Havemercy Read online

  He fell silent, seemingly unaware that this was the most he’d ever spoken to me.

  I realized at once what I’d been too dazed, too tired, to understand until now. Adamo was being kind to me. After all, he wasn’t required to explain the situation or indeed any of the particulars to me. And yet, if I understood correctly, he’d stepped out of his chief sergeant’s quarters to let me know. Perhaps it wasn’t so very important to him, but considering the month I’d been having, I could have kissed him.

  On second thought, I added dryly to myself, that was clearly not a system of rewards I should put into play at the Airman, of all places.

  “Ah, yes. Thank you. I had wondered,” I said.

  “So you should try for some more sleep yourself,” he concluded, then jerked one hand behind him. “That’s where I’m headed. And tomorrow, you might want to lay off it. The boys’ll be tired, on edge. It’s been a long time since the bell sounded, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I do. I’ll keep it in mind. Of course,” I said, all very quickly. “Thank you again.” I was on the verge of adding a tentative but nevertheless friendly good night when the door snicked shut, leaving the hall empty and dark and utterly silent once more.

  Well, I thought. It might have been second nature to the members of the corps, but I’d only been there a month. Though I returned to my couch, I found myself wide-awake, nerves still jangling, heart still skipping its usual rhythm when I remembered the shock of the raid bell, or when I thought that at any moment it was likely to sound again. How any of these men managed to sleep, I had no idea.

  For a long time I stared at the ceiling, calming my thoughts, but the comfortable ambling path of my mind just before sleep continued to elude me. I let my mind wander, but it was too much engaged. I was thinking about the dragons and, admittedly, their riders. What sort of men, I wondered, would volunteer for such a job? It shouldn’t ever have come as a surprise to me that I was dealing with madmen, with lunatics, with perhaps the criminally insane. They were capable of waking instantly at the sound of the bell, suiting up, and shipping out before I’d even rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It was a miraculous talent, certainly, but who would ever knowingly choose such a way of living?

  The dragons’ choices had something or other to do with it, but they chose from a group of volunteers—from men willing to die at the drop of a hat or at the sound of a bell. Though for many of them, I began to realize, it’s what they had been trained for since birth, perhaps creating a mentality an outsider would find difficult to understand.

  My mind veered off after that to uninformed theories on the dragons and the mechanisms that ran them, half motor and half magic. Their greatest attributes were speed, stealth, the ability—despite their limited capacity for fuel, and what it did to their range—to raze an entire Ke-Han city to the ground. And, of course, there was the fact that the technology was ours and ours alone. The Ke-Han had no comparable army in the skies. The corps was th’Esar’s greatest triumph and Volstov’s ace in the hole. Admittedly, the Ke-Han had still found a way to make things particularly dangerous for them. In the earlier years it had been the catapults, firing great rocks into the sky before any of the first airmen had really got the hang of flying their dragons. We’d adapted around that, though, and the next dragons created had been sleeker, swifter, and the catapults had become relatively obsolete. Next, and perhaps most successfully, the Ke-Han had capitalized on their skills with wind magic, coupled with the mountains that so often landed dead center of the battlefield. They’d never brought a dragon down in large enough pieces for it to be of any use to them, but they’d brought one or more to ruin in the mountains, along with their airmen.

  These days, the biggest vulnerability concerning the dragons was the amount of fuel their sleek bodies could hold. It wasn’t enough to get into Lapis and back properly, and Lapis was where the Ke-Han kept their magicians. The more fuel they carried, the heavier they were and the slower they flew, and so on. The system hadn’t yet been perfected, so that the farthest the dragons could reach were the Ke-Han watchtowers stationed along the mountains and their troops stationed around them.

  If the war continued for another fifty years, perhaps the technicians would have time to solve the problem.

  Still, there was a lot riding on the airmen, both on nights when the bell rang and on nights when it didn’t.

  I passed my hand over my eyes, rubbing blearily at them. What I couldn’t get behind, I decided at last, wasn’t the sound of the siren, nor even the flying, for I had no fear of heights. Rather, it was the fire. Most children who grow up in Molly or along the Mollyedge are trained to hate and fear fire; in Molly’s cramped, winding streets and cluttered tenements, fire spreads too quickly to contain and kills without prejudice and without remorse the unlucky, the lame, the very young, and the very old. I lost my brother to one such fire, and naturally have been averse to them ever since.

  After that, I was taken in by a few young women who tricked their trade at a House on Tuesday Street; a fire nearly claimed them two years later, when I was five. I can’t say they moved up in the world after that, but rather cut their losses and dove deeper into Molly, bringing me along with them. I stayed for ten years, even once things became a bit dodgy. It was there that I forgot my brother’s face—since, after all, I’d only known him for three years—and there that I taught myself three languages, the requirement for applying to ’Versity Prep, by studying in the prop room behind the hapenny-for-a-peek burlesque to the sound of Gin the Rattler’s uncertain piano tunes. One year there was even a trumpeter, but he was a hopeless sot, and he was found halfway through his contract facedown in a gutter, and once that happened it was only old Gin hammering away at the half-remembered melodies.

