Farlander (45 page)

As a series of clunks announced the manipulation of the door’s many locks, the young priest withdrew his hands, and a smaller door opened within the larger one. It was narrow and low, intended to force any visitor to stoop and turn sideways in order to step through. Being short, Ché was able to enter without having to duck.

Every hindrance a blessing
, he thought drily; and even here, in the heart of the Holy Empire of Mann, he did not find it odd to be recalling that old saying of the R
shun.

*

The Sentiate Temple was quiet at that early hour. Its circular ground floor was as dim as it always would be, windowless and lit only by a few gaslights sputtering along the curving wall. The two Acolytes on duty watched from behind their masks as Ché shook his shaven head dry, as a dog would, and then his dripping robes too.

‘It’s raining,’ he explained, as though in apology.

The guards wondered if he was an idiot, one of those privileged young priests that sometimes slipped through the examiners’ nets by way of money and parentage.

The taller loomed over his head; like another tower watching him. ‘We serve only the high caste here,’ the guard said. ‘State your business.’

Ché frowned. ‘Mostly this, I’m afraid.’

They had time enough only to widen their eyes before the two punch-knives drove up through their throats.

The two Acolytes convulsed where they stood. Ché withdrew both blades simultaneously and at the same instant stepped aside to avoid the discharges of blood he knew exactly where and how would follow. He walked a tight circle around the spreading pool of gore as he glanced around for any witnesses, and returned in time to see the two guards only then crumple from the knees up, one man folding sideways to the stone floor, the other on to his backside, and then on to his back.

Ché felt nothing.

He was quick to drag the corpses out of sight, behind a statue of an imperial celebrity; Archgeneral Mokabi – retired – he noticed when he paused long enough to inspect the alcove it stood in. The pools of blood would eventually give the game away, but in this gloom only if someone chanced to pass them directly.

It would do, for all the time his work here would take him.

He crouched in the shadows, using a knife to cut free one of the men’s robes. He bundled the garment beneath his arm.

The north stairwell was merely a spiral of steps fixed around a central pillar. Ché followed it upwards for seven floors, proceeding casually as though he rightly belonged there. No one he encountered cared to challenge him.

He halted at the seventh floor of the skysteeple, where the stairwell opened on to a lush and spacious room of pink marble with a water fountain playing at its centre surrounded by potted plants. The air within this space tingled with the heady fragrance of pleasure narcotics. Three bald and slightly plump eunuchs lolled on the edge of the fountain, wearing loose-fitting robes, yet armed with dirks. They occasionally tossed water at each other, throwing giggling glances at the two priests who sat on the opposite rim of the fountain, one wearing an expression of eagerness, the other of acute boredom. From beyond them, through an archway of sensual mosaics and flowing red silks, emerged the sound of laughter, both male and female, mingled with the music of flutes and light drums beating like a steady pulse.

Ché, still hesitating in the stairwell, ducked his head back below floor level. He scratched unthinkingly at his arm while he quickly calculated his options.

He retreated to the floor below, seemingly empty except for the steady resonance of mass snoring.

A window shone pale light into the darkened space before him. It drew Ché to it, and he opened it inwards and poked his head out into the rain.

Looking up, he found it was just as he had known it would be. A concrete facade, nearly vertical, dotted with decorative protrusions too widely spaced to aid climbing. It was windowless for another four floors up.

Ché worked fast. First he donned gloves of the thinnest leather, then withdrew a clay jar from the equipment webbing slung beneath his priestly robes. The jar was sealed with a thick wax plug, and had a shoulder strap fixed to a wire wrapped several times about its neck. As he pulled out the wax stopper, a stench of animal fat and seaweed assailed his nostrils; he checked that the creamy white contents had not hardened inside. Satisfied, he pulled the strap over his head so that the jar hung against his hip, then shook open the bundled robe he had taken from the guard. He began to cut the material into strips using a knife drawn from his boot. Only once did he cast a glance backwards to check his surroundings; even then he did not pause in his task.

With the shreds of cloak stuffed into another pocket, Ché jumped on to the windowsill and turned so that his back faced out into the rain. His balance was precise, like that of a rope walker. Still, the empty air sucked at him.

