Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  “Lady Glynn would have called that hypocrisy indeed.”

  “Carlin Glynn is no longer your tutor.” Her mother’s voice turned to ice, as it always did at the mention of her former friend. “I curse the day I ever brought that bitch in here. She filled your head full of socialist drivel, and now it begins to wear holes in your sense.”

  “Is that why she disappeared, Mother?”

  “Do not think to distract me with Lady Glynn. We were speaking of you.”

  “All right,” Elyssa replied, and sat down in one of the sumptuous armchairs scattered before the throne, tipping her head back as though she were bored. Her fright was as great as ever, but it seemed important, so important, that her mother not see. “What about me?”

  “This little flirtation of yours with the Blue Horizon has gone far enough. It’s time for you to repudiate them, once and for all.”

  “And how am I to do that?”

  “Next weekend, we are invited to the Arvath for the thirtieth anniversary of the Holy Father’s assumption. I was going to skip it; it will be a dull affair, and I would rather play hearts. But now, thanks to your foolishness, I must go and mend my fences. You will go with me.”

  An alarm bell went off in Elyssa’s head. She had only entered the Arvath once in her life, on the day of her christening in the Great Cathedral.

  “Go to the Arvath? For what purpose?”

  “To control the damage. I cannot have conflict with the Holy Father now. Food is becoming scarce. If the drought continues, civil unrest comes next, and we want no fighting in the streets.”

  So she does fear the drought, Elyssa thought. What has changed her mind?

  “Don’t you see, Elyssa?” her mother asked, leaning forward. “This is the great use of the Arvath. People who worry about their everlasting souls don’t have time to take up arms.”

  “How very godly of you, Mother.”

  “I never claimed to be godly, child. I am hardly such a fool. But the Church has a function in this kingdom. God is morphia, and he anesthetizes most effectively when Crown and Arvath work in lockstep.”

  “And what has that to do with me?”

  “Don’t play stupid, Elyssa.” Her mother’s voice had chilled again. “You are the next ruler of this kingdom, and the Arvath demands your public support, just as it demands mine. So on Saturday night, in front of the Holy Father, the nobles, the priests, you will denounce the Blue Horizon and swear allegiance to the Church.”

  “I will not.”

  “Really?” the Queen asked, smiling, and suddenly the fear was back, gripping Elyssa more tightly than ever. She knew that smile.

  “They’re calling you the True Queen in the city, my girl. Elyssa Regina, the one who saves us all. Did you know that?”

  “I have heard of it,” Elyssa replied cautiously, not understanding the tangent, but not liking it . . . nor her mother’s tone.

  “They say you will right wrongs, heal all the wounds of the kingdom,” her mother continued. “And I know you, Elyssa. Carlin went to work on you before you were even out of nappies, and her cursed campaign was effective. You want to be the True Queen. You want to save them all, and you want it badly, at any cost . . . even that of my throne. My legacy.”

  Elyssa blinked, bewildered. Who cared for what the Arvath historians wrote down in a hundred years? People were starving now.

  “Your legacy,” she repeated bitterly. “Not everything is about you, Mother.”

  But again, her mother refused to rise to the bait.

  “The time has come for you to grow up and assume your responsibilities, Elyssa. You will heal this breach with the Arvath, and you will do it on Saturday, in full view of every noble in the kingdom.”

  “And why is that?”

  Her mother leaned forward, smiling again. “Because if you do not, I will strip you of your designation as heir.”

  “You would not.”

  “I would.”

  “And give it to Thomas?” Elyssa demanded. Her disbelief was genuine, for a worse ruler than her younger brother could hardly be imagined. Thomas had raped two girls that she knew of, likely more, and had run up gambling debts with half the bookmakers in the city. At first, Lady Glynn had taught both Thomas and Elyssa, but only until Thomas was eight, after which she delivered the damning judgment that Thomas was not worth teaching. Thomas’s ability to do mathematics ended with subtraction, and historical analysis had proven an impenetrable mystery. He disdained reading, appeared to care only for gambling and whoring and raising hell in the Gut. As a prince, he was a liability. As king, he would be disastrous.

