Prince of Fools

I staggered up, spitting out mouthfuls of filth, roared an oath, slipped and plunged immediately back in. Derisive laughter from on high confirmed I had an audience. My second attempt left me on my back, scraping dung from my eyes. Looking up I saw the whole side of the opera house clothed in interlocking symbols, with one exception. The window from which I tumbled lay bare, a man’s face peering from the hole I’d left. Elsewhere the black limbs of the Silent Sister’s calligraphy bound the shutters closed, but across the broken privy shutter, not even a trace. And leading down from it, a crack, running deep into the masonry, following the path of my descent. A peculiar golden light bled from the crack, flickering with shadows all along its length, illuminating both alley and building.

With more speed and less haste I found my feet and cast around for the Silent Sister. She’d rounded the corner, quite possibly before I fell. How far she had to go until completing her noose I couldn’t see. I backed to the middle of the alley, out of the dung heap, wiping the muck from my clothes to little avail. Something snagged at my fingers and I found myself holding what looked like black ribbon but felt more like the writhing leg of some nightmare insect. With a cry I tore it from me, and found the whole of one of the witch’s symbols hanging from my hand, nearly reaching to the ground and twisting in a breeze that just wasn’t there – as if it were somehow trying to wrap itself back around me. I flung it down in revulsion, sensing it was more filthy than anything else that coated me.

A sharp retort returned my gaze to the building. As I watched, the crack spread, darting down another five yards, almost reaching the ground. The shriek that burst from me was more girlish than I would have hoped for. Without hesitation, I turned and fled. More laughter from above. I paused at the alley’s end, hoping for something clever to shout back at Alain. But any witticism which might have materialized vanished as all along the wall beside me the symbols started to light up. Each cracked open, glowing, as if they had become fissures into some world of fire waiting for us all just beneath the surface of the stone. I realized in that instant that the Silent Sister had completed her work and that Alain, his friends, the old man with his wine, and every other person inside was about to burn. I swear, in that moment I even felt sorry for the opera singers.

‘Jump, you idiots!’ I shouted it over my shoulder, already running.

I rounded the corner at speed and slipped, shoes still slick with muck. Sprawling across cobbles, I saw back along the alleyway, now lit in blinding incandescence shot through with pulsing shadow. Each symbol blazed. At the far end, one particular shadow stayed constant: the Silent Sister, ragged and immobile, still little more than a stain on the eye despite the glare from the wall beside her.

I gained my feet to the sound of awful screaming. The old hall rang to notes that had never before issued from any mouth within it down the long years of its history. I ran then, feet sliding and skittering beneath me – and out of the brilliance of that alleyway something gave chase. A bright and jagged line zigzagged along my trail as if the broken pattern sought to reclaim me, to catch me and light me up so that I too might share the fate I’d fought so hard to escape.

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps. The street I had turned into from the alley ran past the back of the opera house and was well-trodden even at this hour of the night, though nowhere near as crowded as Paint Street that runs past the grand entrance and delivers patrons to the doors. My … manly bellowing … served to clear my path somewhat, and where town-folk proved too slow to move I variously sidestepped or, if they were sufficiently small or frail, flattened them. The crack emerged into the street behind me, advancing in rapid stuttering steps, each accompanied by a sound like something expensive shattering.

Turning sideways to slot between two town-laws on patrol, I managed a glance back and saw the crack jag left, veering down the street, away from the opera house and in the direction I’d taken. The people in the road hardly noticed, transfixed as they were by the glow of the building beyond, its walls now wreathed in pale violet flame. The crack itself seemed more than it first appeared, being in truth two cracks running close together, crossing and re-crossing, one bleeding a hot golden light and the other revealing a consuming darkness that seemed to swallow what illumination fell its way. At each point where they crossed golden sparks boiled in darkness and the flagstones shattered.

I barged between the town-laws, the impact spinning me round, hopping on one foot to keep my balance. The crack ran under an old fellow I’d felled in my escape. More than that, it ran through him, and where the dark crossed the light something broke. Smaller fissures spread from each crossing point, encompassing the man for a heartbeat before he literally exploded. Red chunks of him were thrown skyward, burning as they flew, consumed with such ferocity that few made it to the ground.

