The City (26 page)

‘I remembered what you said some time ago,’ he told Bart eagerly. ‘About your interest in military tattoos. You told me not to trouble myself with them at the time, but I saw this volume.’

He hefted a large tome and read, ‘
Cryptic Codes: Formal and Informal Insignia among Armed Men
. It is by a soldier called Anabathic Marcellus.’

Bart shrugged, trying to show lack of interest, though he was caught between apprehension and curiosity. He frowned and told his friend, ‘It was a whim, that’s all. I do not want to read it. Return it with these.’ He had piled up books to return to the custodians. Carvelho looked disappointed, and returned to his work.

But in a moment of weakness Bartellus ran his hand over the embossed cover. Despite himself, he slid it over and smelled the odour of rich leather. Sighing, he turned the heavy pages with their shiny plates. An expensive book, he guessed. He closed it and looked at the cover again. Anabathic, he thought.
One who marches uphill
. He wondered who hid under that pen name. There were many Marcelluses. Marcellus Vincerus, First Lord of the City, was a writer and historian. Did he call himself Anabathic for the purposes of publishing this obscure book?

The shiny pages slid pleasingly under his fingers as he leafed through them. The bright colours of the pictures leaped out at him: running horses, rampant lions, tigers at bay, soaring eagles and slithering serpents rioting across the pages. As he had said to Dol Salida and Creggan, the soldiery admired animals of pride and power.

As he looked through the book memories, warm and comforting, rose from the pages, not of blood and death and pain, but the
companionship of other warriors, the certainty of shared goals and shared enemies, the sure knowledge of respect and continuity and friendship.

And, inevitably, he thought of Fell, his friend and most loyal aide. And for the first time since his imprisonment doorways started opening in his mind, one after another swinging smoothly on their hinges, revealing worlds of colour and change, and pain. He remembered Fell by his side as they galloped their horses towards the first line of infantry in the victorious Battle of Black Creek. He saw him years later, laughing with his comrades of the Nineteenth Imperial, as they drank yet another inn dry in the long summer of ’47.

Then old Bart walked through a darker, older door and saw again Fell’s trial before the emperor, anonymous faces, for so long the blank straw dolls of the quintain, resolving themselves into flesh and blood men – the Vincerii of course, and Flavius Randell Kerr, the old goat, and tall Boaz. All watching with interest and calculation and without one hint of compassion.

And, standing before them all, the woman who had appeared in his life in the darkest of days. Archange.

It was coming up to sunset, and the library was closing its doors, when Bartellus slipped out into the lengthening shadows. He set off towards Gervain and the attic of the whore Callista, his greatcoat wrapped around him against the cool summer night.

The two boys levered themselves up gratefully from the lee of a low wall and trotted down an alley beside the building, where a crooked red-haired man met them at a side door. He thrust a piece of paper into the bigger boy’s hand before stepping back through the high narrow doorway.

In the darkness the younger brother yawned. The hour was getting late and the day was cooling fast. But there was still a task to do. Before they reached the comfort of home and their mother’s cooking, they first had to visit their paymaster.

Emly raised her head and untied the frayed piece of string at her neck. She pulled back stray strands of dark hair that had fallen over her face and retied the string. Then she bent again to the last piece of the panel. By tradition, the paint on stained glass was black, to
complement and contrast with the clear colours of the glass. But Emly’s signature, the mark which was her own and was becoming recognized in the homes of the wealthy, was the one spot of coloured paint that adorned each window.

She took a narrow brush and dipped it into a pot the colour of damp earth. In the bottom right-hand corner of a piece of clear glass she deftly sketched the shape of a gulon. Then with tiny brush and black paint she highlighted its foxy tail, wrapped around its body, and its sharp pricked ears. She stood and went to a corner cupboard and took out a small precious pot of gold paint, made specially for her by a friendly goldsmith in the Avenue of Mercy. With it she drew in two golden eyes. The gulon looked out at her from the glass, and immediately she felt the hostility of its stare.

She was so accustomed to making the mark that she seldom any longer thought of its significance. The gulon she had seen in the sewers was the first and only one she had ever encountered, and it had been on the day her brother Elija disappeared. She remembered little of that awful day, only the big ugly gulon and the way it hissed at her, baring long yellow teeth. And her last sight of her brother on the bridge in the failing torchlight seconds before it was swept away. No day passed when she did not think of Elija, but she no longer thought of him with hope in her heart, only sad regret.

