Given that war was one of its chief exports, no surprise the Palleseen Archipelago was well-supplied with orphanages. No child was left to grow up on the streets, and that was a worthy thing. The same war that necessitated so many such institutions was simultaneously the purpose of them. The children who passed back through those doors into adulthood would have a career waiting for them, a debt to the Commission of Ends and Means. And in between the parental deaths and the enlistment papers came a period when the state wasn’t particularly interested in those children’s lives.
The vexing thing was that Banders had been exactly right about Masty, until she turned out to be spectacularly wrong. He really had started to remember the Bracite lingo. She’d dragged him with her to help in squeezing a better deal out of the locals, and from a handful of halting words, he’d visibly started recalling a whole vocabulary. The back and forth between the local merchants had become transparent to him, so he could murmur in her ear about whether they were dealing in good faith or rooking her. More, the mere body language had begun to speak to him, what they did with their hands, how they touched their faces or tugged at the hems of their robes. A lexicon of gesture and fidget that held a wealth of information. She had been exalting about her tame Bracite, and how the Butcher was going to be over the moon that she’d scored some particularly hard-to-find spices. Not to mention what she could sell across the camp. Things were looking sunny over Banders country, as she liked to say, until this old boy appeared and got right up in their business.
Two things had happened, then. The first was that all the merchants had suddenly not been open for business because they knew Old Boy right away, plainly some kind of local gang boss or the like, and they wanted nothing to do with it. Second thing was Old Boy was seriously interested in Masty.
He was a big old lad. Enough that Masty’s eyeline was about level with the nipples of his bare chest. That loose robe hid broad shoulders and he had scars across him like the characters of a foreign alphabet. Banders saw a white beard and a hook nose and eyes nested in wrinkles and secrets. And one hand less than army-regulation quota, his other arm ending in a corrugated stump. Sword work, Banders recognised.
“Excuse me,” said Masty, trying to back away, but the man had his shoulder then, like tree roots had the earth. Those deep eyes just stared and Old Boy said something in Bracite.
“No thank you,” Masty said loudly, and then, “Alaaga nei,” which was a thing he’d been telling the merchants when Banders had wanted to pretend not to be interested.
Something happened to the man’s face, hearing Masty speak the language. His hand was abruptly gone from Masty’s shoulder but only because it was at the hilt of the knife in his belt. He drew the weapon with one sharp motion. Masty closed his eyes.
“The fuck like!” said Banders, and socked Lefty right in the face. It was surprisingly like punching a statue, but she still knocked him back. At that point the plan had been to grab Masty and leg it, but suddenly a half-dozen of the perfectly innocent locals who’d been watching this street theatre turned out to be on Lefty’s squad. Some of them got between her and the old boy, and two of them grabbed Masty, an arm each, yanking him backwards.
She clouted the nearest kidnapper about the ear and stamped on his toe, reckoning the window for informed debate had closed.
Banders reckoned she was pretty handy in a fight. She also reckoned that Masty was terrible, and in fact he hadn’t even been trying. Like he was one of Jack’s mob, crippled by some inner wound just waiting to find its way out into the open again. Banders, for her part, got several solid strikes in, and had one of Masty’s captors on the ground and conveniently placed for a good stamping, when the old boy paid her that punch in the face right back. He might only have the one hand, but it felt like he put a whole two fists’ worth of punch into it. He knocked her right onto her ass, in fact. Feeling about the very tender skin around her eye socket now, Banders could only admire his technique. Had to give a man credit for working around his limitations.
After that they’d bundled Masty off – very kid-gloves, no punch in the face for him. And they’d grabbed her and done the same, either because they didn’t want her running off to fetch the nearest squad of soldiers, or in case they needed a backup sacrifice should Masty prove unsuitable.
That was what she reckoned the deal was, sure enough. It was a cult. You heard a lot about them. It was basically what Correct Speech assured you that the world was full of. Every foreigner out there was some kind of religious fiend waiting to throw you on an altar and offer your precious heart to their hungry god. Which was why you had to perfect them with truncheon and baton, to teach them that that kind of thing wasn’t done. Educate the barbarous foreigners about what was and wasn’t the appropriate thing to believe.
For obvious reasons, Banders had never been sacrificed to a foreign cult before, but she knew it happened. And here she was, in a cell, and doubtless the hooked disembowelling blades were even now being whetted, while someone looked up the correct prayers.
