The City (49 page)

‘Evan, it’s Riis.’

They had run into each other several times over the years since the night of the branding. For a while they had served together.

Evan blinked dust from his eyes, then nodded. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said, with some of his usual spirit. ‘Still alive, then, Riis? Joined the horse-shaggers now, I hear?’

Riis grinned at him. It was good to see Evan again.

‘Where’s Parr?’ the injured man asked.

Riis was tired of the question. He and his brother had served together for more than twenty years. Since Parr was killed it was always the first thing he was asked.

‘Dead,’ he said shortly.

Evan leaned his head back, closing his eyes. ‘Got any lorassium?’ he asked.

‘Some,’ Riis told him, digging in a pocket.

Evan’s eyes opened. ‘Good man,’ he said. ‘I’ll need it before the bonesetter gets here.’

Riis pulled out a lump of the dried leaf. He rolled it into a ball and put it in Evan’s mouth. His friend chewed on it for a long time, then sighed.

‘There are fewer of us now,’ he said blurrily. ‘Ranul’s dead too.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘But I found Arish. The bastard.’

Riis frowned, wondering if the pain was confusing his old friend. ‘Arish disappeared thirty years ago,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Changed his name. Bastard,’ Evan repeated. ‘Thought I didn’t know him.’

Rallying, he sat up and spoke in Riis’ ear. ‘We’ve got to get ’em together,’ he said, with the intensity of a drunkard.

‘Who? Get who together?’

‘Arish. Calls himself Fell Aron Lee.’

Riis stared at him in surprise. Everyone had heard of Fell Aron Lee.

‘And Saroyan.’

‘Who?’

‘Lord lieutenant.’

‘What’s he got to do with this?’

‘She. Cold bitch. We’ve got to do it soon. Or we’ll all be dead. There’s only three of us left.’

‘Does she …’ Riis looked around. ‘Saroyan. Does she want
him
dead?’

Evan nodded. ‘More than any of us.’

Riis could make no sense of it. His friend seemed to drift off, and he sat down beside him to await the surgeon. His thoughts wandered on familiar paths, and after a while he nudged the Wildcat gently and asked, ‘Evan, that woman you were talking to …’

Evan’s eyes were closed but he smiled and said slurrily, ‘Same old Riis.’ He feebly grabbed Riis’ arm. ‘Keep an eye on her for me,’ he asked urgently.

‘I will,’ Riis told him. ‘If I get the chance. Is she your woman?’

But Evan had closed his eyes again. ‘Indaro,’ he said, before slumping into unconsciousness.

Weeks later, after the destruction of the Maritime and the Nighthawks’ demotion to guard duty, a message reached Riis at the Paradise barracks. It said merely
Big-bellied Pony, noon tomorrow
and was signed
Sami
. Riis stared at it for a long while. His long-ago vow to kill the emperor seemed naive and childish at this distance. He shrugged and made no decision, but a foul-up in the rotas meant he was off duty that next day. He argued to himself that there was no harm going.

The Big-bellied Pony tavern, in Burman Far under the Third Imperial Wall, was small and dark and smelled of rot and sweat and sour ale. Riis pushed his way in through the doorway and blinked as his eyes got used to the gloom. It was crowded with workers and whores, but no soldiers, he noticed. He looked around for Evan Broglanh.

A whore in a shabby red dress and headscarf brushed up against him, grabbing his belt. ‘Take me out back, darling?’ she leered at him. Riis saw with distaste she was old enough to be his mother and that under the spangled scarf her hair was grey. He shook his head.

But when she nuzzled his ear her voice was metal. She said, ‘Follow me, you fool.’

He trailed after her through a narrow corridor and out into a fetid passage.

‘Evan told me about you,’ the woman said, turning. ‘He didn’t tell me you’re a simpleton.’ She was tall for a woman, middle-aged, mattock-faced and thin as a sword. Her eyes were pale and protuberant. He disliked her instantly.

‘I didn’t know who I was meeting,’ he answered feebly.

‘You know now,’ she replied. ‘You do know, don’t you?’ She stared at him impatiently, like some disagreeable schoolmistress, until he answered, ‘Yes, I know.’

‘You took an oath, as a young soldier, one you have not fulfilled,’ she said.

He was silent. He had never spoken of this to anyone except his brother.

