Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  “You’re on the poppy,” he said flatly.

  “Only a bit.”

  This reply did not ease Christian’s mind in the least. Career fighters in the Creche accumulated so many wounds that they needed an almost constant supply of narcotics, and though morphia was reserved for only the worst injuries, Christian had still seen enough of it to know that that particular habit could dig its claws deep in no time at all. And although he had just been pondering the foolishness of his child’s daydreams of topside, he found himself suddenly furious with Maura, as though she had dug up those old daydreams, soaked them with oil, and lit a match.

  “I suppose it was only a matter of time until you went on the needle.”

  “Tend to your own business!” Maura snapped. “Unless you’ve suddenly grown a cunt and it’s open for sale, then you’ve no idea how to tend to mine.”

  Christian felt his cheeks grow scarlet. She had never spoken so openly about what went on in here, and some small part of him—a tiny corner that somehow pretended, against all odds, that Maura and her men had tea and traded gossip—hated her for it. And yet the greater part of him was ashamed. Hadn’t he just been thinking, bare minutes ago, that all of them—Christian, Maura, the pigeons, the whores—were in the same boat? But of course they weren’t, not at all. The promoters sold Christian out, yes, but it wasn’t the same. He suddenly remembered the two of them, him and Maura, standing on the auction block in the vast room, holding hands, shivering; the room had been cold, and both of them naked. How old could they have been? Four, five? Too young, that was certain; too young to understand what was in store. He thought of the bracelet she had given him one night in the ring, a bracelet woven with the symbol of the Blue Horizon. It had disappeared long since, grown far too small for his wrist, but now Christian found himself wishing that he had kept it.

  “Listen,” he said suddenly, impulsively. “We’ll get you off the poppy. I’ll help—”

  The curtain over the door was suddenly yanked back, and Christian snapped his mouth shut at the sight of Mrs. Evans.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” Mrs. Evans said kindly, with great solicitude. She had likely been an excellent whore; every word reeked of sincerity. Only by watching her eyes did one see the truth.

  “Maura, it’s time. We need to get you bathed and dressed.”

  Maura nodded. She clasped Christian’s shoulder in farewell, but he barely noticed, for now he had caught sight of the figure behind Mrs. Evans: a young man, several years older than Christian, tall, awkward as a gantry, his bright blue eyes taking in every detail of the room. By now, Christian knew most of the pimps by sight, if not by acquaintance, and this one, Arlen Thorne, was rumored to be one of the worst flesh peddlers in the Creche. All manner of rumors surrounded him; some said he was a bastard-born child of the nobility, others that he was a crib baby who had murdered his handler when he was little more than a boy and taken over the entire operation. Thorne’s stable wasn’t even in the Alley proper, but two floors below, in the Deep Patch, where stranger things than children were sold. Some said that Thorne’s menagerie included a witch, a white woman who could kill a man with a glance. Christian didn’t believe in witches, or anything else he couldn’t see with his own eyes; still, he would sooner have trusted Maura with a Reddick wolf than the likes of Arlen Thorne.

  “Lazarus, you should leave now.”

  Mrs. Evans spoke with regret, but only a fool would miss the note of steel that had entered her voice. Behind that steel stood not just six enforcers but enough contacts and knowledge to bring down the Creche and half the city behind it. Christian turned to Maura, but the beseeching look on her face said everything. Suddenly Christian hated the lot of them: Mrs. Evans, Thorne, even Maura herself.

  Tend to your own business.

  He would have liked to ignore Maura’s words, but he could not, for she was right. Unless he was prepared right now, at this instant, to take her away, to remove her utterly from this life—

  But even then, you wouldn’t have the right to take the syringe out of her hand.

  After another long moment’s hesitation, Christian turned and walked away. Many times he had dreamed of simply wringing Mrs. Evans’s neck, but that was just as much a fantasy as topside itself, and it wouldn’t have changed anything anyway. Customers paid, tricks turned . . . the players changed, but the game never ended. Only the suffering was real. As Christian ducked through the grating of his shortcut, he suddenly saw Maura as he had first seen her: the tiny girl who had taken his hand when they were both in the pens, waiting to go on the block. For those few days, they had stayed together, keeping each other from panic, as sale drew closer and the darkness closed in. Even after Wigan bought them both, Maura had done her best to create an invisible circle around the two of them, making birthdays, singing songs, tending his wounds after fights. They had protected each other.

