Shon was grabbed by three or four pairs of hands right then and there. Wardens twisting his arms behind his back, forcing him to his knees. I saw the Marshal striding through the crowd as though he had been waiting for this moment all through the duel, pulling a flintlock pistol from his belt without any emotion registering on his face. I ran forward at him, shouting that Shon had only been saving Peter’s life. Some anonymous Warden hit me in the nose with an elbow, and I went straight down. When I sat up, blood all down my chin, I saw Shon, struggling in his captors’ grip, the Marshal putting the flintlock’s long barrel to the back of his head.
Doctor Mandri gently took the barrel between forefinger and thumb and moved it some four inches up before it fired. It must have near deafened poor Shon, but it failed to explode his head. The Marshal recoiled from the intruder and snapped out at him cold as ever, “Do not interfere with the running of this Island, Doctor.”
In the aftermath of the shot Mandri’s calm, clear voice carried perfectly. “I am only preventing a miscarriage of justice,” he said. His friend and colleague, Jonas Destavian, was lying only a few feet away, as dead as could be, but apart from a little extra gravity in his tone, you could not have told it.
“This prisoner just assaulted a free citizen of Shadrapar,” the Marshal informed him. “I am afraid that it would be a poorly run prison that tolerated that.”
“He is not a prisoner,” Doctor Mandri said.
The Marshal stared at him.
“From the moment the duel started he became Peter Drachmar’s second,” the Doctor continued. “Bewley Anteim broke the law by stepping into the circle, and this man was quite within his rights. He was merely performing his duty as a second.”
The Marshal tilted his head in a way that he was suggesting having Doctor Mandri executed as well, but the Doctor simply gave a tiny nod and then knelt down next to Peter. He had an old medical bag with him and he took from it some cleanser, sealant and a Universal Salve bottle. I saw why, in his position, it was important to be both a medical and a legal man.
The Wardens held onto Shon uncertainly, and for his part he stopped struggling, and they all watched the Marshal. He looked at the Doctor’s back, and then at Shon. He looked for the Governor, who had left, and then at nothing at all, and I felt the wheels of his brain try to grind their way through the technicalities of the situation. Surely he could kill whoever he wanted. At the same time, he was a law-fearing man and the entrance of Destavian had extended the confines of Shadrapan law to cloak his Island. I saw his greed for control at war with his need for order, and I saw it all from the way he stood, because none of it showed on his face. I will say this for the Marshal: he must have been motivated by a genuine respect for the letter of the law, rather than fear of reprisal as most of us are. If he killed Shon then nobody would touch him for it, yet he hesitated still, then signalled for Shon to be released.
I cautiously made my way over and Doctor Mandri glanced up at me. “I think that he will live,” he said, matter-of-factly. There was far too much blood around. Most of it was Peter’s and some of it was mine. The wounds left by the Ropa blade did not bleed at all.
“Is there someone to look after him?” the Doctor was asking. I thought of the hostile and uncaring Island, and then of Kiera, and said, “I really can’t say.”
Mandri grimaced. “Well… I’ll leave something for him that should help him mend.” He put a hand up, and I helped him stand. He looked tired and worn, and I think he had been arguing with the Marshal and attending to Peter as a way of taking his mind off other things.
“What now for you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Home. There are other duellists. My services will not rust for want of use.” He pressed his lips tight together for a moment. “There will not be another Jonas Destavian in my life, but what of that? One was enough. I wish you luck here, Stefan, although it seems about as luckless a place as one might find on this blasted earth. You, your friend and Peter. And his lady friend, whom I wish I could help.”
Shon and Midds the Warden were looking after Peter, I saw, and nobody was paying attention to me, and so when Doctor Mandri walked to the edge of the Island and looked out at the water and the encircling trees, I went with him.
“Perhaps you are lucky after all,” he said softly. “To live here, amongst this…” One hand described the man-eating jungle, the monster-haunted lake.
I said: “What?”
“I would rather stay amongst this than return to the vice and grime,” Doctor Mandri told the view. His voice was sad and strange, with crests of feeling breaking at random through it. “I would rather die amongst this life here. Perhaps I should turn to crime. Did you read Trethowan, Stefan?”
I told him, with feeling, that I did.
“I always enjoyed Trethowan. He found a happiness out here, you know.”
“He was committed to the Island and he died here,” I told him, thus breaking a great secret open on Shadrapar.
