At once the scuffed toe of my boot was very interesting, and I studied it with a concentration Tor Gibson would have praised. “I’m sorry. Switch and I . . . We’d been keeping it private. Didn’t want everyone just jumping in, you know?”
“Only person I can think you’d not want is Ghen, and he can’t go anyhow. Same as me.” Siran was smiling openly now, and in the lamplight her slit nostril almost vanished.
I conceded that point with as much grace as was left to me.
“The hell were you looking at ships for?” Pallino interjected. “Thought I told you you don’t have the money and not to fuck with it.”
“Technically you told me we’d talk about it when the year was up.”
The older man swore, glancing from Elara to Siran like he couldn’t believe I’d said that. “Twice twenty years on the Emperor’s coin and this is what I get? Lip?”
“Had’s been off since that priest stunned his ass,” Elara put in, drawing an icy glare from me.
Pallino’s blue eye widened. “What’s this, now?” He looked round at his paramour, reaching up to adjust his rough leather eye patch.
The last thing I wanted was to relate that particular tale right now. But I sighed, recounting in brief the incident with Gilliam the intus and his foederati compatriots. Much as I hated to admit it, I was glad of the reprieve, the momentary distraction from Switch and the damage I’d done. Despite what you may think reading this account, I do not enjoy reliving my mistakes, and that one still stung.
“The hunchbacked one?” Pallino frowned. “That’s the prior’s by-blow, ain’t it?”
“It is,” I agreed somewhat darkly.
“You think they’ve really got one of the Pale squirreled away down there?” He looked at Siran, who was after all a prisoner herself, free only here in the training yard. Siran only shrugged. I shifted my helmet from one hand to the other, unsure what to say. I had about half a dozen notions of how I could break into the coliseum’s gaol to see if there was any truth to what the mercenary Kogan had told Switch and me what seemed like months ago. Looking back, I suppose it was that brush with the outer Dark that pushed me back to Gila’s repo shop, that had driven me to unlock a piece of my palatine identity, if only for a moment.
“Maybe,” I replied.
“It’s not important now anyway, Pal,” Elara said, putting a hand on the older man’s shoulder. Eyes on me, she asked, “You going to be all right there, Had?”
“I wasn’t entirely honest with him,” I said. “With Switch, I mean.” I was certainly not about to be entirely honest with these three either. Let them think I’d tried to swindle him on our deal. I did not mind being thought a cheat. I had been called far worse. What I planned to do to Gila’s crew and the Mataro County should have been proof enough of that.
“Is that all?” Pallino shrugged his shoulders, leaning against the nearest of the squat pillars. “Black Earth, boy, I thought it was something more serious, the way these two were going on . . .” He waved a hand at Siran and Elara, who bridled. “Look, we’ve got knife work to do here, like you was saying to those poor sods. Get your shit together, Had. I don’t want you pulling any of this berserker nonsense in a real fight. You’re not a fucking Maeskolos. You can’t fight three at once, and thems won’t be trainees you’re tussling.” I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that, but I didn’t have to. Pallino wasn’t done. “We may be your friends, boy, but if you throw yourself into a mess next time we’re on the floor, I’m not jumping in after you.” He drew a line across his throat to emphasize his point.
Ashamed, I bowed my head in understanding.
“We’re just worried about you, lad,” Elara said, putting a conciliatory hand on my shoulder.
I shrugged her off and made for the door. They were right, but I didn’t have to say it.
“This isn’t a game, boy! Not for us!” Pallino called after me. “Oy, we’re talking at you!”
It was too much. There comes a time past each of our mistakes when we must decide to stop adding to the weight of our errors. It comes before we are willing to carry that weight but after we take it on ourselves. I set my jaw as I turned to glare back at them. My mistake with Switch did not wash out the necessities of my condition. I needed that ship. I would have done anything to get it.
Siran cut in, a voice of reason. “Can’t you just talk to Switch? He’s been downright unreasonable . . .”
“Then maybe you should talk to him,” I countered, glad of the simple riposte.
