“After only a year?” Pallino scratched his stubbly jaw, steadied by Elara hanging on his arm. “You couldn’t afford a damn leaky tub on six thousand. You’d need a hell of a lot more.”
I smiled thinly, staggering a bit. “That’s why I’m talking to you both.” I lay a hand on Pallino’s shoulder. “You were a legionnaire—a thirty-year man, was it?” I undershot the number on purpose. “You must be tired of this life!”
“Twice twenty years, and you know it, lad!” Pallino groused, pulling Elara closer. She yelped, and the old myrmidon proclaimed, loud and drunkenly, “My sword was first wetted on Sulis!”
Elara swatted him. “Everyone knows, dear.”
“Killed forty of the Pale for His Radiance!” Pallino said to all who’d listen. He put an arm on my shoulder. “For the Emperor, yeah? Not you, Your Hadrian-ness. Ness . . .”
I knew it wasn’t the time for a conversation like this, but we were all drunk and riding high on the taste of blood and victory. “Switch and I were thinking you two might want to join us. Look. We buy the ship jointly, divvy up shares—”
“We can talk about it,” Elara said, looking over her shoulder to where a mostly sober Switch helped a sick Erdro along. “If the whore boy don’t bite the dust come Summerfair.”
“I won’t!” Switch bristled, face red as his hair, flush with wine and the courage of his survival. “I’ll make you eat those words!”
“Hope so, lad!” she shot back not unkindly, ignoring Kiri’s shouts to leave Switch alone. “But a year’s a long time. Miracle old Pal here and I are still kicking after five and three!”
Pallino’s one eye widened. “Miracle? It’s no such thing, woman. It’s skill!” And from there the old veteran swung into another of his too-familiar tirades about how the gladiators were no proper soldiers and no match for those who were. He beat his chest in an approximation of the Legions salute. “Cost me my good eye to stay alive, it did. That’s more than those green-armored boy-fuckers can claim.” He coughed a bit, stopped to sway uneasy on his feet despite the woman supporting him.
I shook my head, exasperated. I liked Pallino. The old soldier had a gruff charm and bravado in him that spoke to a certain atavistic part of me, as if he were—to use Switch’s term—a proper man, back when that meant only one thing. For all that there was an honorableness in him that ran deep, and he’d kept his head in the thick of the fighting, as befit a veteran of forty years. I wondered at his age and reasoned that he must have a drop or two of patrician blood in him. He had to be older than sixty standard, perhaps halfway to seventy, and yet he moved like a man of fifty, a construct of horn and hardened leather.
“Look, Had,” he said, seeming suddenly more sober. “It ain’t a bad notion, but you don’t know how much money it takes to get even a pissy old lighter spaceborne and staying there. Even with what the woman and I have stored away, you’re not going to get anything new.” He shook his head, and by the tone of his voice I knew I’d pressed far enough, so I ducked my head and followed him. I hadn’t planned on buying anything new. It just needed to fly. “You ain’t going to buy nothing with six kilos in specie. A decent ship’s worth the price of a township, son.” We went on in the droning, slurring noise that passes for quiet among the truly drunk and happy. After a few blocks Pallino seized my arm again. “Don’t buy nothing with VX-3 ion engines. Norman crap’ll shake you right out of the sky.” And I knew I had him, at least for now. It was a start, the first step down a road that would take me off of Emesh and into the heavens, away from this long, dark purgatory of the soul. I said no more, but Pallino’s words had lit something in me. The price of a township. Well, I still had something worth that much, didn’t I? How could I have forgotten?
So I did not press the matter but sang softly with the others from “Between the Worlds So Shining Bright.” And for once—perhaps for the first time—I knew what it was to be among friends and was content.
CHAPTER 38
BLOOD LIKE WAX
I NEVER LOST A round of single combat in the Colosso, never had to kneel beside one of the professional gladiators or my fellow myrmidons to await the judgment of the crowd. Not in five engagements. Not in ten. After seven months and a particularly clever turn using sand from the coliseum floor to short out a gladiator’s shield-emitters, I’d garnered quite the reputation. I’d not been made to kill anyone either. The proper gladiators were not permitted to die, and on the rare occasion that I battled one of my fellow myrmidons, I disarmed them. The commons loved the gallantry of it. Most of my fellow myrmidons lacked the proper training I had, and one-on-one duels were where I was most at home.
