Cage of souls, p.27
Cage of Souls, page 27
“There was a scrap, anyway. Me against them and them against each other. I think I did well enough for myself, given that it was me against twenty at once. I knocked a few heads together. I kicked them about a bit. No, I didn’t get the black eye then, I’m coming to that. Weird thing was that there were a couple of guys actually fighting on my side, which was nice. Middsy piled in for me, and Red as well. Anyway, there we were, most of the Island’s Wardens, kicking each other to death over Kiera. Very romantic, I’m sure. That was when the Marshal came in.
“We broke up all at once. We were all very sharp for the way a room changed when it had the Marshal in it. Everyone was suddenly dusting their clothes down and pretending to have been looking at the wall when it kicked off.
“You can be sure that the Marshal wanted to know what happened, and he was pissed. He was severely mad. So, anyway, everyone kind of pointed at me, and so I got to tell the Marshal I had a girl in my room. I was very cool with him. Kiera came out as well and I think he didn’t know what to make of her. He was looking from me to her to me again. Then he had me right up against the wall by my collar and he was staring into my eyes.
“‘I don’t like you, Drachmar,’ he told me, ‘but do you know, there’s someone I dislike even more than you.’ Right then I wouldn’t have thought there could’ve been. He said, ‘I hate Her,’ and I know you know who ‘Her’ was. ‘I hate Her’ he told me, ‘and I happen to know that She wanted this one to go to the scum.’ That’s your lot, Stefan. Anyway, he was saying, ‘Now I find her with you, Drachmar, not with the scum at all. I am sure that this will make Her very unhappy. I also suspect that the scum might have gained some enjoyment from her, and they are not here to enjoy their time in my custody. Not even for the brief span it would take them to fuck this woman. Listen to me, Drachmar, I know you intend nothing but insubordination, but it happens that you have served some purpose.’” Peter really did the Marshal very well.
“Then he hit me straight in the face.” Peter touched his shiner for emphasis. “‘That’s so you don’t forget your place,’ he said, the bastard. Then he let me go, and he looked around at all the other Wardens. ‘This woman is in Drachmar’s care, and to be maintained unharmed until I give orders otherwise. When that time comes, then Drachmar will surrender her. Will he not?’
“I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. None of the Wardens were happy with it, but the Marshal had given an order. They all knew not to cross him.
“And that’s how Kiera is here right now, and I thought it would keep for a while, but then Jonas turned up and everything went out of the window.”
He looked at the two of us for a moment. “I so wish that I’d never met either of you. If not for you two I’d be out of this place and into the jungle faster than you could blink at me. Rather the monsters than Jonas Destavian, believe me.”
I almost pointed out that most of the time over the last few months he had been pointing out how little he could help me. Kiera looked similarly rebellious. Neither of us said anything, though, and I had to acknowledge that my life would have been far harder without Peter’s company.
“Now Stefan,” Peter said, “I want you to be my second.”
“Does that mean I have to fight?”
“No, it means you have to argue technical points,” Peter told me. “You have to wrangle, basically, about the rules.”
I considered this. “I know a better man. Shon used to be a lawyer and he knows the rules already.”
“I’ll take you both,” Peter decided. “You and this lawyer. I need all the help I can get.”
“And what about me?” Kiera demanded. Peter rounded on her with surprising vehemence.
“You will be in some storeroom while Jonas and I go head to head, and if I get it, then you make tracks out into the great outdoors and don’t look back. Or whatever your backup plan was.”
Kiera stared at him. “That’s it, is it?”
“You better be ready to do what you do as soon as Stefan gets word to you that I’ve lost.” There was none of his easy-going humour. He was deadly serious.
“I’ll come with you,” I offered, although I did not really believe it. “If the worst happens we’ll go together.”
Kiera looked from me to Peter. “I am so sick of being rescued by people,” she said sharply. “I really begin to respect the Witch Queen. At least she can look after herself.”
