The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (224 page)

‘You’re so small,’ she whispered at him. ‘How did I not see it?’

He was pricked in his vanity then and he took another step at her, but she found her knife and whipped it out. He saw the blade, and for a moment he looked surprised, then he looked angry, then he started laughing like she was a hell of a joke.

‘As if you’ve got the bones to use it!’ And he sauntered past, giving her plenty of time to stab him if she’d wanted to. But she just knelt there, blood leaking out her nose and tapping down the front of her dress. Her best dress, which she’d worn three days straight ’cause she knew he’d be coming.

Once the dizziness had passed she got up and went to the kitchen. Everything was trembling but she’d taken worse beatings and worse disappointments, too. No one there so much as raised a brow at her bloody nose. The Whitehouse was that kind of place.

‘Papa Ring said I need to feed that woman.’

‘Soup in the pot,’ grunted the cook’s boy, perched on a box to look out of a high little window where all he got was a view of boots outside.

So she put a bowl on a tray with a cup of water and carried it down the damp-smelling stair to the cellar, past the big barrels in the darkness and the bottles on the racks gleaming with the torchlight.

The woman in the cage uncrossed her legs and stood, sliding her tight-bound hands up the rail behind her, one eye glinting through the hair tangled across her face as she watched Bee come closer. Warp sat in front at his table, ring of keys on it, pretending to read a book. He loved to pretend, thought it made him look right special, but even Bee, who weren’t no wonder with her letters, could tell he had it upside down.

‘What d’you want?’ And he turned a sneer on her like she was a slug in his breakfast.

‘Papa Ring said to feed her.’

She could almost see his brain rattling around in his big fat head. ‘Why? Ain’t like she’ll be here much longer.’

‘You think he tells me why?’ she snapped. ‘But I’ll go back and tell Papa you wouldn’t let me in if you—’

‘All right, get it done, then. But I’ve got my eye on you.’ He leaned close and blasted her with his rotting breath. ‘Both eyes.’

He unlocked the gate and swung it squealing open and Bee ducked inside with her tray. The woman watched her. She couldn’t move far from the rail, but even so she was backed up tight against it. The cage smelled of sweat and piss and fear, the woman’s and all the others’ who’d been kept in here before and no bright futures among ’em, that was a fact. No bright futures anywhere in this place.

Bee set the tray down and took the cup of water. The woman sucked at it thirstily, no pride left in her if she’d had any to begin with. Pride don’t last long in the Whitehouse, and especially not down here. Bee leaned close and whispered.

‘You asked me about Cantliss before. About Cantliss and the children.’

The woman stopped swallowing and her eyes flickered over to Bee’s, bright and wild.

‘He sold the children to the Dragon People. That’s what he said.’ Bee looked over her shoulder but Warp was already sitting back at his table and pulling at his jug, not looking in the least. He wouldn’t think Bee would do anything worth attending to in her whole life. Right now that worked for her. She stepped closer, slipped out the knife and sawed through the ropes around one of the woman’s rubbed-raw wrists.

‘Why?’ she whispered.

‘Because Cantliss needs hurting.’ Even then she couldn’t bring herself to say killing, but they both knew what she meant. ‘I can’t do it.’ Bee pressed the knife, handle first, into the woman’s free hand where it was hidden behind her back. ‘Reckon you can, though.’

Papa Ring fidgeted at the ring through his ear, an old habit went right back to his days as a bandit in the Badlands, his nerves rising with the rising noise in a painful lump under his jaw. He’d played a lot of hands, rolled a lot of dice, spun a lot of wheels, and maybe the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher. He wondered whether she was nervous, the Mayor. No sign of it, standing alone on her balcony bolt upright with the light behind her, that stiff pride of hers showing even at this distance. But she had to be scared. Had to be.

How often had they stood here, after all, glaring across the great divide, planning each other’s downfall by every means fair or foul, the number of men they paid to fight for them doubling and doubling again, the stakes swelling ever higher. A hundred murders and stratagems and manoeuvrings and webs of petty alliances broken and re-formed, and it all came down to this.

He slipped into one of his favourite furrows of thought, what to do with the Mayor when he won. Hang her as a warning? Have her stripped naked and beaten through town like a hog? Keep her as his whore? As anyone’s? But he knew it was all fancy. He’d given his word she’d be let go and he’d keep it. Maybe folk on the Mayor’s side of the street took him for a low bastard and maybe they were right, but all his life he’d kept his word.

