Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  Above the body, Mrs. Evans and Arliss stood nearly toe-to-toe. One was backed by enforcers, the other by bodyguards, but their respective muscle seemed to shrink before the two of them . . . two gods at war, except that instead of straddling the world, these two stood astride the Creche.

  “The girl’s ability to read, or not, is not my problem,” Arliss stated blandly. “She asked me for poppy, and I sold it to her. From the look of her, she needed it.”

  Mrs. Evans’s eyes narrowed. “Are you questioning my management of my own product?”

  Arliss looked at her with distaste. “I’m saying that this tragedy could perhaps have been averted. Regardless, I am not responsible for misuse of my poppy. Your ‘product,’ as you put it, damaged herself.”

  Mrs. Evans turned nearly purple but did not speak; for the moment, at least, she had no response. Christian, who had been looking around the room for Maura, spotted little Gwyn standing at the edge of the crowd, her wide eyes fixed on the corpse. He waved a hand to get her attention, then beckoned her over.

  “Lazarus!” she whispered, smiling happily. Christian guided her away, a bit down the hallway, noting almost absently the sharp angles of her elbow beneath his hand. As the topside drought progressed, the price of food was climbing sharply, and Alley girls were fed poorly to begin with. Gwyn seemed nothing but bones.

  “Where’s Maura?”

  “Gone.”

  “What?” Christian asked blankly.

  “She’s gone. Mrs. Evans says for good.”

  “Gone where?” he demanded, feeling something black uncoil inside him.

  “No one knows.”

  Christian restrained an urge to shake the girl. She was only a child, after all . . . a crib child, just as Maura had once been, so he patted her shoulder and thanked her. But Gwyn seemed to sense his anger, for she tugged at his sleeve and whispered, “Bella told me her special client took her away to live in a big, pretty castle. Like a fairy tale.”

  Christian straightened. Rage was coming, only simmering now, but not for long. Bella’s tale was all very well for Gwyn, but Christian didn’t believe in fairy-tale endings, especially not when the prince liked to beat the maid bloody. Beneath his anger lay hurt; how could Maura have left so abruptly, without even leaving him word?

  “Lazarus?” Gwyn asked anxiously. “Are you angry with me?”

  He looked down at her and felt his rage melt away. Gwyn would spend all her days down here, living on her back. For a moment Christian wished he could help her too, just as he had always longed to help Maura, take the child topside and find her a better life. But what was the point in saving one child if he could not save them all?

  “I’m not angry with you,” he told Gwyn, patting her shoulder. “No one should ever be angry with you.”

  The girl smiled brightly, but Christian didn’t notice, for he had already moved onward in his head. The titled lord he had finished on the third level had given him some information, but not enough. Christian had made his life by violence, but he did not have the cruelty to be a good torturer, and in the end he had been able to do little more than threaten. Offering to spare the man’s life had been more effective. The clown tattoo, Latimer had said, was a sign, almost a password, among a club of noble nonces who operated throughout New London. But Latimer was not Maura’s special client; he liked adolescent boys. The man relayed this information matter-of-factly, without a hint of shame, and Christian had suddenly understood the great danger of this so-called club: it gave the nonces normalcy. Latimer saw nothing wrong in his behavior; he was only worried that others would find out. Once the man had told all he knew, Christian had killed him without hesitation.

  He turned back to the common room, where Mrs. Evans and Arliss were still battling it out. Maura’s client was a noble, had to be. But there were hundreds of nobles in the Tearling; even Christian knew that. In a better world, there would be a prince indeed, some man on a white horse to find Maura and take her away from all this. But Christian was the closest thing Maura had to a hero, and all he had to work with was the tattoo.

  “You’ll never deal in the Alley again,” Mrs. Evans spat. “When I’m done with you, you won’t be able to move so much as a single ounce.”

  “You may be right,” Arliss replied wearily. “But we’re done here.”

