Empire in Black and Gold (78 page)

Bello stepped in before the door closed. His nose told him it was the remains of yesterday’s thin vegetable stew his mother would be serving. His father was at his customary place already, cross-legged on the floor before the low table. He looked at Bello without expression until the boy had handed over the half-dozen bits he had made that day. It was not any threat of retribution that made him part with the money, but the crippling knowledge that there would be none. His father would not even rise to a confrontation with his own son.

‘Saw Bidewell on the landing,’ he said, sitting opposite his father. ‘What’s he want now? Rent day was
last
week.’

Bello’s father’s haunted eyes flicked up to his wife, who was kneeling at the fireplace and spooning out the stew. He said nothing. He never did. He locked up his troubles, always, where they could be neither goaded nor charmed from him.

They preferred Bello to stay indoors after dark, but lately he could not bear to. Tonight, with the unspoken
something
hanging in the air between his parents, he was out of the door the moment he had finished his meal. There were a dozen Fly-kinden families in the same tenement, and more next door. They did not mix with other races but had formed a little community of their own. Bello would go and find his peers, and scrap and gossip and boast about imagined connections with the fiefs and the street fighters. His nodding acquaintance with Holden was hard currency of far more worth than the ceramic chips he was paid in, which were legal tender no further than Helleron’s outlying settlements.

He almost ran into the man sitting on the stairs before he could stop, his wings flaring awkwardly at short notice, carrying him in a great leap over the man’s head. He landed in a stumble, catching himself with another ghostly flash of his Art. At first he thought it was some tramp off the streets who had come in from the weather. Then he saw it was Joyless Bidewell himself. The Beetle-kinden man was staring at him with that lined face of his. His creased lips moved. Bello hesitated, torn between rushing off and witnessing the prodigy of this man, the Big Man of their tenement, for all he was some bigger man’s agent, sitting on the steps like a drunk.

‘Master Bidewell?’ he said eventually. Politeness to the Beetle-kinden, to their faces at least, had been slapped into him.

Joyless Bidewell frowned, obviously not placing him, then said: ‘You’re Frenno’s boy, no?’ When Bello nodded, the big man sighed, gathered his coat closer about him. ‘Well, I’m sorry, boy,’ he said. He sounded as tired as Bello’s father, as tired as Bello himself had been when he came home.

‘Sorry for what? What’s going on?’ Bello demanded. ‘Tell me.’ And then, ‘Please.’

Bidewell glanced up, up towards Bello’s apartment. He shrugged. ‘Rent’s going up, boy. Quite a step up.’

‘What?’

‘Not my fault. Not my doing. Been all day telling people like your folks that they can’t afford to live here any more.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do.’ There must have been something in Bello’s face that showed more fire than his father’s, for the old Beetle levered himself to his feet. ‘Two day ago, boy, this street changed hands. The Firecaller fief’s here now, kicked the House of Maynard out. Fire-callers want more cut than old Maynard ever did. Nobody going to pay that ’cept for all you folks who live here. My boss sure ain’t.’

‘Then . . . don’t pay,’ said Bello, knowing as he did that this was stupid.

‘Don’t call ’em Firecallers for nothing,’ Bidewell mumbled. He pushed past Bello, shaking his head.

Bello had not gone to his friends. They would have to brag the night through without him. He had sat on the steps where Bidewell had sat, and thought. In his mind the image of a fly battering at the glass came again and again.
So go around. Find another way.
Bidewell himself was nobody. Take him away and another servant would fill his shoes. Bidewell’s faceless master, some factor of a city magnate, was so far away that to beg of him would be like pleading with the sun. Bello’s parents, like most of the people in the tenement, would be moved on, kicked out. There would be some worse place awaiting them, and then some worse place again. Perhaps they would share a room with another family. Two other families. Already the room they had was only half of one, split down the middle to fit more families in. Everyone knew the Fly-kinden, the little people, needed hardly any space to live in.

But we were born to have the sky
. However, the Beetles, clumsy and industrious and bound to the earth, did not see it that way.

There was only one way to push, and he had only one means of putting the pressure on.

