Dancer's Lament: Path to Ascendancy Book 1 (25 page)

Across the way, grinning like a cat, Rei mouthed a silent
Well done
.

Iko handed over the battered wooden blade and stormed away. What stupidity! What a useless unnecessary waste of time and effort. None of this was bringing them any closer to an answer to their current predicament.

She returned to the barred window, crossed her quivering, numb arms. She didn’t even feel good about winning. It could be bad for the unit’s cohesion. Torral might just be dense enough to be resentful of the beating, though she’d brought it upon herself. Iko feared she might have made an enemy among her sisters. Better, perhaps, if she’d simply taken a hit and gone down. Then it would be over. Everyone would be satisfied and leave her alone as not worth their time.

Now she had yet one more stupid thing to worry about.

* * *

He decided he would do it before the striking of the mid-night bell. Rafall usually stayed up far into the later hours going over his books. He would not expect a visitor. It would be routine; no different from all his earlier visits.

Rafall would be alone, as he almost always was. He’d enter, strike, and leave with none even being aware of his arrival. Rafall would even greet him as a friend. Invite him to sit. Offer a drink. It would be simple. Comically so. Not a test of his abilities at all, he reflected.

No – this was intended as a test of something very different.

Something Dorin was not certain he wished to succeed in.

He yanked on the cord wrapped round his forearm, tested the tiny collapsed grapnel snug there against his wrist and wondered, why this hesitation?

The test was straightforward, surely.

Yes. A test of his dependability. His degree of, dare he say . . . pliability? Or perhaps . . .
prostration
?

His teeth were clenched now, and he clasped his hands to either side of his neck, where a hidden iron lip, a slim collar, rose from his armoured vest. It was meant as a channel that could possibly catch a blade – a light one, of course. Something he’d yet had to test, though a compatriot in Tali swore by the precaution.

He ran his thumbs along the cloth-disguised iron ridge and the memory came to him of that prick, Tran, yanking Loor by the hair to a pillar for his test. His
initiation
, Tran had called it. His initiation into humiliation, degradation, and meek submission in order to belong.

Pung, he believed, suspected some sort of prior patronage or business relationship between him and Rafall. And thus the test. This
initiation
into Pung’s ranks.

Was this to be his test of submissiveness and self-degradation?

Yet what did it matter? He’d trained as a killer. It was his job. Nothing more. Why then the distaste for this one? It was not a question of morality. No, he’d dispensed with any such artificial external measures of right or wrong long ago. It was internal. It had everything to do with his own self-measure.

The problem was, he’d sworn a vow to himself. More than a vow, really. A pledge to what he considered himself to be. To his integrity. His pride.

He might kill any man or woman . . . but he would bend to none.

There. It was out in the open. Now the question was what to do about it. He let go a long hard exhalation and grasped hold of the edges of the window before him and leaned there, breathing loudly into the night. His arms trembled, rigid. As if ready to yank him out instantly – or to hold him back. He felt as if he were drowning.

He’d agreed. He had to go through with it. Yet he’d already decided not to join any crew or gang or party where any sort of submission was the condition of entry. He was too stupidly proud, he supposed, to compromise himself. That’s just how it was.

The answer, it came to him, would be to leave it to Rafall. The man had done right by him so far. Certainly, he’d knocked him down the day he’d entered the city – but that was business, before they’d struck any agreement or professional understanding. He held no grudge for that. It had been a rather bracing lesson, in fact.

There. He would put the point to Rafall. Yes. And the argument would be very pointed indeed.

*

The yell rang through the rooms in the early pre-dawn hours. Rafall’s guards bolted from their chairs where they dozed before the only access to their boss’s rooms – the base of a steep ladder up to the garret chambers. They bashed and hammered the closed trapdoor, but found it blocked by some weight above, and so dashed down the stairs and out to the street to climb up from the outside.

Yet Rafall’s headquarters had been deliberately designed to be near impossible to access from without, and so it was some time before the nimblest and lightest of his boys and girls managed the tricky ascent. Along the way, up gable and overhang, they encountered splashes of fresh drying blood and signs of a struggle in broken slate shingles, scraps of torn cloth, and a dropped bloodied knife – one of Rafall’s.

