The Graverobber on Ghost Street - [chapter two]
Chapter Two. Notes at end.
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II.
He woke up the next day in time for lunch. This was usual. In the normal course of things, he got back around dawn and slept til around noon, when Kaixin came upstairs with food. Sun slanted in onto the floor and onto Nitesh’s stomach, painting plant-shaped shadows on him. The naightmice were complaining as always.
Yes, yes, Nitesh told them, dragging himself up and opening their cage door. The naightmice skittered out, jumping in under the plants’ leaves, hiding out behind the greenery. They muttered inarticulately about the sun.
You need it for your wings, Nitesh told them, and wandered off to the bathroom. The gurihound had laid itself like a log along the threshold of the room, and Nitesh stepped over its scaled back, managing not to wake it. He went and used the bathroom, washed his hands, and padded back out. Into the living room to open the window for the maqueren on the windowsill, then back to bed, where he found the place he’d vacated was still pleasantly warm, and thus occupied by a dulimao.
I didn’t see you come in, he told it.
You wouldn’t, it told him.
He shoved it aside and lay back down. The dulimao, gravely insulted, curled up on his stomach in the sunlight.
He came awake again when the front door clicked open. Kaixin sang more than was humanly reasonable, and he was doing so now, accompanied by Nitesh’s sister whistling somewhere down the hall. Nitesh followed the singing around the apartment with his ears until it peeped in the door. He opened his eyes.
“Good, you’re up!” Kaixin came in and put the foodbags on the table. “You’re going to hate everything in the world in a moment.”
Nitesh looked at him suspiciously.
“Once I tell you,” Kaixin noted, and ducked out again.
Some rustles and crinkles in the kitchen. Nitesh poked the dulimao under its armpits, which set it into a panic and a jump off the bed and under the table, until it remembered its dignity and drew itself up, affronted.
I can’t eat with you on me, Nitesh said reasonably, leaning himself up against the wall.
The dulimao chose a paw and began licking it clean. It shut all its eyes and ignored him.
“So, about the hating -” Kaixin came back in, one hand full of chopsticks and cups and spoons, a bottle in the other. Nitesh kept his eyes on it but it turned out to just be tea from Roshni, steaming when it hit the cups. Nitesh sighed.
Kaixin was everything his name suggested. He was neither tall nor short, neither thick nor thin, only a bit stocky in the shoulders and neck. Otherwise he was pretty normal, with a pleasant, smile-shaped face and longish, dexterous hands, which were almost always bicycle-greasy from his work at the shop.
He dumped utensils on the table and untwisted the bottlecap, then opened up the food containers. The smell of cornbread wafted out. “The King wants to see you.”
Nitesh’s stomach soured. He got up and went and sat at the table.
“And the double-J girls.”
“Ugh,” Nitesh put his face in his hands. “Did you have to ruin my morning?”
“I do my best,” Kaixin said, and dragged out the other chair. He sat down and started eating. Nitesh looked up - chunky stewed corn, potatoes, meat, and beans in one box, cornbread in the other.
“Didn’t they have anything fresh?”
“This is fresh.”
Nitesh waved a hand. “Winter food. It’s still just harvest, don’t they have anything more - summery?”
“You’re such as happy daisy to be around,” Kaixin remarked, chopsticking out more corn chunks and beans. “It’s late, the lady was sold out.”
“Late?”
“Nearly one. I thought since you got in early you’d wake up early -” he looked over at Nitesh’s face and paused in his eating. “No? No. Well, the J’s were asking after you all morning, and the King’s runner was over around ten. I told her when you usually wake and so she came back an hour later telling me to send you when you woke. And I’ve been fending off the J’s telling them how tired you were and how much you work, all for their benefit, and maybe they could perhaps be a little patient, thank you?”
Nitesh smiled, at that, and Kaixin grinned and went back to eating. Nitesh served himself and ate, too. He mulled it over, and eventually said, “King first. The girls sent me into a real mess last night, and I don’t mind making them wait.”
Kaixin’s eyebrows went up. He chewed.
“New building. Nowhere I knew. There was an ash.”
Kaixin’s eyes widened. He swallowed. “They knew that? And they didn’t warn you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say they knew,” Nitesh considered. “But they should have. They gave me the specific location. It’s out in Qunli. Very isolated. It’s dark. I wouldn’t have gone there if I hadn’t been paid as much as they promised.” He thought about how he could tell Kaixin about last night. “How much time do you have?”
“Enough to swallow the rest of this,” Kaixin held up his cornbread, “and then I have to get back.”
“Then I’ll tell you about last night tonight before I go out,” Nitesh said. “I met -” how did you even explain it? “- a new type of animal.”
“Oh,” Kaixin said, and grinned. “Should I be worried?”
“Not sure.”
Kaixin made a face and shrugged, and downed the rest of his cornbread. “Then I eagerly await tonight,” he said, and stood up. “Have fun with the King and the girls,” he told Nitesh, and headed out.
Nitesh cleaned up, first the food stuff and then himself. He took his day-bag and transferred from his work-pack the stuff he would need - wallet, a few tools, pouch with the goods he’d be presenting the two J’s with later - the King would definitely want to see that. He also grabbed out the contract he had with the J’s and stowed it in his bag too, since he anticipated having to explain himself.
Then he set out to find the King.
During the change, infrastructures cracked and crumbled like candy. There’d been, Nitesh heard from his grandparents, who’d heard it from their parents, who’d lived it, some years where you didn’t leave the house but to scavenge - people looted, killed, everything to stay alive, anything to stay alive, and they couldn’t, not with the winters here and the plagues and the sandstorms. The new animals, sentient but not yet having learnt human speech, tore into humans, and humans tore back, killing in droves, eating what they could, leaving to rot in the streets what they couldn’t, and the carcasses only drew more animals. They took the cars with gas in them and drove out, away; they huddled in malls and shopping centers and foodstores and drove off invaders with kitchen knives, construction tools, anything that worked. They took what they could, til there wasn’t a store but had been broken into, and then gathered in groups to wander and steal some more.
And then the King showed up.
He’d not been the King at first. At first he’d been a rumor - that there was a man who’d talked and clawed his way up, leading the raids. That he was yet in the south, but coming into the city, gathering people to him as he went. That he was in the city, that he treated his people with fairness but outsiders without mercy, that he knew the land like he knew the books of war, that he held enough food for any persons who might join him, that he had guns, that he was he was coming. That he was here.
The king hit the river. He saw what was there. He saw the city spreading out behind him, the brown water before him, the park and the reservoir across from him. He turned and ordered his banner set down. “We will stay,” he said.
His men did. They took the buildings along the river, from monument to railroad bridge. They built a barricade along the streets. They secured what they could, and took what they found.
Then they began to raid.
There was little for anyone else to do but to join them. The king was fair to his subjects: those who came to him voluntarily he allowed to choose apartments, to show him their talents, to work at what they might, as long as it might benefit him and his. Those who did not come voluntarily, he forced into his service or killed. The animals he subdued or shot. And everywhere there was anything to take, he took, and began to build a hoard.
He lasted a commendably long time, for a leader so ruthless. He was almost fifty when he was assassinated, and the son whom he had chosen to follow him had the assassins and their families drowned, then took his place. He had lasted a good while, too, and the King now - well, he’d been only seven years in his place, but already he showed signs of following in his fathers’ steps. His hoard was so great he’d had to take up a whole building for it, and there was talk of him moving the barricades out a street, to add more buildings to his rule. He maintained the greenhouses, he’d gotten the hospital up and working, and he used his brothers to uphold the laws his father had created. He was an effective king.
Nitesh saw this, and understood this. And still hated him, for the simple reason that the King was a horrible human being.
He kept his lot, yes. He thought of what would benefit them, yes. He was smart, and put his men to good use, yes. But he was also petty, and vicious, and cruel, and had sworn, in some fit of idiocy, to outdo his fathers in hoard, land, and population, and to that end he stopped at nothing.
Nitesh had read the old philosophers. He knew about humanity, and righteousness. He knew there were days when one could come to court and tell the king what he thought. He thought if Kongzi or Mengzi came to this king’s land, it would be luck only if they left without a bullet through them.
Nitesh went first to the building the king’s family lived in. It was just outside the King’s Square, and it had been a hotel once, with shops overlooking the end of the walking street and the corner-entrance facing the monument by the river. It was all the king’s now - his, and his family’s, and his hoard’s. There were guards standing outside - relatives to people who’d married the king’s brothers and sisters - and some workers hanging off the roof’s edge, touching up the paint on the building’s side.
Nitesh went to the guards. “Is the king here?”
The one he’d asked shook his head. “Out checking on the harvest.”
Nitesh suppressed a sigh. “Which one?”
“Fourteen.”
Nitesh thanked the guard and left.
The harvest! That was all the way across the railroad bridge, and then wandering nicely around until he found wherever the king was inspecting, capped off with the unpleasant sort of interview one always had with the king, unless one was in good with him. Nitesh was not in good with him. Nitesh was in fact very not in good with him.
Oh, this was going to be delightful.
The railroad bridge was a long walk along a steel footpath high above the Songhua river, no more than a meter wide. Two of them were tacked onto either side the main bridge where the tracks ran; chest-high railings on the one side kept you from falling into the water on a windy day, and a rusting tall fence along the other side kept you from falling onto the tracks. You could walk along the tracks if you wanted to, but they were hard to get to and easy to misstep on, and they had wide gaps either side the piles - set foot in one of those and the best you might hope for was to lose a shoe to the river. No, best to stick to the footpath.
It was a nice view, though. To the right, the new bridge, never finished and petering out in the middle of the river, blocked the view of the city - mostly half-finished construction anyhow, and then some mediocre buildings petering out along the shore - but to the right you got a grand lookover of the city, the Songhua, and the far shore. You could easily tell the King’s lands from the rest of the city - the buildings were painted, smoke rose from the chimneys, people worked and wandered on the riverbank. People fished on the shore, and rowed or powered boats across the brown water, over to the far side and back loaded with harvest pickings or firewood from the park; boats went under the bridge, too, and downriver, to an old factory with mountains of coal ripe for harvest at any time of year, or upriver to the silty farmland past the driving-bridge.
It took an age and a half to walk there - the river was wide, the bridge was long, and the far shore was islands before it was land. The mainest island had been parkland, once, and was now thickly-forested, overgrown, and perfect for any wood needed for any conceivable purpose. The channel had been blocked up into a reservoir and had grown thick with weed; in it paddled ducks, and through it strode lightherons, stepping daintily on their two-meter legs and keeping an eye on the ducks. Lightherons were communicable creatures, excellent herders, and careful with their charges, and so the people in the King’s land had ample supply of duckmeat and duck eggs, at least until migration time.
Past the reservoir, solid, flat land rose up again, and Nitesh set foot on the ground and continued. It was still a good long bit before he reached the greenhouses. The J’s would be hopping mad to be made to wait this long. Good.
It was still early in the harvest - the first-to-ripen fruits were in picking-progress now, but there were still plenty more to be had. There were even some particular greenhouses up on the new bridge’s suddenly-terminated stump: earth had been brought up and packed, with intent to get some winter greenhouses going, if it was at all possible. Nitesh highly doubted it, but the King had trucked in glass from some construction sites and had some good scientists at work on the problem - one of Nitesh’s own sisters among them - and there seemed to be headway. Windmills and generators surrounded the new greenhouses, anyway, and spare cinderblock, insulation, and caulking scattered the bridge.