Peter held her gaze with his own. “Will you do it? For me?”
“For you? Oh well, that makes everything all right,” she said, dripping with sarcasm. “Yes, Peter. I’ll do it. I bow to your logic. Just don’t expect me to be overly grateful.”
“Obviously,” Peter replied somewhat tartly, because it was his own death he was planning for. At that moment, what could have been an interesting argument was interrupted by someone appearing in the doorway.
The intruder was a neat middle-aged man with a tuft of beard and a humorous, creased face. Behind him, a pair of Wardens were setting down three cases.
“Doctor Mandri,” Peter acknowledged. “Still taking Jonas’ money?”
“Indeed I am,” the man acknowledged. “Nobody else’s money is quite so readily available.” He reminded me of the better kind of Academy Master, and I took a liking to him instantly, despite circumstances.
“This is Doctor Mandri, Destavian’s second, a master of law and medicine,” Peter explained. “Doctor, this is Stefan Advani, scholar of the Academy and your opposite number, and this is Kiera de Margot, my…” He faltered a moment and then made matters worse by saying, “companion.”
“Island life obviously has more perks than I was aware of,” Doctor Mandri said. “My lady, I was named Urven Mandri, and I am at your service.”
“Splendid,” Kiera said levelly. “Get me out of here.”
Doctor Mandri gave a single dry laugh. “Ah, if only I could, lady. Will you have another second, Peter? I would be delighted for your… companion here to grace our activities.”
Peter signalled for me to speak, so I told the Doctor that we would be joined by one Shon Roseblade, attorney.
“You are obviously blessed, Peter. It is a rare man who can boast educated friends,” was the Doctor’s comment.
“How about you,” Peter pressed. “You’re on your own?”
“Sadly no,” Doctor Mandri confessed. “We have brought along Bewley Anteim to watch the justice his uncle has bought. A most unpleasant young man. Jonas wanted me to stress how much he regrets being the agent of your punishment. He has no ill feelings towards you.”
“So why do it?” Kiera demanded of him, and he shrugged.
“A professional cannot allow personal feelings to interpose. It is simply the way of things.” He gave a small, bleak smile. “I leave you with your equipment, Peter, and your thoughts.”
He bowed out, leaving us with the three cases the Wardens had brought.
“So,” said Kiera after he had gone. “What did you do to upset the Anteims?”
Peter shrugged. “I guess it can’t hurt if you know, now it’s all come back to bite me in the arse. What you are about to hear is the reason why you should never listen to a strange woman in a bar,” he said, and explained as follows:
“I was down on my luck at the time, owed a lot of people, and it was getting harder to dodge them. I’d have ended up here anyway, give it enough time. I was doing prize-fighting, strong-arming, whatever I could to make ends meet, always watching for the creditors. Then this woman showed up out of nowhere. Style by the bagful, obviously good family. She just walked into the joint I was sitting in and sat right down beside me.
“‘You’re Peter Drachmar? I thought you’d be taller,’ she said, and that was as far as introductions went. She was a looker, and I could see she was a tough one, a politico. I’d got involved in high-class infighting before and it paid well. I was happy to listen.
“It turned out that she had some political rival, and she was willing to go out of pocket to see him taken down a step. It was quite definitely the biggest money I’d seen for a long while, and half up front. With that kind of flash she could have had Destavian, but he’s got more scruples than I ever did. What she really wanted was a quiet knife in an alleyway, she said it straight out. I’m not really the man for that, and besides, it’s actually harder than you’d think.
“So I bargained her down and we agreed I’d find this business associate of hers and call him out. He was a bit of an amateur duellist, it turned out, and he thought he was good, which always makes things easier. She told me the places he went, who he met with. She told me his name, which was Jon Anteim the Younger. Now, sure, I’d heard of the Anteims, but I reckoned one more enemy wouldn’t hurt, and that bruised pride heals soon enough. More fool me.
