CHAPTER I

I dream of dead men.

The skull that rests upon a lip in the cave pollutes my mind, in sleep. Corporal Jona, the Lord of Joni, died in the woods. My husband and I found him there, polluting the ground with the stain of the demon in Jona’s blood.

For days we cleaned the ruin, there, and called upon the Goddess Erin for the mind of the dead. When it came upon us, it came to me in a flood. Where is my body… Where is Rachel… I wept for the dead, and the loneliness.

I wrote it all down. All that I could peel away from the mind inside of mine became ink on paper, handed off to my husband that together we could find the living remains of the demon stain.

The city spurned us. Sabachthani demands the demon-stained for his abominations, and his wicked magics. No one stops him, not even us.

We left, my husband and me, for the hills, on the trail of old stains, searching for clues.

Finding none, we slept.

And, in sleep, I dream of dead men.

* * *

Corporal Tripoli sits alone at a table. He is a handsome enough man, with huge, strong hands. He cracks peanuts between thumb and forefinger without looking up. He isn’t eating the nuts. He’s placing them on one side of the table, away from the shells. He looks up. He nods at Jona, his fellow king’s man, watching Tripoli crack the shells. He picks up one of the nuts and tosses it at Jona, the Lord of Joni. Jona’s a corporal in the king’s men, too. He catches the nut and eats it. Tripoli’s face is bony in the tavern light. His thinning hair looks like a skull. His eyes are hollowed out. He’s a dead man, already sick.

Jona reaches over to take another nut. When he looks up, Tripoli is gone, like he was never there. The pile of peanuts cracked and sorted is all that’s left of him.

The tavern is the same as it was before. The city is the same as it was before.
Tripoli’s death was like nothing had happened.

Save us from these cities of men, Blessed Erin. Howl in the night like wolves for the dead. Let their souls travel across the mournful wails, riding the painful prayers to Erin’s mercy.

I dream of dead men.

Oh, but he isn’t dead, yet. Still, I know he will be dead, soon. The ones who die, most of them, cloud into Jona’s memory. He had time to forget them. He had time to believe in their absence.
Their names fade. Jona knew Tripoli’s first name, and I do not. He had a father, so I know it could not be Tripola.

My husband whispers in my ear.

Restless dream, my love? I have brought the quill and parchment. Write it down. Maybe there will be a clue in the dream.

And, I do.

***

I dream, still.

Jona was asking Rachel a question.

I don’t know where they were. I can’t smell the location inside his skull, only the words. Maybe they were in his dark bedroom, clinging to each other, so it smelled like nothing to him because it smelled like him and her but mostly him.

“How do you learn how to be a Senta?” he said, to her.

 “You breathe,” Rachel said. “How do you learn to be a noble?” 

“I guess you just breathe, too. What about all those tricks?” 

“The greatest Senta never discover such things. The greatest Senta—the Seers—see through them. Dreamcasting is an expression of that path. I struggle to touch that Unity, Jona. Our skin, mine more than yours, they are only partially made of the world of light above Elishta. The other part is an absence that even light ignores. Senta—dreamcasting Senta—see right through me with glowing eyes of light. I can’t see that way. I try but, I can’t. I am a novice’s novice.”

“I’ve seen you freeze two buckets on a whim.”

“The Unity is greater than two buckets, Jona, and much smaller than a single crystal of ice.”

“Now you’re just tossing me. You’re trying to sound wise.”

“You’re just listening. I’m saying nothing. We’re both saying nothing. This is all a ruse because what we really want is to kiss. But do not kiss me now. Let’s stay a while just like this. Don’t move.”

* * *

Aggie, in her cell, her hands slowly turning black where her fingers leaned back in her pallet. 

“Are you all right?” 

“Who, me?” said Jona.

She rolled away from him, her back to him. She looked at the wall. Aggie had been Salvatore’s beloved. Once she had committed one sin, he had abandoned her. And, Jona was to blame that she was in a cell, with an infection in her nose.

