Murillio snorted. ‘Yes. Useful if you happen to be in a travelling fair or a circus. Oh, for certain, Bellam, point control is essential in fencing with the rapier — I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. But as an exercise, I am afraid its value is limited.’
‘Why?’
Murillio eyed the young man for a moment, and then sighed. ‘Very well. The exercise requires too many constraints, few of which ever occur in the course of a real fight. You achieve point control — useful point control, I mean — when it’s made integral to other exercises. When it’s combined with footwork, distance, timing and the full range of defence and offence demanded when facing a real, living opponent. Spearing rings is all very impressive, but the form of concentration it demands is fundamentally different from the concentration necessary in a duel. In any case, you can spend the next two months mastering the art of spearing a ring, or two months mastering the art of staying alive against a skilled enemy, and not just staying alive, but presenting a true threat to that enemy, in turn.’ He shrugged. ‘Your choice, of course.’
Bellam Nom grinned suddenly and Murillio saw at once how much he looked like his oh-so-distant cousin. ‘I still might try it — in my own time, of course.’
‘Tell you what,’ Murillio said. ‘Master spearing a suspended ring at the close of a mistimed lunge, an off-balance recovery to your unarmed side, two desperate parries, a toe-stab to your opponent’s lead foot to keep him or her from closing, and a frantic stop-thrust in the midst of a back-pedalling retreat. Do that, and I will give you my second best rapier.’
‘How long do I have?’
‘As long as you like, Bellam.’
‘Extra time with an instructor,’ said a voice from the shaded colonnade to one side, ‘is not free.’
Murillio turned and bowed to Stonny Menackis. ‘Mistress, we were but con shy;versing-’
‘You were giving advice,’ she cut in, ‘and presenting this student with a challenge. The first point qualifies as instruction. The second is an implicit agreement to extracurricular efforts on your part at some time in the future.’
Bellam’s grin had broadened. ‘My father, Mistress, will not hesitate to meet any extra expense, I assure you.’
She snorted, stepping out from the gloom. ‘Any?’
‘Within reason, yes.’
She looked terrible. Worn, old, her clothes dishevelled. If Murillio had not known better, he would judge her as being hungover, a condition of temporary, infrequent sobriety to mark an alcoholic slide into fatal oblivion. Yet he knew she was afflicted with something far more tragic. Guilt and shame, self-hatred and grief. The son she didn’t want had been taken from her — to imagine that such a thing could leave her indifferent was to not understand anything at all.
Murillio said to Bellam, ‘You’d best go now.’
They watched him walk away.
‘Look at him,’ Stonny muttered as he reached the gate, ‘all elbows and knees.’
‘That’ll pass,’ he said.
‘A stage, is it?’
‘Yes.’ And of course he knew this particular game, the way she spoke of Harllo by not speaking of him, of the life that might await him, or the future taken away from him, stolen by her cruel denial. She would inflict this on herself again and again, at every opportunity. Seemingly innocent observations, each one a masochistic flagellation. For this to work, she required someone like Murillio, who would stand and listen and speak and pretend that all this was normal — the back and forth and give and take, the blood pooling round her boots. She had trapped him in this role — using the fact of his adoration, his love for her — and he was no longer certain that his love could survive such abuse.
The world is small. And getting smaller.
He had walked the pauper pits south of the city, just outside the wall between the two main trader gates. He had looked upon scores of recent unclaimed dead. It was, in fact, becoming something of a ritual for him, and though he had only secondhand descriptions of Harllo, he did his best, since no one who knew the boy would accompany him. Not Stonny, not Myrla nor Bedek. On occasion, Murillio had been forced to descend into one of the pits to make closer examination of some small body, a soft, lime-dusted face, eyes lidded shut as if in sleep or, on occasion, scrunched in some last moment of pain, and these mute, motionless faces now paraded in his dreams at night, a procession of such sorrow that he awoke with tears streaming from his eyes.
He told Stonny none of this. He’d said nothing of how his and Kruppe’s enquiries among the sailors and fisherfolk had failed to find any evidence of someone press-ganging a five-year-old boy. And that every other possible trail thus far had turned up nothing, not even a hint or remote possibility, leaving at last the grim likelihood of some fell mishap, unreported, uninvestigated — just another dead child abandoned long before death’s arrival, known only in the records of found corpses as the “twice-dead”.
‘I am thinking of signing over my stakes in this school,’ Stonny now said. ‘To you.’
Startled, he turned to stare at her. ‘I won’t accept.’
‘Then you’d be a fool — as if I didn’t already know that. You’re better suited. You’re a better teacher. I barely managed any interest in this from the very start — it was always the coin — and now I find I could not care less. About the school, the students — even promising ones like Nom there. I don’t care about anything, in fact.’
Including you, Murillio. Yes, he heard that unspoken addition without the need for her to actually say it aloud. Well, she would of course want to push him away. Much as she needed him to play those self-wounding games with her, she needed even more the solitude necessary for complete self-destruction. Isolation was more than a simple defence mechanism; it also served to prepare one for more severe punishments, possibly culminating in suicide. On another level, she would view her desire to drive him off as an act of mercy on her part. But that was a most irritating form of self-pity.
He had given his heart to the wrong woman. Timing, Bellam Nom, is everything. With sword in hand.
With love in hand.
Oh, well. I’d figured it out with a rapier, at least.
‘Don’t make that decision just yet,’ he said. ‘I have one more thing I can try.’ It won’t be pleasant, but you don’t need to know that.
Stonny simply turned away. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’
Many adults, in the indurated immobility of years, acquire a fear of places they have never been, even as they long for something different in their lives, something new. But this new thing is a world of the fantastical, formless in answer to vague longings, and is as much defined by absence as presence. It is a conjuration of emotions and wishful imaginings, which may or may not possess a specific geography. Achieving such a place demands a succession of breaks with one’s present situation, always a traumatic endeavour, and upon completion, why, sudden comes the fear.
Some do not choose the changes in their lives. Some changes no one in their right mind would ever choose. In K’rul’s Bar, a once-soldier of the Malazan Em shy;pire stands tottering over the unconscious form of her lover, whilst behind her paces Antsy, muttering self-recriminations under his breath, interrupted every now and then with a stream of curses in a half-dozen languages.
Blend understood all that had motivated Picker to attempt what she had done. This did little to assuage her fury. The very same High Denul healer that had just attended to her had set to a thorough examination of Picker as soon as Antsy had returned with his charge lying in the bed of a hired oxcart, only to pronounce that there was nothing to be done. Either Picker would awaken or she wouldn’t. Her spirit had been torn loose and now wandered lost.