The risk of death only came in the group actions such as that first combat I have described. To consecrate each day of combat to Earth and Emperor, those of us not fighting in the small pools or single-combat tournaments would shed our blood in the opening melee. Call it tradition. I participated several times, scraping by sometimes by the skin of my teeth and sometimes in spectacular triumph. Once we came through without losing a single man. Another time only Switch and I remained. Kiri left the Colosso shortly after I arrived, and Banks died shortly after that, killed in single combat with the gladiator captain Jaffa when the man’s spear struck a joint in his armor.
The Umandh were made to fight too. Once I watched a droning quartet of xenobites battle a pair of panthers brought from offworld. One of the beasts fell quickly, the great cats goaded by hunger and hormone shots that drove them mad. The others—learning that the alien things were predators—panicked and tried to defend themselves, their tentacles lashing at the massive cats. They succeeded, but not before another of their number was critically wounded, leaking its noxious green blood onto the bricks. I’d never fought one of the creatures myself. They were not permitted to battle against the human myrmidons. Even without proper combat armor the creatures stood a chance of victory, and it wouldn’t have done for a child of Earth to fall at the hand—or what passed for hands—of a xenobite barbarian.
* * *
The myrmidons’ dining hall in the coliseum dormitories stank of sweat and vat-grown meat and smelled of home. After nearly a year in the Colosso, after fifty-seven of my contracted group engagements and nearly as many nonlethal single combats, the musty place with its shallow-arched ceiling and sputtering lamps was more a home than Devil’s Rest had ever been. I was always greeted with friendly waves from Elara and the others who knew me and with whispers from the rawer recruits. The Legion troop carrier Obdurate had limped into port recently, discharging a few foederati contract soldiers who wanted out of the war. For them the lives of myrmidons at Colosso on a strange new world was a vacation, paradise after the rigors of real combat.
“Nearly wiped the Pale out at Wodan,” one was saying as I walked past. “First Strategos Hauptmann led the sortie himself.”
“Really?”
The foederatus nodded over his bottle of energy drink. “Sure. How do you think we took so many of the demons hostage?”
I stopped, listening. Cielcin hostages. The thought stirred a long-dead piece of me. Scattered words of their language played in my ears. Grubbing as I had in the streets, I had forgotten the war. Always it had seemed so remote, so distant. The monsters had seemed painted at the fringes of the map. They snaked their way closer now, worming their way out of the Dark.
“Hostages?” It was Switch, seated at the table with the foederati. He caught sight of me and waved. “Had! You’ve got to hear this.” He urged me over, and though I’d already eaten, I moved to sit on the bench beside him. “This is Kogan; he’s a mercenary.”
“Was a mercenary,” Kogan said, speaking in a thick accent I didn’t recognize, doubtless that of some hinterlands minority on some planet I’d never heard of. He offered me a hand. I had finally learned the commoners’ gesture and shook it. “Kogan.”
“Had.” I glanced sidelong at Switch. “You were in the war?”
&n
bsp; “Battle of Wodan, forty years back. Just ditched my contract with the Legions, left my company.” He scratched his beard. Kogan was—like me—a good deal paler than the Emeshi, though he wore a plasma burn high on one cheek that turned the plane into a sheet of bubbled scar tissue. His thick neck crawled with tattoos partially concealed by body hair nearly so dense as his beard. “Seized one of their worldships. What’s left of it, anyway. The demons scuttled it in orbit before their leader fled to warp.” He raised his plastic drinking bottle. “Score one for Earth.” He looked at me, speculative. “You’re the one, then? This Had I keep hearing about?”
This had ceased to surprise me, though it never ceased to discomfit me. I answered it as I might have done in my father’s court. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m the only Had here that I know of.”
“I hear you’re quite the duelist. Seen it, too. Your fight against that gladiatrix with the red hair. What’s her name?”
