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The Pain Merchants
Janice Hardy
Nya has a secret she must never share…A gift she must never use…And a sister whose life depends on both.This astonishing debut novel is the first in the epic dystopian fantasy adventure trilogy, THE HEALING WARS.Fifteen-year-old Nya is one of Geveg’s many orphans; she survives on odd jobs and optimism, finding both in short supply in a city crippled by a failed war for independence. Then a bungled egg theft, a stupid act of compassion, and two eyewitnesses unable to keep their mouths shut exposes her secret to the two most powerful groups in the city: the pain merchants and the Healer’s League. They discover Nya is a Taker, a healer who can pull pain and injury from others.Trouble is, unlike her sister Tali and the other normal Takers who become league apprentices, she can’t dump that pain into pynvium, the enchanted metal used to store it. All she can do is shift it from person to person, a useless skill that’s kept her out of the league and has never once paid for her breakfast.When a ferry accident floods the city with injured, the already overwhelmed Takers start disappearing from the Healer’s League and Nya’s talent is suddenly in demand. But her principles and endurance are tested to the limit when her talent turns out to be the only thing that can save her sister's life.
The Healing Wars: Book One
The Pain Perchants
Janice Hardy
For Thomas Hardy and Harlan Ellison.Only one knows why.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uc7191fc0-c81f-59bd-9f0e-7666812dcb05)
Title Page (#u2c95d0d6-270f-554a-a118-d1a4d7346a26)
Dedication (#u8a028509-0e2d-51b7-b6ae-82ec81d1f469)
Chapter One (#u7d5c76ad-c7b3-51ce-99c1-c4044f1cd273)
Chapter Two (#u4d63ac5e-a663-5c40-b98b-c46673bcb473)
Chapter Three (#ubb1fc2ed-9c01-5c12-84a1-fb96447447c6)
Chapter Four (#u5a63449e-763c-5e83-a556-0c4f54975e57)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_52f01db1-34ba-5904-8c53-9c547d8851ec)
Stealing eggs is a lot harder than stealing the whole chicken. With chickens, you just grab a hen, stuff her in a sack and make your escape. But for eggs, you have to stick your hand under a sleeping bird. Chickens don’t like this. They wake all spooked and start pecking holes in your arm, or your face if it’s close. And they squawk something terrible.
The trick is to wake the chicken first, then go for the eggs. I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to figure this out.
“Good morning, little hen,” I sang softly. The chicken blinked awake and cocked her head at me. She didn’t get to squawking, just flapped her wings a bit as I lifted her off the nest; she’d soon settle down once I tucked her under my arm. I’d overheard that trick from a couple of boys I’d unloaded fish with last week.
A voice came from beside me. “Don’t move.”
Two words I didn’t want to hear with someone else’s chicken under my arm.
I froze. The chicken didn’t. Her scaly feet flailed towards the eggs that should have been my breakfast. I looked up to see a cute night guard not much older than me, perhaps sixteen. The night was more humid than usual, but a slight breeze blew his sandpale hair. A soldier’s cut, but a month or two grown out.
Stay calm; stay alert. As Grannyma used to say, if you’re caught with the cake, you might as well offer them a piece. Not sure how that applied to chickens though.
“Join me for breakfast when your shift ends?” I asked. Sunrise was two hours away.
The guard smiled, but aimed his rapier at my chest anyway. Was nice to have a handsome boy smile at me in the moonlight, but his was a sad, sorry-only-doing-my-job smile. I’d learned to tell the difference between smiles a lot faster than I’d figured out the egg thing.
“So, Heclar,” he said over his shoulder, “you do have a thief. Guess I was wrong.”
Rancher Heclar strutted into view, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the chicken trying to peck me—ruffled, sharp beaked and beady-eyed. He harrumphed and set his fists against his hips. “I told you crocodiles weren’t getting them.”
“I’m no chicken thief,” I said quickly.
“Then what’s that?” The night guard flicked his rapier tip towards the chicken and smiled again. Friendlier this time, but his deep brown eyes had twitched when he bent his wrist.
“A chicken.” I blew a stray feather off my chin and peered closer. His knuckles were white from too tight a grip on so light a weapon. That had to mean joint pain, maybe even knuckleburn, though he was far too young for it. The painful joint infection usually hit older dockworkers. I guess that’s why he had a crummy job guarding chickens instead of aristocrats. My luck hadn’t been too great either.
“Look,” I said, “I wasn’t going to steal her. She was blocking the eggs.”
The night guard nodded like he understood and turned to Heclar. “She’s just hungry. Maybe you could let her go with a warning?”
“Arrest her, you idiot! She’ll get fed in Dorsta.”
Dorsta? I gulped. “Listen, two eggs for breakfast is hardly worth prison—”
“Thieves belong in prison!”
I jerked back and my foot squished into chicken crap. Lots of it. It dripped out from every coop in the row. There had to be at least sixty filthy coops along the lakeside half of the isle alone. “I’ll work off the eggs. What about two eggs for every row of coops I clean?”
“You’ll only steal three.”
“Not if he watches me.” I tipped my head at the night guard. I could handle the smell if I had cute company while I worked. He might even get extra pay out of it, which could earn me some goodwill if we ever bumped into each other in the moonlight again. “How about one egg per row?”
The night guard pursed his lips and nodded. “Pretty good deal there.”
“Arrest her now!”
I heaved the chicken. She squawked, flapping and scratching in a panic. The night guard yelped and dropped the rapier. I ran like hell.
“Stop! Thief!”
Self-righteous ranchers I could outrun, even on their own property, but the night guard? His hands might be bad, but his feet—and reflexes—worked just fine.
