149 - One-third, no, half, successful

Whatever the Haian tricks were that Iska knew, they and my talking about it worked well enough that I was able to fight about an eight-day later. I could not talk about it on the first day without falling into choking sobs, or the second day without screaming, but by the seventh I could recount it calmly. The sense of having been driven mad, at least by that, was gone.

Next time Kurkas invited me for dinner—I’d heard that in the Marble Palace, the shield hand often didn’t know what the sword hand was doing—I wrote back, “As I am confined to the Mezem, I send my regrets.” He sent two Mahid for me, so I went up, in chains, with four.

That, I think, was the time I was shown into the Greater Baths. There is a square marble pool the size of a pond, all its trim brass and gold wrought into arabesques. I saw that what I’d heard about how he entered it was indeed true; six burly servants hefted him in their arms and carried him into the water by the stairs a hairs-width at a time, while every moment he threatened them with ten day’s dying if they slipped.

I was surprised he’d show me this, and watch me with nothing more than amusement when I stripped and flung myself in, did water-handstands and so forth. He didn’t begrudge himself the terror of water, but instead seemed to fondly admire it in himself, as if it were a refined, Imperial sort of trait.

My philosophy students I had to bid goodbye. They’d be seen entering the Mezem. Skorsas had to go clothes-shopping for me by himself, but my measurements were etched into the inside of his skull.

At least it got Kidella off me. She was a huge baggy, satiny woman, famous around the Mezem for her boast that she’d bedded every fighter over ten chains. I’d refused her, making her paste herself to me like spit to a wall at every chance, and threaten to spread the rumour that I was impotent, since that was the only possible way I could resist her charms. Her word was good, as gossips began saying it, and sympathetic fans began offering me rostrums they said would cure it.

“Only one way you can disprove it,” Kidella said to me, triumphantly, after one fight.

“You mistake me for one who cares a fly’s fart whether Arkans think I’m incapable,” I answered. After her tenth fight, Niku offered herself to Kidella, making her flee aghast, and change her claim hastily to every man. But the woman had never given up on me, so there was some blessing in the bars.

For days, my eyes flicked in terror to the colonnade far too often in training, dreading to see Niku or Mana being led in; the longer they did not come, the more heartened I was, for the better it made their chances.

The Pages could not write that they’d escaped, of course; the tale was that they’d been murdered. For a time, I was a suspect, and writers kept asking me where I’d hidden the corpses, as if such a thing wouldn’t be found out by truth-drug.

Then the tale was, he, not me, had been her mysterious paramour—not for lack of trying, I thought—and it had been a love-suicide agreement. I told everyone who would listen that they’d escaped; between me and the lefaetas guards, despite their orders to keep their mouths shut, we got the rumour all over the city in a day.

A day after my twenty-ninth fight, Skorsas came into the room and said gently, “You don’t want to hear this, Jewel of the World… I’m sorry… Mannas is back.” I made no pretense, knowing he’d be truth-drugged, but went straight into Iska’s clinic.

He’d been whipped so badly it festered; he was half-delirious with fever and only barely knew me or felt my hand, so we couldn’t speak. I just sat with him while Iska cleansed and anointed his back, and same in the cell until sleep took him. Next day, the medicines and a good night’s sleep had cleared his head, but Mahid came, slapped him in chains and took him off to the Marble Palace in a chair earlier in the morning than I thought I should go to speak to him.

He was back in the cell before noon, with the look on his face of one who’s been scraped. I sat with him again, and we told each other what the other couldn’t know.

“You’ll have gathered, Niku didn’t manage to kill all four of the guards at the top,” he said. “One got away, so we were on the clock, as we planned. She got in the master’s house and pulled the lever, and the thing lowered. But you weren’t there. And then you weren’t there some more. Then the fikken chime went off.”

His eyes filled with tears. “All-Spirit… it makes me sick even to remember it, looking back into the cursed blackness of this city, wondering, ‘Where is he?’ But we’d sworn… we’d kevyalin sworn, you’d made us. So I got on and signalled, and she lifted me. She was in tears too, when I got to the top. She’d known you must not be with me, but wanted to hope, somehow, that you were.

“We had an argument, but it was really each of us arguing with ourself. ‘I’ll go back and carve his way out or die trying,’ she’d say, and I’d talk sense into her; then the feeling would seize me and we’d say the same things, except the other way around. At one point she put both hands on her belly lovingly, as women only do in that one time. ‘All-Spirit,’ I said, ‘you’re carrying his child?’ Congratulations, heart’s brother. I hope to say it again in a better place, some day.

“We waited, looking for your signal. But more guards came, a good fifty, quite the compliment to her. They’d start beating the bushes, we knew. It was time to go. We embraced and went our different ways.

“I was heading to Fispur. I don’t know, maybe if I’d tried harder… I think somewhere in me I felt it was wrong, that I should leave you behind, and feared what people would say when I told them I’d left you… call me a fool, Cheng; I know I am. Or maybe it was just chance, I don’t know. A cowherd’s dog found me in some woods. The cowherd reported me to the local watch, who had horses, and bloodhounds.”

He didn’t say what he had suffered on the way back. Why? It wasn’t as if I didn’t already know.

Yet even now, he flashed his invincible grin, and said, “It was one-third successful: or maybe I should say half, since two out of four got out. Chin up, Cheng. We’ll find another way.”

In his sanguine way, he forgot to ask me how they’d punished me, and I didn’t tell him. When the Mahid came, he turned a gaze to me that asked. “I’ve healed from it,” I said, as they seized his arms.

When they dragged his bleeding and soul-shredded form back, I tried to be to him as Persahis had been to me, as if that were possible, Perhaps he was stronger than me; he came back faster. But then, I’d already noticed the effects of the grium. He was put under the same constraints as me, so there were four Mahid in the corridor when both of us were in our newly-barred and bolted rooms, as if the Mezem weren’t already a cheerless-enough place.

The Pages wrote that he’d been miraculously found in a basement in the city after having been kidnapped by Srian-backed rebels.

No surprise to me, Niku stayed free. No bloodhounds would track her. But now I could see no way to write to her, without risking Skorsas, unless Minis came back for some reason. The last I’d heard from him was the letter about his little brother.

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