by Ben Peek
‘What are you . . . ?’ Syl’s voice trailed off. Bueralan saw the mercenary’s gaze go from the seller to her bag and, in that look, he saw her remember what Gertz had said earlier about an apothecary being in his employ. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I was wr—’
The floor around her gave way.
Beneath it, beneath the place where the trapdoors throughout The Last Courtesy had been set, spikes and nails and sharpened stakes punched through the legs and feet of the mercenaries from both Echoes and Scratch. But the space beneath the floorboards was not deep, so the men and women standing on the floor didn’t drop too far. It was enough only for the spikes to punch into the lower half of their bodies, for their cries to be genuine, for the crippling to be real. Within moments, another trapdoor was flung back on the right side of the room, and two men with spears dashed out. They were the two men Bueralan had met as he entered the town. Covered in dirt, as if they had been lying beneath the floorboards for hours, they ran into the room. Without sparing a glance for the prostitutes, or Gertz, or Vach Sala, they began to thrust their spears into the screaming mercenaries.
‘No!’ Gertz roared, once his voice returned. He gripped the broken blade tight. ‘Stop them!’ he said, turning to Bueralan. ‘Tell them to stop.’
‘No,’ Bueralan said from his sitting position, where he was chained. ‘If you weren’t so sick, you wouldn’t even ask.’ With his free hand, he pointed to the laudanum seller. ‘You’re right, by the way, I do have an apothecary. She’s very talented. She made every mercenary in this town sick, but kept everyone else safe.’ He smiled bleakly at Gertz. ‘But don’t worry, it won’t kill you. Not unless you drink enough for four men. Mayor Kana made it very clear to us that he did not want you dead. He wanted you alive. He wanted to use you to send a message, to everyone who thought they could take Zajce, that there was a price to be paid.’
The saboteur dropped the sword and took two steps back. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he said, turning to run, but stopped when he saw the men with the spears. ‘I don’t want to die!’
‘You’ll die,’ Bueralan said coldly. Across from him, Sabine reached out to detain Sala, one hand on her shoulder, the other bringing a finger to her lips, telling Sala to be quiet, not to struggle. ‘You deserve nothing less.’
19
After he had a bath, after he had his clothes cleaned, Bueralan walked up to the wire fence that surrounded Vach Sala. ‘It wasn’t supposed to go like this,’ he said. The lamp he held revealed her bare cage, her solitary world. ‘Everything was supposed to end tomorrow. It looked like it would. Everyone was in position. All I had to do was leave. But Syl came back just a little too early.’
‘I feel like a fool,’ she said quietly. She wore a long gown of red and black, and her make-up was perfect. Aerala – who not so long ago had been a musician by the name of Sabine – had brought Sala the change of clothes and cosmetics with her dinner. ‘What will happen to me now?’
‘I’ll speak to Kana when he arrives tomorrow,’ he said. ‘He’s a good man. He’s run this town for a long time because of that. He’ll treat you fairly. I’ll make sure of that.’
‘You could open this gate.’ Sala rose and approached the wire fence. ‘I could be gone by the morning.’
‘You came here to work this town. You knew what it was about when you rode in.’
‘I – I did, yes.’ She hooked her fingers into the mesh. ‘Inen. Sorry, Zean. Your blood brother. He would often tell me how awful slavery was. It would be in the early hours of the morning, when it was quiet. He would tell me how it stole so very much from a person. He would shake those bells at me and I would just nod.’ The bells, Bueralan did not tell her, had been the way Zean had talked to Ruk and Elar beneath the floorboards of The Last Courtesy. They had slept there at night, beside the stolen building materials from the port. All the other buildings next to the brothel had been filled with them too. ‘He told me stories about Enaka,’ Sala continued. ‘He told me that before the War of the Gods, Enaka had only unlocked the chains of slaves once a year. Then he would lock them at the end of the day. Inen – Zean, I mean – told me it was the worst thing the god could have done because it gave false hope, and false hope was the chain that was tightest around a slave’s neck.’
She fell silent after that and, after a while, Bueralan left Sala to her thoughts and continued down the streets of Zajce. Beneath the water towers were cages full of sick mercenaries, many of them being watched by the slaves who had been freed. Somewhere in there were Lord Makara and Lady Jaora. He’d heard that they hadn’t believed they were being taken prisoner at first. Then they had begun to beg, each selling out the other.
Bueralan would talk to Kana, like he’d promised. He supposed he owed the mayor an apology for the way he’d behaved during their planning, but maybe he would just press the case of Vach Sala’s youth and how the experience of being in Zajce had changed her. Bueralan hoped that it had changed her, at any rate. He had met enough people to know that, a year from now, a life could be the same, no matter how much you disliked it. You could repeat the same horrors you saw, year after year, if you were not careful. It was something you had to guard against, he believed. No one else could be held responsible for your mistakes if you repeated your crimes after witnessing their consequences. It did not matter if you did it out of greed, or pleasure, or because you didn’t yet know how to change. If you continued, you were responsible and, in Bueralan’s opinion, the consequences were earned.
Around him, the dark shapes of the water towers loomed high against the night sky, like giants from a child’s nightmare. But Bueralan Le, the exiled Baron of Kein-turned-saboteur, did not fear them. They were nothing compared to the horrors he had been part of, so many years ago.
Ben Peek is the critically acclaimed author of The Godless and three previous novels: Black Sheep, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Above/Below, co-written with Stephanie Campisi. He has also written a short story collection, Dead Americans. In addition to this, Peek is the creator of the psychogeography pamphlet, The Urban Sprawl Project. With the artist Anna Brown, he created the autobiographical comic Nowhere Near Savannah. He lives in Sydney with his partner, the photographer Nikilyn Nevins, and their cat, Lily.
By Ben Peek
The Children Series
The Godless
Leviathan’s Blood
The Eternal Kingdom
THE GODLESS
The Children Series
Book One
The Gods have fallen but their powers live on . . .
Fifteen thousand years after the War of the Gods, and their corpses lie scattered across the world. Men and women awake with strange powers that are derived from the bodies of the gods. While some see these powers as a gift, most call them a curse.
When Ayae – a young cartographer’s apprentice in the city of Mireea – is trapped in a burning building, a dormant power comes to life within her. The flames destroy everything around her, but she remains unscathed. This curse makes her a target for an army determined to reclaim the corpse of the god, Ger, who lies dying beneath the city, and harness his power for themselves.
As the army approaches ever closer, the saboteur Bueralan and his mercenary group, Dark, look to infiltrate and learn its weaknesses. Alone in a humid, dangerous land, they find themselves witness to rites so appalling that they realize it would take the gods themselves to halt the enemy’s attack – and even they may not be enough.
‘Epic in sheer size and scope’ SFX
First published 2017 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2017 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-5747-0
Copyright © Ben Peek 2017
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