* * *
It was only after they left me alone as I deserved that I realized what the strange expression was that I had caught flickering candle-like on their weathered faces. It wasn’t dislike or suspicion or even pity. It was concern. They feared for me. Not in the life-and-limb way Cat had done, nor out of white-knuckled fear of my father. They cared because they chose to, and they did so with a gruff but quiet indelicacy that propped me up in my despair and whispered that this was what it was to have a family. A ragged and blustering one, beyond a doubt, but I’d not have traded them for my natural one, not for all the ships in the sky.
And yet . . . and yet I was leaving them. Was trying to leave them, at least. I had been trying since before I’d met them, since I met the sailor, Crow, that day in the cafe. Kogan’s tale still spun in my ears, his words catching in me as Crow’s had, like sparks in tinder. I was remembering the boy I’d been not so long ago. Hadrian Marlowe. I wanted knowledge, knowledge like Simeon the Red had. That was where I had first erred, wasn’t it? In the forgotten Latin, to err was to wander or stray, not to make a mistake. I had staggered from my father’s vision of my life and—like the sinner in the old prayer—fallen from the narrow way into some unfortunate hell. I had wandered, but I was not lost. I had my way out. More than that, I had friends who cared enough to irritate me and hurt because of me. And I was close—I suspected—to one of the Cielcin. There was knowledge of the most special kind. Something even ancient Simeon had not seen or spoken to.
That was something else entirely.
CHAPTER 42
SPEAK LIKE A CHILD
THE CROWD APPLAUDED WHEN we survived. My chest was heaving. The creature’s blood clung to my face, ran into my eyes, cobalt and stinking of copper. I still had one spear in my hands, forgotten, and the other three were lodged deep in the dying creature’s back. I never knew its name—some pelagic beast dredged up from the seas of distant Pacifica. In truth it reminded me of the Umandh, all tentacles and teeth. In death it deflated like a balloon, the thousand tiny hearts that kept its blood pressurized and its body rigid pumping that same blood into the morning air.
Ghen was cheering, pounding Switch on the back. Even Siran looked pleased, smiling as she stared up into the sky. I spat, sending a gobbet of phlegm mixed with the alien’s blood onto the sand. It tasted like burnt metal, like acid and smoke. I stank of the same, drenched as I was in it. Mine had been the blow that had finally cleaved a rent in the chitinous plates of the beast’s hide and opened a major blood vessel.
In the box above us, the count was standing, clapping as he had on each of the rare occasions he’d been in attendance. His husband, Lord Luthor Shin-Mataro, a plutocrat from an old Mandari family, stood beside him, a slim figure in silver-green. “Well fought, well fought!” The count leaned against the parapet, speaking directly to us myrmidons. In the shadows behind him, a pair of Umandh waved a series of paper fans to cool the count and his man, as well as the two children and the collected advisors and counselors who had that day been invited to the royal box. A useless gesture, as the box was doubtless climate-controlled within its nested shield curtains. The count launched into another rote demonstration of our skill and gallantry, this time without the reservations he usually made for loss of life and glorious sacrifice.
None of us had died.
None of us had died.
“You are all exemplars of
your craft.” He cast an object down from his box, a leather pouch that struck the bricks with the clang and jangle of gold. “A gift.” I was closest, so I approached to take the bag.
In the moment before I spoke, my eyes found the count’s, and he bowed his head, inclining it in the slightest deference which from so great a lord as he was a measure of high respect. By all accounts, Count Balian Mataro was a man of classic passions. He enjoyed hunting—though there were no forests on Emesh—and fighting—though no subject would give him a fair contest. Yet whenever his rigid schedule allowed, he witnessed a fight in his coliseum or a race in his circus. Whenever impressed, he doled out bonuses. The others—or those free to leave the coliseum complex—would take the money into Borosevo and spend it on whores and drugs and entertainments of all description. It was my third time receiving such a dispensation. The gold from the previous two remained in my private locker, secured with my few personal possessions, namely my house ring and the new journal I had purchased. It was a luxurious thing: fine white paper and black leather with silver clasps. I missed my drawing, you see.
