152 - The wall through which there is no passage

Now speed was everything. While I dangled, the whole city could see me, and someone moving up the wall of Arko by any way other than a lefaetas is committing a crime, so it would be reported many times over. Whoever was winching me knew it, for I was yanked up so fast it didn’t seem much slower than a lefaetas. “Your feet, semanakraseye, get your feet on the wall and rappel up!” the Arkan Yeolis of Ikal all yelled to me, until I did it.

I was above the trees in a moment; to my shield-side, the gilded eagle on the wall above the Marble Palace, as big as a good-sized farmfast’s fields, stretched one enormous wing toward me. The fragrance of forest earth changed to the distant human smells of the city. The cliff became sheer, so I needed only to tap now and then with my toes, and polished, so I could see my reflection, a hands-bound wiry silhouette against the vast sun-white expanse of the city.

Perhaps undrugged I might have felt what I had while rising on the lefaetas Inodem, the sense of returning to myself while Arko fell away from me; or perhaps what I’d suffered since might have prevented me, filling me with dread that my rising would halt any moment, instead. Or perhaps too much of Arko had seeped into me by now to let it fade away as I rose, as before. To part of me, now, the world outside Arko was the dream, too beautiful and kind to be real.

If I’d had my whole mind, I would have known that this attempt was more tenuous than any of other others, because of this very part of it, and that my chances were, in truth, slim.

As it was, Accedence separated me from too much of myself to let me feel much of anything other than the wind in my hair and the prickly chafing of the rope around my wrists. I rose in a dream, my heart in drug-induced Celestialis, as Arkans say, the inability to be nervous leaving me filled with bliss.

That was a mercy when the rising slowed and then stopped entirely; of course if I’d got the urge to heave myself out of the seat harness and fall to my death in despair, I wouldn’t have been able to except perhaps by chewing.

I hung for a time. Something rushed by me unearthly fast, then two more, leaving a vertical trail of words in the air; my mind could make no sense of it. After a half-bead or so, not long enough for the drug to wear off, I began descending. I walked my vertical path again, backwards, lower than the great gold wing again, to and then below the tops of the trees. There were at least a hundred Sereniteers, Mahid and wall-guards waiting in the forest.

“What did I tell you?” one of those who were allowed to speak said; his voice sounded familiar, from atop the lift Inodem. “Right, like any of us were going to bet against you, you moron!” another shot back. “Come on… who else but Karas Raikas was it going to be?”

“Look at that… he’s fikken tied up! Raikas, how were you going to carve your way through us like that?” The words floated by my mind like dandelion seeds in a breeze, bringing no urge to answer. “Silence, inferiors!” an Aitzas-accented, Mahid-dead voice snapped. A good ten dart-tubes trained on me. “Not a move, Shefen-kas, if you want to spare yourself the headache.”

That was easy to obey. When I look back, it is a study in helplessness: hands bound, drugged to imbecility, my life hanging by a thread whose other end was in the hands of an enemy, a hundred full-geared Arkans surrounding me below, and the stun-drug aimed for me ten times over. I couldn’t even say, “I surrender.” If I had truly felt it, it would have been the most helpless I ever felt in my life, but one.

They chained me; the Mahid knew the look of Accedence right away, but didn’t assume I could not fake it. They led me into the Mahid section of the Marble Palace and shackled me to a table.

I knew when I made the desperate wish, Never let it wear off, that it was beginning to. Now and then a Mahid would come in, take his glove off, hold his hand close to my mouth and say, “Lick my thumb, Shefen-kas.” When I stopped doing it, and instead gave him a glare, he went out purposefully. I still felt less than I should, though, my heart armouring itself with numbness.

I expected an old Mahid, perhaps the same one, to come in with a servant bearing the sacred truth-drug box. Instead it was the prim, flat-faced Sereniteer I’d first met in the Ministry after Erilas’s attempt. He had a box, which he laid on the side-table as he sat beside me.