  “You would not do this, Mother. You loathe Thomas. You hate him even more than I do.”

  “I do hate him,” the Queen replied. “A fool on the throne would be a blow indeed, but fools, at least, can be guided by others. If I asked Thomas to make such an announcement at the Holy Father’s party, he would do it without a thought.”

  “Because he has no conscience! How many girls have there been, Mother? I know you’re paying at least two families for their silence, but I assume that’s the tip of the iceberg. How many have there been?”

  “More than two, that’s certain,” her mother replied, with another of those false sighs meant to approximate regret. “He’s an expensive piece of baggage, your brother. I blame his father. That man was an angel in the bedroom, but a devil everywhere else . . . and Thomas clearly doesn’t even have the bedroom skills to boast of.”

  “It’s not a joke!” Elyssa shouted. “There’s an entire kingdom at hazard here!”

  “I know that, Elyssa. Better than you, apparently. You want to be the True Queen, yes? So why don’t you do me, yourself, and the kingdom a favor? Come to the Holy Father’s party, pledge allegiance to the Church, denounce the Blue Horizon, and then help me to calm the populace.”

  Elyssa stared at her mother for a long moment, her anger slowly fading. “I see. You need the True Queen, just as much as those people out there . . . not to feed them, but to bend them over.”

  “Put it however you like. The kingdom is running out of food. We will have panic soon, and we cannot afford it.”

  “I thought you weren’t worried about the drought!”

  “I wasn’t. But Brenna has convinced me otherwise.”

  “Brenna? The palmist?”

  “Oh, she’s much more than a palmist, child. If you only knew—”

  “Knew what?”

  Her mother’s face seemed to fold in upon itself then, becoming tight and secretive. “Nothing. Suffice it to say, the drought will continue, and it will be worse than anything we can imagine. Farming will come to a standstill, and thousands will die.”

  Elyssa stared at her, feeling sick. “This is what Brenna has told you?”

  “Not Brenna,” the Queen replied. Her hand crept up to grasp her sapphire, an involuntary gesture. “I did not need Brenna to see it.”

  Elyssa blinked, unsure how to interpret that. “What about the Crown stores? The food—”

  “There isn’t enough food to help the farmers. Only to help ourselves.”

  “What? Mother, there’s enough in our warehouses to feed everyone for months!”

  “And what if the drought should continue beyond that time?” the Queen asked. “What if this isn’t the last dry year? We must plan for these contingencies.”

  “What do you mean to do?”

  “What any sane man does in a meager time: hoard.”

  “And what happens to the Almont?” Elyssa demanded. “I read the harvest reports just like you! The Caddell is already down three feet in the central plain. There are a million people out there, Mother! What will the tenants do, when the food runs out?”

  The Queen put down her mug of tea, smiling gently. That smile chilled Elyssa, for in it she suddenly saw the void inside her mother, the black
and faceless gulf that existed where empathy should be. The Queen tipped her head, and silver gleamed in the light: the crown, that tiny circlet that weighed so little and yet meant everything.

  “If those tenants are smart, they’ll pray for rain.”

  Chapter 7

  POPPY DREAMS

  In pre-Glynn New London, the morphia trade boomed. Under pressure from God’s Church, the Beautiful Queen had outlawed the production of narcotics; predictably, in the wake of this decision, planting of poppy fields exploded. New London’s morphia trade was controlled by a handful of syndicates and individual operators, all of them at each other’s throats constantly; the gangland warfare of the pre-Crossing could hardly have been more brutal. Their customers came from all walks of life, but competition was fiercest in the Creche, where, for obvious reasons, demand was most severe.

  —A History of Drug Trafficking in the New World, Professor Ellen Marquand, New London College of History

  My name is Christian.

