We Leave Together Read online

  Contents

  We Leave Together

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  We Leave Together

  A Dogsland Novel

  J. M. McDermott

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  We Leave Together © 2014 by J. M. McDermott

  This edition of We Leave Together

  © 2014 by Word Horde

  Cover art © 2013 Julien Alday

  Cover design by Scott R Jones

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-939905-04-8

  eBook ISBN 978-1-939905-05-5

  A Word Horde Book

  For the readers that have stayed with us to the place where all streets end

  CHAPTER 1

  We have Jona’s truth, taken from his own dead skull, his memories and his knowledge of the night.

  You have that. I do not know anything unless you write it down.

  I write it down, and that will be enough. Knowledge is enough to stop the city.

  The truth hasn’t mattered in Dogsland for a long time. You and I have known of Sabachthani’s sins for decades. We would have stopped him if we could. That his daughter breaks the city laws is nothing to them, either. The truth doesn’t matter here.

  The sins are just hidden. They are not on the street, spread out into every corner and the king nearly dead without an heir.

  We shall see. Write it all down and we shall see.

  ***

  They called him Dog and he was a man that used to be one of the three street-corner kings of this district. I see him as Jona saw him, and I see him as the rats saw him. I also know what is true in the city, for his life. After the death of Turco, and the long fade of Djoss into the demon weed, Dog remained the last king standing on the street. He slept like an animal in the side room of the ruined brewery. Homeless children slept there with him in heaps of cloth and empty liquor bottles, and he protected them as best he could from the worst of the street that might come after the boys and girls. Rats quick enough to dodge a drunk boy’s bottle slipped between the tangled limbs. Rats not quick enough got cooked by whoever caught them. Flies and roaches were small and fast enough to feast in the filth unafraid.

  Dog woke up to smoke any ash or resin left in his pipe. His face looked like a cracked pot wrapped in scabbed leather. He mumbled meaningless sounds to the boys huddled against him for warmth. The boys peeled away from the waking giant.

  Dog’s teeth had rotted out from the pinks. He gummed damp, moldy bread that he kept in a bag tied to a ceiling beam. He stumbled into the light like any of the nameless boys. This crumbling giant’s tough body had fallen deeper into street surrender. When the mudskippers’ whistles screamed, Dog looked off into the direction of the sound. He did not run after them. He watched the boys darting like small deer to the source of sound, and remained behind.

  Boys came to Dog that didn’t sleep in the abandoned brewery. They gave him demon weed in pinches, a few bent matches. They gave him scraps of metal. They didn’t give him much.

  Dog picked at the scrap metal boys had brought for him. He took the scrap to a big can near the water. The side of the can was painted in ash and flecks of sparkling copper: three crowns in a line, like a sentence or a name.

  Dog tossed wood and coal into the can. He banged the metal together hard until a few large sparks landed on bits of wood and paper, enough to make them burn. (He wouldn’t waste a match on anything but his pipe, unless it was too damp in the air for sparks to catch.)

  He fed the fire.

  Dog smoked his pipe while he waited for the fire to heat up. He let the pink weed roll into his skin. He stayed close to the heat until the bloody, pink sweat leaked from his pores. Then, Dog shoved the metal into the fire. He used two other strips of iron from a rusted-out crowbar to move the scrap around in the heat. He fed the fire a steady stream of paper and cloth and wood and dried manure pulled directly from the Pens’ streets by the ragpickers.

  Then, Dog pulled the metal from the fire. He used the ruined blades again to smash the metal into a curve on the ground.

  Dog bent the metal into a rough circle the size of a boy’s head. When that was done, he used the heat to melt and shape spikes like jagged teeth.

  (I do not know if Dog had ever actually seen a crown in his life, but he seemed to make them easily enough to suggest that he had once witnessed a king with a crown. Perhaps he was a deposed king, himself. Perhaps he had been a king, before he came to this city. I can see him now, the victim of labyrinthine machinations that carved away his ears and tongue: a mute prince tossed into a slaver’s galley and lost at sea, and at sea until the pink weed filled his head with death, and he fell in step behind the dealer that fed a habit in exchange for cheap muscle. And now, the lost king slept mute among beggar boys and rats spreading crowns in a knighthood of orphans and drugs. Who knows his true history? All we know is his fate among the smoke. All I see is the shape of his path, and never the source of place before the ruin in his life. Rot stench masks all the sweetness of the vine, always.)

  After the metal scraps had become a new jagged crown, Dog dropped the hot metal into the canal water with an old crane hook. Some teeth cracked and bent in the sudden cooling. This only made the crown more menacing, like a rusty shark’s mouth. Dog handed the crown to the boy that had paid for the prize in demon weed.

  Sometimes, the crown fit. If it didn’t the boy carried it around, looking for another boy that fit it for a trade of crowns.

