We Leave Together, стр. 1

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

This edition of We Leave Together

Cover design by Scott R Jones

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

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