Promise of Blood

Chapter 8

“Olem,” Tamas said, “did you know someone wrote a biography about me?”

Olem perked up from his at-ease position beside the door. “No, sir, I didn’t.”

“Not many do.” Tamas pressed his fingers together and watched the door. “The royal cabal had them all bought up and burned – well, most of them anyway. The author, Lord Samurset, fell out of favor with the crown and was banished from Adro.”

“The royal cabal didn’t like his portrayal?”

“Oh, not at all. He was very favorable toward powder mages. Said they were a fantastically modern weapon that would one day replace Privileged altogether.”

“Dangerous conjecture.”

Tamas nodded. “I’m just vain enough to have rather enjoyed the book.”

“What did he say about you?”

“Samurset claims that my marriage made me conservative, that my son’s birth gave me mercy, and that my wife’s death hardened both qualities with an objectiveness to make them useful. He said that my climb to the rank of field marshal while on the Gurla campaign was the best thing to happen to the Adran military in a thousand years.” Tamas waved his hand dismissively. “Rubbish, most of it, but I do have a confession.”

“Sir?”

“There are times when I don’t feel a sense of mercy or justice or anything but pure rage. Times that I feel I’m twenty again and the solution to every problem is pistols at twenty paces. Olem, that is the most dangerous feeling a commander can have. Which is why, if I look like I’m about to lose my temper, I want you to tell me. No fidgeting, no polite coughs. Just plain out tell me. Can you do that?”

“I can,” Olem said.

“Good. Then send in Vlora.”

Tamas watched his son’s former fiancee enter the room with no small bit of trepidation. Many thought of Tamas as cold. He encouraged the notion. Perhaps his son had suffered for that. But Tamas knew that beneath his calculating nature he had a temper, and for the first time in his life he wanted to shoot a woman.

Tamas interlocked his fingers on the desk in front of him. He fixed his mouth into that ambiguous place between smile and frown.

Vlora was a dark-haired beauty with a classic figure, wide hips and a small chest outlined by the tight blue uniform of an Adran soldier. Her father had been a na-baron who had lost his fortune speculating in all the wrong things. The last of their family wealth had gone to a gold mine in Fatrasta – one that pinched out two months after mining began. He had died a year after that last failure, when Vlora was only ten. Sabon had found her months later, placed in a boarding school by her few remaining relatives; an abandoned child with a unique talent: the ability to ignite powder from not just a dozen paces, as most Marked could, but at a distance of several hundred yards. Tamas had taken her in, provided for her upbringing, and given her a career in the army. What had gone wrong?

“Sir,” she said, snapping to attention before him. Tamas found himself looking at an invisible point above her head as he struggled to restrain his anger. “Powder Mage Vlora reporting, sir.”

Tamas flinched. She’d called him Tamas since she was fourteen. Not one soul had ever commented on that brazen familiarity. She’d treated him more like a father than Taniel ever had.

“Sit,” Tamas ordered.

Vlora sat.

“Sabon apprised you of the situation?” He could feel her studying his face. He kept his own gaze in the air above her head.

“We’ve lost a lot of men, sir,” she said. “A lot of friends.”

“A serious blow to the powder cabal. I need mages now. I’d have liked to leave you…” At Jileman University, he finished in his head. Where she could continue her studies and continue betraying his son. Tamas cleared his throat. “I need you here.”

“I’m here,” she said.

“Good,” Tamas said. “I’m going to put you with the seventy-fifth regiment on the north end of the city. There’s rioters up there to mop up and…” Tamas paused at a low knock on the door. Olem opened the door just a little. A communique was passed through, and there was a moment of whispering between the bodyguard and someone on the other side.

“Tamas,” Vlora said suddenly. “I’d like to be put with Taniel, if that is possible.”

Tamas felt his body jerk and pulled back on the reins of his rage. “That’s ‘sir’ if you please, soldier,” he snapped. “And no, it’s not possible. This city needs to be cleaned up and I’ll have you with the seventy-fifth regiment.” He would not put Taniel through that. He was cold, not cruel.

Olem waved the communique. “Sir,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Problems.”

“Of what sort?”

“The boys have run into barricades.”

“And?”

“Big ones, sir, though hastily built. Very well organized. Not average looters.”

“Where?”

“Centestershire.”

“That’s less than a mile from here. Have they made contact with the barricade?”