And the king was there. Nitesh noticed him easily, from his height, talking among a group of guards and gardeners, and turned back through the gate. He skipped across the tracks and ducked through a hole in the other-side fence, then walked the length between greenhouses. Set foot on the new bridge, then stood there, waiting, since the King got tetchy if you interrupted him, and Nitesh saw no reason to provoke the King to be more dickish than usual.
The talk took a while - there were clipboards involved - but finally the King finished up. One of his guards stepped up to him and told him something, and the King turned round, saw Nitesh, and gave the shit-eatingest grin. Nitesh sighed inwardly.
“Well,” the King said, walking over, crowd trailing. “Xinge Nitesh.”
The King did not know everyone’s name, but he sure as hell knew Nitesh’s name. Back in the change, any foreigners in the city at the time were stuck there, and even after a couple generations of marrying locals, Nitesh’s family was still the foreigners. Nitesh’s names, first and last, pointed back to a country no one in living family memory had ever seen.
Course, that wasn’t the only reason he knew Nitesh’s name, but it was the most obvious one.
Nitesh bowed. He hated bowing to a man like this. He did it anyway. “My King.”
King Rong Yin stopped, guards arraying around him, a couple advisors and some select botanists tailing along. He was tall and powerfully built, wearing clothing that was tailored (rather than looted and adjusted, like everyone else’s), and had a fine leather coat slung over his shoulder. Round his waist was a belt, on which he carried two guns and a sword, all of which he was proficient in. He practiced with his personal guard every morning in front of the monument. You could watch, if you wanted. Nitesh never did, since he was always asleep.
“Xin tells me you came back early last night,” the King prompted.
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“He tells me you had a nice little stash.”
Nitesh nodded.
The King nodded expectantly. “Well?”
Nitesh fished in his bag and found the pouch. He put it in the King’s waiting hand.
The King glanced at a guard, who went to the scientists and brought back a clipboard. “Hold that,” the King said, and upended the pouch on the clipboard, cupping his hand in front of a rolling-away ring. The pouch’s contents were carefully picked - justabout what looked reasonable for a looted apartment, not too rich, nothing hugely expensive. Some gaudy costume jewelry in there, rhinestones round fake pearls and colored crystal. Some semiprecious, turquoise, agate, a good handful of jade. And a few real pieces, actual gold, real diamond, a heavy ruby ring.
The King picked up the ring, admiring it. “Very nice, very nice. You do know how to pick ‘em. This one -”
He was aiming at being presented some of it gratis, just because of his rank, or for a favor. And if he didn’t get it, he’d figure out a reason to not have to pay, something about compensation and relevant departments. Nitesh knew this because he’d experienced it previously, not just once, but twice.
He pulled out the contract. “Sir, I’ve got customers for most of that,” he said, holding up the paper. “They’ve signed up to a certain amount, and they get first pick, but I’d be happy to discuss pricing for the rest once they’re through. Sir.”
The King slipped the ring on his finger, testing it for looks. “Have they seen this yet?”
Shit. “No sir, they haven’t, but they did sign the contract and they have fir-”
“These customers of yours - those foreign girls, am I right? The new ones?”
How had he known? Nitesh nodded briefly.
“There’s something wrong about them,” the King said ruminatively, taking the ring off and tossing it up and down. He looked at once of his guards. “Has either of them requested an audience?”
“Nosir.”
“Has either of them shown outside their rooms?”
“Nosir.”
“Then how did they see you?” the King looked at Nitesh. Nitesh, eyes still on the ring, didn’t think he expected an answer, and didn’t want the largest part of his profit disappearing, and so he didn’t say anything until the King said, “well? come on, foreigner, I’m waiting.” His fingers closed around the ring.
Nitesh looked up at the King. “I don’t know, sir. I met them in the downstairs, like I meet everybody. They just came in two days ago.”
The King frowned at him. “What, they just walked in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“During the day?”
“Yes, sir, just like everyone else.”
“They’re the only other foreigners here, how could they just leave their rooms and see you? None of you saw?”
The guards all nosirred.
The King frowned and looked back across the river. He stood there ruminating a few moments, then turned back to Nitesh. “What are they paying you for?”
Nitesh held up the contract again. “Just go to a certain address and bring back whatever I found there.”
The King snatched the contract, spilling jewelry off the clipboard. Nitesh bent and picked up what had fallen while the King read the contract carefully.
“This,” he said, stabbing the line for payment. “They’re giving you a damn lot for this job. Two thousand?” He frowned at Nitesh.
Nitesh stood back up, putting the jewelry back on the clipboard and dusting off his hands. “Yes, that’s what they told me.”
The King’s frown deepened. “That’s what they told me, what?”
Nitesh was confused for a second. “Oh. That’s what they told me, sir.”
“That’s right,” the King said, and turned back to the paper. ‘Two thousand,” he muttered. “So fucking much. And why would they pick you?”
Nitesh had been wondering that himself. “I can’t answer that, sir.”
“Of course not.” The King thought for a few more seconds, then took the contract, rolled it up, and started back toward the bridge. The guards glanced at each other, then most followed; the one holding the clipboard hastily tipped its contents back into Nitesh’s pouch, then hurried to catch up. Nitesh hurried too, though for a different reason.
“Excuse me, sir -” the King didn’t even look back, and Nitesh slipped round the guards and over to the King, “my contract, and my ring -”
“I’m going to see these foreigners,” the King said, waving the contract at Nitesh. “You’re coming too. They’re going to explain themselves, and you’re going to tell me what makes this -” he shook the contract, “so special.”
“But the ring -”
The King stuffed it into a pocket. “You’ll be compensated in due time by the relevant departments. Now get out of my way or I’ll have you removed.”
Which meant Nitesh was never going to see a fen of payment, just like the last two times. Damn, but he couldn’t let that happen again! He ran up ahead and stopped in the King’s path, halting his progress.
“Sir, I need the ring back as part of the contracted goods I have acquired for the customers. Or if you’d like to purchase it now we can come to an agreement. I am willing to -” he dipped into his bag, pulled out paper and pen from his bag, “compromise in that regard. If you’d prepare a statement, I’m sure an agreement could be reached.”
The King motioned with two fingers. A guard came round him and took Nitesh carefully but firmly by the upper arm. He started to tow him away. “No, wait,” the King said, and the guard halted. The King stepped forward.
“You’re forgetting your place, little foreigner,” he told Nitesh. He took Nitesh’s wrist, squeezed, and twisted. The paper and pen slipped from Nitesh’s fingers. “Is it your place to correct the King? Is it?”
The right answer was no. The right answer was no. Nitesh thought of Kongzi and Mengzi and said nothing.
The King frowned and twisted harder.
Nitesh bent forward a little to alleviate the strain. He swallowed and said, “no.”
“No what.”
“No, sir.”
He expected that would make the King let go. It didn’t.
“Tell me, Xinge Nitesh. When was the last time you put you name in for the lottery?”
Nitesh swallowed again, this time not looking at the King.
“I seem to recall the answer is ‘never’. Might there be a reason for that? Some disease we don’t know about? Or are you just holding out on us? Living with another man - but I’ve seen his name in. So even he does his duty for us, foreigner, so why can’t you?”
Nitesh looked along the ground, because there was no way to explain. He’d tried before, to others, and it never worked. The King, understanding? The very thought was laughable.
The King twisted harder, and this time it hurt. Nitesh hissed and stumbled, and still the King didn’t let go.
“You have no talents, foreigner,” he told Nitesh. “You don’t work with the crops. You don’t fish. You don’t cook, or clean, or do any manual labor. You don’t do honest work, nothing to soil your hands. You don’t defend the borders, you couldn’t use a weapon if you tried. You sleep all day and you go out scavenging at night, like a rat in a trashheap. You’re useless to us, useless to your parents, useless to your king. And you still expect this community to take care of you? You don’t even give us children!”
He wrenched Nitesh’s wrist hard, then threw him back. Nitesh stumbled backward into the guard, cradling his arm to him. It was sore, pounding in his elbow and wrist. He didn’t look at the King.
“I’ve warned you before. This place has no need of useless people. I have no need of useless people,” the King told him. He swept by Nitesh, continuing toward the bridge. “Bring him,” he added, over his shoulder.
Nitesh didn’t look up as the others passed. He didn’t look up as his guard turned him gently around and directed him by the shoulder to follow the others. He held his arm cradled in the other, twisting the wrist around, bending and unbending his fingers, still not looking up, because what the King had said was true.
It was the last, quietest reason Nitesh hated him. Because it was true. Everything the King had said - and he always found some way to work it in, every time he spoke to Nitesh. Useless. Helpless. A waste of resources. A leech on the community. A drain on his family, on his people. Incapable, inadequate, giving nothing back. He was, in terms of helping his community, completely useless.
But, Nitesh thought, as he always did: surely there was something wrong with that. He brought things in, and people bought them. There wasn’t a day when people didn’t come to the shop - often for the clothes, sometimes for the spices, but sometimes even for the jewelry. Sure, you couldn’t eat jewelry, but people bought it anyway, paying with money if they could, bartering food and services if they couldn’t. The King’s own family bought from him. The King - well, he’d never bought, only taken, but -
- but how could he take something from Nitesh, that Nitesh had worked to get, and then call him useless?
There was something there that didn’t connect, Nitesh thought, trudging along beside the guard, behind the King’s posse. It was true, what the King said: Nitesh had no skills that could help others. He didn’t do any productive work, and he didn’t really want to - farming was boring and tiring, boating was boring and required skills that Nitesh completely lacked, and guarding was just plain boring (and also Nitesh and weapons didn’t get along). All he wanted to do was explore the city, get into those old, dead buildings, see what they were like and what people had once lived in them. And, while he was there, assess the value of what was left and decide what was and wasn’t worth bringing back.
Surely that was useful - else why would people have hoards?
The women he’d nicknamed the J’s had been roomed in a pleasant little free-standing building that had once been an office for a travel agency, but which was now a guest quarters. There weren’t often guests, as the line of kings had always tended to forcibly convince people to stay. But every now and then there was someone clearly only passing through - often they weren’t far from madness, and they wanted only a bed and a meal before continuing on. Rarely, there was a monk from the temple to the east and inland. When lacking guests (and even sometimes when occupied) it served as a point for the night guard to congregate.
Right now, theoretically, it housed a few sleeping night guards, the J’s, and a couple day guards to watch the Js’ door. Right now in actual fact, however, it housed a few very-hastily-roused night guards, and a couple very thoroughly shamefaced day guards, and that was it.
“How could you not have seen them?” the King snapped, and the day guards - one a nephew of his, one a common family’s boy - looked down uneasily. The night guards stood at the door of their room, listening blearily, and the King’s posse and Nitesh were scattered in the lobby.
“They were in there until a few minutes ago, sir,” the nephew-guard said.
“Well they aren’t now.” The King looked from guard to guard, then into the Js’ room. “Left it looking like a living soul’s never entered the place. Can you see those beds? Look. Look,” he grabbed the common guard’s face and moved him to look into the room, at the beds with perfectly-flat sheets. “You can’t tell me they’ve been here five days like that -”
“Sir, they were sleeping in them last night, we saw!” the nephew-guard interrupted imploringly. “We checked several times and they were always there -”
“I’ve had enough of this!” The King turned from them, back to those following him. “Does anyone have any idea where those two are?”