  He signaled his two bodyguards. Numbly, Christian observed that the bodyguards wore heavy leather belts beneath their cloaks, that each belt seemed to be nothing but weapons: knives and swords and other handles that were difficult to identify. Theirs was a world of weapons, and Christian had never been meant for such things. And now, as Arliss turned to leave, Christian found himself looking speculatively at the dealer . . . not a cold speculation, but one fueled by rage. Her special client took her away, Gwyn had said, but that wasn’t really true, was it? Morphia had taken Maura away. Morphia had made her so eager to get topside, and when the fairy-tale prince had blacked her eye and swollen her jaw, morphia had soothed her injuries, made her willing to go back again. And now the man who dealt the morphia stood right in front of Christian, less than ten feet away. Arliss’s gaze met his, and in the second before the older man’s eyes widened in alarm, Christian saw something terrible: Arliss was truly sorry for the damage he had done, for the dead girl behind him.

  “That won’t save you,” Christian whispered. “Not from me.”

  Arliss drew breath to shout, but it was too late; Christian had already moved, lightning-quick, and grabbed a handle from the belt of the nearest bodyguard. The weapon, whatever it was, did not come easily; Christian gave a mighty yank and heard the rip of leather stitching, and then it was in his hand, unrestrained. He wondered if fighting dogs felt this way, when they finally slipped a muzzle and sank a mouthful of dripping fangs into the handler’s leg.

  Something I can wield.

  He felt the bodyguards coming for him and ducked away, bending and diving around them to come up on the far side with a clear shot at their backs. He went in low, swinging with all his force at the blue-clad man in the center, and as the head of the weapon whickered past, Christian saw that it was not a knife, as he’d thought, or even a hand axe, but a strange clublike thing, its round head covered with metal spikes that tore through Arliss’s side.

  Arliss screamed, a deafening sound in the small room, and the bodyguards came for Christian. Ducking beneath the first man’s swing, he buried his new club in the man’s belly, where it lodged with a splintering crack of ribs. The man dropped without a sound.

  The second bodyguard paused now, and Christian knew that the man had recognized him. Arliss lay on the floor, badly wounded, his right hip a flayed mass of raw tissue. Such wounds usually incentivized Christian, sent him in for the kill . . . but now he halted, astonished to find that sometime in the last few seconds, the beast inside him had vanished, simply tucked tail and retreated to its dark den. Arliss was powerful, yes, but he was only a cog in a much larger machine, and as Arliss had said himself, only a fool blamed the dealer. What Christian really wanted was the life of the one who had built this place. The one who allowed it.

  “Take him,” he told the remaining bodyguard. “Take him topside and find a doctor.”

  His words only seemed to alarm the bodyguard further, for the man stared at Christian with deep suspicion, adjusting his grip on his sword.

  “I mean it. Take him out of here.” Christian lowered the dripping red club, feeling suddenly exhausted. “I have no more quarrel with him. Maybe I never did.”

  Still holding his sword, the bodyguard reached down to grasp Arliss’s arm, hauling him to his feet.

  “Can’t walk,” Arliss groaned, and the bodyguard hesitated, looking from his master to Christian; he could not carry Arliss and hold a sword at the same time. Recognizing the man’s dilemma, Christian carefully placed the club on the ground and backed slowly away.

  “This is a mistak
e, boy!”

  The words were a hiss in his ear: Mrs. Evans, who had made her way around the melee to stand at his side.

  “Better to finish him off now. You’re signing your own death warrant if you let him go.”

  She clutched his shoulder, purple-painted nails gripping like claws. Mrs. Evans had a grudge to settle, and she was a good trafficker; like a good blacksmith or stonecutter, she would use the best tool that lay to hand.

  “She’s right, lad,” Crofter told him. Crofter’s lip was bleeding from where Christian had knocked him down, but he did not seem angry, only sad. Christian wondered how many girls’ corpses Crofter had hauled to the sluice gates that fed the Caddell.

  “You shouldn’t allow him to live,” Crofter rumbled. “He won’t forget it.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to live, Christian nearly replied, but he did not. Such a statement would be lost on Crofter, on Mrs. Evans, both of them so steeped in the Creche’s culture of basic survival that they would not understand his meaning, not even if he explained it to them, step by step.

