151 - Accedence

My thirty-first fight was against a Nellan, Spiranedas called the Pirate (his boast was that he’d been one, which, for all I knew, might be true). On the same day, Iliakaj would fight his forty-ninth, and we both knew, without speaking of it, that two fight-days after that he’d fight me for his first fiftieth in a row.

I was considering throwing it, in truth, to set him free. It would drop me back down to none again, but the timing of my leaving Arko, I was sure, wasn’t going to be determined by my fiftieth fight anyway.

Losing purposely is punishable by torture, of course, as if it weren’t dangerous enough—the crowd will show the red on the least suspicion—of course, so was the pact Iliakaj and I had made. The trick was to throw it without letting it show even the slightest trace, with so many expert eyes watching, that I was throwing it.

My war-training had never taught me this, but it seemed to me it should be possible, at least with the crowd; it was just a matter of letting myself be a little sloppy or slow, as if in pure error. The person I was least likely to fool was Iliakaj himself. I hoped he’d forgive me.

At any rate, it was the Pirate first, and in the first round we were fighting clean blade. We’d just traded a few strokes when the crowd’s yelling changed, and we both saw from the corners of our eyes that we no longer held its gaze. We both stepped back as one. What the fans were yelling was, “Fire!” Seeping up through the highest seats on the east side was the faintest fog of smoke.

All-Spirit, a thousand people are going to be trampled to death… Guards were yelling, “Stay calm! Don’t run! Don’t push, or I take your head off!” but they could barely make themselves heard, and all the stairways were suddenly jammed solid with screaming Arkans. Spira ran back to his gate, sword raised ready to hack his way through, if he had to. I decided the Director’s stairs were a better way as they would get me to the quarters and from there the colonnade, where fans wouldn’t think to go. Why people were panicking so much when there was so little smoke and the fire authorities of Arko are so fast, I wasn’t sure, but they were, and that made them a worse danger than the fire itself.

So I signed to Skorsas, who was beckoning me hard, that I was going by the Director’s stairs, and he wisely scrambled over the Gate and into the Ring to join me. We started to run across the Ring, but a Mezem guard held up his hand. At least he looked like a Mezem guard; he spoke perfect Yeoli, though, rattling off the tongue-twister you have to be born Yeoli to say effortlessly, over the din of the crowd. “Semanakraseye,” he added, “we’re Ikal and we’re springing you. Come with me.”

I moved to leap after him—or at least intended to, in my mind. My mind and body usually move as one, else my body is faster; but now it froze, as rooted to the golden sand as a tree, and suddenly breaking out in sweat all over. I couldn’t move, not even to speak; my mouth was suddenly so dry, down to the throat, it hurt; Chirel was dead in my hand.

It’s from how the tries before ended. My mind could turn away from remembering the floggings, the smotherings, the sight of a bit if Eliras’s shredded entrails spattered on the cheek of his young daughter, but it was all in every cell of my body. I tried to talk sense to my muscles, but they stayed rock. Skorsas grabbed my arm, saying, “What the fik did he say to you, and in what tongue?”

The Ikal man looked back, his eyes running down me, fast, measuring. He didn’t seem surprised. He made a hand-sign to another Mezem guard behind me, who had a dart-tube in his hand, two fingers raised. Second plan. I heard the familiar hiss and felt the sting in my back. I guess second plan is they carry me. “Skorsas, go,” I said. “They’ve got me, go!” Of course he didn’t. It seemed polite to save them the trouble of sheathing Chirel, so I did that and waited for the sky and the screaming to fade away.

It did, but not to darkness, only distance, as if I were seeing it all from the end of a long watery tunnel, the yells muffled as if through wool. Vaguely I felt their hands seize my wrists, wrench Skorsas’s hands away and draw me along running. “It’s not stun-drug but Accedence we darted you with, semanakraseye,” he yelled in my ear; I heard each word like a bubble through syrup. “Set your mind at rest; by the time you are able to choose again, you’ll be out of Arko.”

Arkans can do anything with their pharmaceutical concoctions; mostly they seem to concern themselves with depriving you of your will, in various shades. I’d read about this one somewhere, how it renders a person entirely docile while leaving him conscious, so he’ll move as commanded or led; if he isn’t, he’ll just stand or sit as he was last left until it wears off. Now I learned how it felt, witnessing my life like the story of another I was following strangely closely, rather than living it.