Within, they levered the furniture from the trapdoor and allowed the guard’s entrance. They searched, but amid the clutter of the struggle found no sign of Rafall himself. Blood lay everywhere, quite liberally so. One girl discovered a crossbow bolt driven into the soft wood panelling of the wall opposite the man’s desk. Their patron’s last ditch defence, missing its mark.

Suspicion immediately fixed upon Pung. The ugly toad had long been envious of Rafall’s ease and camaraderie with the street youths – a touch wholly beyond him. Many were for going after him themselves. But Gremain, Rafall’s long-time lieutenant and eldest among the thieves and clubbers, reined in the hotter heads, cuffed a few, and ordered them to clean up while he and a few others took word of this to Urquart. It would then be up to him, the man Rafall answered to, to decide on any course of action.

This settled the matter and everyone set to clearing up – simultaneously pocketing whatever they could lay their hands on and searching for any hidden cache. Gremain nodded to a few of his most trusted lads and they came down the ladder after him. He knew that if Urquart were true to form, then all Rafall’s old territory should come to him in an orderly straightforward descent. In the meantime, he’d let the others ransack the man’s quarters. It would serve to help smooth over any resentment among those who might otherwise consider the job theirs.

*

At noon the next day, a battered half-sunk open boat loaded with refugees fleeing Heng pulled up on the south shore of the Idryn. Kanian soldiers met them there and searched for any weapons, while confiscating any valuables they could find. Their captain then read aloud from a prepared document stating that it was solely by the grace of the good King Chulalorn of Itko Kan, head of the Southern League, that the refugees were granted freedom from the Hengan yoke, and that from this point onward they were to consider themselves subjects of said Southern League, and legally owed their allegiance to King Chulalorn.

Among the rag-tag mass of refugees was one rather overweight Hengan with a full oiled beard, his fingers bearing indentations where rings had been yanked away by the soldiers, and bleeding earlobes where other rings had been just as brutally removed. He wore a torn and bloodstained shirt and trousers of fine buff leather. He’d obviously taken a head wound recently as the cloth wrapped there was still red with fresh blood. Long after most of the others had gone their way this fellow stood peering westward, to where the distant walls of Heng were just visible through the trees lining the shore. He sighed, his thick rounded shoulders rising and falling, and he tucked his hands into the belt that held his wide belly and frowned pensively. Then he too turned away, shaking his head, and started on the long walk east downriver to Cawn.

NOW THAT DORIN
had secured the patronage of Li Heng’s black market boss, he was, truth be told, damned bored. Pung wouldn’t let him out of his sight. He had to remain within the compound; couldn’t leave without permission. It was as if the fellow didn’t trust him.

Perhaps Pung was only now realizing that it might not have been a good idea to order Dorin to murder his previous employer.

Certainly there were occasional jobs accompanying regular muscle on routine assignments to collect debts. But these were drying up as the siege dragged on. Indeed, even the thieves now came back empty-handed; it seemed the markets were now almost entirely empty and deserted. Yet Pung had him still remain close, unnamed, the lurking ominous threat. Nothing challenging. No real work. He was beginning to feel like a caged exotic pet. The sneaking suspicion now nagged that perhaps Pung had hired him – if
hired
was really the right word – just to take him out of everyone else’s hands.

In which case he’d sold himself far too cheaply. In fact, he was beginning to think that he’d made a very serious mistake in accepting anyone’s patronage at all. It just didn’t feel right. It wasn’t his style.

Still, his hobby remained: his pursuit of the mystery that was the Dal Hon mage.

Everyone, it seemed, knew he was down there, chained and locked in the dark. All the children forced to work about the compound, cleaning and running errands, seemed to know; certainly all those looting the tombs did. But none would speak of it. When he put the question to the dirt-faced kids, most looked frightened. A few, however, shot him narrow gauging looks. As if the prisoner were a secret they possessed and he was not to be trusted with it. An odd reaction, that.