Whatever anyone may say about running, the main thing is to pick your feet up as quickly as possible – as if the ground has developed a great desire to hurt you. Which it kind of had. I took off at a pace that would have left my dog-fleeing self of only that morning stopping to check if his legs were still moving. More people exploded in my wake as the crack ran through them. I vaulted a cart, which immediately detonated behind me, pieces of burning wood peppering the wall as I dived through an open window.

I rolled to my feet inside what looked to be, and certainly smelled like, a brothel of such low class I hadn’t even been aware of its existence. Shapes writhed in the gloom to one side as I pelted across the chamber, knocking over a lamp, a wicker table, a dresser, and a small man with a toupee, before pulverizing the shutters on the rear window on my way out.

The room lit behind me. I crashed across the alleyway into which I’d spilled, let the opposite wall arrest my momentum, and charged off. The window I came through cracked, sill and lintel, the whole building splitting. The twin fissures, light and dark, wove their path after me, picking up still more speed. I jumped a poppy-head slumped in the alley and raced on. From the sound of it the fissure cured his addiction permanently a heartbeat later.

Eyes forward is the second rule of running, right after the one about picking up your feet. Sometimes though you can’t follow all the rules. Something about the crack demanded my attention, and I shot another glance back at it.

Slam! At first I thought I’d run into a wall. Drawing breath for more screaming and more running I pulled away, only to discover the wall was holding me. Two huge fists, one bandaged and bloody, bunched in the jacket over my chest. I looked up, then up some more, and found myself staring into Snorri Snagason’s pale eyes.

‘What—’ He hadn’t time for more words. The crack ran through us. I saw a black fracture race through the Norseman, jagged lines across his face, bleeding darkness. In the same moment something hot and unbearably brilliant cut through me, filling me with light and stealing the world away.

My vision cleared just in time to see Snorri’s forehead descending. I heard a crack of an entirely different kind. My nose breaking. And the world went away again.

6

First check where my money pouch is, and pat for my locket. It’s a habit I’ve developed. When you wake up in the kinds of places I wake up in, and in the company I often pay to keep … well, it pays to keep your coin close. The bed was harder and more bumpy than I tend to like. As hard and bumpy as cobbles, in fact. And it smelled like shit. The glorious safe moment between being asleep and being awake was over. I rolled onto my side, clutching my nose. Either I’d not been unconscious very long, or the stink had kept even the beggars off. That and the excitement down the road, the trail of exploded citizens, the burning opera house, the blazing crack. The crack! I staggered to my feet at that, expecting to see the jagged path leading down the alley and pointing straight at me. Nothing. At least nothing to see by starlight and a quarter moon.

‘Shit.’ My nose hurt more than seemed reasonable. I remembered fierce eyes beneath heavy brows … and then those heavy brows smacking into my face. ‘Snorri …’

The Norseman was long gone. Why small charred chunks of us both weren’t decorating the walls I couldn’t say. I remembered the way those two fissures had run side by side, crossing and re-crossing, and at every junction, a detonation. The dark fracture-line had run through Snorri – I had seen it across his face. The light—

I patted myself down, sudden frantic hands searching for injury. The light one had run through me. Pulling up my trouser legs revealed grubby shins with no sign of golden light shining from any cracks. But the street showed no sign of the fissure either. Nothing remained but the damage it had wrought.

I shook thoughts of that blinding golden light from my mind. I’d survived! The screams from the opera house returned to me. How many had died? How many of my friends? My relatives? Had Alain’s sisters been there? Pray God Maeres Allus had been. Let it be one of those nights he pretended to be a merchant and used his money to buy him into social circles far above his station. For now though I needed to put more distance between me and the site of the fire. But where to go? The Silent Sister’s magic had pursued me. Would she be waiting at the palace to finish the job?

When in doubt, run.

I took off again, along dark streets, lost but knowing in time that I would hit the river and gain my bearings anew. Running blind is apt to get you a broken nose, and since I had one of those already and wasn’t keen to find out what came next I kept my pace on the sensible side of break-neck. I normally find that showing trouble my heels and putting a few miles behind me makes things a whole lot better. As I ran though, breathing through my mouth and catching my side where a muscle kept cramping, I felt worse and worse. A general unease grew minute by minute and hardened into a general crippling anxiety. I wondered whether this was what conscience felt like. Not that any of it had been my fault. I couldn’t have saved anyone even if I’d tried.

