The Brand in the Gutter

Karth Blackwine woke in a gutter, and the first thing he learned about himself was that he did not scream when things hurt. That was useful information, because things hurt a great deal. He lay in the cold run-off of a city he did not recognize, in clothes that were not quite his size, and he took an inventory the way a man takes an inventory when his body knows how to do a thing his mind has forgotten teaching it. Ribs: bruised, not broken. Skull: a lump behind the ear, old blood crusted, the wound a day gone at least. Hands: one empty, one holding the hilt of a sword that ended, eight inches up, in a bright jagged stump where the rest of the blade should have been. And the palm of the empty hand had a mark on it. It was a brand, burned into the meat of him, and it was fresh — the skin around it still angry, still weeping — and it was shaped like an open eye with a key for a pupil. Karth looked at it for a long time. He did not know what it meant. He did not know his own face, or his own age, or the name of the city, or how many men he had killed to snap a good sword in half. But he knew, with a certainty that came up from somewhere below memory, that the brand was bad news, and that it was the kind of bad news that had a clock attached to it. He knew his name was Karth Blackwine because it was stitched, in small neat thread, into the collar of the coat that did not quite fit him. He decided to keep the name. A man in a gutter takes what he can get. "You're awake," said a voice. "Pity. I had a wager going with myself." The speaker was a woman leaning in a doorway across the alley — lean, scarred, a fishmonger's apron and a knife too good for gutting fish — and she was looking at Karth the way you look at a dog that has wandered in off the road and might be valuable and might have teeth. "You know me," Karth said. It was not a question. The way she'd said you're awake had a history in it. "I know your hand." She nodded at the brand. "Everyone in the Reed Quarter knows that hand, friend. That's the Pawnmark. The sorcerer Vell puts it on people he's bought. Soldiers, mostly. Killers he doesn't want walking off the job." Her eyes went to the broken sword, and something in her face tightened. "Which is interesting, because that brand is fresh, which means Vell bought you within the week — and you are very much walking off the job. Nobody walks off Vell's job. The brand doesn't let them. It burns inward, slow, until the owner calls his property home." Karth flexed the branded hand. Now that she'd said it, he could feel it — a low heat under the skin, patient, like a coal banked for the night. Not pain yet. A promise of pain. "How long," he said. "Till what?" "Till it finishes." The woman pushed off the doorframe. "Story goes, a marked man gets till the next full moon to come home willing. After that the brand stops asking." She looked up, past the alley's broken roofline, to where a pale fat moon hung in the afternoon sky, three days off full. "So I'd say you've got three days, friend, to find the sorcerer who owns you and do something clever about it. And you don't even remember your own mother's face." Karth got to his feet. It hurt. He did not scream. He looked at the half a sword in his fist, and the eye-and-key burned into his palm, and the three-day moon, and he found that under the fear there was something else, something steady and cold and almost like relief — because a man with no past and a clock on his life did not have to wonder what to do with himself. He had a sorcerer to find. And eight inches of broken blade said that wherever he'd been, he'd already proven he was good at the finding kind of work. "Three days," he said. "Where does a man buy a new sword in this city?" The fishmonger grinned, and it was not a kind grin, and Karth decided he liked her anyway. "That depends," she said. "How much of the brand are you willing to show the smith?"