“Amarei,” Switch said, unconsciously patting down his own red mane.
“That’s the one.” Kogan drained his bottle. “I hear you’ve got palace training. That you’re some sort of nobleman.”
I studied Kogan, eyes narrowing in spite of myself. “I’ve been hearing that a lot.” Eager to get the focus off of me, I asked, “You captured Cielcin at Wodan?”
“Only a couple hundred. Hauptmann gave them over to the LIO,” Kogan said with a conspiratorial tilt of his head, referring to the Legion Intelligence Office. He leaned further in. “I was just telling your boy here that before I left my company, Commandant Alexei—that’s my old boss—retained a pair of the prisoners for sport.”
“Sport?” I frowned. “Never heard of anyone trying to keep Cielcin slaves.”
“Guess that shit about you being a lordling’s shit then.” Kogan grinned. “Way I hear it, the palatines have been trading Cielcin since the war began.”
One hand flitted up to press my ring to my chest through the fabric of my tunic, and I paused for the space of a breath to stop myself saying something stupid. I’d never heard of any such thing, but that didn’t necessarily make M. Kogan a liar. Rather than disagree with him or say something that might have laid open any sort of truth about myself, I asked, “Which company were you with? The Cousland Drakes?” I’d heard mention of such a company attached to the Obdurate, their vessels stored in the massive carrier’s holds. Switch had been drinking in news of the orbiting battleship as if he’d been parched all week.
Kogan actually spat on the floor, raising more than a few eyebrows from the next table of myrmidons. “The Cousland fucking Drakes? I was with the Whitehorse under Sir Alexei Karelin. Do I look like one of Arno Cousland’s pillow-biters? No.” He slapped the table. “I’ve done seventeen years of active service with Whitehorse Company. Nearly one hundred twenty years standard.” He was referring to his time in and out of cryonic fugue. “Served no fewer than five Legion contracts in seven major engagements. Cousland’s bitches just shoved paper around and marched in Hauptmann’s fancy parades.”
I stood slowly so as not to be perceived as a threat and bowed fractionally. “I didn’t mean to cause offense, messer.”
“Offense?” Kogan shook his head, suddenly amiable. “No, you planetbound saps can’t offend me none. Just correcting your mistake.”
* * *
Some days later I left sparring practice and hurried out into the hall, grateful for the climate control system that worked its best to keep the place a little cool and even more grateful for the sudden solitude. Kogan had been regaling our team at length about his exploits in the Battle of Wodan, how his foederated company had assisted the 437th and 438th Centaurine Legions—under the direction of Duke Titus Hauptmann—in destroying one of the Cielcin worldship fortresses. It might have been a good tale if the teller hadn’t been a belligerent and erratic one.
I thought plaintively of a bath in the common area for the freed myrmidons. At the dinner hour it was likely to be nearly empty, and I had no combats scheduled for the next week. My mind wandered as I walked, recalling my previous bout, the one Kogan had mentioned against the gladiatrix Amarei. It had been my twenty-seventh single combat—my twenty-seventh victory—since registering with Doctor Chand and the Borosevo Colosso. It had nearly been a defeat, in truth. She was as good as any fighter I had ever seen. I’d only won because I’d started gaming the suit, not fighting like it was a proper duel. Amarei had been armored in a combat skin-suit, same as all the proper gladiators. The suit had no way to simulate damage other than to seize up, and so repeated scrapes to her arms slowed her suit’s programmed response time. Underhanded, perhaps, but she wasn’t the one with the weeping red lines on the inside of one arm and on her chest. She wasn’t the one bleeding her life’s blood into the ring.
I descended a flight of metal stairs and exited into a curving hallway, passing lines of dormitory chambers, names glowing on wall panels above palm-locks. Following the hall, I reached the place where it intersected with a tunnel that ramped up onto the street and the complex landing field, then crossed that path into the baths complex near the holding cells where the convicted myrmidons had their block. I rounded the corner at a brisk walk and nearly knocked over a tall man in black robes.
Not black. Darker.