The J’s were asking after you all morning, Kaixin had said. Tell the King that, though? Not too damn likely.
The King looked at him anyway, brandishing the contract. “You. You were the one they went to see last time. You’re the reason they’re not here now. Jiayi,” he looked beside Nitesh, at his commander, “take him and a few of these and check his shop. Send a runner back if they’re there. I’ll be at the Summer Throne.” ‘These’ were others of the guards with him; the King whirled on his heel and stalked out of the building, headed toward the monument.
Jiayi indicated a couple guards; the rest followed on the King’s heels. He looked down at Nitesh expectantly.
“So?”
Nitesh’s building was next to the hospital. Downstairs had a large former medicine shop, and, on the street-facing side, a bunch of former electronics shops. Nitesh’s was one of these, only cleared of its former, now-mostly-useless wares and fitted with brand new shelving. Every morning, if there were no contracted customers, Nitesh would drag his nightly haul down here and he and his brother Mahesh would sort everything out. Spices in one shelf, swag in another, clothing in a third, shoes and boots in a fourth. There was a lot of good and useful stuff here, Nitesh saw, looking around - Mahesh’d gotten out the winter coats and hung them up, and was in-process of bartering a very small one away to Grandmother Jin. She had a pair of kids’ boots pinched in one hand. How was that not useful? Nitesh remembered where he’d picked that pair up - a set of apartments off Tongda Street, in that maze of nearly-identical residentials where you just picked one and went to work. There had been no struggles in those apartments during the change - Nitesh had found their occupants with peaceful, sleeping faces, dry and withered, infants still in their cribs. The clothing in the half-height closets was bright, colorful, mothy, and he had filled his packs for nearly a week running.
No other graverobbers ever brought back children’s clothes.
Grandmother Jin took in Nitesh and the guards in one glance; she hesitated, boots still in hand, but Mahesh asked her to wait a moment and limped over to Nitesh.
“They’re in the guests’ room,” he said, looking the guards over, and Nitesh nodded and slipped past him, through the bead-curtain behind the register. Jiayi followed, and another guard; the last stayed just inside the curtain, alternating his glance between the shop and the hallway.
There were only a couple other doors: the storage room door, the stairway door, and the guests’ room door - the place Nitesh met with people who wanted to contract him, for any reason. Most people came into the shop, figured out if there was anything they liked, and bought that, but every so often someone came in looking for an addition to their hoard (usually members of the King’s family, since they actually had the money to spend on hoards), or for something special that they couldn’t get anywhere else.
The double-J girls had come in two days ago. They wanted gold, they told him. Gold? Well, there was gold on the shelves. Not enough, they’d said, and given him an address. They had reason to believe there was more here. How much more? Nitesh had asked, and they’d told him.
Thinking about the ngis’ hoard, Nitesh realized: they had underestimated.
Fluorescent light met his eyes as he opened the door. A chair had been pushed away from the round table in the room’s center, inviting. On the other side, facing the door, sat the J’s.
It was bad, he knew, that he couldn’t tell the difference between foreigners. But Juanita and Josafim both had blackish-brown hair, sunny skin, heavy eyebrows, thin lips, brown eyes. They wore black motorcycle jackets with patches on them. They wore heavy dark jeans, and boots with old mudstains. They both wore pistols in black belt-holsters, and Nitesh would vouch for other weapons though he hadn’t seen any.
He didn’t know if they were sisters, or friends, or a couple. He didn’t know their last names, nor where they’d come from, nor why they’d asked him. But they’d signed a contract for two thousand without hesitation, and then they’d shown him two thousand, a fat roll in one pocket matched by a fat roll in the other. Two thousand - twenty bills - wouldn’t make a centimeter of difference to them.
Hindsight told him these were the kinds of people he rode past in the night, not looking back. He threw some curse words around in his head, mostly at himself, and came inside.
“Ah,” said the woman leant back in her chair, relaxing and bringing her hands back above the table. The other didn’t move, from where she was leaned on her elbows, over the table, tearing a marigold apart.
She did glance up, though, at Jiayi and the other guards. “Nitesh, you I know. Who are these?”
They both spoke with an accent, and without regard to tones. Nitesh sometimes had to stop and figure out what they’d said.
Not now, though. “These are the King’s guards,” he said. “They want to talk to you.”
The one tearing up the flower smiled a little. The one leaning back smiled more.
“We were hoping to finish our business with you first,” the flower-one said.
Nitesh looked at Jiayi, who stepped forward. “Excuse me, but that will not be possible. You may do so after you have spoken with the King.”
The leaning-back one tapped the other’s foot with the toe of her boot. “What did you find, little Nitesh?” she smiled up at him, and the flower-tearing one glanced up, too. Their four eyes searched Nitesh until he looked away. Then he realized Jiayi was looking too, and the other guard.
This was no good. This was only going to end in him getting in trouble with the King. The J’s might, or they might not, but Nitesh certainly was, for not reporting his finds voluntarily. He wouldn’t give a damn about the ngis, but he’d certainly want to hear about the hoard.
So, “you know,” he said, looking back at them.
The leaning one smiled sweetly. She looked at Jiayi, then stood up and came around the table to stand in front of him. “Let’s see your King, then. I’d love to talk to him, wouldn’t you, Josafim?”
“Be delighted,” Josafim said, ripping the final few petals apart. She tore the stem in half with her thumbnails, dropped it on the table, and stood. “Let’s go.”
It was a silent procession back out the shop, up the street, and to the monument. Jiayi stayed up front with Nitesh. Josafim and Juanita walked side-by-side, barely looking at the guards behind them. They did look at Nitesh every time he looked back, and once one of them winked at him. Nitesh didn’t look back after that.
There had been trees along the riverside, long ago. The first King had cut them for firewood. The second King had had the roots dug up for burning, the soil mixed in with fertilizer. Now the long lines of parkland alongside the river were rowed over with crops, corn growing out in the open, radishes in small columns, sweet potatoes lumping the soil up. The big stone tiles of the park’s sidewalks had been levered up with a crowbar and piled beside buildings; the earth below had been plowed and planted, too, til the only space unused was the monument square itself. The King’s Square, now, holding the Summer Throne.
The Summer Throne was just that. The winter months this far north were long and frigid, and when the king must meet then, he did it in the open, empty cinemas, their tall, glass-faced building just off the square, across the street from his own home. But the King was restless, and hated being closed in, and the monument, with its curving, columned wings reaching round a tall-pillared statue, was appropriately majestic to constitute a throne. Chairs of beautiful, heavy wood had been found by some long-dead graverobber, and now they adorned the monument’s base, just outside the fountain. Tents were erected when it was too hot or rainy. And the King, when he hadn’t anything else to do, could be found there from the fourth month to the tenth - whenever the river wasn’t frozen.
He was there now. Round the throne stood its usual guards, and the fountain behind them was full. The King was deep in conference with his favorite wife, Yifei, while another, Dandan, sat on the fountain’s edge, listening in. The botanists from across the river were clustered on the steps, checking their clipboards and looking over the crops along the riverside, and the nephew-guard and his partner stood at the periphery, looking extremely chastened.
They caught sight of Jiayi and Nitesh and the J’s coming up first, and the nephew-guard elbowed his partner and pointed, talking. Then Yifei looked over the King’s shoulder and the King turned, sitting back up, looking toward them.
Jiayi stopped before the King and saluted. “They were there, sir,” he said. “They seem eager to talk with you.”
He stepped aside as the King stood up. “Then they had better be eager to answer some questions, first,” he said, striding up and stopping just before them. “Who are you two? What are you doing in my lands?”
“Juanita and Josafim,” one said.
“We’re here looking,” the other said.
The King frowned at them. “Looking for what? You’re no monks. You’re not mad. What’re you after?”
“Hear him, Josafim,” said Juanita, looking over. “He’d have us after something.”
“He’s not wrong,” Josafim said, looking at Nitesh.
The King looked at him, too, then back at the women. “Stop this. I know you two are more than you pretend, so there’s no need to pretend. You will tell me now, or you will tell me tonight in the back rooms. You choose.”
Juanita smiled at Josafim, who shifted her weight and let her hands fall to her belt. Juanita nodded toward the King, then turned back toward him. “We’re after a lot,” she said. “You’d have a hoard, I know, as you are King. But, at a certain address in the city, there has far more than you’ve seen in your life.” She sidled over to Nitesh and grabbed him around the shoulders, swinging him to face the King. “This one’s seen it.”
“He has,” Josafim said, coming up behind Nitesh and putting her arm around his waist. “He just didn’t tell you.”
The King’s eyes moved to Nitesh. “Tell me what.”
Shit. Nitesh made to move out of the Js’ grip, but the King noticed, and smiled a little.
“No,” he said. “Stay there, and tell me. Now.”
Nitesh swallowed. “It’s mostly a dead building, as the rest, sir. The apartments are broken into, and there are a few things -”
“That’s not what the King wants to hear~” Juanita purred in his right ear.
“Come on, Little Nitesh,” Josafim snuggled up to his left. “Tell him about the hoard.”
The King’s face got cold.
“It was too dangerous to stay,” Nitesh said quickly, thinking lightning-fast if there was any way to get out of this with his hide intact but without spilling the beans about Os Es. “There was an ash, and a riiik.”
“A hoard?” the King said softly.
“I only brought a few things back, I c-” there! “couldn’t - it belongs to someone.”
“To whom?”
Nitesh shook his head. “I don’t know. There was no one there when I got there. Somebody organized it and left it. But there was power, so they still lived there. I didn’t stay to see. I just grabbed a few things and got out.”
“And didn’t tell me,” the King said. He reached forward and took Nitesh’s jacket by the front. The J’s let him go and slid away as the King pulled him forward. “You wanted to go back on your own, didn’t you? You wanted to keep it for yourself.”
Pretty much. “No!” Nitesh said. “It’s someone’s home, I can’t just walk in and take their things! What if they found me there?”
The King inspected him for a moment, then released him in disgust. “So you steal from the dead because they won’t put up a fight, but you run away at the first chance of anyone who can defend their hoard. Fuck your mother, I knew there was a reason you disgust me.” He turned from Nitesh, back to the J’s. “You two. If you knew it was there, why didn’t you go yourself? Why involved this dog-something?” he nodded back to Nitesh at the last word.
Juanita and Josafim smiled.
“Bait.”
“We want to see what would happen.”
“We know it’s an owned hoard.”
“We want to make a deal with you.”
The King narrowed his eyes. “Oh?”
“In more private,” Josafim said. Juanita nodded.
The King looked at them. He looked behind them, to where Jiayi had moved, along with several guards from around the throne. “Alright. But they join us.”
“That would not present a problem,” Juanita said, and Josafim nodded.
The King nodded. He turned back to Yifei and Dandan. “I will talk to these two, now.”
“Of course,” Yifei said, and took Dandan by the hand, strolling meaningfully off.
“We’ll go to the conference rooms in my building,” the King said, starting away from the throne area. Jiayi and the throne guards fell into formation around him, two more tailing the J’s. The ten of them crossed the square and went into the King’s building, glass doors shutting behind them.
And Nitesh was left behind without word or glance. Jiayi had looked back briefly, but the King had ignored him, and the J’s had put him out of their mind.
What, had Nitesh just been a way for the J’s to get the King’s attention? It felt like it. And meanwhile nobody was fulfilling his contract, and nobody was paying him back for the ring the King had taken. Two thousand. Poof.