  But I can’t protect her now, Christian thought bitterly. Not even from herself.

  Chapter 4

  NIYA

  The second iteration of the Blue Horizon was a strange animal: utterly committed, yet innately contradictory. William Tear had condemned the use of arms, but the Blue Horizon carried steel and used it well. They longed for a peaceful world, but did not flinch from violence in pursuit of that goal. William Tear had despised organized religion, and so the Blue Horizon naturally railed against God’s Church, yet its members worshipped William Tear like a god, speaking of him as though he were alive. No Christian sect ever had such a powerful Holy Ghost.

  —The Early History of the Tearling, as told by Merwinian

  She was in the lowest part of the Hollow when they caught her. The first man stepped out of the mouth of an alley just as his two companions came up behind. Both grabbed a bicep, whipping her arms behind her, and as she tried to wrench free, the first man slipped a hood over her head. They brought her arms together, manacling her hands at the waist.

  With the appearance of the manacles, Niya dismissed her initial assumption that they were simple villains, bent on assault. Women who spent any amount of time in the Gut had to know how to defend themselves; Niya had even heard that one brothel held weekly hand-to-hand combat classes for its pros, classes taught by an army lieutenant who liked his free tumble now and then. Rape occurred all the time in the Gut, but the men leading Niya remained coolly professional. As they led her up the steps out of the Hollow, one of them even tucked a hand beneath her elbow, an almost courtly gesture, designed to keep her from stumbling.

  Do they know who I am? she wondered. The Fetch had forbidden her to attend any more meetings once he had placed her in the Keep, but it was always possible that someone had recognized her from the early days, for in a kingdom where redheads grew scarcer all the time, Niya sported a head of bright, coppery hair.

  Has someone betrayed us?

  At first her three captors remained on their guard. Niya was no easy piece of business, and if they knew who she was, they would know that too. But three on one was three on one, and the captive was hooded, and somewhere between Clewes Alley and the Great Boulevard, Niya sensed all three of them beginning to relax. That was their mistake. Niya’s parents had both died in a pub fire when she was eight, and she had grown up a pickpocket on the streets of New London, earning and eating only what she stole. She did not need eyes to see her way. She knew the Gut the way she knew her own heart.

  I am Blue Horizon, Niya thought, as the men tugged her along. This was the most important fact about her, the first thought she had in the morning and the last at night. If someone had asked Niya who she was, she would have replied with the same single phrase. She was Blue Horizon, and her other life, her old life, mattered not at all. The other Niya had been burned away.

  They dragged her around a corner, into a roar of humanity and the overwhelming smell of food and horses: the New London Circus. Niya had been heading for the Circus when the men grabb
ed her, meaning to check the makeshift apothecary stalls there. Elyssa sent her down every few months to replenish her syrup supply, and Niya always went alone, for the errand was a difficult business. Buying birth control was a gamble in the Tearling; legitimate apothecaries couldn’t carry it, and the illegal ones who dared were just as likely to be on the grift as they were to have any real knowledge of botany. Elyssa trusted only Niya with this errand, and Niya took a strange pride in her own success. Every month that the Princess did not conceive was almost a personal victory. But now it looked as though Elyssa would have to go without syrup for a while.

  “Is she really that ugly, boys?” a man’s voice catcalled drunkenly from Niya’s left. “Give her to me! I’ll even keep the bag on!”

  “Keep clear!” one of Niya’s captors snapped. “And for the love of heaven, sober up! It’s nine o’clock in the morning!”

  Niya raised her eyebrows. Very prudish they were, for mercenaries. Not Caden assassins, certainly, and probably not Queen Arla’s people either. Niya jumped as another voice shouted close by, this time to her right.

  “The True Queen comes! I see a revelation, a rebirth! I see her, as clear as through a glass!”

