Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER SIX

The Bastards of St Charlos

The fat man guarding the top of the stairs fell into her arms with a groan of surprise. She tottered there against his weight for a few moments like a young wife handling a drunken husband, then helped his body to fold neatly and silently onto the landing.

Swan flicked the blood from her knife, inadvertently scattering some of it across the damp wall. The woman stared at the spatter of droplets she had created, liking the contrast of crimson against the yellowing plaster.

‘What are you doing?’ Guan asked her as he stopped by her side. ‘Are you high?’

‘Only a little. Stop worrying, brother. It keeps me sharp.’

Together, the two priests stepped over the corpse and stopped before the door. A gabble of loud voices came from the other side of it. She could hear a baby crying half-heartedly.

‘Please people, one at a time! Milan, I saw you raise your hand first.’

‘I only wanted to say, if we do call off this plan of action then we should do it for deliberate reasons, not because we’re afraid of what they’ll do to us.’

‘But, Milan,’ came another voice. ‘During the week of the Augere? They’ll murder us where we stand for disrupting the holy week like that.’

‘And who would work the mills and steelworks along the Shambles then?’ a woman replied. ‘Or do you think they’d be content to lose their profits while they trained a new workforce?’

‘Pish!’ shouted another. ‘In the mills they could turn around a new workforce within a few weeks. That isn’t the point here. The point is they’re vulnerable during the Augere. All these pilgrims gathered from around the Empire. All these representatives of the Caucus. The whole world is supposed to be celebrating the unity of Mann this week. One big happy Empire, with all of us waving our flags and feeling like we’re part of it like the good sheep they teach us to be. And meanwhile, behind closed doors, they make their latest deals for squeezing us even further. No, they won’t like it one bit when we show them up by taking to the streets. But if they want to settle quickly, without a bloodbath in front of everyone, they’ll have to consider our terms.’

‘We aren’t here to discuss a revolution, Chops. What if they wait until the pilgrims have left, then burn us all alive in the Shay Madi for sport, like they do with the homeless, and then fill the factories with those poor souls who really are true slaves?’

‘Then we’d have a real uprising on our hands. Like in our fathers’ and mothers’ times, when the priests last thought they could take the bread from the mouths of the working people. They must allow us to make a living. Even the priests concede that much.

‘Besides, it’s fear of what we could lose that has led us here in the first place. All those times we should have stood together and we didn’t. And always because they threatened to bring in slaves to replace us, or even to move the factories elsewhere. I work more hours on the presses than I spend at home. So does my wife and our eldest sons. And still we can barely clothe and feed ourselves, let alone make the arrears on our rent, or pay for medicine when the children are sick. We have to do something, for kush sake.’

Swan smiled; not at the words, but at the glib inscription carved in the lintel above the door.

Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

Her brother, loosening his neck muscles by her side, pointed to something in the shadows above the writing. It was a carving of two hands clasped together and entwined in barbed wire.

‘They call themselves the Bastards of Saint Charlos.’

‘Saint Charlos? Never heard of him.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ Guan replied. ‘His name was outlawed twenty-five years before we were born. He was a priest of the old religion, back when the city was still a monarchy. He lived and worked here in the Shambles along the east bank. Gave all his money to the poor. Worked to set up these respite houses. They remember him as a saint for it.’

‘You see? This is why I’m so glad that you’re my clever brother. Otherwise, I’d have to read all those dull books myself. Tell me then, in your wisdom… Why do these chattel call themselves bastards?’

‘Charlos had an eye for the women. It was said that half the children of the district were his illegitimate spawn.’

Swan laughed at that, more loudly than it warranted, while her brother watched her with a bemused frown.

The voices beyond the door fell to a deathly hush.

‘Shall we?’ she asked him.

‘After you.’

Fifty faces were turned to the door as Swan stepped through it. Eyes widened as they saw her priestly robe and her smooth skull; even the crying infant in the lap of its mother blinked at her through its tears.