  He rolled over, repeating the phrase to himself in the dark, as though his name were a thing he could grab and hold. These days, he found the boy Christian increasingly overshadowed, overtaken even in his own mind by the myth he had become: Lazarus. He didn’t want to lose sight of who he truly was.

  He rolled over again, shifting his weight carefully. The week before, his opponent had kicked him in his left hip; it was one of the few good shots the boy got, but it had stung like a bastard, and the bone remained bruised. Christian had a soft mattress these days, rather than the hard pallet of his earlier days with Wigan, but no mattress could ever be soft enough to quiet old wounds.

  My name is Christian.

  He didn’t know his family name. Wigan had claimed to know it; he used to hold that information over Christian’s head when he wouldn’t obey. But Christian didn’t care who his parents were. In fact, he preferred not to know. He felt nothing but contempt for them all: his parents, Wigan, the anonymous broker who had overseen the sale of a newborn. They all scrambled for themselves alone . . . all except Maura.

  But Christian found that it hurt to turn his thoughts to Maura. The last time he had journeyed over to Whore’s Alley to see her, she had been nearly unconscious, the head of a syringe buried in her arm. Gwyn, one of the other girls, had whispered to him that Maura’s topside client had ordered her for a repeat engagement.

  “He likes her hair,” Gwyn whispered, as though relating a secret. Gwyn herself had mousy brown hair, and she had never been requested and never would be. Her only value lay in her youth; she was nine.

  Lazarus. Christian. Christian. Lazarus.

  He rolled back the other way, wishing the vicious circle in his head would stop. Falling asleep had always come particularly hard for him; he could not make his mind be still. Some nights he thought he would give anything to be able to simply go under as others did, easily and without struggle. Sleep was a lost darkness, an oblivion, but the more Christian longed for it, the further it receded.

  Someone knocked at the outer door.

  Christian sat up in the darkness, listening. There were no real doors in the Creche, only apertures in the tunnel walls, but denizens of the tunnels practiced a strange, unspoken courtesy; you never walked right into someone’s rooms without announcing your presence. The knock repeated, then, a minute later, repeated again. Whoever it was, they weren’t going away. Christian lit the candle that lay beside his mattress, pushed himself to his feet, and went into the other room.

  The man in the doorway was unknown but familiar. Though not old, his face was wizened, one of the many leering circles that Christian had seen beyond the bright lights of the ring. Gambler, most likely. The cunning in those ancient eyes was enough to put Christian on his guard.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you, boy.”

  Christian considered the visitor, registering many things: the strangeness of his accent, broad and flat; the thick cloak and boots, made of an unfamiliar material that nevertheless looked expensive to Christian’s eyes; the knife that flashed at his waist. After another moment’s thought, Christian beckoned the stranger inside.

  He had never thought before to be ashamed of these small rooms; they were a world of improvement after the old cramped hole in Whore’s Alley that he had shared with Wigan. But as the stranger ducked through the doorway, Christian caught him looking around the living area with distaste. When he sat down in one of the beaten chairs, a puff of dust rose into the air.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Arliss,” the man replied, and Christian stiffened. He had heard the name; everyone had. Arliss was indeed a gambler, but he was also much more: one of the biggest poppy dealers in the Creche. Christian thought of Maura, her eyes dull and distant. Had Arliss sold her the poppy?

  “You know who I am?”

  “Yes,” Christian grunted, but this man was not at all what he would have expected. Before he came to the city looking for easy money, Arliss had supposedly been a farm boy from the Almont. A genius for numbers had vaulted him into bookmaking, and rumor said he owned vast acres of poppy fields on the edge of the Dry Lands. Arliss was a farm boy turned gangster turned dealer . . . yet the man sitting before Christian looked like none of these things.

  “You’re judging me, boy,” Arliss remarked.

  “So?”

