by Will Panzo
“Why here?” Cassius wiped his damp brow with a damp hand.
“Scipio is close to the mainland, so it’s convenient for trade. And the people in charge here welcome the business. There’s no threat of getting caught or punished. You can sell illegal goods in the open. Hashish, opium, goods without tariffs, magical texts. It’s all fair game.”
“With that sort of money changing hands, why is Scipio such . . .”
“A goddamned pit?” Lucian offered. “These people don’t leave their money here unless they lose it at dice. Or to wine or whores. They take their money home. And Scipio is home to none of them.”
Two main avenues fed the marketplace, one from the north and one from the south. At the south avenue entrance rose an open-air temple to the Antiochi god of commerce Mirqurios, set on a low podium atop a flight of steps. As Cassius watched, priests in ceremonial togas of deep orange dragged an ox into the portico. Supported by four stone columns coated in stucco, the portico would have seemed natural in any Antiochi city but stood out here. The creature, already bleeding from a neck wound, staggered drunkenly and lowed and stomped and snorted at its tormentors to no avail.
In the west end of the square, a large statue of a nude Khimir woman loomed over the marketplace, most likely a representation of some Native goddess that early Antiochi settlers had tried to appropriate into their own pantheon. Behind this rose the council hall, atop which perched a massive, gold-plated eagle. Twoscore legionnaires stood watch at the base of its steps under the eagle’s gaze, geared in crimson tunics, burnished-steel cuirasses, and wide-brimmed helmets.
“Is that where the legion is stationed?” Cassius nodded toward the hall.
“Their fort is a mile outside the city walls,” Lucian said. “But they guard the hall still.”
A squat figure emerged from the hall and began to bark orders. He was dressed in an ornamented steel muscle cuirass, with acid-etched scrollwork inlaid with gold. He wore a sword on each hip after the fashion of a centurion, each a short, stabbing gladius, although clearly this man was no common centurion. Two tall white eagle feathers decorated his wide-brimmed helmet.
“That’s Vorenicus.” Lucian produced a small pouch of powdered tobacco from his tunic pocket. He sprinkled some into the small divot between the base of his thumb and wrist and then snorted it. He coughed, wiped his eyes.
“The legion commander?”
“General Quintus’s son, and his second-in-command. Good officer from what I hear. Fair with his men and the Natives. About as honest as they come in this damn place.”
“Do his legions patrol the streets?”
“Did you run into a bit of trouble on the mainland?” Lucian smiled. “Is that what this is about?”
“What was it you said about people here not asking questions?”
Cassius stared at the council hall. His face was impassive, but it seemed to Lucian a kind of forced calm, like a gambler trying to hide a favorable position. His eyes though, deep-set and dark, belied something fierce, something the boy struggled but failed to contain.
“Unless you make a terror of yourself, the legion won’t notice,” Lucian said. “This town is a den of thieves. The legion’s presence is a show of force, nothing more.”
“What about the council?”
“They’re puppets.” Lucian waved a hand dismissively. “They hold no real power. The city is split in half. Metellus Cinna’s gang runs Hightown, where my bar is. Gnaeus Piso runs Lowtown.”
“A city with two bosses?”
“This town has one boss, boy. Him that lives in that jungle”—the barkeep hooked a finger north—“surrounded by his personal army. Piso and Cinna are powerful. But they both serve at the pleasure of General Quintus.”
“These two bosses—Piso and Cinna—they’re enemies, right?” Cassius looked off into the middle distance, his eyes unfocused.
“Why do you think that?”
“You said Quintus is the power here, yet he lives in the jungle. That far from the action, it only makes sense that he’d set up two bosses, have them both kick up a share of their earnings. They’d fight each other for position, and neither would grow strong enough to challenge him.”
“You’ve got a devious mind,” Lucian said.
“Am I right?”
“The bosses are enemies.”
“Why?”
“That’s old business.”
“Maybe that could be an opportunity for work.”
