Author: Brian Tackle
Title: Sixty Crowns
Date: 2005-02-02 10:37:46
Type: Stories
Synopsis: A pickpocket tries to scrape together enough 'sid to heal himself from the mugging he'd received the previous night.

Two-Hands woke up, face down, when the sun burned deepest red. There was dried blood on his chin, and a splinter had found its way into the pulpy flesh of his thumb where it seemed to pulse with infernal malice in time with his heart. There was a smell like spilled beer, too long unattended, gone sun-bad and reeking. The dancing lights of Tankin's burned nearby from out the second-story windows like small beacons in the late evening gloom.

Then he spent the rest of the sunset inventing curses for himself.

His two good knives were gone. The shoddy one still pressed up against the small of his back in a leather thong. Waking and rolling over, its broken hilt had ground some spectacularly painful grits of sand into his skin. He picked out one grain and looked at it, marveling at its very un-round shape. He started thinking about how things should be a lot rounder, as a general rule. They don't cause so much pain that way.

The money was gone, too. The pay from last night's job squandered mostly on cheap wine and the dubious company of heavily painted women--but no, there had been some even after that. More like a lot. Twenty double hands of sid and two uncut ambers in a pouch. Little scrap of leather tie still wagging from his belt, the clean edge where it was separated from his person by a pair of scissors.

Robbed by tailors. Two-Hands wasn't in the mood for telling that to anyone in particular, least of all the early crowd at Tankin's. Better to nick the price of a healer and live out his shame in private.

He rolled to his feet, colours dancing in front of his eyes from standing up too fast. The sound of a flute echoed 'round Tavern Circle from the other side of the Gamehouse, the kind of slow somber melody you hear clerics trying to compose all the time. Older, lesser, broken world and all that. The southern sky was heavy with storm, somewhere between purple and black in the last rays of the sun. Jihae was just beginning to rise.

The easy marks were the Uptowners who strolled down into the Crater at night to catch a thrill or two, laughing and brazenly displaying their opulence to each other. For some reason they believed themselves immune from pickpockets' hands and muggers' knives because the Silver Grain had turned into an after-hours place for soldiers.

Two-Hands approached one of them.

"Oh, excuse me sir," Two-Hands mumbled.

Isela used to call them rags. Just bump into a rag, she'd say, and count the money later. Could never understand why she called them rags. He got sixty, though. Good enough. Didn't have anything to put the coins in, but he had them.

He maneuvered his way across the Common Market toward the stairs of the Crater. It was already full dark down by Tankin's, that far beneath street level. Above, he could see the rooftops of the Silver Grain and Rajasthan's water hole, still burning with a faint gold- red glow that threw black under the arabesque fluting.

Marching up the rough stairs to the Upper Commons, Two-Hands decided that his ankle was broken. He thought someone said you can't walk on a broken _anything_ let alone your foot. Felt broken, though. Lot of pain. Some of the sid in his hand slipped out between his fingers and smacked dully on the ground, and the light hit them all wrong and twisted Tektolnes' face into a leering grin.

"I hope your eyes fall out," Two-Hands said to the filthy urchin who snatched up the coins almost before the dust of their impact had settled.

"Yeah, well I hope you die!" the urchin yelled.

Somehow the childish insult stirred up intense rage in Two- Hands and he tried to grab the kid by the hair and toss him down the stairs. But the kid was young and quick, and he slithered away into the thin night crowd. Two-Hands reached aroundfor his dagger, the one that wasn't good, so he could throw it at the kid. But his hand was full of sid and while he was trying to figure out a way to hold both the dagger and the coins, the kid vanished out of sight.

Fifty-four sid. Still enough for a minor magicking. His chin had started bleeding again. He didn't remember getting hit on the chin at all.

There was some sort of rhyme about getting better and drinking water, he remembered. Who'd said that anyhow? Probably not Isela. She was tough, like they are when they grow up in the warrens, the sort that takes a good beating without even blinking.

Rajasthan's was right around the corner but Two-Hands passed it by and made his way across the Upper Commons, the Silver Grain catching his eye on the left. There was an unusually thick pack of peasants outside of Nenyuk-East who were being harassed by a white- robed Templar and some soldiers. Two-Hands pressed through and walked toward the South Bridge, wondering if he should stop and rob the crowd blind.

"Hey!" the Templar shouted.

Two-Hands decided to keep walking.

"Bring that man with the shriveled arm over here," he heard the Templar snap.