“I should have known something was up because I’d only insulted him once before he was at my throat. He seemed to recognise me and I began to have my doubts about the whole deal, but by then it was too late. I forget what I said about him, some comment about his way with women, but we had a fight arranged within the minute for that very afternoon. We met up in the old Red Cabin arena. He had a mob of his friends, and I had tipped off an Angel I knew to keep everything on the legal side. I was counting on staves or something, just a sporting business where I could beat him about and send him up, but he came with knives and wanting blood. Someone had been spreading the dirty about me. I found later that he thought I was sleeping with his mistress. My patroness had done her groundwork. I wouldn’t have needed to prod him at all; waste of a good insult.
“We got down to cases pretty quickly after that, and I found out he was better than he was supposed to be and mad with it, which made it hard to predict him. If I’d been wanting to kill him it would have been simple. He was leaving himself open all the time because he was so keen to kill me. As it was, I just wanted to put the wind up him and I had a real tough time of it, leading him on and him getting madder and madder, and in the end it was a great big waste of my time and effort because, of course, I did kill him. He came in with a big gutting stroke and I just sidestepped and put my knife in his neck without really thinking about it. So that was that.
“Of course, there was this great fuss, and I realised, now that I had killed their first son, that I didn’t want the Anteims for my enemies after all. It was all legal, a proper duel, but I knew that there were other ways of getting even. I signed up for the Island the next day. Never did see the other half of the money.
“Chasing down my patroness would have been a death sentence. I found out shortly after that she was Haelen Anteim, the dead guy’s sister. She inherits the Anteim fortunes when Old Jon finally kicks it. It’s her that’s put Jonas onto me now, I’ll bet, to shut me up. I never did tell anyone. Nobody would have believed me.”
Peter tried to gauge our reactions. I had guessed it to be something of the like, although I would have worked an element of romance into it somewhere. Kiera was shaking her head.
“You surely are the most stupid man I ever heard of,” she said. “I would have seen that coming from the other end of the city.”
“Well, you’re born to that kind of thing,” Peter said irritably. “How the other half live, you know. Besides, it was legal. Anyway, I’m a Warden; it’s you two who’re prisoners.”
“We’re talking about you,” Kiera said quickly.
We opened the cases next and saw the weapons that Peter would be fighting with. There were rather a lot of them.
“A proper duel between professionals is fought in three rounds,” Peter explained. “Each round stops when someone gets a hit in. Yeah, someone can die before the last round, but if the fighters know what they’re doing then it won’t happen. Jonas will be trying to get us to the last round as fast as he can, so, Stefan, you and this Shon have to dispute any hit he lands on me. I want to drag this out and maybe figure some way of winning, ’cos I’m damned if I can see one right now. Maybe I’ll even get a strike on Jonas, slow him down.” He did not sound hopeful.
The first case contained a staff some five feet long, made of light wood with a copper band at each end, plus a narrow dagger with a bar handle, so that when gripped the blade would jut from between the middle fingers. The staff was dyed in bands of red and yellow, and the dagger’s grip was beaded with the same colours.
“Toys,” Peter said dismissively and, when I said the dagger looked dangerous enough on its own, “Anyone who gets themselves hurt with these shouldn’t be in the game in the first place.” Now that he had the tools of his old trade to hand there was a new quality to him. He weighed the staff thoughtfully, twirling it in the close confines of the room. Kiera smirked at that, but to me it looked casually dangerous in a way that I could never aspire to.
The next case held something that was mostly a spear: a solid metal shaft perhaps a foot shorter than the staff, bulking out into a thick, flanged mace-head before tapering to a steely point. Again, there was red and yellow in it, stained deep into the metal. It weighed more than I could believe.
“Lead,” Peter told us, hefting it. “Lead inside the head, steel everywhere else. Makes them safer, really. Easier to see coming. This is for the second round.”
