by Ben Galley
‘Convenient, when you’re the one who owns the most shades, hmm? And yet we still believe an afterlife awaits us. Such gall, we humans have.’
I knew what afterlife truly waited for us: a cold and screaming place beneath the earth. I held my tongue. ‘And the Cult?’
‘Ever heard the word “extremist”?’
I had not.
‘Well, that’s them. They’ve been around since the Nyx changed and binding was discovered. But they are fanatical about Sesh, and known for their delusions of grandeur. Never mind their treachery.’
‘We had a god like Sesh in the east. But in our old religions we called binding a curse, so not a soul dared worship him.’
‘Lopt, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘You know your Krass mythology.’
‘This world has been telling the same myths for thousands upon thousands of years, Caltro. Our gods are just regurgitated from the gods of the ancients. Krass. Arctian. They’re all the same if you look deep enough. You should try reading Master Falafef’s series of epic poe—’
‘No.’
‘All very derivative, anyway,’ Pointy muttered.
I buoyed him with another question. ‘I know the Nyxites wrote the Tenets, but who wrote the first Code? The Cult or the Nyxites?’
‘It was the first emperor of the Arc, Emperor Phaera. The Tenets set down the rules of binding, but he needed laws that made him, and kept him, emperor. Thus the Code was born, and it has been rewritten and amended with every single successor. I think it’s been updated more times than Frandi’s Weeping Sky,’ he added with a smug chuckle.
His joke – if that’s what it was – fell on dead ears. ‘And where are the Cult these days, if one wanted to find them?’
‘They keep to themselves these days, but I wager you could probably still find them outside the Core Districts. Anyone wearing red robes is a cultist. Secretive bunch, though. Plenty of free shade tors and tals are members, and donate to their cause, according to talk I’ve overheard. The Cult even used to have a church, but when the royalty banned them it was burned to the ground.’
‘Emperor Milizan.’
‘You’ve heard this one.’
‘Widow Horix told me he was murdered by his son.’
‘The story goes that Milizan fell in with the Cult, and the deeper he fell, the more they wormed their way into the Cloudpiercer. When he began to talk of killing himself to join the Cult and be closer to Sesh, Farazar the emperor-in-waiting took a stand. And rightly so, if you ask me. By then the Cult had their fingers in the Chamber of the Code, the Court, even the Chamber of Military Might.’
He was waiting for me to ask, I knew it. Normally I would have played silent and out-waited him, but I was too impatient. ‘Then what?’
‘Milizan’s son murdered him in true Arctian style. Farazar hid in his father’s private latrine for near on a day before skewering him with a sword. They say the blade went in his arse and out his mouth. After he bound his father in the Grand Nyxwell, as per royal tradition, Farazar claimed his father’s half-coins and became ruler. Then he banished his mother, the Empress Hirana, to the north of the Reaches and appointed his Krass wife to the throne instead. That was just shy of twenty years ago. Nobody has seen her since, nor received so much as a note from her. She just disappeared. Or died.’
‘That sort of thing seems to happen far too often in this city.’
‘The royals are the only nobles who dare to murder so openly. The rest are content to play their little games.’
Pointy got no further. It seemed Busk had grown bored of imprisoning me. Either that, or he had some more strongboxes for me to open. I went limp as soon as they opened the wardrobe doors, eager to make the men work for their living.
I hit the floor with a soft thud, and rolled my eyes.
Not one of them touched me. Busk’s orders, no doubt. I sighed and hauled myself up, giving Pointy a roll of my eyes as I passed him. All he could do in response was catch the lamplight.
‘Remember what I told you,’ came a faint whisper. The guards flinched, but nothing was said.
Clubs poked me down the stairwell and into another dusty room, where an array of boxes had been arranged in a circle, like a downtrodden fight-pit beneath a Krass tavern. In its centre stood a shirtless, toad-like man, swollen with muscle and inked with geometric Scatter Isle tattoos. He was sweating in drips. His shaved, dented dome of a head glistened in the lamplight. Bruises darkened both his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for a year. He had rings of greenish metal around his fingers and bare toes, and he wore the blankest expression I had ever seen on a human being. Or a toad, for that matter.
