Dogged the obsidian path, p.11
Dogged (The Obsidian Path), page 11
My wardog nose caught everything they didn’t say.
With a last nod in my direction, Sahar hoisted the overstuffed pack to her shoulder and left us.
Balen and I watched her step from the ship and disappear into the crowd.
“She likes you,” I told him.
“Not enough.”
“She likes me more though.”
He barked a startled laugh and slapped my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go get drunk.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Walking with people was always frustrating. Their short legs meant each of their strides was maybe half a wardog’s. When they weren’t in a rush, they dawdled at a painfully slow pace, so caught up in babbling about whatever was on their overactive minds that they didn’t even notice all the interesting scents they were missing. As people went, Balen was one of the best. But he was still slow and still didn’t want to stop so I could poke my nose into every alley and open window.
With the breeze blowing in from the west and carrying the worst of the smoke and smog off into the jungle, Aszyyr didn’t smell as bad as it would when the winds changed. The Imperial Forges, located on the northern edge of the city, spewed a constant barrage of churning filth into the sky. Belched clouds the colour of rusting iron slunk into the trees, and I wondered if smoke elementals existed. I’d heard of other strange amalgamations—lava, steam, and the emperor was said to have a massive dust elemental patrolling the deepest levels of the palace basements—so it seemed possible. Where did these elementals go once they’d escaped the forge chimneys? Were they changed by the nature of their creation, part demon and part elemental?
A shambling demon, jagged armoured plates that looked like splintered glass protecting its hide, passed us heading in the opposite direction. When it noticed me, it flinched away, stepping to put extra distance between us. I wondered if my kind had brought the emperor’s peace to its world.
Air elementals, each carrying the scents of where they’d been and who they’d spent time with, flitted through the skies above. Some I heard rather than saw, but most were old enough to have accrued a mass of dust and fur balls. The bigger ones staggered through the air, raining flecks of garbage on those below. Looking over my shoulder to make sure that big demon hadn’t decided to make some ill-conceived attempt at vengeance for whatever it suffered at our claws, I noticed a small but dense cloud of bright white cotton fibres a score of strides behind us. It smelled like that soap—a mix of olive oil and limes—the overly fastidious wizards were so fond of.
“I think I’m in a whiskey mood,” Balen said, interrupting his own flow of babble.
I had no idea what that meant. I’d tried whiskey once, stealing a sip from one of the glasses on Sigaria’s table. Part swamp, part lamp oil, it tasted the way the armpit of a sailor from the Craggs smelled after you’d buried him in a peat bog for a few weeks.
“Why do people drink alcohol?” I asked.
“It feels nice.”
“So does lying in the sun, pooping in long grass, and chasing scared things, and yet I’ve never seen you do any of those.”
“I lie in the sun sometimes.”
“We spent weeks on the ocean. Not once did you nap in the sun.”
“Sailors don’t like it when their captain spends his time lazing instead of working alongside them. Captain Kyyrish never much cared, and everyone hated him.”
I understood. People were more like wardogs than they pretended. They, too, wanted to be part of a pack.
“You’re unhappy,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
I’d seen Sigaria angry or sad enough times to know. “Your shoulders are tense, your jaw clenched. You aren’t paying attention to anything but getting to the Soggy Tart. A huge demon, easily capable of tearing you apart—not that I’d let it—passed us and you didn’t even notice.”
He glanced back but the hulking creature was gone.
“Sigaria says she drinks to be happy too, but sometimes she cries. And sometimes she gets angry and throws things at any wardog who annoys her, and we all find somewhere else to be.”
“I can’t imagine wardogs hiding from anything.”
I’d never thought about it before, but I’d fight a horror lizard if I had to and yet was afraid of Sigaria, who I could easily kill. “I don’t think people drink to be happy.”
“Sometimes we do.” He made a face, lips twisting. “Sometimes though…” He sighed. “It feels like life ties knots in me.”