Swan snapped her fingers loudly, and the infant stopped crying with a startled jerk.

The room was packed from wall to wall with seated men and women, the air thick with the heat of so many bodies pressed so closely together.

How can they sit like this, in each other’s stench?

‘We’re looking for Gant,’ her brother declared, loudly. ‘Please show him to us.’

Nobody moved. The man standing at the front of the room wrung his hands in dismay.

‘Are you Gant?’ Swan asked him.

He looked to the others for support, and Swan noticed a few men along the sides reaching beneath their coats for weapons.

‘Who wants to know?’

It was a man standing by the shuttered window, his arms folded across his burly chest. He had a pipe in his mouth, and a peaked cap on his head cocked over one eye.

‘I do.’

‘And you are?’

‘They call me Swan.’

‘Well, Swan, they call me Gant. And this is a peaceful assembly. We’re doing nothing wrong here.’

Her brother snorted. ‘I would say that planning dissent amongst your fellow chattel is very wrong indeed.’

Chairs began to scuff against the floor. People were standing, moving back towards the walls. A handful of men were taking up positions around them.

‘No trouble,’ Swan said with her empty palms raised. She nodded to the man Gant. ‘Good evening to you, then. Or what remains of it.’

Slowly, with caution, they both backed out of the room, their task here complete. Swan took a final glimpse of Gant’s curious expression then pulled the door closed behind her.

Instantly, her brother broke a bonding stick in half and used it to seal the door in its frame. The door handle rattled; someone trying to open it.

The voices grew loud again on the other side.

Swan and her brother hurried down the stairwell, racing each other. The Respite House was a tall building with many floors and rooms. Perhaps it had been an hostalio in its time, or one of the famous brothels of the district. People had scattered from the stairs and the landings when they’d first seen the two of them go up. Now, mutters sounded from behind closed doors, children’s cries stifled suddenly. Swan broke her own bonding stick in half, and helped Guan close the main exit of every landing as they descended, sealing each one in turn.

Her brother wouldn’t meet her eye as they did it.

Outside in the cobbled street, a stinking breeze was blowing down the narrow stretch of the Accenine – the only river on the island of Q’os – and amongst the twisting, diabolical streets of the slums that were the Shambles. The fumes from the nearby steelworks caught in the back of her throat, dark smokestacks pouring their affluence into the evening sky. Guan worked quickly to seal the main front door while Swan thrummed to her inner music, and observed the figures scurrying from the sight of their robes.

She stared at the distant Temple of Whispers above the skyline, a tall, warped sliver amongst smaller skysteeples. It was more brightly lit than before. She knew that the second night of the Caucus must be starting by now; felt a moment’s relief that they did not have to be there again tonight.

Much closer, on the opposite bank of the fast river, the Lefall family fortress stood in a brilliance of focused gaslights. Barges were filling up with soldiers along the quayside: General Romano’s own private troops, shipping down to the harbour for the fleet’s departure tomorrow. Swan still had to pack, she recalled, and see to it that her new house-slave understood how to care properly for her animals.

Guan nudged her side, and she returned to the business at hand.

He took out his pistol and stood watch as she lifted one of the unlit brands they’d left leaning against the wall. Swan aimed her own pistol at it and fired.

The oil-soaked wood ignited and a blue-orange flame sputtered in the breeze. Quickly now, Swan ran the torch along the side of the wall, leaving a trail of fire that quickly climbed upwards where they’d splashed it with oil.

She circled the building, leaving her brother where he stood, passing the two other doors they’d already sealed. By the time she returned to him, the entire structure was sheathed by flames.

Banging on the front door now. People trying to get out.

‘Remind me again: why aren’t the Regulators handling this one?’

‘Because, sister, the Matriarch’s family owns half the linen mills in the Shambles. No doubt she wanted the job done right.’

The sounds of panic were starting to compete with the roaring of the flames. Shutters were being thrown open across the building, people hanging out amongst spumes of smoke.

‘You think this will work?’