Doctor Mandri regarded me wryly. “Well, we spoil everything, don’t we? We are an ingenious people.” He blinked, and I saw tears huddled in the corners of his eyes. “I loved him,” he said, and did not know whether he meant as a son or a friend or a true lover. I was conscious of Destavian’s body there, a bloodless slot in its chest. Doctor Mandri looked into my eyes then and saw that I could not understand why he did not have the Marshal kill the lot of us.
“He would have wanted it this way,” the Doctor said. “He was a good man.”
Then a Warden came to take Shon and I back below. The show was over. I never saw Doctor Mandri again.
*
I managed to slip away from the workshops shortly afterwards, under the pretence of going to relieve myself. The Wardens were too involved in reliving the duel to care where I was going or how long I would take. I crept from the working masses and went to the old storeroom where Kiera was holed up.
She was dressed as a Warden still, and watched me from the shadows for some time before I found her.
“So what?” she asked straight out.
“He won,” I said, and then corrected it to, “Peter won.”
Kiera stared at me, and then made a kind of hard shrug that flung her hair back from her face. “Pity,” she said. “I was looking forward to the jungle.” Her eyes were like the eyes of Doctor Mandri, though, with unacknowledged tears beading behind them. She stared at me, tough and independent, for perhaps twenty seconds more. Then, “Oh God, he actually won?”
When I nodded mutely, she flung herself at me and held me fiercely, and I put my arms around her, and tried not to think of her hair, or the way her body felt next to mine, and failed, mostly. My libido was never a respecter of occasion.
She shuddered once and I thought that the weeping would start after all, but sometimes Kiera de Margot was just as tough as she made out and she kept it all inside.
“There’s more,” I told her, but only as soon as she felt able to let go of me. “He was hurt.”
She stared at me, waiting.
“Doctor Mandri, he said that Peter would live, but he’s not going to be up and about for a while. He won’t be able to… look after you. The other Wardens know this. I don’t know whether you think it’s safe to stay or whether you want to chance it after all.”
Her eyes flicked away from me, thinking.
“What do you think, Stefan?” she asked me. “The Marshal’s writ, will it still run without Peter? You know the way these people work better than I do.”
I tried to imagine the Marshal and how he would be reacting to all this. I never had got my head around the way the Marshal hated Lady Ellera so much, and I considered that by beating Destavian, Peter had surely managed to infuriate the woman even more. Thanks to me, Kiera had come to symbolise rebellion against the Witch Queen’s wishes. First I had supposedly tainted her with my mind, then Peter had saved her from the fate Lady Ellera had chosen for her. Now Peter had saved himself, so retaining a tenuous shield over Kiera. What a net we three were all tangled in.
“I think it will hold,” I told Kiera. “I think that the Marshal will see that it holds, if only to spite Herself.”
“Then I’ll trust your judgement,” Kiera said flatly. “I’ve had enough of needing people. I suppose that Peter needs me now.”
We parted then, but she held my hand first, as women of good family did with their friends. I think she saw that our positions were not so different, certainly closer than we were to Peter. She made her own way back to the upper levels and I returned to the shop floor, where one of the Wardens caught me and beat me for idling, which was harsh but fair.
*
In the aftermath of Peter’s duel the Island was quiet and thoughtful, and the next few weeks passed almost in a dream. I worked, I slept. I transcribed Trethowan for the Governor, who seemed more and more pensive as though brought bad news he could share with nobody. Hermione invented a simple word game that was briefly all the rage along our stretch. There was an Outing at which I steered well clear of Tallan and he did me the like favour. In all that time, I saw Peter and Kiera the once.
Midds came, one day, and fetched me up to see them. I never really understood Midds. Only now, recounting all of these distant adventures, do I realise how many tiny acts of kindness I owe the man for. I think his upbringing amongst the Compassionates must have been rooted deeper in him than he knew.
Anyway, Midds brought me up to the Wardens’ level and there, just outside Peter’s room, was Kiera. She was still in her Warden’s uniform and, to my surprise, was playing chess. I came very close to just breezing straight up to her opponent and congratulating him on how well he was healing. It was not Peter at all, but balding Harkeri the artificer, who should not have been just sitting there playing chess with a female prisoner. I shut right down into subservient convict mode and waited to be acknowledged. Kiera glanced up a little too brightly, said something quietly to her adversary and gestured for me to follow her into Peter’s room.
Peter was not looking particularly recovered. He was asleep, though, and breathing easily, and Doctor Mandri’s medicines had obviously been working their magic on him.