It could give you some tough moments, your word. Could force you into places you didn’t want to be, could serve you up puzzles where the right path weren’t easy to pick. But it wasn’t meant to be easy, it was meant to be right. There were too many men always did the easy thing, regardless.

Grega Cantliss, for instance.

Papa Ring looked sourly sideways. Here he was, three days late as always, slumped on Ring’s balcony as if he had no bones in him and picking his teeth with a splinter. In spite of a new suit he looked sick and old and had fresh scratches on his face and a stale smell about him. Some men use up fast. But he’d brought what he owed plus a healthy extra for the favour. That was why he was still breathing. Ring had given his word, after all.

The fighters were coming out now with an accompanying rise in the mood of the mob. Golden’s big shaved head bobbed above the crowd, a knot of Ring’s men around him clearing folks away as they headed for the theatre, old stones lit up orange in the fading light. Ring hadn’t mentioned the woman to Golden. He might be a magician with his fists but that man had a bad habit of getting distracted. So Ring had just told him to let the old man live if he got the chance, and considered that a promise kept. A man’s got to keep his word but there has to be some give in it or you’ll get nothing done.

He saw Lamb now, coming down the steps of the Mayor’s place between the ancient columns, his own entourage of thugs about him. Ring fussed with his ear again. He’d a worry the old Northman was one of those bastards you couldn’t trust to do the sensible thing. A right wild card, and Papa Ring liked to know what was in the deck. Specially when the stakes were high as this.

‘I don’t like the looks of that old bastard,’ Cantliss said.

Papa Ring frowned at him. ‘Do you know what? Neither do I.’

‘You sure Golden’ll take him?’

‘Golden’s taken everyone else, hasn’t he?’

‘I guess. Got a sad sort o’ look to him though, for a winner.’

Ring could’ve done without this fool picking at his worries. ‘That’s why I had you steal the woman, isn’t it? Just in case.’

Cantliss rubbed at his stubbly jaw. ‘Still seems a hell of a risk.’

‘One I wouldn’t have had to take if you hadn’t stole that old bastard’s children and sold ’em to the savage.’

Cantliss’ head jerked around with surprise.

‘I can add two and two,’ growled Ring, and felt a shiver like he was dirty and couldn’t clean it off. ‘How much lower can a man stoop? Selling children?’

Cantliss looked deeply wounded. ‘That’s so
fucking
unfair! You just said get the money by winter or I’d be a dead man. You didn’t concern yourself with the source. You want to give me the money back, free yourself of its base origins?’

Ring looked at the old box on the table, and thought about that bright old gold inside, and frowned back out into the street. He hadn’t got where he’d got by giving money back.

‘Didn’t think so.’ Cantliss shook his head like stealing children was a fine business scheme for which he deserved the warmest congratulation. ‘How was I to know this old bastard would wriggle out the long grass?’

‘Because,’ said Ring, speaking very slow and cold, ‘you should have learned by now there’s consequences when you
fucking
do a thing, and a man can’t wander through life thinking no further ahead than the end of his cock!’

Cantliss worked his jaw and muttered, ‘So fucking unfair,’ and Ring was forced to wonder when was the last time he’d punched a man in the face. He was sorely, sorely tempted. But he knew it would solve nothing. That’s why he’d stopped doing it and started paying other people to do it for him.

‘Are you a child yourself, to whine about what’s fair?’ he asked. ‘You think it’s fair I have to stand up for a man can’t tell a good hand of cards from a bad but still has to bet an almighty pile of money he don’t have on the outcome? You think it’s fair I have to threaten some girl’s life to make sure of a fight? How does that reflect on me, eh? How’s that for the start of my new era? You think it’s fair I got to keep my word to men don’t care a damn about theirs? Eh? What’s God-fucked fair about all that? Go and get the woman.’

‘Me?’

‘Your bloody mess I’m aiming to clean up, isn’t it? Bring her up here so our friend Lamb can see Papa Ring’s a man of his word.’

‘I might miss the start,’ said Cantliss, like he couldn’t believe he’d be inconvenienced to such an extent by a pair of very likely deaths.

