165 - Some sort of manrauq

I am standing in a room lined with dark carven wood, in the style of Brahvniki, at a red oak desk which is covered with papers marked all over with my handwriting. (The script is all Zak, but the style of hand is the same.) There are notations in different-coloured inks, just like in this life.

I am middle-aged with something of a paunch, wearing a waistcoat of velvet and silk in red and purple, over a cream-coloured shirt with flaring sleeves just like the ones that were popular two hundred years ago in Brahvniki; I’ve seen them in paintings, and the pantaloons with the apron-like square codpiece. I have a long mane of straight black-grey hair—I feel it falling over my shoulders, but I also feel the breeze from the window on the top of my head—and a pointed beard that, when I scratch it, is all waxy. I smell wood-polish and beeswax candles.

I’m alone in my office, just after dawn, thinking about things that are mine as daylight grows brighter. I have the shape of them all combined and fitting together in my mind as I do the units of the army or the ministries of Assembly Palace. The three ships, soon to be four, I have on the triangle, carrying slaves from Tebrias to Marsae, Arkanherb from Marsae to Brahvniki, wine and porcelain from Brahvniki to Tebrias; the five ships doing the cinnamon-run down the Brezhan; the expedition I went in on with Mixael, Sorvath and Niota to see what might be traded for along the unknown coast south and east of Nellas.

The usual cares are in the back of my mind. Plague among the slaves, a bad year for the grapevines that will raise wine prices in ten years, those stupid wars they’re always getting into up the river that are so bad for business, ‘We’ll kill you for dealing with them’ and all that shit. Did we send enough warriors with the expedition to be a deterrent for pirates? The head clerk says the new one we just hired is pocketing copper claws from the till, so we should dismiss her before we waste more time teaching her, but maybe it’s just because she refused his advances. These aches in my knees that won’t go away, why can’t Surchaer do anything about them? Oh to be young and painless again.

Then there’s the politics. “Best for a merchant to be friends with everyone, my lad,” my mother used to say. “And friends with everyone means no politics. Yes, the Benaiat is eternally bumbling and the Praetanu eternally hobbled by inside quarrels, of course they are, but by some eternal miracle the City doesn’t starve to death or fall into the sea, so we can leave well enough alone.”

But the degree of influence the Thanes and Vwarians are gaining here, with that misbegotten alliance, is beyond the pale. Five people on the Praetanu—yes, you have to count Ekata, she’s as bought as a scrap-market rape-slave—then that push for Thanish as a second court language, and Great Bear take me if the rivership that went down with all of Aenir’s tribute-claws was truly sunk by a windstorm.

Sorry, Mama, but I think you would have wanted Brahvniki for Brahvnikians, forever, yes? I don’t think you’d like hearing so much “gottumel” and “shaiz” on the streets, or even in neighbourhoods where the children of respectable people can hear it. Or the smell of that revolting spiced cabbage concoction everywhere. They want to go a little dirty for their ambitions? Well, so can we. There are some you can’t be friends with.

I talked with those I trust. One of them said laughing, “Vyasil, you have such a military mind, for a trader; perhaps you missed your calling.” As if these weedy little arms could ever be a warrior’s. But our moves have gone well so far. One Thane is almost off the Praetanu, now, hanging by a thread in the City, since we delved up the matter of his hirelings’ daughters. He never thought he’d be outbid. These foreigners, they all have one weakness or another. Bit by bit, one by one, same way I built up my house, we’ll prevail.

I get up from the chair, wander to the window. Out beyond the harbour, the dawn-purple sky meets a sea so glass-flat I can barely tell where sky becomes sea, while the first brilliant sun turns the masts with their folded sails to columns of orange flame. A cormarenc cuts soundlessly out of the piers, sending up the faintest white of wake. Gulls wheel, crying, and I wonder, as I sometimes do, how it would feel to be one.

Just as I am thinking, ‘Was that a trace of a sound behind me?’ I feel an all-encompassing shock, as if I’ve been struck all over at once, bringing a sudden darkness in and around me. I realize, something has stabbed into my back, cold and fiery at once, just inside my left shoulder-blade; the attempt of my heart to keep beating, thus tearing itself against razor-sharp edges of steel, becomes agony beyond imagining, freezing my breath in my lungs, my blood in my veins. My body is no longer mine; I began a long sinking to the floor as time slows down almost to stopping.

Shit… who knew? How did they find out? Too many cursed people were in on it… Nika, I’m sorry! My love, my little ones, how will you fare without me? The will is made, she knows where it is, my brother and sister-in-law will help, I haven’t left them in the red, I… the dead weight of my body falling pulls it off the blade and I am suddenly flung up out of it, looking down from the ceiling. It lies still as only a corpse can lie still, eyes glass, head at an angle that would hurt, arms outstretched, a pool of blood spreading under it on the slate-tile floor. The dark-clad little figure, its head and face wrapped in deep grey, leans to wipe the dagger on the purple and red-patterned velvet. My face looks the same as ever, but different, dead.

I leave life angry, in part because it was a life filled with goodness, and in part from being back-stabbed again. How many times has it been? Is there a mark on the part of my soul that permeates the back of each body, when I fill it, with lettering that says, “Assassins! Stab here!”? Can there not be some sort of manrauq that can let me somehow sense when it’s coming?

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