When We Were Executioners by J. M Mcdermott Page B

tonight, and one door with fellows outside waiting uncomfortably for a rampaging carriage that would never come. The moonlight and lamplight reflected off the water. The crane had a shadow among these shadows. Sometimes a lone river ship slid past outside. Night watchmen sang out in the dark to let other ships know the speed, the direction, and the size. Men with long poles trudged, halfasleep, up and down the deck, pushing the ship along.
    Jona didn’t dress right away. First, he slipped back into the water naked, and he scrubbed at his hands and face. He didn’t know if he still had blood on him.

CHAPTER XIII

    The sea breeze licked at the jewels of river water all over his body.
    He needed to dry off, and put some clothes on, and row back to his post at the island before the morning shift change.
    He didn’t have a towel, so he just pushed all the water down with his hands until he felt merely damp.
    He found one leach on his leg. It was dead already from his demon blood. The leech hadn’t let go when it died. He pulled the squishy black creature out of his skin, and tossed it into the water.
    He used river water to rinse the bloody spots on his leg from the leech’s teeth. Jona had to wait for the wound to clot before he could touch his clothes lest the blood burn through the new uniform. He didn’t mind. He wanted to be drier. He wondered if he had a leach dead on his back that he couldn’t see, but he couldn’t do anything about it now.
    He had to get back to his post. He pulled on his new clothes, and now he was a river tout, ready to give directions around the canals for a coin to the other ships, and sometimes a lift to a fellow left by a ferry that didn’t mind paying a bit more for the hurry.
    He tied a ratty bandanna over his hair, and smeared some fresh mud on his face and arms. People see a dirty river tout, they don’t look twice at him.
    He shoved his new rowboat into the water. He jumped into the boat so his momentum pushed it out of the black and into the water. He rowed silently. He dodged the few ships running through the canals without a singsong cry about his own presence on the water.
    He had to go down the canal, into the bay, and north to the island, where he’d change clothes one more time tonight, back into his uniform, and sink this little rowboat with the clothes inside of it.
    Jona wasn’t far from the edge of the canal, where larger vessels full of fruits, fish, vegetables, and wheat unloaded precious cargo into the flat canal vessels. Perishables usually ran after dark, to get to the markets by morning light.
    Jona turned the corner to the bay, where bustling brothels and bars spewed disease and terrible music like a house vomiting buckets into the gutters.
    Someone cried out for a river tout. Jona didn’t look up. He was going to keep rowing as if he didn’t hear. Then, the voice cried out again, and Jona recognized the voice.
    Lord Elitrean’s son in a sailor disguise waved his arm at Lord Joni, whose tout disguise was better. The boy had draped himself in filthy rags like a sailor, and wore rags over half his face like a wound. The boy was not covered in filth or mud. His skin was pure and white, as if he had come directly from a bath, and no salty sea air or sunlight had browned his white skin.
    ( I think everyone puking in the gutter, and spinning to foreign noise among foreign prostitutes was a noble in disguise. Even the prostitutes were bored rich wives, looking for some excitement, unconcerned about passing down the face of the father to the sons and daughters. )
    Jona slowed his little boat. He shouted to Elitrean exactly what a tout should shout. “What, you?”
    “Ahoy, tout,” shouted Elitrean. His accent was all wrong. He sounded like a nobleman trying to sound like a sailor. “Run me to my boat,” he said.
    “How much you got?”
    “I got enough, tout. Nine do it for you?”
    “They foreign coins or local?”
    “Local.”
    “I’m your boy,” shouted