‘Maybe at least they’ll stop banging on about rights for a while. To hear their talk, you’d think that rights were handed to each and every one of them when they were born.’

Someone shrieked, and then a smoking body landed before them with a thud against the cobbles with a thud. More people began to rain down; crack crack crack went the splintering of their legs.

Swan hopped back as a skull spattered its contents out across the street. She stared at the gory mess in fascination.

A baby was crying close by. She spotted it amongst the moving bodies, still wrapped in the arms of its broken mother. For all she knew, it was the same infant she’d seen in the room at the very top.

‘Lucky you,’ Swan said to it as she bent down for a closer inspection. To her brother: ‘They cry so quietly, these children of theirs. Have you noticed?’

‘No,’ he replied amidst the screams and the roaring of the flames. ‘Let’s go.’

She nodded, then left it there bawling; someone else’s problem.

Pedero glanced behind him as he knocked on the heavy door of tiq. His hand was shaking as it fell to his side, and he felt the wetness of his armpits where they had bloomed as stains against his priestly white robes.

In his belly lay a sense of dread so intense he thought he might throw up from it.

Get a grip on yourself, the spypriest commanded, and took a deep breath, and exhaled, and clenched his fists tightly.

He was admitted into the room by an Acolyte in plain clothing. The man frisked him roughly, his gaze sweeping over Pedero’s appearance in displeasure. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed, then walked the length of the large room to where a wooden stall was fitted against the far wall; a house-slave stood next to the open doorway of the stall with a bowl of sponges in his hand.

Pedero tried to calm himself as he waited in front of the heavy desk. The rest of the space was crammed with various boxes of files still waiting to be unpacked, much like his own office in the other wing of the building, following the yearly move of the Elash order to its new anonymous premises. A half-eaten breakfast lay amongst the documents on his superior’s desk. Through a doorway behind the desk, he noticed the heavy travelling chest on the floor of the other room, sealed tight by a leather latch and a wrapping of hairy rope.

‘Make it quick!’ came Alarum’s rough voice from his personal privy. ‘I must leave soon for the harbour.’

Pedero’s head jerked around at the spymaster’s sudden announcement. ‘I have a report for you, sir. I think – I think it best that you read it.’

‘Is that you Pedero?’

‘Yes. Yes it’s me.’

‘Well, can’t it wait?’

Pedero looked down at the report he clutched in his trembling hand. The ink of the small, neat handwriting had smudged in places from the sweat of his fingers. ‘I don’t believe so. It’s from one of our listening posts. Concerning a Diplomat by the name of Che. I understand he’s accompanying the Holy Matriarch on her campaign.’

A hand emerged from the open doorway.

Pedero sidestepped towards it, stuffed the document into the waiting hand without looking. He bowed his head as he stepped back to a respectable distance, clasping his own hands behind his back.

After some moments: ‘He said this? To his damned house-slave?’

‘Yes, sir.’

A mumble of oaths ensued. Alarum wasn’t normally a bad-tempered man. Since declaring that he was to accompany the Holy Matriarch as her personal intelligence adviser, though, he’d been waspish with everyone around him.

‘The time stamp is dated for last night. Why am I only hearing of this now?’

Pedero coughed for air. ‘There was some confusion,’ he began, wincing, ‘concerning the paperwork.’

‘You mean it’s been sitting on your desk all this time, and you didn’t bother to read it until several moments ago.’

He couldn’t deny it. He’d already tried to think of a way that he might push the blame of his own error downwards, but his mind had been gripped by a greater terror just then – sitting there behind his desk with the report trembling in his hand, his mind in a panic at what it had just read, appalled by the knowledge that he was now infected by it, that he couldn’t very well unread the words and therefore be spared the fate most likely promised by them. Tear the bastard thing to pieces and burn them, his thoughts had jabbered in a dizzying moment of hysteria. He’d even stood and turned to the door with that very intention in mind, when he’d noticed Curzon perched behind his own desk across the room from him, peering down his nose above his spectacles; teller of everyone’s tales.