  All of this was long past. It was only the late hour and my unfortunate bout of insomnia that caused me to remember them. I wasn’t often prone to such nostalgic indulgences.

  I was just on the verge of drifting off again—in the midst of wondering what it was my brother really did look like—when I heard the sound of a door slamming, followed by raucous laughter and approaching footsteps. The voices I heard a few moments later I recognized immediately. Rook, Ace, and Ghislain were coming toward the common room, and my only recourse was to pretend I was sleeping.

  Luckily, they stopped just beyond the door; I heard them talking, muted, through the wall. A few nervous laughs punctuated the distant conversation.

  “Fuck”—and that was Rook—“if I wouldn’t’ve taken a dive if it wasn’t for that trick you pulled at the last fucking second!”

  “You’ve been holding out on us, Ghislain,” Ace—it must have been Ace—agreed.

  “It was just a dive, only without the falling off,” Ghislain pointed out. Only Ace laughed at that one, but it was the sound of Rook’s voice that fascinated me most. It had changed. It was no longer a sullen child’s, neither stubborn nor prideful, defensive nor prejudiced, but laced with fierce excitement.

  “Fuck, but it was sweet,” Rook said. He was entirely breathless.

  If only I could have moved, sat up, or even reached for something to write on. I had the strange and sudden urge to document this moment for posterity, that I might remember it in the morning as real and not the deluded fabrication of my mind left to its own devices. Even with the airmen’s distraction, I didn’t trust my own movements to be stealthy enough to escape their attention, especially keyed up as they were from the raid.

  No, with my luck, I would knock a table over, announcing my eavesdropping presence more assuredly than any air-raid siren.

  “I only did what I had to,” said Ghislain, and his voice sounded calmer than the rest.

  “Saved my life or damn near to it.” It was the first time I’d heard Ace sound wide-awake, focused. He cursed cheerfully. “I thought I’d never see anything outside of that tornado again! Lucky for me you’ve got lead weights in your ass the same as your dragon. Ke-Han; who’d have guessed? They’ve got balls on ’em,
if nothing else.”

  “Thank the bastion for that. Another day on the ground and Havemercy’d’ve lost it.”

  “You mean you’d have lost it,” said Ace, but it was a cheerful rejoinder, with none of the venom or snapping I’d grown accustomed to hearing from them whenever the airmen interacted in a group, or especially when Ace and Rook were alone.

  Breathing shallowly, holding carefully still despite the fact that no one had attempted to enter the room, I remained possessed by a feeling I could not name or did not want to. In short: I was awestruck. I’d spent weeks trying to divine what it was that kept these men together and allowed them to function as a team when all I’d seen of them appeared to be grave dysfunction and an unwillingness to do whatever it was they were told. These were men contrary as cats and solitary as lone wolves, and all the information I’d gathered to this point added up to indicate that logically, they could not and would not function as a team.

  Except logic appeared to have taken a leave—perhaps the sirens had scared it away—and outside my door the three men continued to converse as perfectly natural human beings. A little nervous and on edge, certainly, but it was the kind of jump that anyone got from a rush of adrenaline, and it held none of their usual sparking hatred.

  “Think the war’s on for good again?” Rook’s voice practically trembled on this last, with enough eagerness to inspire in me a peculiar mix of revulsion and intrigue. Only a man so cold as Airman Rook would crave the resumption of something as destructive as Volstov’s hundred-years war with the Ke-Han.

  “Don’t think anyone’ll really miss that guard tower. Anyway, that isn’t the important part. They hit us. You know what that means.” With my eyes closed, I thought I could almost picture the smooth, rolling indifference of Ghislain’s broad shoulders.

  “We hit back,” Rook answered, with violent exhilaration. “Shit, I don’t think any of them’s going to be forgetting tonight real soon.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be forgetting tonight real soon,” Ace complained.

  “Better be on your guard,” said Rook, “or else Ghislain’ll be taking your spot on that board pretty quick.”

  “Maybe he’ll take yours,” said Ace, but quietly, and it was only then I grasped that I could hear him because he was standing just outside the door.

  I threw the blankets over my head. The room lit up with a spark and a hum, and the sound of laughter and booted feet flooded the common room.

  I cursed silently in the three languages I’d learned to speak, which had indirectly led me along the path to being here, sleeping on a couch—a grown man, hiding from other grown men.

  “Well, if it isn’t the littlest fucking professor.” Even with me, Rook’s voice did not regain that glass-sharp cruelty to which I’d become accustomed. “Up and out. This is a private party and I know you ain’t asleep. Ain’t nobody who sleeps after the raid siren on their first night.”

  “I was asleep,” I said stubbornly, which defeated my purpose in concealment, but I thought perhaps in the long run it might save me from the indignity of being sat on, or coated in tar, and then dipped in feathers, or whatever other horrible plans they had percolating behind their laughing eyes and smug, secure grins.

  When I opened my eyes I saw immediately why anyone back from a raid procured inarguable rights to the showers, as all three men were covered in thick, uneven layers of ash that had been smeared into their clothes and faces like a second skin. Their gloves were stained greasy and black, and there were bright, pale rings around their eyes that I supposed meant they had been wearing goggles. When Rook smiled, his teeth flashed white and uncomfortably pointed against the black of his skin.

