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You slip into Grief’s lair, letting the heavy metal door creak closed behind you. Inside, the air feels different; it weighs less heavily on your lungs. The rot is an undertone to gunpowder and iron, twyrine and pure alcohol. You stand there for a moment, fighting the urge to pull at your mask and gulping in great lungfuls of air, like a man coming up from drowning.
One of the men sitting by the door looks up and gives you a lazy, cock-eyed look, as if to ask what the exactly the fuck is wrong with you.
You brush past him with a glower.
“Burakh!” Grief calls, from his throne. “The air out there ain’t fit to breathe, huh?”
There’s nothing else you could call it but a throne, set up on his own stage. Still playing king.
“What are you doing here?” He regards you lazily. “It’d better be business.”
And playing is the word for it.
The thought brings you back to windy afternoons on the Steppe; the roughness of a standing stone under your fingers as you scramble higher, trying to keep up with Lara and Grief. I’m king , Grief would crow as he reached the top, until Lara knocked him aside. We don’t have kings, idiot. And then she would look down at you with a triumphant smile and say I’m general. And Stakh- You banish the memory, bitterness crawling in your throat.
“I have news,” you say.
“We’ve heard some ourselves. Hear you’re in good with Saburov and Olgimsky already.” Grief’s mouth twitches. “High and mighty. That was a quick ascent.”
You pause, not sure if it’s a joke or a jab. Every conversation with your old friends feels like some kind of trap, a thick patch of tall grass hiding bones and broken glass. There’s history here you don’t yet know, Lines tangled and knotted. You left and returned to find familiar faces hard-hearted and sharp-tongued and all the places and words that should have been safe treacherous.
Grief waves a hand at you, impatient.
You start to tell him of the little you’ve learned, of a re-emergence of the Sand Pest, of precautions. “Better not to go outside at all,” you finish.
“We’ll catch our deaths?” Grief says, his smile thinning to a sneer. “We’ll take our chances. Business must go on, I’m afraid. That big city doc will need his bullets- and you’ll be wanting something as well, no doubt.”
Are you stupid? you want to say, but you bite down on the impulse. You’ve been gone so long; you’ve lost the thread of how everything works, fallen out of touch with the rhythms and habits. Is it a wonder that all your old friends bridle at being ordered around?
But before you can fall back, try another tactic, you catch something else in his eyes, a gleam of something far colder than his smile. Fear.
You take a step forward, holding his gaze. “Can’t stare me down, Cub,” he says, but his eyes flick outward, once.
You were aware of his men ringing the warehouse, in the way you’re always aware of bodies crowding a space, but now you notice their stillness. The chatter of conversation has fallen to a murmur. Every gaze is on you. Through the hostility seeps fear.
Wild, hungry fear.
It was a mistake, mentioning the Sand Pest; you can see the old wounds now, lurking behind the eyes of Grief’s men. The warehouses are close enough to the Sprawl to have seen the plague fires, the dead, the dying.
Their stares remind you of the mob watching the herb bride burn.
Once again, you have blundered into a pitfall. Clumsy.
Grief looks at you. His smile is unchanged, but it’s beginning to look more and more like a grimace. The masked tragedian crouched above him stares down at you in mute appeal.
You grit your teeth and think of kneeling wrist-deep in that thief’s guts, trying to perform an extraction with the aid of only a rusty scalpel, as your head swam from hunger and bloodloss. Not enough to win you any friends, apparently.
“I’m hunting a cure,” you say. “I’ve come to buy bullets.” You pull the beaten old revolver from your belt casually, as if you’re holding it only to show Grief. The words are stilted, the action artificial, like an actor fumbling to remember his lines, his blocking. But all eyes are still on you.
“Some medicine, that is.” Grief appraises it with a shopkeeper’s eyes. “Shitty piece of work.” If this is some sort of performance, he’s a better actor than you.
“I’ll take what I can get,” you say. “It’s better than what they gave us at the Front.”
