Norras raised both hands and balled them into fists as if to instruct the heathen. He closed the distance between them, swift on his feet, jerking his head in sharp stutters designed to fool the eye and tempt an ill-advised swing. He looked rather like a chicken to me, bobbing his head like that, fists at his face, elbows out like little wings. A big muscular hen.
Snorri clearly had the reach so Norras came in fast. He ducks his head, does Norras – takes punches on his skull. That’s what I was going to say. I’d seen men hurt their hands on the Teuton’s thick and bony head before. I didn’t have time to get the words out. Norras jabbed and Snorri caught the man’s fist in the flat of his palm, closing his fingers to trap it. He yanked Norras forward, punching with his other arm, brushing aside the wild swing of the Teuton’s left with his elbow. The Norseman’s huge fist hammered into Norras’s face, knuckles impacting from chin to nose. The man flew back a yard or more, hitting the floor with a boneless thump, blood spattered his upturned face, mixed with teeth and muck from his flattened snout.
A moment of silence then a roar went up that hurt my ears. Half delight, half outrage. Betting parchments flew, coins changed hands, all informal wagers made in the moment.
‘An impressive specimen,’ Maeres said without passion. He watched while two pitmen dragged Norras away through the double-chambered exit valve. Snorri let them do their work. I could see he’d calculated his chances of escape and found them to be zero. The second iron gate could be raised only from the outside and then only when the first had been lowered.
‘Send in Ootana.’ Maeres never raised his voice but was always heard amid the din. He offered me a thin smile.
‘No!’ I strangled back the outrage, remembering that I had seen lipless men even in the palace. Maeres Allus had a long arm. ‘Maeres, my friend, you can’t be serious?’ Ootana was a specialist with countless knife-bouts notched onto his belt. He’d sliced open half a dozen good knifemen this year already. ‘At least let my fighter train with the hook-knife for a few weeks! He’s from the ice. If it’s not an axe they don’t understand it.’ I tried for humour but Ootana already waited behind the gate, a loose-limbed devil from the farthest shores of Afrique.
‘Fight.’ Maeres raised his hand.
‘But—’ Snorri hadn’t even been given his weapon. It was murder, pure and simple. A public lesson to put a prince firmly in his place. The public didn’t have to like it though! Boos rang out when Ootana stepped into the pit, his hooked blade held carelessly to the side. The nobles hooted as if we were watching mummers in the square. They might hoot again tonight with equal passion if Father’s opera contained a suitably villainous party.
Snorri glanced up at us. I swear he was grinning. ‘No rules now?’
Ootana began a slow advance, passing his knife from hand to hand. Snorri spread his arms, not fully but enough to make a wide man wider still in that confined space, and with a roar that drowned out the many voices above, he charged. Ootana jigged to one side, intending to slash and dodge clear, but the Norseman came too fast, swerved to compensate, and reached with arms every bit as long as the Afriqan’s. At the last Ootana could do no more than attempt the killing blow, nothing else would save him from Snorri’s grapple. The exchange was lost in the collision. Snorri pounded into his man, driving him back a yard and slamming him into the pit wall. He held there for a heartbeat, perhaps a word passed between them, then stepped away. Ootana slid to a crumpled heap at the base of the wall, white fragments of bone showing through dark skin at the back of his head.
Snorri turned to us, shot an unreadable glance my way, then looked down to inspect the hook-knife driven through his hand, hilt hard against his palm. The sacrifice he’d made to keep the blade from his throat.
‘The bear.’ Maeres said it more quietly than ever into the noise of the erupting crowd. I’d never seen him angry, few men had, but I could see it now in the thinness of his lips and the paling of his skin.
‘Bear?’ Why not just shoot him with crossbows from the rail and be done! I’d seen a Blood Holes’ bear once before, a black beast from the western forests. They set it against a Conaught man with spear and net. It wasn’t any bigger than him but the spear just made it angry and when it got in close it was all over. It doesn’t matter how much muscle a man may carry, a bear’s strength is a different thing and makes any warrior seem weak as a child.
