It was late evening by the time Kallion stood outside the apartment building on the Vallina where he had gone in a very different mood two nights earlier. He hadn’t exactly hurried, but he hadn’t dragged his heels aggressively enough either, and the hour was not yet so late that he could turn away and come back tomorrow. Or, better yet, find someone who could give the damn contract to Pyke and let her deliver it herself. He wished he had never mentioned that he knew where Nikias lived.
When he had climbed the stairs and found the door—he remembered the door, it had a charm hanging on it with a bead in the shape of a cat head, which he had thought adorable two nights ago—luck seemed finally to be on his side. There was no answer to his knock.
He stood there a minute or two for form’s sake, gave another perfunctory knock, and touched a fingertip to the cat charm’s nose. Then he turned to leave.
Nikias was standing at the top of the stairs. He hadn’t seen Kallion yet; he was leaning heavily against one hand on the wall, eyes closed, obviously tired and in pain.
“Nikias,” said Kallion briskly. Better to get this over with.
Nikias’s eyes popped open. They looked slightly unfocussed. Immortal gods, he had been drinking. (Of course he had been drinking; in his situation, who wouldn’t?) Please let him not be drunk.
“What do you want?” He sounded merely tired.
“I’ve come with an offer. Not—from me. From Satteia, Epaphras Photionis’s wife. She wants to help you set up in business. If you want.”
Nikias peered at him doubtfully for a moment, glanced around the gallery as if confused, then looked back at Kallion.
“What?” he said finally.
“Look, uh.” He wanted to suggest they sit down somewhere, but the only place was inside Nikias’s room, on Nikias’s bed. And no. “How’s your back?”
Nikias raised one eyebrow in a way Kallion hadn’t seen him do before. It was remarkably charming.
“Stiff. Itchy.”
Kallion winced. “Yes, the itching is the worst part, almost, isn’t it?”
“Is it.”
“Er, as I was saying, Satteia heard about the trouble Pyke had, and how you have left her employment, and she wants to help you open a snack stand of your own. Not in the form of charity, of course. She wants to offer you a sum to help establish your business, in return for a share of the profit. This is—I was interested to learn—something she has done before. She owns a share in a bakery, a glassworks, and an import-export business.”
“And she wants to own a snack stand.”
“A share in a snack stand, yes. She thinks you could open in the Tetrina Market—that’s near where I live. It’s an excellent idea because there’s no one selling snacks there, and it’s a busy market. She has some ideas about what you could sell and so on.” Kallion wished this conversation would end. It was becoming more and more absurd. And some of it was veering into untruths. These had not been Satteia’s ideas. “Obviously you will have to meet with her in order to discuss the details, but she wanted me to bring you the contract and go over it with you … Perhaps you’d better come see me at the clerks’ hall in Court Row tomorrow. We can talk then.”
“Yeah,” said Nikias leadenly. “That would be better.”
That would be better, and it could have been conveyed in a message; there was no need for Kallion to have come here himself. He cursed himself for not thinking of that.
They remained standing there awkwardly. Kallion would have to pass Nikias to get to the stairs, and Nikias was not moving.
“I’m not going to invite you in,” Nikias said finally.
“No! What? No, of course not.”
Nikias moved out of the way of the stairs, and Kallion rushed overeagerly toward them.
“Good night!” he called without looking back.
Nikias woke the next morning with a headache. He didn’t think he had drunk all that much the night before, so this just seemed insulting. He lay in bed looking at the sun coming in his small window and hitting the floor in a bright square, remembering his conversation with Kallion.
If he hadn’t seemed enthusiastic about Satteia’s proposal last night, it was only because it had been delivered by the last person he wanted to see or even think about. As far as the proposal itself, he was all for it. The Tetrina Market sounded like a perfect location; he hadn’t visited it yet himself, but somebody had been telling him all about it … Oh. That had been Kallion.
Lysandros had done that thing that philosophers always seemed to want to do, and got Nikias to see things upside down and backwards. He realized he’d been a sanctimonious prick, pretending that he knew what Kallion should and shouldn’t be ashamed of, and he owed Kallion an apology.
He hauled himself out of bed, finding that his back was less stiff than yesterday, dressed, and set off for Court Row.
He’d never been here before, and didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out to be a long, arcaded building running down one side of a narrow street next to the imposing bulk of the Hall of Justice. Inside the arcade were lawyer’s offices, their names and symbols—a sword, a crow, a balance, and so on—painted on signs beside the doors. Nikias asked a messenger boy whether he knew where to find Kallion, and was directed to an arch at the end of the arcade.