It reminded her of the orphanage.
Not like that, obviously. Nobody was going to be running a sacrificial cult on the actual Archipelago, right under the nose of Ends and Means. But she remembered some weird shit from the orphanage. They’d locked her in a half-flooded cellar for a day and a night. And then everyone had laughed and they’d gone and had fish for breakfast. Fish for breakfast was a treat, so it had all been fine, all a joke. But it had been a joke about what the wicked priests did to you with their evil cults. The implication had been, If we’d been foreigners, there’d have been weights on your ankles and the fish would have been breakfasting on you.
And here she was, and probably it wouldn’t be fish, given they were some way inland, but the foreigners were doubtless going to do for her anyway.
They hadn’t tied her up, and when the sacrifice party came through the door she was going to make them regret that oversight. A few wild blows was probably all she was good for, though. And doubtless the old boy with one arm had perfected his left-handed sacrificing technique.
The key scraped in the lock. She’d been relying on hearing a whole mob of them come down the corridor, maybe singing hymns about how nice it was to get bloody to the elbows on their god’s behalf. Instead it was just that little metal sound that let her know her time was up.
She had just enough time to set her feet for a really good lamping, so that when the big metal-shod door swung open she was able to plant her fist absolutely perfectly in the middle of Jack’s face.
He went down instantly with a spray of blood from his nose, ending up with his box against the opposite wall, swearing fiercely.
Banders grimaced, went to help him, then drew back as he swatted her away.
“What was that for?” he complained nasally.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t know it was you! How is it even you?” Banders demanded, feeling almost outraged that Jack, of all people, was rescuing her.
“Damn me,” Jack said, and she heard a really visceral click. And then, “Thank you. I suppose.”
She was about to say that he was welcome and she’d punch him again any time, but his nose wasn’t broken any more, and although his face was blood all down to his chin, there wasn’t any more of it coming out of him. Even the puffiness had been banished before it could become bruising. He’d done his thing. Handy, that. Meant she didn’t have to feel guilty about having hit him.
“We have to find Masty,” she said. “They’re going to cut his heart out or something.” And, because he was looking at her, “What? This is my fault, all of a sudden? We were shopping! What kind of a cult grabs you when you’re shopping? Look, are you with me, finding Masty? Or have you done your good deed for the day?”
“Yes, fine, obviously. Where is he?”
“No idea. Can’t you find him like you did me? How did you even find me?”
Jack looked shifty, and looked past her, like there was something at her shoulder. “Complicated,” he said. “Can’t do it for Masty, but if they’re sacrificing him then probably it’s an important room and we can find it. Can you fight?”
“I just gave you two shiners and a broken nose,” she pointed out, although the evidence for them had evaporated like mist. She pushed past him into the corridor, looked both ways and then chose a direction, ready to jump the first local who turned up. “Anyway, you must have taken that key off someone, so presumably you’ve already bruised your knuckles a bit.”
“It was just hanging by the door. I… can’t fight. Sorry.”
“Well then I’ll just have to use both fists and you can cheer me on. Besides, I’ve got my secret weapon.”
“What’s that?”
“You,” she told him over her shoulder, reaching a set of stairs and deciding that sacrificial chambers felt like more of an upstairs thing. “They get me with their gutting knives or something, you can just put me back on my feet, right?” Because, for all his faults and the fact he was a bit wet, Jack was a handy friend to have in a fight.
“I can’t,” Jack said. “Not you.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs, crouched low. There was a walled courtyard out there, covered over with cloth to dull the sun-glare. She could hear low voices.
“What do you mean, not me? Is this ’cos I hit you?”
“No, it’s not… I don’t even know. Not you, though. God won’t do it.”
“Look, if this is about being a Pal, how come Lidlet got a pass?” Banders demanded through her teeth.
“It’s not that, either. God just says… He won’t do you. Can’t, sorry. He says can’t.”
She stared at this man who was suddenly not even remotely handy to have anywhere near her. “Me personally? Seriously?”
Jack’s apologetic look didn’t get much time to shine as, right about then, one of the locals turned up, a slight man with a shaved head. Banders jumped him immediately, grabbed the little pen-knife he had at his belt and threatened him with it.
