Even those awful few moments in the courtyard of the inn, when Tove had died, had been poisoned for him. Thinking about it, the fight had started very easily, and Tove had pulled him out of it and sobered up very quickly. (Well, drunken fights did start over nothing, and the prospect of violence could sober a man up in a heartbeat.) But then Tove had tried to send him out of that door first, and seemed surprised, even alarmed when Oramen had pushed him out. (Of course he’d want his friend to get to safety before he did; he thought the danger was all behind them, back in the bar.) And then, his words: “Not me,” or something very like that.
Why that? Why exactly those words, with the implication – perhaps – that the assault itself had been expected but it should have happened to whoever was with him, not Tove himself? (He had just had a knife rammed into his guts and ripped up towards his heart; was he to be suspicioned because he failed to scream, Fie, murder! or, O, sire, thou dost kill me! like some mummer in a play?)
And Dr Gillews, seemingly by his own hand.
But why Gillews? And if Gillews . . .
He shook his head – foreman Broft glanced at him and he had to grin back encouragingly for a moment before resuming his thoughts. No, that was taking supposition too far.
However it worked out, he was sure that, this morning, he should have tested the caude. It had been foolish not to. Admitting his flying might be a little rusty would have been no great disgrace. Next time he would do the sensible thing, even if it meant running the risk of embarrassing himself.
They came out on to a platform above the pit, looking down from halfway up the curved wall into the focus of all the attention: a night-black cube ten metres to a side lying tipped in a moat of dirty-looking water at the bottom of a great shored chamber at least thirty metres in diameter. The cube seemed to swallow light. It was surrounded by scaffolding and clambering people, many using what looked like pieces of mining equipment. Blue and orange flashes lit the scene and hissing, clattering steam hammers sounded as various methods were attempted to gain entry into the cube – if it could be entered – or at least to try to chip pieces off. In all the noise and hubbub, though, it was the object itself that always drew the eye back to it. Some of the labourers they’d accompanied filed on to a hoist attached to the main platform and waited to be lowered into the pit.
“Still resisting!” Broft said, shaking his head. He leaned on the makeshift railing. A pump fell silent and Oramen heard cursing. As though in sympathy, the light nearest them, on the wall of the chamber to the side of the adit, flickered and went out. “Can’t get into these things,” Broft said, turning and tutting at the extinguished light. He looked at one of the lantern men and nodded at the lamp. The fellow went to inspect it. “Though the object might be judged worth lifting out,” Broft continued, “the brethren would have left it here to rot – or not rot, probably, as it hasn’t already – but, however, under our new and may I say much more enlightened rules, sir, we might offer the object to a third party, which is to say . . . What?”
The lantern man had muttered something into Broft’s ear. He made a tsking noise and went to look at the dead light.
It was relatively quiet in the chamber for a moment. The squeaking noises of the pulleys lowering the first group of workers towards the pit floor was the loudest sound. Even Vollird seemed to have stopped coughing.
Oramen hadn’t heard the knight’s cough for a little while now. Without warning, he felt an odd chill.
“Well,” he heard Broft say, “it looks like a blasting wire, but how can it be a blasting wire when there’s not any blasting today? That’s just ridiculous.”
Oramen turned to see the foreman tugging at a wire strung with some of the other wires looped along the wall between the light fixtures. The wire led down the wall to disappear behind the planking at their feet. In the other direction, it disappeared into the tunnel they’d just walked down. Vollird and Baerth weren’t on the platform.
He felt suddenly sweaty and cold at once. But no, he was being silly, absurd. To react as he suddenly wanted to react would be to make himself look fearful and stupid in front of these men. A prince had to behave with decorum, calmness, bravery . . .
But then; what was he thinking of? Was he mad? What had he decided, only a few minutes earlier?
Have the bravery to risk looking foolish . . .
Oramen swivelled, took Droffo by the shoulders and forced him to turn with him and step towards the adit. “Come,” he said, forcing Droffo forward. He began pushing through some of the workers waiting to descend. “Excuse me; excuse me, if you would, excuse me, thank you, excuse me,” he said calmly.