Not to mention the danger Os Es was in. Nitesh how tolerant the King was not about new animals. New, old, it didn’t matter - if they were in the way -
The sun was over the river, but still a while from setting. An hour? An hour and a half? Then Nitesh could go out, pack up and go back to the dead building and warn Os Es what was coming. For surely the King would come. And those J’s, probably - talking over what they wanted from Os Es’ hoard, how they’d split it, convincing the King that since they’d known where to look they should get a share. How had they known where to look, anyway? The power, probably. Nitesh remembered all those lights - two generators, at least. And a roof full of solar panels or windmills could easily be seen in a populated area - in someplace unpopulated, like that, only people who were there by chance would notice. And check it out, if they felt like risking attack.
Bait indeed.
Nitesh turned from the King’s Square. An hour and a half. He’d return to the shop and sort out what he could with Mahesh, grab something to eat, and go. Telling Kaixin would have to wait another night. Morning, maybe. If he didn’t, Os Es would be shot out of hand, killed like a criminal or animal. Nitesh couldn’t allow that.
He spent a busy hour with Mahesh in the shop, cataloguing what had been sold and what, from last night’s job, could be sold on the counter, and what behind it. Sundown was approaching when a messenger came from the King. It was Jiaqing, Jiayi’s little brother.
“The King says you’re not to go out tonight,” he told Nitesh, who stopped and stared. “He’s forbidden it.”
But how could he know what Nitesh had been planning? “Is there - did he say why?” Nitesh asked.
“He said to tell you he’s had enough of your secrets and he doesn’t want you going there,” Jiaqing said.
How could he know? Nitesh nodded and turned away.
Jiaqing didn’t leave, though. He eyed Nitesh. “Why didn’t you tell him before?”
Children, in Nitesh’s view, were like animals: if they wanted to know something, they wouldn’t beat around the bush. They were forthright, because there was no point in not being forthright.
On the other hand, this was still the King’s brother-in-law. So Nitesh answered as he had the King, “there was someone living there.”
“So why’d you go?”
“The ladies signed a contract with me.”
Jiaqing was, unfortunately, one of the bright ones. “So if someone was living there isn’t that stealing?”
Nitesh looked away. Thankfully, Mahesh came up just then. “Is there anything else to your message?” he asked.
Jiaqing shook his head, eyes fixed, as most people’s usually did, on the empty pant-leg.
“Then go on,” Mahesh said, pointing his brace at the door. “Leave.”
Jiaqing backed out, still-looking wide-eyed at Mahesh. Once outside he finally scooted, and Nitesh turned round to his brother.
In this modern era, there was - as the King’s scientists had calculated - between a forty and forty-five percent chance of a human child being born completely free of physical or mental defect. Defects and miscarriages accounted for more than half of pregnancies; the rate was higher in some families and lower in others, and the scientists had yet to figure out why. Nitesh’s family was lucky - of the four boys and five girls carried to term, one boy and three girls had not only lived but turned out completely healthy, and the other living boy - Mahesh - had only had the minor problem of one undeveloped leg. Nitesh’s parents had raised him anyway, and he’d turned out as capable as Nitesh and his sisters.
“Well?” Mahesh asked, still looking after Jiaqing. “Were you stealing?”
“No,” Nitesh said.
“Then?” Mahesh looked at him.
People walked by outside. Potential customers. Potential listeners, to tell the King. “I’ll be telling Kaixin tonight,” he said. Hell, he wasn’t going anywhere tonight anyway.
Mahesh nodded, and returned to his work.
He did tell, after work, after they’d shut shop and gone back upstairs, and after dinner. Dinner was a family affair - Nitesh’s sister or sister-in-law cooked every night, and the families ate all together in Nitesh’s parents’ rooms. It was Xiao Roshni and her children, Mahesh and wife and children, Nitesh’s parents, Nitesh’s uncle and his grandchild, and Kaixin and Nitesh, and it was good-naturedly loud as always - you didn’t have a family meal without finding out everything about everyone’s day, often all at the same time, at top volume. Nitesh did get the same questions as from Jiaqing, and there was really no good way to answer them except them except “yes, someone lived there” and “I couldn’t come back empty-handed”. This earned opprobrium from his father, Jinpeng, to whom morals were the highest thing one could aspire to, and benefit the lowest. Nitesh left the dinner feeling chastened, even though he’d done nothing wrong.
He got to tell the truth later, though, to Kaixin and Mahesh, late that night. “It’s true,” he told them, fingers tapping on the table in front of him. “The King said I want to keep it secret. And I do. But it’s because of Os Es, not because of the money. And you understand why I didn’t tell -”
He looked up, and they were both nodding. Well, of course they would - anyone who’d talked to Nitesh for half an hour would know why he had done it. And anyone who’d been to one of the Xinge family dinners would know why he hadn’t told.
“Yes,” Mahesh nodded.
“Did the girls know, though, is the question,” Kaixin said pensively from the couch.
Nitesh shrugged uncomfortably. He didn’t want the J’s knowing about Os Es.
“Well, think about it,” Kaixin continued. “They’ve watched the place long enough to know there’s a hoard there. Wouldn’t they know about - it, too?”
“Couldn’t it just have been a guess?” Nitesh asked, looking at his fingers tapping the table. “You know, with the power and the lights -”
“…maybe,” Kaixin said, considering.
“No,” Mahesh said. The others looked at him. “Not if they know where to send you. They’ll have watched it. Haven’t you thought about it? Those women - they have guns. They’ll shoot something they don’t like. They’re that type. While they were waiting in the back room, they were talking in another language -” Mahesh looked from Kaixin to Nitesh. “They’re dangerous.”
Nitesh looked at Kaixin, who shrugged noddingly. “They look like it,” he agreed.
And they were talking with the King, and planning to go after the hoard, and Os Es would be in their way… Nitesh looked down.
Mahesh levered himself up to go. “Nothing to be done,” he said, but stopped beside Mahesh’s chair on the way out. “Maybe it’ll get away. You can’t know.”
Nitesh nodded, and Mahesh left. It was quiet a bit longer, after the door shut, and then Kaixin stood up. “Well, don’t think about it. I know you love animals, but it’s nothing to keep worrying over. It’ll get away or it won’t, right? And there’s nothing you can do about it, but you can’t think about that and nothing else, right?”
He walked out of the room, still talking. Nitesh thought about Os Es, the beautiful, strange lines of that creature. He thought about the society hinted at, the great shape of an animal-lot he didn’t know, a gathering of ngis. He thought about the test, the feeling like with an advalti’s touch, but less threatening, less elated, more awake, curious, wanting to -
“-have a good time while you’re here, right?” Kaixin came back in behind Nitesh, who looked up. Kaixin had a bottle. Dammit.
“Kaixin,” Nitesh said, looking at the drink.
Kaixin followed his gaze, then smiled and held up the baijiu. “Relax, I’m not going to have much. You’re just usually never here this late, so I thought -”
“Not if it’s going to be like last time -”
“-spend some time together, you can have some too so it won’t be like last time,” Kaixin lowered the bottle and smiled sadly. “Do you think I meant it?”
Nitesh looked at him. “ - no -”
“I told you,” Kaixin said, coming forward to the table. He put the bottle down and put his fingers on the table, leaning a little on them. Nitesh caught smell of his breath. Dammit, when had he - ?
Kaixin saw his expression, and his face saddened. He looked down. “I swear,” he continued to Nitesh, “I won’t do anything you’re not - you don’t have to, alright? Really. I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t. Not you. I just -”
Nitesh stood up. “I know.”
“I know you know, I just want to tell you, nothing like that’s going to happen again, okay? I know what you’re not -”
“Kaixin -”
“- you’ve been telling me since the beginning and I know, I just haven’t ever, I’ve never met anyone else who didn’t want it and it’s just -”
“Listen!”
Kaixin stopped. He looked up at Nitesh. Nitesh looked back. Dammit, how did you deal with this? Nitesh barely understood what it was that Kaixin wanted - what every man he’d tried with had wanted - only that they wanted something that made no sense and was repetitive and boring and also pretty off-putting. But when Nitesh had tried to explain that, Kaixin was the only who’d listened.
So Nitesh stepped forward. “I know,” he said, and kissed Kaixin.
After that it was pretty much the same as most times, with Kaixin getting progressively drunker, but still managing to get them both off. Nitesh just sort of followed along the motions, or at least the ones he was okay with, with Kaixin close by, encouraging, hopeful, helpful, and cheerfully-drunk. At least he was back to his good-mooded self. It wasn’t til they’d washed up and gotten into bed that they got to the part Nitesh actually enjoyed.
They’d turned almost all the lights out. The one growlight they’d left on in the livingroom crawled with xiaoliangchong spreading and folding their wings; the dulimao loured under it, snapping at the bugs. In the bedroom, they set up a second light above the bed, and nested some pillows up against the wall-corner. Kaixin leant against them, smiling vaguely; Nitesh got his sketchbook and half-lay, leaning back against Kaixin’s stomach, Kaixin’s arms around his shoulders. He sketched, and Kaixin watched, fingers stroking along Nitesh’s neck, jaw, shoulders, hair, and commenting.
“Isn’t that at the end of Shangzhi Street?”
“Yes, the honeycomb building -”
and
“Tomatoes. You just want more summer.”
“Well…”
and
“I don’t think maqueren have that many arms -”
“Pretend, why don’t you?”
He filled a whole page with the ngis, and when he was finished, Kaixin traced the lines with a fingertip. “This is what you were talking about.”
“Yes.”
“I can see why you like it -” Kaixin’s fingernail went up and down, tracing teeth. “You said there are more?”
Nitesh related the whole conversation, as much as he could remember.
Kaixin nodded, and thought, and watched Nitesh for a long time, not saying anything. Til finally:
“You want to go and see them.”
Nitesh hesitated, but nodded. “Sometime.”
“When?”
Nitesh didn’t know. “When I can.”
Kaixin nodded.
He nosed against Nitesh’s ear but didn’t say anything while Nitesh filled another page, with teeth, hands, hands-feet, sectioned bodies climbing shelves, humanish eyes watching, waiting, unchanging. When Nitesh finally looked back Kaixin was asleep. But it was only halfway through the night, and Nitesh stayed up long after, drawing to himself, thinking if there was a way.
~:~:~:~:~:~:~
Notes:
-- As mentioend in my rl journal, I shall be editing for Harbin-consistency here eventually. The greenhouses need reaarangement and possible nixing (though the glass ones on the new bridge might stay) and I need to figure out how many place-names stayed and how many were lost in the changes.
-- The J's. Oh, the J's. I am starting to realize I have certain character-types who come back often. The J's are ... of one of those types.
-- Names are in Chinese name order: Lastname, Firstname. Xinge Nitesh would, in English name order, be Nitesh Singh.
-- Kaixin and Nitesh ... well, yeah. 100% as awkward and ehnwhatever as life. :D
-- Need to figure out specifically what kinds of changes the changes wrought in humans. Birth rearrangements/malformations/etc are high, but what causes that? Weird animals are weird, but what caused that? Not to mention the animal-sentience...
-- Note: Actually, upon further reflection, I realize I misspoke here. Nitesh's mother is local; his father is of the Xinge family. (Though he could still be named Jinpeng - gotta think about the mix of names/cultures at the third generation.)