  “So I think it takes a hell of a nerve. Only a fool blames the dealer.”

  Christian felt anger trying to kindle, but he crushed the impulse. Anger was a liability in this situation, and a pointless one, for very little was personal in the Creche. Keeping his face neutral, he sat down across from Arliss and locked his hands on his lap.

  “What do you want?”

  The bookie’s face cleared, as though he, too, were relieved to get down to business.

  “I’ve a proposal for you. How much do you know about gambling odds?”

  “Not much.”

  Arliss leaned forward, steepling his fingers beneath his chin. His face became suddenly animated, as though a switch had been flipped, and Christian understood that though Arliss might deal in poppy, his real passion was plainly in numbers, in gambling.

  “Every time you win a fight, boy, the odds on you go up. That means my bettors have to lay more money with me in order to get the same amount back. I’ve seen some impressive fighters down here over the years, but never anyone like you, boy. You’re becoming a figure of some legend. They say you can’t lose.”

  “Not can’t,” Christian said, lifting his chin. “Won’t.”

  “I believe you. That’s why I’m here. A fighter like you presents a unique opportunity for people in my business.”

  “What opportunity?”

  “Do you like living down here?”

  The question was so unexpected that it made Christian look around, seeing the place as though with new eyes: the furniture, worn down to the wood in some places; the old bloodstains on the stone floor; the piles of filthy clothing in the corners.

  “Of course you don’t,” Arliss continued, answering his own question. “No one likes living down here. Tell me, boy, have you ever been topside?”

  Christian shook his head, repressing a scowl, for the word itself irritated him, made him think of Maura and her damnable client.

  “It’s better up there,” Arliss continued. “Cleaner, and the air reeks less. People smile more. When you look up, you see bright blue sky instead of slime-covered stone.”

  Christian nodded. He had heard such stories all his life, and he supposed he believed them, but he didn’t trust them. Smiling people? Bright blue sky? What place was there for him in a world like that?

  “If topside is so wonderful, why don’t you go and live there?”

  “I am, boy,” Arliss replied. “Poppy and numbers, I’m slowly selling all of my interest in the tunnels. Within six months, I’ll be go
ne for good.”

  Christian stilled. Arliss out of the Creche . . . it would rock the place almost to its foundations, leaving the poppy trade controlled by a handful of lesser dealers.

  Don’t let him distract you.

  “What are you selling?” he demanded.

  Arliss smiled, though Christian noted, again, that the smile never touched his eyes. “A man could make a good life topside. Even a killer like you.”

  “You need money to live topside. Food is expensive up there. Dwellings cost rent.”

  “Indeed they do. That’s why you would need to leave here with a great hoard of money, enough to last your lifetime.”

  Christian looked up sharply, and Arliss leaned forward, his eyes bright.

  “What would you say if I told you that we could fix a fight, boy? One fight, only one, but on that one fight we could make enough money for us both to retire.”

  Christian blinked. “You want me to throw a fight?”

  “Would that be so hard, boy? Surely you’ve won enough.”

  “I’m not a boy. I’m twenty.”

  “Listen to me,” Arliss growled. “The odds on your fights are now astronomical. Up in the Gut, they’re talking about closing out bets on you altogether. We go long, and both of us make a killing. We could wipe out half the books in the city.”

  Christian frowned. Arliss was right. He had won so many fights that no one doubted his gifts anymore. So why did he feel as though losing a single bout would mean that he had lost everything?

  Because you have nothing else.

  Ah, that voice. Lazarus or Christian, it didn’t matter . . . that voice knew him well. He had never lost a fight, not even in the early days, when he was a child pitted against older children. On the worst days of his life, when all else was up in the air, he had always known that he would never lose, and he clung to that knowledge as moss clung to stone . . . or, perhaps, as a hanged man clung to the rope.

  “Why do you need to fix a fight?” he demanded. “Don’t you make a fine living already, stringing out girls in the Alley?”