‘Didn’t think so.’ Cantliss shook his head like stealing children was a fine business scheme for which he deserved the warmest congratulation. ‘How was I to know this old bastard would wriggle out the long grass?’
‘Because,’ said Ring, speaking very slow and cold, ‘you should have learned by now there’s consequences when you fucking do a thing, and a man can’t wander through life thinking no further ahead than the end of his cock!’
Cantliss worked his jaw and muttered, ‘So fucking unfair,’ and Ring was forced to wonder when was the last time he’d punched a man in the face. He was sorely, sorely tempted. But he knew it would solve nothing. That’s why he’d stopped doing it and started paying other people to do it for him.
‘Are you a child yourself, to whine about what’s fair?’ he asked. ‘You think it’s fair I have to stand up for a man can’t tell a good hand of cards from a bad but still has to bet an almighty pile of money he don’t have on the outcome? You think it’s fair I have to threaten some girl’s life to make sure of a fight? How does that reflect on me, eh? How’s that for the start of my new era? You think it’s fair I got to keep my word to men don’t care a damn about theirs? Eh? What’s God-fucked fair about all that? Go and get the woman.’
‘Me?’
‘Your bloody mess I’m aiming to clean up, isn’t it? Bring her up here so our friend Lamb can see Papa Ring’s a man of his word.’
‘I might miss the start,’ said Cantliss, like he couldn’t believe he’d be inconvenienced to such an extent by a pair of very likely deaths.
‘You keep talking you’ll be missing the rest of your fucking life, boy. Get the woman.’
Cantliss stomped for the door and Ring thought he heard him mutter, ‘Ain’t fair.’
He gritted his teeth as he turned back towards the theatre. That bastard made trouble everywhere he went and had a bad end coming, and Ring was starting to hope it’d come sooner rather than later. He straightened his cuffs, and consoled himself with the thought that once the Mayor was beaten the bottom would fall right out of the henchman market and he could afford to hire himself a better class of thug. The crowd was falling silent now, and Ring reached for his ear then stopped himself, stifling another swell of nerves. He’d made sure the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher.
‘Welcome all!’ bellowed Camling, greatly relishing the way his voice echoed to the very heavens, ‘To this, the historic theatre of Crease! In the many centuries since its construction it can rarely have seen so momentous an event as that which will shortly be played out before your fortunate eyes!’
Could eyes be fortunate independently of their owners? This question gave Camling an instant’s pause before he dismissed it. He could not allow himself to be distracted. This was his moment, the torchlit bowl crammed with onlookers, the street beyond heaving with those on tiptoe for a look, the trees on the valley side above even carrying cargoes of intrepid observers in their upper branches, all hanging upon his every word. Noted hotelier he might have been, but he was without doubt a sad loss to the performing arts.
‘A fight, my friends and neighbours, and what a fight! A contest of strength and guile between two worthy champions, to be humbly refereed by myself, Lennart Camling, as a respected neutral party and long-established leading citizen of this community!’
He thought he heard someone call, ‘Cockling!’ but ignored it.
‘A contest to settle a dispute between two parties over a claim, according to mining law—’
‘Get the fuck on with it!’ someone shouted.
There was a scattering of laughs, boos and jeers. Camling gave a long pause, chin raised, and treated the savages to a lesson in cultured gravity. The type of lesson he had been hoping Iosiv Lestek might administer, what a farce that had turned out to be. ‘Standing for Papa Ring, a man who needs no introduction—’
‘Why give him one, then?’ More laughter.
‘—who has forged a dread name for himself across the fighting pits, cages and Circles of the Near and Far Countries ever since he left his native North. A man undefeated in twenty-two encounters.
Glama… Golden!’
Golden shouldered his way into the Circle, stripped to the waist, his huge body smeared with grease to frustrate an opponent’s grasp, great slabs of muscle glistening white by torchlight and reminding Camling of the giant albino slugs he sometimes saw in his cellar and was irrationally afraid of. With his skull shaved, the Northman’s luxuriant moustache looked even more of an absurd affectation, but the volume of the crowd’s bellows only increased. A breathless frenzy had descended upon them and they no doubt would have cheered an albino slug if they thought it might bleed for their entertainment.
‘And, standing for the Mayor, his opponent… Lamb.’ Much less enthusiastic cheering as the second fighter stepped into the Circle to a last frantic round of betting. He was likewise shaved and greased, his body so covered with a multitude of scars that, even if he had no fame as a fighter, his familiarity with violence was not to be doubted.
Camling leaned close to whisper, ‘Just that for a name?’
‘Good as another,’ said the old Northman, without removing his steady gaze from his opponent. No doubt everyone considered him the underdog. Certainly Camling had almost discounted him until that very moment: the older, smaller, leaner man, the gambler’s odds considerably against him, but Camling noticed something in his eye that gave him pause. An eager look, as though he had an awful hunger and Golden was the meal.
The bigger man’s face, by contrast, held a trace of doubt as Camling ushered the two together in the centre of the Circle. ‘Do I know you?’ he called over the baying of the audience. ‘What’s your real name?’
Lamb stretched his neck out to one side and then the other. ‘Maybe it’ll come to you.’
Camling held one hand high. ‘May the best man win!’ he shrieked.
Over the sudden roar he heard Lamb say, ‘It’s the worst man wins these.’
This would be Golden’s last fight. That much he knew.
They circled each other, footwork, footwork, step and shuffle, each feeling out the other, the wild noise of the crowd and their shaken fists and twisted faces pushed off to one side. No doubt they were eager for the fight to start. They didn’t realise that oftentimes the fight was won and lost here, in the slow moments before the fighters even touched.
By the dead, though, Golden was tired. Failures and regrets dragging after him like chains on a swimmer, heavier with each day, with each breath. This had to be his last fight. He’d heard the Far Country was a place where men could find their dreams, and come searching for a way to claim back all he’d lost, but this was all he’d found. Glama Golden, mighty War Chief, hero of Ollensand, who’d stood tall in the songs and on the battlefield, admired and feared in equal measure, rolling in the mud for the amusement of morons.
A tilt of the waist and a dip of the shoulder, a couple of lazy ranging swings, getting the other man’s measure. He moved well, this Lamb, whatever his age. He was no stranger to this business—there was a snap and steadiness to his movements and he wasted no effort. Golden wondered what his failures had been, what his regrets. What dream had he come chasing after into this Circle?
‘Leave him alive if you can,’ Ring had said, which only showed how little he understood in spite of his endless bragging about his word. There were no choices in a fight like this, life and death on the Leveller’s scales. There was no place for mercy, no place for doubts. He could see in Lamb’s eyes that he knew it, too. Once two men step into the Circle, nothing beyond its edge can matter, past or future. Things fall the way they fall.