The punch shattered my nose before I could scream.
Blood exploded across my area of vision in hissing, copper-tasting drops. Knees gave way to the icestone of Ashenfell Bridge, and I stumbled forward, hands ripping against centuries-hardened mortar as I tried to check my fall. Metal taste filled my mouth, mixed with the bitter taste of fear.
"Look at him bleed," Marcus sneered above my head, his voice cutting through fog that clung to broken stonework. "Just like his useless father."
I spat scarlet upon worn bridge, watched it stream between worn crevices where hundreds had probably bled before me. My grandmother's medicine—the vial I'd gripped just moments earlier, rolled somewhere and out of reach in the darkness.
"How did things get wrong so fast?"
I'd been just standing here twenty minutes before, fingers closed around the crumpled bills I'd desperately scraped together, selling everything I owned. The dealer, his eyes sunken and teeth discolored from tobacco, had materialized out of the fog as if a spirit come back from the bridge's evil past.
"You got the cash, boy?" His breath stank of tobacco and something bitter.
I'd also nodded, too scared to speak a word. The medicine was worth more than others in the Lower District made in a month, but Grandmother's cough had become so bad that pink foam bubbled on her lips every morning. The healers had turned us down, no coin, no cure. The black market was the only option.
The trader had pulled out a small glass vial filled with a silvery liquid that radiated its luminescence. "Concentrated moonbell extract. Take three drops in warm water, morning and night. This'll cure whatever's eating her lungs."
My hands had trembled, and I took up the precious medicine. So close. Grandmother might sleep peacefully without that awful, wet rattle that troubled both of us.
And that was when the footsteps had echoed across the bridge.
"Well, well. Little Renji's playing with the big boys."
Marcus had emerged from the mist with his pack of jackals, their expensive leather boots clinking stone in measured cadence. The dealer had looked once at their approach, scooped up both my money and the medicine, and disappeared into the mist faster than smoke.
"Wait!" I had cried to him, but the blackness had already engulfed him.
Marcus's boot hit me in the ribs now, and air was forced from my lungs in a sick, wracking hiss. I bent double, trying to cover my internal organs as his followers closed in.
"Your dad thought he was clever, too," Marcus said, circling me like an animal.
"Thought he could steal from my family warehouse and live."
Another kick, but to a kidney this time. White lightning racing down my back.
"I didn't—" I gasped, but his kick in the stomach ended the words.
"Didn't what? Didn't know your father was a thieving rat? Didn't think his debts would fall on his children?"
I pulled against the weight, muscles screaming in pain. Blood oozed from my chin onto the worn stone, and I could taste iron film coating my teeth. "He's been dead three years. Whatever he owed…"
"Interest accrues, gutter trash." Marcus grasped a hank of hair and wrapped it around his fist, tugging my head back and forcing me to meet his chilly blue glare. "Three years' interest on a good-sized debt."
His friend, a giant of a man named Willem, bellowed with amusement. "Fling him off now, Marcus? Save ourselves the trouble?"
I felt an icy dread. The bridge was nearly two hundred feet above the churning black water of the Ashenfell Gorge. No man had ever survived so great a plunge. Weathered rocks leaned inward, as if the bridge itself eavesdropped and listened.
"Not yet," Lucas said, letting go of my jaw so that my head hit the rock. "I want him to know something about what happens to sons of thieves."
They stomped back and forth afterwards. Fists and boots and knees, every blow shattering new shafts of pain into my body.
I fought back, I was able to catch a wild blow that connected with Willem's throat, which I was rewarded for with a merciless kick that left me winded. But three to one, especially when the one was desperate and hungry, could only end in one fashion.
The striking continued for what felt like hours, but could not have lasted more than minutes. When they finally moved back, I had no sensation in my face at all from the swelling, and something warm came out of my ear.
"Enough playing," Marcus said, gasping for breath. "Willem, Dex, get hold of his arms."
Fear coursed through my veins with cold precision. They pulled me to my feet, legs too shaky to support my body. Through swollen eyes, I glimpsed the edge of the bridge, the weathered railing between land and gulf below.
"Please," I snarled, the noise scratching my raw throat.
"My grandmother—she is waiting for me."
"Should have thought of that before your father felt it appropriate to steal from us."
They dragged me to the edge. The mist churned beneath, heavy as concrete stuff; I could not see water, only endless darkness churning with an obscene life of its own. Natives had long spoken of Ashenfell Bridge being cursed, built upon bones and blood, that things in those black waters had never been in sunlight.
I'd always dismissed such legends as fantasy.
Now, staring into that hungry darkness, I wasn't quite so certain.
"Any last words?" Marcus asked.
I thought of Grandmother, alone in our tiny room, coughing up blood onto rags she tried to keep hidden from me. I thought of the medicine, somewhere beyond my reach in the darkness, and how she would starve to death without it. Inflamed rage sparked to life in my chest, not at Marcus or his thugs, but at the unfairness of it all. In a world of the strong exploiting the weak, of medicine costing more than lives were worth.
"Go to hell," I spat, blood seeping from my puffed lips.
Marcus smiled. "After you."
They dragged me over and up the parapet.
For a moment, I was suspended on the grooved stone, wind tussling my hair, the space yawned open at my feet. The fog curled up to claim me like clutching fingers.
Then they let me go.
I fell.
The bridge disappeared above me as I sped through veils of mist and blackness. Wind shrieked through my ears, and my stomach was pulled up into my throat. This was it, death at twenty-one, Grandmother to die alone.
Water burst up to engulf me, darker than coal and colder than twice its temperature. I crashed into the surface with jarring bone, and the river closed over me.
Down, down into the sheer darkness. My lungs burned for air, but the passage was too strong, driving me deeper into the abyss of the earth. My vision shattered as consciousness began to fade.
But when blackness closed over me, something magical happened.
Far below, in water that ought not to rest beneath any river on this planet, something colossus stirred. Something beyond comprehension, something older than the bridge high above it, perhaps even older than the stones themselves.
And in that boundless darkness, two devilish eyes unfolded, eyes like molten gold, burning with wisdom older than man.
They regarded my falling figure with unhidden hunger.
The last thing I saw before nothingness enveloped me was those eyes bursting the surface of the black water, becoming bigger and lighter, coming from the depths of the earth towards me.