I looked from Kiera to the open doorway, the chessboard beyond. “What was that about?”
She met my gaze levelly. “Give me some credit.” She sat beside Peter’s bedside on a chair she had borrowed from someone. “Politics is my family business, Stefan. Give me a lever and a place to stand… You, Peter and the Marshal, bless him, gave me that lever.” She tried a smile but it was tired and strained. The impression of ease she had given at the gameboard was gone. “It’s a matter of momentum. Peter’s opposition, the Marshal’s mandate, it broke their stride. There was a window in which I was not something to be abused and cast aside.” By now I was wishing I could break away from her gaze, but it was impossible. “I got my fingernails into that gap. I forced it. I didn’t behave like a prisoner. I didn’t wear the greys. I didn’t cower in Peter’s room. I pretended I was free to go where I wanted. I talked to them as equals. I learned their names. It’s always harder to do things to someone who knows your name. I started with Midds and Regenel – Red, they call him. I moved on to Harkeri and Gannon and Halo Phelder. I know most of them now. I was trained to remember names and faces. I could waltz out there and chat to any one of them and it would be just as though I was hosting a party back home. I smile, I flirt, I hang on an arm here and there. Who wouldn’t want to be with someone like me, the society hostess?”
The odd thing was, it was when she said that that she looked most like a prisoner. She looked worn down and under tremendous pressure.
“How long do you think—?” I started, and she cut me off sharply, though her voice was too low for the Wardens outside.
“You don’t need to swan in here with your Academy education to tell me that. It lasts as long as the Marshal remembers. It lasts so long as it needles the Witch enough to please him. As soon as his game’s out, then my game’s out too, and all those people whose names I know, Gannon, Harkeri and the rest, they’ll all forget my name. They’ll all pick up right where they left off. They might pause a moment, as though trying to place where they know me from, but no more. I’m living on someone else’s time again, but it’s the Marshal’s and I can’t use him—” there she stopped, but the words I think she was aiming for were like I could use you.
It was not as though I hadn’t known or couldn’t understand her position. I reached out, as gingerly as though she were venomous, and tilted her face to look at me. With the need to be bright and shining fallen from her, I could see how she would look in twenty years, if the sun left us that long. My own face probably showed how I would look when I was dead.
I won’t deny that part of me was hoping that mere need might turn into something more, but there have been more romantic circumstances, I admit. In retrospect, she probably had other priorities just then.
“I survive,” she said, and it could have been a motto for everyone on the Island.
*
It was almost a month before Peter was halfway well again. Bewley Anteim’s blade had cut deep and I think he owed his life to both Kiera and Doctor Mandri. The first I knew of his recovery was seeing him across the workshop floor. He looked worn and pale still, and a lot of the lines on his face were laughter lines no longer. He was on duty though, because in the Marshal’s eyes if he was well enough to walk he was well enough to work.
He came over as the midday meal was brought round, and gestured for me to go with him. In a nearby storeroom he sat heavily on a pile of sacks.
“How are you?” I asked, cautiously.
“Healing.” He managed a taut smile. “Glad to be out of that bloody room, I can tell you, and away from that bloody woman. I should have been up and about a week ago, but for her.”
I wasn’t convinced he should have been up and about at all, but I said nothing.
“I hate being cooped up,” he said, leaving me thinking that he had chosen a poor place to hide out, then. “Worse,” he added, “I hate being cooped up when someone’s after me.”
“The Anteims.”
“You can be sure.” He nodded grimly. “I hear your mate, the lawman, he took Bewley right down. Not that I’m complaining, you understand. Means they’ll be even keener, though, and I’m not up for another fight right now.”
“If they have sent someone he’ll be on the next boat,” I pointed out.
“And that’s due…?”
“Any day. Tomorrow maybe. That’s what Lucian was saying.”
“Tomorrow. Right.” He mulled this over. “I’m in the mood for a gamble, Stefan. I think it would be a good idea if, when that boat pulls in, I was elsewhere.”
I looked at him guardedly.
“I’m in the mood for a mining expedition,” he clarified. “Maybe one that gets stuck and spends a good three, four days out away from the Island where I can’t be found. That boat from the city has a schedule, after all. If it unloads a mess of duellists onto the Island, how long can they wait before they all have to go home? I can’t see people like Destavian slumming it for a whole month just to get at me. Sound like a plan?”
“Something approaching a plan,” I allowed.