“Like the knots I get in my fur?”
“Kind of. Sometimes the knot is this hard lump of pain. Like when you lose someone you love.”
Though I hadn’t thought about it in these terms, I knew this pain. I growled, low and appreciative at having learned something new about people. That ache in my chest I felt every time I thought about my mate did indeed feel like a knot being tugged tight.
“Sometimes,” he continued, “the knot is tangled desire. I want something I either can’t or shouldn’t have.”
“Like Sahar.”
He darted a sideways look at me.
“She undid the knots in my fur,” I added. “I wonder if she could have undone your knots.”
“She did,” he mumbled. “But then she tied new ones in me.”
As was often the case with Balen, I wasn’t sure what he meant. His face fur, longer now than when I first boarded the BlackThorne, still bore bits of shiny metal woven into the braids. Some of it was gold, but most looked like pieces of eating utensils and things that had broken off other things. If I hadn’t watched him wind a sliver of the ship’s wheel into it, I’d have thought it a collection of garbage it had picked up over the years.
“And sometimes,” Balen said, “we drink to escape our own thoughts.”
“That’s why people babble!” I blurted. “It’s because the voice in your head never shuts up.”
“You’re not wrong.”
Which seemed a confusing way to say I was right.
“Sometimes,” he added, “the voice in my head says mean things. It tells me I’m not good enough to amount to anything. It tells me I’ll fail. It berates me for all the missed opportunities.”
My own thoughts had begun to whisper doubts but that was different because I wasn’t suited to the task assigned me.
“I can already hear it telling me that Sahar was a missed opportunity, that I should have…” He sighed, waving a hand at nothing in a gesture I didn’t understand.
“I have her scent,” I told him. “Wardogs never forget a smell. I can find her for you. You can—”
“No.”
Remembering an earlier conversation, I said, “Inhibitions.”
“Thank the gods for those.” Balen gestured toward a rundown building at the next corner. “And thank the gods for the Soggy Tart.”
I stopped in the street to examine the ruin. The bottom half of the building had been constructed from mortared stones and looked to have been knocked down, rebuilt, shattered, and then mudded back into the wall a thousand times. The sagging second story, built from warped boards painted the same thick red people liked to use on barns for reasons I couldn’t understand, was worse.
“I’ve left buildings that looked healthier than this and called them destroyed,” I told Balen.
He grunted a laugh at my simple statement of fact.
Such establishments typically had signs to tell people what they were. Wardogs didn’t read, but I’d seen enough depictions of frothing tankards to know what was expected. Here, I saw none of that.
“Why is it called the Soggy Tart?”
“It used to be a bakery,” Balen answered. “A few decades ago, a storm elemental raged through here and smashed a bunch of the city flat. The bakery’s roof was torn off and thrown out to sea and, as local legend has it, the goods got soaked in the rain. Since everyone was starving to death, they survived on sodden pies and cakes while rebuilding. After that, the name just kind of stuck.”
I wondered if he was making things up the way people sometimes did when they didn’t know the answer.
The air elemental I’d seen earlier drifted past us, its burden of brilliant white cotton dust dancing in its belly. Banking to the left, it turned down the next street and headed off toward the centre of the city. The scent of olive oil and limes followed in its wake.
Seeing it reminded me of something I’d been thinking about back on the BlackThorne. “You lied to the Merchant’s Guild elemental so you could help me.”
“Yes. It’s important that you find answers and I want to help. I might not be much of a fighter, but I know guilds and embassies and dealing with people. I can help navigate the tricky waters of guild politics.”
I had no idea water was involved in politics. Maybe he meant water elementals. If the Merchant’s Guild used air to deliver messages, it seemed likely they used water elementals as well. I imagined them swimming through the city’s water and waste systems and decided I’d ‘do my business,’ as Sigaria called it, outside whenever possible.
“What are the poop rules here?” I asked Balen.