‘You keep talking you’ll be missing the rest of your fucking life, boy. Get the woman.’

Cantliss stomped for the door and Ring thought he heard him mutter, ‘Ain’t fair.’

He gritted his teeth as he turned back towards the theatre. That bastard made trouble everywhere he went and had a bad end coming, and Ring was starting to hope it’d come sooner rather than later. He straightened his cuffs, and consoled himself with the thought that once the Mayor was beaten the bottom would fall right out of the henchman market and he could afford to hire himself a better class of thug. The crowd was falling silent now, and Ring reached for his ear then stopped himself, stifling another swell of nerves. He’d made sure the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher.

‘Welcome all!’ bellowed Camling, greatly relishing the way his voice echoed to the very heavens, ‘To this, the historic theatre of Crease! In the many centuries since its construction it can rarely have seen so momentous an event as that which will shortly be played out before your fortunate eyes!’

Could eyes be fortunate independently of their owners? This question gave Camling an instant’s pause before he dismissed it. He could not allow himself to be distracted. This was his moment, the torchlit bowl crammed with onlookers, the street beyond heaving with those on tiptoe for a look, the trees on the valley side above even carrying cargoes of intrepid observers in their upper branches, all hanging upon his every word. Noted hotelier he might have been, but he was without doubt a sad loss to the performing arts.

‘A fight, my friends and neighbours, and what a fight! A contest of strength and guile between two worthy champions, to be humbly refereed by myself, Lennart Camling, as a respected neutral party and long-established leading citizen of this community!’

He thought he heard someone call, ‘Cockling!’ but ignored it.

‘A contest to settle a dispute between two parties over a claim, according to mining law—’

‘Get the fuck on with it!’ someone shouted.

There was a scattering of laughs, boos and jeers. Camling gave a long pause, chin raised, and treated the savages to a lesson in cultured gravity. The type of lesson he had been hoping Iosiv Lestek might administer, what a farce
that
had turned out to be. ‘Standing for Papa Ring, a man who needs no introduction—’

‘Why give him one, then?’ More laughter.

‘—who has forged a dread name for himself across the fighting pits, cages and Circles of the Near and Far Countries ever since he left his native North. A man undefeated in twenty-two encounters.

Glama . . . Golden!’

Golden shouldered his way into the Circle, stripped to the waist, his huge body smeared with grease to frustrate an opponent’s grasp, great slabs of muscle glistening white by torchlight and reminding Camling of the giant albino slugs he sometimes saw in his cellar and was irrationally afraid of. With his skull shaved, the Northman’s luxuriant moustache looked even more of an absurd affectation, but the volume of the crowd’s bellows only increased. A breathless frenzy had descended upon them and they no doubt would have cheered an albino slug if they thought it might bleed for their entertainment.

‘And, standing for the Mayor, his opponent . . . Lamb.’ Much less enthusiastic cheering as the second fighter stepped into the Circle to a last frantic round of betting. He was likewise shaved and greased, his body so covered with a multitude of scars that, even if he had no fame as a fighter, his familiarity with violence was not to be doubted.

Camling leaned close to whisper, ‘Just that for a name?’

‘Good as another,’ said the old Northman, without removing his steady gaze from his opponent. No doubt everyone considered him the underdog. Certainly Camling had almost discounted him until that very moment: the older, smaller, leaner man, the gambler’s odds considerably against him, but Camling noticed something in his eye that gave him pause. An eager look, as though he had an awful hunger and Golden was the meal.

The bigger man’s face, by contrast, held a trace of doubt as Camling ushered the two together in the centre of the Circle. ‘Do I know you?’ he called over the baying of the audience. ‘What’s your real name?’

Lamb stretched his neck out to one side and then the other. ‘Maybe it’ll come to you.’

Camling held one hand high. ‘May the best man win!’ he shrieked.

Over the sudden roar he heard Lamb say, ‘It’s the worst man wins these.’

This would be Golden’s last fight. That much he knew.

They circled each other, footwork, footwork, step and shuffle, each feeling out the other, the wild noise of the crowd and their shaken fists and twisted faces pushed off to one side. No doubt they were eager for the fight to start. They didn’t realise that oftentimes the fight was won and lost here, in the slow moments before the fighters even touched.