“Sir?” he heard Broft say.
Droffo was dragging his feet. “Prince,” he said as they approached the entrance to the adit. A glance up it showed no trace of Vollird and Baerth.
“Run,” Oramen said, not loudly. “I’m ordering you to run. Get out.” He turned to the men remaining on the platform and bellowed, “RUN! Get OUT!” then he pushed the uncomprehending Droffo forward, darted past him and started running as fast as he could, pounding uphill, the boards slamming and quaking under his feet. After a few moments he heard Droffo following, his feet too hammering on the boards, whether because he also thought there might be danger or because he saw Oramen running away and thought he ought to stay with him regardless, Oramen did not know.
How slowly one ran, he thought, when one’s mind was racing so much faster. He could not believe that he could run any quicker – his legs were pistoning beneath him, his arms swinging and his chest pulling the air into his lungs with an instinctive functionality no mentation would improve upon – but he felt cheated that his furiously working brain could in no further way contribute to the effort. It might be a doomed effort, of course. Looking at it logically, rationally, it probably was.
He had been too trusting. Naïve, even. One paid for such laxness. Sometimes one got away with it, escaped just punishment – rather as he’d escaped and Tove had paid, that day in the courtyard of the Gilder’s Lament (and maybe Tove had not paid unjustly) – but one did not escape every time. Nobody did. Now, he had no doubt, was when he paid.
Embarrassment. He had worried about being embarrassed because he might overreact to some perceived, perhaps misperceived threat. How much more embarrassing to have missed all clues, to have wandered through this violent, kinetic world with a babe’s wide-eyed innocence and trust, to have ascribed innocence and decency when he should have seen duplicity and iniquity.
I should just have tugged at the blasting wire, he thought. Tried to pull it free. What a fool, what a selfish fool. Together we might—
The explosion was a dirty yellow blast of light followed almost immediately by what felt like a warbeast kicking him hard in the back with both hind legs. He was lifted off his feet and propelled through the air up and along the adit so that it seemed like a vertical shaft he was falling into. He was upright and flailing for a long moment, then suddenly tumbling; limbs, shoulders, behind, head and hip smacking off the surrounding surfaces in an instant cacophony of pain, as though a dozen accurate kicks had all been landed at once.
He blinked up at a ceiling; rough wood, right above him. His nose was pressed against it. He might be crushed. Perhaps he was in a coffin. His ears were ringing. Where had he just been? He could not remember. There was a crazed ringing sound in his head and the air smelled wrong.
He rolled over, making a small noise as bruised, broken parts of his body protested. The real ceiling was visible. He was lying on his back now, the floor beneath him. This must be some part of the palace he hadn’t encountered before. Where was Fanthile?
Dim yellow lights flickered on the wall, linked by loops of wire. The loops of wire meant something, he knew. He’d been doing something. Something he ought to keep doing. What had it been? He tasted blood. He brought one hand up to his face and felt stickiness. He squinted at his hand, raising his head off the floor on quivering, complaining neck muscles. His hand lo
oked very black. He used it to support himself and peered down the corridor. It was very black down there too. Smoke or steam or something was creeping up the tipped ceiling, gradually obscuring the lights further down.
Somebody was lying on their side down there. It looked like that what-did-you . . .
Droffo. It was Earl Droffo. What was he doing here? That cloud of smoke was creeping up the ceiling above him. Droff had lost some of his clothes. He looked a bit tattered altogether. And not moving.
The realisation, the memory, came crashing back on him as though the ceiling had caved in, which, he thought, might be exactly what was about to happen. He dragged himself to his knees and then his feet, coughing. Still the cough, he thought; still the cough. He could hear it in his head but not through his still ringing ears.
He staggered down the tunnel to where Droffo lay. He himself seemed to be as poorly clad as the young earl; in rags, all torn and shredded. He had to keep his head down, out of the dark overcast of smoke still drifting up the adit. He shook Droffo but the man didn’t move. His face looked pale and there was blood coming from his nose. The smoke was getting lower down all the time. Oramen bent, took Droffo by the armpits and started hauling him bodily over the boards.