‘Yes, I know all about it,’ she said impatiently. ‘Five boys swore to kill the emperor thirty years ago. Now there are just three left and the task is within their reach. Arish and Evan have chosen their part. But we need someone already in the palace.’ And she outlined to him the plan of invasion and assassination.

‘You want me as a doorman,’ he said, frowning, after she’d finished, ‘to let enemy troops in, and to stand by and applaud as Arish kills him. I’ll do it myself.’

‘Fell is our best hope.’

‘Fell isn’t here. I am. I’m a palace guard, remember?’

‘And who do you think is responsible for that, idiot?’

Riis stared at her. After his conversation with Evan he’d asked around about Saroyan, and found that, among other things, the lord lieutenant was responsible for troop deployment within the palace. But he had not made the connection.

‘We have infiltrated someone else into the Red Palace,’ the woman went on. ‘A girl. She is maidservant to Marcellus’ whore. She will contact you with information and you will keep an eye on her.’

‘So you want me to be a doorman and a childminder? And if I find an opportunity to kill the … target, if for instance he’s standing alone in a room with his back to me, do I have your permission?’ he asked sarcastically.

She smiled thinly. ‘You don’t like women, do you?’

I love women, he thought. I just don’t like
you
.

She said, ‘The emperor is not a normal man. He will be hard to
kill. Fell has the best hope. Probably none of us will survive this. You will have your chance to die for your City.’

Riis scowled. ‘I don’t want to die for the City. I want to kill the emperor and get away with it. And if I get a chance then I will take it.’

‘Fell wants to kill him too, remember. And Evan Broglanh. Of all of you, Evan is the one who kept in sight the vow you made as children. The rest of you were side-tracked – Fell with his mission to save his warriors, you with your women, Ranul … well, Ranul was perhaps the best of you,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘What happened to him?’

Saroyan ignored the question. ‘I must go now. You will not see me again. Broglanh will stay in touch. If you must, you can leave messages for Sami at this inn.’

And Riis did as he was asked. He shepherded the girl Amita to her new quarters with the whore Petalina. Though she had no idea who he was, he wanted to get a good look at her. She was pale and fair and looked no more than fifteen. She had shining hair and hid nervously behind its pale curtain. He wondered what sort of conspiracy it was that thought a girl like her would be useful.

He watched her sometimes at night as she scurried around the palace. He was amused by her dogged persistence, although he thought she was wasting her time. Once he had been forced to kill a guard he spotted stalking her through the darkened corridors, although he suspected the man planned to violate the girl, rather than report her for snooping. Either way, it could not be permitted. Riis dragged the man’s body down to a lower, drowned, level and made sure it sank into the silent water.

Amita was a chore to him, a chore and a nuisance. But when he heard she was dead, he grieved for her more than he would have thought possible.

The sisters Petalina and Fiorentina, in a family not blessed by the gods with boys, had been raised by their father to hunt and ride to hounds, to swim and run, and to use a sword, as well as the more maidenly pursuits of singing and dancing. A later generation of girls was to be pressed into the army, to die in their thousands on battlefields in sight of the City, but in those days their father was seen as a harmless eccentric for the education he gave his daughters.

Petalina, sitting in the emperor’s feasting hall before a board
groaning beneath the weight of gold plate, ornate candlesticks and cutlery, and startling sprays of exotic flowers decorated with stuffed hummingbirds and bright fish, not to mention mountains of food and gallons of wine, wondered what their father would think of them now.

She looked along the table at her sister who was listening to her husband Rafael Vincerus as he spoke confidentially in her ear. Fiorentina must have felt her gaze for she looked up and saw Petalina and smiled. Rafe saw the look and turned and raised a glass to Petalina.

‘Would you like some more little fishes?’ asked the tedious foreigner at her side. He must have thought she was smiling at him, and he was offering her a basket full of the dried fish which was a delicacy in his land. What a strange people, she thought. The Wester Isles are surrounded by living fish, yet its people value this dry chewy abomination which tastes like salted wood.

‘No, thank you.’ She smiled warmly, her eyes on his, and added apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I have only a tiny appetite.’

He smiled condescendingly as if confirmed in his opinion that ladies rarely admitted to eating, if they ate at all. Petalina smiled at the thought of Marcellus and herself a few hours before, after a robust session of lovemaking, devouring a leg of mutton together, and how he had laughed at her as she tore into it with her teeth.