She put the brush down and her hand dropped to her side. The panel was far from finished. It was now a jigsaw of bright shards of glass, shaped and painted but separate. It was ready to be joined together into a work of art with strips of lead called calms. The work still to be done involved skill and craftsmanship, and she and Frayling would work many more hours to complete it. But her creative work was finished and, as always, she felt more sadness than satisfaction.

The previous piece she had painted, with the tentacles of the monster, had dried, and she placed it on a wooden tray. She laid a piece of felt over it, then put the gulon piece on top. Grasping the tray under one arm, she hoisted the hem of her skirt and tucked it into her waistband before climbing carefully down the ladder. At the bottom she covered her legs again and descended the flights of stairs to the ground-floor furnace room where Frayling worked.

Frayling must have heard her coming for he opened the workroom door and took the heavy tray from her arms. He was a tall young man, thin and stooping, with mouse-coloured hair that flopped over
his face. He was still shy with Emly though he had worked for her father for more than two years. He was more outgoing with Bartellus, who claimed the man had a dry wit, though Em had never seen any evidence of it. Frayling got around nimbly enough on a single crutch. His right leg had been cruelly crushed, and was useless to him except as a prop. He was unmarried and had no relatives. His room was a tiny cell on the first floor, and he seldom left the house.

‘So,’ he said to her, nodding nervously, ‘the gulon.’

She gazed at him. A fine pair, she thought, a shy man and a speechless woman.

‘Did you tell Bartellus?’ he asked, blinking. ‘About the watcher?’

When she said nothing, he added reprovingly, ‘You said you would.’

Em had been trying not to think about the man she had seen loitering in Blue Duck Alley. It was four days before and she was in her attic workroom, sitting on the wide sill overlooking the alley, feeding crumbs to the birds, when she leaned out and looked down to the cobbles. She could see the tops of people’s heads and she was tempted to drop pieces of bread and see if they hit anyone. One head stood out from the usual slowly milling crowd of workers and street vendors. It was topped with fair hair which caught the sunlight. The man was strolling down the alley as if he had all the time in the world. As he moved further away she could judge he was a tall man. A soldier, she thought. He walked with a swagger, in contrast with the shuffling, apologetic gait of the poor people of Lindo.

She had thought no more about it until she spotted him again earlier that day. He was leaning against a corner, half hidden in deep shadow. She was sure it was the same man, and he seemed to be watching the House of Glass. Emly jumped up and ran down the stairs all the way from the attic to the ground floor. She went into the front room at street level, a room never used for it was musty and damp. There was a window on to the alley, boarded up but with gaps between the boards. It was thick with grime. She breathed on the glass and rubbed at the spot with her fist. The man had vanished from the corner, and she was disappointed. But moments later she saw him coming towards her, strolling like a man who owns the world, she thought. He was certainly a soldier for he wore military boots and a faded red jerkin which might once have been part of a uniform. And he was armed, with a sword sheathed on his left hip, and a long knife at his waist on the right.

He was coming close, looking up and down at the House of Glass, glancing with interest along the narrow alley beside it. He had very pale eyes, she saw. Emly ducked away from his gaze, though there was little chance he would spot her behind the dusty glass. When she looked again he was gone.

She shook her head at Frayling. She wished she had never told him, for he would be at it like a dog on a bone until she told Bartellus.

‘If you don’t tell him, I will,’ said the servant, then he blushed for his forwardness.

BARTELLUS’ BAD KNEE
was aching by the time he reached the quiet twittens of Gervain. The quarter was in the northwest, nestled comfortably between the luxury of Otaro and the imperial precincts of the Red Palace. It was perhaps the safest area of the City for an old man to walk alone at night, and Bart’s grip on his dagger loosened for the first time since he left the Great Library.

As he neared his destination he trod more quietly, alert for footfalls behind him, for shadows slinking into darkness. But the quarter was still and silent, the only sounds the distant chatter from a small inn, brought on the night air, and his own laboured grunting.