‘What now?’ I asked my guards. They poked me into the circle as the man began to shrug and roll his head around his shoulders. I’d seen enough of the pits in Taymar to know a fighter when I saw one.
‘Have you lost your mind, Busk?’ I had no idea if the tor was in the room, but I called to him anyway. ‘I’m a locksmith, not a prize fighter!’
A whisper came from the shadows of an adjoining corridor, where two figures waited. A hand ventured into the lamplight and waved. The guards shoved me to the dust.
A punishment. It had to be. For daring to touch the tor, no doubt. I had no clue whether he realised what I’d done to him, or whether he even knew of haunting. I knew next to fuck all beyond what Pointy had told me: that the practice was a rumour, neither acknowledged by the Code nor remembered by half the Arc since the Nyx had started to spit the dead back out. Time has an awful habit of eating away at knowledge.
The man raised his fists and began to dance around me, feigning strikes. I shook my head. ‘I’m not a fighter.’ Though I said no more, he must have assumed I added, ‘So please, feel free to hit me.’
He eagerly obliged me. His fist, copper-ringed on every finger, drove into my ribs. I slumped to the dust, curling up around the waves of pain that spanned my body.
He nudged me with a foot. As I levelled a glare at him, I noticed his bruise-framed eyes kept sneaking to the edges of the room, paying too much attention to the guards. I felt nothing but cold in the room and yet his sweat continued to pour.
I knew the many expressions of fear. Some wore it openly in quivers and chill sweats. Others preferred to bury it behind grins or stoicism. This toad of a man was the latter. If there was anything to be gleaned from his expression, he looked almost apologetic. Not too apologetic, I thought, as he flexed and dug a toe into my side.
I challenged the invisible man again. ‘What’s your goal here, Busk?’
No answer.
I hauled myself up and decided to play along as best I could. My answers were more important than a bit of pain. Our fists rotated between us, one set grimy, the other glowing. I threw the first swing, a wild and useless one at that. The fighter’s knuckles connected with my chin like a mallet, then came a strike to my nose. Over and over, back and forth. My face was a mask of pain.
Outrage pushed me up from the dust. I clawed for the man but he brought me close, hooking arms around my head to drive his knee into my gut. It had little effect without copper, but it was still deeply unsettling having somebody else’s limbs thrust into you over and over.
I twisted away. My neck would have broken had I been made of bone and flesh. For a moment I was free, but in came the fists again, more desperate this time. I fended off blow after blow until I found my arse on the floor again, eyes blurry.
As I fought through the pain, I saw the guards rush in. I was on the cusp of insulting the parentage of everybody in the room when I realised they weren’t after me. They were after the fighter. He was pushed against the boxes amid curses and muffled warnings.
It was a challenge. A test, not a punishment. Busk wanted to recreate our incident, though this time with him far out of reach. Whether he knew I’d haunted him or not, he knew something had happened, and he wanted to see it again. I decided it must have been his thirst for profit; he was following the reek of a new opportunity. That
brought a smile to my blue cheeks.
Pointy had told me a playwright once opined that theatre was the only universal joy of the people. I had scoffed at first, but now I realised it was true. The fight-pits of Taymar and Saraka may have been designed for the scrapings of society, but they were still grand theatre at their core. The curtain opening? The first punch. The sharp dialogue? The parries and blocks. The crescendo? The crack of a skull splitting, the puff of blue smoke, the wet suck of a face collapsing inwards. All theatre, very much like this situation. I was the hero of my own squalid play. I saw it now: Busk wasn’t about to risk me, just goad me into action.
As they pushed the fighter back into the ring, I saw in his face that he also knew his role: expendable. The word hung between us in the clammy, sweat-filled air.
I let him hit me over and over, getting in the odd punch here and there to make it worth his while. They barely grazed him, let alone stopped him, and yet I could feel him pulling back after every barrage. I dreaded to think how many pints of blood I would have lost by now in a real fight. I was thankful I was already dead.