She wished he was with her, for the empty chair on one side gave her no excuse not to talk to the ambassador. He had only one topic of conversation and, try as she might by asking him about his family, and the customs of his country, and his opinions on the war, he would not be diverted from his pet subject. Having heard all she ever wanted to know about fish, Petalina had cast about for some diversion. But she could not talk to the guest opposite her, a dashing captain of the Isles’ navy, for a herd of flying fish, painted and pinned on sticks, was in her way. Fish all about me, she thought in despair, and despite herself she giggled, concealed it with a cough, then straightened her face.

‘Are they very beautiful, the Wester Isles?’ she asked the ambassador, sitting back in her chair and turning towards him so he could have a good view of her breasts. Our trade links are crucial, Marcellus had reminded her, as if she were unaware of it. Keep the man happy. See he has anything he wants. ‘Anything?’ she had asked him archly.

The ambassador gazed fixedly at the twin mounds of pale soft
satiny flesh presented to him, and replied, ‘Yes, very beautiful, my lady.’ He dragged his eyes back to her face and she rewarded him with a smile of such complicit warmth that she could see sweat popping out on his forehead.

‘What is beautiful, sir?’ asked a deep voice. ‘My lady Petalina?’ She felt a strong hand on her shoulder, then sliding down her back, as Marcellus dropped gracefully into the empty seat beside her. As always, she felt the thrill of his presence and saw all eyes along the great table turn to her lover.

There was a moment’s silence as Marcellus looked around him, acknowledging faces with a smile or a nod, then he raised a glass to Fiorentina, in an echo of his brother’s gesture moments before.

‘Indeed,’ replied the ambassador as Marcellus returned his enquiring gaze to him, ‘the lady Petalina is beyond beautiful. She is …’ His ambassadorial skills, if he had any, deserted him and he laboured for a word. Petalina wondered if he was going to compare her with a fish. The entire company fell silent as the man struggled. ‘She has a beauty that is seen only once in a lifetime,’ he finished rather lamely.

Petalina smiled sweetly at him, wondering if he realized the insult he had offered to every other woman in the room. She glanced again at Fiorentina, who returned her look gravely, but her eyes were twinkling. She spoke to her husband and Rafe leaned across the table, pushing aside an elaborate arrangement of roses, and attracted the ambassador’s attention. The fish man apologized to Petalina and swung to speak to him.

I love you, my sister, thought Petalina.

‘I trust you kept him entertained?’ Marcellus asked her quietly.

She looked up into his eyes. The brothers were unalike, Marcellus bigger, heavy-shouldered, fair, Rafael smaller and more graceful, and dark. But their eyes were the same, black as midnight – not the very dark brown often seen among eastern tribesmen or the people of the southern wastelands, but pure pitch black, and shiny as wet pebbles. They scared her a little, the eyes.

‘Like most men,’ she told him, ‘he is not difficult to entertain.’

‘I saw you entertaining him with your breasts.’

She shrugged. ‘I would have thrown off all my clothes and leaped astride him if it stopped him talking about fish.’

Marcellus laughed. ‘Now you have met him,’ he asked her, ‘what choice of companion would you make to sweeten his night?’

‘Easy,’ she answered. ‘A boy.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘But he was entranced by your womanly bosom.’

She smiled at him, then said, lowering her voice, ‘All men are fascinated by breasts but there are those who want to sink into them, to wallow in them, to succumb to them, and those who are fearful of them. He was entranced as a mouse is fascinated by a snake. He is a man of deep uncertainties and seeks sexual comfort from what he knows. Trust me, the ambassador of fish will be well satisfied by a pretty boy, perhaps two, but it must be very discreet for, like all important men, he is anxious to be well thought of.’

‘Like all important men?’ he repeated, sitting back and gazing at her sternly.

‘Yes, my love,’ she told him complacently. ‘Even you, when you were younger, judged yourself by the opinions of others, I’m sure. But it is so long ago that you have forgotten.’

She wondered again how old he was. He had to be at least seventy, for she had first met him thirty years before and he was not young then. Yet there was still more gold in his hair than grey, and his clean-shaven face was unlined, except around the margins of the eyes. He was as strong as he had ever been; stronger. She feared for him, for more than half his year was spent campaigning, and each time he sallied out with his troops she was afraid she would never see him again. It was the one ambition of his life to see an end to the war. Or so he told her. Where, though, would he be without it? She feared that if the war ended, as he wished, and he went into retirement, then he would quickly age and die.