He slid into a narrow lane then into a shadowed doorway. Climbing the steep stairs to Callista’s garret he wondered as always if this was a wise thing to do. Aside from his love for Emly, this was the only part of his life which made him vulnerable. He knew it but he could not abandon it.

He knocked twice on the mean door at the top of the steps and it opened immediately, releasing a gust of rank air.

‘About time,’ a voice grunted. ‘We’re not here for your convenience, man.’

‘Convenience scarcely comes into it,’ Bart barked. Not for the first time he wondered why he was trusting his life, and perhaps Em’s, to this disaffected soldier, one-eyed, sarcastic, bitter. Vitellus he called
himself, a former member of the Thousand, the elite bodyguard of the emperor. As such he was a deep well of information on the Immortal and his ways, and on the geography of the inner palace, called the Keep. He considered himself the chief of this motley chain of conspirators, but Bart saw him as the rattling link which put them all at hazard.

He looked around the group. Seven today.
I trust none of you
, he thought.

‘Welcome,’ said the man who called himself Sully. Small and slim, an ex-soldier as they all were, he worked as a servant in a palace on the Shield. He was sharp of mind and Bart put more faith in the man’s opinions than in any of the others’. ‘We were saying there was a naval battle two days ago.’

‘I heard.’

‘You heard what?’ demanded Vitellus. Always ready to argue, to confront.

‘Only that there
was
one.’

‘South of the Salient. Two of our ships sunk. We don’t know how many of theirs. The blockade was broken for a day.’

‘There was fresh fish in the market,’ said Bart.

Sully smiled. ‘Fishermen only need a few hours to bring in fish by the netful. For many of them it is the difference between life and death.’

‘What do
you
have for us, old man?’ Vitellus asked Bart.

Bartellus shrugged. Nothing. Vitellus sniffed, as if this confirmed his expectations. Bart offered them valuable information on the Halls and secret pathways under the City, although it was of little use to these soldiers in their obsession with politics and personalities.

Jonto, a serving cavalryman, growled, ‘We’re not interested in fish, man. Vitellus and I have heard talk of a coup attempt.’

There’s
always
talk of a coup attempt, Bart thought. But he nodded encouragingly.

‘The Emperor’s Hounds,’ Jonto said. The Hounds were a century of the Thousand, led by a thirty-year veteran called Fortance, Bart recalled.

‘What about them?’ he asked.

‘They fouled up a bodyguard detail. Their leader was demoted and moved to another century …’

‘He’s lucky he’s not dead,’ put in Sully.

‘And there’s been a shake-up. Reassignment to and from other centuries. It’s made a lot of people unhappy.’

Sully said what Bart was thinking. ‘Soldiers are always unhappy. They always have something to moan about.’

‘The Hounds are blaming Rafe Vincerus for the defeat of the Maritime.’

‘Why not blame Flavius Randell Kerr? He was the army’s general,’ asked Sully. But Bart knew the answer – Flavius was dead and Rafael alive. No sport in blaming a dead man.

‘And there’s something else,’ said Vitellus. He glanced at Jonto. ‘Talk among the Leopards. Against Marcellus. And his doxy.’

Marcellus Vincerus was once wed to Giulia, sister to Marcus Rae Khan, head of the Family Khan. Marcus was popular enough among the soldiery, but less so than his sister, the only woman to have ridden with a cavalry unit, a decade ago. When Giulia left her husband’s embrace to return to the Khan palace on the Shield, it was rumoured to be because of Marcellus’ dalliance with a famous courtesan.

They fell to discussing the whore, who was much despised. It was a favourite subject. Bart looked at them with contempt. Pride and ambition fed these men. They saw themselves heading an army, leading their peers, cheered by the people, brutally crushing enemies. Meanwhile they gossiped like fishwives, swilling too much ale, and peppering their largely invented yarns with salacious detail.

For him, no one would shout his name in triumph. If Bartellus found a way to revenge himself on the emperor for the brutal killing of his family he knew nothing more waited for him than death, torturous and lingering, or sudden. His ambition was to thrust a knife deep into the man’s heart, or slit his throat, whichever proved practical at the time. To avenge the four innocents who had died at Araeon’s hands – four out of millions. And if he found a chance to punish the others who had conspired against him, or who had stood by and watched the entertainment of his betrayal and torment, then so much the better.