“Well, it’s been a while, Raikas,” he said affably, as he unlatched and opened the box with precise gloved fingers. “You against Kli-fas, that was brilliant… it’s just as I foretold, you were meant for greater things. But now we know who you are, I truly understand why you wish to escape.” That’s why he’s speaking to me equal-to-equal, when before he was angry at me for tongue-slighting him. “And you were telling me the truth, when you said you weren’t one of Fourth Shefen-kas’s guard; you were Fourth Shefen-kas. I got in trouble for that; now it seems I’ll get some of my own back, same time as I get truth out of you.” The box was full of instruments, like a surgeon’s; he lifted what looked like pliers, unbuckled my belt and took my Arkan trousers to the knees with several rough pulls.

“Why don’t you just truth-drug me?” I asked, as he closed the thing’s pincers around my testicles.

“Because, as the last time proved, truth-drug doesn’t seem to work quite right on you. At least not lately... maybe it’s the grium.”

Yes it does! All three doses worked perfectly well! She fikken flew! Now I would suffer the cost of the benefit then. “I’ll stop tightening when you admit it hurts.”

“Of course it hurts!”

“Feh… that was too easy. First drop of sweat on your brow, then.”

The world became pain. Soon I was trying to will sweat through the pores of my brow. “I’ll tell the truth!” I said. “I have no reason not to. I was in the Ring when people began crying ‘Fire,’ then there were two Ikal men dressed as—” Relief from the pain cut me off. He held the pincers close to my eyes.

“Look, Raikas... Shefen-kas. This is how far I had them closed just now. They can close all the way to here… see that?” There was perhaps a half-fingerwidth of space between the thing’s teeth. He applied it again. “Yes, you’re going to tell the truth. The story is that torture does not produce truth, that the subject babbles only what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear, but that’s only when the interrogator doesn’t know what he’s doing. There is no particular story I want to hear. Understand that. Truth is always easier to tell than lies, because it is there in the memory; what I’m going to do is make your mind so riven with pain that you can’t tell up from down, and you’ll cease being able to tell anything but the truth in tiny shreds, which I will then put together.”

“But—” I gasped as he clamped, then steeled myself to talk through it. “You can do that with a drug! I have no wish to tell anything but the truth—I didn’t plan it, I didn’t even choose it, I froze up when they told me, why do you think I was on Accedaaaaaaaiiiiiggghh!”

He tightened until my body was thrashing against the bonds without my willing it, breaths tearing in and out of my lungs. Each worse increment of pain seems like the end, the ultimate, the wall through which there is no passage, until you are taken to the next. When the world was beginning to go black and white by turns, he said, “All right, start now, Shefen-kas. Give me the whole account.”

It was as he’d said. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying, much of the time; now and then he’d give me a draught of water, though he never loosened the pincers to do so, and that would bring me a little bit back to myself, but then he’d take me away again. I’d never have been able to sustain a false version. When it was done I lay limp in the shackles, soaked with sweat and tears, thinking, I have two children, and another coming, and that is all I will ever have.

He scrawled a few last notes and was gone. I lay alone trying to gather myself, to stop the trembling and the twitches by taking long deep breaths. Iska… Skorsas… whack-weed cream… poppy-juice… a hot bath… these things awaited, I told myself. About a bead passed, and I had myself calm if not without pain, when the old Mahid came in with the sacred truth-drug box. Of course they had to double-check.

When it had worn off, they took me back down to the Mezem in a carrying chair, and I was given all I had yearned for in the tenderest way.

The fire had been put out fast, as I’d expected, leaving only some charring on the pillars under the stands, but the boys were still laying out trampled corpses, fifty-seven in all. No one I knew, Skorsas told me quickly.

They’d questioned him, and he’d confirmed I’d been darted. Then Iska, the moment he learned I’d almost escaped but was in Mahid hands again, wrote a letter, and talked the Director into signing it, begging them not to torture me again as I had come to the point where it would impair my fighting ability. I knew that was his true judgment, else he’d never have written it, in case he got truth-drugged himself. Between all these things, like a miracle, I was not punished further.

What precisely transpired on the Rim I will never know, except what the Pages had. The Yeolis were using a winch turned by four people, no less, but Arkans in too great a number got there before I was more than about three-quarters of the way up. I doubted I should believe the Arkan casualty count, as it seemed heroically low, unlikely for regulars against Ikal; I heard on the grapevine later that it was much more.