“Yes,” Olem said. He didn’t look happy. “Royalists, sir.”

“They had to come out of the woodwork eventually,” Tamas said. “Damned king’s men without a king. Numbers?”

“Not a clue. They appear to have gone up overnight.”

“What’s the extent of their holdings?”

“I said, sir. Centestershire.”

“What, the whole center of the city?”

Olem nodded.

“Bloody pit.” Tamas leaned back in his chair. He let his eyes fall to Vlora, his anger at her betrayal warring with the stupidity of men who’d throw their lives away over a dead monarch. He felt his hands shaking. “Why?” The word wrenched out against his will. He scolded himself immediately. He had better control than that. He forced himself to meet Vlora’s eyes. Why did you betray my son?

He saw sorrow in those eyes. A lonely, sad girl. The eyes of a child who’d made a horrible mistake. It made him furious. He stood, his chair thrown to the ground behind him.

“Sir!” Olem barked.

“What?” Tamas practically yelled at the man.

“Not the time or place, sir!”

Tamas felt his jaw working soundlessly. I did tell him to stop me.

The door to the office burst open. Taniel stumbled in, breathing hard as if he’d run up all five flights of stairs. He stopped in the doorway, frozen in place at the sight of Vlora.

Vlora stood. “Taniel.”

“What is it?” Tamas said, the calm in his voice forced.

“General Westeven is in league with the Privileged.”

“Westeven is in Novi on holiday. I made sure of it before the coup.”

“He returned yesterday. I’ve just come from his home. It’s guarded by at least two dozen Hielmen. We tracked the Privileged there but couldn’t force our way inside. She is a guest of his.”

“He has to be out of the city. They may just be using his house as a base of operations.”

Taniel strode into the room, stopped beside Vlora, his eyes on his father. “If Westeven is in the city, he’ll move quickly. He could strike at any time.”

Tamas leaned back, taking in the information. General Westeven, the longtime retired captain of the Hielmen, was a legend. The man commanded respect from noble and commoner alike and had won battles across half the world. He was one of the few military men, foreign or domestic, that Tamas truly saw as an equal. And he was a king’s man through and through.

Tamas slid his dueling-pistols case across the desk to rest in front of him and began to load one. “Olem, eject anyone from this building that isn’t a member of the seventh brigade. Once the House of Nobles is secure, we’ll see about those barricades. General Westeven may be behind them.”

Olem left the room at a run.

The rest followed Tamas out into the hallway and down the stairs. Olem met them again on the second floor. The place was packed with people – city folk, peasants, poor merchants. It seemed like half the city filled the hallways. Olem had to push his way through to get to Tamas.

“Sir,” Olem said, “There are too many people in the building. It’ll take us hours to clear all the rooms.”

Tamas scowled. “Who are all these people?” A line had formed, and Tamas couldn’t see the front of it. He grabbed the closest man, an ironworker, by his thick overalls with the hammer stitched to one pocket. “What are you here for?”

The man trembled slightly. “Um, sorry, sir, I’m here to debate my new taxes.” He spread his hand toward the line. “We all are.”

“New taxes haven’t been issued,” Tamas said.

“For the king!”

A gunshot went off near Tamas’s ear and the man slumped to the ground before he’d been able to draw his dagger halfway. Vlora immediately began reloading her pistol. On Tamas’s other side, Taniel had drawn both of his.

The entire hall burst into motion. Cloaks and coats were discarded, and from beneath them weapons were drawn – swords, daggers, pistols – a few even had muskets. What had a moment before been an aimless line of city folk and commoners became an armed mob.

They fell on Tamas’s soldiers with the same shout: “For the king!”

Olem flung himself between the greater part of the crowd and Tamas. He fired a pistol and then drew his sword, cutting down three of the royalists in as many blinks of the eye. Tamas yanked his sword out and bellowed, “To me! Men of the seventh brigade, to me!”

Soldiers caught unawares were cut down. The hall was too crowded with the royalists, their trap sprung. But they weren’t expecting three powder mages or Olem’s trained ferocity.

“Back to the stairs, sir,” Olem yelled. “Up to the next floor!”

They cut their way toward the stairs in a fighting retreat. The royalists attacked en masse, trying to gain the advantage through numbers. Tamas stepped up beside Olem to hold them back while Vlora and Taniel fired their pistols from behind them. The staircase was soon full of the thick smoke from spent powder. Tamas breathed it in and savored it.