His casual request of Gren to be allowed to go below was met with a similar silence and a long, measuring stare. And that was it. Not even a denial. That Gren ignored the question said everything. And of course Dorin couldn’t raise it again; to do so would look . . . suspicious.

So he was powerless. For a time. Then he noticed how many kids were smeared in the greenish silt and clay of the underground tombs. Too many to be accounted for by the few he watched using the one main entrance Gren had taken him through.

So he kept watch. Very carefully of course, from the most distant vantages available. And soon enough he noticed how many of the child labourers disappeared around certain woodpiles yet didn’t emerge. How many appeared from certain run-down storage huts without being seen to enter.

Pung and his crew of dim thugs didn’t seem aware of what was going on. But then they had nothing but contempt for the children, kicking and beating them at will. Why should they suspect them to be capable of their own deceptions?

One evening he started following them. Eventually one girl in filthy baggy rags, or at least what he thought was a girl, slid into a gap between piled logs and disappeared. It was a tight fit but he was quite lean and had trained for such narrow passages himself.

The gap led to a hole and a choice. Dive in headfirst and see what might await? Hadn’t the girl? Yet who knew what might lie in store for trespassers below? A pit? Sharpened stakes?

Lying there in the dark he decided that perhaps he was letting his imagination get the better of him. They were, after all, only kids. He sidled forward, lost his grip as his palms slid and slipped on clay, and was taken by the slick wet slope.

He thanked the gods he didn’t yell. He landed in utter darkness amid a litter of trash that he recognized by feel as rags, sandals, torn shoes, wooden slats and rope. Reflexively, he gathered his feet beneath himself and stood, only to bash his head on a timber. He ducked, biting back curses and biting his lips as well. Stars danced in the blackness of his vision.

He knelt in the dark, bent forward, gripping his head, and waited for his vision to adjust. Slowly he made out that he occupied a crude room, or cellar, hacked from the dirt. What glimmers of natural light there were shone down from the chute above, while the weak flickering yellow of lamplight glowed from a tunnel ahead. He tried walking hunched over, but found that the roof was still too low and so was reduced to shuffling forward on all fours.

He crawled for a time, cautiously, wary of detection – though why he should be wary of a pack of children he wasn’t certain – and was surprised to find a veritable warren of tunnels running beneath the compound, and no doubt beyond. At one corner he detected the murmuring of a voice and paused, listening, then followed the sound.

The raw dirt tunnel ended at a junction with a much larger, properly excavated and stone-lined one. He straightened, carefully, and padded forward to another corner. Here the voice was much stronger, amplified perhaps by the semicircular stone walls. He peeked round the corner and so confused was he by what he saw that it took him a moment to understand that he was looking at a horde of kids all sitting in a crowd before one door, all leaning forward, straining to hear the voice that Dorin now realized was coming from within.

He cocked his head as well, listening. ‘Gather round, gather round, my pretties,’ the voice was murmuring. ‘Listen to me and none will dare raise a hand against you, I swear. But we must stay together. United. A family.’

Dorin’s brows rose as he identified the voice as that of his Dal Hon rival.

‘So you always say,’ objected one boy, ‘but they still beat Jawan and came for little Rill and did those icky things they do to her.’

‘But they don’t enter our tunnels,’ answered the voice from beyond the door.

‘They’re too damned small for them!’

‘Exactly. Those are ours. How goes the digging beneath the main house, Deel?’

‘They don’t suspect nothing. But Gren’s poking round – he’s sharp, that one.’

‘Listen,’ objected the first youth again. ‘No more digging till you deliver on our protection. I say that’s fair.’

Many of the matted mops of dirty hair bobbed as the children nodded and murmured their agreement.

The voice behind the door was silent for a time, then the Dal Hon spoke again. ‘Very well. I was hoping to wait longer before having to resort to such measures. But I will summon a daemon out of the darkness . . . if I must.’

The kids’ eyes glowed brightly as they shared awed glances.

‘Really?’ one whispered in amazement. ‘You c’n do that?’

‘Of course!’ the Dal Hon snapped, quite annoyed. ‘I am not to be trifled with. As I shall demonstrate.’