‘Begin,’ Theophilus said.
Bas gave a step immediately and still it was barely enough, Einnes’s blunt stave just missing his chest. He had known she would be fast, but he could not have supposed – he simply had not remembered, it had been so long – how fast they were. He had never been so swift, not even in those distant days of youth, and certainly not with forty-five long years weighing down his body. But at least he had purchased something with those days and weeks and months, with torn tissue and scarred flesh and broken bone, something like wisdom or at least knowledge. She would wish to demonstrate her superiority quickly, and he played against that, circling right unceasingly, forcing her off balance. Thrice more she tried for a quick end and thrice more he avoided it, and after the last he feinted to her off side and came full-speed against her shoulder.
‘Touch!’ Theophilus said.
Isaac howled. Hamilcar laughed loudly and passed him a tertarum, seeming happy with the loss. Theophilus’s adjutant whose name Bas had never learned or already forgotten watched the proceedings with slavish intensity, as if he had staked his life on the outcome. Nor was he the only one, the crowd swelling with passers-by, a half-dozen now though it would soon grow to more than that. He could hardly blame them – the God-Killer facing off against a god, a preliminary for the act to come.
Einnes retreated to their starting position. ‘That would never have gotten through my armour.’
‘Best not to let it get to that point.’
‘Indeed,’ she said, raising her weapon. ‘It was a fine blow.’
This time when Theophilus gave the signal she remained as she was. Indeed there was a long moment when it seemed as if neither would make a move, and then she did and he was lost completely. She was fast, by the gods she was fast, faster than she had displayed during the first pass; between the reshuffling of her feet and the blow against his chest had been some half-fractured second, and he had barely seen the blow fall.
‘Touch,’ Theophilus announced unhappily, as if the spreading swell of pain across Bas’s breast was not sufficient evidence.
‘I think I grow used to the size of this,’ Einnes declared.
Bas didn’t answer. His breath was coming shallowly and he gave in to it, let his chest heave back and forth, wiped sweat away from his brow, scowled. Back to their starting positions and Theophilus opened his mouth to speak and Bas was off his back foot and full-force forward, Einnes unprepared and still managed to deflect the first blow and the second but not the third, her stave going spinning off into the dust, the gathered crowd giving a cheer.
‘Very clever, Caracal,’ she began, unconcerned with the reaction of the mob, indeed almost seeming to share it, ‘here I had supposed this thing called age had finally gained a hold.’
He should not have smiled but he did, not at the cheering or at the enthusiasm of his soldiers, but at her response, at her eyes which were on his. And in fact just then he was feeling every one of his years, and also something else, some dim sense of gratitude for this last one, and indeed for this very moment.
Their fourth exchange was not as close as it looked, and though it lasted several long minutes, and though the onlookers held their breath and flinched every time wood rattled against wood, the contest was never in doubt. A slight error in judgement had set Bas behind at the outset, and from there on he was entirely on the defensive, working desperately to acquire equilibrium. To no avail – they locked staves for a moment and then she shifted and he went stumbling onward, with a blow against his back to speed him along.
Bas spent a long time catching his breath, Einnes retreating to her starting position without losing a moment, still and perfect as a statue, as if the previous four passes had not exhausted a single drop of her energy, as if she could so continue all evening and into the morning beyond. She was dressed in simple robes of deepest black, and the long tendrils of her hair, wrapped tight in silver cord, reached down past the backs of her knees. And below her hair those eyes, which were like purple perhaps, or darker than purple.
‘We lose the light,’ Theophilus announced, staring at the sun dimming itself beyond the mountains to the west. ‘Will you call it a draw?’
‘No,’ Einnes said.
‘No,’ Bas agreed, nearly in the same instant.
Hamilcar laughed loudly from the sidelines, though to Bas’s ears it had something fearful to it.
‘Two and two, Caracal,’ Einnes said, ‘and the last to decide the matter.’
This did not require a response and Bas did not bother to offer one. He stretched his shoulders and twisted his neck back. He felt the sweat drip down off his forehead and the blood run fierce and free in his veins, he felt the last rays of the winter sun beat down on his face and his arms and his chest.