“You don’t want to mix with them.” Lucian stood. He looked around to see who was nearby, who might have overheard their talk. He leaned in close to Cassius. “And, anyway, I told you we’re here to meet a connection of mine. You two can head to Lowtown and arrange prizefights. It’s not glamorous work, but it pays. There’s no coliseum on this island. No spellcaster guilds and no schools of magic. A killer’s options are limited.”
“Why such strict rules about magic?”
“The bosses maintain a stranglehold on killers. They don’t want independent operators on the island. Especially those who practice other than Antiochi magic. The Murondians and Fathalans are forbidden from building their churches here. Without churches, their magic users can’t contact the beings beyond the veil from which they draw their powers. We had a Blood-magic cult a few years back, came up from the Southern Kingdoms, but the bosses rooted them out. Burned them alive and tossed their ashes in the sea for fear their corruption would spread throughout the island. Some Native tribes had shaman callers, but they were all killed in the early days of conquest. Killed or shipped off to Antioch City, so the runemasters could study their secrets.”
“So only Antiochi magic is tolerated here?”
“And only if you work for one of the bosses. Remember that when you head to Lowtown, boy. Make your money, but do it quietly. Don’t draw attention to yourself.”
“You’re not coming with us?” Cassius asked.
Lucian shook his head. “I’m not welcome in Lowtown.”
“Why not?”
“Old business.”
• • •
The bar smelled of smoke, and smoke hung thick in the air. Tobacco smoke, heavy and pungent. Awanu dream root, darker and redolent of fruit. Wisps of blue opium that streaked overhead like shot darts. Strong hashish that left Cassius’s throat oily and raw.
“Have a drink,” Sulla said. “It’s not every day I offer to buy a round.”
She was pale for an Antiochi, slender and tall, with chestnut hair. She had sharp eyes, light brown and locked in a permanent squint, and had also a pinched face, a receding chin. She seemed always to be tasting something unpleasant. Cassius put her age at twenty-five, but she wore her makeup thick, as was popular on the mainland, heavy powder for her cheeks and forehead, charcoal for her lashes, her lips covered with beeswax and flower extract the red of a fresh wound. In truth, she might have been much older or much younger.
“You don’t have to buy me a drink,” Cassius said. His eyes had started to water from the smoke. He wiped them and scanned the room.
All the windows were shuttered, and on the far side of the bar, a door opened into a long hall, where Cassius glimpsed scores of men huddled over gaming tables.
The front room itself was small, with a dozen customers sitting alone, drinking watered wine or mugs of beer, a few with bowls of vegetable porridge or stew set before them. Hard men. Old beyond their years and worn, some with ruined limbs, mangled arms, or stumps for legs. They might have been laborers’ injuries, suffered in a quarry pit or timber yard. But Cassius knew at first glance not a man of them had ever worked an honest day. The other wounds told that story. The missing eyes and missing fingers, the shorn ears, the brands on their faces and foreheads that read the same judgments in a dozen languages: cutpurse, horse thief, rapist, murderer. He fixed his cloak so that it hid his hands and dropped his hands to hover
near his gauntlets.
“You don’t want a drink?” Sulla asked.
“I can buy my own,” Cassius said.
“A man who asks nothing of others, is that it?” She smiled. “A man who settles his own scores?”
“Something like that.”
“You’ve never had a girl offer to buy you a drink before, have you?”
It was true. He hadn’t. And although there might have been circumstances where Sulla’s question could be read as flirtatious challenge, it was clear, even to someone of his inexperience, that this was not one of those times. She was not being playful. She was appraising him, sizing him up. And after only a few minutes of conversation, and one offered drink, she had read him expertly.
He flushed, despite himself. Thankful, at least, that no one would notice in the darkened bar.
“I’ll have tea with whiskey,” Cassius said.
“How cosmopolitan.” Sulla slapped the bar top, called for the tender.
“What’s yours?” the barkeep asked. He was a young man, broad-shouldered, with heavy brows and jet-black hair slicked with lard.