Gray-and-white uniforms emerged from the hall. Hielmen – what was left of Manhouch’s personal guard. There were twelve of them. They carried the best air rifles with bayonets fixed and charged forward without hesitation. These were not simple royalists. They were trained killers, notches even above Tamas’s best soldiers. They would not waver or retreat until they were dead.

The Hielmen carried air rifles, but the rest of the rabble did not. Tamas felt Vlora ignite a powder horn, and a man nearest the Hielmen exploded, showering the lot of them with gore and knocking two flat. Tamas reached out with his senses and ignited the powder in a man’s unshot musket. The unexpected blast blew the face off the woman next to him.

They made it up the stairs to the third floor, the Hielmen dogging their heels. They started up for the fourth floor when the popping sound of air rifles filled the air. It was a sound to chill a Marked’s blood, for a Marked knew that shot was meant for him.

Vlora stumbled on the stairs and fell. Taniel, farther up the stairs, leapt to her in an instant, sliding the ring bayonet over the end of his rifle and meeting the Hielmen’s charge with a silent snarl. His bayonet sliced a Hielman’s neck with the quick, easy motion of a trained butcher. He dodged to one side of a bayonet thrust and grappled with another Hielman. The man was a hand taller than him and at least three stone more. Taniel brought up the butt of his rifle in a blow savage enough to put the Hielman’s nose into his brain. The soldier dropped without a sound. Tamas felt a thrill watching his son fight. Taniel Two-Shot he might be, but he had the brutal hand-to-hand skills of an infantryman.

Taniel swung toward the four remaining Hielmen, ready to charge.

“Taniel!” Tamas barked, “Fall back!” He picked Vlora up. Deep in a powder trance, her body seemed to weigh nothing at all. She gritted her teeth against the pain. “Did it hit a bone?” Tamas asked.

She shook her head.

Tamas heard a pop and felt the bullet graze his left shoulder, missing Vlora’s head by inches. Tamas turned around only to look down the length of an air rifle, the bayonet coming toward his gut fast.

He transferred Vlora’s weight to one arm and drew his pistol and shot from the hip, dropping the Hielman dead from a bullet through the eye.

By the time Tamas reached the fifth floor, the last few Hielmen lay dead on the stairs. Tamas and his men assessed their wounds. Olem had a number of new cuts – they’d need stitching, but nothing more. Vlora’s shot had glanced off her thigh. She could handle pressure on it, so the bullet had not shattered the bone, and she’d be fine. Taniel had not been touched. His face was twisted in a savage grimace as he wiped gore from the end of his bayoneted rifle. At some point Ka-poel had joined them. The red-haired girl smelled of sulfur, and her hands were black. She wiped her hands on her buckskins and smiled at Tamas when she saw him looking.

Pistol shots and the sound of steel on steel faded on the floor below. Tamas took a few deep breaths, listening to Vlora’s heart beat. They both leaned against the wall, her head on his shoulder. He stepped away from her.

Footsteps echoed on the stairs below them. A moment later Sabon appeared. He had powder marks on the cuff of his jacket and a shallow sword gash along one arm. He breathed a quick sigh of relief on seeing them all together.

“Anyone hurt?” Sabon asked.

“Minor wounds,” Tamas said. “Where were you?”

“The officers’ mess. They came out of nowhere.”

“Casualties?” Tamas asked. Anyone important?

“A few,” Sabon said. He gave a slight shake of his head at the silent question. “From the looks of things it was mostly rabble. Took us by surprise, but once we’d rallied the men, it was barely a fight. All the Hielmen came straight for you.”

“Is the House secure?”

“Working on it.”

“Enemies captured?” Tamas asked.

“We’ve taken at least two dozen without a fight. Probably another forty wounded. They’re General Westeven’s men.”

“I know.” Tamas stepped over to his son and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Well done, Taniel.”

Taniel unfixed his bayonet and put it in its case. He shouldered his rifle. One glance to Vlora and then a stiff nod to Tamas. “Back to work, sir.”

Tamas watched his son descend the stairs, followed closely by the savage girl. He felt like he should say something else. He wasn’t sure what.

“Sabon.”

“Sir?”

“Alert Lady Winceslav. Tell her we need her soldiers in the city. General Westeven holds the barricades and I’ll be damned if I send my own men to their deaths against them. The mercenaries will need to start earning their pay. Prepare me a command base near the barricades. We take the fight to him. Vlora.” He paused, considering his decision for a moment. “Go with Sabon. I want you on my staff.”

