The boy spoke for the first time. “Go home and look between your wife’s legs, comrade,” he said. “I think I left something there last night.”
This answer amused the crowd further. While he was grinning round at them, Practal hit him hard in the ear again. This time the power-knife fell out of his hand and started to eat its way into the cobbles an inch from his foot, making a dull droning noise. He stood there looking down at it and rubbing his ear.
The point of Practal’s sword rested against the boy’s diaphragm. But the boy refused to look at him, so Practal lowered it and went back to his stool. He sat down with his back to the square while his apprentices wiped his face with a towel, murmuring encouragement in low voices, and gave him a dented flask. He held it up.
“Want some?” he called over his shoulder. The crowd appreciated this: there was some cheering even from people who had backed the other corner.
“That piss?” said the boy. “Soon I’ll drink the lot.”
Practal jumped to his feet so quickly he knocked the stool over.
“Fair enough then!” he shouted, his face red. “Come on!”
But nothing happened. The boy only hacked with his heel at a ridge of hard old ice the apprentices had left sticking to the cobbles in the centre of the square, while the power-knife, held negligently close to his right leg, flickered and sent up whitish motes which floated above the crowd, giving off a sickly smell. He seemed worried.
“This square has been badly set up,” he said.
The court faction shifted irritably; the crowd jeered.
“I don’t care about that,” said Practal, and threw himself into a sustained, tight, very technical attack, controlling the momentum of the sword with practised figures-of-eight so that it shone and flashed in the light from the inn door. Practal’s faction cheered and waved their arms. The boy was forced into a clumsy retreat, and when his foot caught the ridge of ice in the centre of the square he fell over with a cry. Practal brought the sword down hard. The boy smiled. He moved his head quickly out of the way, and with a clang the blade buried itself between two cobblestones. Even as Practal tried to lever it clear, the boy reached round behind his legs and cut the tendons at the back of his knee.
Practal seemed surprised.
“That’s not the way to fight with a weapon like that,” he began, as if he was advising his apprentice.
He let go of the sword and wandered unsteadily about the square with his mouth open, holding the backs of his legs. The boy followed him about interestedly until he collapsed, then knelt down and put his face close to Practal’s to make sure he was listening. “My name is Ignace Retz,” he said quietly. Practal bit the cobbles. The boy raised his voice so that the crowd could hear. “My name is Ignace Retz, and I daresay you will remember it.”
“Kill me,” said Practal. “I’ll not walk now.”
Ignace Retz shook his head. A groan went through the crowd. Retz walked over to the apprentice who was holding Practal’s mail shirt and meal-coloured cloak. “I will need a new shirt and cloak,” he announced loudly, “so that these kind people are not tempted to laugh at me again.” After he had taken the clothes, to which he was entitled by the rules, he returned the power-knife to its sheath, handling it more warily than he had done during the fight. He looked tired. One of the courtiers touched him on the arm and said coldly, “It is time to go back to the High City.”
Retz bowed his head.
As he was walking towards the inn door, with the mail shirt rolled up into a heavy ball under one arm and the cloak slung loosely round his shoulders, Practal’s apprentice came and stood in his way, shouting, “Practal was the better man! Practal was the better man!”
Retz looked down at him and nodded.
“So he was.”
The apprentice began to weep. “The Locust Clan will not allow you to live for this!” he said wildly.
“I don’t suppose they will,” said Ignace Retz.
He rubbed his ear. The courtiers hurried him out. Behind him the crowd had gone quiet. As yet, no bets were being paid out.
Mammy Vooley held a disheartening court. She had been old when the Northmen brought her to the city after the War of the Two Queens, and now her body was like a long ivory pole about which they had draped the faded purple gown of her predecessor. On it was supported a very small head, which looked as if it had been partly scalped, partly burned, and partly starved to death in a cage suspended above the Gabelline Gate. One of her eyes was missing. She sat on an old carved wooden throne with iron wheels, in the middle of a tall limewashed room that had five windows. Nobody knew where she had come from, not even the Northmen whose queen she had replaced. Her intelligence never diminished. At night the servants heard her singing in a thin whining voice, in some language none of them knew, as she sat among the ancient sculptures and broken machines that are the city’s heritage.
Ignace Retz was ushered in to see her by the same courtiers who had led him down to the fight. They bowed to Mammy Vooley and pushed him forward, no longer bothering to disguise the contempt they felt for him. Mammy Vooley smiled at them. She extended her hand and drew Retz down close to her bald head. She stared anxiously into his face, running her fingers over his upper arms, his jaw, his scarlet crest. She examined the bruises Practal had left on the side of his head. As soon as she had reassured herself he had come to no harm, she pushed him away.
“Has my champion been successful in defending my honour?” she asked. When she spoke, lights came on behind the windows, revealing dim blue faces which seemed to repeat quietly whatever she said. “Is the man dead?”
Immediately Retz saw he had made a mistake. He could have killed Practal, and now he wished he had. He wondered if she had been told already. He knew that whatever he said the courtiers would tell her the truth, but to avoid having to answer the question himself he threw Practal’s mail shirt on the floor at her feet.
“I bring you his shirt, ma’am,” he said.
She looked at him expressionlessly. Bubbles went up from the mouths of the faces in the windows. From behind him Retz heard someone say,
“We are afraid the man is not dead, Your Majesty. Retz fought a lazy match and then hamstrung him by a crude trick. We do not understand why, since his instructions were clear.”
Retz laughed dangerously.
“It was not a crude trick,” he said. “It was a clever one. Someday I will find a trick like that for you.”
Mammy Vooley sat like a heap of sticks, her single eye directed at the ceiling.
After a moment she seemed to shrug. “It will be enough,” she said remotely. “But in future you must kill them, you must always kill them. I want them killed.” And her mottled hand came out again from under the folds of her robe, where tiny flakes of limewash and damp plaster had settled like the dust in the convoluted leaves of a foreign plant. “Now give me the weapon back until the next time.”
Retz massaged his ear. The power-knife had left some sort of residue inside his bones, some vibration which made him feel leaden and nauseated. He was afraid of Mammy Vooley and even more afraid of the dead, bluish faces in the windows; he was afraid of the courtiers as they passed to and fro behind him, whispering together. But he had made so many enemies down in the Low City that tonight he must persuade her to let him keep the knife. To gain time he went down on one knee. Then he remembered something he had heard in a popular play, The War with the Great Beetles.
“Ma’am,” he said urgently, “let me serve you further! To the south and east lie those broad wastes which threaten to swallow up Viriconium. New empires are there to be carved out, new treasures dug up! Only give me this knife, a horse, and a few men, and I will adventure there on your behalf!”
When tegeus-Cromis, desperate swordsman of The War with the Great Beetles, had petitioned Queen Methvet Nian in this manner, she had sent him promptly (albeit with a wan, prophetic smile) on the journey which was to lead to his defeat of the Iron Dwarf, and thence to the acquisition of immense power. Mammy Vooley only stared into space and whispered, “What are you talking about? All the empires of the world are mine already.”