“You just going to sit there like that?” said Jona.

“I didn’t ask for you to come here,” said Aggie. “I don’t want you here. The last time you came here, I was sick. I couldn’t tell you to leave. Now I’m telling you to leave.”

“Feeling better, though, right?”

“Of course not. They’re burning me alive as soon as the church mother signs the form.”

“Ain’t dead yet, though.”

“No.”

“Salvatore’s going to get here, soon. I promise. He’ll get you out.”

“I don’t believe anything you say.”

Jona stood in her cell, looking down on her, her back to him and she was feigning sleep. He had brought her food. He had brought her some better water than they have in the prison. There were vomit stains along the wall by her pallet. She had been puking in her sleep. Her neck was flush. She must have been running a fever.

“Tell Salvatore...” She started to cry.

* * *

I dream of dead men.

I dream of dead men, all night long.

Geek steps into an open sewer grate as if swallowed. His uniform vomits up in dirty water overflowing from the rains. In the dream, he is standing at the bottom of a sewer grate, looking up, reaching his hand up for the light above the flood. The rains come again, and flood the ground with muddy water. It pours over Geek, staining him in mud, and pushing him away until he’s gone. Flowing in the water, all the lost boys with their broken crowns, and all the girls in their dresses and cracked jars and porcelain, lime-white skin of Rachel’s brothels and all the animals moved from boat to killing floor in the abbatoir dismembered and thrown into the brack.

Bad dreams, from two minds blurred in sleep.

I woke up in a cold sweat, half-woman, half-wolf, thrashing around in the dark. Blessings of Erin, they are difficult things. Goddesses do not ask us to do easy things. In life, he was a king’s man, a lord of Dogsland, fallen into poverty after the failure of his father. In death, he was a blight below a bluff, where toxic mushrooms sprouted in his acidic demon blood.

I could smell Jona’s skull in the cave. I could feel its empty eyes upon me, as if he could see though dead. I’m the one who sees through his eyes. The dead see nothing. His skull was dead weight, and toxic, but the smell of it helped me see through his eyes.
When we finish the hunt, we will leave it with the Temple of Erin in the city, and it will be easier to keep my dreams away from his.

Salvatore, the thief, eluded us in the city with the aid of his masters. Rachel Nolander, a nomad all her life, had been running north beyond our territory when Jona died. All the places they had touched and corrupted in our territory must be cleaned of the stain.

This blessing of Erin, that I might see and smell the world inside Jona’s memories, walk down the paths that a Walker can read in the signs of things, read the patterns of a life like Senta dreamcasting, it all fills me up in the dark. At night, this blessing makes it hard to sleep. Last night, I turned over and over again enough to drive my husband to another corner of the cave. I woke up afraid, reaching for him, because I was dreaming with memories that were both mine and not mine. My husband was not there.

I searched for a body that was not my own in between the three bodies I knew. I was only supposed to have two: I am wolf and I am woman. The third, Jona’s body from Jona’s memories, was never mine except in dreams. Those first moments awake were as unreal to me as a dream.

Breathe...

My husband came to my side. I calmed. I wondered how long until the demon child’s mind might fade away into the distant hum of old memories. My husband carried a demon child’s mind, too, and he never seemed so anxious as me. He had had so many years to think the bad dreams through to quietude. He licked my face. His long whiskers tickled me, and I laughed from it. I was a woman, and laughed like a woman. He had the wolf skin pulled over his back.

Don’t lose yourself in him.

I joined my husband in the early morning dawn outside the cave. He flicked his ears at the small insects that liked this dry cave upon a small mountain. I let them land. I liked how they felt in my ears. The itch was my own, and helped me recover from the dream. The wind over my fur. The ground beneath my paws. I was a Walker of Erin, and I knew my mind from Jona’s.

I stretched. I walked into the early dawn. “I’m getting breakfast.”

My husband ran on ahead into the forested places down the side of the little mountain.

Easier like this.