-- Muffin else I can think of to say. Pico out!
~:~:~:~:~:~:~
II.
He woke up the next day in time for lunch. This was usual. In the normal course of things, he got back around dawn and slept til around noon, when Kaixin came upstairs with food. Sun slanted in onto the floor and onto Nitesh’s stomach, painting plant-shaped shadows on him. The naightmice were complaining as always.
Yes, yes, Nitesh told them, dragging himself up and opening their cage door. The naightmice skittered out, jumping in under the plants’ leaves, hiding out behind the greenery. They muttered inarticulately about the sun.
You need it for your wings, Nitesh told them, and wandered off to the bathroom. The gurihound had laid itself like a log along the threshold of the room, and Nitesh stepped over its scaled back, managing not to wake it. He went and used the bathroom, washed his hands, and padded back out. Into the living room to open the window for the maqueren on the windowsill, then back to bed, where he found the place he’d vacated was still pleasantly warm, and thus occupied by a dulimao.
I didn’t see you come in, he told it.
You wouldn’t, it told him.
He shoved it aside and lay back down. The dulimao, gravely insulted, curled up on his stomach in the sunlight.
He came awake again when the front door clicked open. Kaixin sang more than was humanly reasonable, and he was doing so now, accompanied by Nitesh’s sister whistling somewhere down the hall. Nitesh followed the singing around the apartment with his ears until it peeped in the door. He opened his eyes.
“Good, you’re up!” Kaixin came in and put the foodbags on the table. “You’re going to hate everything in the world in a moment.”
Nitesh looked at him suspiciously.
“Once I tell you,” Kaixin noted, and ducked out again.
Some rustles and crinkles in the kitchen. Nitesh poked the dulimao under its armpits, which set it into a panic and a jump off the bed and under the table, until it remembered its dignity and drew itself up, affronted.
I can’t eat with you on me, Nitesh said reasonably, leaning himself up against the wall.
The dulimao chose a paw and began licking it clean. It shut all its eyes and ignored him.
“So, about the hating -” Kaixin came back in, one hand full of chopsticks and cups and spoons, a bottle in the other. Nitesh kept his eyes on it but it turned out to just be tea from Roshni, steaming when it hit the cups. Nitesh sighed.
Kaixin was everything his name suggested. He was neither tall nor short, neither thick nor thin, only a bit stocky in the shoulders and neck. Otherwise he was pretty normal, with a pleasant, smile-shaped face and longish, dexterous hands, which were almost always bicycle-greasy from his work at the shop.
He dumped utensils on the table and untwisted the bottlecap, then opened up the food containers. The smell of cornbread wafted out. “The King wants to see you.”
Nitesh’s stomach soured. He got up and went and sat at the table.
“And the double-J girls.”
“Ugh,” Nitesh put his face in his hands. “Did you have to ruin my morning?”
“I do my best,” Kaixin said, and dragged out the other chair. He sat down and started eating. Nitesh looked up - chunky stewed corn, potatoes, meat, and beans in one box, cornbread in the other.
“Didn’t they have anything fresh?”
“This is fresh.”
Nitesh waved a hand. “Winter food. It’s still just harvest, don’t they have anything more - summery?”
“You’re such as happy daisy to be around,” Kaixin remarked, chopsticking out more corn chunks and beans. “It’s late, the lady was sold out.”
“Late?”
“Nearly one. I thought since you got in early you’d wake up early -” he looked over at Nitesh’s face and paused in his eating. “No? No. Well, the J’s were asking after you all morning, and the King’s runner was over around ten. I told her when you usually wake and so she came back an hour later telling me to send you when you woke. And I’ve been fending off the J’s telling them how tired you were and how much you work, all for their benefit, and maybe they could perhaps be a little patient, thank you?”
Nitesh smiled, at that, and Kaixin grinned and went back to eating. Nitesh served himself and ate, too. He mulled it over, and eventually said, “King first. The girls sent me into a real mess last night, and I don’t mind making them wait.”
Kaixin’s eyebrows went up. He chewed.
“New building. Nowhere I knew. There was an ash.”
Kaixin’s eyes widened. He swallowed. “They knew that? And they didn’t warn you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say they knew,” Nitesh considered. “But they should have. They gave me the specific location. It’s out in Qunli. Very isolated. It’s dark. I wouldn’t have gone there if I hadn’t been paid as much as they promised.” He thought about how he could tell Kaixin about last night. “How much time do you have?”
“Enough to swallow the rest of this,” Kaixin held up his cornbread, “and then I have to get back.”
“Then I’ll tell you about last night tonight before I go out,” Nitesh said. “I met -” how did you even explain it? “- a new type of animal.”
“Oh,” Kaixin said, and grinned. “Should I be worried?”
“Not sure.”
Kaixin made a face and shrugged, and downed the rest of his cornbread. “Then I eagerly await tonight,” he said, and stood up. “Have fun with the King and the girls,” he told Nitesh, and headed out.
Nitesh cleaned up, first the food stuff and then himself. He took his day-bag and transferred from his work-pack the stuff he would need - wallet, a few tools, pouch with the goods he’d be presenting the two J’s with later - the King would definitely want to see that. He also grabbed out the contract he had with the J’s and stowed it in his bag too, since he anticipated having to explain himself.
Then he set out to find the King.
During the change, infrastructures cracked and crumbled like candy. There’d been, Nitesh heard from his grandparents, who’d heard it from their parents, who’d lived it, some years where you didn’t leave the house but to scavenge - people looted, killed, everything to stay alive, anything to stay alive, and they couldn’t, not with the winters here and the plagues and the sandstorms. The new animals, sentient but not yet having learnt human speech, tore into humans, and humans tore back, killing in droves, eating what they could, leaving to rot in the streets what they couldn’t, and the carcasses only drew more animals. They took the cars with gas in them and drove out, away; they huddled in malls and shopping centers and foodstores and drove off invaders with kitchen knives, construction tools, anything that worked. They took what they could, til there wasn’t a store but had been broken into, and then gathered in groups to wander and steal some more.
And then the King showed up.
He’d not been the King at first. At first he’d been a rumor - that there was a man who’d talked and clawed his way up, leading the raids. That he was yet in the south, but coming into the city, gathering people to him as he went. That he was in the city, that he treated his people with fairness but outsiders without mercy, that he knew the land like he knew the books of war, that he held enough food for any persons who might join him, that he had guns, that he was he was coming. That he was here.
The king hit the river. He saw what was there. He saw the city spreading out behind him, the brown water before him, the park and the reservoir across from him. He turned and ordered his banner set down. “We will stay,” he said.
His men did. They took the buildings along the river, from monument to railroad bridge. They built a barricade along the streets. They secured what they could, and took what they found.
Then they began to raid.
There was little for anyone else to do but to join them. The king was fair to his subjects: those who came to him voluntarily he allowed to choose apartments, to show him their talents, to work at what they might, as long as it might benefit him and his. Those who did not come voluntarily, he forced into his service or killed. The animals he subdued or shot. And everywhere there was anything to take, he took, and began to build a hoard.
He lasted a commendably long time, for a leader so ruthless. He was almost fifty when he was assassinated, and the son whom he had chosen to follow him had the assassins and their families drowned, then took his place. He had lasted a good while, too, and the King now - well, he’d been only seven years in his place, but already he showed signs of following in his fathers’ steps. His hoard was so great he’d had to take up a whole building for it, and there was talk of him moving the barricades out a street, to add more buildings to his rule. He maintained the greenhouses, he’d gotten the hospital up and working, and he used his brothers to uphold the laws his father had created. He was an effective king.
Nitesh saw this, and understood this. And still hated him, for the simple reason that the King was a horrible human being.
He kept his lot, yes. He thought of what would benefit them, yes. He was smart, and put his men to good use, yes. But he was also petty, and vicious, and cruel, and had sworn, in some fit of idiocy, to outdo his fathers in hoard, land, and population, and to that end he stopped at nothing.
Nitesh had read the old philosophers. He knew about humanity, and righteousness. He knew there were days when one could come to court and tell the king what he thought. He thought if Kongzi or Mengzi came to this king’s land, it would be luck only if they left without a bullet through them.
Nitesh went first to the building the king’s family lived in. It was just outside the King’s Square, and it had been a hotel once, with shops overlooking the end of the walking street and the corner-entrance facing the monument by the river. It was all the king’s now - his, and his family’s, and his hoard’s. There were guards standing outside - relatives to people who’d married the king’s brothers and sisters - and some workers hanging off the roof’s edge, touching up the paint on the building’s side.
Nitesh went to the guards. “Is the king here?”
The one he’d asked shook his head. “Out checking on the harvest.”
Nitesh suppressed a sigh. “Which one?”
“Fourteen.”
Nitesh thanked the guard and left.
The harvest! That was all the way across the railroad bridge, and then wandering nicely around until he found wherever the king was inspecting, capped off with the unpleasant sort of interview one always had with the king, unless one was in good with him. Nitesh was not in good with him. Nitesh was in fact very not in good with him.
Oh, this was going to be delightful.
The railroad bridge was a long walk along a steel footpath high above the Songhua river, no more than a meter wide. Two of them were tacked onto either side the main bridge where the tracks ran; chest-high railings on the one side kept you from falling into the water on a windy day, and a rusting tall fence along the other side kept you from falling onto the tracks. You could walk along the tracks if you wanted to, but they were hard to get to and easy to misstep on, and they had wide gaps either side the piles - set foot in one of those and the best you might hope for was to lose a shoe to the river. No, best to stick to the footpath.
It was a nice view, though. To the right, the new bridge, never finished and petering out in the middle of the river, blocked the view of the city - mostly half-finished construction anyhow, and then some mediocre buildings petering out along the shore - but to the right you got a grand lookover of the city, the Songhua, and the far shore. You could easily tell the King’s lands from the rest of the city - the buildings were painted, smoke rose from the chimneys, people worked and wandered on the riverbank. People fished on the shore, and rowed or powered boats across the brown water, over to the far side and back loaded with harvest pickings or firewood from the park; boats went under the bridge, too, and downriver, to an old factory with mountains of coal ripe for harvest at any time of year, or upriver to the silty farmland past the driving-bridge.
It took an age and a half to walk there - the river was wide, the bridge was long, and the far shore was islands before it was land. The mainest island had been parkland, once, and was now thickly-forested, overgrown, and perfect for any wood needed for any conceivable purpose. The channel had been blocked up into a reservoir and had grown thick with weed; in it paddled ducks, and through it strode lightherons, stepping daintily on their two-meter legs and keeping an eye on the ducks. Lightherons were communicable creatures, excellent herders, and careful with their charges, and so the people in the King’s land had ample supply of duckmeat and duck eggs, at least until migration time.
Past the reservoir, solid, flat land rose up again, and Nitesh set foot on the ground and continued. It was still a good long bit before he reached the greenhouses. The J’s would be hopping mad to be made to wait this long. Good.
It was still early in the harvest - the first-to-ripen fruits were in picking-progress now, but there were still plenty more to be had. There were even some particular greenhouses up on the new bridge’s suddenly-terminated stump: earth had been brought up and packed, with intent to get some winter greenhouses going, if it was at all possible. Nitesh highly doubted it, but the King had trucked in glass from some construction sites and had some good scientists at work on the problem - one of Nitesh’s own sisters among them - and there seemed to be headway. Windmills and generators surrounded the new greenhouses, anyway, and spare cinderblock, insulation, and caulking scattered the bridge.