“The what?”
“There are many places wardogs are not allowed to poop in PalTaq. Most places, really. Pooping in a bad place makes Sigaria very angry. But when we go to war, the rules are different. No one cares if we poop in the streets of cities populated by monsters.”
Balen made an amused sound and said, “Monsters.”
“Aszyyr is part of the Demon Empire, which suggests the same rules apply. On the other paw,” I nodded toward the nearest alley, “it smells like I wouldn’t be the first to poop in there.”
“Poop where thou wilt is the whole of the law,” Balen said, seeming pleased with himself for making no sense whatsoever.
We entered the ruined building, and everyone recognized Balen, waving or shouting in greeting, and ignored me. He waved back, cracking jokes with some, and claimed an empty table, collapsing into a chair. After picking up and studying the other chair, I sat on the floor, which put my head at the same height as his.
A bald man, squat and muscled, did a bow-legged waddle to our table.
“Mot,” Balen said in greeting. “You have room for my crew?”
“No one else is dumb enough to rent rooms here,” Mot responded.
“The usual rates then?”
“The usual rates.”
“Whiskey,” Balen said. “Whatever meat you have. Food and drink for the crew when they get here. Whatever they want, on the Merchant Guild’s tab.”
Nodding, Mot turned to me. “Raw meat and water?”
He smelled strange, old beyond time, thin like he wasn’t all there.
“Raw meat—” I cut myself off. Sigaria wasn’t here. She’d probably never learn what I ate while away and if she did, I’d say I was sorry. “Stew?”
Mot nodded. “Stew.”
“With pepper?”
“With pepper.” Seeing the bright steel spear I held, he raised an appreciative eyebrow. “Nice spear.”
“It is.”
“If you ever think about selling it, don’t.”
I watched Mot waddle away, trying to understand what I smelled. “What is he?”
“Once, when very drunk, Mot told me he was some kind of party deity from a dead world. Mot the Fun God, he said. After that, he barfed in the back alley.”
After eating, Balen only drank a single whiskey before announcing he wanted to sleep. I could always sleep and, once I’d smelled everything interesting in the Soggy Tart’s main room, was ready to be somewhere else. I followed him up the creaking steps, each plank groaning under my weight as I ascended, and into a room he seemed to select at random. There were two beds, and he collapsed onto one. I sniffed at the other and decided to sleep on the floor.
For a long time, I lay listening to his breathing change. Rodents moved in the walls, scampering claws on old wood. Later, after the sun had set, the rest of the BlackThorne’s crew stumbled into the Soggy Tart. They were drunk and sang boisterous songs. I fell asleep soon after the last fight ended with someone getting stabbed and carried off to the nearest medicker. It was funny; people were unlike wardogs in so many ways but hearing the timbre of voices change from aggressive to worried reminded me of when I was a pup. Sometimes we’d roughhouse and someone would get hurt and suddenly everyone was really concerned with what would happen when Sigaria found out.
Much like the Kennel Master was mother to all wardogs, Balen was mother to his crew.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I woke to the fading scent of olive oil and limes. Rising, I padded silently to the door Testing the air, I found no trace of the smell. Whatever woke me wasn’t in the hall. Next, I moved to the window, darting a glance at Balen and wondering if I should wake him. He lay, snoring gently, one leg hanging over the side of the bed. Such an unnatural position to sleep in. Wardogs looked ridiculous when they slept on their backs. I smelled around the edges of the shutters and caught the slightest trace of lime. Searching the dark street below, I saw only a single black cat, crouched as it stalked a rat not much smaller than itself. I would have banged on the window and ruined its hunt were it not for the fact I didn’t want to wake my friend. Instead, I bared my teeth even though it hadn’t noticed me and prayed to the emperor it would fail.
A wizard had probably passed by outside, their scent trickling up to my nose.
Can someone wearing bright white robes manage a proper skulk?