Do your job, Pedero had numbly decided in the chill loneliness of the moment. Brazen it out like you always do.

A moment of madness, he now considered, standing there in the reality of his decision. Pedero lifted his head high as though offering his throat for sacrifice. ‘I’m afraid so, spymaster. With the move, you see… we’re still getting back on our feet.’

‘Excuses Pedero? I should have you sent to the pain block for a week for this, and you should thank me for being so lenient.’

‘Yes spymaster.’

A long and weary sigh. It was hardly the most reassuring of sounds from this man.

‘Tell me. How many hands has this report passed through?’

With those words the blood drained from his face. He could feel it, the sudden coldness of his flesh; like he was dead already. He looked to the Acolyte and the house-slave, but they were avoiding his eye.

‘The listener. And myself.’

‘The listener’s name? I can’t make it out here.’

‘Ul Mecharo.’

‘And the slave woman?’

‘Her number is on the report. Top left.’

‘I see it.’

Pedero heard something strange from the stall. He realized it was Alarum clacking his teeth together, a habit his superior tended to exhibit when trying to coerce some detail from his memory.

‘I know this young man,’ he mused through the wall of the stall. ‘Or at least I used to know his mother, when I was young. She was a Sentiate back then, still is, I think. Not one of these dead-eyed girls you get now either. No, full of fire and claws this one. Had to stop seeing her after she fell pregnant, though. Couldn’t stand the taste of her…’

‘It does put a rather strong question mark over this Diplomat’s state of mind,’ Pedero tried. ‘He signs his death warrant with such talk, once the Section receives the report.’

‘I rather suspect, Pedero, that his death warrant was signed the moment the details of his mission were first disclosed to him. He knows too much now. We must assume the Section will have him killed as soon as his mission is completed, one way or the other.’

Pedero bit his lip, wondering how to press the spymaster further. He had known the man for several years now. Alarum had always demanded frank discussions with his staff, most of all by his own sometimes brutal candour; he considered it a necessary requirement of their job if one was to remain in anyway level headed.

Pedero glanced to the Acolyte and then to the slave, but both seemed to spend their lives here staring unfocused at the floor. He took a step closer to the stall again, almost pressing against it. ‘Is it true?’ he asked his superior, his voice nearly a whisper. ‘What he said, I mean?’

Alarum’s response came loud and sudden. ‘Leave us,’ he commanded, and at last the Acolyte and slave looked at Pedero, then both headed for the door.

‘You would really wish to know, if it were?’ asked Alarum when they had left.

‘I rather have the feeling a noose is around my neck anyway.’

‘Oh? Then what of me? Haven’t I now laid eyes on this report also?’

‘You may be part of it already,’ said Pedero, bravely. He knew it was long past the point for caution.

A soft wheeze came from the stall. Pedero decided that it was laughter.

Why is he laughing? What is it in the smallest of ways that could be funny about any of this?

‘My superiors, perhaps,’ came his voice at last. ‘This Diplomat’s handlers within the Section, certainly.’

Pedero dabbed his moist lips. He had stopped breathing, it seemed. Just then he found himself thinking of the brick of hazii weed that awaited him in his private chambers back in the Temple District, and the long evening of pleasure he had promised himself with his newly acquired body-slave. He wondered if he would even make it home alive.

It was a hard stare he gave as the document glided through the stall’s doorway and came to rest on the floor.

‘Bury this in the files somewhere. Say nothing of it to anyone. Is that clear?’

He could have thrown himself at the Alarum’s feet, so grateful he felt in that moment. The relief that flooded him was like a flush of sexual pleasure.

‘Of course, spymaster,’ Pedero replied as he hurriedly bent and scooped the sheet of paper from the floor.

‘And – Pedero?’

Breathlessly: ‘Yes spymaster?’

‘What does this Diplomat look like?’

‘I believe his description is in his file.’

‘Bring it to me.’