The Dawnhounds Read online

  Her hands shook, and she could feel a stabbing pain coming on from somewhere between her eyes. Tonight’s chase had worn her down. Her edges were fraying at the best of times, and it wasn’t the best of times. She took a moment to look around. A blank trundled by, carrying a cask of palm wine. His glassy eyes made her uncomfortable, but she knew he wouldn’t tell anybody. Blanks weren’t smart enough to talk: they could follow orders and that was about it. The city used to hang people but, now, well, it found a use for them. It was humane, as far as those things went.

  She took out a kiro cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag. The instant opiate wave crashed over her, and she staggered. She had to lean against a wall to keep herself upright—stronger than usual. Cut with something? Maybe, yes, no, who cares? Too much thinking. Too much

  —please there’s been a mistake. I was onl—

  —please I have a daughter. She’s sick and she n—

  detail. She reeled under the weight of memories that weren’t her own: pulled from whatever communal consciousness the kiro tapped into. She got them sometimes when she wasn’t high: snatches of song from another frequency, little blaring bits of nonsense. The drugs made them more clear, but less sharp: as though clarity took away some of their bite. She wasn’t an addict, of course. Addicts were a blight on the city, and belonged in the cells. She was a good

  —following orders. Just kept on firing like Mr Ź—

  cop. The sorta cop from the stories. Sure there were bad cops, but you needed good cops to balance them out.

  She finished the cigarette, and stomped it out to be sure. Strongest stuff she’d had in a long time: she swore she could feel somebody else’s breath coming up through her throat. The wall was soft: coated in a coloured layer of mycelium. Cosmetic? Probably. Didn’t matter. She was tired, and that was fine. Sleep didn’t come easily and it was no sin to get a little

  —I don’t underst—

  help. Well maybe it was but it wasn’t a big one and it was okay because she did more good overall unlike—

  She wondered whether there had once been real magic in the world. Magic: incredible, unreal, world-breaking stuff. Every kid knew the old stories: all men lived forever, until the Goddess Night took the secret of immortality and ate it. When the trickster Lan-wei tried to sneak into her belly and steal it back, she caught him between her mighty thighs and broke him in half. Magic didn’t exist in the world; magic belonged to the dead.

  She leaned against a wall, and heard music carried on the wind: a familiar melody she hadn’t heard in years. Kiada’s song. Could it really be? Kiada was gone, in the way so many street kids were gone—one day there with a clever smile and a bright and clear soprano, the next: gone. Like she never existed. Taken by the city, to the place where poor kids went. She’d been an eastern kid: swung in one day on a merchantman, got left at the docks. She hadn’t talked about it much, but they’d talked about everything else. She was pale, like all easterners, with hair like flame and deep brown eyes. They’d been children, then older than that, sitting with one-another and watching the moon rise and touching in quiet ways that never went anywhere. They were filthy and homeless, but somehow she always smelled like home. One day the city ate her whole, and didn’t even have the courtesy to spit out her bones.

  She used to sing that song, sitting on the rooftops, looking out over the canals. She said it was from an opera they’d had back home in Accenza. There was more, but she didn’t know the other songs. She knew that one song, because they’d sung it on the ship, and so far as Yat knew she didn’t have a life before the ship: just ocean, then Hainak.

  Somebody was singing it now: not Kiada’s bright soprano, but huskier, earthier. She stumbled after the music, as though her heart and her legs were in accord, and the rest of her just had to deal with it.

  They took her to a door in the Shambles, painted white. She knew the place: a bar for folk with delicate issues. Folk unfit to be cops, or citizens: folk the world tucked away where it didn’t have to look at them. Folk the city ate sometimes. A wave of shame washed over her: she’d been caught doing this before. The police had a register of places like this. They didn’t raid them unless the voices in parliament got too loud: the men in bird masks shouting about sin, about the cycle of death and birth and how certain delicate issues broke the gods’ perfect system. She slumped against the door, and a face peeked out: a broad-chested man in a mask shaped like a stylised buck. He held a big bit of wood in both hands: something not clublike enough to count as an illegal weapon, but clublike enough to crack a troublemaker’s skull. His face softened when he saw her.