And the king was there. Nitesh noticed him easily, from his height, talking among a group of guards and gardeners, and turned back through the gate. He skipped across the tracks and ducked through a hole in the other-side fence, then walked the length between greenhouses. Set foot on the new bridge, then stood there, waiting, since the King got tetchy if you interrupted him, and Nitesh saw no reason to provoke the King to be more dickish than usual.
The talk took a while - there were clipboards involved - but finally the King finished up. One of his guards stepped up to him and told him something, and the King turned round, saw Nitesh, and gave the shit-eatingest grin. Nitesh sighed inwardly.
“Well,” the King said, walking over, crowd trailing. “Xinge Nitesh.”
The King did not know everyone’s name, but he sure as hell knew Nitesh’s name. Back in the change, any foreigners in the city at the time were stuck there, and even after a couple generations of marrying locals, Nitesh’s family was still the foreigners. Nitesh’s names, first and last, pointed back to a country no one in living family memory had ever seen.
Course, that wasn’t the only reason he knew Nitesh’s name, but it was the most obvious one.
Nitesh bowed. He hated bowing to a man like this. He did it anyway. “My King.”
King Rong Yin stopped, guards arraying around him, a couple advisors and some select botanists tailing along. He was tall and powerfully built, wearing clothing that was tailored (rather than looted and adjusted, like everyone else’s), and had a fine leather coat slung over his shoulder. Round his waist was a belt, on which he carried two guns and a sword, all of which he was proficient in. He practiced with his personal guard every morning in front of the monument. You could watch, if you wanted. Nitesh never did, since he was always asleep.
“Xin tells me you came back early last night,” the King prompted.
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“He tells me you had a nice little stash.”
Nitesh nodded.
The King nodded expectantly. “Well?”
Nitesh fished in his bag and found the pouch. He put it in the King’s waiting hand.
The King glanced at a guard, who went to the scientists and brought back a clipboard. “Hold that,” the King said, and upended the pouch on the clipboard, cupping his hand in front of a rolling-away ring. The pouch’s contents were carefully picked - justabout what looked reasonable for a looted apartment, not too rich, nothing hugely expensive. Some gaudy costume jewelry in there, rhinestones round fake pearls and colored crystal. Some semiprecious, turquoise, agate, a good handful of jade. And a few real pieces, actual gold, real diamond, a heavy ruby ring.
The King picked up the ring, admiring it. “Very nice, very nice. You do know how to pick ‘em. This one -”
He was aiming at being presented some of it gratis, just because of his rank, or for a favor. And if he didn’t get it, he’d figure out a reason to not have to pay, something about compensation and relevant departments. Nitesh knew this because he’d experienced it previously, not just once, but twice.
He pulled out the contract. “Sir, I’ve got customers for most of that,” he said, holding up the paper. “They’ve signed up to a certain amount, and they get first pick, but I’d be happy to discuss pricing for the rest once they’re through. Sir.”
The King slipped the ring on his finger, testing it for looks. “Have they seen this yet?”
Shit. “No sir, they haven’t, but they did sign the contract and they have fir-”
“These customers of yours - those foreign girls, am I right? The new ones?”
How had he known? Nitesh nodded briefly.
“There’s something wrong about them,” the King said ruminatively, taking the ring off and tossing it up and down. He looked at once of his guards. “Has either of them requested an audience?”
“Nosir.”
“Has either of them shown outside their rooms?”
“Nosir.”
“Then how did they see you?” the King looked at Nitesh. Nitesh, eyes still on the ring, didn’t think he expected an answer, and didn’t want the largest part of his profit disappearing, and so he didn’t say anything until the King said, “well? come on, foreigner, I’m waiting.” His fingers closed around the ring.
Nitesh looked up at the King. “I don’t know, sir. I met them in the downstairs, like I meet everybody. They just came in two days ago.”
The King frowned at him. “What, they just walked in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“During the day?”
“Yes, sir, just like everyone else.”
“They’re the only other foreigners here, how could they just leave their rooms and see you? None of you saw?”
The guards all nosirred.
The King frowned and looked back across the river. He stood there ruminating a few moments, then turned back to Nitesh. “What are they paying you for?”
Nitesh held up the contract again. “Just go to a certain address and bring back whatever I found there.”
The King snatched the contract, spilling jewelry off the clipboard. Nitesh bent and picked up what had fallen while the King read the contract carefully.
“This,” he said, stabbing the line for payment. “They’re giving you a damn lot for this job. Two thousand?” He frowned at Nitesh.
Nitesh stood back up, putting the jewelry back on the clipboard and dusting off his hands. “Yes, that’s what they told me.”
The King’s frown deepened. “That’s what they told me, what?”
Nitesh was confused for a second. “Oh. That’s what they told me, sir.”
“That’s right,” the King said, and turned back to the paper. ‘Two thousand,” he muttered. “So fucking much. And why would they pick you?”
Nitesh had been wondering that himself. “I can’t answer that, sir.”
“Of course not.” The King thought for a few more seconds, then took the contract, rolled it up, and started back toward the bridge. The guards glanced at each other, then most followed; the one holding the clipboard hastily tipped its contents back into Nitesh’s pouch, then hurried to catch up. Nitesh hurried too, though for a different reason.
“Excuse me, sir -” the King didn’t even look back, and Nitesh slipped round the guards and over to the King, “my contract, and my ring -”
“I’m going to see these foreigners,” the King said, waving the contract at Nitesh. “You’re coming too. They’re going to explain themselves, and you’re going to tell me what makes this -” he shook the contract, “so special.”
“But the ring -”
The King stuffed it into a pocket. “You’ll be compensated in due time by the relevant departments. Now get out of my way or I’ll have you removed.”
Which meant Nitesh was never going to see a fen of payment, just like the last two times. Damn, but he couldn’t let that happen again! He ran up ahead and stopped in the King’s path, halting his progress.
“Sir, I need the ring back as part of the contracted goods I have acquired for the customers. Or if you’d like to purchase it now we can come to an agreement. I am willing to -” he dipped into his bag, pulled out paper and pen from his bag, “compromise in that regard. If you’d prepare a statement, I’m sure an agreement could be reached.”
The King motioned with two fingers. A guard came round him and took Nitesh carefully but firmly by the upper arm. He started to tow him away. “No, wait,” the King said, and the guard halted. The King stepped forward.
“You’re forgetting your place, little foreigner,” he told Nitesh. He took Nitesh’s wrist, squeezed, and twisted. The paper and pen slipped from Nitesh’s fingers. “Is it your place to correct the King? Is it?”
The right answer was no. The right answer was no. Nitesh thought of Kongzi and Mengzi and said nothing.
The King frowned and twisted harder.
Nitesh bent forward a little to alleviate the strain. He swallowed and said, “no.”
“No what.”
“No, sir.”
He expected that would make the King let go. It didn’t.
“Tell me, Xinge Nitesh. When was the last time you put you name in for the lottery?”
Nitesh swallowed again, this time not looking at the King.
“I seem to recall the answer is ‘never’. Might there be a reason for that? Some disease we don’t know about? Or are you just holding out on us? Living with another man - but I’ve seen his name in. So even he does his duty for us, foreigner, so why can’t you?”
Nitesh looked along the ground, because there was no way to explain. He’d tried before, to others, and it never worked. The King, understanding? The very thought was laughable.
The King twisted harder, and this time it hurt. Nitesh hissed and stumbled, and still the King didn’t let go.
“You have no talents, foreigner,” he told Nitesh. “You don’t work with the crops. You don’t fish. You don’t cook, or clean, or do any manual labor. You don’t do honest work, nothing to soil your hands. You don’t defend the borders, you couldn’t use a weapon if you tried. You sleep all day and you go out scavenging at night, like a rat in a trashheap. You’re useless to us, useless to your parents, useless to your king. And you still expect this community to take care of you? You don’t even give us children!”
He wrenched Nitesh’s wrist hard, then threw him back. Nitesh stumbled backward into the guard, cradling his arm to him. It was sore, pounding in his elbow and wrist. He didn’t look at the King.
“I’ve warned you before. This place has no need of useless people. I have no need of useless people,” the King told him. He swept by Nitesh, continuing toward the bridge. “Bring him,” he added, over his shoulder.
Nitesh didn’t look up as the others passed. He didn’t look up as his guard turned him gently around and directed him by the shoulder to follow the others. He held his arm cradled in the other, twisting the wrist around, bending and unbending his fingers, still not looking up, because what the King had said was true.
It was the last, quietest reason Nitesh hated him. Because it was true. Everything the King had said - and he always found some way to work it in, every time he spoke to Nitesh. Useless. Helpless. A waste of resources. A leech on the community. A drain on his family, on his people. Incapable, inadequate, giving nothing back. He was, in terms of helping his community, completely useless.
But, Nitesh thought, as he always did: surely there was something wrong with that. He brought things in, and people bought them. There wasn’t a day when people didn’t come to the shop - often for the clothes, sometimes for the spices, but sometimes even for the jewelry. Sure, you couldn’t eat jewelry, but people bought it anyway, paying with money if they could, bartering food and services if they couldn’t. The King’s own family bought from him. The King - well, he’d never bought, only taken, but -
- but how could he take something from Nitesh, that Nitesh had worked to get, and then call him useless?
There was something there that didn’t connect, Nitesh thought, trudging along beside the guard, behind the King’s posse. It was true, what the King said: Nitesh had no skills that could help others. He didn’t do any productive work, and he didn’t really want to - farming was boring and tiring, boating was boring and required skills that Nitesh completely lacked, and guarding was just plain boring (and also Nitesh and weapons didn’t get along). All he wanted to do was explore the city, get into those old, dead buildings, see what they were like and what people had once lived in them. And, while he was there, assess the value of what was left and decide what was and wasn’t worth bringing back.
Surely that was useful - else why would people have hoards?
The women he’d nicknamed the J’s had been roomed in a pleasant little free-standing building that had once been an office for a travel agency, but which was now a guest quarters. There weren’t often guests, as the line of kings had always tended to forcibly convince people to stay. But every now and then there was someone clearly only passing through - often they weren’t far from madness, and they wanted only a bed and a meal before continuing on. Rarely, there was a monk from the temple to the east and inland. When lacking guests (and even sometimes when occupied) it served as a point for the night guard to congregate.
Right now, theoretically, it housed a few sleeping night guards, the J’s, and a couple day guards to watch the Js’ door. Right now in actual fact, however, it housed a few very-hastily-roused night guards, and a couple very thoroughly shamefaced day guards, and that was it.
“How could you not have seen them?” the King snapped, and the day guards - one a nephew of his, one a common family’s boy - looked down uneasily. The night guards stood at the door of their room, listening blearily, and the King’s posse and Nitesh were scattered in the lobby.
“They were in there until a few minutes ago, sir,” the nephew-guard said.
“Well they aren’t now.” The King looked from guard to guard, then into the Js’ room. “Left it looking like a living soul’s never entered the place. Can you see those beds? Look. Look,” he grabbed the common guard’s face and moved him to look into the room, at the beds with perfectly-flat sheets. “You can’t tell me they’ve been here five days like that -”
“Sir, they were sleeping in them last night, we saw!” the nephew-guard interrupted imploringly. “We checked several times and they were always there -”
“I’ve had enough of this!” The King turned from them, back to those following him. “Does anyone have any idea where those two are?”