I paused to watch the sunrise. Every hill is a mountain dying or being born; every mountain is a hill upon a hill upon a hill. From where I stood, I could see over the trees to a rising sun. It looked like the hills were on fire.

I started a fire of my own. Without the wolfskin on my back I was cold, but I had human hands, and I could build fires. My husband yawned awake, flashing his predator teeth. He wanted meat for breakfast, and he did not want to eat bread like we did in the city. He spoke to me.

What do you remember?

“Everything.”

I remember many things I had forgotten, just being here, where he lived long ago. I have seen nothing new in the demon child’s mind that leads to our enemies. Had Jona ever come here? Do you remember him here?

“Jona only left the city twice in his life. Once to train with the king’s men, and once more to die. We should find Sergeant Calipari, again. He knows the streets, the way criminals hide in pieces of paper. We can force him to lead us to Jona’s mother.”

We can ask anyone. Jona should have known such things. Other people should know them. Where did she work? He knows where she worked, doesn’t he?

The sun cracked over the treeline, light like fire everywhere, and rain clouds in a haze, deep grey like smoke.

“Yes and no. There are too many places that he remembers. If we found precisely his street, we’d find his house. If she has left her house, sold it off perhaps... We’d need to purify the ground, still. I need the streets below my feet to find it, more time studying his skull. I can’t get his mind in order outside of the city.”

What I remember of this one from the cave is so old. Even were they my own memories, it would be hard to find anything new to unravel Sabachthani.

“We have to go back.”

My husband pulled the wolf skin from his back. He stood up, on two legs—man’s legs—and he held his hands to my fire. “Lady Sabachthani? What would Jona do about her?”

“I think… If I were Jona, I would write to her father.”

My husband growled deep in his throat. The red valley was Lord Sabachthani’s legacy, at the northern boundary of the kingdom. Two of the three skulls we kept with us were from the demon children’s, them only just children, and bones we stole from his estate. He will kill us faster than she.

We don’t know that.

He is our enemy more than she is.

We don’t know that, either.

He snarled. He pulled the wolf skin over his back, gathered up our three skulls, and howled a mournful song of death. We would return to the city.

Three skulls: two deformed children and Corporal Jona Lord Joni. Both of us had taken the children’s skulls from Sabachthani’s estate, stolen from the shape that his wicked magic had twisted them to enslaved abominations. Inside their minds, their memories would be only confusion and pain and a void where a soul might have been. We suspected their father’s name, and that was enough. Jona’s skull was mine, alone. We had found his dead body near the north, and found the stain of his death. We took his skull from the body. With the blessings of Erin, his memories came to me, and I carry them still. I’ll carry them, and his skull, all the days of my life.
I buried our fire with rocks and sand. I gathered all the maps and letters we had accumulated from both Sergeant Calipari and my own quill pouring out the memories inside of me. We had packed them away in oilskin and stones to keep them dry and away from mice. We needed them, now. I pulled the wolf skin over my back.

We would travel slower back to the city than when we had run to here. We were going to be cautious, this time, with Lady Sabachthani watching for us.

Down the hill, through the trees and valleys until we reached the roads. A small rain storm came. I closed my eyes, rolled onto my back and opened my mouth for the drink.
I carry his mind. It pushes into my own, like a kept sea. His whole world was mine, with my senses, the Blessings of Erin, a wolf ’s nose for scent, and the wisdom of the wild places, I dive deep inside his memories.

I remember looking up into the storm from Jona’s mind, where the falling raindrops appeared spontaneously from the mysterious depths of sky. They appeared like magic from the grey depths, and tasted clean as magic as they pooled on the tongue.

Erin, bless us, your loyal Walkers, that we may be swift in our hunt, and make peace with Sabachthani that we may lay the wicked low.

Raining, again, and Jona, I remember you in every rainstorm because of the smell of the rain so close to the ocean is the only rain you knew.