  “Bakky,” she said.

  The bouncer smiled at her. It wasn’t his real name, but they didn’t use real names. It was a place like a dream: its memory lost in the morning.

  “Ezu,” he said, and smiled. He lay the wood against the door frame, and wrapped her in a hug. She hugged him weakly back, and didn’t smile. The drugs made her head spin a little, and she felt ill as he pulled her in.

  “Music?” she slurred.

  He cast a suspicious eye down at her.

  “I’m letting you in,” he said, “but I’m telling the bar you’re prematurely cut off, alright? You’re alright for a pig, but Shaz will kill us both if you puke on the floor.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Music?”

  She nodded. She wasn’t planning to drink anyway: it usually just made her feel ill at the time, and worse in the morning. She stumbled down the stairs into the bar. It was more quiet than she’d expected, then she realised the crowd were enraptured by the woman onstage. She wore a veil over her face, though her chin—jutting out below—was dark-skinned like a local, not pale like an easterner. Her hair was red, but not red like Kiada’s: dyed red with henna, running down her back in a single, strong plait. She was singing Kiada’s song, though: despite the difference in their voices, it was unmistakable. Yat didn’t know what the words meant, but it was clearly a song of sorrow. The crowd swayed back and forth, their arms around each other, as the woman sang. Yat swayed with them, tottering through the crowd as though the ground were swaying beneath her feet like a ship in a storm.

  A band stood at attention, at their instruments. They did not play, except for the percussionist, who beat a single immense drum, each beat seeming to shake the world to pieces. Some of the instruments were traditional: a viol, the drum. She did not recognise the rest: a clear sac embedded with wooden pipes, an array of flesh that hummed when squeezed. New things, fresh from the labs. The drumbeat was beautiful, primal, and Yat let it wash over her as she approached the stage in a half-trance. The song pitched upwards, gaining in speed and intensity and then—

  —stopped. Yat hung in the moment, the sudden silence more rich and vibrant than any song could be: it was as thought the world had drawn in breath, and she could do nothing but stand and wait for it to exhale a hurricane.

  It hit, as the band unleashed at once: strings and pipes smashing a wall of sound, amplified by the tinkers’ horns on the walls. It annihilated thought, and pain: for a moment, there was only music. It could’ve lasted forever. The crowd danced around her, but she just stood, in front of the stage, with her eyes closed. She felt safe here. She knew she wasn’t: that maybe this would be another night when she got unlucky. Conceptually, she knew it, but she didn’t care. They couldn’t take music from her; they couldn’t take the strong-chinned woman with the beautiful, husky voice; they couldn’t take the way her body and her voice made Yat feel: the warmth and tension that she felt in her muscles, and somewhere beyond her muscles. She finished the song, and began another: one Yat vaguely recognised from street faires. It was good, but the spell was broken: she pushed her way through the crowd and found a wall to lean on. She watched the dancers warily: men with men, women with women. It was exciting, but her excitement ashamed her. She watched them dance, and she felt something she didn’t want to give words to.
r />   A man pushed another against the wall, and for a moment it looked like a fight. She stepped out. Her head spun, and she could hear thoughts in her head which were not her own: snatches of Kiro-talk echoing around inside her skull.

  “Are you okay, Sir?” she said. The two men gawped at her, then the one against the wall laughed.

  “I’m fine,” he grinned. He had a spiral design painted on his face, which seemed to dance in the light. The other man pushed against him, put his chin against the base of the other man’s neck, kissed up and up. His face was painted red, with white lines cutting through it. Yat wasn’t quite keeping up: the drugs in her system made her words come out too late. She realised what was happening, but her mouth was already ahead of her.

  “Is he hurting you, Sir?” she said.

  They both laughed at that, then the kissing man pulled the other one close and stared into his eyes.