‘Begin,’ Theophilus said.
Her style was as dissimilar to his own as was every other thing about her, each strike a staccato movement, unrelated to the previous motion or the one that would succeed it. Their staves rapped an uneven tattoo. On the sidelines, noticed by neither warrior, the crowd had gone silent, tense with anticipation. Hamilcar was leaning forward on his stool, long pipe forgotten in the dust beside him, and Isaac was upright, leaning past the Dycian as if about to tumble over him. The crowd of pentarches and tourmarches and hoplitai that now surrounded the practice ground had grown to several dozen, though none made a sound, as if frightened to interrupt. They thought so much of him – even those who shouldn’t, who knew better, who had spent years watching him in flesh and folly, seen Bas shit himself when sick with the flux, seen his bad decisions lead to the deaths of men in his charge, seen him sleep and dream and bleed; still they could never quite believe that he was a man, as they were men.
He planted his left foot, he shifted, he shifted back the other way, he saw her recognise his feint for what it was and decided in the instant before the final instant that it would not be a feint at all, and she saw the same and reacted, and the tips of their mock weapons fell against flesh, near simultaneous.
‘Touch, Caracal,’ Theophilus said, and the crowd erupted. Isaac raised his fists to the sky, bellowing, and rising with enthusiasm Hamilcar overturned his pipe, embers dying in the dust. The pentarches hooted, the tourmarches hollered, the hoplitai cheered, five-fingered hands gripped each other with happy enthusiasm.
Near enough for honest error, though Bas would not have supposed it such; rather that Theophilus, a long way from the guileless youth Bas had met on the Marches, was wiser than to announce anything else. And it had been close, after all. But Bas knew, and Einnes knew.
In the long moment afterward, as the spectators roared and beat their chests, the two locked eyes. ‘You give good sport, God-Killer,’ she said, tossing the stick to Theophilus and striding off. ‘Too bad it was not more than that.’
‘Too bad for you,’ said a voice from the mob, some ignorant soldier believing what he wished to believe, Einnes ignoring him and Bas ignoring him also.
14
When Pyre walked into the whorehouse on the Second Rung late one evening in early spring, he looked neither to his right nor his left; not at the mahogany floors or the silver-plated water pipes, not at the walls, which were hardwood and draped with tapestry, not at the supple leather couches, not at the pale and rounded flesh of the courtesans who lounged on them, not at the silk that failed to cover that flesh. Behind him, as was generally now the case, Hammer loomed tall and broad and silent – another child of the Fifth, and equally disinterested in the view, a strangely passionate sort of dispassion.
The woman in the entrance was well practised in waiting for men. She offered the smile that she gave all of them, that she had been giving since she was too young to understand what it offered – though she had learned quickly enough, no woman can remain long in such ignorance. For once at least it failed to earn a response, Pyre and his follower as indifferent as eunuchs. She led them through a curtain, and then through another curtain, and then into a room that was not pretending
to be anything but what it was, and four men doing the same. Pyre did not need to see the brands on their necks, stars and webs and geometric patterns of no clear purpose, to know them as members of the Brotherhood Below. He had never met any of them before but he knew them well all the same, knew the savagery that had been required to attain their position, knew the desperation that had driven them to that savagery, knew they would draw blood without regret or pity or enthusiasm, would draw blood because that was their purpose and they knew nothing else. Pyre pitied them, as he pitied the whores, though it was a distant sort of pity, one that would have no impact on the event to come.
The leader, or at least the man who then spoke, was bulky and pockmarked and heavily bearded. His robes were expensive, ugly and fashionable, and a long, curved blade rested outside them. ‘Against the wall,’ he said. Their guide had disappeared without a word, her purpose completed.
‘We are unarmed,’ Pyre said. ‘As per the agreement.’
‘This the first time you ever been patted down, Fifth Rung trash like you?’ The man’s sneer tore a hole through the sweat-matted fur of his face. ‘Against the wall or into the ground, your choice.’