“Taniel!”

Taniel stopped on the landing and glanced back up the stairs, trying to decide whether to wait or not. He knew that voice. He didn’t want to hear anything it had to say. He nudged a body with his toe. One of the Hielmen he’d gutted with his bayonet. The man’s eyes fluttered. Still alive. He glared up at Taniel. He gritted his teeth, not making a sound, but he must have been in immense pain. Taniel debated whether to call a surgeon or to kill him. The wound was mortal. Taniel squatted next to him.

“You’ll not live out the week,” Taniel said.

“Traitor,” the Hielman whispered.

“Do you want to live another day or two, kept alive so that you can answer to Tamas’s questioners?” Taniel asked. “Or end it now?”

The man’s eyes betrayed his suffering. He remained silent.

Taniel undid his belt and folded it over, offering the end to the man. “Bite on this.”

The Hielman bit down.

It was over in a handful of heartbeats. Taniel wiped his knife on the Hielman’s trousers and jerked out his belt from between the man’s teeth. He stood up, buckling the belt back on. Why did he do this? He should be off at the university, chasing girls. He tried to think back to the last time he’d chased a girl. His first night in Fatrasta, before the war began, he’d met a girl at a dockside bar. They’d flirted all night. A little drunker and he might have slept with her, but he’d kept his head about him and remembered Vlora. He wondered if that girl was still there. He had a sketch of her in his book.

The Hielman lay at his feet, at peace despite the scrambled gash in his stomach and the fresh crimson line dripping from his throat. Ka-poel stood a few feet away, silent as always. She watched the dead Hielman as if fascinated.

“We should go,” Taniel said to Ka-poel.

“Taniel, wait.”

Vlora hurried down the stairs. She stumbled, caught herself on the railing, and sank down to sit on the steps halfway down. She held one hand over the wound on her thigh.

They stared at each other for a moment. Vlora was the first to look away, down at the body at Taniel’s feet.

“How are you?”

“Alive,” Taniel said.

Several more moments of silence followed. Taniel could hear his father upstairs, yelling orders. Tamas hadn’t even been fazed by the sudden attack. A warrior through and through.

A few soldiers passed them, two going up, one going down. There was a commotion in the main hall downstairs as Tamas’s soldiers rounded up wounded prisoners.

“Forgive me,” Vlora said.

Tears streaked down her face. Taniel fought the impulse to rush to her side, to see to her wound and comfort her. He could sense her pain, emotional and physical, but it could not touch him in his powder trance. He refused to let it touch him. He hooked his thumb through his belt and squared his jaw.

“Let’s go,” he said to Ka-poel.

Adamat ground his teeth in frustration. Seven days since the coup. Seven days since he’d visited Uskan and gotten only more questions for his time. Who’d been burning pages from books on religious and sorcerous history? Who’d taken the other books? And what the pit was Kresimir’s Promise?

Adamat stopped his hackney cab in Bakerstown long enough to grab a meat pie, then continued on past Hrusch Avenue, where the dusty smell of oil, wood, furnaces, and gunpowder whirled between the gunsmith shops and foundries. Here the noise was louder than usual, the crowds thicker. A boy sat on the step of every shop with a bundle of papers, taking orders and reporting numbers as well-dressed gentlemen rubbed shoulders with the lowliest infantryman. A hawker stood on the street corner and yelled that the new Hrusch rifle would protect a man’s home. The gunsmiths were selling the rifles as fast as they could make them.

Adamat flipped through the day’s paper. It said that Taniel Two-Shot was in the city, returned a hero from the Fatrastan War for Independence. Now he was chasing after a rogue Privileged. Some said the Privileged was a surviving member of the royal cabal. Others said it was a Kez spy, keeping an eye on Tamas’s powder cabal. Either way, an entire block had been leveled already, and dozens had been killed or wounded. Adamat hoped the Privileged would either be caught or would leave the city altogether before more blood could be shed. There was going to be enough of that in the coming face-off between Westeven and Tamas.