It took them a while to produce the bear. This clearly hadn’t been part of the plan that involved Norras and Ootana. Snorri simply stood where he was, holding his injured hand high above his head and gripping the wrist with his other hand. He left the hook-knife where it was, embedded in his palm.
The fury the crowd had shown at Ootana’s entrance flared to new heights when the bear approached the gate, but Snorri’s booming laugh silenced them.
‘Call that a bear?’ He lowered his arms and thumped his chest. ‘I am of the Undoreth, The Children of the Hammer. The blood of Odin runs in our veins. Storm-born we!’ He pointed up at Maeres with his transfixed hand, dripping crimson, knowing his tormentor. ‘I am Snorri, Son of the Axe. I have fought trolls! You have a bigger bear. I saw it back in the cells. Send that one.’
‘Bigger bear!’ Roust Greyjar shouted out behind me, and his fool brother took up the chant. ‘Bigger bear!’ Within moments they were all baying it and the old slaughterhouse pulsed with the demand.
Maeres said nothing, only nodded.
‘Bigger bear!’ The crowd roared it time and again until at last the bigger bear arrived and awed them to silence.
Where Maeres had procured the beast I couldn’t say but it must have cost him a fortune. The creature was simply the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Dwarfing the black bears of the Teuton forests, overtopping even the grizzled bears from beyond the Slav lands. Even slouched behind the gate in its off-white pelt it stood nine foot and more, and heavy with muscle beneath fur and fat. The crowd drew breath and howled its delight and its horror, ecstatic at the prospect of death and gore, outraged at the unfairness of the killing to come.
As the gate lifted, and the bear snarled and went to all fours behind it, Snorri took hold of the hook-knife and pulled it free, making that curious turn of the blade at the last moment necessary to prevent the wound from becoming larger still. He bunched the injured hand into a scarlet fist and took the blade in an overhand grip in the other.
The bear, clearly some arctic breed, came in unhurriedly on all fours, swinging its head from side to side in great sweeps, drawing in the stink of men and blood. Snorri charged, stamping his great feet, arms wide, roaring that deafening challenge of his. He drew up short but it was enough to make the bear rear, returning the challenge with a snarl that nearly unloosed my waters even behind the safety of the rail. The bear stood ten foot, forelegs lifted, its black claws longer than fingers. Snorri’s knife, crimson with his own blood, looked a sorry little thing. It would hardly penetrate the bear’s fat. It would take a longsword to reach its vitals.
The Norseman shouted out some curse in his heathen tongue and flung out his wounded hand, holding it wide, splattering blood across the bear’s chest, a pattern of red on white. ‘Madness!’ Even I knew not to let a wild thing see that you’re wounded.
The bear, more curious than enraged, bent down, folding up to sniff and lick at its bloody fur. And at that instant Snorri charged. For a moment I wondered if he could actually kill the thing. If by some miracle of war he could drive his blade just so into its spine while its head was down. All of us drew a single breath. Snorri leapt. He set his injured hand flat to the top of the bear’s head and like some court tumbler vaulted onto its shoulders, crouching. Roaring outrage, the bear snapped erect, reaching for the annoyance, powering up to its full height as if Snorri were a child and it the father carrying him aback. As the bear straightened Snorri straightened too, leaping upwards with their combined thrust and reaching high with his knife-hand. He drove the blade into the wooden skirts of the rail some twenty feet above the floor of the pit. He pulled, reached, swung, and in a broken second he was amongst us.
Snorri ver Snagason surged through the highborn crowd, trampling full-grown men underfoot. Somewhere in those first few steps he found a new knife. He left a trail of flattened and bleeding citizens, using his blade only three times when members of the Terrif pit team made more earnest efforts to stop him. Those he left gutted, one with his head nearly taken off. He was out into the street before half the crowd even knew what had happened.
I leaned over the rail. The hall was in chaos, everywhere men were finding their courage and starting to give chase now that their quarry was long gone. The bear had returned to sniffing the pit floor, licking blood from the flagstones, the red print of Snorri’s hand stark across the back of its head.
Maeres had vanished. He had a way for coming and going, that one. I shrugged. The Norseman was clearly too dangerous to keep. He would have been the death of me, one way or another. At least this way I’d put a three hundred crown dent in my debt to Maeres Allus. It would keep him off my back for a good three months, maybe six. And a lot can happen in six months. Six months is an eternity.