  And Dog waited there, smoking the demon weed the boys had brought, measuring the boys’ heads with his fingers, and crafting new crowns in his back alley scrap forge, then sleeping like an old monster from a children’s story wrapped in lost boys and trash.

  This monster of old skin, muscle, and bone looks at the water like he’s waiting for us to come and claim his horrible skull, but no one is coming for him.

  No one ever comes for him.

  ***

  I have written many things.

  As wolves we ran, and as wolves we slipped underground.

  We slid up from the sewers, and we stood upon the brink of our destination, where the sewers opened to the empty building of the street, at the edge of our destination.

  Aggie knew the way in and out, and so did Jona following Salvatore and Aggie, and so, therefore, did we.

  We slipped inside in the dark. We climbed in silence past the rectory kitchen, up the stairs and into the darkness.

  Wolves slipped into the rooms, sniffing through them all for the woman who is old enough to be in charge.

  We peeled back the wolfskin. We looked at her sleeping. She was an old woman in the dark, with skin empty of sunlight to our dusky brown and golden. She snored gently. She was a thin woman with blue veins like rivers in her wet parchment map of skin. She looked up at us, and pulled the ragged sheets around her body, pulling back.

  She reminded me of another woman.

  “We are the Walkers of Erin,” I said. “We have been hunting the demon stain.”

  “What are you doing he
re? This is not the proper channels!”

  “The proper channels are too corrupted,” I said. “Do you remember Aggie?”

  “Of course I do! It was one of the worst things that’s ever happened in my life, signing off on her! Where were you? Where was your huntress in the night?”

  I placed the papers at the foot of her bed.

  “We need your help,” I said. I bowed gracefully. “The children of Erin beseech your aid, madame Imamite, against our common enemy.”

  “And… who is our enemy?”

  “Elishta,” I said.

  “Naturally, but who else? Who has brought you crawling here for my help?”

  “We need to see the king,” I said. “We need a meeting with him. We need to work together to end the stain in the city streets.”

  She picked up the papers and shook them. She flipped through them. “Do I even want to know the details?”

  I shrugged. “Copies have been made. We want you to make copies, too. Everyone must know the truth. Spread them to every convent, every prayer hall and sanctuary. Tell anyone that listens. This is why we came to you, to be sure you receive the truth directly.”

  She pushed the paper back to me. “Stay for breakfast. Stay here. No one will know if you remain among the Anchorites a day. There is no contact with the outside world in here. We receive shipments in silence and veiled from one gate. We do not let our girls wander the streets wagging tongues.”

  I shook my head. “Aggie was not supposed to leave your gates.”

  “She was a demon child. Who knows what evil magic she used to escape us.”

  “You should read those. Send your people to us when you’re ready to aid us. We need an audience with the king.”

  She put them on the ground. “I should have you arrested. It is illegal for a man to invade our convent. We are allies in this world but not the next.”

  “Elishta is our enemy in both. Our faiths are practical enough when it comes to that.”

  She nodded. She took a deep breath. She picked up the pages. “Go, then. I will make my own decisions about what you have brought to me.”

  We bowed.

  Our next destination was a nobleman whose son was murdered and thrown into the water. We were going to offer him the whole kingdom. All he had to do was be ready to act when the time came to stop Sabachthani, and to make copies.

  He would help us. Of course he would help us. He was weeping about his son after we handed him the truth. We told him what happened, and what vengeance he could take. We told him that we had chosen his noble line to support when the king died, and our support came with knowledge of his enemies.

  Imam’s priests would fall in line with us, and with him.

  Our revolution was coming.

  ***

  I see what I see of the city, by the grace of the goddess Erin, who granted me the lost memories of the demon child’s skull that I might root out the evil of the world. I do not sleep except that I dream with someone else’s memories and wait until they may pass through me like a flood washing away in my mind. Corporal Jona Lord Joni’s memories—he is the dead demon child whose skull I carry—pour through me in waves and I am lost in him and his world. My husband is beside me, and he says it will pass soon enough. All these lost dreams will pass.

  Give it time, he says. Just write them down and then you will find yourself again.

  I remember too much. I step away and try to think like he does, and see the city from the angle of his eyes. The nobleman would make the city a series of islands cut open by the canals, where all the people of the street are divided by bridges that can be owned and kept by lords. It was not good that the Chief Engineer was murdered, but his incomplete canal is better unfinished. On an island, the worst would only grow taller, crueler. That is what happened to the Sabachthani on their island, I think, with all the noblemen that repose beside them. They grew too tall on their island. They thought they were more than dogs in this city full of dogs, owned by dogs, that we refuse to name except with the name our wolves have for such a place.

  Husband, are you still awake?

