“Ahhh.” Arliss leaned forward, and the keenness of his gaze made Christian uncomfortable. “Someone special over there, boy? Mother? Sister? Friend?”
“No!”
“We could get her out too, you know. An ordinary whore? We could make enough to buy her clear as well. Use a blind broker, and the price stays good and reasonable. You and your special girl, out of this cesspool.”
Christian remained silent for a long moment. He did not trust this poppy dealer, with his thick boots and world-sized promises. But a deeper part of his mind was already working over the man’s words. If he could get Maura out as well . . .
This is what the dealers do, the voice in his mind spoke up suddenly. Sell dreams, but at the end they’re only nightmares.
And yet this admonition, too, seemed the voice of cowardice, of the boy who still clung to the Creche as the only world he knew. Arliss was right; he could not go on winning forever. The money would not allow it. Things must change, whether he wanted them to or not.
“Why are you leaving the tunnels?” he demanded.
“Christ, boy, do you think I enjoy peddling the needle to people who trade in children? I don’t, no more than you enjoy the slaughter. I am not a good man, but I am not a bad man either, not by a long shot.”
Christian stared at him, wide-eyed. The words might be new, but the idea was utterly familiar, the same idea that haunted him on these nights when he tossed and turned on his small mattress. Killer or not, he had never thought of himself as bad.
“There’s plenty of misery topside, too,” Arliss remarked. “Whole goddamn world’s drying up this summer, and people are starving. They’ll need my wares just as much as the girls in the Alley. More, maybe.”
Arliss stood, the expensive cloak dropping to cover him, and in that moment, Christian realized that the gangster was actually quite small. The aura of the successful dealer had made him seem much taller, even seated.
“I’m easy to find, boy, if you ever decide you want to take up my offer.” Arliss paused, then, unexpectedly, put a light hand on his shoulder. “There’s a better world, you know. So close we can almost touch it.”
Christian didn’t respond, only stood motionless as Arliss left. Several shadows detached themselves from the doorway to follow him: bodyguards. Arliss had left them outside.
Christian returned to his mattress in the far room, but no sleep waited there. His mind was too full of the picture, the damnable picture that Arliss had painted for him. Topside . . . he would not dare wish it for himself, perhaps, but if he could truly buy Maura’s freedom and take her with him—
Christian realized then that he had been seduced, just as Arliss had intended, by the mere possibility of freedom. A seduced man was a fool, a mark; hadn’t he seen as much in the stables, in the wet and rolling eyes of the johns? But Christian couldn’t help himself. The better world, Arliss had said, and that was a laugh, this worst of dealers taking the Blue Horizon’s words and turning them to his ends. But now Christian wondered whether there wasn’t a better world out there after all, one just for him and Maura. Blue sky, dry air, a small house that would be their very own . . . and suddenly he was up and out of his den, heading toward the Alley.
* * *
The enforcer on Mrs. Evans’s door was new, but he seemed to know who Christian was; his mouth dropped open as the fighter approached, and even though the enforcer was half a head taller, he let him by without a murmur.
Mrs. Evans was nowhere in sight, which seemed a mercy. Christian waved to several of the girls who sat in the common area, waiting for clients, then headed down the hallway toward Maura’s room. When he knocked, however, it was not Maura who answered, but a childish, lisping voice.
“Come in.”
He ducked through the curtains and found the little girl, Gwyn, kneeling by the side of the bed, dabbing Maura’s face with a dry rag. Maura’s eyes were closed; she looked to be unconscious. A single candle burned weakly on the bedside table, but it was quite enough to illuminate Maura’s pulped cheek, and a split lip that had swollen to twice its normal size.
“What happened?” Christian whispered hoarsely. He leaned back, moving out of the light, for in that instant it seemed important that no one should see his rage, not even the nine-year-old girl who knelt on the floor.
“Her special client,” Gwyn answered, with all the naive candor of the child who does not know which things are meant to be secret. “He hit her last time, too, but Mrs. Evans said it was nothing, and she gave Maura some poppy. She looks much worse this time, though.”