5
Opera! There’s nothing like it. Except wild boars rutting.
The only good thing about Father’s interminable opera was the venue, a fine domed building in Vermillion’s eastern quarter where a preponderance of Florentine bankers and Milano merchants gave the city a very different flavour. For the first hour I gazed up at the nymphs cavorting nude across the dome, somehow painted so that the curved surface presented them without distortion. As much as I admired the artist’s eye for detail I found the scene frequently interrupted by flashes of imagery from the Blood Holes. Snorri felling Norras with what must have been a fatal punch. Ootana falling forward from the pit wall, the back of his head broken open. That leap. That spectacular, impossible, insane leap! On stage a soprano soared through an aria as I replayed the Norseman launching himself to freedom.
In the intermission I searched for familiar faces. I had come late to the showing and had shuffled my way noisily to a seat blocking everyone’s view. In the dim light and separated from my more punctual companions I had to settle for sitting among strangers. Now under the lanterns of the intermisso hall and plucking glasses of wine from every passing tray, I found that despite my brother Darin’s dire warnings the opening night was surprisingly poorly attended. It seemed that Father himself had failed to arrive. Taken to his bed, the gossip had it. He was never a music lover but the Vatican’s coffers had financed this tripe of angels and devils wailing one against the other, fat men sweltering under wings of wax and feathers whilst belting out the chorus. The least their most senior local representative could do was attend and suffer with the rest of us. Damn it all, I couldn’t even spot Martus, or fucking Darin.
I jostled past a man in a white enamel mask, as though he were attending a masquerade rather than an opera. Or at least I attempted to jostle past, failed, and bounced off him as if he were cast from iron. I turned, rubbing my shoulder. Something in the eyes watching from those slits swept away in a cold wash of fear any inclination I had to complain. I let the press of people separate us. Had it even been a man? The eyes haunted me. The irises white, the whites grey. My shoulder ached as though infection ate at the bone … Unborn. Darin had said something about an unborn in the city …
‘Prince Jalan!’ Ameral Contaph hailed me with irritating familiarity, puffed up in ridiculous finery no doubt purchased for just this occasion. They must have been desperate to fill the seats if toadies of Contaph’s water were invited to the premiere. ‘Prince Jalan!’ The flow of the crowd somehow pulled us further apart and I affected not to see him. The fellow was probably just pursuing me for the fictional paperwork regarding Snorri. Worse still, he might have already heard the Norseman was running amok in Vermillion’s streets … Or perhaps he’d scratched off the gold plate from my gift. Either way, none of the reasons he might want to talk to me seemed to be reasons I might want to talk to him! I turned sharply away and found myself face to face with Alain DeVeer, sporting an unbecoming bandage around his head and flanked by two large and ugly men in ill-fitting opera cloaks.
‘Jalan!’ Alain reached for me, finding only a handful of my own exquisitely tailored cape. I shrugged the garment off and let him keep it while I sprinted for the stairs, weaving a dangerous path around dowagers sporting diamonds in their hair and gruff old lords knocking back the wine with the grim determination of men wishing to dull their senses.
I have quick feet but it’s probably my total disregard for other people’s safety that allowed me to open a considerable lead so swiftly.
There are communal privies at the rear of the opera house. For the men, a dozen open seats above water flowing in channels that pour out into the alley behind. The water runs from a large tank on the roof. A small band of urchins spend all day filling it with buckets – an activity I had occasion to note when using one of the cast changing rooms for an assignation with Duchess Sansera a season previously. I was banging away dutifully as a chap does with a woman of declining years and increasing fortune when hoping to cadge a loan, but every time I seemed to be getting anywhere a small boy would wander past the door, heavy buckets sloshing. Quite put me off my stride. And the old cow didn’t loan me so much as a silver penny.
That afternoon with Duchess Money-Buckets wasn’t a complete waste though. After I’d let her usher me out of there with a wet kiss and a goosing of my buttocks, I chased down as many of those ratty little children as I could and kicked some arse. It’s true that my foe outnumbered me but I am the hero of Aral Pass, after all, and sometimes when Prince Jalan Kendeth is roused to anger it’s best to flee, whatever your number. If you’re eight.