But the Yeoli numbers were correct, as they plausibly added up to eighteen. The four who had got me from the Ring to the rope were still at large; seven had been killed by guards at the top and one was expected to die of his wounds. Two hanging back to report was routine; another one would have lit the fire; they were all still at large, too, it seemed. Lastly came the words that made what I’d seen while I’d been hanging fall together into sense: “On the approach of a Mahid unit, and knowing their bid was futile, three of the Yeolis leapt to their deaths from the Rim.”

Accedence dulls and yet crystallizes at once, and what is crystallized can come hard back into the memory. The words I’d heard from the man falling past me were suddenly sword-edge clear. “Semanakraseye, I’m sorry…”

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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.”

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150 - A heart-rending little subplot

Yeolis began being brought to the Mezem thick and fast around then. I thought at first some slaver, or group of them, had set up a connection; horror kept me from realizing fast that it was in truth because we had become fashionable, mostly by my doing.

I knew many of them, though none were close friends or kin. If any resented my being there, or blamed me for their own being there, they never said so.

The first two to get matched against each other came to me. We were five then. I called Assembly under the stands.

How to meet, with my two Mahid there, and Mana’s? I decided to just bring them with me; it wasn’t as if they understood Yeoli anyway. Having no orders to forbid us to go under the stands, since that was still on the Mezem premises, they just came with and stood there like four black stelae.

No Yeoli wanted to speak first; all sat silent, their eyes wide in the torchlight, begging for answers, all fixed on me. The semanakraseye speaks last; but some remembered me as a milakraseye in the Lakan war, and the truth of the Mezem had dashed them all down to children who look for a parent, and I was the highest-chainer. Who has killed most and lived longest is king, in the Mezem.

I said, “It’s not for me to decree what we do. But one thing I think: whatever we do, whether it’s fight or toss a die for who kills himself or whatever, both should agree on it. If they fail to agree, they fight.” They voted chalk to that; with one choice made, speaking came easier to them, as it will.

The proposal was also carried that the winner should see the loser decently buried, and submit to a branding on the face. I thought that severe and said so, as did Mana; but the new three were fresher from home, stricter in ethics, more set to keep themselves Yeoli. It made me see what I had lost.

The first pair were strangers to each other, and could not agree, so they ended up fighting. You could see in a moment they were only sparring, though; the crowd started flapping its lips, calling them cowards, throwing things. Finally after five rounds, with the crowd calling “Whip-rounds! Whip-rounds!” the Judge concurred, and I got to see what that meant.

The rounds are cut to half the time, and on the first break both fighters are struck five lashes with the Arkan whip, the break after that, seven, and so on. Sooner or later, mad with pain, they try in earnest to get each other just to escape the whip.

Finally one Yeoli took the other down with a wound that was not mortal, and, sadly, came back to his senses the moment after, letting out a scream of anguish, flinging down his weapons and dropping to his knees beside his opponent. The crowd, of course, showed the red.

I could have set fire to them all as one in their seats when, as he lifted the corpse, they broke out into laughter, and mock keening, and lip-flapping. I drove the writers off him when he went out into the corridor, though I was due in the Ring. “Lay him in the colonnade for now and wait,” I said. “And don’t turn your hand against yourself; we made our law, and you have your due yet to pay.” He saluted me like a commander, sobs racking him, while Skorsas came yelling, “Raikas, you’re on! You’re on now!”

We had not reckoned on how hard it would be, either, to bury a Yeoli in Arko. First, the Mezem doesn’t have a morgue, unless you count the lion-trench as that. I begged Iska for use of one of the cells, and he granted it to us.

Second was the Arkan fire laws; you can’t burn any wood that wasn’t cured even in an oven, let alone outdoors, and they weren’t about to let us go outside the city.

There’s the Arkan way, of burying corpses in the earth, outside the city; but the graveyards are all full, corpses already heaped six deep, unless you’ve bought one long in advance, and try to find one that will accept a heathen foreigner anyway.