Kiera opened up the last case and I saw within the strangest kind of sword. It was, from pommel to tip, as long as the steel spear, but the blade was broad and almost two-dimensionally flat, seemingly made of gleaming stone. The grip had a complex guard, twisted in serpentine curves that reminded me of the Weapon, or the spires in the swamp. It was a work of art in its own right, with contours that led the eye through an intricate series of turns and then straight up the lustrous blade. The hilt was lacquered in the same colours as the other weapons, but their faded heraldry made it clear that here was the original. When I took it from its resting place it was all I could do to lift it, and it seemed impossible that anyone could fight with such a thing. On the grip itself there were stencilled four characters that read something like R O P A but not quite, and the R was backwards and quite differently drawn, so that I suspected that they were really an acronym in some other alphabet altogether.
“Careful with that,” Peter cautioned.
“I know,” I said. “I’m surprised that the blade hasn’t snapped straight off already.”
“I mean careful you don’t turn it on. You’d kill yourself.”
“Turn it on?” I saw then that the convolutions of the guard hid several controls, and realised that it was neither heavy nor complex for the sake of it.
Peter took the sword reverently from me, getting his arms underneath it to take the weight. “I reckon there are nineteen of these Ropa blades in Shadrapar, and most belong to the big duelling arenas. The fact that Jonas Destavian owns two shows just how good he is at this. These things are sheer death. They don’t even have to cut. If I turned this on and touched your shoulder with the blade, your heart would stop or your brain would curdle. They put out a kind of a field, and it is sheer death.” There was a distant look in his eyes. “They’re beautiful to fight with. I only used one twice for real, but I used to go into the big arenas to practise. There’s nothing like them.” I think that he had resigned himself, then, to dying on the morrow, but if he died with one of those murderous devices in his hands then he would not regret it so much. Like many practical, pragmatic people, there was an artist inside of him, trying to make itself known.
*
The only other thing worthy of note was Shon’s reaction when I asked him to second with me. I have seen men and women in the Island under every stress and pressure, but never someone quite so excited.
24
Professionals at Work
It was a grim day next, but that had not stopped the spectators turning out. Earlier, it had rained a little, which scared me. Back home that meant all kinds of liquid plastic and chemical evil. In the jungles, if you can believe it, rain was just water, which was as strange to me as anything had been. I stood with it running down my face and spotting damp on my clothes, and had nothing to connect it to, no way to relate to it. It was as though it was an experience designed by an alien species and I lacked the mindset to appreciate it.
Someone had marked out a circle on the very same deck that had seen those bloody executions the previous day. It looked remarkably small, but it still took up most of the available space. I think almost every Warden must have shirked work to watch, the Marshal included. There was a ring of black uniforms, three men deep in places. Their faces were stamped (save for the Marshal’s, which was proof against stamping) with anticipation and bloodlust. It was just like any other crowd at the fights. No doubt bets were placed, but probably on how long Peter would last, not who would win.
Someone had hauled two large and ornate chairs from the top floor onto a hastily tacked-up dais to give the authorities somewhere to sit. Normally there were professional judges at these things, but here it was the Governor and Lady Ellera, neither of them looking as though they should be out in daylight. The Governor had a big, cowled cloak on to shield his hairless skin, but his mistress faced the day with such icy poise that the sun hid itself. This was the court that Shon and I, and Doctor Mandri, would be appealing to on points of law.
Peter was out already, seeming at ease and fingering the narrow blade of the punch-dagger he would be using in the first round. His was the look of a man at peace yet not moved by any great optimism.
“An old man once told me—” he started, but then the other side was coming up, and I never did find out what that old man once told him.
Doctor Mandri was looking affluently restrained in a suit of shiny metal colours. Beside him was an overweight younger man looking far more affluent and far less restrained, whom I took to be Bewley Anteim, wearing what was presumably the very fashion in Shadrapar at that moment. As swiftly as I had liked the Doctor, I took a straight dislike to the Anteim boy. Of all of us here, he was the one who wanted Peter’s blood on Destavian’s hands: his the vengeance and his the wherewithal to accomplish it.
