The Left Hand Of God (19 page)

Then, for the first time, Cale struck a blow himself. Conn parried, but only just. Stroke after stroke now pushed him backward until they were almost back where the fight started. Conn was breathing heavily now, and growing fear made him gasp the harder—his body, unused to the terror and presence of death, rebelled against his great skill and years of training; nerves frayed and guts melted.

Then Cale stopped.

He stepped back out of striking range and looked Conn up and down. There was a beat of a second or two, and then a desperate Conn struck once more, The Edge hissing as it cut the air. But Cale was moving even before the blow began, blocking The Edge with one knife and stabbing the other deep into Conn’s shoulder.

With a cry of pain and shock, Conn dropped the sword as Cale twisted him around and held him around the neck with his forearm, pointing the remaining knife at Conn’s stomach.

“Keep still,” he whispered softly in Conn’s ear, and then loudly to the soldiers as they moved to stop him. “As you are or I’ll butterfly the little creep,” and he gave Conn a sharp jab in the stomach to make his point. The sergeant, terrified now, motioned his men to stop.

Throughout all this Cale had been squeezing Conn around the neck ever harder so that he could not breathe. Again he whispered in his ear.

“Just before you go, Boss, something to take with you: fighting isn’t an art.”

With that Conn collapsed into unconsciousness and hung limply from Cale’s now loosening grip around his neck.

“He’s still alive, Sergeant, but he won’t be if you do anything courageous. I’m going to pick up the sword—so behave yourself.”

Taking Conn’s considerable weight, Cale slowly sank down and reached for The Edge. Once it was in his grasp, he stood up again, keeping a weather eye on the soldiers. More were coming in through the outer gates now, until there must have been nearly a hundred.

“Where are you going to go, son?” said the sergeant.

“You know,” said Cale, “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

It was then that Vague Henri shouted down from the roof.

“Promise you won’t hurt him and he’ll let him go.”

Startled, the soldiers responded to this first attempt at negotiation with three arrows in Henri’s direction. Vague Henri ducked and disappeared from view.

“Delay that!” shouted the sergeant. “Next one who moves without an order gets fifty and a year cleaning the shithouse!”

He turned back to Cale. “What about it, son? Let him go and you’ll come to no harm.”

“And after?”

“I can’t say. I’ll do what I can. I’ll tell them these boys were moithering you—whether they’ll listen . . . What choice do you have?”

“Cale! Do what he says,” shouted Vague Henri from the roof, careful this time to let only his head show over the roof’s edge.

Cale waited for a moment, although it was perfectly clear what he had to do. Taking The Edge away from Conn’s throat, he carefully looked around for somewhere to place it. He was in luck. Just two steps back, which he took with extreme care, there was an old part of the wall at just below knee height where two enormous foundation stones met. He slipped The Edge between the two stones to a depth of about ten inches.

“What are you doing, boy?” called out the sergeant.

And with that Cale dropped the unconscious Conn Materazzi to the ground, turned to the sword and with all his strength pushed it against the weight of the great stones. The Edge, perhaps the greatest sword in the history of all the world, bent then snapped with a sound of a bell being struck—PING!

There was a gasp from the soldiers as if from one person: Cale looked at the sergeant then calmly dropped the broken half of The Edge he was still holding. The sergeant walked toward him, taking a chain and lock from one of the soldiers next to him.

“Turn around, boy.”

Cale did as he was told. As the sergeant cuffed his hands, he said softly in Cale’s ear, “That’s the last stupid thing you’ll ever do, son.”

One of the physician soldiers—one to every sixty men in the Materazzi army—was checking the unconscious Conn. He nodded to the sergeant and then went to check the others. Now Arbell Swan-Neck burst into the ring that surrounded Cale and knelt down next to Conn, checking his pulse. Satisfied, she stood up and looked at Cale, now pinioned between two soldiers. He stared back at her, expressionless and calm.

“I don’t suppose you’ll forget me a second time,” he said, and with that he was dragged off by the soldiers. It was then that Cale had a stroke of luck. Vague Henri had not been alone on the roof. Just as curious, if less worried about what might happen to Cale, Kleist had followed Vague Henri. As soon as the fight had started Vague Henri had told Kleist to try to bring Albin.