“Who is this client?”
“Nobody knows,” Gwyn replied pertly. “It’s always Arlen Thorne comes and takes her away, and brings her back too. Maura told Jilly the john has a tattoo—”
“What kind of tattoo?” Christian asked, trying to keep his voice casual.
“A clown,” Maura said. “On his hand. Do you have any poppy?”
“No,” Christian replied slowly. “No poppy.”
“That’s too bad.” Gwyn turned back to Maura, dabbing at her swollen lip. “It made her all better last time.”
Under Gwyn’s ministrations, Maura moaned softly. Christian longed to go to her, but he also knew that Maura wouldn’t want him to witness this . . . any of it. She always tried so hard to pretend on his visits, to make believe that they both lived pleasant lives. She would be mortified if she knew that Christian had seen her this way. He could go and find Arlen Thorne, get the client’s name, and beat the life from his body . . . but Maura wouldn’t want that either. Tend to your own business, she had told him, and he had listened, and now look where they were.
You don’t own her, Christian reminded himself, breathing deeply. Any more than Mrs. Evans does, or anyone else. What happens next is her decision.
But this was the Alley; no one had choices. Looked at broadly, even the decision to take the first hit of morphia had been determined long before Maura had picked up the syringe . . . determined by statistics, if nothing else. After another moment spent mastering himself, he moved toward the doorway.
“Are you going?” Gwyn asked, confused. “Don’t you want to stay until she wakes up?”
“No. I have to go. Do me a favor and don’t tell her I was here.”
“All right,” Gwyn replied guilelessly, but Christian didn’t know whether she could be trusted; she was, after all, only nine.
And what of that? his mind demanded nastily. When you were nine, you crushed Alja Mueller’s windpipe and ate a good dinner afterward.
He ducked through Maura’s hangings, heading back up the hallway, ignoring greetings from Benia, who had clearly just finished with a john and was heading toward the bathroom. He barely saw the common room, the enforcers who glimpsed his face and automatically drew back. He was thinking of the auction block again, of the way that Maura had shivered in the dankly cavernous room as they took off her clothes. Christian had wanted to stop them, but he had been even smaller than she, and seeing her naked had hurt his heart. Somehow he understood, even then, the power of that forced disrobing, the debasement that came with it. Wigan had bought the two of them as a package, but Christian had gone into the ring right away, while Maura had been a buy-and-hold; Wigan had spotted her long white-blonde hair and seen the potential for a good investment. He held her until she was eight, when he brokered her sale to Mrs. Evans and made a tidy profit.
I begged him to keep her, Christian remembered now. I begged him. Maura begged him. But he only laughed and said the thing that made me furious, about the bubbles in the ale. What was it?
Christian couldn’t remember. All he remembered were Maura’s giant eyes, staring into his, when Mrs. Evans’s enforcers came to take her away. He supposed it could have been worse; she could have been sold to the Deep Patch, and at least when she was in the Alley he could keep an eye on her.
And what a fabulo
us job you’ve done.
Christian winced. Maura had been in no state to hear about Arliss’s offer, but the very instant she was better he would tell her about it, about topside. Perhaps he could convince her. Perhaps she would even come of her own free will. Perhaps he should have broached the subject, despite her weakened state. One way or another, he would have to get her off the poppy, and from what Christian knew of most addicts, that was probably going to mean locking her up.
Are you sure even that will work? his mind whispered. That girl who made the bracelet, who held your hand until they put you on the block, how much of her is left?
Christian wished he knew the answer.
Chapter 8
MEN OF GOODWILL
In hindsight, it seems clear that Queen’s Guards were no better than other men. They drank; they gambled and whored. From time to time they murdered civilians, or even each other. But this is not the popular image of the Guard, which was supposed to embody an almost courtly ideal: men who were not only the best with a sword but the purest of heart. This pretty fiction took a curious hold, persisting long after it had become patently obvious that the average Queen’s Guard was neither. A man whose heart was as fine as his sword would be an extraordinary find indeed, but if such a Queen’s Guard ever existed, then history has forgotten him.