There was a taverna seven streets away in the big Gold Boys fief where the fighters met. The Gold Boys had been around for ever. They were comfortable, pally with the guard and the magnates, paying all the right people. They ran entertainments: brothels, gambling houses, illegal fights. It was the high end of the fief culture and it gave them an oft-pawned respectability. The Taverna Marlus had become the fashionable place for the well-to-do to gawp at the lowly but brutal. Thrills for the one, money for the other. Marlus and the Gold Boys did well out of it.

There was always a gaggle of youths hanging about the doorway. They were a mixture of Fly-kinden and Beetles, halfbreeds and a few others. Bello was not one of them and, if he gave them the chance, they would have knocked him down a few times. His wings flung him straight past them, through the open door and skidding on the rugs of the floor.

‘Out, you!’ bellowed Marlus. The proprietor, a pitch-skinned Ant-kinden, was playing dice with several of his richer patrons. He stood up, scowling. The sword at his belt, no less than the crossbow hung above the bar, reminded everyone of his boast to be a renegade soldier from a distant city-state.

‘Here to see Holden!’ Bello gasped out, looking frantically around to find the man. For a swooping moment he could not see him, anticipating a hasty ejection and maybe a kicking from the locals. Then he saw the Beetle-kinden fighter at one of the tables, nodding at Marlus. The Ant narrowed his eyes, but sat back down.

‘You got a message for me, Bello?’ Holden asked. The Fly youth looked at him seriously. This was the part that he had not rehearsed.

‘I – I need to talk to you,’ he said. Holden was sharing a table with two other Beetle-kinden brawlers, and they were already smirking. Bello pressed on. ‘It’s really important. Please, Master Holden.’

‘
Master
Holden,’ one of the others snickered.

Holden grimaced and stood up, stretching. ‘Ignore them, boy. They’re just jealous because they haven’t pissed off the Gladhanders like I just did.’ Holden’s drinking fellows looked a step more threadbare than he was.

‘Right, be quick,’ the fighter said when he got Bello out of earshot. ‘I’m looking to pick up another job this evening.’ He did not say it, but he might as well have done: being seen talking to a ragged Fly-kinden youth would not help his image.

‘I . . . want to hire you,’ Bello got out, before his nerve could fail him.

‘Yeah?’ Holden grinned at him, delighted. ‘With what, Bello?’

Bello reached into his pockets and brought out a handful of change. Most of it was ceramic bits, but there were a few silver standards in there. It was all the money that Bello had ever kept back from his parents, all the money he had kept secret and hidden for the right moment. This had to be the moment, and the money had to be enough. ‘They’re going to throw us out. They’re putting the rent up,’ he blurted out. ‘You must have heard.’

‘So put this towards the rent,’ Holden said reasonably.

‘But what about next month? And what if they put it up again?’ Bello asked. ‘I need to hire you to fight the Firecallers, Master Holden. Because then it’ll be done, and we can go back to the way things were.’

Holden’s face had soured when the Firecallers were mentioned. He closed Bello’s hands over the money. ‘Listen, boy,’ he said. ‘Two things.’ Sympathy twisted at his scars. ‘One: the Firecallers are on the up. They’re doing well these days. I’d charge a lot to start spiking their engines. Two: what you’ve just showed me is less than what I charge for a consultation, let alone to actually draw a sword.’

He let that sink in, giving Bello time to consider it. In Bello’s head the fly was walking up the pane, trying to work out why it could not get out that way.

‘Anyone around here’s going to be the same,’ Holden said. ‘Marlus’s place is for the doing-wells.’ He grimaced. ‘Course, there are other places. Someone might be desperate enough for rep to take on the Firecallers.’

Bello stared at him desperately. Holden scowled. ‘The world isn’t fair. Know it and move on. You don’t want to get mixed up in this.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ Bello asked him. ‘Please, Master Holden, I have to find
someone
. At least tell me where to look.’

‘Listen, boy, you want to go to these kind of places, it’s on your head. They ain’t safe, not any way.’ The fighter sighed. ‘But I can tell you, if you want.’

Holden’s first recommendation was a gambling house on the riverfront. Helleron’s river trade was halfway to nothing since they had put the railroad in. What had been rich men’s warehouses and offices were fallen into rot and ruin, and all kinds of vermin had moved in. The place had no name but there was a picture of a scorpion painted crude and yellow above the door, just like Holden had described. Nobody stopped Bello going in.