  “Oh, leave off!” another of her captors moaned. “If I have to hear any more of their—”

  “Shut up,” the first man cut in again. The leader, Niya decided. The street preacher’s words faded from hearing, but almost immediately another one sprang up, this one a woman, her voice elevated, straight ahead.

  “Elyssa Regina! We have waited, we have prayed, and now she comes to save us! Elyssa, the True Queen!”

  The prophecy. One could not escape it anywhere in the city. Niya hated the prophecy, but not because she was tired of hearing about it, like the man at her shoulder. No, Niya hated the prophecy for one simple reason: it placed Elyssa in greater danger.

  She had not felt this way at the start. When the girl’s story—a room full of men, an ancient seer with white eyes—had first begun to circulate several weeks before, Niya’s initial reaction had been ridicule. The Blue Horizon was not interested in prophecies or magic. They wanted real things for real people: food and shelter and clothing and education. The Fetch derided prophecy as the work of simple minds, of people not willing to put any actual effort into bringing the better world to pass, and Niya had agreed with him. But when Gareth spoke up, even the Fetch listened.

  “We have to test it, that’s all,” Gareth told them one night. “We have to see what she’ll do. If she’s made of the same stuff as the mother, then no prophecy will mean anything. But if she’s not . . .”

  She’s not, Niya thought now. After more than a year in the Keep, Niya knew, better than any of them, that Elyssa was as different from her mother as a child could be. The True Queen prophecy had proven extremely useful to the Blue Horizon in the past weeks, for it had been the easiest thing in the world to direct it onto Elyssa, thus weakening both Arla and the Arvath. Propaganda was the Fetch’s specialty, but Gareth dealt in deeper truths, and he had insisted on seeing Elyssa for himself. If Niya and the Fetch had known that Gareth planned to land himself in the Keep dungeons—and in the hands of Welwyn Culp, of all people!—they would have fought harder . . . but done was done.

  “Please!” a man begged nearby. “Some bread, for my wife!”

  “I have bread,” another man answered. “A full loaf, if you’ll give me three pounds.”

  The words burned in Niya’s brain, but it was not the first time she had heard such an offer. With the drought worsening, even flour was becoming a luxury, and speculators of all kinds had jumped into the market. A few more months without rain, and three pounds for a loaf of bread would look like a bargain.

  “This way, girl,” said one of her captors, nudging her gently to the left. “Stop dawdling.”

  The Church, Niya realized. It must be. If the Queen’s people had identified her as Blue Horizon, they could simply have taken her on any given day in the Keep. But the Holy Father had offered one hundred pounds on the head of any proven ringleader, and her captors were moving her steadily east, toward the Arvath. Under the guise of discomfort, Niya flexed her arms lightly within the limited parameters of the manacles, stretching her back.

  William Tear, guide my hand.

  They came around Hell’s Bend—Niya recognized it because of the crying of old Maeve, who always set up her stall on the same southeastern corner and shouted, “Chickens! Chickens! Roasted chickens!” from sunup to sundown—and as they rounded the corner, Niya launched herself sideways at the man holding her arm, driving with her legs and crushing him into one of the sharp-edged brick moorings that kept most of the houses in the Gut from falling down. The man grunted in surprise, but the grunt cut off almost immediately, and Niya felt warm wetness splatter her arm and shoulder.

  The other two were on her immediately, but not quickly enough to keep her from pulling off the hood, and once sighted, she was able to back away from them, giving herself a two-meter clearing to work with. The man she had sidelined was sprawled on the ground, blood streaming from his left arm, which had torn open at the bicep. From the way he curled on the pavement, Niya felt certain that she had sprung one of his ribs as well. In a quick blink, she identified her surroundings: the long, claustrophobic alley that backed between Hell’s Bend and Murderer’s Row. This early in the morning, the alley itself was empty; the pubs were closed, and even the cutthroats and independent pros had long ago found a bed. The Blue Horizon had no presence in the Row, nowhere to run to. Niya was on her own. Two on one was still poor odds, but—

  But numbers don’t matter, the Fetch whispered in her head. Niya grinned at the memory, feeling the old glee slip over her now, stretching her muscles, giving her strength. Men always thought her merely a pretty bit of fluff, and Niya never tired of giving them an education.