  My husband has a long, thin body, when he is a man. He rests, now, without the wolfskin on his back. He is like a wet maple leaf with his long, gray hair spread all around across the paper, leaving a rain-damp blur upon the inks. I should wake him, and peel him back from our maps, but we know the city so well, now. One of the remaining demon children is close. Salvatore Fidelio must finally face his death. We will kill him, and fight the stain of demons in this city. We are not executioners. We are healers, now, in a fire and revolution and the reaping of the weeds, to cull the weakness in the streets of men. The streets will burn with fire before we are done here.

  —Husband?

  The map over our floor, where the city lines and valleys and alleys and corners and the people stay where Sergeant Nicola Calipari’s quill placed them, and we find them there as if they were trees that never moved from their roots, and the map has been used so much that we leave it there more from habit than need. We have walked these narrow streets, my husband and I, and we know the city as well as we know the forest hills beyond the city, where we run with the wolf packs, the skin of wolves upon our backs and claws and howls that sing beneath Erin’s holy moon.

  We sleep, now, upon the rippling paper map, all over the smudged ink of the city, and I touch my husband next to his heartbeat. I feel for it, beating gently like an insect in the dark corner of his chest. I shake him.

  Wake up.

  He is slow to answer. Why?

  I have a question to ask you.

  Let it wait until daybreak.

  Would you die for me, like Jona did for his beloved?

  No. You shouldn’t die for me, either. Let me sleep.

  Liar.

  He rolled over with his back to me. I touched his back, where his lungs rose and fell beneath his muscles and bones. I traced his shoulder blades in the dark with my thumb.

  Jona burned his life down for the woman he loved.

  Rachel and Djoss escaped Dogsland to the north, past the red valley of demons and undeath. They have joined with the dust of the world, living as they have always lived, hiding as they’ve always hid. They die slowly in their own stains and sins.

  Streets shape the people in the streets until none escape where Calipari’s ink has marked them down in bleeding black. They cannot make themselves into something new. Humans push between the cobblestones and alleys and tiny doorways, against the walls and boundaries. After all the grinding, a soul might not cling inside the mangled clay and flesh.

  Where does the ruin begin, where does it end? An eternal traveler, I have witnessed the crumbled walls of lost cities disintegrate to lines of stones like rotten teeth. I have touched the heads of a thousand children in blessing; some had wealthy families and some only had the clothes on their backs and no one knew exactly where the breach between the generations began. I have watched the noble mayor cry out the first ordinance of his administration, and held my tongue at how this law would slowly wear the buildings down until broken foundation stones alone would remain hidden between tufts of grass. I have watched the virtuous daughter marry the powerful son and a lasting civilization spiraled up like castle spires from their clasped hands in peace.

  I have watched men and women fall in and out of love. I have fallen in and out of love. I have watched all creatures fall in and out and in and out of love.

  And I, Erin’s divine Walker—a woman, sometimes, with the nose of the wolf—I can smell the ruin of this city in the sea breeze. We turn a corner in the streets, and a building stands empty—not burned, not broken, just empty—and the windows have fallen away with tile roof and wood like leaves in autumn. Witness it. The ruin is already here. It will grow. There is a king of the day and a king of the night. There is a push between the ruin and the building of things, and the daylight has already lost. The night king rules the streets. The ruin is already here.

  We remain in the city, m
y husband and I.

  I can see more. Every day I see more. Jona’s mind and memory unravels around me, through me, in memories and feelings like what people think they mean when they talk about their soul. I smell beyond his sins and sorrows. I smell and I see and I feel a lost world. What matter is truth to memory? The feeling of truth is all that remains. Sabachthani would melt the truth away, why not I, too?

  I write it down, even in this darkness while my husband sleeps, upon the backs of the paper of the maps.

  My quill crawls. I do not know what to tell you anymore of the city that haunts my memory. Dogsland is the same city she has been for all these pages—the Pens District the same horrible place they’ve always been. The smell in the air grows stronger in the long heat, without rain to sweep the rotting meat into the sewers.

  Shall I speak of the cobblestones like buried turtle eggs all fossilized and crumbled under layers of silt? Shall I speak of the creaking buildings hunched into each other’s shoulders, all these sick and drunk buildings leaning against other sick and drunk buildings to keep their shoulders up? Nothing changes. For more than two decades Jona lived here, and nothing changed for anyone except that everything was worse.

  Jona Lord Joni did not see his world that way, but I do. Jona sees a world full of people and memories and feelings, not things. He does not know the horror of his home, for it is the only home he knew.

  I know him, and his home, because of the skull we found below a bluff, far from the city he called home. Hunting demon children brought my husband and me to this city, by Erin’s will.

  ***

  Jona saw this old woman sometimes in Rachel’s building. This old woman wore putrid bandages wrapped over her arms and legs where the rats chewed her rotting flesh.

  The rats tell me that the woman’s arms tasted like rotten meat, and it is a soft and supple meat and easy to digest for rats. She swung at the rats with rags and trash that didn’t hurt the rats much. Sometimes she just lay back and wailed as if she were making love to a paramour shaped like a pack of rats.