—The Tearling as a Military Nation, Callow the Martyr
Carroll had thought that it would be a simple matter to track the seer. Her appearance, after all, made it almost impossible for her to blend into a crowd, and she did not hurry on her way, merely sailed serenely down the streets of the Hollow. Following her should have been an easy business, but it had gone wrong right from the start.
The albino kept her hood on, for one thing. Brown hooded cloaks were everywhere you looked in the city. Once Carroll thought he had lost her entirely, only to find her behind him, standing on a corner, nothing visible but the grinning white flash of her jawline. She had doubled back, he thought, flanked him deliberately. Elston said the white woman was a witch, and though Elston saw demons in every shadow, his distrust of the seer resonated throughout the Guard. Arla’s close guards whispered that the witch was teaching the Queen to read the future. Even Captain Givens was certain that Brenna was more than she seemed; he thought she might even be a Mort spy. Several times a week she left the Keep, and Givens wanted to know where she went, whom she answered to. He had passed the task down to Barty, reasoning that a member of Elyssa’s Guard would be less familiar to the seer, and Barty had given Carroll the assignment, selecting him even over the older, more experienced guards like Elston and Coryn. Carroll knew that this was no confidence in his own abilities; rather, Barty knew he was the only guard who would not be tempted from his mission by the variety of entertainments outside the Keep. But the rest of them would never let Carroll forget it if he came back empty-handed. He was determined not to fail.
But the seer seemed to know the Gut well, much better than Carroll did. He had been down here only twice, on the Queen’s business, and twice was enough. He understood that such areas served a purpose; every city needed its pubs, its gaming hells, perhaps even its brothels—though that idea sickened Carroll, who was a devout Christian and thus hated the very idea of prostitution. Father Timpany said that it was best that such establishments were quarantined in one area, kept far from the innocent. But Father Timpany, like most Arvath priests, had a rich man’s view of Christianity—utterly divorced from Christ—as well as a truly appalling command of scripture. Carroll himself made a better Christian, and he certainly would have made a better priest. Long before, he had actually thought of joining the Arvath novitiate; he was a Keep child, and so that path had been open to him, along with so many others. But the hypocrisy of the Arvath sickened him, and if Father Timpany was the best the Church had to offer, then Carroll had likely made the right choice. He loathed the Gut, and as a result he did not know it well. If Brenna wanted to slip him, she probably could.
He followed the seer down a winding street that he believed led to the Circus . . . but here, again, he was deceived. The street came out in a narrow alley, so dark and claustrophobic that Carroll paused before entering. Corruption seemed to infect the alley, shrinking it, making it dark. On either side people leaned against the walls, their expressions dazed, their faces covered in soot, or perhaps it was filth. The alley reeked of shit, but beneath that stench was another, so sweet that it cloyed. Carroll thought it might be morphia. Despite the retreating figure of the seer, for a moment he could not bring himself to take another step.
Come on, he told himself. You’re a Queen’s Guard!
After a moment he began walking again, his eyes on the seer’s back. Someone tried to pick his pocket, and Carroll slapped the offending thief away, then saw that it was a child, a girl no more than four or five years old, with the sunken eyes and brittle-looking skin of starvation. Carroll had not thought much of the reported famine, for there was always plenty of food in the Keep, and the state of the kingdom as a whole was not the business of the Guard. The sight of the child shocked him.
What else has been softened for us? he wondered suddenly. What else do we not hear about?
Without thinking, he tore the pouch of dried fruit from his belt and gave it to the child. She took it, with a smile of gratitude that made Carroll feel sick . . . but almost immediately another child snatched it from her and sprinted away, diving into a broad culvert that led beneath a building. The little girl was left behind, screaming, and Carroll could take no more. He fled, breathing a sigh of relief when he emerged from the alley and found himself in a wider boulevard.