  They looked less like men and more than a little like the portraits of the Ke-Han warrior gods I’d seen inked in the textbooks at the ’Versity.

  “I know I’ve left it here somewhere,” said Ace out loud, though to no one in particular. He was rummaging through the cupboards set into the far wall.

  “Leave him be,” said Ghislain, meaning me. “I’m too worn-out to be fighting with anyone as isn’t dressed in blue and screaming curses on my family to all eternity.”

  “Sometimes he wears blue,” said Rook, nodding toward me with a maddening obstinacy.

  To my great surprise, however, he didn’t press the matter. He only leaned against the wall and folded his arms, as though he were too tired to stand and too wired to sit.

  “Ha!” Ace produced a bottle from one of the cupboards, which bore a seal resembling that of the private store of the Arlemagne noblesse. I recognized it because their diplomat had spent a very long time wetting his throat with it in between detailing how exactly he wanted Airman Rook torn to pieces by wild dogs.

  Ghislain—who’d procured a chair and was studying the floor as though he were now trying to decide whether it would be an adequate place to fall asleep or not—smiled, his mouth knowing and expectant, then asked anyway. “What’s that?”

  “I thought we might celebrate, it being our first raid of the season and all.”

  “Make it quick,” said Rook, leaving a long black smudge against the wall where he’d been leaning against it. “I’m gonna sleep like the dead tonight and I ain’t getting up for any lessons.” He threw this last with a look at me, which was jarring after having been so ignored.

  “There aren’t any lessons tomorrow,” I said, uncomfortably clearing the sleep from my voice as the other two turned to look at me as well. “I thought—Well, the Chief Sergeant suggested, I mean—I don’t have anything planned,” I concluded lamely, ashamed of myself for being so surprised by the change in the airmen that I no longer knew how to interact with them.

  It was as though they’d undergone a metamorphosis, and where I’d once made myself comfortable in a cocoon of sarcasm and heavy-handed wit, I now had to reevaluate everything I’d learned. I got the feeling they’d brought the shadows of their dragons back with them, hidden but transformative, and were both less and more like real human men for it.

  If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought they did it on purpose.

  “There, see,” said Ace, pouring the bubbling liquor into large cups obviously not meant for the expensive vintage they now held. “No lessons. That means you can all celebrate and stop pretending like you’re sleepy as babes in arms.”

  “I am sleepy,” said Ghislain, but he held his hand out for the glass all the same.

  I could no more attempt to go back to sleep now than I could after the air-raid sirens had gone off. Even ignored as I was, even aware that I was an outsider, I could not help but observe with fascination the difference in process. My fear, that as the novelty and the adrenaline wore off them it would be replaced by the sullenness and anger I’d come to think of as characteristic, turned out to be unfounded. Instead, a kind of calm had settled over them. It was partly exhaustion, perhaps, but when Ace thrust his cup out in front of him, even Rook begrudgingly joined the toast.

  What I realized then—with the clarity that could only come from having been powerfully, painfully wrong—was that much of the behavior of the airmen came not from a fount of cruelty and stupidity, but rather a gratuitous squandering of ability. These were men who’d been fed from birth, as Marius had so aptly put it, on their own importance to the realm. Each member of the Dragon Corps knew this about himself, only to be met with the stubborn reality that, when the war was no longer being waged, th’Esar had no need for them. It must have been a bitter tonic to swallow. It was as though the siren and the resulting raid had bled off some reserve of poison and drained them of their shaky, pent-up rage.

  They no longer seemed a separate species, like proud, ill-behaved animals, but appeared to be men at last.

  That was not to say I excused their behavior, for in truth I still found their society as oppressive, cruel, and elitist as I ever had, but I felt for the first time as though I understood, infinitesimally, the smallest piece of the puzzle that caused them to operate the way they did.

/>   ROYSTON

  We had to be careful. That much was of paramount importance.

  A knock on my door—my brother, briefly inquiring after my health that evening—jolted me from a thoroughly incautious examination of the shadow of Hal’s eyelashes against his cheek while he read.

  My own private feelings on the matter would have to be kept just that: private. It was all there was to it, and with no room for argument I thought that I could readily convince myself of the new way of things.

  All too soon—or seemingly not soon enough—Hal had finished with his reading. At least, I applauded myself, I’d kept from descending so much into my thoughts that I no longer had the wherewithal to converse with him properly.

  “Hal,” I spoke to remind him, quiet and low, though it was as much for my own benefit as it was for his. “You mustn’t forget what we discussed. We cannot meet with such frequency, and you must try your hardest not to seek me out so.”

  “I will,” Hal said. Then, flushing, he added, “But it will be difficult.”

  “You must do it,” I insisted, more forcefully than was perhaps necessary. I had to make him listen and, beyond that, I had to know he understood me. I thought of my brother’s wife, her intolerance fueled by a sharp but nevertheless closed mind. I thought of what she might do if she suspected Hal of having any manner of feelings for me which she might deem unseemly, and it was enough to make me ill.