I paused and leaned against a wall, catching my breath and trying to shake off whatever it was that plagued me. My heart kept fluttering behind my ribs as if I’d started to sprint rather than come to a halt. Each part of me seemed, fragile, somehow brittle. My hands looked wrong, too white, too light. I started to run again, accelerating, any fatigue left behind. Spare energy boiled off my skin, rattled through me, set my teeth buzzing in their sockets, my hair seeming to float up around my head. Something was wrong with me, broken, I couldn’t slow down if I wanted to.

Ahead the street forked, starlight offering just the lines of the building that divided the way. I veered from one side of the street to the other, unsure which path to follow. Moving to the left made me worse, my speed increasing, sprinting, my hands almost glowing as they pumped, head aching, ready to split, bright light fracturing across my vision. Veering right restored a touch of normality. I took the right fork. Suddenly I knew the direction. Something had been tugging at me since I picked myself up off the cobbles. Now, as if a lamp had been lit, I knew the direction of its pull. If I turned from it then whatever malady afflicted me grew worse. Head toward it and the symptoms eased. I had a direction.

What the destination might be I couldn’t say.

It seemed to be my day for charging headlong down the streets of Vermillion. My path now followed the gentle gradient toward the Seleen where she eased her slow passage through the city. I started to pass the markets and cargo bays behind the great warehouses that fronted the river docks. Even at this hour men moved back and forth, hauling crates from mule-drawn trolleys, loading wagons, labouring by the mean light of lanterns to push the stuff of commerce through Vermillion’s narrow veins.

My path took me across a deserted marketplace smelling of fish and fetched me up against a wide expanse of wall, one of the city’s most ancient buildings, now co-opted into service as a docks warehouse. The thing stretched a hundred yards and more both left and right, and I had no interest in either direction. Forward. My route lay straight ahead. That’s where the pull came from. A broad-planked door cracked open a few yards off and without thought I was there, yanking it wide, slipping past the bewildered menial with his hand still trying to push. A corridor ran ahead, going my way, and I gave chase. Shouts from behind as men startled into action and tried to catch me. Builder globes burned here, shedding the cold white light of the ancients. I hadn’t realized quite how old the structure was. I charged on regardless, flashing past archway after archway each opening on to Builder-lit galleries, all packed with green-laden benches and walled with shelf upon shelf of many-leaved plants. When, about halfway through the width of the warehouse, a plank-built door opened, slamming out into my path, all I had time to think before blacking out was that hitting Snorri Snagason had hurt more.

I came back to consciousness lying horizontal once again, and hurting in so many places that I missed out the blissful ignorance stage and went directly into the asking of stupid questions.

‘Where am I?’ Nasal and hesitant.

The bright but flickering light and the faint unnatural whine helped me to remember. Somewhere with Builder-globes. I made to sit up and found myself tied to a table. ‘Help!’ A little louder. Panicked, I tested my strength against the ropes and found no give in them. “Help!”

‘Best save your breath!’ The voice came from the shadows by the door. I squinted. A thickset ruffian leaned against the wall, looking back at me.

‘I’m Prince Jalan! I’ll have your fucking head for this! Untie these ropes.’

‘Yeah, that’s not going to happen.’ He leaned forward, chewing something, the flickering light gleaming on his baldness.

‘I’m Prince Jalan! Don’t you recognize me?’

‘Like I know what the princes look like. I don’t even know the princes’ names! Far as I’m concerned you’re some toff who got juiced up and went swimming in a sewer. Just your bad luck to end up here. Horace though, he did seem to know you from somewhere. Told me to keep you here and off he went. “Keep an eye on that one, Daveet,” he said. “Keep a good watch.” You must be some kind of important or you’d be floating down the river by now with your throat cut.’

‘Kill me and my grandmother will raze this quarter to the ground.’ A blatant lie but, spoken with conviction, it made me feel better. ‘I’m a rich man. Let me go and I’ll see you’re fixed up for life.’ I’ll admit I have a gift for lying. I sound least convincing when I tell the truth.

‘Money’s nice an’ all,’ the man said. He took a step away from the wall and let the flickers illuminate the brutality of his face. ‘But if I let you go without Horace’s say-so then I wouldn’t have no fingers to count it all with. And if it turned out you really were a prince and we let you go without the boss’s say-so, well me and Horace would think having our fingers taken was the easy part.’ He bared his teeth at me, more gaps than teeth, truth be told, and settled back into the shadow.

