Stands a Shadow (10 page)

When he looked up, it was to see the look of a cautious animal approaching.

Whiskers settled herself in the chair opposite as she held the slate board against her chest, then folded her hands neatly in her lap. He watched her as he poured out a generous measure of wine.

They played in silence, with the shouts and laughter from the street muted by the thick panes of window glass. Indeed she could play, at least enough to make a game of it at the beginning. Ché went easy on her anyway, wanting to make it last a while. She played along with that too, an amused awareness in the occasional glance shot from beneath her thick eyebrows.

With each move she made, she held the slate against her chest so it wouldn’t get in the way as she leaned forward over the game board. Ché finally pointed at the thing, catching her eye. ‘Please. Take that thing off.’

She blinked at him.

He pointed again, and made a gesture of removing it over her head.

She looked down at the slate, studied it for a moment. Then she pulled it off her with a rough hasty motion, and set in down against a leg of the table.

‘Now, how about the rest of your clothes?’

He watched her closely as she watched him. Was there a flush of colour on her face again, just a hint of it?

His curiosity only intensified.

Whiskers took a drink of wine, then deployed three of her pebbles, using them to flank one of his own, picking it up with her calloused fingers to place it next to her other captured stones.

‘I leave in the morning,’ he said, watching her eyes closely as he did so. ‘With the fleet. We go to wage war on the non-believers.’ Nothing. No change in her expression.

Ché carelessly drove his black stones against her gathered whites, now huddling for protection in one quadrant of the board. He allowed himself a few mistakes until his offensive stalled and she rallied with her own. She didn’t take long with her moves, as though she was hardly taking the game seriously herself. She seemed more interested in the wine.

He refilled her glass, and waited until she’d nearly finished that helping too. When next he caught her eye, he declared: ‘I’ve been told by my handler to kill the Holy Matriarch.’ And the words sounded loud in the dim quietness of the apartment.

Her eyes danced wildly, watching him. Ché could feel the sudden charge in the air between them.

‘If she runs from battle, that is. Or looks as though she might be captured. It seems they will not allow that. She must win or fall. Nothing else.’

He placed a pebble down, picked up another, placed it next to the first. A third snuggled in behind them. ‘Now, I mostly wonder who my handlers
are
. I wonder who I am really working for after all this time, if they can order the death of a Matriarch.’

Whisker’s face thrust towards him. ‘Hush now!’ she said with an uneven voice, the tones slightly off. Her hands gripped either side of the table.

For a moment, Ché was startled enough to say nothing. He simply swallowed hard.

‘What?’ he replied quietly, and gave a toss of his hand. ‘You think they’re listening in the walls?’

She looked up from his mouth, her chest rising and falling fast; a silent panting. ‘You will cause us both harm with talk like this. Why say these things to me?’ Her face was so close he could feel her hot breath against his own.

‘Because, I thought you couldn’t understand me,’ he said slowly. ‘You’ve been pretending as much since we first met. Pretending you couldn’t read my lips.’ And he fixed her with a hard, accusing stare.

‘I owe you no loyalty,’ she snapped back at him with her strange tone of voice. ‘I am not your wife, to be telling your woes to. And neither am I your mother.’

At once Ché’s mood darkened. It was like a lamp going out.

‘I know very well what you are,’ he growled, and of their own accord his eyes glanced at the slave collar about her neck.

Her eyebrows arched high. ‘Oh? And what is that, if not a slave of a slave, then?’ And her gaze darted around the walls of the apartment. ‘They afford you a finer cage than the rest of us, that is all.’

Slowly, Ché tipped over the ylang board until the pebbles began to slide one by one onto the wooden floor, where they clattered and rolled as the two players locked stares. As the final pebble settled and silence returned once more, he dropped the edge of the board back against the table with a snap.

Whiskers sat back trembling.

‘Are you working for them?’ he demanded. ‘Do you report to them about me?’

‘Who?’ the woman replied blankly.

Ché exhaled a long breath of air. He stared long at her, torn inside between anger and anguish.

‘Go,’ he told her. ‘Get out.’

She rose, lifting her slate as she did so. Walked without another word for the door.

‘Here,’ he snarled as she glanced back, and he corked the half-empty bottle of wine and tossed it into her hands. Her eyes widened in surprise for a moment, but then she composed herself. She took the bottle with her, closing the door behind as she left.

Ché leaned back in the chair, found that he was staring down at the scattered pebbles on the floor – something in the pattern of them he could not quite read.

CHAPTER SIX

The Bastards of St Charlos

The fat man guarding the top of the stairs fell into her arms with a groan of surprise. She tottered there against his weight for a few moments like a young wife handling a drunken husband, then helped his body to fold neatly and silently onto the landing.

Swan flicked the blood from her knife, inadvertently scattering some of it across the damp wall. The woman stared at the spatter of droplets she had created, liking the contrast of crimson against the yellowing plaster.

‘What are you doing?’ Guan asked her as he stopped by her side. ‘Are you high?’

‘Only a little. Stop worrying, brother. It keeps me sharp.’

Together, the two priests stepped over the corpse and stopped before the door. A gabble of loud voices came from the other side of it. She could hear a baby crying half-heartedly.

‘Please people, one at a time! Milan, I saw you raise your hand first.’

‘I only wanted to say, if we do call off this plan of action then we should do it for deliberate reasons, not because we’re afraid of what they’ll do to us.’

‘But, Milan,’ came another voice. ‘During the week of the Augere? They’ll murder us where we stand for disrupting the holy week like that.’

