back to the streets where we began. Who: Amos & Loch What: A stroll. Where: Tenements When: This evening Rating: PG Status: Complete
When the priest at last stepped out of the orphanage, he was met with a chillier evening than he had anticipated. Amos raised his hands to the scarf around his neck, tightening the loops as he strode down the tenements streets. The wind set his sleeves flapping. In the scant light, he might have been a spectre. And yet it was not for this that the urchins of the night kept their fingers at bay. Kin recognised kin. Even though the eldest Luscini now donned the pristine vestments of the Cathedral, he would always be a product of the city’s dregs. With the surety of a street rat did he navigate the winding alleyways, his reedlike figure slipping in and out of narrow corners with practised ease.
The man was nearing the Bazaar districts when his gaze at last alit on a familiar figure. It was, admittedly, not one he had seen for quite some time. “Good evening, Loch,” the priest greeted, tilting his head in polite acknowledgment. “It is good to see you well.”
She stiffened when she heard the voice, like a cat with her back up. She had been listening to the approaching footsteps, trying to determine if they announced a threat. It was a lie, the saying that old habits died hard—in her experience, they never died at all.
“Well, fancy meeting you here, Amos.” Loch did not use his title. Had she spoken it, the disrespect would have been much greater. She eyed the scarf around his neck and the red spots on his cheeks, a result of the cutting wind. “Ain’t exactly the nicest evening for a stroll, I gotta say.”
Despite the extra layers she wore, she couldn’t say she was any more comfortable than he looked. The approach of winter was a lead weight in any urchin’s gut, present or past. A counter ticking down: the reality that the cold took a handful of orphans off the streets every year and, for all you knew, it might just be you this time around. No matter how many years passed, there was no leaving that thought behind.
“I would agree,” Amos said. His hands were tucked under the layers of his robes, trembling slightly with another whisper of the wind. “I am just returning from House of Faram, however, and so the walk must be suffered.”
A bland smile then, as though he were remembering an encounter with the woman not long ago—and not entirely dissimilar to the present one. Tilting his head in the direction of the road, which led to both the city proper and the docks, the priest added, “Are we taking the same path, perchance?”
Loch let out an unsteady laugh; it was too much to hope for he’d chalk it up to the cold. She didn’t need to ask what path he was referring to. “I am. Can’t stop you from walking along with me if you want to, now can I?”
They had walked this route together a few times, but the first one stood out in her mind. If she closed her eyes, she could still remember the blood flowing forth from her wounds, taking her warmth with it. The knowledge that she was going to die. The scrawny kid she’d never given a shit about saying how he was some sort of mage now, and the white light shining around his hands and knitting her flesh together again.
He’d never asked for anything in return. Not yet.
Before she realised it, she was already putting a cigarette to her lips. She lit up and took a deep drag. Seeing the smoke coil and twist when she released her breath reassured her, somehow.
“You still visit House of Faram?” she asked—an effort to banish the memory from her mind.
“I’ve a hand in helping it go along, yes,” he said. It was a Pharist orphanage, thereby a Cathedral investment. And any clergyman who hoped to ascend in the ranks knew to involve himself in any and all Cathedral investments. Were it not for this and for similar acts of charity, the tenements were not likely to see Amos as often as they did. He had, after all, chosen a higher path.
Furthermore, why would anyone that had escaped the tenements seek to return? Save for those like his family, enterprising folks who capitalised on the district’s dismal conditions, the residents of the tenements fought tooth and nail to claw their way out of the hellhole. It was a difficult matter for those outside the tenements to understand. Only a rare few, like the woman now in his company, could own to having experienced a similar desperation. And, subsequently, a similar euphoria for having escaped.
“What brings you by the district, if I might ask?” He offered her a wan smile as they began to walk down the road. “As you said, it is not the most pleasant evening for a stroll.”
“Business,” she said. “Not here for the sights, that’s for damn sure. Gotta make a living somehow, though.” How, exactly, she was making her living today, she did not specify. She had a feeling Faram would not have approved of her activities. She smiled, amused. “But hey, if it’s too cold, you could always take a crystal back.”
“I do intend to once we are further in,” he said. “The Cathedral is a ways yet from here.” Amos did not pry further into her business, instead opting to direct the conversation elsewhere. “Has everything been well with the docks? I understand it has been a trying period of recovery.”
“Fucking mess is what it’s been,” Loch said, taking a drag from her cigarette. “That damned serpent blocked our routes for far too long. Wanted to make it swallow a crate of explosives and watch it blow, but it just vanished.” Not that the interruption of the sea routes hadn’t bred opportunity—but that hadn’t made it any less annoying. “Gone just as suddenly as it came. Fuck if I know why. Just hope it never crawls back out of whatever hole it crawled into.”
And the mess in the Tenements, not too long after—she’d heard about that, from others who had been stupid enough to risk their necks in a fight against a behemoth who could destroy buildings with a single swing of its weapon. She didn’t really care where that one had come from, either, and in her opinion, there wasn’t much that could be done to make the Tenements even worse than they already were.
“There have been many mysteries of late, I will grant,” the priest said. Not least among which was the illness that was sweeping the countryside. And yet that was not a matter that he could have brought up with the harbormaster’s assistant, even were Amos inclined to. “But I am glad you and yours are persevering, Loch.”
You and yours. The people he was referring to as such, and those Loch considered most similar to her, were two wildly different groups. Amos was right, more so than he knew. Her kind did persevere. They persevered until they prospered, or until they stuck their hand in the wrong pocket and paid the price for it.
“Of course.” An urchin ran out of a nearby alley and down the street; her lips curved into a smile. “We ain’t going down that easy.”
The sound of the Peacekeepers’ boots running in chase, ten seconds later, in the exact opposite direction the little thief had gone was like music to her ears.