Sleeping away from PalTaq was always like this until I grew accustomed to the new smells. When at war, we drew straws to see who got to sleep closest to the exits. Natural guards, we slept lightly, our noses and ears never resting.
Hours passed, the world outside becoming gradually brighter. I resisted the urge to accidentally make a loud noise to wake Balen. People got grumpy when woken before they were ready. While I might need more sleep than my friend, I managed to get it in brief naps scattered through the day. And as I could rely on my ears and nose to wake me if needed, sometimes I even slept while walking, doing mundane tasks, or listening to people talk about boring things. I preferred sleeping curled on the floor, but had spent endless years at war, snoozing through long marches between cities in need of pacification. Vigilant Aggression had explained that last word when I asked what it meant. It basically described our holy mission, to bring peace to distant worlds. ‘Peacification’ would have made more sense, but people rarely did things the easy way.
Balen finally woke and we went downstairs for a quick breakfast of fried meat, some other fried meat, and eggs. I finished mine in a few heartbeats and tried not to watch him as he picked and nibbled at his food.
Blowing out his cheeks, he sat back, rubbing his belly. “No way I can finish this.”
He’d barely touched the food.
I stared at the table, trying not to drool.
“You want the rest?” Balen asked.
I glanced at him and then away. Desire warred with obedience. Didn’t he know wardogs weren’t supposed to eat people food?
“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I managed.
He looked from me to his plate and back. “You’re still hungry.”
So hungry!
“Wardogs aren’t supposed to eat people food.”
“Aren’t wardogs carnivorous?”
I knew the word. “We are.” Which didn’t mean I didn’t love roast potatoes and any other people food I wasn’t supposed to eat.
Balen slid the plate toward me. “Well, this is all meat.”
I hesitated and a long line of drool leaked from the corner of my mouth.
“Since it’s meat,” he explained, “it’s both people food and wardog food.”
“That’s true,” I agreed cautiously.
“You need your strength to do the emperor’s work. If you don’t eat, you won’t be as strong.”
“A weak wardog is a dead wardog.”
“And we don’t want that!”
“Not before my work is done.”
He gave me an odd look, but I was too busy shovelling food into my mouth to wonder at what it meant. I could have eaten more but no longer felt like my stomach was trying to devour itself from the inside.
When I finished licking both plates clean, Balen said, “So what’s the next step?”
At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about but then remembered Sigaria saying that investigating was like following a trail. For a terrified moment I couldn’t remember the name of the demonologist I’d come to Aszyyr to find. Why couldn’t people have simple names like wardogs?
“Harakim N’Fyr!” I blurted with relief when the name came to me. “I must find Harakim N’Fyr, the demonologist who bound the gate that killed Vigilant Aggression.”
“Do you know where Harakim lives?”
“In Aszyyr.”
“It’s a big city.”
It was. Worse, I had no idea how the demonologist smelled and couldn’t follow her scent. I also hadn’t thought to ask anyone what she looked like or where, exactly, I might find her. I wanted to howl in mournful defeat. Nhil should have sent someone else, someone better suited.
“Is Harakim powerful or important?” Balen asked.
I shrugged, helpless. “She’s the demonologist who bound the gate the wardogs have used for generations to bring the emperor’s peace to other worlds.”
“I think that means yes.” He stood, pushing back from the table. “I have an idea. Let’s go.”
I followed Balen from the Soggy Tart. Once out on the street, he stopped, looking up at the sky. Dark clouds, a thousand churning shades of grey, stretched from one horizon to the other. The world had changed while we ate. In the weeks since I left PalTaq the wind had always blown eastward. It had shifted and now carried the rusting smoke stench of the demonic forges from the north end of the city. A confused blend of decaying fruit, murky swamps, and reptiles intermingled with the stink of industry. Far to the north, lightning stabbed down from the heavens, lancing into the jungle below. Were those elementals, too, sparks of destruction raging at how short their lives were?