  “Am I hurting you?” he said, with a big smile.

  His partner shook his head, mock-coquettish.

  “No sir,” he said, in a piping imitation of Yat, “not at all Sir.”

  Red-face grabbed him and kissed him on the mouth, fully. He had one hand behind his partner’s head, and another tilting his chin up. They stood together, and Yat blushed. When they pulled apart—for only a moment—she saw spiral-face pulled back his tongue.

  “How about now?” said Red-face. The other man was going a little red himself, and for a moment they all had red faces.

  “No,” he said, and smiled. “But if you want to try again, my place is up the road.”

  They pushed together, nose-to-nose, and spiral ran a playful hand across red’s cheek. They stood there, swaying to the music, not looking at Yat, so very gentle together. She didn’t know what to do, so she wandered back into the dance floor, closed her eyes, and let the music wash over her again. The band were finishing their second song, and taking up a third: the percussionist had moved from the drum to an array of bone plates, hung by vines from the roof. He danced between them: he had a small hammer in one hand, and a bundle of short vines in the other. Each plate played a different tone, and he beat out a hypnotic rhythm. He also wore a veil, but was otherwise naked except for a loincloth. His movements were sinuous and beautiful, and a warmth moved up her. He was a small man, and dark, and he glistened with sweat as he danced. It occurred to her, as she watched him, that she did not find men beautiful by default, with women as a defect, nor did she move between men and women: the contours of the body mattered less than the way it moved, how gentle its arms looked, the way it made her heartbeat quicken. She loved men and women; she did not love men, and women.

  She stayed and watched the rest of the show, as the night wore on. She burned through most of her kiro, and weaved amongst the crowd, and let them exist around her. When it was done and they closed out, she returned into herself and remembered why she’d come: Kiada’s song. The band went through a door at the back of the stage, and disappeared. The crowd were going their separate ways, pairing off and wandering into the night. She clambered onto the stage. Bakky saw her, and sighed, and shook his head, then turned to find something else to do. The door was still half-open and she slipped through it, into the green room. The percussionist was reclining on a long couch, smoking a pipe. He looked up when he saw her coming, then cleared his throat, stood up, and left. The rest of the band stood up, fidgeted, smiled, went with him, filing out of the room, deeper into the guts of the bar.

  For a moment, Yat was crestfallen. Then she saw the singer, standing in the corner. She was even more beautiful without her veil: strong, oak-eyed and solemn. She was perhaps thirty, but she held herself like a wise woman. She took a step forward.

  “I saw you watching me,” she said.

  “I, uh …” said Yat, “um.”

  Smooth as usual. As the woman swept forward, she stepped back, almost stumbled, felt her back hit the wall of the green room. Her cheeks flushed hot. She had lain with women before, and with men, but her shame made her feel like a child. Her memory flashed back to those officers in the boardroom, with their dead eyes and empty smiles. The singer stepped back, and held her hands up in front of her.

  “You don’t need to be here, if you don’t want,” she said. There was a disappointment in her voice, but she stepped to the side, to leave a clear path to the door. Yat shook her head.

  “That song,” she said, “the first one. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful. You’re—”

  She didn’t know what else to say. She stared at the woman, almost defiantly, as if to say I belong here, like you, with you. She did not step forward, so the woman did it for her. They came together, and Yat pushed her face into the woman’s neck. She was such a perfect creature: a thing from another world and yet here, just another lost in the night.

  The woman was strong. She didn’t know her name, and she didn’t want to know her name: she was the Veil, and that was it. Yat pulled herself into the woman, let her warmth and her smell encompass her, become her. Veil was strong, lean, well-muscled: when she pushed back, she did so with just enough force to send a shudder through Yat, a current, starting between her legs, spreading into her belly, moving up her back, making the hairs on her neck stand on end. She let the woman take her, push against her, slide a hand across her breasts, down her stomach, a trail of lightning. They stopped for a moment, negotiated her belt buckle, hand-meeting-hand, pulling back, startled, then moving in together, in concord. Veil’s hand went down past the open belt, and Yat’s body parted for her.