The farce continued for almost an hour, until the man’s shoulders had sloped past the point of no return, until he had not a drop of sweat left to exude. I stood with hands on knees, panting through habit. I glowed white in two-score places; everywhere his fists had punished me.
‘Happy?’ I looked around the boxes at the frowns of the confused guards and the shadows of the corridor. ‘Or do you need to see somebody die to get your cock hard, Busk?’
This whisper was short and angry. I didn’t catch it, but the guards did. Their fears now proven unfounded, they seized me at last. I saw the exhausted fighter being thrown some gemstones. Before I was escorted away, I saw Busk’s furrowed face pass through an arc of lamplight. He refused to meet my eyes.
As I was manhandled up into the tower, I gazed up at the dust-filled shafts of light that speared the atrium. It was afternoon by my reckoning, and a cloudy one at that. A storm had moaned around the tower several days ago; perhaps its wake still covered the city. Although I hadn’t seen it, I’d heard its roar and felt the heavy pressure in the air. Changes in the weather were a lot easier to feel now that I was practically all air.
We had almost climbed the stairs when the knock sounded: the deep pounding of a spear-butt striking metal. The guards grumbled to each other, casting looks down the stairwell. As I was pushed back to my gaudy prison cell, several of them peeled away to see to the visitors. I was locked away in the wardrobe, along with my burning curiosity.
‘What did they do?’ Pointy spoke up once our room was empty.
I smiled in the darkness. ‘Failed, is what they did. Busk suspects something after our last encounter. Tried to goad me into action.’
‘And… did you?’
‘No.’
The sword sighed, almost sounding relieved. ‘So it was a mistake, then. You were wrong about the haunting.’
I laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I just didn’t try. But tonight I will. And you’re going to help me.’
‘Er… how?’
‘Fear not, my dear Pointy. You won’t have to do much.’
‘What, then?’
‘Not a clue yet, but I’ll come up with something. Don’t worry. I always do. And I’ll take you with me.’
‘As wondrous as that sounds, you worry me, Caltro.’
I sighed dramatically. ‘I’ve spent too much of this half-life worrying. A man with nothing has nothing to lose except himself. I’ve lost that already. What’s there to fear now?’
‘Pain. Punishment. Another hundred years on a shelf. Complete death…’
Perhaps it was all the theatre that had puffed me up. Perhaps it was playing the untouchable hero, but despite thinking of that crowded, endless cavern of ghosts, or the black void, I felt the smile on my face and refused to let it fall. Busk had shown his hand today. He was afraid of me.
‘I told you I wanted my freedom.’
‘Yes…?’
‘Well, I intend to have it, and by any means necessary. The widow. The haunting. Even the fucking Cult. I don’t care who or what gets me there, but I will be free.’ This is my desire. It was selfish, maybe, but in a world that extended few helping hands, you needed to be selfish to survive. ‘If you want the same, then feel free to come along.’
Pointy pondered that for some time, and at last he sighed. It sounded like a gale howling over a flute. ‘All right. Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all, eh? Or so Desami said.’
‘Another fucking poet?’
‘Sonneteer, actually.’
‘Then those are the first words of sense a poet’s ever uttered.’
Glowing white eyes peered through the grille. An unseen mouth voiced a challenge. ‘State your business.’
‘Colonel Kalid to see Tor Busk. Again.’
‘He’s busy.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Just give me the scroll.’ A metal shutter below the grille opened with a seagull’s shriek. A gloved hand poked forth, palm up and open.
‘I have a personal message from Tal Horix. It must be delivered to him only.’
‘Ugh. Wait here.’
Both the grille and the shutter closed with a snap, and Kalid retreated to the edge of the steps to wait. He spent the minutes looking up at Busk’s poor excuse for a tower, standing barely fifteen stories tall at the most. The colonel counted by the grubby, pinhole windows. Gargoyles, more Skol in design than Arctian, glared down at him from between oriels and balconies. Pointless creatures. Their open mouths probably tasted rain once a decade.