In the end we had to hire a funerary house to cremate him, outside the City. They charged us our eyeteeth, of course, and then plundered and buried him in a field instead of doing what they’d sworn to, thinking an oath sworn to barbarians was not binding; we were lucky Skorsas, ever cynical, thought to send a spy. I happened to mention this to Norii, who happened to mention it in the Pages; as such businesses live by their name, that did it much harm.

The second house we went to exhumed and cremated the corpse properly and were honest thereafter, so we stayed with them. Those of our people who got kicked into the trench by non-Yeolis we bribed the trench-keepers to give us.

There was one service no Arkan would do: pull out wisdom teeth for families at home, so we had to do that ourselves. Each was placed in a tiny sack, with the name of the man, his home town and his killer; these I kept, with the pliers, in a chest on the shelf of my wardrobe, waiting for the first of us to make fifty fights and take them home. Skorsas, who could speak blithely of small girls being cut between the legs, turned green when I told him.

When the question of who would do the branding first came up, they all looked to me, and I agreed, trying to keep pain in my throat from choking me. Again the fire laws made trouble. We ended up having to bribe the Mezem kitchen staff to let us use their leftover embers. The victor and I would creep in when a scullion let us, and brighten up the coals with the bellows. Then the victor would kneel at my feet, crystal in his hand.

Some of them, I thought I might change their minds at the last, so the rest of us would have to pin or bind them. We all knew that, at home, the scar would make a man an outcast perhaps, and certainly unmarriageable, if he were honest about why it was there. But though every one of them wept on the first mark, even Mana, none flinched away. I remembered how he and I had planned to marry together; now he’d have this. I hesitated; he grabbed my hand and said, “The people wills.” I remember his tears sizzling and spitting like meat-juice on the iron, as I pressed it to his cheek.

Then what I had in some part of me pretended could never happen happened. I was matched against a Yeoli, Chinisenga Kriyo, of Selina.

He broke our law, not asking my agreement to his act. He strode out while names were still being drawn from Fate’s Helmet. I followed him, but when I came to the corridor I didn’t know which way he’d gone; he’d told his boy he’d gone out for a walk in the city, words with excuse written all over them. I got a torch, and ran under the stands, looking all across the floor with its ankle-deep dust, and up into the rafters.

Deep in, under the north end, I found him as I’d feared. Very high up; he must have been thinking to make sure the fall killed him if the belt clasping his neck broke. He was still alive, his limbs twitching, but I doubted he would be by the time the people and ropes needed to fetch him could be brought. Imagining how bitter it would be to be saved from this after choosing it, to face what he’d thought to escape, I took my time informing Iska, and by then his heart was still.

Intrigued, the Director matched me against another Yeoli, Inara Merao. He drove a dagger into his own stomach, and died on Iska’s table, despite Anhunem’s efforts.

The third one, Kyera Shae-Lemana, the Director had seized and restrained before his name was announced. No one saw him again until fight-day. Then, two guards brought him to his gate in chains. I could see even across the Ring his eyes were bloodshot and staring his chest heaving and his body pricking like a rabid dog’s. They’d fed him a drug to make him berserk; he would not know who or why or where he was fighting. As the herald readied to strike the gong and Forlanas put his hand on the lever, I looked to the fighters’ box. The Yeolis, as one, stabbed out their hands, chalk.

Kyera almost beat me. His skill was good, the drug made him both fearless and tireless, I was using a standard-issue Arkan sword that I’d bought in the market, rather than Chirel, against a Yeoli, and everything in me shrank from fighting him. Now I understood why no Yeoli balked at the brand; one could comfort oneself, as one looked for openings against another who wore a crystal, that punishment waited.

There were no rest-breaks, of course; if he beat me, he’d be brought down with stun-darts. While I circled away from his rushes, my breath coming in tearing gasps, my limbs turning to water, I heard Mana’s voice cry, “Do it, Fourth Chevenga! The people wills!” I took him down with a wound, and the crowd roared, delighted to see me have such a hard time of it.

I held up my empty hand in Iliakaj’s mercy gesture. I thought I saw six whites for every five reds, but the Director showed red. So many ways, he could make me pay for the ways I had annoyed him.

