153 - The pact is off

I was not punished further, but my constraints were tightened. Now I had to wear hobbles all the time except when I was in my room, training or fighting—even in the bath—and when I was training I had to wear a collar with a long slender chain attached to the belt of one of my Mahid. (That meant he came with me when Koree had us run up and down the stairs of the stands, and of course I’d strive to outrun and outstay him, berating him for a sluggard and a weakling who was making my training too easy. They learned to send good runners.)

They did this once when I was in the Ring, fighting against Spiranedas the Pirate for my thirty-first again, the Mahid holding the chain in his hands and following me doing his best not to hinder my motion. But he had to come into the Ring with me, step dangerously close to the lion-trench and so forth—it occurred to me that if he fell in without letting go he could drag me in with him—and Koree told the Director it was slowing me down too much. Many of my fans complained as well, saying they were not getting their full chains’ worth, so they settled for deploying eight Mahid in total while I fought, my usual two in my gate and two more in each of the other three egresses. As well they’d post guards on all the doors leading under the stands.

Skorsas was best at helping me bear it. “I’ve never seen a fighter complimented so much, and so sincerely, in my life,” he’d say.

I beat Spira, and, as if to punish me for almost escaping again, the crowd made me kill him. Iliakaj won his forty-ninth (in this latest string), which had also been postponed due to the fire, and by the astonishing coincidences that happen all the time in the vicinity of Fate’s Helmet, he and I were matched for his fiftieth.

We made no pretense, after our names were read, but embraced. “Let us go somewhere private,” he whispered in my ear, though I had no idea what he’d want to tell me. There was my room and nowhere else, so we went there.

“Sievenka, if you throw it, I’ll kill you,” he said.

I’d got in the habit of wrapping linen strips around my ankles to keep the shackles from chafing them, and I was just unwrapping them now. I didn’t look up at first, trying to decide what to say. “You think you’re hiding it,” he said. “I’ve been reading fighters, by their faces and the way they move, for a long time.”

I drew myself up and let out a sharp breath. It would just seem silly if I denied it. “What is this? Pride? You don’t think you’ve earned your freedom even if one single fighter decides to make it a touch easier for you? After three hundred-odd fights?”

“I won’t take another man’s chances away from him, even for that,” he said.

“Ilia, you’re joking, right? Don’t you keep your eye on events?” (That was an insult, really; he did, unfailingly.) “You really think my chances of getting out of here have anything to do with fifty fights?”

“You might call it pride. Where I come from, the word for it is ‘honour’.”

“So to not take away my chances, you’d kill me; thanks so much. What if you beat me and I haven’t thrown it? Will you kill me then? Is our pact off? How will you tell?”

“Don’t pretend I’m a fool, Sievenka. I’ve watched every twitch of your finger in all of thirty-one fights that I was in the box to see, as well as sparring you. I’ll be able to tell on the first exchange.” He fixed my eyes with his, and then grinned darkly. “If you are worried about that, you’ll just have to beat me, won’t you?”

Feeling the choice taken away from me made me see just how firmly I’d chosen it and how wedded my heart was to it. I felt sick. I turned away, leaning on my hands to either side of the barred window. Get up… take a breath… start again… How much of that did he owe the cursed world?

“Iliakaj, don’t you see?” I said, whirling around to face him again. “Assuming we honour our pact—it doesn’t matter that I win. I am ransom-bait for my people, no matter what. But it does matter that you do. Think of her whom you love, and want to marry properly; think of your kids. Think of your age; one of these times, stiffness is going to catch you at exactly the wrong instant, and maybe the crowd or the Imperator or the Director will decide to be an asshole for once; it would be like them. That could be in the next fifty, and then I do have your blood on my hands. And for what, when none of my chains matter?”

“Ah, lad.” His voice turned gentle, much to my surprise; I’d thought he might get angry. “That’s how you are, how you think… in truth, that’s how I knew, more than any sign.” He patted the side of my arm. “One reason why I would never so lower you, as let you throw a fight. It’s this, too: I have been here so long and fought so many fights, it would be wrong to end it in such a way. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand. You’re out of your fikken dust-speck of a sliver of an excuse for a mind, but I understand.” I took a deep breath, and said, “I will not throw it. I will give it my all.”