I lay back, moaning from time to time, and asking questions that he ignored. At least the strange compulsion that had me running headlong into this mess in the first place had now faded. I still had that sense of direction, but the need to pursue it had lessened and I felt more my old self. Which in this instance meant terrified. Even in my terror though I noticed that the direction that nagged at me was changing, swinging round, the urge to pursue it growing more faint by the minute.

I drew a deep breath and took stock of my surroundings. A smallish room, not one of those long galleries. They’d been growing plants there? That made no sense. No plants in here though. The broken light probably meant it wasn’t suitable. Just a table and me tied to it.

‘Why—’ The door juddered open and cut through my nineteenth question.

‘Good lord it stinks in here!’ A calm and depressingly familiar voice. ‘Stand our guest up, why don’t you, and let’s see if you can’t sluice some of that filth off him.’

Men loomed to either side, strong hands grasped the table and the world turned through a right-angle, leaving the table standing on end, and me standing too, still bound to it. A bucket of cold water took my breath and vision before I had a chance to look around. Another followed in quick succession. I stood gasping, trying to get a breath – no mean task with your nose clogged with blood and water everywhere – whilst a fragrant brown pool began to spread around my feet.

‘Well bless me. There seems to be a prince hidden under all this unpleasantness. A diamond in the muck as they say. Albeit a very low-carat one.’

I shook the wet hair from my eyes, and there he stood, Maeres Allus, dressed in his finest as if bound for high company … and an opera perhaps?

‘Ah, Maeres! I was hoping to see you. Had a little something to hand over toward our arrangement.’ I never called it my debt. Our arrangement sounded better. A little more as if it was both our problems, not just mine.

‘You were?’ Just the slightest smile mocking at the corners of his mouth. He’d worn that same smile when one of his heavies snapped my index finger. The ache of it still ran through me on cold mornings when I reached for the flagon of small beer they put by my bed. It ran through that same finger now, secured at my side.

‘Yes.’ I didn’t even stutter. ‘Had it with me at the opera.’ By my reckoning the business with Snorri had bought me in the region of six months’ grace but it never hurts to sound willing. Besides, the main thing when tied to tables by criminals is to remind them how much more valuable you are to them when not tied to a table. ‘The gold was right in my pocket. I think I must have lost it in the panic.’

‘Tragic.’ Maeres lifted a hand, cupped his fingers and a man came from the shadows to stand at his shoulder. A dry rustling accompanied his advance, and stopped when he did. I didn’t like this one at all. He looked too pleased to see me. ‘Another fire with no survivors.’

‘Well …’ I didn’t want to contradict Maeres. My eyes slid to the man beside him. Maeres is a slight fellow, unremarkable, the kind of little man you might find bent over the ledgers at some merchant’s office. Neat brown hair, eyes that are neither kind nor cruel. In fact remarkably similar to my father in age and appearance. Maeres’ companion though, he looked like the sort of man who would drown kittens recreationally. His face reminded me of the skulls in the palace catacombs. Stretch skin over one and press in some pale staring eyes, and you’d have this man, his smile too wide, teeth too long and white.

Maeres clicked his fingers, snapping my attention back to him. ‘This is Cutter John. I was telling him as we came in just how unfortunate it is that you’ve seen my operation here.’

‘O-o-operation?’ I stuttered the question out. Victory could be measured now by a lack of soiling myself. Cutter John was a name everyone knew, but not many claimed to have seen him. Cutter John came into play when Maeres wanted to hurt people more creatively. When a broken finger, amputated toe, or good beating wouldn’t suffice, when Maeres wanted to stamp his authority, set his trademark upon some poor soul, Cutter John would be the man to do the work. Some called it artistry.

‘The poppies.’

‘I didn’t see any poppies.’ Row upon row of green things growing, here under Builder-lights. My Uncle Hertert – the heir-apparently-not, as Father liked to call him – had made countless initiatives to cut the opium supply. He’d had town-law out on boats patrolling God knows how many miles of the Seleen, convinced it came upriver from the port of Marsail. But Maeres grew his own. Right here. Under Hertert’s nose and ready to go up everyone else’s. ‘I didn’t see a thing, Maeres. I ran into a door for godsakes. Blind drunk.’