“So are you up for it?” was his next question. “Great outdoors?”
I considered this carefully, remembering my last excursion with Sauven. “You have to bring Thelwel,” I said. “If he’s game, I am.”
“He’s good?”
“From what I’ve seen, indispensable.”
Thelwel was game. He was fond of nature, madman that he was. He was always ready to risk his life in the jaws of a monster, just for a bit of greenery and a clear sky above him. Even now I cannot understand where he got this attitude from.
*
I was up early for boat duty but Thelwel was there before me, patiently coercing the craft’s engines into some semblance of life. He smiled as he saw me and I peered over his shoulder, hoping to understand just what he was doing. The workings of the point generators were a botched mess of repair on repair, ancient systems drawn out into a long half-life by people like Thelwel and his father.
Peter turned up shortly after that with another prisoner in tow, and it took a moment before recognition set in, because Kiera was back in her greys and it was hard to reconcile. The clothes were potent symbols. Kiera and Thelwel were introduced, and he nodded to her warily, waiting for the whole story before making judgements.
Kiera was already looking edgily at the surrounding green, at the unguessable depth of the lake. She was as artificial a creature as I was, a city creation. As Peter stowed a few tools and toys in the locker, I sat close to her. I wanted to take her hand, strictly to comfort her of course, but she kept them clasped together.
“I was not going to stay behind,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want the Marshal to remember me and withdraw his protection.” Then, no louder, but with fierce feeling, “I’m fed up of living on someone else’s sufferance.”
Later I spoke to Peter, saying that I thought he had got fed up of Kiera’s company during his convalescence. He looked at me with some amusement, seeing straight through me and knowing that I saw straight through him.
“I owed her this much,” he pointed out. His expression was blandly good-natured.
*
We set off just as dawn was fingering the muddy water of the lake, and it was easier, this time, to bid goodbye to the walls and boundaries and pass into the endless shadow of the living jungle. When that line of darkness caught us, Kiera stiffened abruptly as though stabbed, and clutched the sleeve of my tunic.
“God,” she gasped between clenched teeth, “It’s like a nightmare.” I did not know whether she meant on general principles, or a specific nightmare of her own. Looking up at the vaulted and groined ceiling of green and grey and darkness, the phantom pillars of tree trunks briefly illuminated by our unhealthy ship-lights, I could only agree. It was all too close to my own fever dreams, to the Lady Ellera’s green room.
We cruised softly through a vine-hung, tree-made gallery, large as a civic hall and lightless as a crypt. We were silenced by the scale of it and the boat made no sound save the faintest hum of the generators. We were at the centre of a chorus of calls and cries, croaks and rumblings, the slosh of water and the buzz of wing. Thelwel was smiling without knowing it. His eyes shone in the harsh light of the lamp. Kiera had pushed herself up beside me, shoulder to shoulder, seeking some human contact in the face of all that other. Her face was tugged at by fear and wonder.
Peter was untouched, not a man for imponderables.
Without ever breaking the hushed mood, something longer than the boat surfaced beside us. What it was I cannot say, for its black hide barely reflected our lights, but one small eye regarded us with a disturbing acuity, as though weighing us all in the balance. I almost expected it to speak, like that other swamp prodigy, but it just rolled away from us and was gone into the ink of the water. In all that time, none of us had made a sound.
Kiera looked to me to supply some information about our visitor, but Trethowan had not mentioned it and I could say nothing.
*
We found a spot to mine that was rich enough, and Peter got down to the subject of sabotage with Thelwel.
“These boats break down, don’t they?” he suggested.
Thelwel, humble prisoner before a Warden, said nothing.
“Not often, but it happens,” Peter continued.
Thelwel made a noncommittal noise.
“For instance, something might happen on this trip,” Peter pointed out. “The machines might go wrong and strand us for, say, three days. We can last three days out here.”
Thelwel was watching him unhappily. I do not believe that Peter realised where all the blame would land if this plan of his went awry.
“So, maybe you could think of something that might pop out of joint and take just that long to fix,” said Peter, now getting a little testy at the lack of response. “And maybe you could see that it happens, Thelwel, you follow me?”
“These boats go wrong enough without having to rig them,” Thelwel said, not looking at him.
“That’s the spirit,” Peter started, and then decided that it wasn’t. “Look, Thelwel, do you understand what I’m asking you?”
Thelwel’s expression said that he understood all too well. Thelwel himself said nothing.
