn the bell in. I’ll be dead soon, I can’t stop you, yet you must at least cover the expense of my funeral. I’ll not have my appearance in Borzai’s Hall of Judgment delayed because the rites were not pleasing to him. And after that if you wish it, it could be your trade. It is a good living, daughter. And with me gone, there will be one less body to care for, one less mouth to feed. You have no field, and butchering people will give you more than butchering pigs.”
Then he sighed and crawled toward his bed. I said nothing. I helped him back to it, his body surprisingly light as I slung his arm over my neck.
“How can I kill someone who has done nothing to me?” I asked.
Anto grunted. “Don’t look into their eyes. Consider that the Mayor has a reason for their death. Remember that if they have led a proper life, they will be sent to the right hall for eternity.”
“Won’t the Mayor’s guards be able to tell I’m not you?”
“No,” Anto murmured. “I’ve been wasting away long enough. I’m a small figure, so are you. Wear my hood, carry my axe, none will be able to tell the difference. It is no different than chopping wood. Raise the axe, let it fall, don’t swing it, and aim the edge for the neck. You’ve killed enough pigs, you can do this.”
And with that, he slipped away to his sleep, exhausted by all his recent efforts.
I understood he’d always wanted a son. That he’d wanted the farm to produce the crops it had when he was little, before the bramble grew to choke it. I understood that he never wanted me to marry Jorda.
I understood that maybe, he’d wanted to give me the bell a long time ago, but had been too scared to do it. Why else would he have begged and called in so many favors from old friends to make sure I worked as a butcher?
I walked through Lesser Khaim dressed as an executioner.
Inside I was still me, Tana, weary and tired, struggling to see through the small slits in the leather hood over my face.
I’d called Duram down, and kissed him on his forehead before I had left.
“What was that for?” he’d asked, puzzled.
“Just know that I love you and your brother. I have to leave for an errand. But I will be back home soon.”
After I sent him back upstairs, I’d opened the cedar chest in Anto’s room and pulled out both his hood and heavy cape. They fit me well as I pulled them on, as Anto said they would. His canvas leggings slid off my waist, but a length of rope fixed that.
The axe lay in the bottom of the chest, the edged curve of the blade gleaming in the light.
It weighed less than it looked, and was well balanced in my hand. Heavier than the axe I used to chop wood with, but not anywhere as heavy as I had somehow imagined.
Now I rested the axe on my shoulder and walked down the banks of the Sulong.
I followed a fire crew down the stone steps. They wore masks and thick, double-canvas clothing. As they walked they pumped the primers on the back of their tanks, then lit the fires on the brass-tipped ends of their hoses.
When they flicked the levers, fresh flame licked out across the bramble threatening to creep over the stairs. Clumps of the thorny, thick creep withered under the assault.
Clearers followed close behind, chopping at the bramble, careful not to touch any of it lest they get pricked. Children scampered around with burlap sacks to pick up bramble seeds.
They stopped the burn when they saw me and stepped aside to let me down the path.
“If it’s Alacan magic users you’re sending to Borzai’s judgment today,” one of them called out from behind a mask as fearsome as mine, “then I salute you.”
Others agreed in wordless grunts as they hacked at bramble with axes.
The ferry across the river dipped low to the water when I stepped aboard. The ferryman dug his pole deep into the muck and shoved us along the guide ropes that kept the raft from drifting downstream.
“Ain’t the Alacan refugees causing the bramble creep,” he muttered, and jutted his chin upriver.
I knew that. I could both see and smell the problem as the raft cleared a tall thicket of ossified bramble. When it wasn’t cleared, the roots thickened, and hardened to become a singular and impenetrable mass.
And appearing behind that mass, far over the river Sulong, a half completed bridge soared from Khaim’s side of the riverbanks. The unfinished structure hung in the air with no visible means of support, floating over the river as men worked on extending it toward Lesser Khaim day and night.
The stench of the magic holding the half-completed structure in the air wafted down over the river’s surface: strong, tangy, and dangerous.
All that magic caused bramble to spring up all throughout Khaim and Lesser Khaim. People scraped it from their windowsills and fought it throughout their fields.
“Mark me,” the man said with a final push to get us to the other side. “We’ll end up like Alacan: choked with bramble and fleeing our city if we keep building that unholy thing.”
I paid the ferryman his copper and stepped off onto the pier. He said those things only because he was bitter about losing his livelihood. There would be no place for him when people could simply walk the bridge.
I walked through Khaim, enjoying the taller marble and stone buildings and fluted columns. Lesser Khaim