Kalid heard the shouting behind the reinforced iron of the huge doors, which were also smaller than Horix’s. This continued for several minutes, with the colonel gleaning such random snippets as, ‘Who does that crow…’ and, ‘Damnable bitch!’
When the doors finally cracked open, they swung outwards at speed. If they’d hoped to catch him unawares, they were disappointed; Kalid was already out of reach. Arctian doors taught that lesson early in life.
Tor Busk stood in the dark of his atrium, squinting at the afternoon light. He already wore a scowl for the colonel. Eight guards surrounded him, short spears out and ready.
‘Speak, messenger.’
Kalid flexed his shoulder muscles, making the plates of his armour knock together. ‘The lady Tal Horix wishes to know your decision.’
‘My decision on what, precisely? Don’t you know I’m a very busy man?’
The colonel could see that. Busk’s hair, normally slicked back with grease, was in strands and pestering his forehead. Most tors and tals didn’t like to exert themselves unless it was at a ball or in the bedchamber.
‘On whether you still wish for the Krass shade you came to purchase not so long ago? One scroll has already been sent, but we received no reply. My mistress would like an answer.’
Busk smiled, but his lips were white and tightly drawn.
Kalid tried to play patient and insouciant, as Horix had instructed. He’d never heard that word before, and now his mind kept repeating it, over and over, whenever it had a spare moment.
Busk played for time. ‘Which shade is this, exactly? I deal with so many, you see.’
‘Don’t you recall? A Krassman sold by Boran Temsa. A shade who is apparently dangerous and a risk to Tal Horix’s life.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘And so?’
‘Well.’ More chin rubbing.
Kalid stepped forward, causing the tor’s guards to bristle. ‘The widow wishes you to understand that this is the last time she will extend her offer.’
Busk puffed himself up, understanding Kalid’s meaning: this was his last chance to right his wrong and return the ghost. ‘Oh, is it, now?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well, you can tell her that I rescind my offer. Considering her rudeness, I am not interested. I’ve got enough Krassmen half-lives in my tower. I don’t need another,
especially a dangerous trouble-maker.’
‘So the charity and care you spoke of—?’
Busk was already signalling for his guards to close the doors. ‘Withdrawn! I extended my help, and all you and that widow have done since is badger me.’
There was another word Kalid had never heard before. Perhaps it was Skol.
Busk waved his hands as if shaking off an errant wasp. ‘I don’t expect to see you here again, Colonel. Good afternoon!’
Kalid was shut out with a bang. He turned, chuckling to himself. He didn’t pretend to understand the game of words and veiled intentions that the nobles played; Horix had given him his lines and he had spoken them. What he did understand was that his mistress was a skilled player of the game, and Busk had just made a losing move. That was fine by Kalid. What benefitted Horix usually benefitted him.
When he returned to Horix’s tower, the widow was waiting for him in the doorway. A swift march through several districts of bustle and commotion, in hot sun and full armour, would send even a hardened Arctian running to a water trough when he saw one. Kalid hastily washed away the dust and sweat before he approached Horix.
‘Mistress.’
Without a word, she led him across the patterned atrium floor as the door was sealed behind them. Her hands were ensleeved as usual, but her cowl had been thrown back. Her thin hair shone like silver thread. Her eyes were hungrily affixed to the colonel’s lips, as if she could read his words before he spoke them. This jabbing and parrying with Busk had lit an old flame in her; he could see it plainly.
Kalid bowed low. ‘My apologies, Mistress. The city is busy in the aftermath of the sandstorm.’
She tutted impatiently. ‘I don’t care about sand, Colonel, only our good Tor Busk. What did he have to say?’
‘He said he withdraws his offer, and that you are to leave him be. Apparently we’ve done nothing but “badger” him since he tried to help.’
‘Have we now? How bold of him to say.’
‘Seemed quite put out by the whole thing,’ he added. ‘I take it that was the answer you wanted, Mistress?’
A wicked smile spread across the cracks in her cheeks. ‘Indeed. As I predicted, our prideful Tor Busk has just thrown down a gauntlet. He thinks I am bluffing, that I am toothless and weak. He thinks I will give up Caltro and just let the matter lie.’