Riding the Serpent's Back (22 page)

Chi ran off into the mist. He found the path that climbed away from the terrace and took it at a run, but soon he slowed his pace. The horses had gone, of course, so he set out to walk. By the time he reached Edge City, he had decided that Cotoche and Leeth could wait until later. He should never have gone to the Falls with them in the first place, it was only at Cotoche’s insistence that he had acquiesced. He should have been in the Warren healing, and then he should have spent some time with Ghost and the other Raggies. He was letting things slip, leaving a trail of broken promises wherever he went.

He went into the Warren first, and that was his mistake.

When he had been at the Falls, he had been missing one of his regular healing sessions with Tezech Ferrea. The man was a hypochondriac, but in the network of gang-bosses and string-pullers in the hierarchy of Edge City he was an important hypochondriac. For some time now, Chi had been tending to his imaginary ills, cultivating the relationship. Chi had thought Tezech was
his
.

This misapprehension was corrected when he was seized by four of Tezech’s men. With his newly increased strength and his street ways, he fought hard, but he had little chance against four trained men.

They tied him to a post in the basement of Tezech’s palatial house and left him there for a day and a night.

The next day, a girl brought him water and bread, which she fed to him with nervous mouse-like movements. “Will you set me free?” pleaded Chi, trying to win her sympathy. But she just looked at him as if he was a freak, which was, he realised, exactly how he must look to her.

He decided to try a different tack.

“If you set me free,” he said, in his sweetest tone, “I will ensure that you are not killed.”

She grabbed the tray from where she had rested it on a barrel and fled back up the stairway.

He spent another night alone, his body aching from the unnatural position he had to adopt, sitting slumped against the post.

It was not until some time the next day that Tezech Ferrea came to see him. He muttered some words to someone, then swept down the stairs, his thin body engulfed in a padded blue cloak bearing his stylised image of the sun and silhouetted birds. He smiled so that his teeth shone whitely from his colourless face. “I must apologise,” he said. “I missed our little healing session. I was away on business.”

“Your apology is accepted,” said Chi. “Can I go now?”

“You will go,” said Tezech. “But not to a place of your own choosing, I suspect. I have been conferring with a messenger from Tule. You will be going there shortly. I believe your son would like to see you and in my munificence I have facilitated your family reunion.”

“How much has he paid you?”

Tezech tutted and shook his head. “Expenses only, I assure you.”

Chi didn’t believe him. “Did he make you any promises?” he asked. “He’d never make you a Principal of Edge City, if that was your price.”

Tezech shook his head, but continued to smile. “In a year’s time,” he said, “I will be Governor of the Shelf. You proved to be a valuable bargaining asset.”

Chi laughed at him and Tezech’s smile faltered. It was replaced by a look of loathing.

“And you believed him?” Chi asked, so amused that he momentarily forgot his predicament. “You mean you’re really as stupid as you look? Lachlan would not make you Governor in a million Eras!”

“We have a pact of cooperation,” said Tezech. “By that document certain prices have been agreed, upon the completion of various stages of progress. Your delivery to the capital is merely a goodwill gesture on my part, a seal on our pact.” Tezech stepped forward and yanked at the boy’s hair so that his head was tipped up. “You are finished now,” he said. “You will not even warrant a mention in the histories of our Era. A failed politician, a failed fugitive, and now no more than a freak in the grossly perverted body of a child.”

Chi knew two manifestations of anger. One was the sudden destructive rage he had felt when he had pushed Leeth at the Falls, trying to provoke a fight. The other was what he felt now: a cold knot of ire, buried deep in his chest. He felt it taking shape, pushing out, stealing over his senses. “That makes me angry,” he said quietly. “I don’t like it when you talk that way.”

And then he did what he had never tried to do before. With the Talent he had cultivated so carefully to heal, he reached out into Tezech’s animus, seeking out the points of weakness, the points of corruption. But instead of smoothing them over, healing them, he focused on them with all his effort and heaved them apart. He had only ever used his Talent to create, but now he used it to destroy the man who stood before him.