“Salvē, brother.” Sulla reached inside the sleeve of her slate-colored dress and produced a few coins, more than enough for two drinks. She palmed them into the bartender’s grip, the gesture swift, discreet. She leaned in close. “Who’s handling the fights today?”
“Master Dio.”
“Any decent action?”
“Slow day,” the barkeep said. “Junius showed up. Everyone is too scared to fight him. The oddsmakers are furious. But he won’t leave till he gets his match.”
Sulla released the barkeep. When he returned with their drinks, she nodded her thanks and offered Cassius his mug.
“Are you a half-breed?” she asked offhandedly.
“What?” Cassius seemed taken aback by the bluntness of her words, offended that she would make such an assertion so directly.
“Don’t be sensitive,” Sulla said. “Only mainlanders care about that sort of thing. Everyone’s a mongrel out here. You just don’t look full Antiochi. Your skin tone is a bit strange. And there’s something about your face I can’t place. Are you part Fathalan?”
“No,” Cassius said flatly, not rising to her taunt as he had the first time.
“Don’t get offended. I’m an eighth Murondian on my mother’s side if that makes you feel better.”
“It doesn’t.”
In the long hall, the men at the tables gamed by torchlight. They shot dice and rolled knucklebones and flipped coins and at one table, two men moved pieces around a semmet board brought up from the rich deltas of Awanu, the Sun Empire, whose kings were gods and monsters both, with the bodies of men and the heads of animals.
“How long have you known Lucian?” she asked.
“A day. And you?”
“Longer than that.”
“Was he right to send me to you?”
“Better me than one of the bosses,” Sulla said. “See, I work for myself. I’m an independent. That’s rare in this city. But I make it worthwhile for everyone to let me operate on my own.”
“Doing what?” Cassius glanced at each table as they moved toward the back of the room. Huge piles of coins and banknotes sat stacked before the players, sums that could ransom kings.
“I’m the best fence on this island. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you Sulla can sell water to a well. I don’t like killers, though.” Sulla sneered. “Arrogant bastards.”
“I’m just here for the work, same as you.”
“There’s a ring for sparring outside. I’ll introduce you to the gaming master.”
They passed through a doorway hung with a gossamer weave, into a quiet back room peopled with men in conversation over drinks. Here, away from the raucous noise of the gaming tables, deals were being made, conspiracies plotted. With whispers so soft they might go unnoticed in church, men arranged heists, masterminded kidnappings, said words that would set in motion events to end another’s life, irrevocable proclamations. They might have been Blood-magic cultists uttering death curses instead of the common criminals they truly were.
“I was thinking about doing other things,” Cassius said.
“There’s not much honest work for killers here. Maybe you could be a bodyguard. But you’d have to be good. And my commission changes if you land a contract with the bosses.”
“Your commission?” Cassius stopped.
Sulla drained the rest of her mug and set it on a nearby table. “Standard ten percent.”
“Five.” Cassius placed his cup on a windowsill. “Plus a guarantee that I’ll fence any unwanted spells I earn in the ring through you, subject to your standard commission.”
“Never had a girl buy you a drink,” she said, “but something tells me this isn’t your first negotiation.”
“I’m good at what I do, too.”
She stood silent. He could feel her studying him.
He had seen a bull-baiting once, in a small town near the Murondian border, the bull set upon by six Rhuiss war hounds, the most vicious dogs in creation. It was an unpleasant show, but he had forced himself to watch. There were lessons to be learned from it, certain truths regarding the struggle of one against many that could not be gleaned from tactical texts, truths that could only be explicated in blood.
An unpleasant show but still he remembered it, could recall vividly the look of the hounds as they made their approaches, searching for a weakness in the bull. It was the same look he saw now on Sulla’s face.
“Deal.” Sulla forced a smile, then lifted Cassius’s cup from the windowsill and glanced inside. “You know, it’s bad luck not to finish a drink bought for you.”