In the shower, I looked at my hands and thought, However much I scrub them clean, they will never be the same. Next I knew marble was sliding cold against my side; I’d staggered into it. The world spun, its hot sparkling rain seeming to spray from all directions; I held myself up by gripping the pipes, one freezing my sword-hand, one scalding my shield-hand, the difference hard to tell. Head sickness, I thought, not stomach, for I feel no nausea: grium.

I tried to shake it off, and felt Mana’s hand on my shoulder. “Under the stands,” he commanded. “Semana kra,” I stammered back.

I thought they’d convened to decide who was to brand me. As it was, Mana put both his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Cheng, we were talking in the box. We decided we shouldn’t do it to you.”

Memory plays tricks. I can’t recall flinging myself in the dust at all, or trying to clear a spot of floor to beat my head against; but the voices all around I remember clear as yesterday. “You were right, saying he’d take this badly.” “Let him work it off, then he’ll be ready for sense.” “Get his head out of the dust so he doesn’t choke.” “Cheng, listen! Cheng, your people are talking, shut up and kyashin listen!”

Finally Mana backhanded me, and said a fingerwidth from my face, “Semanakraseye, semana kra.” They made me get up out of the dust before they’d speak.

“When you get home, you’ve got to fight the war for us—”

“With a clean face and a clean conscience,” someone cut in.

“Shut up, shit-brains!” Mana snapped at him, knowing exactly what I’d think of that. “Whatever’s in your heart, Cheng, we know you can’t feel clean with this on you. We know. But because you are semanakraseye, you have to give your conscience up to us; remember, the semanakraseye has no honour but the people’s will. We commanded you to do it, because we need you for the war. You’re the best we’ve got. Now we command you to forgo the brand, because to our mind you can only be judged properly at home, so punishment should be held off until then. Show him the vote as it was, sibs.” Their hands all came out, chalk.

“Kyera didn’t choose,” I said.

“He would have consented,” they all started saying, “he would have, if he’d had a chance, Cheng—look what your first two did.”

“Wait,” said Mana. “He’s right; Kyera didn’t have a chance to say. We do.” He laid one hand on my shoulder formally, and took his crystal with the other.

“Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, if you and I are matched, and they use that drug, know now that I die willingly by your hand, so you may live, for the sake of Yeola-e.” He stepped back, and looked hard at the others.

Not so easy to say chalk to, your own death rather than someone else’s. They stood blinking, words catching on tongues.

Mana stood back on his heels, in his way, and his face bloomed with its wildest grin. “Shit-eaters,” he spat. “You’re only facing a roll of the die, you greenhands; he’ll most likely be out of here before you get a chance at him. Me”—he ran his hand through his chains, and said what I had never been able to bear to. “I’m looking at the certainty, unless there’s some way out. Haven’t any of you noticed, how they’re setting us up against each other for our fiftieths?” Silence fell, as if everyone’s breath had been cut off.

“Yet I’ve done this,” he said, in little more than a whisper, then left the perfect pause. “Well, all right, all right. I can’t blame you; even knowing one’s ear’s due to be pecked soon, no one wants to make an appointment. Think of it this way, then, even if you feel he went on a fool’s mission. This one”—he smacked my back—“is still the warrior and the general people would cut off their sword-arms to have back; he’s still the one who has all the friends in high places in other countries, who has the name and the nerve to make the alliances, and now the knowledge of Arko too. He’s still the one who’s capable of carrying our hopes; he’s still the only soul on All-Spirit’s sweet green Earthsphere who could pull our fat out of the fire. Even if it’s just possibly, even if you think I’m just his old friend blowing his horn, even if it’s just a slim chance—” He touched my chest, over my heart. “Would you stick a sword through that?”

Two raced each other to be first to swear; then, none wanting to be seen as the most reluctant, the rest crowded in. I took it all in silence and calm, as a semanakraseye should, though my heart was water. The tears I shed were of sheer admiration of him; it’s the best who are their best at the worst.