* * *

Salvatore is still alive. I do not dream of him. He’s running through empty sewer lines, and slipping into windows in the dark. Slipping into bedrooms, into beds, into the hearts of lonely women in the night.

The skulls of the dead, deformed demon children, plucked from Sabachthani’s monstrous abominations: they are Salvatore’s children.

Alive, and alive and always alive, and spreading his life without remembering the purposes of life except to live.

I do not dream of him.

* * *

Rachel and Jona were lovers, but not quite yet.

Windows closed nearly all at once when homebound women saw the sunlight darken and return and darken again with the salt smell of sea rain and the strong winds. Jona did not close Rachel’s window. He leaned out backwards as far as he could with his boots hooked under a bed. He looked straight up into the silver clouds, all of them lambent from the swallowed sun.

“What are you doing?” said Rachel.

“Just looking,” he said, “I want to see the rain fall.” 

“Your tea is getting cold.”

“Fate worse than death.”

Rachel stood up. She touched his stomach with her gloved hand. He looked down his body, back into the room, where she touched him. Then, he looked into into her face. A raindrop landed on his forehead. He smiled.

“How many days you get off a week?” she asked.

“Just one or two,” he said, “Unless they need me and I don’t get any.”

“So come in here and drink tea with me. Watch the rain on the king’s time. You woke me up for this.”

“Yeah.” He pulled himself in from the window. He turned around and closed the shutters. Her hands straightened his uniform at his shoulders.

“You wearing this on your day off?”

He shrugged. “Keeps me out of trouble,” he said, “You ever give the Senta stuff a break?”

“Of course not,” she said, “I’m wearing all the clothes I own.”

“Yeah,” he said. He nodded at her. He sat down at the little table under the window. “Yeah, I know. I wasn’t trying to... I’m just saying that me out of this uniform is like you out of your Senta stuff. Anyhow, tough fellows might like to find me out of it, no bells to call my brothers-in-arms down. I wear the uniform. I bleed for the city, all the blood I got in my body, in my heart. All of us king’s men do. We swear an oath like that.”

She sat down across from him. There were teacups, with tea. They were supposed to be drinking it. Rachel and Jona both stared down into the brown pools of stale tea, and their restless hands upon the cups.

Rachel yawned. She spoke to her tea, not him. “Do you know anything about hearts, Jona? The Senta know hearts. Hearts are not one organ. Inside a mother’s womb, two pulsing bags of blood seek their eternal mate.”

Her hand reached out to his. She opened his palm, and traced a finger down his lifeline, then his loveline. She lifted it up to her own face. She placed it on her cheek.

“Lungs are fine apart,” she said, “Hands do not need another but to clap. Brains gnarl like roots in the nothing of soul, and guts spin in knots around the nothing of hunger. But hearts are made by two complete parts merging together. Once the two pieces sense each other in the blood flow, they cross every bloody cliff inside of us. The arteries bind the halves close. The veins make love to each other in the life pulse that makes all life from love entwined.”

She let go of his hand. He let it linger on her face.

“Your tea is getting cold, Jona.”

“Fate worse than death,” he said. He did not move his hand from her face. Then, he moved his hand. It went down to the table. He stood up. “I have to go,” he said.

“Don’t you want tea?”

He shook his head. “No... I did, but...”

“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

“Right,” he said. He sat back down. He picked up the teacup, and sniffed at it. He sipped a little. “It’s good,” he said.

“So, what do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wanted to see you. Was that one of the koans?”

“No. It’s just something my mother taught me before she died.” Her face, the way she looked at him, makes me happy, because Jona was loved by someone before he died.

* * *

My husband and I feasted in the night on stolen meat. A sheep heavy with lamb, it slowed her down. We dragged her into the woods while the shepherds’ dogs cowered away from us.

From the raw mutton, I showed this Senta wisdom to my husband, from the heart of the aborted lamb.

In the daylight, we searched fetal birds peeled from their shells —their tiny grey bodies limp in our human palms, all blood and fluids and dying tissues. Just beneath the translucent skin, the organs pulsed and died in two distinct pieces that would no longer fully merge.