‘You sobered up remarkably well.’ He lifted a golden vinaigrette to his nose, as if the stink of me offended him. Which it probably did. ‘In any event it’s a risk I can’t run, and if we have to part company we may as well make it a memorable event, no?’ He tilted his head at Cutter John.

That was enough to let my bladder go. It wasn’t as if anyone would notice, soaked and reeking as I was. ‘C-come now, Maeres, you’re joking? I owe you money. Who’ll pay if I … if I don’t pay?’ He needed me.

‘Well Jalan, the thing is, I don’t think you can pay. If a man owes me a thousand crowns he’s in trouble. If he owes me a hundred thousand, then I’m in trouble. And you, Jalan, owe me eight hundred and six crowns, less some small amount for your amusing Norseman. All of which makes you a small fish that can neither swallow me nor feed me.’

‘But … I can pay. I’m the Red Queen’s grandson. I’m good for the debt!’

‘One of many, Jalan. Too much of any denomination waters down the currency. I’d call “prince” an over-valued commodity in Red March these days.’

‘But—’ I’d always known Maeres Allus for a businessman, a cruel and implacable one of a certainty, but sane. Now it seemed that madness might be spiralling behind those dark little eyes. Too much blood in the water for the shark in him to lie quiet any longer. ‘But … what good would killing me do?’ He couldn’t ever tell anyone. My death wouldn’t serve him.

‘You died in the fire, Prince Jalan. Everyone knows that. None of my doing. And if a hint of a rumour floated behind Vermillion’s conversations. A whisper that you might have died elsewhere, in even less pleasant circumstances, over a matter of debt … well then, what new heights might my clients reach in their efforts not to disappoint me in future? Might there be ladies of ill-repute who would recognize Cutter’s latest bracelet and spread the word as they spread their legs?’ He glanced toward Cutter John who raised his right arm. Dry bands of pale gristle encircled the limb, rustling against each other, dozens of them, starting at his wrist and reaching past his elbow.

‘Wh-what?’ I didn’t understand what I was seeing, or perhaps some part of my brain was sensibly stopping me from understanding.

Cutter John circled his own lips with one finger. The trophies along his arm whispered together as he did so. ‘Open wide.’ His voice slithered as though he were something not human.

‘You shouldn’t have come here, Jalan.’ Maeres spoke into the silence of my horror. ‘It’s unfortunate that you can’t un-see my poppies, but the world is full of misfortunes.’ He stepped back to stand by Daveet at the door – the lights flickering across his face providing the only animation, a shadow smile there and gone, there and gone.

‘No!’ For the first time ever I wanted Maeres Allus not to leave. Anything was better than being abandoned to Cutter John. ‘No! I won’t talk! I won’t. Not ever.’ I put some anger into it – who would believe a sobbing promise of strength? ‘I’m saying nothing!’ I strained at my ropes, rocking the table back against its legs. ‘Pull my nails. I won’t talk. Hot pincers won’t drag it from me.’

‘How about cold ones?’ Cutter John raised the short handled iron pincers he’d been holding all this time in his other hand.

I roared at them then, thrashing, useless in the ropes. If one of Maeres’s men hadn’t been standing on the table legs it would have tipped forward and I’d have gone face first into the flagstones, which bad as it sounds would have been far less painful than what Cutter John had in mind for me. I was still roaring and screaming, working my way rapidly toward sobbing and pleading, when a hot wet something splattered across my face. It was enough to make me unscrew my eyes and pause my bellowing. Although I’d stopped yelling the din was no less deafening, only now it wasn’t me screaming. I’d drowned out the crash of the door bursting open, too far gone in my terror to notice it. Only Daveet stood there now, framed in the doorway. He turned as I watched, slit from collarbone to hip, spilling coils of his guts to the floor. To the left a large figure moved at the edge of my vision. As I turned my head the action shifted behind the table, another scream and a pale arm wrapped in bracelets made from men’s lips landed on the flagstones about a foot from where Daveet’s head hit the stone when he tripped on his intestines. And in one moment there was silence. Not a sound save for men shouting far down the corridor outside, echoey in the distance. Daveet appeared to have knocked himself out or died from sudden blood loss. If Cutter John missed his arm he wasn’t complaining. I could see one more of Maeres’s men lying dead. The others might be dead behind me or taking a leaf from my book and sprinting for the hills. If I hadn’t been tied to the damn table I would have been overtaking them on the way to the aforementioned hills myself.