“Bad luck for me or bad luck for you?”
“Maybe both.” She offered him the cup. “So finish, damn it.”
• • •
A mudbrick wall, crumbling and covered in charcoal graffiti, encircled the courtyard. The yard itself was roughly a hundred feet across, an arid slab of hard-packed earth barren except for patches of scrub grass, streaked with dried blood and black grime. The lifelessness of the place struck Cassius as odd.
The rest of the island had seemed wet and alive to him, aggressively fertile. Even where the city sought to tame the land, he witnessed the endurance of the jungle. Stunted banana trees grew amidst refuse heaps. Strangling vines scaled the walls of tenements. Snakes and small lizards stalked the corners of the Market. But here, that same resilient life had been extinguished, snuffed by fire and magic.
Two men stood on opposite sides of the clearing, both Antiochi, one dressed in a blue tunic, the other in purple. A pair of jeweled gauntlets hung from each man’s hip. A crowd of fifty men gathered behind them, near the crumbling wall. They smoked and shouted, eager for a show. It was early afternoon, but all were drinking, some even drunk. Four oddsmakers serviced those who wanted action, arguing gaming spreads and exchanging clay tokens for coins. A greasy fat man in a black tunic moved through their ranks. He held a small writing slate and a nub of chalk, and with these, he noted the bets placed within the crowd so he could collect the house’s take.
Coins from every corner of the known world changed hands. Coppers that bore images of hooded cobras, pillaged from eastern temples perched atop mountain ranges so large and so ancient, they formed the backbone of the world itself. Lion-headed silvers from Murondia, whose armorers knew secrets of fire and metal handed down from the age of heroes. And everywhere, on coins of all weights and worths, from rude half-coppers to newly minted gold pieces, shone the Antiochi eagle.
As Cassius watched, a man in the crowd fainted, either from excess drink or heat. Fellow revelers dragged him to the shade of the bar before unburdening him of purse and blade and rings and sandals and anything else of worth. A bearded man staggered up to the prone figure, lifted his tunic, and prepared to relieve
himself on the unconscious man, to the cheers of those nearby.
Cassius looked away. Sulla fixed him with her gaze.
“We don’t have to do this,” she said. “I can take you back to Lucian.”
The savagery of the island was no surprise to Cassius. He had prepared himself for that as best a man could, knowing he was journeying to a place that no longer abided the rule of law. Nor was he a stranger to violence or cruelty or vice. He had traveled much in his short life. Had learned the art of Antiochi spellcasting at the knees of brutal men on the Island of the Twelve.
But still something here unsettled him. Something he had not prepared himself for, could not prepare himself for, because it was alien to him even now, a thing he could not name. For the first time since arriving on the island, he wondered if he was equal to the task at hand, if he could do what needed to be done here.
“Just get me in the ring,” he whispered. There, at least, he would feel at home. There he could master his doubts and his fears, bend them to his will. There, amidst the blood and fire, he always felt in control.
“That’s Junius in blue,” Sulla said. “One of Piso’s lieutenants. A first-rate killer. The barkeep said he’s been looking for a match all day, but no one wants to face him.”
“Why not?”
“Afraid he’d paint the courtyard with their brains is my guess.”
“Seems they found someone to accommodate him.”
“Not sure who that is in purple. But I can tell you he doesn’t have a chance against Junius. I’m going to get some action. This is guaranteed money.”
Sulla elbowed her way into the crowd, calling to see which chiseling bastard had the best odds.
Cassius eased back against the outside wall of the gambling den. The fat man announced the last round of bets, and the crowd fell silent just as Sulla emerged from the press.
“Guaranteed money.” She was grinning.
The fat man lifted a hand, and at his signal, each fighter unhitched his gauntlets and donned them. Cassius felt a tug in his chest, a sign the men were drawing on the energy used to power their spells. It was part of his gift, shared by all spellcasters who practiced Antiochi magic, or Rune magic, as other practitioners referred to it.