But the relief did not last long, for here loitered all the denizens of the Gut: prostitutes and pimps, bookmakers and marks, footpads with knife handles sticking from their socks. As Carroll passed the food stalls, he saw that the prices for both food and wine had gone through the roof since the last time he had been down here. Six pounds for half a chicken! Four pounds for a loaf of bread! This last made sense, for grain was now so scarce that the price of beer had more than doubled as well; all of the Guard had been complaining about it after furlough. Carroll wondered whether fruits and vegetables were similarly exorbitant, but as he went down the boulevard, he could not see any produce available at all. They had fresh fruit every day in the Keep . . . and now Carroll felt new shame wash over him. Arla’s people would never want for food, or for anything else, and as much as Carroll would have liked to tell himself that he was in the Queen’s Guard on his own merit, he knew better. His father had been a Gate Guard, and Carroll had spent mornings in the Keep from his earliest childhood. Elyssa had known his name when he was only twelve years old, and when he was fifteen Carroll had begged to join her Guard. He saw fairness in Elyssa, a fairness that was entirely absent in the Queen. Arla was hard, not fair, and as a result, the Tearling was hard as well. It was luck, simple luck, that had put Carroll into the Queen’s Guard; it was luck that kept them all in apples and meat. If Carroll thought otherwise, he had only to look at the sea of grim faces on this street, their deep-pouched eyes and bone-stabbed cheeks. He had known there was misery without the Keep; of course he had. But the Keep was insular, narcotic. It allowed a man to forget the world outside.
Focus! his mind snapped. The seer!
Carroll did his best. It was easier if he didn’t look to either side but simply kept his eyes on Brenna’s back. He was just beginning to overtake her again when she turned and darted down a staircase. The stairs, jammed between a pub and a brothel, were even darker than the alley had been . . . or perhaps it only seemed that way because the sun had now disappeared behind the buildings. There could be any number of thieves and cutthroats waiting just below the level of the street. But Carroll had been given an assignment, and he was only twenty years old, young enough to feel the sting of ego in failure. If he came back and told them that he had lost the albino—a woman, and an utterly distinctive one, at that—what would
they say? Barty would be disappointed, and Dyer would be merciless. But if Carroll came back with something useful, some vital piece of information linking the seer to the Caden, or even to Mortmesne, that would quiet them all . . . even Carroll’s own mind, which sometimes liked to whisper that he was no Queen’s Guard, only a rich man’s son.
Protect me, Lord, Carroll thought, then turned left, following the white woman down the stairs.
* * *
The tunnels were not what Carroll had expected. He thought that they would be dark, and several steps down he had already realized, chagrined, that he should have grabbed a torch. He expected mold and damp as well, perhaps mud. But when he reached the bottom of the staircase—more than a hundred steps—he found himself at the end of a bright stone tunnel, its floor professionally cobbled. The light was so good—torches stood in holders every five feet or so—that Carroll could even see, far down the tunnel, the hooded, retreating back of the seer, just before she disappeared around a corner. The floor was so clean that Carroll was sure someone swept it regularly.
What on earth was I worried about? he wondered. This place is cleaner than the Keep!
He hurried down the tunnel, trying to walk light on his feet as Vincent had taught him. Vincent was old—he would undoubtedly retire soon, leaving the arms room in the hands of the much younger Venner—but he knew more about footwork than any man alive, and Carroll had been taking lessons from him since he was fifteen. More than swordcraft, Vincent had also taught him the art of dancing light on his feet, and Carroll used it now, nearly skipping down the passage. There were no intersections, only a series of turnings. Carroll went around several large curves before he began to hear the roar.
For a moment he thought that he must have gone the wrong way and ended up near the sluice gates that fed into the Caddell, for the roar was loud and angry, like the river when it reached its full flow in springtime. But after another moment he realized that this sound was human, many voices yelling at once. He turned a final corner and blinked.
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