“And?”
“He entrusted me with a request.”
Gene had learned both eloquence and argument in the past, but he was not inclined to display verbal skill when raising a serious subject. Today’s meeting might fulfill a wish he had cherished for almost ten years. Faced with that, he found himself all the more at a loss for words.
“He asked me to give you this.”
Gene took a rolled sheet of parchment from inside his clothes and spread it open. On it was a bird with its wings extended. The drawing had been executed with care, down to the fierce beak, the talons, and the delicate feathers, but it had no eyes, as though darkness had swallowed them. No, as though the bird itself were a shadow.
The old woman took the drawing and gazed down at it. For a long time she said nothing. Then she abruptly spoke.
“It’s a copy.”
“Yes.”
“Did you draw it?”
“No.”
She rose and took an ink bottle down from the cupboard. Opening it, she dipped her little finger inside, then drew it carelessly across the feathers of both wings. Next she dipped her forefinger in her remaining coffee and rubbed it over the wings. The drawing quickly filled with spreading stains. Tapping the paper with a stained finger, she pushed it toward Gene.
He said, “That looks rather different from what I remember.”
“Of course it does. What you saw was Irko. This is the Shadowhawk.”
Gene’s lips tightened. His fingertips stiffened too. At the same moment, the old woman raised her eyes to look at him.
“You don’t know what Irko is, do you?”
“No. What is it?”
“A bird. A hawk from Irkonik, swift and fierce as a shooting star.”
“Is that also called a Shadowhawk?”
“Well, it’s the same, and it isn’t. A ‘Shadowhawk’ is just what it says. A shadow. The shadow of an Irko.”
Gene did not know why she distinguished between them, but the picture she had drawn certainly looked more like a shadow of something. One corner of her mouth twitched. It was a cold smile, unlike an old woman’s.
“If you don’t understand, just think of them as the same. Most people who know of it do. At first, that man was known as someone from Irkonik. The Delphinad fools who heard that rustic name, without even knowing where it was, must have given him the nickname Irko. They didn’t know what an Irko was or where Irkonik was. They just shortened it because it was easier to say. But then Hersander, who came from the north, heard the nickname and began calling him ‘Shadowhawk.’ That was easier to remember and rolled off the tongue, so before long it replaced the old name. Ah, yes. What became of Hersander? Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“What? You don’t know Hersander? These days, don’t people call on Hersander’s curse every night in the name of some wretch who’s going to die tomorrow?”
At her words, something came dimly to mind. There was still a place that ran a similar game: an underground tavern in the eastern part of the canal, called the White Spider’s Den. Gene had never been there. It was chiefly a den for people who bought and sold lives, assassins and human traffickers. Its customers might earn a fortune today without knowing whether they would be alive tomorrow, and they were said to enjoy betting even on their own lives. Sometimes a single person’s payout grew so large that they killed one another trying to get their hands on it. Compared with those who frequented that place, patrol work might almost have been called respectable employment.
In any case, Gene shook his head.
“No one knows that name now.”
“Well, I’ll be. Hersander carried on as though he’d live a thousand years, and a few decades pass and no one remembers him. What a thing life is. Good deeds, wicked deeds, none of it amounts to much. Whether you live kindly or cruelly, everyone is forgotten like this.”
The old woman stood, brought over a box of odds and ends, and emptied it onto the table. Among needles, spools, a broken pipe, pebbles, and safety pins, a silver coin rolled out. It was a familiar lily silver coin, but a few small symbols had been carved into its surface. Two crosses and one asterisk, three marks in all. She tapped its face.
“This is Hersander’s token. He carved it himself. Every token has different marks, and they used to say there were about a thousand. You needed one to join the game of lives. Nobody else knows the rules he made for those three carved marks, so you can’t counterfeit one. The moment he takes it in his hand, he knows whether it’s genuine. You bought one, hung it up in the betting room beneath the tavern, and waited. When someone died, the pot was divided. When there was a big payout, one of these once became worth seven gold Serapion.”
A big payout meant that someone with little chance of dying had died. Someone like the Shadowhawk, for example. The old woman tossed the silver coin onto Gene’s hand with precise aim.
“Take it.”
“Why give it to me?”
“You say Hersander’s gone. Then there’s no one left to exchange it for gold. What good is keeping it?”
Gene closed his fingers around the coin, his grip tightening slightly.
“Then is that why you’ve kept it all this time?”
The old woman narrowed one eye.
“What are you trying to say? ‘I thought you kept it as a memory of some old man gone into the earth, but you’ve been clutching it because you hoped it would turn into money, you rotten old hag’? Is that what you want to say?”
The accusation was so blunt that he had no reply. No, for the first time she had called him an “old man.” Did that mean the two had been lovers or husband and wife? The cold-blooded assassin called the Shadowhawk, and Sara Izram, an old woman who lived by working a corner of farmland?
The thought crossed his mind, but Gene soon shook his head.
“No, Madam Izram. I have no right to intrude on your memories.”
“I never had a husband named Izram. Just call me Sara.”
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