He watched calmly as Tezech Ferrea’s legs buckled and he fell, first to his knees and then flat on his face. He watched as Tezech’s hands squirmed in the dirt floor of the basement, crawling towards Chi’s feet like crabs on the banks of the Hamadryad. Then one hand stopped, and a few seconds later the other, a finger stretched out so that it barely touched one of Chi’s feet.

~

“I told him he’d never make Governor,” Chi said, sadly. “He should have believed me.”

Leeth looked around the gathered faces. Sawnie had been nodding at regular intervals throughout Chi’s story. Joel and Petro looked on impassively, as did Marsalo and Echtal and some of the others. Only Cotoche looked as horrified as Leeth felt.

“You were clearly right about Lachlan’s plans to secure the Shelf,” said Sawnie. “And now Lachlan knows you’re alive and a threat again. If you have the forces then you should take the Junction immediately. If not, then we should build up our forces in preparation. Petro and I could raise a few units from Halstrand, I’m certain of that.”

“But if we take the Junction then we might be starting a fight we’re not yet ready to win,” said Chi. “One day I’ll lead a great army, but we’re not ready yet. I’d like you to see what I’ve established here, before anything else.”

Sawnie nodded her acceptance.

“How did you get out?” asked Joel. “After you un-healed the gang-boss.”

“A few minutes later one of the guards came down and I suggested he might like to release me.”

“And he did so?” asked Echtal.

Chi nodded. “His master was lying at my feet, with blood coming from his ears,” he said. “The guard asked what I’d done and I said I could show him easily enough if he didn’t untie me and then do his utmost to convince the rest of Tezech’s organisation that they should work for a new boss. He untied me, which was just as well as killing Tezech had left me sick and sore with the effort. I’m not sure how many times I could do a thing like that – working a Charm backwards must be so fundamentally against our nature that its physical consequences are unknowable. Even thinking about it makes my head hurt.”

“I suggest we sleep on it,” said Petro. “We can make our plans in the morning.”

But by morning they had a different problem altogether.

To many, the city of Totenang was second only to Tule in importance and grandeur: its Embodied temples and colleges were only marginally less important than those of Tule, whilst in terms of architecture and culture, it could even be argued that Totenang led its larger counterpart. By its geographical position, Totenang commanded the trade along the second of the Rift’s Two Rivers. The Principal of the second largest city effectively ruled over much of the north-east of the Rift.

Red Simeni sat on the rocky promontory that jutted out a short distance to the east of the city’s harbour. From here he could look out across the Hurstwater, losing his thoughts in the sheer scale of it all. This was only one of the smaller of the series of interconnected lakes which spanned the north of the Rift valley. Through these lakes a boat could travel all the way from the mouth of the Little Hamadryad to the largest of the lakes, the Lai. The Lai was filled from the northern sea through a gap in the Rim mountains; in turn it spilled over into the Hamadryad river and the lesser lakes. Where Totenang commanded the mouth of the Little Hamadryad, Tule had grown up around the Hamadryad itself and so, in many ways, the two were sister cities.

To Red, there was no dispute: for him, Totenang had always been simply
The City
. He had been born and raised here, he had become a man here, he always returned here from his travels and his errands on behalf of Principal Pieter Lammer. He had never wanted to live anywhere else.

And yet today, he felt something he had not felt since he had been a nobody trying to force his way in: today, he felt excluded.

For today was the day of the Principal’s wedding.

He tried to work out why he should feel this way, but as ever, he found that the workings of his own mind were opaque to him. He was not the analytical type: he felt his way through life with his heart and with his balls, not with his head.

If he used his head more he would be back at the palace right now, making himself smile and mix and – although it was not strictly his responsibility – ensuring there were no problems in the smooth running of the celebrations.