“I’ll whip your wool-haired butt and fling you back to nothing, anyway, so-called Living Greatest. Then I will be that.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that, granddad. We’ll see who stays Living Greatest and who gets flung back to nothing.”

“Yes, we will see, you stripling Godless wool-hair.”

“Indeed we will, straight-hair, sheep-licking Enk.”

We went for a while, trading the slights of our fathers’ wars, until I was clearly besting him and he spat, “God of my ancients laugh at me, for getting into an insult-match with a politician.” Laughing, we flung our arms around each other, and messed each other’s hair like warriors on the same side after a victory.

†

There was as much fuss for this fight, of course, as there had been for Riji Kli-fas. “My precisely-accounting God, we’re rich,” said Skorsas. “If only we could buy you a lefaetas.”

The going odds the day before were five to four for me. Even that seemed wrong, an insult, like foul words thrown at a statesman. There was harmony between us, and our pact, which I hoped would make the fight easy to get through and the result easy to bear, whatever it was; but wrongness grew blacker in me as the time drew nearer.

It’s the wrongness of the whole Mezem, I thought. Imprisoned so long, he stands in my mind for the imprisonment of all of us, and I feel that if I have a hand in keeping him imprisoned, I’ve taken the side of the Mezem. That didn’t seem to explain all of it though, so I looked deeper into my heart. Yes, it’s worse: he’s a friend. Friend enough to have helped me keep my head in this place. I had never been in a duel with a friend, or even former friend. We would not kill but we would shed blood, and his life might ride on it.

I could not sleep the night before, for the pain of it, and had to don hobbles and Mahid to go to Iska’s desk. “No extract of nothingness this time,” I gritted, wondering whether the Mahid would whisper to the oddsmakers in the morning.

Iska seemed to know what was troubling me, and that it was beyond him to talk me out of it, or come up with some measure I might take myself, for he didn’t ask, but just poured the stuff for me. It put me into a flat dreamless sleep like a night without moon or stars.

In the morning, Iliakaj came into my room, having been waiting until my door was unbolted from both sides for Skorsas to fetch water. He closed the door in the Mahids’ faces, grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me up against the wall. I was too startled to counter.

“The pact is off,” he said, his nose a bare fingerwidth from mine, and his blue-grey eyes gone icy. “You hear me? I changed my mind. The pact is off. I might wound you out, I might kill you. In honour, I must tell you.”

“You’re doing this to make it easier for me,” I said. The harmony was still between us; did he think it could break so easily?

I expected him to deny it outright, angrily or sneeringly, but either way, loudly, the immediate urge of one whose true intent is the opposite. He didn’t. “You can tell yourself that all you like, lad,” he said coolly. “But you won’t know for sure, when we’re in the Ring, will you?”

“I think you’re full of shit,” I said. For one thing, he was neither telling nor showing me a reason for such a change of heart, even an unlikely one.

“Because this isn’t like me… fik you, I know that.” He took a deep breath, and I heard a quiver in it. “We’ve never hid much from each other, so it’s not as if you can’t probably smell it anyway. Fik you and your ancestors back to the slime… you’re one of three fighters who have ever scared me.” I did smell it, I realized, and felt it in the tension that made his fingers like claws. “You got under my skin, you little shit, talking of my age and stiffness if I had to fight another fifty; you should have kept your mouth shut. If I get a chance that’s a kill, I know my hand will take it.”

I stared at him stunned. “Well,” I said finally. “My offer’s still open.”

His hand was faster than Riji’s foot, backhanding me across the face; I barely had time to flinch my eyes shut. “Inferiors!” a cold voice snapped. The Mahid had orders to make sure Mezem laws weren’t broken, as well as the Imperator’s, it seemed. Iliakaj spun on his heel and strode out, slamming the door behind him.

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