I rounded a stack of broken coops an arm-swipe faster than he did. Without slowing I dodged left, cutting up a corn-littered row of coops running parallel to Farm-Market Canal. It gained me a few paces, but he had the reach on my short legs. No chance of outrunning him on the straight.
Swerving right, I yanked an empty market crate off one of the coops. It clattered to the ground between me and the night guard.
“Aah!” A thud and a crack, followed by impressive swearing.
I risked a glance behind. Broken crate pieces lay scattered across the row. The night guard limped a little, but it hadn’t slowed him much. I’d gained only another few paces.
The row split ahead, cutting through the waist-high coops like the canals that criss-crossed Geveg. I veered left towards Farm-Market Bridge, my side throbbing hard. Forget making it off the isle. I wasn’t going to make it off the ranch.
More market crates blocked the row a dozen paces from the bridge. The crates were knee high and a pace wide, with tendrils of loose, twisted wire sticking up like lakeweed. Didn’t Heclar ever clean his property? I cleared the crates a step before the night guard. His fingers raked the back of my shirt and snagged the hem. I stumbled, arms flailing, reaching for anything to stop my fall.
The ground did it for me.
I sucked back the breath I’d lost and inhaled a lungful of dust and feathers. The night guard crashed over the pile a choking gasp later and hit the ground beside me. Dried corn flew out of the crate and speckled the ground.
I hacked up grime while he swore and grabbed his leg. He’d left a good chunk of his shin on one of the crates and his bent ankle looked sprained for sure, maybe broken.
He glanced at me and chuckled wryly. “Just go.”
I dragged myself upright, but didn’t run. He’d lose his job over me and I’d guess he didn’t have many options left if he was working for a cheapskate like Heclar. I knelt and grabbed his hands, my thumbs tight against his knuckles, and drew.
For an instant our hands flared tingly hot from the healing. He gasped, I groaned, then his pain was in my hands. I left the bad leg. It was a good excuse for letting me go and, Saints willing, he’d keep his job. If he didn’t, then at least I’d healed his hands. It was hard enough for native Gevegians to find work these days and bad hands wouldn’t help.
Knuckles aching, I turned away before he realised what I’d done. It wasn’t the first time I’d healed someone out of pity, but I tried not to do it often. Folks tended to ask questions I didn’t want to answer.
I took a step forward, but something large blocked my escape. Heclar! He swung at my head and I ducked, but not fast enough.
Pain slammed into my temple and I thudded back to the ground. Heclar floated in the silver flecks dancing around my eyes, a blue-black pynvium club in his hand.
That cleared me straight. I was lucky he was so cheap he only hit me with it instead of flashing it at me. The weapon was too black to be pure pynvium, but blue enough to hold a lot of pain. I didn’t want it flashed in my direction any more than I wanted to go to prison.
He scoffed and pointed the club at me. “Bunch of thieves, both of you.”
I grabbed the night guard’s shin and drew, knitting bone and yanking every hurt, every sting, every wince from his ankle. His pain ran down my arm, seared my leg and chewed around my own ankle. Yep. Definitely broken. My stomach rolled, but there was nothing in it to throw up.
I seized Heclar’s leg with my free hand and pushed. The agony the night guard hadn’t revealed raced up my other side and poured out of my tingling fingers into Heclar. I almost gave him the knuckleburn, but that would make his hands clench and a hard, sudden grip on the pynvium club might be the enchantment’s trigger. Be just my luck to accidentally set it off.
Heclar screamed loud enough to wake the Saints. To be truthful it was worse than he deserved, but sending me to prison for eggs I hadn’t yet stolen was worse than I deserved. The Saints are funny that way.
I left both men lying in chicken feed and feathers and sprinted for safety. Just five paces to the exit, then another five to Farm-Market Bridge. Once I crossed the bridge, I’d be off the isle and in the market district on Geveg’s main island where it was easier to hide. If I didn’t pass out first.
At the foot of the bridge, two boys in Healers’ League green were staring at me in wonder. I skidded to a stop and glanced over my shoulder. I had a clear view of the night guard and the blubbering rancher. The boys had seen me shift for sure.
“How did you do that?” one boy asked. Tall and skinny, but with hard eyes for a boy so young. Too young to be an apprentice. A ward then. The war had left Geveg with plenty of us orphans about.
“I didn’t…do anything.” Breathing took more effort than I had. I held my side as I edged past them, checking for mentors or escorts that stuck to wards like reed sap. If either had seen me shift pain…I shuddered.
“Yes, you did!” The other boy nodded his head and his red hair fell into his eyes. He shoved it back with a freckled hand. “You shifted pain. We saw you!”
“No I didn’t…I stabbed him in the foot…with a nail.” I leaned forward, hands on my knees. The silver flecks were back at the edge of my vision, sneaking up on me from the sides. “If you look close…you can still see the blood.”
“Elder Len said shifting pain was just a myth, but you really did it, didn’t you?”
I wasn’t sure which Saint covered luck, but I must’ve snubbed her big time at some point in my fifteen years. “You boys better get back to the League…before the Luminary discovers you sneaked out.”
Both paled when I mentioned the Luminary. We got a new one every three years, like some rite of passage the Duke’s Healers had to go through to prove their worth. The new Luminary was Baseeri of course, and like all Baseeri who held positions that should have been held by Gevegians, no one liked him. He ran the League without compassion, and if you crossed him, you didn’t stand a chance of getting healed if you needed it. You or your family.
“You don’t want to get into trouble, do you?”
“No!”
I placed a finger to my lips and shushed. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
They nodded hard enough to bounce their eyeballs out of their heads, but boys that age couldn’t keep a secret. By morning, the whole League would know about this.
Tali was going to kill me.