This time, Pallino was not here to say the words, and so I went to one knee in the dust, a pain reporting in my sliced thigh, and said, “We thank you, Your Excellency, for your generosity. Truly we are not worthy of such honors.” It was a pittance, really, less than a fraction of what I had once swindled from Lena Balem—and lost in epic fashion. I chafed to grovel like that and chafe more at remembering it. A knee so unaccustomed to bend as mine does not bend easily. Yet they were just meaningless words, expected of my station and the context in which we found ourselves.
But, when in Rome . . .
* * *
Though it was in part a prison, the coliseum complex in Borosevo was not like the dungeons of the bastille on Vesperad or the Emperor’s prison planet on Mars. It held its secrets in slack fingers, and time and imprudence jostled them. Rumor was that the priest, Chanter Gilliam Vas—sometimes in the company of a blindfolded cathar, sometimes not—had been seen in the coliseum warrens many times since the Obdurate’s arrival and the influx of foederati and legionnaire dropouts to our ranks. The word was that they were keeping something in the solitary confinement ward of the underground prisons amongst the madmen and the murderers who died in Colosso in the most spectacular of ways. Some said it was an Exalted, one of the demoniacs who ply the Dark between the stars, as in the tale of Kharn Sagara. I heard various descriptions: it had two heads, or else six arms, all jointed steel and exposed bone. Still others said it was a traitorous lord, some maniac who’d turned against mankind and the light of Mother Earth in favor of the Cielcin. They said he broke bread and meat with them and supped on the bones of human children.
They have said the same of me.
Many times I’d pointed out the obvious theory, the one we’d heard from Kogan: that the count had purchased a captured Cielcin from the foederati who’d sailed to Emesh aboard the Obdurate. That theory had caught in the minds of the myrmidons and the gladiators both.
Sweating from a round of exercises in the yard, we all marched back into the musty cool of the coliseum hypogeum. Switch was ahead, laughing with one of the younger recruits. His once-slim form had filled out in the months of our indenture. He looked a proper fighter. Siran made some passing remark to me before she and Ghen—along with five more of our number—were marched back to their cells in the prison block. I waved farewell, returning Siran’s jest with a wry remark of my own.
“Now what?” Switch’s recruit friend asked. “Food?”
Surprising him and most of us, Switch wrapped an arm around the recruit’s waist. “We need to get you clean first!” The recruit elbowed him in the ribs, and Switch bent over, groaning. Pallino and the others all laughed at his expense, and I smiled.
“You two can go wash yourselves, then,” Pallino said, passing his helmet off to one of the others with a knowing look. He always seemed to have a mock attendant at hand, a squire of sorts. The grizzled veteran adjusted the strap of his leather eyepiece and said, “Food for us, then. And none of that shit they serve upstairs. I’m cooking.” That evinced a small cheer, for Pallino was as fine a cook as any I’d ever met, in his plebeian way. It always surprised people, learning that of the leathery old man. I watched him go, smiling at the others, but I didn’t move, for a notion had struck me.
One of the others jostled me, and I came to, looking round. “What’s that?”
Erdro, who had been with us since the beginning, repeated his question. “You coming?”
“I . . .” I looked away, down the hall at Switch and his recruit’s retreating backs. “No, no. You go on without me.”
Erdro frowned. “You’ll lose mass if you don’t eat, man.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I waved him off. He wasn’t wrong, but the loss of a single meal would hardly devastate me.
One of the girls grinned. “He’s going to go bathe with Switch.”
“You wish!” I shot back, grinning crookedly. This hit too near the mark, for she blushed. “No, I’ll catch up to you. Might take some of our bonus for that last win into town, get something that’s not vat-grown.” Unbidden, I felt a pang of longing for the sea markets and the bazaars of Meidua, for the old Nipponese man and his fish rolls. I missed the taste of game brought in from our forest and from the valley of the Redtine. Real food, honest and true, was a thing enjoyed only by the wealthy, who could afford it, and the destitute, who were so close to it that no one could take it away.