The J’s were asking after you all morning, Kaixin had said. Tell the King that, though? Not too damn likely.
The King looked at him anyway, brandishing the contract. “You. You were the one they went to see last time. You’re the reason they’re not here now. Jiayi,” he looked beside Nitesh, at his commander, “take him and a few of these and check his shop. Send a runner back if they’re there. I’ll be at the Summer Throne.” ‘These’ were others of the guards with him; the King whirled on his heel and stalked out of the building, headed toward the monument.
Jiayi indicated a couple guards; the rest followed on the King’s heels. He looked down at Nitesh expectantly.
“So?”
Nitesh’s building was next to the hospital. Downstairs had a large former medicine shop, and, on the street-facing side, a bunch of former electronics shops. Nitesh’s was one of these, only cleared of its former, now-mostly-useless wares and fitted with brand new shelving. Every morning, if there were no contracted customers, Nitesh would drag his nightly haul down here and he and his brother Mahesh would sort everything out. Spices in one shelf, swag in another, clothing in a third, shoes and boots in a fourth. There was a lot of good and useful stuff here, Nitesh saw, looking around - Mahesh’d gotten out the winter coats and hung them up, and was in-process of bartering a very small one away to Grandmother Jin. She had a pair of kids’ boots pinched in one hand. How was that not useful? Nitesh remembered where he’d picked that pair up - a set of apartments off Tongda Street, in that maze of nearly-identical residentials where you just picked one and went to work. There had been no struggles in those apartments during the change - Nitesh had found their occupants with peaceful, sleeping faces, dry and withered, infants still in their cribs. The clothing in the half-height closets was bright, colorful, mothy, and he had filled his packs for nearly a week running.
No other graverobbers ever brought back children’s clothes.
Grandmother Jin took in Nitesh and the guards in one glance; she hesitated, boots still in hand, but Mahesh asked her to wait a moment and limped over to Nitesh.
“They’re in the guests’ room,” he said, looking the guards over, and Nitesh nodded and slipped past him, through the bead-curtain behind the register. Jiayi followed, and another guard; the last stayed just inside the curtain, alternating his glance between the shop and the hallway.
There were only a couple other doors: the storage room door, the stairway door, and the guests’ room door - the place Nitesh met with people who wanted to contract him, for any reason. Most people came into the shop, figured out if there was anything they liked, and bought that, but every so often someone came in looking for an addition to their hoard (usually members of the King’s family, since they actually had the money to spend on hoards), or for something special that they couldn’t get anywhere else.
The double-J girls had come in two days ago. They wanted gold, they told him. Gold? Well, there was gold on the shelves. Not enough, they’d said, and given him an address. They had reason to believe there was more here. How much more? Nitesh had asked, and they’d told him.
Thinking about the ngis’ hoard, Nitesh realized: they had underestimated.
Fluorescent light met his eyes as he opened the door. A chair had been pushed away from the round table in the room’s center, inviting. On the other side, facing the door, sat the J’s.
It was bad, he knew, that he couldn’t tell the difference between foreigners. But Juanita and Josafim both had blackish-brown hair, sunny skin, heavy eyebrows, thin lips, brown eyes. They wore black motorcycle jackets with patches on them. They wore heavy dark jeans, and boots with old mudstains. They both wore pistols in black belt-holsters, and Nitesh would vouch for other weapons though he hadn’t seen any.
He didn’t know if they were sisters, or friends, or a couple. He didn’t know their last names, nor where they’d come from, nor why they’d asked him. But they’d signed a contract for two thousand without hesitation, and then they’d shown him two thousand, a fat roll in one pocket matched by a fat roll in the other. Two thousand - twenty bills - wouldn’t make a centimeter of difference to them.
Hindsight told him these were the kinds of people he rode past in the night, not looking back. He threw some curse words around in his head, mostly at himself, and came inside.
“Ah,” said the woman leant back in her chair, relaxing and bringing her hands back above the table. The other didn’t move, from where she was leaned on her elbows, over the table, tearing a marigold apart.
She did glance up, though, at Jiayi and the other guards. “Nitesh, you I know. Who are these?”
They both spoke with an accent, and without regard to tones. Nitesh sometimes had to stop and figure out what they’d said.
Not now, though. “These are the King’s guards,” he said. “They want to talk to you.”
The one tearing up the flower smiled a little. The one leaning back smiled more.
“We were hoping to finish our business with you first,” the flower-one said.
Nitesh looked at Jiayi, who stepped forward. “Excuse me, but that will not be possible. You may do so after you have spoken with the King.”
The leaning-back one tapped the other’s foot with the toe of her boot. “What did you find, little Nitesh?” she smiled up at him, and the flower-tearing one glanced up, too. Their four eyes searched Nitesh until he looked away. Then he realized Jiayi was looking too, and the other guard.
This was no good. This was only going to end in him getting in trouble with the King. The J’s might, or they might not, but Nitesh certainly was, for not reporting his finds voluntarily. He wouldn’t give a damn about the ngis, but he’d certainly want to hear about the hoard.
So, “you know,” he said, looking back at them.
The leaning one smiled sweetly. She looked at Jiayi, then stood up and came around the table to stand in front of him. “Let’s see your King, then. I’d love to talk to him, wouldn’t you, Josafim?”
“Be delighted,” Josafim said, ripping the final few petals apart. She tore the stem in half with her thumbnails, dropped it on the table, and stood. “Let’s go.”
It was a silent procession back out the shop, up the street, and to the monument. Jiayi stayed up front with Nitesh. Josafim and Juanita walked side-by-side, barely looking at the guards behind them. They did look at Nitesh every time he looked back, and once one of them winked at him. Nitesh didn’t look back after that.
There had been trees along the riverside, long ago. The first King had cut them for firewood. The second King had had the roots dug up for burning, the soil mixed in with fertilizer. Now the long lines of parkland alongside the river were rowed over with crops, corn growing out in the open, radishes in small columns, sweet potatoes lumping the soil up. The big stone tiles of the park’s sidewalks had been levered up with a crowbar and piled beside buildings; the earth below had been plowed and planted, too, til the only space unused was the monument square itself. The King’s Square, now, holding the Summer Throne.
The Summer Throne was just that. The winter months this far north were long and frigid, and when the king must meet then, he did it in the open, empty cinemas, their tall, glass-faced building just off the square, across the street from his own home. But the King was restless, and hated being closed in, and the monument, with its curving, columned wings reaching round a tall-pillared statue, was appropriately majestic to constitute a throne. Chairs of beautiful, heavy wood had been found by some long-dead graverobber, and now they adorned the monument’s base, just outside the fountain. Tents were erected when it was too hot or rainy. And the King, when he hadn’t anything else to do, could be found there from the fourth month to the tenth - whenever the river wasn’t frozen.
He was there now. Round the throne stood its usual guards, and the fountain behind them was full. The King was deep in conference with his favorite wife, Yifei, while another, Dandan, sat on the fountain’s edge, listening in. The botanists from across the river were clustered on the steps, checking their clipboards and looking over the crops along the riverside, and the nephew-guard and his partner stood at the periphery, looking extremely chastened.
They caught sight of Jiayi and Nitesh and the J’s coming up first, and the nephew-guard elbowed his partner and pointed, talking. Then Yifei looked over the King’s shoulder and the King turned, sitting back up, looking toward them.
Jiayi stopped before the King and saluted. “They were there, sir,” he said. “They seem eager to talk with you.”
He stepped aside as the King stood up. “Then they had better be eager to answer some questions, first,” he said, striding up and stopping just before them. “Who are you two? What are you doing in my lands?”
“Juanita and Josafim,” one said.
“We’re here looking,” the other said.
The King frowned at them. “Looking for what? You’re no monks. You’re not mad. What’re you after?”
“Hear him, Josafim,” said Juanita, looking over. “He’d have us after something.”
“He’s not wrong,” Josafim said, looking at Nitesh.
The King looked at him, too, then back at the women. “Stop this. I know you two are more than you pretend, so there’s no need to pretend. You will tell me now, or you will tell me tonight in the back rooms. You choose.”
Juanita smiled at Josafim, who shifted her weight and let her hands fall to her belt. Juanita nodded toward the King, then turned back toward him. “We’re after a lot,” she said. “You’d have a hoard, I know, as you are King. But, at a certain address in the city, there has far more than you’ve seen in your life.” She sidled over to Nitesh and grabbed him around the shoulders, swinging him to face the King. “This one’s seen it.”
“He has,” Josafim said, coming up behind Nitesh and putting her arm around his waist. “He just didn’t tell you.”
The King’s eyes moved to Nitesh. “Tell me what.”
Shit. Nitesh made to move out of the Js’ grip, but the King noticed, and smiled a little.
“No,” he said. “Stay there, and tell me. Now.”
Nitesh swallowed. “It’s mostly a dead building, as the rest, sir. The apartments are broken into, and there are a few things -”
“That’s not what the King wants to hear~” Juanita purred in his right ear.
“Come on, Little Nitesh,” Josafim snuggled up to his left. “Tell him about the hoard.”
The King’s face got cold.
“It was too dangerous to stay,” Nitesh said quickly, thinking lightning-fast if there was any way to get out of this with his hide intact but without spilling the beans about Os Es. “There was an ash, and a riiik.”
“A hoard?” the King said softly.
“I only brought a few things back, I c-” there! “couldn’t - it belongs to someone.”
“To whom?”
Nitesh shook his head. “I don’t know. There was no one there when I got there. Somebody organized it and left it. But there was power, so they still lived there. I didn’t stay to see. I just grabbed a few things and got out.”
“And didn’t tell me,” the King said. He reached forward and took Nitesh’s jacket by the front. The J’s let him go and slid away as the King pulled him forward. “You wanted to go back on your own, didn’t you? You wanted to keep it for yourself.”
Pretty much. “No!” Nitesh said. “It’s someone’s home, I can’t just walk in and take their things! What if they found me there?”
The King inspected him for a moment, then released him in disgust. “So you steal from the dead because they won’t put up a fight, but you run away at the first chance of anyone who can defend their hoard. Fuck your mother, I knew there was a reason you disgust me.” He turned from Nitesh, back to the J’s. “You two. If you knew it was there, why didn’t you go yourself? Why involved this dog-something?” he nodded back to Nitesh at the last word.
Juanita and Josafim smiled.
“Bait.”
“We want to see what would happen.”
“We know it’s an owned hoard.”
“We want to make a deal with you.”
The King narrowed his eyes. “Oh?”
“In more private,” Josafim said. Juanita nodded.
The King looked at them. He looked behind them, to where Jiayi had moved, along with several guards from around the throne. “Alright. But they join us.”
“That would not present a problem,” Juanita said, and Josafim nodded.
The King nodded. He turned back to Yifei and Dandan. “I will talk to these two, now.”
“Of course,” Yifei said, and took Dandan by the hand, strolling meaningfully off.
“We’ll go to the conference rooms in my building,” the King said, starting away from the throne area. Jiayi and the throne guards fell into formation around him, two more tailing the J’s. The ten of them crossed the square and went into the King’s building, glass doors shutting behind them.
And Nitesh was left behind without word or glance. Jiayi had looked back briefly, but the King had ignored him, and the J’s had put him out of their mind.
What, had Nitesh just been a way for the J’s to get the King’s attention? It felt like it. And meanwhile nobody was fulfilling his contract, and nobody was paying him back for the ring the King had taken. Two thousand. Poof.