He said nothing to me, nor I to him, after we proved this to ourselves. We ate what we had killed.

Say something, my husband.

I regret returning to the city because it means you will not be completely yours, completely mine. Too many bad smells. All of them his.

That is not our place to choose. If Erin wills it…

…we die on this trail. Eat, beloved, for tomorrow we may face Sabachthani’s executioners.

As wolves we dashed into the city, not priest and priestess. We ran like wild dogs, snarling and biting and blood on our teeth.

For three days we lived in the alleys like dogs. We slept in mud, and ate in the mud and snarled at everything that came near, all our skulls and papers always hidden deep under our fur. We had to slink our way through the streets to a small temple of Erin, near the harbor. We scratched at the back door until we were discovered and could enter in hiding, make arrangements for our stay. After dark, we slipped into a rented room dressed like foreign thieves. The innkeeper, greedy enough to have no curiosity, was paid to ignore us. Not even a maid came to our little room.

We wrote to Lord Sabachthani by addressing the king, though the king would do nothing for us. We waited, hunting nothing. We told Lord Sabachthani that we would not hunt without his permission—only wait for word through a liaison of the temple.

Wait and wait, then. So much paper arrived at a man’s door. He ruled this city while the king was too old, and too tired to take the reins of state. Our small concerns were nothing to the diplomacy and negotiations of all these crowded districts, and all the cities of the world.

Patience, then, and wait. Close my eyes and see with my eyes, smell with my nose, deep into the streets and buildings Jona’s memory.

* * *

Three crowns, painted on doors and archways, lined up in a row like winning at cards, and Calipari didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. New marks on the walls meant fighting. Newcomers meant upsetting the balance. The king’s men were sent to find the new markers of things, drag them in before anything changed. Vandalism, at least, and more if they could beat anything out of them.

Jona and Geek found a porter they knew eating sausage from a street vendor. Sweat pooled at the porter’s armpits and spilled down the front of his dirty shirt.

Geek whistled and stuck out his hand in friendship. The porter smiled with food jammed in every gap in his teeth. The porter took Geek’s hand, but cringed when Geek clamped down for the shake. Geek had powerful hands. He was reminding the porter that Geek was not here in friendship.

After the handshake, Geek showed his palm to Jona. Sweaty blood was all over Geek’s hand. The porter rubbed at his, trying to force a smile at the king’s men come to push him for something. Geek showed his dirty palm to the porter, too, like it was the porter’s fault.

“Sorry,” he said, to Geek. He wiped his blood-soaked palms along his leg. It wasn’t going to get cleaner on his bloody pants. “I’ve been pushing meat from the killing floor to the river. Forgot about it.”

“Nothing on it,” said Geek. “Me and my boy,” Geek pointed his bloody thumb at Jona, “We are on a tear looking for a few fellows.”

“They in trouble?”

Geek whistled and shook his head. “They will be if we don’t find them.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know the names. Some foreigner moving the pink demon weed around like he’s somebody, but he ain’t anybody. Who knows where he’s getting his supply? Can’t be good for his health. Dunnlander, I hear, dressed in red. Got a couple fellows on his side, drawing three crowns on things. They set up shop a day, maybe an hour. Then, they run somewhere new. Dunnlander finds the new spot, the supplies find their way in from who knows where, and these two other fellows go watch-outman or touting or something else.”

“Always something,” said the porter, “I see that stuff coming in off the ships and lots of my boys plucking it for someone else. Don’t know anybody doing it for new people. Nasty stuff, I think. Wish you could drive it all out, but it would just find its way back again. Leastways keep it in order, right? Keep any trouble off the streets.”

Jona’s eyes narrowed. The porter wouldn’t be so friendly with Geek if he hadn’t spent some time in a room negotiating mercy with Sergeant Calipari. He was hiding something.