The words have the intended effect. All at once, the tension slackens, a dozen heads turning from you in synchronicity as the chatter picks up again. Someone laughs; dice clatter across the warehouse floor.
Grief’s shoulders relax a hair, his hand falling from where it was creeping towards some hidden weapon.
You seize the moment and break the circle, stepping forward, up onto Grief’s stage, until you’re beside his perch.
“I came to check on you,” you say, softly. “I have medicine that may protect from the infection.”
His eyes narrow. “To trade?”
No, you stupid man. “No. For you. Though if you have any food…”
Grief searches your face. You couldn’t guess what he finds there, and his eyes give nothing away. “Is this some sort of repayment? I told you we’re even.”
“No. I want to keep you safe,” you say, quietly. Honestly. Grief’s eyes widen. It would be comic, if he didn’t look so genuinely surprised. “You, and Lara, and- Stakh, if he’ll let me.” And the list of names burning a hole in your pocket. The boy who gave you bandages when you were bleeding into the dirt. The man who talked you into taking his cow off his hands. The maudlin architect you drank with at the Broken Heart. Even Saburov and Olgimsky. Everyone.
The enormity of it is too much; exhaustion is buzzing through your head, competing with the razor’s edge of fear you’ve lived on since you stepped from the train. You can focus only on what’s in front of you, brash and red-headed as he is.
Grief’s recovered from his bout of sentimentality by the time you get your thoughts back in order; his lips twitch into a smile. “Looking after all your ducklings?” he says. “Keeping them in a row?”
“Something like that,” you say. “An ounce of prevention.”
“And there ain’t a cure.” That sobers Grief.
“Not yet,” you say.
“Alright,” he says, swinging a leg down from the throne. “I’m all yours, Cub. Minister to me.”
You could be too late. The air outside is thick and diseased, and Grief’s men are constantly coming and going, coming to blows, spitting and bleeding onto the floor of the warehouse. And Grief is the beating heart of it all, talks with every visitor, has a hand in every deal. Or at least that’s how you saw it your first day back. “How do you feel? Any pain, any fever?”
Grief gives you a tight smile. “Like a fool, Cub,” he says, softly. “But a healthy fool.” There’s something pained in his expression, a thread waiting to be unravelled; but now’s not the moment to pull at it, with hostile eyes on your back and the minutes ticking away. Later, later, if there is a later.
Your examination is quick; you strip your gloves and touch him lightly. The skin of his forehead and cheeks is rough under your hands, scarred from a childhood illness. You’ve seen so much more since then; all the myriad ways a body can be wrent asunder, by illness, by violence, by privation. But the handful of memories, time-worn as they are, still have the strange clarity of childhood fear as they come to the surface of your mind.
Lara, tears rolling down her cheeks as she took a knife to the cover of one of her precious books, just to see something fall apart in her hands. Stakh, trying to ask you grave questions in a trembling voice. And you, staring at your hands, still and silent. You already knew death; your father taught you the ways and the Lines, the role of a butcher, the role of a menkhu. He had explained this, too, in his patient, careful way; your friend might live. Your friend might die.
A little rehearsal for what was to come. The thought bubbles up in your mind. You quash it, and focus on the task at hand. You are not a child any longer. You have practiced your father’s art. You can protect them. You will protect them.
No fever; his skin feels cool to the touch. There’s none of the telltale purpura or hematoma you have heard about, and no skin beginning to crack and bleed.
You pull your hands away, and take a box of immunity tablets from your pack. “Take these. And stay inside, as much as you can. That goes for all your men, too.”
There must be something in your face, because he has no clever retort. “I’ll mind myself.” He takes the box and swallows the tablets dry. You’re not sure whether it’s meant to be some sort of power play or just Grief being strange.
When you’re sure he’s swallowed them you turn to go.
“Cub,” he says as you step from the platform. “Take care. Remember, you don’t have me looking over your shoulder anymore.”
You’re painfully aware. As far as thanks go, it’s poor. But there’s something else in his expression, something genuine, you hope. “I do my best,” you say, and step back out into the haze.