11 Spring 519
The chilling water that seeps along the seams of the ravosala creeps and pools at Caspian’s slack fingertips. In his dreams, the creaking of the gently rolling barge that had thrummed in harmony with the melody winding through him suddenly turns discordant. Eyes shooting open, he retracts his hand and jolts upright, and in his flailing nearly sends the entire craft pitching over.
The ravosalaman, of a bearing and countenance completely foreign to him, swears loudly and with hasty maneuvering, manages only narrowly to keep the whole of them from going awry.
“Have you lost your petching mind?” the ravosalaman snarls at him, holding his oar aloft and threatening very plainly to drive it down into his cranial lobes.
Staring up at what still seems at this point to be entirely unwarranted and contextless rage, Caspian freezes, but the stranger still hasn’t lowered the weapon hovering just inches away from Caspian’s eyes, so Caspian throws his hands up over his face in an instinctive flinch he finds impossible to suppress. The sudden movement from him locks them both in a reactive loop, in which the ravosalaman only grows angrier and falls further into the definitively offensive, and Caspian, in his drunk-high befuddlement and dizzying alarm, thrashes more haphazardly, sending the boat rocking with dangerous force, which in turn does very little to mollify the ravosalaman in his fury.
A few more moments of this, and had the ravosala not already been so proximal to a dock, Caspian’s reckless floundering would have sent the three of them straight into the lake. But the hull slams against it, the gilded wood grinding piercingly against the iron-wrought, rope-latticed posts, and Caspian scrambles backwards over the ledges and seats and wrangles his body onto the closest thing for miles to be considered land. It’s not the cleanest of escapes, his left foot dipping clear into the obsidian waters, the chill a shock that stabs and snakes through his system. The ravosalaman gets a clear knock and a swipe with his oar too, hard enough to bruise, but there’s time later for taking inventory. The saving grace here is that categorical division of territory, debatable though it might sometimes be, with the way the tides can encroach upon the city’s extremities – but as Caspian predicts, no matter his ire, the ravosalaman isn’t leaving his watercraft unattended for even a moment.
Fearing very little, the ravosalaman swings his oar directly at Caspian’s temple, but with its momentum encouraging the boat to drift further, and Caspian’s well-timed and completely unintentional stumble, the strike misses him completely.
The message it intends to send, though, is clear, and the two of them resort to shouting at each other over the wavering lake.
“You crazy vagik,” the ravosalaman screams, furiously paddling towards him to close the distance, swinging his oar straight for Caspian’s head again. “I was only trying to get you from Point A to Point B. You hired me. I should have let you drown in the canal where I found you!”
“Vagik?” Caspian ducks on unsteady feet. “Vagik? Right, I’m the vagik, while you scrape algae and bottom rot for a living,” he screams back.
It’s night now – no, it isn’t, it’s dawn, and the light is breaking across the darkling mirror on which they float, that light illuminating very little, and vanishing into its depths. The sky above has taken on shades of rose deepening to clementine, that demure serenity marred by Caspian and his alleged savior casting unveiled vulgarities at one another at fever’s pitch.
It’s the ravosalaman who gives up first. That’s what Caspian tells himself, at least, as he throws one last unseemly gesture over his shoulder, and turns to stalk the streets where he’s just been dumped.
From the posters littering the walls and the inescapable iron pavilion lined with fetters domineering his field of vision, though, it’s with a greater chill than the lake could ever give him that he realizes he’s made himself privy to the early hours of The Slave Market in the Plaza of Dark Delights.
Not open for business, from the hour and the looks of things, though business turns and burns in its machinations in preparation. There’s a trio of young women being dragged from one end of the market to the other, all blindfolded and gagged, and another trio taken in quick succession, and another, and another, procession to a ceremony he’s never taken any pleasure in witnessing. It doesn’t help that he’s not, how might one put it – not entirely in his right mind at the moment. The bleary confusion in which he’d awakened in the ravosala hasn’t left his system yet, and in his stilted consciousness, the consistent mantra keeping him upright is that this isn’t a safe place for him, isn’t really ever, and especially isn’t now, and he needs to leave. Immediately.
But he’s not going home, though it’s not far – not like this. Not with Taalviel likely to be home and waiting for his full report as to what he’d been sent to go and witness and take note of, and it’s not that he didn’t accomplish those things, he just didn’t carry them off as neatly as maybe a spy ought to have – he’s in one piece, though, and isn’t that what matters?
Home’s off the list. There’s another place he knows, though, one not very far either, and most importantly, that place isn’t here, where the morning light is only growing and more people with both more and less to lose are beginning to filter in, and if someone notices him, damask torn and bedraggled and his face near-Benshiran and then if they look closer and somehow divulge from his eyes that his sister’s also a bird there’s very little that he or anyone can do, if someone so chose, to clap him in irons and gag him all the same. And along he would be forced to go after those trios of women, dragged up onto that pavilion for his future to be decided and torn apart without his own volition -
In an unassuming, dilapidated unit across from the House of Immortal Pleasures, the façade stained with the expectorations of the brothel’s patrons whose nights have taken worse turns, Caspian stumbles across a threshold and into open arms that grip and cradle him through his high, into thoughtless, dreamless sleep, rocking him with the same ease the lake had, before it had turned against him in its icy slithers.
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WC: 1,083