by Ian Whates
Their swords locked, leaving them glaring at each other over the crossed blades. Kat's second sword had been stopped in mid-strike, her wrist gripped in Brent's free hand. It became a wrestling match between a wiry man and a teenage girl, each attempting to overpower the other.
He might have been bigger than her but Kat was stronger than she looked; not as strong as Chavver, perhaps, but strong enough to surprise him, she hoped. For long seconds they struggled, Kat straining to hold him, feeling that her arm was about to pop from its socket and knowing that she couldn't keep this up for much longer.
Then he did something she'd never seen before; a twist that looked impossible and must surely have dislocated his wrist. Suddenly their blades unlocked and his longer sword flicked out towards her. Taken by surprise, her own effort nearly carried her forward onto the tip of his blade; but speed of reaction saved her, enabling her to twist out of the way. Instead of being impaled, she felt steel rake across her front, slicing through her tunic to cut a bloodied gash in her skin, running in an oblique line from somewhere between her neck and chest to her left shoulder.
She jumped back, both swords raised.
"First blood to me," Bryant said, eyes gleaming.
Brecking obviously, so why waste the breath to crow about it?
He was quick, he was clever, he was skilful and he was confident. No wonder Brent had given Chavver such a hard time. But Kat was all of those things too, and she was only just getting started.
Spurred on by the piquant sting of her wound she moved to the attack again, feet dancing, twin blades weaving intricate, synchronised patterns as she probed for an opening. Brent matched her move for move, his single blade seeming almost alive as it blocked a thrust here, parried a cut there, and arced round to deny her again. Kat was impressed. Not many would have been able to live with her at this speed. So she started to work harder, steadily winding up the pace of the attack while sacrificing none of her skill or aggression.
Through the shifting veil of steel formed by their blades Kat saw Brent's eyes widen. She'd surprised him, unsettled him. He'd thought that he had her measure, that she'd shown him all she had. More fool him. She ramped things up still further and finally breached his guard, her hand twisting past his blade, her own sword inflicting a shallow cut to his forearm; at the same time her other blade struck, slashing into his other arm, cutting deep enough to damage the triceps muscle – Kat knew about wounds, knew about damage inflicted and taken. She heard his sharp intake of breath as he stepped quickly back, disengaging.
She let him, giving him the time to doubt, perhaps enough to take the edge off his reactions. She wanted that arrogance to fracture, to let a little fear seep in, along with the realisation of how severely he'd underestimated her.
"Much better; now we've both been bloodied," she said. Now who's pointing out the frissing obvious? But she couldn't resist, and upped the ante of their verbal sparring by promising, "For every cut you land on me, I'll pay you back double."
Before he could reply she attacked again, not holding back anymore, wanting to keep him off-balance and determined to finish this quickly. He was quick, but not this quick. The attack sent him stumbling backwards, his defence becoming more ragged, more desperate. She sensed the end was near. He knew that too, she could see it in his eyes.
Again one blade slipped through, even as the other was parried, cutting Brent in the side before he could dance out of reach. She grinned and pressed forward, her twin blades a blur.
He was weakening fast. Whether this was due to his recent time in jail or the wounds, Kat couldn't say. Perhaps he would have been tougher before his imprisonment; she couldn't have cared less. Life didn't deal in might-havebeens. Hers didn't, at any rate. A thrust with the left hand, a twist with the right. She felt one sword scrape his ribs while the other sent his own weapon flying from his hand and clattering to the ground.
Brent stumbled back a pace, sweating, panting for breath. "Enough," he gasped, holding up a defensive hand. "I yield. You've bettered me and I'm at your mercy." Perhaps he saw it in her eyes. For the first time, she saw a hint of fear in his. "You wouldn't kill an unarmed man, surely."
"Really; you think? Not the man who distracted my sister long enough for the Soul Thief to sneak up and kill her; I wouldn't kill him, you reckon?"
"Look, I had to," he burbled. "My orders were to keep the Soul Thief alive… she was a Demon, you see…"
"You knew she was a Demon? Breck, why am I always the last one to know anything?" Kat took a menacing step closer. "Who are you working for?"
"I don't suppose it matters now. The Misted Isles… the Demons contacted us offering…"
As he spoke, his hand came up again as if to ward her off.
No! Too late she caught the glint of something is his palm as it shot forward to punch into her upper arm. The pain was excruciating. She cried out. At the same time, she reacted. Instantly, instinctively. He tried to grasp her good arm but she was too quick, his fingers slipping away from their attempted hold as she struck at him, her sword lashing out once, twice and a third time, doing damage at every turn.
For a split second Brent stood before her, blood pumping from the slit in his throat, hand reaching, struggling futilely to stem the flow. He might have tried to speak, to tell her something, but any final words emerged as nothing more than incoherent gurgles.
"Sorry, I lied," Kat said. "For every cut you make, I'll pay you back more than double."