“All right then, Had.” Pallino sketched a salute—his polite farewell—and drew the others off and away. Over his shoulder he called, “Practice tomorrow at eighth watch.” I returned the salute with Imperial precision, as if the man were a tribune or legate of the corps. He didn’t see it, but he didn’t have to. They were gone.
I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect time. The convict-myrmidons would be frog-marched through their short shower cycle and returned to their block in time for the evening meal. I knew they weren’t locked into cells after the fashion of a palatine’s dungeon or a Chantry bastille but simply confined to a dormitory under lock and key.
That key was held by one of two guards in a duty station at the end of the hall where weeks before Gilliam Vas had ordered me stunned by his foederati. Constantly bored, the two gaolers lounged behind their desk, wearing tired expressions and khaki uniforms with the Mataro sphinx embroidered on their sleeves. I passed them, walking with purpose up a narrow side ramp and into one of the stainless-steel-paneled service corridors that led to the kitchens. If I was right, the food trolleys would be along with their variously flavored protein pastes and watery vegetables at any moment, pushed in a train by several of the coliseum staff, plainclothes men who had drawn the short straw that day and so were made to make the long and tedious circuit of the prison block.
I mussed up my hair, changing the lie of it, and on a whim adopted an impression of the chanter’s hunched shoulders, thrusting my head a little forward on my neck to disguise the face of Had of Teukros just a little. You would be surprised how much a little change deflects even those men who account themselves astute. Once I fooled an Imperial auctor with little more than accent and a pair of colored lenses to hide my violet eyes.
“You there!” A thickset plebeian man in a white-striped chef’s costume poked his head out of a side door, framed with steam from a huge pot simmering on a heating element and glowering in a way that showed off his pronounced underbite. “Boy, come here!”
“Messer?” I frowned, effecting a Durantine accent, Chand’s face and tones coming so readily to mind.
All in all, this disguise would not have fooled an Imperial auctor—it might not have fooled an astute child. But the man wasn’t quite as bright as are most children, and so he swore, “Bloody offworld shit-lickers. You! Yes, you! Are you deaf, boy? Come here.” He pointed, gesturing violently with a spoon. Committed momentarily to my scheme, I st
umped in after him, helped him to hoist the steaming pot into a cradle atop one of the rolling trolleys I’d come to find. Behind him, farther into the kitchens, a team of cooks worked under the big, ugly man to finish the meal. I was early, so I spent the next few minutes taking the man’s orders in silence, all the while maintaining the hunchback as best I could.
After perhaps ten minutes, a round-faced local woman poked her head in from the back hall. “Protein’s thawed out, Stromos.”
The monstrous chef with the underbite practically snarled at the woman. “Not ready here.”
“They’re prisoners, man. You’re not cooking for the count.”
“More’s the pity,” the man grumbled. But in short order the food—finished or otherwise—was packed into heated pans and marched into the hall. To himself, Stromos said, “No one appreciates food anymore.” My heart went out to him.
I grabbed the sleeve of an attendant as he was leaving the kitchen with a cart of some noodle dish in brown sauce. “I’ll take it.”
The man eyed me, confused. “Really?”
I smiled. “Yeah, you look dead tired, and I got a girl in there. You know?”
“One with the slits?” He picked at his nose, indicating the mutilation. “Why?” He made the question sound one of genuine confusion, as if he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting one of the felons for any reason whatever.
“Look at me!” I shrugged my sloped shoulders, sinking into the character of the hunchbacked plebeian, and grinned. “And I don’t really have to look at her face, you hear?” I grinned, more a snarl than anything, and the other man laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.
A part of me danced inside when I made it over the threshold, following the line of food workers down a narrow hallway lit by roundels high on the left. Mirrored panels on the ceiling concealed cameras and recording equipment. Whether or not anyone was watching was another question. The dancing part within me turned over, slowing as I contemplated my next step. I’d been guessing that this would work for months. I wanted only to see it, to know it was really here. If Kogan’s story was true—and I put the odds strongly in the one-time mercenary’s favor—I only wanted a glimpse.
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