They didn't know that I was a collector and I couldn't have undone the bindings they worked in my wall, no matter how hard I concentrated.
"You should leave," I rasped out of a sore throat. "Don't you know what I can do? I'm an architect, employed by the veche itself. If you don't go, now, I will undo your bonds and turn your pions right back on you! Trap you here, call enforcers, and then who knows what information would get out? I don't think my landlord wants anyone to know the kind of associates he employs, do you?"
The large man smirked between tight knitted cap and unwashed beard. "Yeah, we were told about you. Pity you can't pay your bills, Miss Employed-by-the-veche." He leaned forward. A breath like rancid meat and old onion washed over my face. It set my eyes watering. "We were told to keep you busy, if you went and tried anything. Keep you occupied." He wrapped a hand across my jaw and tipped my face. The back of my head pressed into the wall, my neck strained until I thought the scars would tear. "We could give you prettier cuts than these." He flicked a pink ridge on my cheek. I sucked air through my teeth. "So you keep quiet." He released me, cuffed the top of my head with a casual backhand, like I was a dog that had displeased him, and rejoined his fellow.
They had moved on to my study, I realised as my body sagged against the restraints. To my books, my footstool. The chair I had sat in while Devich drank tea and touched my knees. Devich! I sent out a mental call, a need that welled up from my gut into my head. Come tonight, Devich! Find these bastards and… and what? Walk blindly in through the door and be found dead, clogging one of Tear's more obscure rills tomorrow morning? Did I really want him here, did I want him to fight for me, to suffer for me? Possibly die for me.
Die? I shuddered.
I had to be overreacting. It was just a few kopacks, wasn't it? And this was Varsnia, the civilised world.
I cleared my throat. "Um, excuse me?" No reaction, just more rummaging and plunder. "Hey!"
One of the large men stepped out of the kitchen. "Want us to shut your mouth for you too?"
I refused to be daunted. "What, exactly, is going to happen here?"
A smile broke through the untrimmed beard. "Already happening, bitch."
With a breath I clamped down on sudden anger. But anger was good. Anger was better than cowering attached to the wall, willing for a saviour to come. "Fine. What is happening, then? What-" saying this took a steadying pause of its own, I refused to sound afraid "-are you going to do with me?"
The smile widened as he chuckled. "You're a confident one." He made a sweeping gesture with one thick-as-apylon arm. "We take what you owe. Compensation. Apartment for the apartment, goods for the kopacks. You're lucky there. By the looks of it you'll cover everything you owe."
My throat was suddenly very dry. I didn't ask what would have happened if I hadn't accumulated so many memories, so many treasures with my hard-earned kopacks. How they would have made up the gap.
"So you take my home, you take everything I own. Then you let me go."
He roared with laughter, smacked his own knee and nearly doubled up against the wall. Hardly inspired confidence.
The other man was drawn into the hallway from the study. He carried a small bear statue in one hand and a very old book in the other. The bear was set in solid burnished copper, with an old mechanical clock in its belly. The clock no longer worked. The book was Velchev's Principles of Architecture. An original copy, hand written in ink on vellum, complete with diagrams and pencilledin notes. Both were priceless. Both were gifts, given to me by old family members of the national veche on the completion of the gallery.
I looked away.
"What?" he asked. Biting the word off like a barbarian, barely able to speak the language, let alone appreciate the true value of what he held in his thick hands.
"Reckons we're going to let her go, this one does," the comedian answered.
Barbarian added a chuckle of his own. It sounded hungrier than his companion. He liked his work, liked the consumption of another person's life, particularly someone who thought they were better than him. He enjoyed the process of biting, ripping it to bits and devouring until there was nothing left.
To Comedian it was just all one big, black joke.
"Now why would we do that?" Barbarian asked.
I tried to find his eyes. "Because you'll have got what you came for."
Comedian shook his head. "Apartment goes to the landlord, your stuff gets sold to pay off debts. You, we're supposed to bring in all nice and in one piece. Not the way we usually work it. Most of the time the landlord's happy to let us beat 'em to a right mess. But he's been getting visitors, said they wanted you brought back. You had a lesson to learn-"
"Quiet down!" Barbarian growled.
Comedian shut his mouth, pressed it into a thin smile. "Look at you, got me talking too much."
"You hand me over to the landlord, then?" I tried to remember if I'd ever met the man. Savvin's father had set me up with the apartment in exchange for taking his son into my critical circle, when I had earned my right to head a circle of nine. He had organised everything, and I'd been happily relieved of the chore.
Did Savvin's father know, then, the kind of man who owned these apartments? Was he laughing with Savvin at how low his former centre had fallen, at what would happen to her when she couldn't pay her rent?
"To his visitors, I'd say." Comedian's grin broadened. "And by the look of them, they'll teach you to ask too many questions. Never seen such a strange-"
"Quiet!" Barbarian roared.
"No." I straightened as much as the clutching wall would allow. "No." I would fall no further, and I would not fall away from Kichlan, from Lad. From the twins with their sad humour; Sofia with her serious eyes; even silent, pouting Natasha. I would not leave my team. "I can't go with you. I won't go with you."
Both laughed together.
"Feisty!" Comedian crowed.
"They will break you, bitch," Barbarian said. "I hope I see it. Hope I'm there."
"Break me?" I couldn't control my words anymore, couldn't tell which ones were foolish and likely to get me killed. "You don't know what breaking is! Brains full of the Other's piss, that's all you've got. You useless, little men."
Barbarian strode toward me. "Shut your mouth!" He lifted the solid copper bear, eyes glinting, terrible with purpose and anger.
"One piece, Ngad!" Comedian ran forward, gripped the copper bear and fought to pry it from Barbarian's grip.
"No one breaks a person like Grandeur breaks a person!" I laughed at their shocked faces, at their hulking dance around the bear, held frozen in his roar above their heads. "She smacks you and she cuts you and she leaves you all alone."
"What's wrong with her?" Barbarian paused in a bulky pirouette and peered at me, large eyebrows crunched into a caterpillar frown. His hold on the bear loosened enough for Comedian to yank it from his hand.
"What does it matter?" Comedian scowled between us both. "Stupid bitch's mad, not our problem. They can deal with her."
"She breaks you," I continued, only half hearing the two large men supposedly stripping me of my world. Little did they know how much had already peeled away. "But you find your feet again. Falling just means you're someone else when you stand up." I looked up, met each face. "I didn't get up again to let you push me down."
"Other's stinking balls," Barbarian muttered. "She's insane."
"I'm not coming with you."
"You don't understand." Comedian leaned close to my face, the bear still clasped in his hand and safely behind his back. "You don't have a choice. You'll stay where you are until we're ready, then you come with us. And you either come nice and quiet, or we rig your bonds and drag you the whole way. Don't want that, do you?"