The first two bravos he tried to speak to, a Beetle and some kind of halfbreed, just cuffed him away. The second one had struck hard enough to knock him to the floor. He righted himself with a flick of his wings. He found a third. She was a lean, elegant Spider-kinden woman, slumming it or down on her luck. There had once been gems in her rapier hilt but the sockets were empty now. When he told her what he wanted she nodded across to one of the house staff and took Bello aside into a little room.

‘Let’s see your money,’ she said, and he showed it to her, all two handfuls of it.

She laughed. She laughed for a long time, having seen that, and something went out of her. ‘You little idiot,’ she said, when she could. ‘I was going to rob you, you fool. Kill you, most likely.’ She said it quite merrily. ‘Not for that, though. I don’t soil my blades for potsherds and tin-tacky.
Hire
me? You couldn’t hire a man to drink with you for that.’

Bello found, in the face of her laughter, that he was shaking. She was two feet taller than him, armed and a professional, but he had to hold himself back from doing something rash.

‘But,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘I need—’

She shook her head. ‘You’re mad,’ she told him. ‘Mind

you, I value that. Look, I’ve a man you can go to. Don’t tell him I sent you. It won’t help your case. I just happen to know he’s down at Scaggle’s tonight, after a job.’

There were even lower dives than the scorpion-fronted gambling den. Scaggle’s was one of them. It was further down the river, built under a bridge so that there were water marks halfway up the stone steps. Scaggle was a Beetle-kinden crone, burly and round shouldered. She was all the staff she needed, all the guards too. Even as Bello came up the steps he had to flit aside as she hurled a drunk down onto them, careless of whether he hit rock or water. She squinted at Bello, then hulked back inside.

It was very dark in there. The place was little more than a cave. Fly-kinden eyes were good, though, and Bello could pick out a dozen men sitting round five tables, lit only by wan candlelight. They were Beetles and half-breeds, save for one. That one was the man Bello had come here to find.

He was as outlandish as anyone Bello had seen: tall and straight and fair, with sharply pointed features and skin that was very pale. He wore an arming jacket secured with an elaborate pin. He looked as though he had stepped out of another world, from a story.

He eyed Bello narrowly, saying nothing as the boy approached him. When he raised his earthenware mug to drink, Bello saw the flexing spines of the Mantis-kinden jutting from his forearm.

He said nothing, neither invitation nor dismissal. It was left to Bello to say, ‘Excuse me, you are Master Tisamon?’

A nod only. Bello forced himself on before he dried up. ‘I need to hire you, Master.’

The man Tisamon’s mouth quirked at that and he put his mug down. ‘Do you know why I come here?’ he asked. His voice was as dry and sharp as the rest of him.

Bello shook his head.

‘I come here because people hiring men like me do not,’ Tisamon finished.

‘I need to hire you,’ Bello repeated.

‘Go away.’

‘I can’t. I won’t.’

Abruptly Tisamon was standing, and Bello felt as though he’d swallowed his heart. There had been no transition between ease and edge. The edge had always been there, just out of sight. On the man’s right hand was a metal gauntlet that ended in a two-foot blade jutting from the fingers.

‘Please . . .’ Bello said, through a throat gone dry.

‘Can I help you?’ Tisamon asked, and he was looking over Bello’s head. Not wanting to take his eyes off the man, Bello forced himself to crane back. There were three newcomers there, burly Beetle men squinting in the gloom.

‘Don’t want to disturb you, chief,’ said one of them. ‘Just need a word with the little fellow here.’

Bello choked, flinched back from them. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘We’re the fellows you’re walking out of here with,’ said their leader. ‘You’ll excuse us, chief, won’t you?’

‘Certainly,’ Tisamon said, relaxing back, only it was not really relaxing. Bello saw the edge still there, though the Beetles missed it. ‘When I’ve finished speaking with my client, that is.’

There was a pause while the Beetles exchanged glances, Tisamon smiling urbanely at them.

‘Now, listen, chief—’ their leader started, and one of the others snapped out, ‘Look, this ain’t nothing to do with you. We’re taking the Fly-boy.’

He grabbed Bello by the shoulder, surprisingly swift.

Tisamon
moved
. Bello saw nothing of it. As soon as he could, he dived beneath the table, and the fact that the hand came with him, and the man stayed where he was, made sense only later on.