He spluttered, falling back on a guard in a strange brown uniform with cream epaulets. “Watch where you’re going, slave!” He straightened, taking in my appearance and my simple attire, pressing a perfumed cloth to his face in the rank tunnel.
Cautious, I bowed deeply, straightening my right leg out before me. “Forgive me, Your Reverence, but I am no slave.”
The chanter lowered his kerchief, revealing a hooked nose wrinkled in disgust. “No, no, I suppose you’re not, sirrah.” There was a lisping, aristocratic drawl to the man’s voice, a liquid hauteur that tightened my fists. He stood tall almost as myself. At a glance I’d thought him palatine, short for that exalted caste. But continued study revealed that he was patrician; the slight surgical treasons that were the hallmark of that lesser, artificially enhanced caste betrayed him.
No, not patrician either. My jaw tightened, and my skin began to crawl.
There was something wrong about the priest. Something off. In the scant light, I could see that one eye gleamed a piercing blue while the other was black as pitch. He had a head of thick blond hair, oiled and combed straight back from a square face and heavy jaw; his nose was bent, his broad shoulders hunched. The high blood that ran like fire in my veins stuck in his like wax. Half a hundred tiny imperfections evidenced themselves in his face, in his posture and carriage, more so even than in the bulk of the serfs and plebeians I had known. “Out of the way,” he said.
Dutifully I stepped aside, back against the wall, and focused my attention on the quartet of guards. The uniforms were completely unfamiliar. Dark brown jackets belted at the waist, high black boots. Each bore a patch on his right forearm, an armorial white horse rampant against that brownness. Kogan’s words came back to me. The Whitehorse Company. Free mercenaries. Foederati. They marched a standing fugue cylinder on a carriage between them, the heavy device buoyed several inches from the floor. It stood empty, quiescent, the running lights dim. They’d come up from the prison section. Standing against the wall, I glanced back down the way they’d come, bit my lip.
I made a decision and cleared my throat. “Forgive me, messers. You’re not with the Whitehorse Company, by chance, are you?”
The chanter’s escort turned, slowed up a little. The robed man went on a little farther, then stopped as the oldest of his four guards said, “We are.”
“Under Alexei Karelin?”
“Walk away, pissant,” the chanter said, narrowing his eyes in that broad, unhandsome face as he glared right at me. “Right now.”
“Sir Alexei Karelin,” a younger soldier corrected, pride overriding his master’s command.
“Forgive
me.” I bowed, not quite so formally as I had moments before, buying a moment to examine the floating fugue crèche floating in its suppression field. It was far too large for any man, a floating lozenge large enough for a cow. If Kogan had been telling the truth, I knew what had been in that crèche. Not a cow, but no human either. “Forgive me, I’d not realized the man was a knight.” I paused, licked my lips. The top one was still split from where Amarei had broken it with a punch the week before. “Are you hiring?” It was an idle question, not one I truly expected to get me anywhere.
The chanter produced his kerchief from his sleeve again and pressed it to his face, those mismatched eyes suddenly hard as he moved toward me. Ah, the look of aristocratic contempt. I’d seen it so often in my own father. No—this was more like the light in Crispin’s eyes, rampant and feverish. “Are you deaf, boy?” He seized me by the shirt front, slammed me against the wall. I’d had worse, so much worse, and tried not to smile at the effort. Let the man think he was in control. “I said walk away.”
Pointedly I ignored the priest holding me and spoke instead to the four guards. “I speak eight languages, five of those well, and I’ve almost a year’s Colosso fighting experience.” The thought had literally occurred to me as I spoke it, yet there it was: a way for me to leave Emesh, and soon. Switch could come with me, and Pallino and the others, if they wanted. The foederati shifted uneasily, eyeing the angry priest. Still I hoped business was business. It was the soldiers I needed to listen, not the Chantry’s man.
It might have worked, but the priest slammed me back against the wall again. My head struck stone. I winced, losing focus for a second as he stepped back, wiping his hands on the front of his synthetic black robes. Still I didn’t fight back. The man was a priest of the Holy Terran Chantry, anointed with the ash of the Homeworld herself. No matter my blood, it would have been death to strike him. He made a gesture to his guards. “Stun him.”
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