“Is he alright?” Jory asked.
“For Jason,” Gary said, “this is actually pretty good.”
In the fighting pits of the Fortress, two women squared off inside a steel cage. The first was Sophie Wexler, the Nightingale. The other was called the Queen of Thorns, for the thorny whip manifested by her power. It had length enough that no part of the cage was safe, and being a power rather than a weapon, the Queen had devilish control over it. Sophie was cut and bloody from numerous wounds, but the weakness of the whip was its inability to deal critical damage. So long as it failed to ensnare an enemy, it couldn’t deal a finishing blow.
Sophie’s ability was speed. Not only was she fast, but she could run up walls or even over water. She was boxed in by the cage, but she pushed her reflexes to the limit to avoid being entangled. She had suffered lashes, but the whip had never managed to tie her down.
Sophie ran up the side of the cage as the whip lashed under her, flipping off and into a kick, but her opponent jumped back out of reach. Having missed the kick, Sophie landed off-balance. Seeing her chance, the Queen flung the whip quickly, wrapping it around Sophie’s forearm. Grinning triumph at Sophie, she only found resolution on her enemy’s face. Too late, she realised she’d been baited.
Sophie shifted her seemingly unbalanced stance, bracing her weight and yanking on the whip with both arms. The Queen stumbled forwards and Sophie ducked behind, looping the slack whip around the Queen’s neck to choke her with her own power. The Queen dismissed the whip and Sophie acted quickly before the Queen had a chance to conjure it up again.
Sophie swept the Queen’s unbalanced feet out from under her, grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face into the floor. The hard-earth floor of the Fortress was practically stone and Sophie smashed the Queen’s face into it a second time and a third, over and over until there was a sharp crack and the Queen’s body went limp.
Skin painted red, silver hair matted with sweat and blood, Sophie left the cage without looking back.
“Your winner, ladies and gentlemen… the Nightingale!”
Three viewing boxes, normally empty in the early afternoon, all had occupants watching Sophie’s match. In one was Cole Silva, the newest member of the Big Three crime lords of Old City. With his father’s passing, the old man’s protection could no longer keep Sophie from his grip. Just as he had been closing his fingers around her, she had run to Clarissa Ventress. Now Ventress had Sophie fighting ever more-dangerous opponents. There was every chance she would be ruined before he could snatch her back into his clutches. Watching her bloody form stride away from the cage, he slapped the fruit platter in front of him across the room.
In her own viewing box, Clarissa Ventress was happily imagining the look on Silva’s face. She was less happy with Sophie’s friend, Belinda.
“You can’t keep doing this!” Belinda said. “You’re going to get her killed.”
Clarissa sighed, her good mood deflated. She responded to Belinda without deigning to look at her.
“The arrangement,” Clarissa said, “was that dear Sophie would help me provoke Silva into the kind of rash action that his father always kept him from making.”
She turned her head towards Belinda.
“The form that provocation takes is for me to decide,” Clarissa continued. “How Sophie survives it is for her to figure out.”
“You filthy—”
Belinda cut herself off as Clarissa’s enormous bodyguard stirred. Darnell had the predatory features universal to leonids, and Belinda took a step back.
“That’s what I thought,” Clarissa said. “I don’t want to hear your pitiful whining again. Go tend to your injured friend.”
Belinda desperately wanted to tear a chunk out Clarissa’s throat, but she was not the match of Clarissa or her bodyguard, two of the criminal underworld’s rare bronze-rankers. She also knew Sophie would be awkwardly applying medicine right now and making a complete mess of it, so she turned and left.
The third box in which the match had been closely viewed belonged to Lucian Lamprey. Old City might be the territory of the Big Three, but as Director of the Magic Society, he might as well have been the sky above them. If nothing else, as a silver-ranker he could personally tear through Old City's strongest enforcers like they were mewling children.
Outside Lamprey’s viewing box, Cassowary Finn hesitated before knocking on the door. As the son of Lucian’s friend and deputy, Pochard, Cassowary had been installed as Lucian’s dogsbody and normally enjoyed the man’s favour. His lack of progress in finding information on the Nightingale had turned that favour on its head. Hoping that was about to be rectified, he knocked on the door.
“Enter!” Lucian’s voice barked from inside.
51
Song of the Nightingale
“Enter!” Lucian's voice bellowed, and Cassowary opened the door. Following him in was a nervous-looking, middle-aged man with a balding head and noticeable paunch.
“Cassowary,” Lucian said, his forehead creasing into a frown. Elven features weren’t well-suited to malevolence, but Lucian made it work.
“I take it,” Lucian said, “that you’re showing your face here because you have what I asked for?”
“Yes, sir, Mr Lucian,” Cassowary said quickly. “This man is a bookmaker here in the pits and has been for some years. He knows all about the girl.”
The middle-aged man visibly gulped as Lucian looked him up and down.
“Name?” Lucian demanded.
“Hubert, sir. They call me Bert the Bookie.”
“Not your name, imbecile. The fighter, Nightingale.”
“Sorry, sir. Her name’s Sophie, sir. Sophie Wexler.”
“You just heard Cassowary tell me you knew everything about her which, for your sake, I very much hope is true. Tell me everything, Bert the Bookie.”
“Everything, sir, yes, sir,” Hubert said. “She wasn't born local but came over with her father, when she was real little, like. This was at the time of the monster surge before last. I remember that's when it was because her father was part of this merchant group. The head of their muscle. Seems they hadn't been doing so well and gambled big on a sailing run during the surge. There’s a reason no one sails during a surge, though, and they lost everything. Only a handful made it in on some dinghies, including the girl and her old man. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years old.”
“He took a little girl out to sea during a monster surge?” Cassowary asked. “What a prick.”
“Shut up,” Lucian said to Cassowary, then returned his gaze to Hubert. “You, keep talking.”
“Well, the merchant group was done,” Hubert continued. “No ships, not even the money for passage back after the surge was over. The girl’s old man went to work for Silva. Not Cole Silva who’s in charge now, obviously. His old dad. Good man, too. Tough, but fair, you know?”
“Get on with it.”
“Sorry, sir. So, the girl’s old man could fight, like, proper fight, and catches the old man’s attention. Does well under Silva Senior for a lot of years, until there’s a problem. Silva Junior takes an interest in the girl.”
“Hardly a surprise,” Lucian said. “He has eyes.”
“She is a looker, sir. But she didn't want any part of Silva the younger, and none could blame her. He'd left more than a few professional women in no state to undertake their profession, if you catch my drift. Old Man Silva, he knows what his son is, and likes the girl's father. So he tells his son that it's hands-off.”
“I bet he took that well,” Lucian said.
“About how you’d expect, sir, yes. He did as he was told, but didn’t make things pleasant for the girl. Got to the point that her father decided to get her out. He just didn’t go about it a good way.”