When they were done, Mana smacked me on the shoulder. “Cheng,” he said, his lip quirking, “now we’ve done this, don’t mess up and fail us, all right?” My heart stopped being water instantly and I said, “I won’t.” It was just what I needed, as inspired as the rest.

A heart-rending little subplot of the show we made, for Arko. That night, I killed Kyera a thousand times in my dreams.

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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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148 - The black crushing in every cell

I was already stripped; they chained me into the whipping-frame, and a Mahid read something ceremonial, probably similar to what the herald had to the crowd on Erilas’s execution; some of the words sounded familiar.

“One Fourth Shefen-kas Sharanoias, also known as Karas Raikas, is convicted of the attempt to escape from the City Itself, stealing his person and worth from the Illustrious Mezem, and Imperium in general with respect to his ransom-worth; and further, aiding and abetting in the escape of Mannas the Wolf and Niku the Wild, thus stealing their persons and worth from the Illustrious Mezem, and from Imperium with respect to their ransom-worth. Thus he owes the Imperator not only his own life, but theirs, and so he shall not only be flogged thirty-lashes, but die three times for Imperium.”

Die three times? That’s what they said with Erilas—but if they’re killing me, why the decree to bar my window? Then the first blow of the whip slashed through my thoughts, scattering them.

Though it sent shreds of me all over the Hall floor, the flogging was nothing. Of course I knew what it was to smother to unconsciousness; but when you do it by your own will as a sacred rite before the people of Yeola-e, you are above yourself, carried by the God-in-You.

Suffering it shackled, at the gloved hands of a Mahid, so your last sight is the void blue chips of his eyes studying the dying of consciousness in yours, reduces you to less than nothing, and life to less than blackness. At the point where I was falling over the edge of the abyss, my body in its death-throes, I could not keep in my mind that the decree meant they would not kill me; so I was sure each time my thoughts were my last, and gave myself up to the ways that death was best: the Niah secret is safe, my people won’t have to pay my ransom. I didn’t separate from myself as I had other times when I’d been tortured, as much as I would have liked to. When I woke up the third time, I felt I had been driven mad.

My muscles were not my own. One of the Mahid carried me over his shoulder again, with an air of having expected it, letting me know this was not an unusual result. He dumped me on the floor in front of Iska’s desk, lax as a corpse too fresh to have stiffened.

The boys carried me tenderly to the bed in the cell. I couldn’t speak any more than I could move, but Skorsas could tell him what they’d done to me because he’d pressed his ear up against the Hall door. They gave me Haian remedies and poppy-juice strong enough that I was gone before Iska even finished marigold-creaming my back. But the feeling of having been driven mad was still there in the morning when I woke.

Pain huge beyond imagining, I remembered again. Have I fulfilled that prophecy enough, I wondered, come to the end of what he foresaw? Right now, at least, I didn’t feel inclined to make any more tries at escape. There was reason to it, not just fear; the moyawa had been a better means than any other that was likely to come along.

And yet Ikal might try again; they won’t have received orders to give up. They’d have a much harder time of it now; probably they’d have to scratch months of planning and start over.

Skorsas stayed, his arms firm around me. I learned later he paid one of the spare boys some extra chains to fetch and carry. I had no argument with it; I no longer ruled my thoughts, it seemed, for I kept feeling again the Mahid’s hand on my face no matter how much I tried to drive it out of mind. Then I’d break into a sweat and my heart would pound and my hands shake so hard I couldn’t stop them except by laying them on something, and I was pale as porcelain, he told me later. Fits of tears came out of nowhere; then, dry-eyed, I’d feel the black crushing in every cell that was the moment of succumbing. The only relief was in imagining myself killing him as I’d killed Daisas, the more brutally, the better.

Iska came, sat beside me and laid a gentle hand on my head. “You need to talk about it,” he said. I hadn’t said a word to Skorsas.

“I died three times,” I said. “What is there to talk about?” He urged me, and I put him off, a few more times before he said, “You need your Haian. You can’t go to him; I’ll bring him here.”

“Iska, no…” My voice broke; I felt as if it would never again be steady. “When I go to his office, I make sure no one sees me, so as not to jeopardize him. If he comes here, the Marble Palace knows.” He ignored that.