Kleist had found Albin in the only place he knew where to look for him. In a moment he was out of his office door and calling for his men to go with him. And so it was that Albin arrived just as four soldiers were dragging Cale out of the garden and heading for the city jail, a place where he would have been lucky to make it through the night.

“We’ll take care of this now,” said Albin, backed by ten of his men dressed in their uniform of black waistcoats and black bowler hats.

“The sergeant-at-arms told us to take him to the jail,” said the most senior of the soldiers.

“I am Captain Albin of Internal Affairs and responsible for security in the Citadel—so hand him over or else.”

Albin’s commanding presence as well as the ten hard-looking “bulldogs,” as they were not at all affectionately known, had cowed the soldiers, who were rarely allowed in the Citadel and were instantly ill at ease when challenged in such a strange place. Nevertheless the senior soldier tried once more.

“I’ll have to ask the sergeant-at-arms.”

“Ask who you like, but he’s our prisoner and he’s coming with us now.” With that, Albin nodded his men forward and the disadvantaged soldiers uncertainly let Cale be taken. The senior soldier nodded to one of the others and he legged it back into the garden to fetch help—but by then the bulldogs had taken Cale and, picking him up, had started making their way into the labyrinth of alleys that wound in and out of the Citadel. By the time help arrived, they had vanished.

Within ten minutes Cale was locked inside one of Vipond’s private cells and a jailer was working on the irons binding his hands. Twenty minutes later he was free and standing in the middle of the dimly lit cell as the door was locked behind him. There was a cell to either side of him, separated partly by a wall and partly by bars. Cale sat down and began to consider carefully what he had done. They were not happy thoughts, but after a few minutes they were interrupted by a voice from the cell to his right.

“Got a smoke?”

W
henever we meet,” said IdrisPukke, “it seems to be in unhappy circumstances. Perhaps we ought to change our ways.”

“Speak for yourself, Granddad.” Cale sat down on the wooden bed and pretended to ignore his fellow prisoner. It was too much of a fluke, meeting up with IdrisPukke again.

“Bit of a coincidence, this,” said IdrisPukke.

“You could say.”

“But I
do
say.” There was a pause. “What brings you here?”

Cale thought carefully before replying.

“Got into a fight.”

“Getting into a fight wouldn’t bring you into Vipond’s personal jail. Who were you fighting with?”

Again Cale thought about his reply—but what did it matter? “Conn Materazzi.”

IdrisPukke laughed, but the delight and admiration were clear, and while Cale tried to resist the flattery, he was hardly able to.

“My God, Goldenbollocks himself. From what I’ve heard, you’re lucky to be alive.”

Cale should have realized he was being provoked, but for all his unusual gifts he was still only young.

“He’s the one who’s lucky. He should be coming round about now, and with a nasty pain in his head.”

“Well, you’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” He said nothing for a moment. “Still—none of that explains why you’re here. What’s this got to do with Vipond?”

“Maybe it was because of the sword.”

“What sword?”

“Conn Materazzi’s sword.”

“Why would his sword have anything to do with this?”

“It wasn’t exactly
his
sword.”

“Meaning?”

“It was really Marshal Materazzi’s sword. The one they call The Edge.” The silence was much deeper this time.

“After I dropped Conn, I jammed it between two stones and snapped it.”

The silence from IdrisPukke was deep and cold. “A particularly mindless act of vandalism, if I may say so. That sword was a work of art.”

“I didn’t have time to admire it while Conn was trying to use it to cut me in two.”

“But the fight was over by then—that’s what you said.”

The truth was that Cale had been regretting his impulse from the moment he snapped the sword.

“Do you want my advice?”

“No.”

“I’ll give it to you anyway. If you’re going to kill someone, then kill them. If you’re going to let them live, then let them live. But don’t make a meal of it either way.”

Cale turned his back on IdrisPukke and lay down.

“While you’re sleeping, dream on this: everything you did, particularly breaking the sword, means you should be in the Doge’s hands. None of it explains why you’re here.”

Half an hour later the sleepless Cale was disturbed by the sound of his cell door being unlocked. He sat up to see Albin and Vipond entering. Vipond looked at him balefully.