He had hardly seen Estelle since she had so blithely dismissed him after he had delivered her to the barge at Seedrickston. The flirting had been fun, but it had never been more than a game. He knew himself well enough to be sure she only had him by the balls, not the heart. Love was a feeling he had shut out a long time ago.

So why was he sitting here alone?

He could hear the city celebrating all around him. Every so often the barges in the harbour blew their hooters, and it seemed that every other street had its own party. The people of Totenang had never needed much reason to celebrate.

Red had been a member of the Principal’s household for most of his adult life. From where he sat he could look down over the haphazard roofs of the district known as the Hangings, spreading back from the docks. He had grown up there, adopted by a family headed by a heavy-fisted docker and a woman who gutted fish at the market for ten hours of every day. Even now the smell of fish innards made him feel vaguely nostalgic. With his aptitude for learning and his aversion to their rough ways, Red could see now how poorly he had fitted into his adopted family, but at the time he had been unaware of any difficulties. Not until his fourteenth birthday when the charity money from the nearby Embodied College had run out. Then, without hesitation, his step-parents had thrown him out of their home.

That had been the first of many lessons Red was to learn about the superficiality of human relationships.

He was hopelessly equipped to cope with life on the streets, and before he was fifteen he had been buggered by a hundred and eighty-five men, and had given various other forms of relief to over two hundred more. He was severely beaten on four occasions, and cheated out of his money on sixty-three. He remembered it all. Every detail.

One time, he had been with a merchant who had just come in from Tule. While Red had his head buried in the man’s crotch, the trader started to moan and mumble in a tongue Red recalled from his childhood: something his adoptive father had picked up at work. When he had finished, Red held the man close and spoke to him in the same language and the man looked surprised, then burst into tears. He had been speaking Escarlan, from the remote fishing community in the Rim where he had grown up.

From that day on, and with the merchant’s encouragement, Red started to cultivate his facility for the Tongue in a more intellectual manner. His mentor found him work in a docking office, then a training placement at one of the city’s Embodied Colleges. Within months of abandoning his life of prostitution and beatings, Red was working as an assistant translator in the Principal’s administrative office. This rich new world was a revelation to him and he immediately started to cultivate friendships and favours. He vowed never to sink so low again.

He had been a confidant of Pieter’s for nearly a year now and his future was mapped out ahead of him. He knew a senatorship was out of the question – although his adoptive parents assured him of his True blood, his lineage was not clear enough for him to reach such heights – but if Estelle succeeded where her predecessors had failed and bore Pieter children, Red was confident he could become a mentor-guardian figure to them. When one of them succeeded Pieter, Red would be senior adviser to one of the most powerful leaders in the Rift.

He stood and stretched. Put that way, the future was all sealed and confirmed, but he knew that to retain his current status he would have to work at least as hard as he already had to achieve it in the first place.

He descended the slope into one of Totenang’s main thoroughfares, and immediately was surrounded by the vibrant throb of the city-wide party. A band was playing on oil-drums and guitars, and people in all kinds of fantastical costumes gyrated in the street, while others hung from windows or pressed tightly along the pavements.

Red seized a middle-aged woman from the crowd and spun her out into the street. She squawked, then laughed and grabbed him around his narrow waist and engulfed him in her ample, and mostly exposed, body. Red realised too late that the woman was smeared with some kind of jelly or slime that smelt sweetly of herbs.

His tailored jacket and trousers were covered in the stuff. He tipped the woman back until she hung in his arms and then kissed her deeply. She tasted of the same herbs and he realised she was high, and – simply from the kiss – he was getting high too.

He straightened and spun away from her, and was immediately taken up in the mad frenzy of the crowd.

~

The palace gardens were flooded with light from hundreds of gas-lamps and flaring torches suspended from every available tree and wall. The central fountain had been infused with Charmed, luminescent algae so that it glowed like lava. There should have been three thousand and twenty-four people here tonight, including the many hundreds of servants and guards.

Some time just before morning, the three thousand and twenty-fifth threaded his way through the chaos, heading determinedly for the Principal and his new wife.