“Let’s have a drink here,” said Rik leading Rena into the bustle of the tavern. The men here were poor and hard-faced, mostly dockside labourers and the sort of scum who scavenged a living by the river banks. Their clothes had a damp, sodden look, and mud trailed from the cuffs of their trousers. They were not used to seeing a young and pretty girl. Some of them licked their lips appreciatively. Rik grinned nastily and placed his hands ostentatiously on the hilt of his weapons. The tavern goers swiftly looked away.
They took a table on the platform overlooking the river, and Rik called for grog. Rena declined asking for small beer. Rik paid for both and told the tavern-keeper to leave the bottle. Coin changed hands.
“What are you thinking?” asked the girl.
Why did women always ask you that, Rik wondered? “I was thinking about those boats. A lot of them are going to be robbed by dawn tomorrow if there’s anything worth taking on them.”
“Why do you always think about such things?”
“Upbringing, I guess. I saw a lot of that stuff happen in Sorrow.”
“There are poor people everywhere. Desperate enough to steal.” She said it as if it were somehow worse than selling your body on the street. Certainly it was in the eyes of the law. Property was a sacred thing to the Exalted and those who aped them. Crimes against property were treated with the same severity as heresy.
“Yes, there are,” said Rik.
“Is that why you became a soldier?” Rik did not want to explain to her the whole business with Antonio and Sabena. It was too depressing to recount, and you never knew, word of his presence might even reach the gang lord from here. Hopefully by now he had long forgotten Rik but it was never good to take chances with these things.
“No.”
“Why then?”
“I needed a job.”
“A job that could kill you?”
“You can get killed crossing the road. You can get killed by robbers. You can get killed by the plague.” He saw by the way she winced that he had opened an old wound. “Sorry.”
“No matter.”
“It’s better to be the man carrying the gun, than the man whose pig is carried away by the man with the gun.”
“So I have heard.”
“I’ve gone hungry a lot less since I became the Queen’s Soldier.”
“Is that all that matters to you? Aren’t you proud to serve the Queen?”
“Not particularly.” He realised he was being disagreeable to her, was challenging the things she believed in, and he wondered why he was doing it? The answer came to him quickly enough. She was judging him for not living up to her ideals, and he did not like being judged. He fumbled for something to say. Before he could think of anything, she said:
“I heard a preacher once. He said we were all soldiers. He had been one himself. You could see. His leg was wooden. His hand was a hook. I don’t want you to end up like that.”
“He was one of the lucky ones,” Rik said, and regretted it at once. “He wasn’t a beggar.”
“Lucky?”
“What did he say?” Rik asked to distract her.
“He said we were all soldiers in the war between good and evil. Do you think there is such a war?” She made it sound like it was a very daring question. He supposed it was to her.
“The temple says so.”
“I do. He said that since the worlds were created, God has fought with his Shadow. The preacher said they have fought since the dawn of time and will fight till Worlds’ End. Each of us is a soldier in that struggle. Every good word, every good deed, every pure thought is a bullet fired for the Lord. Every bad word, bad deed, bad thought is a sword wielded for the Shadow. The battle is very close. Each of us can make the difference.”
“That sounds very close to heresy. Doesn’t the temple predict the Light’s inevitable victory?”
“He said that the Light would win, but it would only do so when the balance was tipped ever so strongly in its favour. And he said the Shadow would triumph many times only to have the Light shine again. He said there had been many such times in the past. Like before the Terrarchs came with the Truth.”
“Is that what they came with?”
“Oh yes, it is. But the thing that has always stayed with me is this. The preacher said that on the last day we will all be judged. All our good deeds and all our bad deeds will be weighed by the Angel of Justice. Those of us whose good deeds outweigh the bad, will be reborn in Light. Those of us who were soldiers of the Shadow will go to the Pit.”
“I thought we were already there,” said Rik. She looked terribly serious and he wanted to distract her.
“He meant the Bottomless Pit, the Place of Torment.”
“I was joking.”
“I sometimes think I am going there. I have been very bad. Look where I work. Look what I have done.”
She looked as if she were about to cry. He touched her hand. “What choice did you have?”
“We always have a choice, the preacher said. Always.”
“Sometimes all our choices are equally bad. Trust me, I know.”
“If God is so good, why is this world so wicked?” she asked.
“I asked a priest at the orphanage the same thing once,” said Rik.
She looked at him curiously. “What did he say?”
“He beat me with a stick.” He tried to smile, but he felt it slipping. At that moment he felt as if his face was melting and resetting into something strange and unnatural. He glanced away because he knew her smile was a mirror of his own.
A barge drawn by a wyrm and decorated in the most ornate fashion came round the bend in the river. It had been chartered by a party of Terrarchs or perhaps it belonged to one of them. It was a big craft with a small orchestra playing at the prow and a group of masked and costumed Exalted chatting and drinking in the rear. Armed guards watched from the bow. A smaller barge with more armed men aboard followed.
“They’ve started early,” he heard someone say.
“It would be lovely to be one of those ladies,” said Rena. She seemed entranced by their appearance. Her smile looked more natural now. “Look at those gowns.”
He felt a sudden unexpected surge of tenderness for her. He was not sure why. Perhaps it was because she looked vulnerable and eager and at once frightened and excited by life. Perhaps it was just the grog. He reached out and touched her hand.
“It would be lovely to live like them,” he said, the thought of his unknown father and the birthright he had never known making his expression bitter. “But we cannot. The Terrarchs rule. We are the ruled. They own this world.”
Not for the first time he wondered what it would be like to live in a place and time where that was not the case. He tried to picture a world where he ruled. That was easy enough. All he had to do was imagine living like the Terrarchs. He tried to imagine how the world could become like that and his imagination failed.
The Clockmaker had dreamed that dream too, and look what had happened to him. Perhaps the books held the secret. But he was about to lose those, and even the heavy pouch of money he would get in return did not seem like adequate compensation for the loss of that pitiful dream.
“I wish I had a gown like that,” she said.
“Maybe one day you shall.” Doubtless one day soon those discarded gowns or the fabric from which they were made would show up in the second hand shops.
“Do you really think so?”
“It’s possible,” he said. It was always better to err on the side of caution he had found. Hopes were easily dashed.
He drank some more grog and watched the boat disappear behind the bend in the river. The temple bells rang once more. It was time to get back to Mama Horne’s. There was a deal to be done, or spoiled if he could. And failing that there was the backup plan.
He made sure their route back took him by Bertragh’s house.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The costume was a good one, Sardec thought. The mask was one of the ancient hero masks, sculpted from greystone, and depicting the blade-dancer Xeimon. The robes were a formal court duellist’s such as the hero had worn before the Ten Towers Fall and the coming of the Princes of Shadow. It was an appropriate costume for Solace. Xeimon had been one of the Three Hundred and died heroically guarding the entrance to the Dragon Vale.