Pyre looked at Hammer for a moment, then shrugged and set his palms against the wall. Hammer did the same. The bearded man ran his hands swiftly down Pyre’s legs and waist and hips, then did the same to Hammer. When it was over he led them down another hallway, out of sight of the rest of his guards. He paused at the last door, spent a long moment staring at Pyre before nodding and opening it.
The room was small and sparsely appointed. Two guards waited scowling beside the door, and one at the back did the same. At a wooden table sat four chairs and two men. The first was, Pyre knew, the head of the Brotherhood Below, the vast criminal organisation that had long been the effective power on the Fifth Rung and most of the Fourth. It smuggled goods up from the docks, it ran whores, it cribbed protection money, it left fathers dead and mothers weeping. It had done all of these things, at least, in the years before the Five-Fingers had come to power, had begun to push them steadily upslope. His name was Ink, and in his dress and composure he seemed little affected by the steady erosion of his base of power. He wore rich robes of coloured silk and a line of golden bracelets on arms not free of muscle. Ink could still count on the knives of some two hundred hardened killers, men who made a living from cruelty, whose daily bread was leavened with blood. He took in a thousand eagles a year, a sum that was quite literally inconceivable in the neighbourhood in which Pyre had been born, and in much of the Roost entire.
He did not matter a fig, he was irrelevant and extraneous to the moment at hand. One could see it even by the way Ink lounged in his chair – defiance that verged on petulance, like an upslope child. By contrast, the man sitting beside him was stiff and straight and almost regal. Probably past forty, though it was hard to tell, with his hair painted in two vibrant if unnatural colours, and with the heavy make-up that obscured most of his face, white powder extending mask-like down to the high cowl of his robes, black silk with threads of silver interwoven. The skin around his eyes had been painted amber, and the lids as well. He did not bother to introduce himself.
There were two open seats. Pyre took one and Hammer took the other. Then they all sat a moment in silence.
‘Congratulations.’ The chancellor’s voice was high-pitched, unbecoming, like an untuned lute. ‘You have succeeded in making yourself a nuisance.’
The bearded man who had escorted them inside smirked, rolled round the table to stand behind his masters. Pyre could sense Hammer quiver in the chair beside him. For his part, Pyre neither moved nor spoke.
‘It is an accomplishment,’ the chancellor acknowledged. ‘It is a thing of which to be proud.’
The sounds of a zither came in from the adjoining comfort rooms, muffled but recognisable, and the sounds that accompanied those sounds, soft moaning and occasional grunts, pleasure real and feigned. Pyre had the sensation – one he was long familiar with, as every child of the Fifth was familiar – of something small and foul running across his skin, lice or fleas or bedbugs.
‘You’ve no response?’ the chancellor asked.
‘You’ve yet to ask a question.’
The chancellor’s smile was as false as all the rest of him, as false as his coloured hair or his rouged cheeks. ‘Fair enough. You are not the voice of your organisation, only the muscle. All to the good – a fool might pay his attentions to the puppet, but a wiser man directs his thoughts to the mummer.’
‘You exaggerate my importance. I am merely a servant of the word.’
‘Oh, I think otherwise – it is not to Edom that the Five-Fingers have replaced the Brotherhood as the chief source of order, all along the docks and even up as high as the Fourth Rung. Not to Edom that bullyboys leave slaughtered birds in the main intersections, not to Edom that there are few enough Cuckoos willing even to go out on patrol. We have been aware of the Five-Fingers since Edom first returned to the city. We allowed him to continue his activities, because you downslopers need something to occupy your minds – to the degree that you may be said to have any – and because we found it convenient to have the fulcrum of dissent so clearly in hand. Five years, I’ve been aware of him, but only in the last year and a half – since you’ve joined them, Pyre, the First of His Line – have they risen to their current level of importance.’
‘Which would be?’
‘A nuisance, as I said. An irritant. A headache, a minor misfortune, a blemish of the skin.’
‘Hard to notice with all that make-up,’ Hammer said.