  The bodyguard hoisted Arliss’s slight frame over one shoulder. This operation was completed in silence, for Arliss had passed out. Crofter was right; the dealer would not forget this, not even if he healed, and one day Christian would be walking down a tunnel and not hear the scrape of boot on stone, nor sense the blade coming until it slipped between his ribs. He watched the bodyguard disappear through the doorway, Arliss’s limp form dangling over his shoulder, leaving a trail of blood behind. The club still lay on the floor, dripping red from its spikes, and at the sight of it, Christian felt perversely elated. This was not the ring, but the real world. He had made a choice, perhaps the first of his life.

  “Go, boy,” Mrs. Evans muttered, disappointed. “Run and hide, down in the Deep Patch. You’d be a fool to linger here.”

  She was right, but Christian did not go. He dug in his pockets and pulled out his only coin, a five-pound silver. Holding it up, he saw Mrs. Evans’s eyes flash, lit with that sparkle that never came but from the sight of money.

  “Where is Maura?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  Mrs. Evans’s eyes narrowed, and Christian saw the quick calculation as she debated her next move. After another moment, she muttered, “I don’t know where she is, truth. Arlen Thorne brokered the deal, four days ago, paid me good gold. He didn’t take any of Maura’s things, but he said we wouldn’t be seeing her again.”

  Christian nodded, then handed her the silver, which vanished in a quick, practiced movement from hand to pocket. Almost without thinking, Christian retrieved the spiked club from the floor. He didn’t know what good it would do—he sensed there was an art to wielding it, one that eluded him—but all the same, he liked the feel of the weapon in his hand.

  “Go, boy,” said Mrs. Evans. The urgency in her voice told Christian that she was expecting someone important soon: a churchman, perhaps, or even a royal. She was anxious to have the gruesome scene cleared away. Christian took a last look at the dead girl, then ducked through the doorway and left the stable.

  Mrs. Evans was right; he should disappear into the Deep Patch, the lowest levels, and hide there while Arliss’s people raged for him across the Upper Creche. That was the way to survive, yes, but Christian had never cared less about survival. He saw Maura as she had lain in her sickbed: her split lip, her pulped cheek. Then he blinked and saw Arlen Thorne, the scarecrow man of the Creche, smiling his nasty, knowing smile.

  I am coming for you, Christian thought, striding up the tunnel with the club clutched in his hand. You’ll beg for death, believe me, and I will give it to you . . . as soon as you give me a name.

  Chapter 11

  THE BETTER WORLD

  The better world is no easy undertaking, but difficulty does not frighten us. We are not discouraged by setbacks, for setbacks are only discrete steps on the road to victory. No amount of darkness can extinguish hope.

  —The Book of the Blue Horizon, as preserved in the Glynn Library

  I don’t understand this,” Elyssa said testily. “You want a better world, fine. Wonderful. But William Tear’s better world had no weapons. Every man in the Tear carries a knife, at the very least, so how on earth are we to get rid of weapons at this late date? Confiscate them?”

  Gareth smiled. It was a smile that annoyed Elyssa, because it would have belonged better on a much older man. Whenever she sat at Gareth’s bedside, she felt very young. He was only twenty-three, if he was to be believed, but there was all the difference in the world between mental and physical age. It hadn’t been so bad when he was still laid up on his back, but now that his ribs were healing, he was able to sit up while they conversed. For Elyssa, it was like being in Lady Glynn’s schoolroom all over again.

  “Confiscation of weapons wouldn’t work,” Gareth agreed. “But force isn’t the goal. The aim is to create a society where weapons would become superfluous. No one has to force a man to discard something he doesn’t need.”

  Elyssa tried to picture such a society, and failed. Steel was wound into the very fabric of the Tearling. Rights in the Almont were essentially held at the point of a sword, and even in New London, where simple laws were at least nominally enforced by city constables and the army, no man dared to travel without a blade. And yet Lady Glynn, too, had talked this way . . . as though logic would have to win out someday, as though reason had ever been any part of why men carried weapons.