The memory is vague and vivid, both at once, oddly. “We knew fear might well freeze you, semanakraseye,” the first Ikal man bellowed gently into my ear as they hauled me, arms linked in mine, along a path through the press of shuffling fans that they created by hard pokes in butts and legs with their daggers. My body felt like it was floating; I couldn’t even master my own tongue to say, Just call me Chevenga. “It would happen with anyone who went through what you have.”

I wondered with a kind of vague absence where my two Mahid were; last I’d seen them was at my gate before the start of the fight. Someone armed waited behind one of the service doors that leads underneath the stands; as we came close, he slipped it open and my two pulled me through, into the last place the fans would flee. We were on the opposite side to the fire, from what I’d seen outside, though; I couldn’t even smell smoke. What a coincidence, that it was at the same time, I thought, until it occurred to me, swimmingly-slow, that they had set the fire.

They ran me a little deeper in, where a fourth Ikal man waited, stripped me of my black, gold and scarlet and cajoled me into a suit of clothes such as a fessas or solas might wear to a fight, though they didn’t take off my wristlets, but rather hid them under the sleeves of the shirt. “He’s Acceded,” the first two kept saying to others as they joined us. I hoped I wasn’t drooling. The two false guards I later remember in peacetime clothes, albeit with many hidden blades, so they must have changed too.

They ran me to a postern that goes out onto the street. Now I could smell smoke. They put a pair of dark spectacles on me, but no wig; shouldn’t I be blond? But I realized as we ran out into a milling crowd on the street, in which a good one of every ten or fifteen heads wore black curly hair, and others had shoulder-slung swords, that I wouldn’t look at all out of place. Their wish to look like me made me look like them. My devoted fans, I thought. You say I owe you everything, and I say I owe you nothing, but I fully grant that I owe you this.

The five of us running flat-out through the streets, even, wasn’t implausible; it helped that they kept yelling in Arkan to passersby as we ran past, “Fire in the Mezem! Fire in the Mezem! The whole thing’s going to go up—what if it spreads to the city!? Aiiigggh!” That was good for distracting people away from taking a good look at us.

It was good to run under the influence of this stuff; I felt as if I were flying, and never seemed to get tired. I thought of hiring a fast chair, but of course they’d all be gone to the Aitzas who’d been quickest out; too bad I wasn’t wearing my faib-skates, except I’d have got ahead of the Ikal people.

We took back-streets, alleys and laneways, through the solas quarter with the miniature replica of each house on a square post in front of it, and the Aitzas quarter with its ivy-covered and huge-windowed manses, as Niku and I had so many times; then, as if seeking refuge, we dashed into the woods.

The forest paths end where the slope toward the cliff becomes steep enough to be a climb. Standing there, just low enough that the tops of the trees would hide her from the City, was an Ikal woman—with curly brown hair, she made no pretense of being Arkan—holding a leathern seat-harness that was fastened to the end of a long thick rope that ran as far up the cliff as I could see.

“Vaena, we’ve got him, signal prepare to winch!” barked one of the two who had firm grips on my wrists; it came clear he was the commander. She gave the rope where it hung three yanks, and felt three yanks in reply from above. “We had to Accede him, though.”

In broad daylight, they were going to do this. They had no choice, I would see later, when my head was clearer; with their few numbers—eighteen left from their last attempt—and my new constraints, there was no other time or way they could get me out of the Mezem. Hiding in the city or the woods until night-time would be unwise; the cliffs, above and below, would be crawling with guards, soldiers, Sereniteers or what-have-you until I was found.

“In here, legs through here, semanakraseye, fast, fast, fast,” they all said, hurrying me with their hands. I felt a pair of fingers feel whether Chirel was clipped, find it wasn’t, and clip it. “Hang on, hard, here.” They grabbed my hands, wrapped them around the rope. Then the commander, his hand on it above mine, poised to signal, paused.

“I don’t know… I don’t know if I trust him to stay hanging on.” Of course you can kyashin trust me, you think I’m mad? “We’ve had to talk him through everything… up there, he’ll be by himself…” Maybe the drug makes me look like a moron; that doesn’t mean I am one. “I mean, if he doesn’t manage to walk up the first steep bit while he’s being pulled, he’ll end up with a few scrapes and bruises, but if he’s way up there and he lets go…” I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine, signal, curse it! “Well, look, Cha, let’s be safe then—someone got some cord?”

They wrapped my hands around the rope again, and lashed my wrists together to it as well, making sure the loops around the rope were tight enough that my hands could not even slip down. “It’s not as if he can fight anyway,” the commander pointed out. Amazing though it seems, I had already thought of that myself. “Semanakraseye, we’re sorry… they’ll cut you loose the moment you’re up.”

--