I had found three of the little bastards cowering in the tiny utility room where the buckets are stored along with assorted brooms and mops. And that was the pay-off – another hiding place to add to my list.
Racing along the same corridor now, with Alain and friends a corner or two behind me, I stopped dead, hauled the closet door open and dived in. The thing with closing doors behind you is to do it quickly but quietly. That proved a challenge whilst trying to disentangle myself from various broom handles in the dark without the teetering bucket towers crashing down around me. Seconds later when Alain and his heavies clattered down the corridor, the hero of Aral Pass was crouched among the mops, hands clamped to mouth to stifle a sneeze.
I managed to hold the sneeze back almost long enough, but no man can be in complete control of his body, and there’s no stopping such things sometimes – as I told the Duchess Sansera when she expressed her disappointment.
‘Achoo!’
The footsteps, fading at the edge of hearing, stopped.
‘What was that?’ Alain’s voice, distant but not distant enough.
Cowards divide into two broad groups. Those paralysed by their fear, and those galvanized by it. Fortunately I belong to the latter group and burst out of that closet like a … well, like a lecherous prince hoping to escape a beating.
I’ve always made a close study of windows, and the most accessible windows in the opera house were in the aforementioned communal privies, which needed them for obvious reasons. I pounded down the corridor, swerved, banked, and crashed through into the fetid gloom of the men’s privy. One old gent had settled himself there with a flagon of wine, clearly feeling that breathing in the sewer stink was preferable to a seat closer to the stage. I ran straight past, climbed onto the rear throne and tried to jam my head between the shutters. Normally they were propped ajar to offer sufficient ventilation to prevent the place exploding if one more over-fed lordling passed wind. Today, like everything else since I got up, they seemed to be against me and stood firmly closed. I shook them hard. They weren’t latched and it made no sense that they wouldn’t give. Fear lent strength to my arm and when the damn things wouldn’t open I ripped out the slats before thrusting my head through.
For a half second I just stood with that cool, slightly less fetid, air on my face. Salvation! There’s something almost orgasmic about getting out from under a heap of trouble, winning free and thumbing your nose at it. Tomorrow maybe that same trouble will be waiting around a corner for you, but today, right now, it’s beaten, left in the dust. Cowards, over burdened with imagination as we are, spend most of our attention on the future, worrying what’s coming next, so when that rare opportunity to live in the moment arrives I seize it with as many hands as I’ve got spare.
In the next half second I realized that we were on the second floor and the drop to the street below seemed likely to injure me more grievously than Alain and his friends would dare to. I should perhaps puff myself up, brazen it out, and remind Alain whose damned father’s opera this was and whose grandmother happened to be warming the throne. No part of me wanted to bank on Alain’s commonsense outweighing his anger, but an ankle-breaking drop into the alley where they flushed the shit … that didn’t appeal either.
And then I saw her. A tattered figure in the alley, bent over some burden. A bucket? For one ridiculous moment I thought it was another of those little boys lugging water for the tank. A pale hand lifted a brush, moonlight glimmered on what dripped from it.
‘Jalan Kendeth, hiding in the privies. How appropriate.’ Alain DeVeer banging open the door behind me. I didn’t turn my head even a fraction. If I hadn’t taken care of business at the start of the intermission I would have rapidly filled the privy I was standing on by way of both trouser legs. The figure in the alley looked up and one eye caught the moonbeams, glowing pearly in the darkness. My shoulder ached with a sudden memory of the masked figure I’d barged into. Conviction seized me by the throat. That had not been a man. There had been nothing human in that stare. Outside the blind-eye woman painted her fatal runes, and inside, among the lords and ladies, hell walked with us.
I would have run head first into a dozen Alain DeVeers to get away from the Silent Sister. Hell, I’d have flattened Maeres Allus to put some space between me and that old witch. I’d have put my foot in his groin and told him to add it to the debt. I would have charged right at Alain and his two friends but for the memory of a fire on The Street of Nails. The walls themselves had burned. There had been nothing left but fine ash. Nobody got out. Not one person. And there had been four other fires like that across the city. Four in five years.