‘You watch your fucking tongue, boy, or I’ll carve it out and toss it to a whore.’ Ink sounded like Pyre had known he would sound, blunt-tongued and bitter. He was happy for the chance to say something, however petty or vicious, simply to remind himself that he was still in the room. This last explained, to Pyre’s mind at least, the greater balance of human speech.
Without looking behind him, eyes still on the painted man, Pyre gestured Hammer into silence.
‘As a rule, I think very little about the Fifth Rung,’ the chancellor began, no more interested in his subordinate’s outburst than was Pyre. ‘And so long as you were willing to entertain yourself downslope, this dispute between Ink’s organisation and your own was of no meaningful interest to me or mine. But this … expansion into the Third Rung, this attack on the bank last month; you overreach yourself, and you court disaster.’
‘And I’ve been summoned tonight to hear a warning?’
‘And in hopes of coming to some sort of mutually beneficial agreement. There are three ways that this situation might be dealt with. The first, and the easiest, is to tell me what you want, and for me to give it to you.’
‘A simple enough thing, Chancellor, and one of which we’ve made no secret. I wish for this yoke which has laid across our backs for millennia uncounted to be lifted, and I wish for those who have held us enslaved to be brought to justice.’
The chancellor made a face as if Pyre had emitted some unexpected odour. ‘And the sun to shine at the hour of the Owl, and the current in the bay to run backward? Perhaps I shall wave my hands and make you live for ever, or bring your dead grandmother back to life? Enough nonsense, boy, there’s no point in holding up your facade any longer. I can offer you riches and wealth beyond anything you’ve yet dreamed – and power as well,’ he added, ‘real power, power over life and death in the borough where you reside, a king in your little kinglet. If, needless to say, one who still pays homage to an emperor above him.’
‘You think me a hypocrite, then? To be bought off with coin or cheap favour?’
‘Hypocrisy is a word that the weak use to bind the strong – to contain and corral them, to confuse and diminish them. It rarely works, of course, but then the weak have few enough weapons on which to rely. My time is not infinite, and I find the company insalubrious. You have thus far shown yourself to be a competent tactician—’
‘Enough to make you
r dog run scared,’ Hammer interrupted.
The eponymous dog snarled, cracked his fingers, then pointed one at Hammer. ‘You just keep on thinking that, zealot,’ Ink said. ‘You just keep right on thinking that.’
The chancellor rolled his eyes, continued on as if the interruption had never taken place. ‘—and a man of some intellect. Surely you are not dense enough to believe the … pabulum you spread to the masses?’
‘I have no need for gold,’ Pyre said simply. ‘If you had hoped to bribe me, you’ve wasted both of our time.’
‘Drop the fucking act, boy,’ Ink snarled. ‘You done enough to get yourself a spot at the table, now claim your winnings and get back to your hole.’
The chancellor raised two fingers, the nails of which had been painted opposing colours, and Ink fell silent. ‘You say you have no personal interest in the matter? You say you wish for the well-being of your people? Fine, I will take you at your word. If you were to fall in line, we could discuss … changes in the organisation of the lower Rungs. Those Above allow me wide leeway in that regard.’
‘A better-fed slave is still a slave,’ Pyre said simply. ‘My people wish for freedom, and will accept no substitute.’
In the flickering candlelight the chancellor’s lips were bright, and they left a stain of red on his teeth. ‘Is that really what they wish? Do you honestly suppose that there would be any gain for anyone if the rabble that occupy the lower Rungs were suddenly to find themselves without our guiding hand? Think hard here, think honestly, do not simply mouth the platitudes that have been taught you. Given the opportunity, would they spontaneously assemble themselves in council? Would they draft laws, would they distribute offices and responsibilities? The Fifth would be an abattoir before the sun’s rise tomorrow, the blood would rise about your knees.’
‘At first, perhaps,’ Pyre agreed. ‘But the tide runs back out, doesn’t it? And when it did we would be able to rebuild, as free men rather than slaves.’
Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 Page 12