He thought he felt fingers brush his back, where the shoddy knife was, but he ignored it and kept walking. His feet padded on the unresilient stone of the bridge. A shadow passed across his eyes and a grunt came from behind, and a rattling crash.

Keep walking. Don't look back. Isela wouldn't look back.

He looked back anyway and saw a half-giant sprawled out on Agafari Street. The soldier's eyes had rolled up into his head and saliva drooled from his open mouth. His massive club was crushed underneath him in a crazy way, still clutched in a plate-sized hand. Further back, in the Commons, steel threw back the light of Jihae, blood red moon, slashing a downward arc through the air. A blue arrow protruded from where the giant soldier's spine met his brain, but it looked black under the moon.

Dusty alley closing in on both sides, shadow, a breath of cold, then flickering lamplight on Dark Moon Road. The heavy sound of armored footfalls. Two-Hands moved like the softest breath of wind, making no sound at all. "Ungh!"

The Yellow Star twinkled in front of Two-Hands' vision, and Kelvik's Eyes glared back at him. He heard: "Watch out, beggar!" And another one said, "Kruth, man, make way for Utep's soldiers!" A hairy, armored legionnaire stood over Two-Hands and spat in the dust. "Didn't you see us coming, cripple?"

Two-Hands picked himself up off the ground, brushing himself off. He tried to apologize but the soldiers had already rushed past and raced off toward the riot in the Commons. Someone howled a war cry in the distance.

One, two, three...As Two-Hands fumbled in the dirt for his dropped coins he noticed that Tektolnes had a crown on his head. Never saw that before. Funny how I never saw that before. Just a circlet 'round his egg-shaped skull, nothing more.

Okay, he thought, I still got thirty-eight coins. That's got to buy you _something_ at a healer. He figured he couldn't even see straight anymore. His chin was bleeding profusely. He was starting to feel an acute pain in his chest, and it hurt to breathe. Anything's got to be better than nothing.

Two-Hands knew There was this elf who kept a place in somebody's old cellar toward the end of the road. Her name was Oriphen or something. She was supposed to be able to do this leg-bone kind of ritual that would fix you up good. Two-Hands didn't like it when people went rousing up all that creepy totem-magick kind of thing, but he was hurting bad. Jihae was a lot higher in the sky than he remembered. There was dirt in his mouth.

There was this time a few years back when he and Isela had done a double-job for some Surif's son. The kid was almost in tears, this girl was the love of his life and her father wouldn't let them see her anymore because somebody squealed they'd got themselves spiced up good over Lim Ctul's or something. Son says, Just get me his belt, the one with the family crest on it. Plops down half payment in a thick sack, like double what Two-Hands got last night. So they said Sure, need a few days to plan. And the son just happened to forget to mention the ginka, which just happened to get a hold of Isela. Ginka like you see in the forest, and even the little savages don't go near it.

The dark houses flowing past, the street somehow moving itself under his feet in the direction he wanted to go. He was almost at the end of the road.

That smell, what he smelled near Tankin's, it was like that. Ginka just slid right out of the girl's father's garden, right out of _nowhere_ for Belar's sake, with this smell like spoiled beer. Later on he asked some merc at Tankin's what it was. Skin, he'd said. Ginka no like skin.

He knocked on the door. No answer. Windows blind.

It was Oriphen's place for sure. Or whoever lived in the house upstairs anyhow. He knocked again. His stomach lurched. A drop of blood beaded on the tip of his hacked-up chin and blobbed off, landing on the street. The dust sucked it up like some kind of thirsty beast. He thought he was going to vomit.

The door opened a crack and a ruddy light splashed out.

"Uaptal's beard, what happened?" one voice asked.

"Some beggar," said another. "Cripple. Look at him."

Two-Hands stretched out his arm, let the sid fall on the floor inside the house, flat glass coins pinging on the wood. He couldn't even talk, the pain in his chest bending him over with pulsing agony.

"That's not going to buy you very much," said the first voice.

"Sixty crowns," Two-Hands managed to whisper.

"Nah, it's not even thirty."

He remembered the poem then, the one about water. The one that Isela taught him when they were waiting for that girl's father to fall asleep that night.

     O deeply healing pow'r like skillful hands
       Of surgeons, warding 'gainst the evil blight
       That Sixty Tyrants rained upon the lands,
       With love like water, cures and cleanses white
     And brings the mountains low with thund'rous sounds.
     One drink worth more than all their iron crowns.

And maybe he said it out loud, too, because they stared at him for a moment, unbelieving, and then took him inside. And when he passed over the threshold he let her go, they let him go, and then they healed him.