The royalists had barricaded off Centestershire, nearly the whole middle of Adopest. They’d launched a preemptive attack against Tamas’s forces, only to be driven back. Now it seemed the population was holding its breath. General Westeven, nearly eighty years old, had rallied the entire royalist population of the city, gathered them in one spot, and made enough barricades to stop a damned army. All in one night, or so it seemed. Field Marshal Tamas had responded by bringing in two whole legions of the Wings of Adom mercenary company and surrounding Centestershire with field guns and artillery. Not a shot had been fired yet. Both men were experienced enough not to want to turn the middle of Adopest into a battlefield.

It was a damned nightmare, Adamat decided. Two of the Nine’s most celebrated commanders facing off in a city of a million people. No one could come out a winner from that.

Yet life went on. People still needed to work, to eat. Those not involved directly in this new conflict stayed well away from it. Tamas had done an admirable job at keeping the peace in the rest of the city.

To complicate matters, the Public Archives, where Adamat was most likely to find copies of the damaged books at the university, were behind the royalist barricades. It was not a place he was prepared to go alone.

The carriage came to a stop in front of a three-story building off a side street at the far end of High Talian, the slums of Adopest. There was but a single entrance on this street, with a faded olive-green double door. Half of it was closed, blocked from inside, the paint peeling and the masonry crumbling around the doorpost. The other half was open, and a man of small stature leaned against the opposite post.

Adamat fetched his hat and cane from the carriage and held them in one hand, the other seeking a handkerchief from his pocket, which he used to cover his mouth as he stepped out. He paid the driver and approached the doorway, listening absently to the clatter of hoofbeats behind him as the carriage pulled away.

“Where in Kresimir’s name did you find an apple this time of year, Jeram?” Adamat wiped his nose and stuffed the handkerchief in a pocket.

The doorman gave him a slant-toothed smile. “G’evening, sir. Haven’t seen you for a month or two.” He took a crunching bite of his apple. “My cousin in the south of Bakerstown gets fresh fruit all year-round.”

“They say we might go to war with the Kez if negotiations don’t go well,” Adamat said. “You’ll have to wait until next fall for another apple.”

Jeram made a sour face. “Just my luck.”

“How go the fights today?”

Jeram pulled a worn piece of paper from the brim of a threadbare hat and studied it to make out the most recent markings. “SouSmith’s done three in a row, Formichael has won twice today. The two of them look ready to drop, but it’s the foreman has a death bug in his britches, says the two of them are gonna fight it out this hour.”

“Five fights between the two of them already?” Adamat snorted. “It’ll be piss poor, they’ll barely be able to stand.”

“Aye, that’s what the tables are saying, and there’s not much wagers yet. Everybody that’s betting has put it on Formichael.”

“SouSmith hits hard.”

Jeram gave him a sly glance. “If he can land a punch. Formichael’s better rested, younger, and half SouSmith’s weight.”

“Bah,” Adamat said, “you young ones always think the old have nothing left in them.”

Jeram chuckled. “Right, then, what’ll it be, governor?” He removed a folded paper from his back pocket, covered in smudges and long-erased lines. He set it against the doorframe and poised a piece of charcoal over it.

“What are the odds?”

Jeram scratched his cheek, leaving a bit of charcoal there. “I’ll give you nine to one.”

Adamat raised his eyebrows. “Give me twenty-five on SouSmith.”

“Risky,” Jeram grunted. “Figures.” He scratched down the numbers and folded the piece of paper, then jammed it back in his pocket. Adamat knew the paper was just for show. Jeram had a memory almost as good as Adamat’s, and without a Knack – he never forgot a face, never forgot a number, and had not once delivered wrongly on a bet, though many times was accused of such. That didn’t happen often nowadays, not since the Proprietor took over this boxing ring. He didn’t take kindly to anyone accusing his bookies.

Inside, the only light came from rectangular slat windows high up under the eaves. Adamat pushed past a series of curtains that muffled sound and hid the inside from prying eyes. The whole building was one big room, long since gutted, with a few stalls and cordoned-off rooms to give the fighters some privacy to recover from fights. In the middle was the building’s namesake: the Arena, a round pit twelve paces across, four paces below floor level.

A latticework of haphazard seating surrounded the pit, going back to either side of the building and nearly to the roof. Adamat ducked beneath the rear seating, crossed to the other side, and elbowed his way in among the men crowding the edge of the pit. The stands were full, men shoulder to shoulder in all the seats, enough for a few hundred gentlemen with their canes and hats, street workers with frayed jackets, and even a pair of city police officers, their black capes and top hats hard to miss among the crowd.