He found it hard going. So much hurt; even the coughing pained him. He wished Droffo would wake up and that his hearing would return. The smoke coming up all quiet and dark from down below seemed to be catching up with him again. He wondered if he might have to let Droffo go and run away to save himself. If he did and they’d both have died otherwise, it would be the sensible thing to do. If he did and they might both have survived, it would be the wrong thing to do. How simple that seemed. He decided to keep on dragging Droffo for the time being. He’d think about dropping him if he really couldn’t see and breathe. His back hurt.
He thought he felt something through his feet, but his ringing ears let him down. By the time he realised that what he was feeling through his feet might be footsteps, it was too late. You pay, he had time to think.
Next thing he knew there was a rough hand round his nose, mouth and chin and a terrific thudding sensation in his back. Possibly a shouted curse.
He found he had dropped Droffo. He wrenched himself away from whoever had grabbed him; their grip seemed to have loosened. He turned round and saw Baerth standing there looking thunderstruck, a broken long-knife in his hand. Its blade lay between them on the wooden boards, in two pieces. That was careless, Oramen thought. He felt round to the small of his back, through the remains of tattered clothing, found the gun that had stopped the blow and tugged it free.
“You broke it on this!” he shouted to Baerth as he brandished the gun and shot the fellow with it. Three times, just to be sure, then, after the knight had collapsed to the boards, once more, through one flickering eyelid, just to be even more sure. Baerth had had a gun too. A hand on it, at his waist; should have used it earlier. Oramen was glad his ears were already ringing; meant he didn’t have to suffer the sound of the gun going off four times in such a confined space. That would really have hurt.
He went back to Droffo, who was moving on his own now. “You’re going to have to get up, Droff!” he shouted, then hefted the fellow one-armed under his armpit, side by side this time so that he could see where they were going and not be surprised by murderous fuckers with long-knives. Droffo seemed to be trying to say something, but Oramen still couldn’t hear. The tunnel ahead looked long and hazy but otherwise empty. He kept his gun in his hand all the same.
People came down the tunnel eventually and he didn’t shoot them; ordinary labourers and a couple of guards. They helped him and Droffo out.
Back at the adit entrance, in the looming darkness of the under-plaza, all studded with little lights, they got to sit and lie down in the little encampment round the tunnel mouth and he thought he heard – muffled, as though his ears were full of water – that somebody had run away.
“You poor sir! Look at you! Oh, you poor sir! A blotting paper!” Neguste Puibive was helping Oramen’s nurse to dress him. Neguste was shocked at the extent of his master’s bruising. “Camouflaged you are, sir, I swear; I’ve seen trucks and things all scattered with dibs and daubs of paint with less of a mixturing of colours than your poor skin!”
“No more colourful than your comparisons, Neguste,” Oramen said, hissing in pain as the nurse lifted his arm and his servant fitted his undershirt over it.
Oramen’s ears still rang. He could hear well enough now, but the ringing, even if much reduced, remained and the doctors could not guarantee it would ever fully stop. That might be his only lasting damage, and he counted himself lucky. Droffo had suffered a badly broken arm as well as a puncturing of the membrane in one ear, leaving him permanently half-deaf. The doctors reckoned his arm could be made whole again; they had an embarrassment of experience with every form of human injury in the infirmaries of the Settlement.
Oramen had been fairly surrounded by doctors for too much of the time. At one stage he’d thought a group of Sarl doctors was going to come to blows with another clutch of Deldeyn medics over some abstruse point regarding how to treat extensive bruising. He wondered if they were just keen to be able to say they had once treated a prince.
General Foise had been to see him. He had wished him well politely enough, though Oramen had the distinct impression the fellow was looking at him as he might at a piece of malfunctioning military equipment he was thinking about having junked. Poatas had sent his regards by note, thankfully, claiming great and urgent busyness occasioned in no small part by the necessary re-excavation of the chamber partially collapsed by the explosion.
Oramen dismissed the nurse – a prim, middle-aged woman of some formidability – and, with much grunting and wincing, let Neguste alone help him complete dressing.