“Right,” Banders told them. “Good. I don’t want this to get ugly. You’ve got a friend of ours. The man you brought me in with. You’re going to take us to him now, and then we’re all leaving together.”
The man didn’t want to help her with any of that, but the knife was a potent argument and a decidedly better friend in a fight than Jack. Then the man tried to explain that he didn’t speak Pel, but as far as Banders was concerned everybody spoke Pel. It was an easy language to learn and, she explained, if he really didn’t speak it then he had about fifteen seconds to get fluent before she used the knife and then found someone who did. Which threat turned out to be worth ten years of vocabulary lessons because suddenly he did speak Pel after all.
Which was how they were eventually brought into what she took to be the Grand Ritual Chamber. It was evident they were in a very large building, because the little shaved man took them through a variety of well-appointed rooms to reach it, with her companionable hand on his shoulder and the knife-blade hidden in the folds of his robe.
Banders was aware they’d accumulated quite a tail of hangers on and guards and the like by then, who plainly didn’t feel that the tableau she was presenting was quite naturalistic enough. She’d picked up her pace and hustled her guide-slash-hostage faster and faster until at last they burst out into this largest room yet, everyone else spilling out behind them, and she lost all track of what was going on.
It was a huge stone room, lit by high sun-wells that cast shafts down like an ethereal colonnade. The walls were heavily carved with friezes of stylised people doing heroic things to monsters or each other. At one end, two enormous statues of wolfcat monsters sat, each with one paw raised and jaws agape. Between them was not the expected bloody altar but a big stone chair, and on the chair was Masty.
Banders couldn’t quite process that. She even looked to Jack to see if he had any insights, but he was doing his usual confused expression, so no help there. Masty was out of uniform. They’d done him up like a local, except all the clothes were huge. His robes went all the way down the steps that the chair was set up on. He had a big hat on, too, and someone had painted his chin with a big white stripe.
“Get down here,” Banders told him. She had the knife out in plain sight now. The people who’d followed her in had swords and a few batons, and seemed to have run out of any concern for the life of the little shaven-headed man.
“Banders…” Masty said.
“Get the hell down here, we’re leaving,” she told him, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Then the one-armed man had turned up, which at least meant she had a target for her ire. She waved the knife at him. He had his own knife back by then. The one he’d threatened Masty with back in the marketplace.
“It is forbidden,” he said, in stilted Pel, “to bear arms in the royal presence.”
“Your guys started it,” Banders said. “You want this knife, you come get it?”
“Royal presence?” Jack echoed.
“Lefty here has delusions of grandeur,” Banders said, enjoying the angry flare of the man’s nostrils. “Didn’t you hear, Lefty? Last king of Bracinta died decades ago. Was just some sprat left, wasn’t there? Vanished away, wasn’t he? Or dead. And he’d not be some old boy like you. He’d be just about…” The energetic motor of her words hit a sudden snag and wound down. “… just about, you know, about, about Masty’s age. Give or take.”
Masty, up on the big throne, wearing the fancy ceremonial headpiece, looked horribly embarrassed.
“It was,” he said, and everyone there hushed completely so that even his quiet voice resounded through the chamber, “what they called me. I mean, Pals, so it wasn’t exactly respectful. More reminding me what I’d lost. And eventually it was just a word, and it got shortened and mumbled until everyone had forgotten what it actually meant. I’m sorry.”
“What are you blathering about?” Banders asked blankly.
“Masty,” Masty explained. “Majesty. Your Majesty.”
“The crown prince,” Lefty announced harshly, “who shall be His Majesty Feder the Fourth of the Hackle Throne, rightful king of all Bracinta. Returned to us in our time of need to sweep the foreign filth from our shores and restore our land to greatness.”
Banders looked from him to Masty.
“I mean, I’m still trying to talk them down,” said her old comrade, from under the weight of his new hat. “Look, can we…” He couldn’t look Banders in the eyes as he said it. “I am making a decree that I get to talk to my friends in private. And tea. Bring some tea.”
*
“So you’re the king, so good,” Banders decided. They were sitting in a little room with a stained-glass ceiling, kept pleasantly cool by running water in little channels about the floor. A variety of plants with spiky leaves flourished in each corner. The tea, when it came, was pleasantly fragrant, unfamiliar but presumably fit for a king. “You might have mentioned something.”