A fight had finished perhaps ten minutes ago, and the Arena workers were throwing down sawdust to soak up the blood, readying for the next one. A quiet murmur filled the room as men talked among themselves, resting their voices to cheer the violence ahead. Adamat breathed in sweat and grime and the smell of anger. He let his breath out slowly, shuddering. Bareknuckle boxing was a barbaric, feral sport. He grinned to himself. How fun. He took another breath, catching a whiff of pig. Not long ago the Arena had been a sty, and before that? A series of shops, maybe, back when High Talian was supposed to be the newest, richest, most fashionable part of the city.

A pair of shirtless men left the fighters’ stalls at the end of the room. They entered the Arena side by side and without ceremony. The workers cleared out, and the fighters faced each other. The man on the left was smaller, leaner, his muscles corded and defined like a warhorse. His curly brown hair bobbed into his face now and then, and he blew it away each time. Formichael. The Proprietor’s favorite fighter – or he had been when Adamat had last come by the fights. He was a warehouse worker, young and handsome, and it was whispered the Proprietor was grooming him to be something more than a simple thug.

The man on the right looked twice Formichael’s size. His hair had a touch of gray at the sides, his face bore a poorly shaved beard. His eyes were piggish, set deep in his face, and they examined Formichael with the singular intensity of a killer. His arms looked big enough to win a wrestling match with a mountain bear. Pits marred his knuckles where they’d broken – and been broken by – men’s jaws, and his face was covered in the puckered scars of bad stitching jobs. He flashed a set of broken teeth at Formichael.

Despite SouSmith’s advantage in size and experience, he was obviously tired. His chin sagged from a long day of hard-won fights, the corners of his eyes betraying exhaustion, and his shoulders drooped ever so slightly. What’s more, experience had long worn out its welcome. SouSmith was getting old, and his chest and stomach had given way to flab from excess drinking.

The foreman descended to the second step of the ring and conferred with the two fighters. After a moment he stepped back. He held up his hand, and then dropped it, leaping back.

Three hundred men yelled as the two fighters lashed out at each other. Fists met flesh with dull slaps that were drowned out by the surge of voices.

“Kill ’em!”

“Make him bleed!”

“The gut! Flush him in the gut!”

Adamat’s voice was drowned out in the cacophony of wordless cries. He didn’t even know what he said, but his heart poured all his frustration with Palagyi, his anger that his wife and children were away, into his shouts. He leaned forward, fists flailing in mockery of the two men, screaming at the top of his lungs with the rest of the rabble.

Formichael connected with a vicious jab to SouSmith’s ribs. SouSmith stumbled to the side, and the younger man surged forward and pounded on the same spot, perhaps on an old broken rib, fists flashing in the dim light. SouSmith reeled, trembling, toward the side of the pit until he was up against the wooden slats that separated him from the crowd. Fingers reached out from the onlookers, nails gouged at his bare head, spittle splattered on his cheek. Adamat watched, the fighter’s head just beyond his reach. “Go on,” he shouted. “Don’t let him back you into a corner!”

Something audibly cracked, and SouSmith fell to one knee, hand up in front to ward off Formichael’s blows.

Adamat’s voice fell to a whisper. “Get up, you bastard,” he growled through his teeth.

Formichael punched SouSmith’s hands and arms, beat them down until the older man was on both knees, suffering under the onslaught. Formichael’s face flushed with the promise of victory and he slowly let up until the punches were mere taps, then altogether. He stood, chest heaving, examining the man at his feet. SouSmith didn’t look up.

Bah, Adamat thought. Finish him already.

But there was nothing of that in Formichael’s plans. Grinning, he bent over and grabbed one of SouSmith’s arms, pulling him up into a single, brutal punch. SouSmith went back to his knees, his whole body shuddering. Formichael would string this out, letting SouSmith’s exhaustion keep him down and continuing the beating until SouSmith was nothing but a pulp.

Formichael delivered several more single punches before letting SouSmith fall back down to his hands and knees. SouSmith’s face was a mess of blood and pulped flesh. He spit into the sawdust. Formichael turned, raised his arms to the crowd, bathed himself in the roar of voices. He faced SouSmith once again.

The big man rose to his feet in less than a heartbeat, all twenty-five stone following his fist into Formichael’s pretty young face. The impact lifted Formichael off the ground. His body flattened out in midair and then bounced like some child’s toy off the wooden slats before tumbling to the ground. He shuddered once before falling still. SouSmith spit on Formichael’s back and turned away, plodding up the stairs and toward the fighters’ stalls. Hands reached out to slap him on the back in congratulations; curses lashed out for bets lost.