Brent collapsed to the ground, though Kat was no longer paying him any attention. "Shit… Shit… Shit!" She examined her wound, which was bad, she'd realised that straight away. There was a lot of blood – it must have severed something important. The "it" in question was a homemade blade, not a proper knife at all but the shard of something pilfered and sharpened. She could testify to exactly how sharp the result was. The offending article was currently embedded in her arm, just above the elbow. The sensible thing to do was leave it there, she knew that. Removal would only risk further injury. But as well as hurting like mad this crude makeshift blade offended her, and she wanted it out of her body as soon as possible. Common sense be hanged. Wrapping a cloth around her good hand to give her better purchase, she grasped the shard, took a second to brace herself and then pulled, yanking it out in one firm swift movement. Another scream escaped from between her clenched teeth and yet more blood welled forth, but she ignored the pain, knowing she had to work swiftly.
She wrapped the same cloth around her arm just above the wound, using her teeth and her good hand to pull it as tight as possible, forming a tourniquet. Not perfect, perhaps, but it was the best she could do.
She straightened up, sheathed both her swords and – turning her back on Brent's corpse, dismissing the bastard from her thoughts – walked away, cradling her injured arm. She headed towards Iron Grove Square – Charveve Court, she corrected herself – and the Tattooed Men; she headed towards Shayna. Had she been fit and healthy, the distance would have been nothing, but in her current condition this was going to be a challenge, no denying it. She couldn't afford to stop, couldn't afford to rest. This was the City Below; if she fell down the chances were she'd never get up again but would instead become just one more corpse for the spill dragons to pick over and the body boys to collect come morning.
But that wasn't going to happen, not to her. She was Kat, leader of the Tattooed Men, last of the Death Queens, and she was going to make it. She had to make it.
…To the topmost Row, the Upper Heights,
Where stars and Demons frequent the nights,
The end of this verse, fair Thaiburley's crown,
From which lofty peak you can only fall down!
He loved it here in the Upper Heights, the roof of the world. It was morning and Tom had arrived early, to stand by the city's outer walls and gaze out across the mountains. He had travelled a long way of late – in more senses than one – and he'd seen any number of wonders, things which the street-nick he'd been a mere month
ago could never have conceived of; but nothing he'd encountered could compare to this. Thaiburley's crown, the very place he'd been trying to reach on that day which now seemed a lifetime ago, when he'd scaled the city's walls and witnessed what appeared to be a murder.
He still recalled the first time he'd been brought up here by the Prime Master – the old Prime Master. Then the sight had taken his breath away, and it still did.
The wind today was stronger than on that first visit and the air colder, though not enough to cause him to regret choosing this as the venue for the meeting. It seemed fitting.
He turned to consider the city's roof. A panorama of decorative spires, artful crenulations, slender towers and elegant chimneys opened up before him, stretching away as far as the eye could see. According to the Prime Master, one man had conceived all this, someone called Carley. For a while Tom had wondered if this might be Thaiss's brother, but it wasn't, he knew that now.
A number of things had tumbled into place in the aftermath of his renewing the core, almost as if some part of his mind had deliberately held back a welter of information gleaned from the goddess, knowing that he needed to concentrate on the job at hand and only releasing this final flood once the work was done. Perhaps it wasn't his mind, perhaps this delayed knowledge had always been the goddess's intent. So many things that had puzzled him or that would have puzzled him once he'd found the time to think about them now made sense. Not everything, unfortunately.
The Jeradine, for example. He knew that they were an ancient race whose civilisation had once spanned the stars, now reduced to a dwindling population content to live out their days in the shadow of others. Why had they settled for such placid obscurity? Their ambitions and their motivations were completely alien to Tom, beyond his ability to understand. The more he discovered about them the more he became intrigued by his own ignorance on the subject. He determined to learn all he could about these enigmatic neighbours, hopefully with Ty-gen's help, but he couldn't do that from up in the Heights.
His attention returned to the inspirational vista before him, slipping back to that first time he'd been brought here. Seeing the city's roof had fulfilled a lifelong dream, though there had been one disturbing element; he'd found the Upper Heights haunted by elusive will-o'-the-wisp figures intent on teasing him. The Demons.
They were gone now, of course, and the new generation had yet to establish itself, but if anything the place felt more haunted now than it ever had then. Tom kept expecting to glance around and find the familiar face of his mentor beside him, to hear that gentle voice offering him insights and wise words. Instead, he had just the wind for company.
That was set to change, though, as Tom spied the Prime Master's successor striding towards him. The man's brown hair was being blown into ragged wisps by the wind, as if mussed by some gigantic invisible hand.
Thaiburley's new de facto ruler smiled as he approached. Tom felt a lurch of loss at the sight. He still couldn't believe the Prime Master he'd known was gone, and it felt odd addressing anyone else by the same title, especially someone he knew.
"The view is extraordinary, isn't it?" Thomas said as he reached Tom.