“Evening, Lord Vipond,” called out IdrisPukke cheerfully.

“Shut up, IdrisPukke,” replied Vipond, still looking at Cale. “Now tell me—and I want the whole truth, or by God I’ll hand you over to the Doge this minute—tell me exactly what happened; and when you’ve finished, then tell me exactly who you are, and how it was possible that you beat Conn Materazzi and his friends so easily. I mean it—the truth, or I’ll wash my hands of you as quick as boiled asparagus.”

Cale did not, of course, know what asparagus was. The only difficulty was going to be in deciding how much he would have to tell Vipond in order to persuade him he was being completely honest.

“I lost my temper. That’s what people do all the time, isn’t it?”

“Why did you break the sword?”

Cale looked awkward. “That was a stupid thing to do—it was in the heat of a fight. I’ll apologize to the Doge.”

Albin laughed. “Oh well, as long as you’re sorry.”

“Where did you learn to fight so well?” said Vipond.

“At the Sanctuary—all my life, twelve hours a day, six days a week.”

“Are you telling me that Henri and Kleist can fight like that?” This was awkward for Cale.

“No. I mean, they’re trained to fight, but Kleist is a zip . . . a specialist.”

“In what?”

“The spear and the bow.”

“And Henri?”

“Supply, mapmaking, spying.” This was true, but not entirely true.

“So neither of them could have done what you did today?”

“No. I told you.”

“Are there others with the same skill as you in the Sanctuary?”

“No.”

“What,” asked Vipond, “makes you so special?”

Cale paused in order to give the impression he was reluctant to answer.

“When I was nine years old I was good at fighting—but not like now.”

“So what happened?”

“I was in a training fight with a much older boy—no holds barred, real weapons, except the points and edges were blunted. I got the best of him, got him down on the ground—but I was too cocky and he managed to pull me down. Then he hit me on the side of the head with a rock. That was that. The Redeemers pulled him off me, which is why he didn’t beat my brains out. I woke up a couple of weeks later, and two weeks after that I was back to normal except for a dent in my skull.” He reached up and pointed with one finger to the left side of his skull toward the back. Then, again, he stopped as if reluctant to go on.

“But you weren’t like before?”

“No. At first I couldn’t fight as well as before. My timing was all wrong, but after a while whatever happened when he cracked my skull open, I got used to it.”

“Used to what?” asked Albin.

“Every time you strike a blow it means you’ve already decided where it’s going to land on your opponent. And you always give yourself away—where you’re looking, the turn of your body, how you bend to stop from overbalancing as you strike. All of that tells your opponent where you’re going to strike, and if he reads these signals badly then the blow lands; if he reads them well, he blocks it and avoids it.”

“Any fighter, anyone who plays games, knows that,” said Albin. “A good fighter, a good ball player, they can disguise a strike or a throw.”

“They can’t hide it from me, no matter what they do. Not now. I can always read whatever move someone is about to make.”

“Can you show us?” asked Vipond. “Without hurting anyone, I mean.”

“Ask Captain Albin to put his hands behind his back.”

Albin looked uneasy at this, something not lost on the, until now, silently watching IdrisPukke.

“I wouldn’t trust him if I were you, Captain, darling.”

“Shut your mouth, IdrisPukke.” Albin looked closely at Cale and then slowly put his hands behind his back.

“All you need to do is decide which hand to point at me as quickly as you can. You can do whatever you want to make me guess wrong— feint, move your body, try to make me choose the wrong way. It’s up—”

Before Cale had finished his sentence Albin lashed his left hand toward him, only for Cale to catch it in his right hand as gently as if it were a ball thrown by a clumsy three-year-old. Six more times, try as hard as Albin might, the same thing happened.

“My turn,” said Cale as Albin, peeved but mightily impressed, gave in. Cale put his hands behind his back and they began the same process in reverse. Cale struck out six times and six times Albin made the wrong choice.

“I can read what you’re going to do,” said Cale. “The instant you start to move. It’s just a fraction faster than before my injury, but it’s always enough. No one can read what I’m going to do, no matter how quick or experienced they are.”