“Let’s start with this, Chivinga,” Persahis said, his delicate Haian-accented voice strange to hear here, in a cell in the Mezem, with two Mahid outside. “You cannot rest at all, the way you are lying.” I was partly up on my elbows, and rock-tense; I didn’t notice until he pressed my shoulder a bit and I moved like a statue more than a person.

He had me lie half on my shield-side, since the whip had not curled around it so much as the other, with my sword-side knee raised so I leaned on it. Then he gave me some drops, told me to breathe long and deep and keep my mind on it, and talked me through thinking of and relaxing every part of my body, head to toe.

Just that settled me some; but then he began that touching without touching that Haians do, starting with what felt like a drawing from the back of my head that made me feel a breath of cool air across my face, and as he worked, I slowly fell deeper into peace. Skorsas was still holding my head in his hands; I heard him sigh in relief.

“Where is your strength?” Persahis asked me.

Strength? I have no strength; I’ve been stripped of it. “Answer from the centre of yourself,” he said. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten it’s there.”

I had; the reminder brought it back. “My strength is here,” I whispered.

“Good. Put your mind on it; go into it. Remember all that it is; remember all that you have been able to do, because you have it.”

It was hard; to find that in myself I had to fight something in me that had not been there before. “Better now than later,” he says. “Time lets it take a deeper hold.” He made me keep my mind on it while he worked over my head and neck and back with his hands, touching without touching. It felt as if he was linking me back to myself, somehow.

I was blooded at thirteen. I assassinated Inkrajen. I opened the gate of Kantila. I was the commander against the mamokal. I entered the Circle School at eighteen. I remembered how my collar glistened with decorations, ran over what I had done to earn each one. I should not count my Ring victories in the same tally as my victories as a warrior, and yet… I defeated Riji Kli-fas.

Remembering all this, I realized that, sword to sword, or bare-handed, or any way, I could take to bits at my leisure the Mahid who’d done it. I would likely never have a chance to, but it was surprisingly healing to know.

“You will need to talk about it, so that it doesn’t become a silence, a forbiddance, in you,” Persahis said. “But you’re not quite ready for that yet.” When I imagined myself trying, I saw what he meant. “I will be back tomorrow, and each day for another two, and we will see how you are then. There was no way not to feel as if you were driven mad by that, Chivinga; what we are doing is ensuring it lasts only for a few days and not longer.” He said the rest half to Skorsas, too: “No wine or Arkanherb, plenty of water, don’t miss any meals even if you’re not hungry, and make sure you get a good night’s sleep each night even if you have to take something.”

After he’d been gone for a time, I probed my own mind as we delicately tongue a sore tooth. The sense of madness was still there, but much less. Even though Skorsas stayed with me, I did need a sleeping drink that night, as I knew after lying awake in the dark for a half-bead.

“Bad news, lad,” Iska said to me the next morning, after breakfast. “That Haian isn’t allowed into the Mezem again. Director’s orders, but not really, if you know what I mean.”

I felt a weight fall on my heart like a stone and a chill settle over me, both at once. I was glad he’d let me eat before telling me. Two Mahid had been right outside the door; even if they hadn’t heard our words, they’d seen my state before and after. He was subverting the punishment, weakening the lesson they wanted me to take from it, never to try to escape again.

“I’ll go to his office and find out what he was planning to do,” said Skorsas. “Not the same, but better than nothing.”

“No,” Iska and I said, both at once. “It’s too dangerous, you’re tainted with me,” I said. The idea of him being in their hands was more sickening than myself, in a way; it was his age, I realized.

As well as the rules he’d laid out, I knew one thing Persahis was planning: that I should talk about what they had done to me. “You can do that with me, lad,” Iska said, patting my shoulder. “I’ve done the like a few times before. I even know a Haian trick or two. You’d have to ask a Haian how they work, but they do.”

I felt an even worse weight like a stone on my heart as the truth sank in: I would never see Persahis again, while I was in the Mezem. I guess now I will find out how great a part he had in keeping me sane, I thought.

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