Adamat collected his winnings and then waited until enough of the crowd was milling about to slip unnoticed back to the stalls. He entered SouSmith’s room and closed the curtain behind him. “That was quite the fight.”

SouSmith paused, a bucket lifted over his head, and gave Adamat a single glance. He tipped the bucket, letting the water wash away a layer of sweat and blood, then scrubbed his body with a soiled towel. He tilted his head at Adamat, the skin around his eyes puffy and bruised, his lips and brows split. “Aye. Make the right bet?”

“Of course.”

“Bastard’s trying to kill me.”

“Who?”

“Proprietor.”

Adamat chuckled, then realized SouSmith wasn’t joking. “Why do you say that?”

SouSmith shook his head, twisted the red-brown water out of his towel, and dunked it in a clean bucket. “Wants me to sink.” SouSmith was far from stupid, but he’d always spoken in short sentences. A man had trouble collecting his thoughts after years of being punched in the head.

“Why? You’re a good fighter. People come to see you.”

“People come to see young whips.” SouSmith spat into one of the buckets. “I’m old.”

“Formichael will think twice next time he’s told to fight you.” Adamat remembered the still body on the Arena floor. They’d had to carry him out. “If he’s still alive.”

“He’ll live.” SouSmith tapped the side of his head. “He’ll be afraid.”

“Or maybe he’ll just be sure to finish it quick,” Adamat said.

SouSmith took a deep breath, then let out a chuckle that turned into a grunting cough. “Not bad either way.”

Adamat watched his old friend for a moment. SouSmith was a different man than his appearance suggested. He was no average thug, not like the other boxers. Behind his beady eyes was a sharp intelligence; behind his gnarled fists the soft hands of brother and uncle. Many read him wrong, one of the reasons for his winning record. One thing no one read wrong, though: behind it all, even deeper than his loyalty to his family or his cleverness, he was a killer.

“I have a question for you,” Adamat said.

“Thought you missed me.”

“You once told me you were part of the street gang Kresimir’s Broken.”

SouSmith froze with the corner of the towel still in one ear. He lowered it slowly. “I did?”

“You were very drunk.”

SouSmith’s movements were suddenly cautious. He glanced toward the stall’s single desk, to a drawer where he no doubt had hidden a pistol. Yet a man his size didn’t need a pistol.

Adamat made a reassuring gesture. “You were very drunk,” Adamat said again. “I didn’t believe you at the time. I was there when they pulled those boys out of the gutter. I didn’t think anyone had escaped what went after them.”

SouSmith examined him for a few moments. “Maybe one didn’t,” he said. “Maybe one did.”

“How?”

SouSmith countered with his own question. “Why?”

“I’m doing an investigation.” Adamat had already decided to tell SouSmith the whole story. “For Field Marshal Tamas. He wants to know what Kresimir’s Promise is.”

SouSmith looked impressed. “One man I’d not cross,” he said.

“Agreed. You have any idea what it means?”

SouSmith returned to cleaning himself up. “Our leader was a royal cabal washout.” SouSmith opened the desk drawer. He removed a grimy old pipe and a tobacco pouch. SouSmith lit up his pipe before he went on. “A loudmouth. A jackass. Wanted attention. Said our name was supposed to remind the royal cabal of their mortality.”

It was the longest sentence Adamat had heard SouSmith utter in years. “Did he tell you what it meant?”

“Break Kresimir’s Promise,” SouSmith said, puffing on his pipe. The smell of pistachio-flavored tobacco filled the tiny room. “And end the world.”

“What’s the promise?” Adamat asked.

SouSmith shrugged.

Adamat tapped the side of his jaw with one finger as SouSmith leaned back. He wasn’t going to say any more. Not about this. Adamat let his thoughts slip toward Palagyi. The twerp of a banker still had men lurking about. He was unpredictable. A man with SouSmith’s size and reputation could keep the idiot in line. At least until Adamat’s loan was due and Palagyi had the law on his side. Besides, SouSmith could be very useful in tight places – such as the Public Archives, behind the royalist barricades.

“Any chance you’re in need of a job?” Adamat asked.

SouSmith examined him through those small eyes. “What kind of a job?”