  Veil spoke, and Yat could hear her smile in her voice.

  “You do find me beautiful, don’t you?”

  Yat couldn’t speak: her chest was too tight. She let out a gentle moan as the woman’s fingers opened her, and entered her. If she could will herself to open more, she would’ve: open totally, let the Veil have all of her—things without words that lived in places without names.

  “Yes,” said Yat. The word fell out of her. She didn’t know what she was answering: she was answering everything. Yes it felt good, yes she was beautiful, yes she could have whatever she wanted. She felt the Veil’s hands inside her, and against her, steady yet urgent. Yat’s breathing was heavy, and her chest rose and fell in time with the Veil’s, the woman’s breasts pressing against her own and making her feel warm even through the stiff cotton of her uniform, joining with the heat moving up from her legs, dancing together as her muscles tightened, starting somewhere behind her thighs moving up through her until she cried out; it fell away, built again, broke inside her and made her grunt, fell away again and sent ripples out across her hips and down the backs of her legs; tightness building and building, reaching crescendo until she was all fire, and then the wave broke and rolled over her, a spasm rolling through her body that pushed her face deep into the Veil’s shoulder. She bit down to stop herself crying out again, and heard the Veil cry out with her, and then they slumped into each other, breathing hard, smiling, laughing between teeth.

  Yat looked into the Veil’s perfect dark eyes, and breathed for what felt like the first time all day.

  “Can we—” she said, “can we go somewhere else? Can I uh, can I, return the favour? Please?”

  The Veil shook her head, and smiled sadly.

  “Go home, constable,” she said. “Or I might end up telling you my name, and we both know where that ends.”

  It was true: they wouldn’t let her off lightly again, and they’d do worse to the other woman—cops protected cops, even when they loathed them. Cops were the exception there. She didn’t know how the Veil knew, though the uniform probably gave it away. She nodded.

  “Before I go,” she said, “can I kiss you?”

  The woman—

  Yat was standing in another street, closer to home. She didn’t remember walking there, didn’t remember what had come next. She felt good, though: warm, loved. She didn’t know how long the feelin
g would last, but she held onto it tightly, like a fist clenched around an ember. She kept walking. People were hanging lanterns and banners: 10 years free and Hainak stands and Fuck the Lion.

  The last one made her laugh. Out loud? Maybe, hard to say. Her lips were dry; she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. The banners were few days early, and it made her uneasy—parties were always a problem, and the anniversary didn’t hold much for her; she’d been a kid when it happened. She remembered fire, and shouting, and little else.

  The first rays of morning stained the sky in purple and orange. Had she really been at the docks that long? She passed the hawker from earlier. He took a step forward, recognised her, then went back to bothering another early-riser—a baker, by the look of him. Maybe some sorta factory worker. Some sorta—

  New street, closer to home. The city was more crowded now: it came to life around her, and she did not feel safe. The sun began to rise over the other side of the wall—the four heavens making no allowance for the laws of men—and Yat

  —the reek of sulfur, and salt water and—

  went

  —did what you said, now let me sl—

  home.

  Salt. Salt water and—

  mud? Peaty, boggy, salty: like the worst whisky Yat had ever tasted. She sat up in her bed, then went over to the window and spat. The sun hung in the sky over Hainak, and she sighed: she’d woken up early again. Still not adjusted to night shifts. Not the first time she’d had to shift her body clock from one to the other. She lay back down in her bed and closed her eyes. It did nothing. She rolled over and tried to curl up around her pillow. It was comfortable, but it didn’t make her any more tired. Well, tired wasn’t the word: she was always tired, she just couldn’t sleep. Her head hurt, and her mouth tasted like an ashtray. Her clothes were a mess. Somewhere in the night, she’d lost her belt: had forgotten to do it back up and then just lost the whole damned thing somehow.