“Really?” Masty – His Majesty Feder the Fourth – asked her. “I’d almost forgotten. Everyone else forgot. They took me in after – it was sort of a coup, only it simultaneously killed everyone and also failed. There was just me and a bunch of viziers all knives out and trying to take over. The Pals moved in, put their advisors in place and… just sort of took me off. For my own good, because the assassins were still out there. Took me away until I would be old enough to claim my throne. Except by that time the viziers and their Pal advisors were getting along really well and probably they’d lost track of exactly where I ended up. I was moved around a lot. I think I was probably supposed to get very ill and die at some point, but someone in the army decided that wasn’t right and so they just…”
“Made a Whitebelly of you. So you could be useful,” Banders said. And it was doubtless a bad thing, if you were a Bracite royalist. Losing the heir to the throne like a coin out of a torn pocket. Except she had grown up out of the orphanages, and so it seemed far more natural to her than being the king.
Masty seemed to be of the same mind. “I liked being useful,” he said. “I don’t get the impression that kings are very useful. It’s not even like they want me to do anything. It’s just… now I’m here, apparently that’s a new dawn for Bracinta and there’s a whole list of people they want to throw out of a window in my name, and another list of people I’ve never heard of who are apparently very deserving of royal favour. And what I think about it isn’t important. It’s just having the right backside on the throne suddenly unlocks all these doors that were shut for them. I don’t know what to do.”
She wanted to say something acid about how terrible it must be to be the actual king of somewhere, except he really did seem to be having a hard time of it.
“So what happens now?” Jack asked.
“I have told them that you get returned to the city. I’m going to watch you from the walls when you leave, even. Non-negotiable. Kingly decree. To make sure you’re safe.”
“I mean, to you,” Jack said. A little lump formed in Banders’s throat at the way they were trying to out-selfless each other.
Masty shrugged. “I mean, what can you do against a royal destiny,” he declared. “I shall be the best ruler of my people that I can and try not to get assassinated by a vizier. Or General Halseder, for that matter.”
“That’s Lefty?”
“None other. Lost the arm defending my parents, he says.”
“I mean, based on how that turned out, he made a piss-poor job of it,” Banders said, then clapped her hand to her mouth. “Shit, that was—”
“It’s fine,” Masty told her. “I don’t remember them. Not really. I don’t remember any of it, except fuzzy, bright images. A garden, a toy, clothes, a chair. None of it’s real to me. What’s real is… the army. Soldiers, marching, getting cuffed because I was slow learning Pel. Ammies for lunch. Keeping my head down. Fitting in.”
Banders stared into her teacup. “Yeah, well. Not exactly kingly. Sorry.” As though she was authorised to tender apologies for the entire Palleseen Sway.
“No,” Masty said. “That’s just… that’s me. That’s my life. It’s what I am. What made me me. I don’t want to be anyone else but me.”
At that point, General Halseder turned up, looking as though he’d rather be stabbing someone. Banders remembered him getting his knife out in the market. She’d thought he was about to gut Masty then. He’d been offering his service, she guessed, trying to swear fealty to the royalty he’d recognised in Masty’s face.
*
They were taken to the regular entrance to the palace, then. The Wolf Palace, ancient seat of the Kings of Bracinta, and soon to be so again.
The city was full of Pal soldiers who could be back on duty again very quickly. Banders didn’t see that Lefty turning up in the city square and making the announcement was going to go down well. The looming geopolitical upheaval was overshadowed, for her, by the prospect of having to go back to the Butcher and explain that they’d lost Masty.
Except, even as she and Jack reached the edge of the square that fronted the palace, a cloaked figure slipped out from nowhere with that particular brand of stealth the man always had. Not her kind, slinking away the moment she was looked for, but the way he was always there when you wanted him. Just fading from the background with whatever it was you needed right at that moment. In this case, what she really needed was her old friend Masty, and here he was, cloaked up but with most of his uniform under it, and no twenty feet of ermine trailing at his heels. Probably no expensive hat either, given it wasn’t exactly something he could have stuffed in his codpiece, and that was a shame because Banders could have sold that.
“What, they let you off kinging for good behaviour?” she demanded, and he got three words into explaining that, no, he’d dodged the lot of them and run away to rejoin the army when she hugged all the breath out of him.
At around that point there was a shout from back towards the palace, and Banders said “Run?” and Masty said “Run!” and they ran.