He pulled out one strip of cloth, rolling it into a ball, then dabbed it into the jar before fixing the sodden ball to the outside wall next to the window frame, where it stuck against the concrete surface.

He proceeded to do the same with further strips, sticking a total of six rolled-up rags upon the surface within easy reach of his hands. By the time he had finished the last one, the first and lowest had dried into a hardened footrest.

Ché removed his boots. He tied them together by the laces and slung them around his neck. Tentatively, he stretched a leg to the side and tried the first foothold with a bare sole. It held firm.

‘World Mother preserve the foolish,’ he muttered, and stepped out on to it with all his weight. Ché did not dare look down. With a fierce grimace, he began to climb.

*

Despite his relative youth, Ché was experienced at such work. He had discovered a natural aptitude for it, which was surprising, considering he had never been given any say in the matter.

It was this he reflected upon as he forced himself to climb the near-vertical wall of a tower in the freezing rain a few hundred feet above the ground, his fingers trembling with the effort, the sting of water in his eyes. A life without choices.

For instance; his childhood.

Ché had been lucky at conception. He had been born into a family of great wealth – the Dolcci-Feda merchant clan, with warehouses covering half the northern docklands. At thirteen, he had been living happily enough in an affluent suburb to the east of the city. Like any other boy of that age, he had been easy with laughter, and daring, though at times overly wild. But life had changed dramatically when he had fallen into trouble of his own making – the worst kind of trouble, involving the daughter of a family that were commercial rivals to his own. In short, Ché had got their fondest treasure with child.

One sultry afternoon, with dark thunderclouds pressing down upon the city, Ché had been forced to watch a duel with blades, fought between his own father and hers, as was the custom of settling disputes of honour in Q’os. Though both men were wounded, they survived, and without a death it settled nothing. A few days later, a cannon shot exploded through the outer wall of Ché’s bedroom. Thankfully, he was not in the room at the time.

The shot had been launched from an artillery piece set up furtively on the roof of a neighbouring household, whose occupants were away summering at their vineyards in Exanse. Initially, Ché’s father was enraged by the act. Later as the dust slowly settled throughout the great house, his mood turned quiet and nervous.

Even within the military, blackpowder was the rarest of commodities. Yet this had not dissuaded their enemies. Neither, for that matter, had they been deterred by the seal which Ché had worn around his neck since the age of ten, thus protecting him by means of the threat of vendetta. It was now clear that their enemies would stop at nothing to settle this dispute.

Ché was the only son of the family, and some day he would take over the reins of their business empire. It was quickly announced to him that he must leave for his own safety. His father could think of no other way to guarantee it.

The very next morning, Ché was smuggled by a covered carriage to the local agent of the R
shun order. Once safely inside the building, with the doors locked, the windows shuttered, the lamps turned low, his father offered the woman a small fortune in gold, trying to persuade her to send Ché away somewhere to train as a R
shun apprentice. She was reluctant at first, but Ché’s father pleaded and begged, claiming that the boy’s life depended on her.

Ché left there a week later, after hiding out in the agent’s cellar. Someone had turned up to collect him, a middle-aged R
shun with the sharp cheekbones and hard, violet eyes that signified a native of the High Pash. The man growled his name, Shebec, and after that hardly spoke again. Without any chance of saying farewell to his family, Ché was smuggled on to a ship which set sail the moment they were aboard. In just over a week, it had crossed to Cheem, and from there began a strange and frightening journey through the island’s mountainous interior.

And so it was that pampered Ché spent the rest of his boyhood learning how to kill without mercy, and with whatever means came to hand. As the weeks passed into months, and the months passed into years, it surprised him to find that he did not miss his family at all, nor the life of luxury he had left behind.

Ché had always been a fast learner, so as an apprentice assassin his progress was swift. He made friends readily, and he was careful not to make any enemies. Yet for all that, he was a youth troubled within his own skin.

At night, lying in his bunk in the dormitory that housed all the apprentices, Ché would dream another’s dreams.

He would dream of having lived another life entirely – a life in which his mother and father were not his real parents, nor their home his true home. So real were these sleeping visions, so founded in fact and minutiae of detail, that he would awake in the morning feeling a stranger to himself, floundering to grasp what was real and what was merely sham. Sometimes, secretly, Ché suspected he was losing his mind.