  “What about robbery?” she asked. “Even a utopian society wouldn’t wipe out humanity’s tendency to covet. Surely people have the right to defend their own possessions from thieves.”

  Gareth shrugged. “Thievery only thrives because it’s tolerated. In William Tear’s town, if someone stole something, he would never be able to keep it. There are no secrets in a connected society. Everyone would know, and someone would turn him in. There was no thievery . . . not in the beginning, at least.”

  “How do you know so much about William Tear’s town?” Elyssa demanded. It was another sore point with her: Gareth’s impossible familiarity with the fledgling settlement of the Landing period. Even Lady Glynn, who had admired William Tear enormously, hadn’t had anywhere near as much detail. But then the Blue Horizon were fabulous propagandists; look how they had co-opted the True Queen prophecy, wrapped it so tightly around Elyssa that the city was singing ballads about her now. But all the same, Elyssa didn’t think that Gareth was lying about the past. He seemed to understand Tear’s world as one who had lived there.

  “Not everything from the Landing period was lost,” Gareth replied. “There were records kept.”

  “What records? I never heard of any, and Lady Glynn said—”

  “Records don’t have to be written down. And as clever a woman as Carlin Glynn was, she didn’t know everything.”

  Elyssa frowned. Of course Lady Glynn hadn’t known everything, she knew that . . . yet her heart disputed it.

  “Was Lady Glynn one of you?” she demanded. “Blue Horizon?”

  “Yes.”

  Elyssa nodded. Somewhere deep inside herself, she had known. Lady Glynn’s long diatribes on the vast gap between rich and poor; her disgust with the Queen’s tolerance of the traffic in the Creche; her deep and enduring hatred of Welwyn Culp . . . but most of all, the hope in Lady Glynn’s voice, the way she had been able to make the solutions to all of the kingdom’s problems seem very near, perhaps even within reach, if they could only put aside all their meaningless conflicts, their greed, their hatred—

  We take care of each other, Elyssa thought now. That was all Lady Glynn had really been saying to her, every day, and Elyssa had been comforted by the vision Lady Glynn presented, bewitched by the better world. How could she stand in judgment on the Blue Horizon, when Lady Glynn had believed as hard as they did, when they wanted the same things for the Tearling that El
yssa wanted herself?

  “Why did she come here?” she asked Gareth. “Why come and work for the Crown, for my mother?”

  “Because we needed you to be different. Lady Glynn had been friends with Arla since childhood; it was a unique opportunity to plant one of our own at court.”

  “Have you planted others?”

  Gareth smiled but said nothing.

  “Is Lady Glynn dead?”

  “We don’t know, and believe me, we have looked. If she’s alive, she’s not to be found.”

  Elyssa drew a deep breath. Once upon a time, Lady Glynn’s eye of disapproval had been so fierce that Elyssa had been reluctant to hand in a substandard historical analysis. Now she had spent the week imagining her tutor’s reaction, wondering what Lady Glynn would think when she heard that Elyssa Anne Raleigh, noted atheist and sympathizer with the poor, had embraced the Church and denounced the Blue Horizon. Elyssa shrank from the very idea, and the child in her felt a sneaking relief at Gareth’s words, that Lady Glynn was indeed gone, that she would never have to stand before her old tutor and account for her deeds.

  Gareth took a sip of the water by his bedside. Elyssa winced, but then reminded herself that Coryn himself had already tasted the water; he checked it every time the glass was refilled. Elyssa did not have a single guard in this room, not even Barty, who had made a veiled threat to tell her mother when she ordered him to stay outside. But Barty wouldn’t tell her mother. None of them would. Her Guard knew about the speech she was expected to give tonight in the Arvath, and they were furious at her mother’s tactics. Barty in particular had been almost livid on Elyssa’s behalf. Close guards could be a misery . . . but they could also be kind. Tears gathered in Elyssa’s eyes, and she could not will them away. She looked down at the coverlet, rubbing at her eyes as though to rid herself of a speck of dust.