1st 5 Pages November Workshop - Cauthron Rev 2

Name: Kyle Cauthron
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Title: The Salter’s Son


Pitch:

Mummifying the dead wasn't ever Paolo’s aspiration, but it’s the work he got. Now no amount of scrubbing can strip the stench of it from his skin, and folks won’t hardly come near him for fear of catching the plague. But he’s a refugee with no family and no money. For him there isn’t any escaping his indenture. Until he discovers the impossible.

In his world all the beasts are reptiles, and commerce, near every bit of it, ebbs and flows with the heat of the sun. That is, until Paolo discovers a new way of warming the beasts. He finally has his chance for cutting free—for buying his way out of his indenture—but only if he keeps his secret long enough to cash in. Unfortunately, Bento, the town's brutal money-lender, catches wind of the discovery and wants it for himself. Soon, so will every cutthroat with a musket or a knife. To stay alive and win his freedom, Paolo will have to venture into the mountains and partner with someone who might just be a cutthroat herself.


Revision:

Even in the dark, finding the house hadn't been any bother. The air around it was thick with smoke. For seven days they'd burned tallows, sage and whatever they could find for incense. But all I smelled was rot. I ducked my nose into the arm of my jacket, desperate to cut the smell. I nearly backed myself off that narrow terrace of a street just to escape, except that wasn't how I was raised.

The house I stood before was like all the others in the Squalors--all of them made of adobe and barely clinging to the cliffside. Its window didn't have any glass. There were only skins stitched together and sewn with stones to stop them flapping, but there wasn't any breeze that morning. There rarely was when I needed one. My breathing was coming in fast and shallow, making me take in more and more of the stench. Bile splashed against the back of my throat.

I knocked on the door harder than I meant to. The thing wasn't more than a few sticks wrapped in hide, and it rattled something fierce. The shaking released a fresh wave of stench, and I had to brace my hand against their wall. Damn those Nazra and their superstitions! I might be Nazra, but at least I had the good sense to know you don't leave a body out of the vat for a week. Not in Secco.

Beneath me the ground had set to swaying, but I knew it wasn't true. It was the memory coming back. I had waited my own week once and now there wasn't any forgetting. For seven days I had huddled below decks in the bowels of a ship. I had stayed there, pressed against a bulwark in the dark, too scared to move. Around me the ship hadn't ever stopped swaying, and the hammock with its body inside had rocked and creaked along with it. The air had been hard to hold onto then, the breathing a struggle. I hadn't had any smoldering sage or spices to cover it. All I could smell was death.

"You're early," the man said.

I jerked away from his wall and tried to look composed. Lacking the adobe I'd been leaning against, it was hard to appear steady, but I doubt he noticed. His eyes were vacant, his voice hollow. I didn't offer him my hand. He wouldn't have taken it--not even with me wearing gloves. Behind him was a room lit by a dozen tallows, all of them burned to nubs. They were spaced around the boy-sized shape wrapped in burlap. An earthen bowl held the lock of hair they would burn when I left.

Please let this be fast.

The man shuffled out of my way. His body stooped like there wasn't anything left holding him up, and I regretted cursing him and his Nazra ways. They had had to flee their home, same as me, and now they had lost their boy. I nodded at his wife sitting in the corner by the dung fire. I considered explaining myself for being early, but I didn't reckon I could manage. The stench of death was as thick as the smoke.

"It ain't right that you come so early," she said. "We get until dawn." As she spoke, she didn't lift her eyes from the burlap sack.

She was right, but it had taken a double measure of will to get me to the door the first time. I couldn't manage it again.

"I told him not to wander," the man said. His voice sounded strained. "I told him you don't leave the ropes. I told him, 'It's the mines, Son. You don't leave the ropes.'"

My stomach clenched in mini-heaves, but I couldn't duck my nose into my sleeve. It wouldn't have been respectful.

"We get until dawn," the woman said. "It's custom."

I sank to their bare earth floor as far from the body as I could get. It wasn't as refined as what the Salter would have done, but it was better than fainting.

I hadn't known the boy--not well at least--and I did my best not to remember how he had looked when he smiled. It was said he had been in the mine four days before they found him, then another seven in that room. I knew his insides would be squirming with bugs, and I knew I was going to have to carry him on my back. It was easier to think of him as just a body.

Dawn, I told myself. I breathed through clenched teeth, trying not to retch, trying not to curse those people for their ways, because I could feel the ground pitching again like it had on that ship. I remembered what it was to sit vigil.

I couldn't keep doing this. That I knew for true. If I didn't escape, there would be another. And another. Because this was Secco, and I was apprenticed to a Salter.

#

It was the flies that got me. Soon as I stepped from the smoke, they started collecting, and it only got worse as I carried the Nazra boy down the cliffside ladders. They crawled across my face and into my ears and nose. I ignored them as best I could until, on the last ladder, when I felt it coming. I dropped to the street and rolled the body from my back, but I wasn't sprightly enough. My stomach emptied before I got to my knees. I sat back on my heels to breathe and spied the sick splattered across my shirt.

"You don't care much for the ripe ones, do you?" asked a man behind me.

I leapt to my feet and tried pretending like I hadn't been doing what he'd seen. I wiped what I could from my shirt.

"I don't expect we'd catch the Salter doing that. Over a little stink?"

It was Bento. Even in his boots his forehead barely reached my cheekbones, but height wasn't what defined him. That man was as dried out as a chili and twice as mean. For whatever reason he had always taken an interest in me, and he grabbed every chance he could to drop me a peg or two. He leaned over the body. He pressed in so close I couldn't help but step back. As it happened, Bento was also missing an ear. While most folk would wear their hair long to hide it, he kept his razor short. At the precise end of his lean he cocked his head so that his empty ear hole stared at me from under his hat. I took another step back despite myself.

He sniffed.

"I will admit it. That one is particularly ripe."

He straightened. "You could have just dropped him from the ladder," he said, working a pinky finger around in his empty ear hole.

Breathe, Paolo, I told myself. He's just trying to goad you. I willed my jaw to unclench and forced my breath out slowly. As I did, he turned his attention to the tip of his pinky and wiped it onto his trousers.

I knelt to hoist the body from the ground and noted how little the burlap did to stop the stench. Bento stayed where he was. His eyes were greedy.

"You know I could get you out of this," he said. "I could get you out from under your Salter, get you away from all these bodies.”