When they were about done, and Oramen, dressed formally, was ready to make his first public appearance since the explosion three days earlier, he drew his ceremonial sword and asked Neguste to inspect its tip, holding it out level with the fellow’s eyes, almost at his nose. The effort of it hurt Oramen’s arm.
Neguste looked puzzled. A little comical, too, with his eyes crossed, focusing on the sword’s tip so close to his face. “What do I look for, sir?”
“That is my question, Neguste,” Oramen said quietly. “What do you look for?”
“Sir?” Neguste looked mightily confused. He started to put his right hand up to touch the tip of the sword.
“Leave it be,” Oramen said sharply. Neguste let his hand fall back. “Are you really so sicked by riding in the air, Neguste?”
“Sir?” Neguste’s brows were furrowed like a field; sufficiently deep, Oramen thought, to cast shadows.
“That was a canny absence you had there, fellow, just when all closest to me were marked to die.”
“Sir?” Neguste said again, looking like he was about to start crying.
“Stop saying ‘Sir?’,” Oramen told him gently, “or I swear I’ll stick this point through either one of your idiot eyes. Now answer me.”
“Sir! I lose my latest meal near on sight of an air-beast! I swear! Ask anyone! I’d not wish you harm, sir! Not me! You don’t think I had any part in this, do you? Sir?” Neguste sounded horrified, shocked. His face drained of colour and his eyes filled with tears. “Oh!” he said faintly, and crumpled, his back sliding down the wall, his backside thumping heavily down on the floor of the carriage, his knees splayed on either side. Oramen let the tip of the sword follow him down so that it was still angled at his nose. “Oh, sir!” he said, and put his face in his hands. He started sobbing. “Oh, sir! Sir, kill me if it pleases you; I’d rather you did that and found me innocent later than live apart from you, accused, even just in your heart, a free man. A limb to a hair, sir; I swore that to Mr Fanthile when he instructed me I was to be your last sticking shield as well as your most faithful servant. I’d lose arm or leg than see a hair on your littlest toe unkindly plucked!”
Oramen looked down
at the crying youth. The Prince Regent’s face was set, his expression neutral, as he listened – through the ringing – to the fellow’s hand-muffled sobs.
He sheathed the sword – that hurt too, a little – then leant down to grasp Neguste’s hand, slippery and hot with tears, and pulled the lad to his feet. He smiled at him. Neguste’s face had some blood in it now, all reddened with crying, his eyes already puffed. He wiped his nose on one sleeve, sniffing strenuously, and when he blinked tiny beads of moisture arced from his eyelids.
“Calm yourself, Neguste,” Oramen said, clapping him gently on his shoulder. “You are my shield, and my conscience too in this. I’m poisoned by this too-slow-seen conspiracy against me. I’m late inoculated against it and suffering a fever of suspicion that makes every face around me look mean and every hand, even those that would help, seem turned against. But here; take mine. I offer apology. Ascribe my wronging you as your share of my injury. We infect those closest in the very act of caring for us, but mean them no harm.”
Neguste gulped and sniffed again, then wiped his hand on his britches and took Oramen’s offered hand.
“Sir, I swear—”
“Hush, Neguste,” Oramen told him. “No more’s to say. Indulge me in silence. Believe me, I long for it.” He drew himself up, his very bones protesting at the movement, and gritted his teeth. “Now, tell me. How do I look?”
Neguste sniffed and a small smile broke across his face. “Very well, sir. Most smart, I’d say.”
“Come then, I’ve my poor face to show to the people.”
Vollird too had started down the adit, carbine drawn, then turned back. He’d been challenged by some surface official, shot and killed the fellow then made off into the dark landscape of the under-plaza, followed by, or taking with him – reports varied – the diggings’ blasting marshal. This man was found later a short way off, also shot.
Only a handful of men had survived the blast and subsequent fire in the chamber at the bottom of the adit, which had been badly damaged and had partially collapsed. The excavations on that black cube – mercifully itself probably undamaged – had been set back many days. Poatas seemed to regard this as Oramen’s fault entirely.
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