  “You’re up past your bedtime, lads. Run along now.”

  Their eyes widened, and they shared an uncertain look. Each of them outweighed Niya by at least four stone, and both had knives . . . a fact they seemed to remember in that instant, for each drew. But Niya merely smiled, and the sight of that smile made them both pause again.

  “If you kill me, there’s no bounty. Be careful.”

  “Maleficos non patieris vivere,” one of them muttered, and both men crossed themselves.

  “Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live,” Niya translated. Spotless Latin, and now she noticed a second fact as well: all three men were clean-shaven, without so much as a shadow of beard. Not simple mercenaries, seeking to collect a bounty; these were Holy Guards, of the Arvath itself. Despite the manacles on her hands, Niya felt her defensive instincts expand, twisting into something that was almost predatory. She hated God’s Church, hated it with every muscle, for beneath every injustice in the kingdom, every degradation of the powerless, one could always find a priest. When a parishioner emerged from the stables in the Creche, there was always a priest waiting, happy to take his coin and offer absolution. Frocks littered the Almont, holding Hell over the tenants’ heads, counseling obedience and patience. Without the bolster of the Arvath, the tenancy system would have collapsed long before. The Church might have snowed the rest of the kingdom, but the Blue Horizon was not deceived. God’s Church was anathema to all they fought for.

  “Well?” Niya asked pleasantly. “Come on, then.”

  They moved in warily, knives held too far out in front. The Fetch had always said that the Arvath Guard was just for show; the Caden, or even the Queen’s Guard, could have taken them easily. These two were frightened, Niya knew, and there was no greater liability in a fight. It was a lesson she had learned from her earliest years, fending off sots in the Gut. She had been afraid then, for she had only been a child, and starving. But she was not afraid now.

  One of them leapt forward, swinging his knife sidearm. Niya dropped low, moving with the fluid dancer’s grace that had first c
aught the Fetch’s eye. Clutching her manacled hands together, she knocked the man’s knife hand aside, popped to her feet in front of him, and battered his nose with her locked fists. There was a satisfying crunch as the nose fragmented, and the man fell backward, his hands clapped to his face, blood gushing between his fingers.

  The other one had moved behind her; Niya felt his breath on the nape of her neck. She ducked to her left, spun, and straightened to find him overbalanced, his knife now sweeping in a downward arc toward his knees. Niya tackled him, driving him backward into the soot-covered wall of the pub. His head thudded against the stone, and while he tottered there, dazed, Niya drove her booted foot into his groin. He went down without a sound.

  Panting, Niya backed away. She was sweating, though it was a chilly morning. A fine shroud of mist had begun to collect at either end of the alley. Niya wondered whether she should question one of these God-monkeys, find out how they had identified her and, more importantly, whether they knew about her identity in the Keep. But she quickly abandoned the idea. The sun was well up. Soon the early-morning pros would be stirring, and publicans slept all around her. Screaming would awaken someone.

  After another moment’s thought, Niya reached for the man who lay on the ground. She yanked his shirt open at the neck and saw without surprise the gold cross, inlaid with diamonds: the mark of the Arvath Guard. Niya jerked the cross from his neck—the chain snapped easily—drew his head back, and cut his throat. Then she dug into his pockets, looking for the keys to her manacles.

  They were all wearing the crosses, which pleased Niya; the diamonds alone would fetch enough to feed an Almont village for a month. The second guard was unconscious when she sliced him, but the third, the leader, woke up as she pulled his head backward. The man looked up at her with a gaze that Niya fancied imploring, but she was not moved. If these three had managed to get her to the Arvath, His Holiness would have handed Niya over to the Queen—and thus to Welwyn Culp—without a thought. The man on the cobbles gasped, struggling to cry out, and Niya sliced him, as neatly as old Maeve would slice up one of her chickens, smiling kindly at the children who gathered around every morning to watch. Then she took his cross as well, slipping it into her pocket with the others.