“Help me out, Stefan,” Peter tried. I left Kiera to sit by Thelwel, who was looking profoundly put upon. It was not just the prospect of punishment, I saw. The idea of deliberately damaging a machine for no reason other than convenience did not sit well with him.
I told him the whole story: Peter’s quarrel with the Anteims, the duel, the threat of further repercussions, also the problems that Kiera and I would face if Peter died. Through it all, his expression did not change, but at the end of it he said, “I can do it,” which was what I was after. Only when I was about to thank him did he add, “I do not like the Anteim family myself.”
Peter snorted. “Good man. We’ll get together and plot against them some time. Kiera too. Weren’t your family up against them?”
“More often than not,” she agreed. “Stefan?”
“I’m a very peaceable man,” I protested.
“Until a friend of yours cut most of Bewley Anteim’s head off. You probably made their list for that,” Peter suggested. An unpleasant thought occurred to me.
“I hope Shon’s all right,” I said. “I hope they don’t pick on him.”
Peter cursed suddenly.
I can still hear the terrible cry I gave out a moment later, when I realised what I was seeing. At first I thought it was just the humped backs of two fish moving towards us: that was all there was above the waterline. Then I looked beneath and saw that the two bumps were the raised eyes of a monster twice the length of our craft that was cruising in our direction at some speed. In form it was something like the luminous visitor to my cell Below – a long-bodied salamander with appallingly broad jaws and a powerful tail that was thrashing it through the water at us. It must have been forty feet long.
Peter dived for the lockers straight away, and Kiera grabbed the nearest loose object, one of Thelwel’s tools, and threw it straight at one of the eyes.
Her aim was dead on, and the lump retracted into the creature’s skull briefly in pain, but then the monster was rearing up before and over the boat, hoisting its head and forelimbs out of the water. It was high enough to blot out the light, its great semicircle of head, all streaming water and greenish hide, angling down on us. I saw those jaws gape, rimmed with needle teeth. It could have snapped any one of us up in a single gulp. The boat was rocking wildly with the swell, Kiera and I both crying out. Thelwel was scrambling towards it up the slope of the deck, waving his arms, and the monstrously huge head focused on him, each eye moving independently to track him.
It can’t work, was what I was thinking. This one has eyes, and it’s far too big to be fooled by his trick. I saw the jaws feint at him, as he stood there on the edge of the boat, balancing against the waves. The snout came within half a foot, backed, advanced again. I was crouched in the bottom of the boat, half-holding Kiera, both of us staying quite still and not giving the monster any excuse to notice us.
Thelwel was breathing very fast and his face was set and steady. He had his arms out for balance, and it looked like he was about to embrace that hideous head. The monster made a deep grumbling that vibrated through the metal hull of the boat, and hooked one foreleg over the side, tilting us towards it. Thelwel leant slowly back, still keeping his precarious footing, and that ponderous head tried to find a way round him, swinging in great baffled arcs.
Peter made a small satisfied sound, and I hoped that he had found a gun.
All of a sudden the monster pressed hard down on the side of the boat, and we all fell towards it. I saw Thelwel actually bounce back from its very lips, and Kiera and I were rolling over one another, helplessly tumbling towards that opening mouth. Past us dashed Peter, and I saw (and even in that moment I could hardly believe it) that he was leading with the point of a Ropa blade.
I think he yelled some battle cry. There was so much going on I cannot be sure. I saw the full length of the blade slide easily into the monster’s flesh, somewhere above one foreleg, and the monster gave out a shrill shriek of pain, but refused to die. Even the death-field of the Ropa blade had not been able to find a vital organ in that mammoth beast. Peter had time to swear foully and take a two-handed grip on the embedded sword. The blade came free as the creature reared back, and Peter fell into a crouch, holding the weapon before him. Then the monster lunged forward. Jaws agape, it bore down as though it would swallow us all at once. I heard Peter cry out in shock, but when I looked there was another gash across the nose of the monster from the Ropa sword, and Thelwel was in its teeth. It had gripped him across the body and one arm, and I thought it would swallow him, but instead it just flung his loose body away into the trees.
Peter kicked off from his crouch and brought the blade in an arc that cut a long and bloodless line across the entire width of the monster’s throat. He let the momentum of the sword carry him through, off the boat and into the water, because that vast head, suddenly and abruptly bereft of animation, was crashing down on the boat. On myself and Kiera.
That falling silhouette, large enough to mask the whole sky, was my last memory for some time.