Geek touched Jona’s arm, pulling him back. “Hey, I forgot to ask,” said Geek, “How’s that wife of yours doing? You ever see this fellow’s wife, Jona?”

The porter looked over his shoulder, his face a mask. He was feeling the fear, now. “We got a boy coming, soon. I hope it’s a boy. She’s big as a sow.”

“This ugly fellow’s going to be a father?” said Jona. “I was doubting Imam all morning. Now I have faith in miracles.”

The porter smiled wide with ragged teeth like a broken, yellow fence spilling sausage bits down his shirt. “I gotta get back,” he said, “But, I do hear a Dunnlander’s running with ragpickers. Mudskippers are the only ones not scared enough to know better. Those kids’ll cut your throat for your boots if you’re asleep in an alley. None of them half as old as the mongrels that follow them for scraps.”

“Got a name for us?”

“I don’t know nobody. I know he’s got some rowdy friends.”

“How rowdy?”

“Rowdy, but, you know, not rowdy enough for what they’re doing. And not enough of them.”

Jona had a vision of them, then. A few foreigners scrambling what they could, skimming off the top of other people’s shipments, maybe jumping people in alleys for their product. They would have to be moving around a lot. They probably wouldn’t use the same place more than a day. It was no wonder their marks were up all over, in and out of the Pens.

Geek tossed the porter a coin. “Thanks,” he said. The porter winked and turned. He lumbered through the bustle back to the main slaughterhouse of the Pens.

Geek looked around the street for ragpickers. “You know any ragpickers?” he asked.

“I hate street kids,” said Jona, “You?”

“Not yet.” Geek tossed a coin to the same food vendor the porter had used. The vendor said nothing, about it, and handed Geek a sausage. Geek offered Jona a sausage. Jona shrugged, and paid for his own.

The sausage came wrapped in bread. When Geek was eating, the sweaty blood left on his hand got on the bread and he didn’t seem to care. Jona watched and it made him a little sick every time the red bread disappeared into Geek’s mouth. Jona thought about his blood. Then, he threw his own food into a sewer grate. “Guess I ain’t so hungry,” he said.

Geek wiped his dirty hands off on the vendor’s apron.

The vendor hated it, but he said nothing. The vendor looked at the two king’s men like they were chasing off business just by standing in front of the man—which is exactly what they were doing.

“What?” said Jona, to the vendor.

“Nothing,” said the vendor.

“We’ll stay here long as we want,” said Jona. “Nice and safe with us around.”

The vendor nodded his assent. His eyes burned. The vendor pulled out a glass flask half-full. “You king’s men thirsty after your meal? Maybe you take this brandy somewhere people don’t see you drinking it? Rainstorm coming. Hard enough to sell anything in the rain without you two blocking up the view.”

Geek took the flask with his bloody hand, nodding.

The two king’s men walked away down the street without a word more about it.

Pens district streets coiled like muddy vipers. With so many boot prints and wheel-tracks, an empty stretch of avenue looked like a swarm of muddy vipers lying asleep in the sun. These muddy vipers grabbed at boots and held on. They hissed in the suck when the boot pulled loose.

Jona left Geek to searching out the ragpickers among all those twisting veins of mud. He said he had someone he needed to talk to, and the two men separated. Jona went to Rachel’s apartment. He hesitated there, wondering if he should knock or not knock. He pressed his ear against it. He heard nothing. He thought about leaving, then.

He lifted his knuckles to the door. He took a breath.

“Djoss isn’t here.”

“Yeah? Good.”

“Jona?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

The door opened. She looked at him, up and down. Her hair was mussed. She had been sleeping. “What is it?”

“I… It’s going to rain soon. Can I come in?”

“You woke me up,” she said. “Want some tea?”

He didn’t want tea. He didn’t want to enter. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want anything. But, he wanted something, and he knew it was something with her and only her, wherever she might be.

The rainstorm came, at last, washing up from the water. He leaned back out the window, deliriously happy to see the rain falling down, right into his face.