‘And who would work the mills and steelworks along the Shambles then?’ a woman replied. ‘Or do you think they’d be content to lose their profits while they trained a new workforce?’

‘Pish!’ shouted another. ‘In the mills they could turn around a new workforce within a few weeks. That isn’t the point here. The point is they’re vulnerable during the Augere. All these pilgrims gathered from around the Empire. All these representatives of the Caucus. The whole world is supposed to be celebrating the unity of Mann this week. One big happy Empire, with all of us waving our flags and feeling like we’re part of it like the good sheep they teach us to be. And meanwhile, behind closed doors, they make their latest deals for squeezing us even further. No, they won’t like it one bit when we show them up by taking to the streets. But if they want to settle quickly, without a bloodbath in front of everyone, they’ll have to consider our terms.’

‘We aren’t here to discuss a revolution, Chops. What if they wait until the pilgrims have left, then burn us all alive in the Shay Madi for sport, like they do with the homeless, and then fill the factories with those poor souls who really
are
true slaves?’

‘Then we’d have a real uprising on our hands. Like in our fathers’ and mothers’ times, when the priests last thought they could take the bread from the mouths of the working people. They must allow us to make a living. Even the priests concede that much.

‘Besides, it’s fear of what we could lose that has led us here in the first place. All those times we should have stood together and we didn’t. And always because they threatened to bring in slaves to replace us, or even to move the factories elsewhere. I work more hours on the presses than I spend at home. So does my wife and our eldest sons. And still we can barely clothe and feed ourselves, let alone make the arrears on our rent, or pay for medicine when the children are sick. We have to do something, for kush sake.’

Swan smiled; not at the words, but at the glib inscription carved in the lintel above the door.

Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness
.

Her brother, loosening his neck muscles by her side, pointed to something in the shadows above the writing. It was a carving of two hands clasped together and entwined in barbed wire.

‘They call themselves the Bastards of Saint Charlos.’

‘Saint Charlos? Never heard of him.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ Guan replied. ‘His name was outlawed twenty-five years before we were born. He was a priest of the old religion, back when the city was still a monarchy. He lived and worked here in the Shambles along the east bank. Gave all his money to the poor. Worked to set up these respite houses. They remember him as a saint for it.’

‘You see? This is why I’m so glad that you’re my clever brother. Otherwise, I’d have to read all those dull books myself. Tell me then, in your wisdom . . . Why do these chattel call themselves
bastards
?’

‘Charlos had an eye for the women. It was said that half the children of the district were his illegitimate spawn.’

Swan laughed at that, more loudly than it warranted, while her brother watched her with a bemused frown.

The voices beyond the door fell to a deathly hush.

‘Shall we?’ she asked him.

‘After you.’

Fifty faces were turned to the door as Swan stepped through it. Eyes widened as they saw her priestly robe and her smooth skull; even the crying infant in the lap of its mother blinked at her through its tears.

Swan snapped her fingers loudly, and the infant stopped crying with a startled jerk.

The room was packed from wall to wall with seated men and women, the air thick with the heat of so many bodies pressed so closely together.

How can they sit like this, in each other’s stench
?

‘We’re looking for Gant,’ her brother declared, loudly. ‘Please show him to us.’

Nobody moved. The man standing at the front of the room wrung his hands in dismay.

‘Are you Gant?’ Swan asked him.

He looked to the others for support, and Swan noticed a few men along the sides reaching beneath their coats for weapons.

‘Who wants to know?’

It was a man standing by the shuttered window, his arms folded across his burly chest. He had a pipe in his mouth, and a peaked cap on his head cocked over one eye.

‘I do.’

‘And you are?’

‘They call me Swan.’

‘Well, Swan, they call me Gant. And this is a peaceful assembly. We’re doing nothing wrong here.’

Her brother snorted. ‘I would say that planning dissent amongst your fellow chattel is very wrong indeed.’

Chairs began to scuff against the floor. People were standing, moving back towards the walls. A handful of men were taking up positions around them.

‘No trouble,’ Swan said with her empty palms raised. She nodded to the man Gant. ‘Good evening to you, then. Or what remains of it.’

Slowly, with caution, they both backed out of the room, their task here complete. Swan took a final glimpse of Gant’s curious expression then pulled the door closed behind her.

Instantly, her brother broke a bonding stick in half and used it to seal the door in its frame. The door handle rattled; someone trying to open it.

The voices grew loud again on the other side.

Swan and her brother hurried down the stairwell, racing each other. The Respite House was a tall building with many floors and rooms. Perhaps it had been an hostalio in its time, or one of the famous brothels of the district. People had scattered from the stairs and the landings when they’d first seen the two of them go up. Now, mutters sounded from behind closed doors, children’s cries stifled suddenly. Swan broke her own bonding stick in half, and helped Guan close the main exit of every landing as they descended, sealing each one in turn.

Her brother wouldn’t meet her eye as they did it.

Outside in the cobbled street, a stinking breeze was blowing down the narrow stretch of the Accenine – the only river on the island of Q’os – and amongst the twisting, diabolical streets of the slums that were the Shambles. The fumes from the nearby steelworks caught in the back of her throat, dark smokestacks pouring their affluence into the evening sky. Guan worked quickly to seal the main front door while Swan thrummed to her inner music, and observed the figures scurrying from the sight of their robes.

She stared at the distant Temple of Whispers above the skyline, a tall, warped sliver amongst smaller skysteeples. It was more brightly lit than before. She knew that the second night of the Caucus must be starting by now; felt a moment’s relief that they did not have to be there again tonight.