His younger namesake could only agree. The cloud cover was high this day, giving a spectacular view over the mountain peaks. Tom could even follow the course of the Thair for a little way. It was odd to gaze down upon a stretch of river which he must have travelled along while aboard Abe's barge. The Thair seemed so small from up here. He wondered whether the Prime Master might have come up here to watch the barge the day he'd left. He didn't dwell on the view, though, not wanting to risk a return of the vertigo that had troubled him in the past. Instead he returned his attention to the city's rooftop.
"There's still a place for you on the council, you know," Thomas told him. "You'd make history: the youngest councillor the city's ever seen, by a decade or three."
Tom smiled but shook his head. "Thank you but no. That's not for me and we both know it. Just thinking about it scares me worse than the Rust Warriors ever did. Whatever powers I can or can't call upon, I don't know enough to make decisions for the whole city. I'd only end up making a mess of things."
"You have good instincts, Tom. I believe you'd do a lot better than you suppose."
Tom snorted. "I doubt that. Besides, where's the fun in being stuck in stuffy meetings the whole time?"
"You've got me there," Thomas agreed with a wry smile. "Where indeed?"
"Look, if you meant what you said about plans to regenerate the City Below, let me get involved in that. I could do some good down there. I know the streets and what's needed for the people in them. At least that way I wouldn't be sitting around wondering what the breck everyone else was talking about, which is what would happen if I sat on the Council."
"Yes, I am serious about rebuilding the City Below. It's been sorely neglected over the years, and this seems the perfect opportunity to do something about it. So much major work is going to be needed in different parts of the city, especially the Heights, that we might as well expand that to include the under-City as well, to roll everything up into one big redevelopment project. Your help with that would be greatly appreciated, thank you."
Tom felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from him. The prospect of spending the rest of his life in the Heights had grown ever less appealing as time went on. He knew that some people would be expecting him to do exactly that and had almost been willing to go along with those expectations, particularly given his own growing sense of alienation from the streets. The more he considered the possibility, though, the more he realised that it simply wasn't what he wanted. In fact he hated the idea. As he'd determined en route to the core, it was high time he shed the mantle of others' expectations and started determining his own destiny. Tom wasn't a street-nick anymore, but nor was he a cloud scraper, and the streets were still his home.
"I hear you met Thaiss herself," Thomas said, a little too casually. "How did you find her?"
By walking a brecking long way, Tom felt tempted to reply. Instead, after a moment's thought, he simply said, "Odd."
Thomas smiled. "I'm sure. Living that long must be… difficult; I mean, it must have a profound effect on who you are. What I suppose I'm getting at is, did you think her entirely sane?"
Tom considered the question for a moment, largely because he didn't really know how to reply. "I'm not sure I'd have any way of knowing," he said at last. "How do you judge the sanity of a god?"
Thomas laughed. "There is that, I suppose." After a slight pause he added, "One thing I don't understand is why she didn't come back with you. I mean, if Thaiburley means so much to her and she knew the city was in such deadly peril, why didn't she return here in all her glory and sort the situation out herself?"
She did, Tom thought, if only in my head. "I don't know," he replied. "I've wondered about that myself and, well…"
"What?"
"I'm not honestly sure she could. She's lived in that citadel for so long, relying on her machines to keep her alive… I wonder whether she can live anywhere else anymore."
"Dependent on the machines, you mean… in effect confined within her own citadel? Now there's a thought."
A strange look passed across the Prime Master's face just for an instant and then it was gone.
"What?" Tom asked.
"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking that perhaps it's as well Thaiss never visits her city these days, that Thaiburley might be better off with a goddess who only wakes up once every century or so, allowing our society to develop without constant interference. That's all." He smiled at Tom. "Anyway, I've a meeting with the reconstituted council to prepare for. So, if you'll excuse me." With that, Thomas left him.
Tom reflected on what struck him as a strange conversation. He thought back to the questions that had troubled him during his time at the ice citadel and the suspicion that he wasn't being told everything. He'd learnt a lot since then but still didn't have all the answers by any means. Howev
er, he was young, he was powerful, he had access to the city's core and knew how to reach Thaiss's citadel. The answers wouldn't elude him forever.
He watched Thaiburley's new and vigorous Prime Master walk away and couldn't help but wonder… would it really have mattered who had won here? After all, from everything he knew, Thaiss's brother had never sought to destroy Thaiburley as such, merely claim it as his own. He'd used some pretty nasty tactics, true, but perhaps he'd needed to in order to stand any chance of success. From the point of view of those living in the city, particularly in the City Below, would one god be any worse than the other?
When Tom had replenished the core, he'd felt the corrupting influence – the essence of Thaiss's brother – flee to the City Below. Everyone assumed that it had fled to Insint, a natural ally, but Tom wasn't so sure. After all, it now emerged that Insint had been linked with the Maker in some way and ultimately been responsible for sending Tom up-City in search of a Demon's egg, which Thaiss's brother would surely have known was a myth. So perhaps the two were never actually allies in the first place.