Not to mention the danger Os Es was in. Nitesh how tolerant the King was not about new animals. New, old, it didn’t matter - if they were in the way -
The sun was over the river, but still a while from setting. An hour? An hour and a half? Then Nitesh could go out, pack up and go back to the dead building and warn Os Es what was coming. For surely the King would come. And those J’s, probably - talking over what they wanted from Os Es’ hoard, how they’d split it, convincing the King that since they’d known where to look they should get a share. How had they known where to look, anyway? The power, probably. Nitesh remembered all those lights - two generators, at least. And a roof full of solar panels or windmills could easily be seen in a populated area - in someplace unpopulated, like that, only people who were there by chance would notice. And check it out, if they felt like risking attack.
Bait indeed.
Nitesh turned from the King’s Square. An hour and a half. He’d return to the shop and sort out what he could with Mahesh, grab something to eat, and go. Telling Kaixin would have to wait another night. Morning, maybe. If he didn’t, Os Es would be shot out of hand, killed like a criminal or animal. Nitesh couldn’t allow that.
He spent a busy hour with Mahesh in the shop, cataloguing what had been sold and what, from last night’s job, could be sold on the counter, and what behind it. Sundown was approaching when a messenger came from the King. It was Jiaqing, Jiayi’s little brother.
“The King says you’re not to go out tonight,” he told Nitesh, who stopped and stared. “He’s forbidden it.”
But how could he know what Nitesh had been planning? “Is there - did he say why?” Nitesh asked.
“He said to tell you he’s had enough of your secrets and he doesn’t want you going there,” Jiaqing said.
How could he know? Nitesh nodded and turned away.
Jiaqing didn’t leave, though. He eyed Nitesh. “Why didn’t you tell him before?”
Children, in Nitesh’s view, were like animals: if they wanted to know something, they wouldn’t beat around the bush. They were forthright, because there was no point in not being forthright.
On the other hand, this was still the King’s brother-in-law. So Nitesh answered as he had the King, “there was someone living there.”
“So why’d you go?”
“The ladies signed a contract with me.”
Jiaqing was, unfortunately, one of the bright ones. “So if someone was living there isn’t that stealing?”
Nitesh looked away. Thankfully, Mahesh came up just then. “Is there anything else to your message?” he asked.
Jiaqing shook his head, eyes fixed, as most people’s usually did, on the empty pant-leg.
“Then go on,” Mahesh said, pointing his brace at the door. “Leave.”
Jiaqing backed out, still-looking wide-eyed at Mahesh. Once outside he finally scooted, and Nitesh turned round to his brother.
In this modern era, there was - as the King’s scientists had calculated - between a forty and forty-five percent chance of a human child being born completely free of physical or mental defect. Defects and miscarriages accounted for more than half of pregnancies; the rate was higher in some families and lower in others, and the scientists had yet to figure out why. Nitesh’s family was lucky - of the four boys and five girls carried to term, one boy and three girls had not only lived but turned out completely healthy, and the other living boy - Mahesh - had only had the minor problem of one undeveloped leg. Nitesh’s parents had raised him anyway, and he’d turned out as capable as Nitesh and his sisters.
“Well?” Mahesh asked, still looking after Jiaqing. “Were you stealing?”
“No,” Nitesh said.
“Then?” Mahesh looked at him.
People walked by outside. Potential customers. Potential listeners, to tell the King. “I’ll be telling Kaixin tonight,” he said. Hell, he wasn’t going anywhere tonight anyway.
Mahesh nodded, and returned to his work.
He did tell, after work, after they’d shut shop and gone back upstairs, and after dinner. Dinner was a family affair - Nitesh’s sister or sister-in-law cooked every night, and the families ate all together in Nitesh’s parents’ rooms. It was Xiao Roshni and her children, Mahesh and wife and children, Nitesh’s parents, Nitesh’s uncle and his grandchild, and Kaixin and Nitesh, and it was good-naturedly loud as always - you didn’t have a family meal without finding out everything about everyone’s day, often all at the same time, at top volume. Nitesh did get the same questions as from Jiaqing, and there was really no good way to answer them except them except “yes, someone lived there” and “I couldn’t come back empty-handed”. This earned opprobrium from his father, Jinpeng, to whom morals were the highest thing one could aspire to, and benefit the lowest. Nitesh left the dinner feeling chastened, even though he’d done nothing wrong.
He got to tell the truth later, though, to Kaixin and Mahesh, late that night. “It’s true,” he told them, fingers tapping on the table in front of him. “The King said I want to keep it secret. And I do. But it’s because of Os Es, not because of the money. And you understand why I didn’t tell -”
He looked up, and they were both nodding. Well, of course they would - anyone who’d talked to Nitesh for half an hour would know why he had done it. And anyone who’d been to one of the Xinge family dinners would know why he hadn’t told.
“Yes,” Mahesh nodded.
“Did the girls know, though, is the question,” Kaixin said pensively from the couch.
Nitesh shrugged uncomfortably. He didn’t want the J’s knowing about Os Es.
“Well, think about it,” Kaixin continued. “They’ve watched the place long enough to know there’s a hoard there. Wouldn’t they know about - it, too?”
“Couldn’t it just have been a guess?” Nitesh asked, looking at his fingers tapping the table. “You know, with the power and the lights -”
“…maybe,” Kaixin said, considering.
“No,” Mahesh said. The others looked at him. “Not if they know where to send you. They’ll have watched it. Haven’t you thought about it? Those women - they have guns. They’ll shoot something they don’t like. They’re that type. While they were waiting in the back room, they were talking in another language -” Mahesh looked from Kaixin to Nitesh. “They’re dangerous.”
Nitesh looked at Kaixin, who shrugged noddingly. “They look like it,” he agreed.
And they were talking with the King, and planning to go after the hoard, and Os Es would be in their way… Nitesh looked down.
Mahesh levered himself up to go. “Nothing to be done,” he said, but stopped beside Mahesh’s chair on the way out. “Maybe it’ll get away. You can’t know.”
Nitesh nodded, and Mahesh left. It was quiet a bit longer, after the door shut, and then Kaixin stood up. “Well, don’t think about it. I know you love animals, but it’s nothing to keep worrying over. It’ll get away or it won’t, right? And there’s nothing you can do about it, but you can’t think about that and nothing else, right?”
He walked out of the room, still talking. Nitesh thought about Os Es, the beautiful, strange lines of that creature. He thought about the society hinted at, the great shape of an animal-lot he didn’t know, a gathering of ngis. He thought about the test, the feeling like with an advalti’s touch, but less threatening, less elated, more awake, curious, wanting to -
“-have a good time while you’re here, right?” Kaixin came back in behind Nitesh, who looked up. Kaixin had a bottle. Dammit.
“Kaixin,” Nitesh said, looking at the drink.
Kaixin followed his gaze, then smiled and held up the baijiu. “Relax, I’m not going to have much. You’re just usually never here this late, so I thought -”
“Not if it’s going to be like last time -”
“-spend some time together, you can have some too so it won’t be like last time,” Kaixin lowered the bottle and smiled sadly. “Do you think I meant it?”
Nitesh looked at him. “ - no -”
“I told you,” Kaixin said, coming forward to the table. He put the bottle down and put his fingers on the table, leaning a little on them. Nitesh caught smell of his breath. Dammit, when had he - ?
Kaixin saw his expression, and his face saddened. He looked down. “I swear,” he continued to Nitesh, “I won’t do anything you’re not - you don’t have to, alright? Really. I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t. Not you. I just -”
Nitesh stood up. “I know.”
“I know you know, I just want to tell you, nothing like that’s going to happen again, okay? I know what you’re not -”
“Kaixin -”
“- you’ve been telling me since the beginning and I know, I just haven’t ever, I’ve never met anyone else who didn’t want it and it’s just -”
“Listen!”
Kaixin stopped. He looked up at Nitesh. Nitesh looked back. Dammit, how did you deal with this? Nitesh barely understood what it was that Kaixin wanted - what every man he’d tried with had wanted - only that they wanted something that made no sense and was repetitive and boring and also pretty off-putting. But when Nitesh had tried to explain that, Kaixin was the only who’d listened.
So Nitesh stepped forward. “I know,” he said, and kissed Kaixin.
After that it was pretty much the same as most times, with Kaixin getting progressively drunker, but still managing to get them both off. Nitesh just sort of followed along the motions, or at least the ones he was okay with, with Kaixin close by, encouraging, hopeful, helpful, and cheerfully-drunk. At least he was back to his good-mooded self. It wasn’t til they’d washed up and gotten into bed that they got to the part Nitesh actually enjoyed.
They’d turned almost all the lights out. The one growlight they’d left on in the livingroom crawled with xiaoliangchong spreading and folding their wings; the dulimao loured under it, snapping at the bugs. In the bedroom, they set up a second light above the bed, and nested some pillows up against the wall-corner. Kaixin leant against them, smiling vaguely; Nitesh got his sketchbook and half-lay, leaning back against Kaixin’s stomach, Kaixin’s arms around his shoulders. He sketched, and Kaixin watched, fingers stroking along Nitesh’s neck, jaw, shoulders, hair, and commenting.
“Isn’t that at the end of Shangzhi Street?”
“Yes, the honeycomb building -”
and
“Tomatoes. You just want more summer.”
“Well…”
and
“I don’t think maqueren have that many arms -”
“Pretend, why don’t you?”
He filled a whole page with the ngis, and when he was finished, Kaixin traced the lines with a fingertip. “This is what you were talking about.”
“Yes.”
“I can see why you like it -” Kaixin’s fingernail went up and down, tracing teeth. “You said there are more?”
Nitesh related the whole conversation, as much as he could remember.
Kaixin nodded, and thought, and watched Nitesh for a long time, not saying anything. Til finally:
“You want to go and see them.”
Nitesh hesitated, but nodded. “Sometime.”
“When?”
Nitesh didn’t know. “When I can.”
Kaixin nodded.
He nosed against Nitesh’s ear but didn’t say anything while Nitesh filled another page, with teeth, hands, hands-feet, sectioned bodies climbing shelves, humanish eyes watching, waiting, unchanging. When Nitesh finally looked back Kaixin was asleep. But it was only halfway through the night, and Nitesh stayed up long after, drawing to himself, thinking if there was a way.
~:~:~:~:~:~:~
Notes:
-- As mentioend in my rl journal, I shall be editing for Harbin-consistency here eventually. The greenhouses need reaarangement and possible nixing (though the glass ones on the new bridge might stay) and I need to figure out how many place-names stayed and how many were lost in the changes.
-- The J's. Oh, the J's. I am starting to realize I have certain character-types who come back often. The J's are ... of one of those types.
-- Names are in Chinese name order: Lastname, Firstname. Xinge Nitesh would, in English name order, be Nitesh Singh.
-- Kaixin and Nitesh ... well, yeah. 100% as awkward and ehnwhatever as life. :D
-- Need to figure out specifically what kinds of changes the changes wrought in humans. Birth rearrangements/malformations/etc are high, but what causes that? Weird animals are weird, but what caused that? Not to mention the animal-sentience...
-- Note: Actually, upon further reflection, I realize I misspoke here. Nitesh's mother is local; his father is of the Xinge family. (Though he could still be named Jinpeng - gotta think about the mix of names/cultures at the third generation.)
-- Muffin else I can think of to say. Pico out!