“What journey?” asked Adnihilo.
Ba’al pulled a key from inside his pack, ignoring him. “Speaking of which, the assembly should be here soon. Leave the bags and go find something useful to do until evening.”
The half-blood pressed. “What about food? And what’s behind that door?”
“Fend for yourself, Imp. We need to save for supplies: food, clothes, tents.”
Opium, wine, that black powder, thought Adnihilo. “What’s up the stairs?”
“You stay away from there.”
“Why?”
Adam laid a hand on his friend’s deadened shoulder—a thousand, dull needles, prickling, cold. “Let’s go. Mags is getting hungry, and I could eat a horse.” They were walking along the dock when Adam spoke again, Magdalynn clinging to his free arm, his other leaning on his crutch. “Do you think one of these merchants would give us something? I don’t want to beg, but what else can we do?”
“We could run,” Adnihilo answered. “There’s nothing stopping us. We could steal onto a ship and try to get back home, or to Pareo.”
“You still don’t trust him? Even after he saved us?”
“We saved us.”
Magdalynn broke in, “He promised! He said he would take us home! And he said you wouldn’t believe it.” She pointed at Adnihilo. Then, with eyes shimmering, to Adam she said, “I want to stay, and I want you to stay with me. Please don’t go.”
He caressed the girl’s strawberry blonde hair, “I made you a promise, remember? We’ll stay together no matter what. I’m going to make certain you get home.” He looked toward Adnihilo. “You too. I want us to stick together.”
“I don’t trust him,” spat the half-blood, turning toward a side street packed with foot traffic. “He’s using us. Using you. You can’t even walk. My arm is fucked and…” He thought of the dozens of dead pirates scattered about the deck—their rash, bloated faces. It gave him tremors. “And what in Hell killed all those men? He won’t tell us, and you trust that?”
“Adnihilo.”
The half-blood would not hear it. He was angry. He was afraid. It might have been necessary to play along while imprisoned on the ocean, but this bishop, whatever he truly was, would turn on them soon enough. He needed to be ready. He needed to escape. He touched the hilt of his sabre to make sure it was there, then he vanished in a stream of pedestrians flowing into the heart of the city.
“Adnihilo!” Adam called after him, but he was gone.
†
The witch’s son walked for hours amongst a thousand pairs of narrow eyes, yet none seemed to notice him. They hardly noticed one another, and Adnihilo wondered if they could tell each other apart. Everywhere he looked was the same flaxen face, the same round chin and black, silken hair. He couldn’t tell a man from a women, so similar were their frames under long robes of cotton and silk. The same held true for the homes and the roads. They were perfectly symmetrical, as was the flow of traffic uninterrupted as people entered and exited from an endless web of interconnected alleys.
Before he knew it, Adnihilo lost his way. Kill the boy, he thought, his only answer to everything. But wasn’t yet a child himself? What could he do now, a coward and a cripple? A slave, an animal, he mused as a Gautaman child, perhaps eight years old, broke from the flow of the crowd to approach him. The boy’s face was at once amazed and terrified, his thin eyes stretched wide and his little hands reaching. “What do you want?” asked Adnihilo, and the boy answered in unintelligible words, touched his own hair then reached for the half-blood’s. “You want to touch my hair?” What’s wrong with these Gauts, Adnihilo thought to himself, yet he knelt, and the boy grabbed a knotted rust-brown lock and gasped as if a dog had snapped at him. Then his tongue began running, and it did not stop as he poked and prodded at the foreigner, gasping and laughing and chatting away on his own. The witch’s son didn’t know what to think till he took a stiff finger to the stomach. “Hey!” escaped his mouth, and he jabbed the boy back. “How do you like it!” The child answered by stabbing Adnihilo a few more times with his stubby fingers, all the while contagious with laughter. Soon, their game became a full-scale duel. Fingers flashed, giggling ensued, and passersby scowled at the disturbance of two fools play-fighting underfoot. And for the few minutes this went on, Adnihilo forgot his scuffle with Adam, the uselessness of his left arm, the home he lost in the Purge of Babylon; But then a woman’s voice wailed over the crowd. The Gautaman boy frowned, called back to his mother, turned without a word, scampered off, and vanished. In an instant, the witch’s son was alone again. Alone, lost, and broken.
Adnihilo turned into the nearest alley, his right hand over his eyes hiding his tears. He didn’t understand why he was crying, only that he was glad no one was around to see it—no one he cared about, anyway. Cain was dead, as was Jezebel and his mother. What did it matter if the Gautamans saw? But then why the tears at all? He thought again, of Adam and Magdalynn, realized how much he envied his friend. The pastor’s son had not turned craven in the heat of danger. He hadn’t failed to take revenge and rescue Magdalynn, nor did his faith relent even in the face of his injuries. What could the half-blood claim in comparison but failure? What made them so different?
“Kill the boy,” Adnihilo repeated aloud, looking up at the sun climbing above as it scoured the alley of its shade. He rubbed his cheeks dry—he’d done enough crying for one life time—and readied himself