‘Oh, Jalan!’ Alain drew the ‘a’ out, making it a sing-song taunt, ‘Jaaaalaan.’ He really hadn’t taken having that vase broken over his head very well.
I jammed myself further through the broken shutter, wedging both shoulders into the gap and splintering more slats. Some kind of webbing stretched across my face. Because right now I needed a big spider on my head? Once more the gods of fate were crapping on me from a height. I looked to the left. Black symbols covered the wall, each like some horrifying and twisted insect caught in its death throes. To the right, more of them, reaching up from where the blind-eye woman had returned to her work. They seemed to have grown along the sides of the building, like vines … or crawled up. There was no way she could reach so high. She planted her hideous seeds as she circled the building, painting a noose of symbols, and from each one more grew, and more, rising until the noose became a net.
‘Hey!’ Alain, his gloating turning to irritation at being ignored.
‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ I pulled free and glanced back at the three of them in the doorway, the old man clutching his wine looking on bemused. ‘There’s no time—’
‘Get him down from there.’ Alain shook his head in disgust.
The drop to the street had been knocked off the top of the list of today’s most terrifying things, where it had nestled just above Alain and friends. The writing on the wall immediately outside swept all that other stuff right off the list and into the privies. I stuck both arms through the hole I’d made and launched myself out. I made it a couple of feet, and came to a splintering halt with my chest wedged into the shutter frame. Something dark and very cold stretched across my face again, feeling for all the world like a web spun by the world’s toughest spider. The strands of it closed my left eye for me and resisted any further advance.
‘Quick!’
‘Grab him!’
Pounding feet as Alain led the charge. When it comes to wriggling out of things I’m pretty good, but my current situation offered little purchase. I seized the windowsill with both hands and tried to propel myself forward, managing an advance of a few inches, jacket ripping. The black stuff over my face pulled even harder, pressing my head back and threatening to throw me back into the room if I lessened my grip even a little.
Now, nature may have gifted me a pretty decent physique but I do try to avoid any strenuous activity, at least whilst clothed, and I’ll lay no claims to any great strength. Raw terror does, however, have a startling effect on me and I’ve been known to toss extraordinarily heavy items aside if they stood between me and a swift escape.
Anticipating the arrival of Alain DeVeer’s hand on my flailing shin occasioned just the right level of terror. It wasn’t the thought of being dragged back in and given a good kicking that worried me – although it normally would … a lot. It was the idea that whilst they were kicking me, and whilst poor old Jalan was rolling about manfully taking his lumps and screaming for mercy, the Silent Sister would complete her noose, the fire would ignite, and we’d each and every one of us burn.
Whatever had stretched across my face had stopped stretching and was instead keeping me from getting any further forward, all its elasticity used up. It felt more like a length of wire now, cutting across my forehead and face. With my feet finding nothing to push against, I hung, one-third out, two-thirds in, thrashing helplessly and roaring all manner of threats and promises. I rather suspect Alain and his friends might have paused to have a laugh at my expense because it took longer than I expected before someone laid a hand on me.
They should have taken the matter more seriously. Flailing legs are a dangerous proposition. Fuelled by desperation I struck out and made a solid connection, booted heel to something that crunched like a nose. Someone made a noise very similar to the one Alain had made that morning when I broke the vase over his head.
The added thrust proved sufficient. The wire-like obstruction bit deeper, like a cold knife carving through me, then something gave. It felt more as though it were me that gave rather than the obstruction, as if I cracked and it ran through me, but either way I won free and tumbled out in one piece rather than two.
As victories go it proved fairly Pyrrhic, my prize being the liberty to pitch out face-first with a two-storey drop between me and the flagstones. When you run out of screaming during a fall you know that you’ve dropped way too far. Too far and too fast in general for there to be any reasonable prospect of you ever getting up again. Something tugged at me though, slowing my descent a fraction, an awful ripping sound over-riding my scream as I fell. Even so, I hammered into the ground with more than enough force to kill me but for the large mound of semi-solid dung accumulated beneath the privy outlet. I hit with a splat.