Beyond the arch was not an office but a large hall, airy and pleasant, with clerks’ desks arranged in rows, occupied by young men busily writing and talking to clients. The murmur of conversation was like the sound of the sea, and the room smelt pleasantly of wax and paper. Tall book-cupboards filled with scrolls lined the walls.
Kallion’s desk was halfway down on the side of the room near the door. His head was bent over some document, but there was no one else at his desk. Nikias approached.
Kallion didn’t look up, just went on working. He was writing in ink, consulting a tablet beside him that was filled with something that looked more like scribbles than writing. His hair was tied back, out of his face, exposing the delicate curves of his ear.
“Oh, hello.” He looked up, an automatic smile on his face. Nikias felt as if he might melt. “Nikias. Hello.” The smile faded a fraction, and Kallion gestured at a stool on the other side of his desk. “Have a seat. I’ll—um, be with you in a minute.”
“Sure,” Nikias mumbled. “You look busy.”
He pulled out the stool and sat gingerly, hoping it didn’t creak. It didn’t.
“Do you buy the furniture?”
Kallion looked up with a perplexed frown as Nikias was wondering why on earth he had said that.
“Um. It’s hired.”
“Oh. Just—it’s a good stool. Sturdy. I’m pretty big … ”
There was a pause. Kallion’s tongue flicked over his lips. “You are, yes.”
He looked back down at his paper—just stared at it, not writing.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Nikias said, his voice coming out too loud.
Kallion looked up, simple annoyance in his expression. He slapped the tablet shut and put down his pen.
“I’m sorry for being such an ass the other night,” Nikias went on quickly.
Kallion’s eyebrows rose. “Oh. That. You don’t need to apologize. There was a misunderstanding. You articulated something that—”
“I whatted?”
“Said. You said something that lots of people—most people—think.” He shrugged. “You don’t need to apologize for that.”
“No, I do. All the more so because most people think that way. Most people are wrong about things like that.”
“Uh. Are they?”
“Yes.”
Kallion spent a moment carefully rolling up the scroll on his desk.
“So,” he said finally, “yesterday evening, when we were alone outside of your room, that would have been a good time to talk about this. Today, here, would be a good time to talk about Satteia’s contract—but less good for this.”
Nikias laughed. “Yeah, all right. I see what you mean.”
“Good.”
Kallion reached down into a cubby under his desk and withdrew the scroll he had brought to Nikias’s apartment the night before—or anyway Nikias supposed it was the same scroll, as he hadn’t taken a very good look at it last night. Kallion unrolled it on the desk and stared at it for a moment.
“Right. So. I’ll read it to you, shall I?” He flicked a questioning glance from under his long lashes. They were being so careful to avoid offending each other now, and there was just the barest chance that Nikias might know how to read.
“Thanks.”
“So the first part is standard language for this kind of contract,” Kallion began. “It says—”
“You!” someone yelled from behind Nikias.
He swivelled on his stool to look behind him, shocked. A young man in a dirty tunic stood there, trembling with rage as he pointed a finger at Kallion.
“Agron,” said Kallion calmly, rising from his desk. “How can I help you?”
“You, help me?” Agron growled. He gave a despairing laugh. “That’s a good joke. Do you know how you could help me?”
He advanced around the desk, giving Nikias a wide berth and bouncing a little on his feet like a boxer. Kallion stood his ground, his posture tense but his expression cool.
“You could help me by dying in a ditch! You could help me by—Let go of me!”
Nikias had reached across the desk to grab the young man by the shoulder. He pushed him firmly back, swung around the desk, and got an arm securely across the fellow’s chest.
“He ruined me!” Agron yelled, his voice ragged with emotion. “Everything I had—everything … ”
He must have been a boxer, or a wrestler or something; he was very hard to hold onto, although Nikias was the bigger of the two. It didn’t help that the struggle was putting strain that Nikias didn’t need on his injured back.
“I know,” said Kallion seriously. “And I am sincerely sorry.”
“That—doesn’t—help!” Agron panted.
Nikias heard someone calling for guards, as everyone else in the hall stared and pointed at the commotion.
“I know,” Kallion said again. “And I know it won’t help for me to tell you that I had no choice. But what can I do now? Is there anything I can do now?”
“Now you can DIE AND GO TO HELL!”
Agron kicked out at Kallion’s desk, sending it over in a shower of tablets and scrolls, and wrenched free from Nikias’s grip. He scrambled over the fallen desk as Nikias dodged around it, and made a grab for the nearest weapon, which was the stool that Nikias had been sitting on. Nikias ploughed into him just as he threw the stool, hitting him full speed with his right shoulder. He heard the stool crash as Agron went over like a chopped tree.
By this time, guards from Court Row were coming in through the door, and a couple of other clerks hauled Agron up, blinking as if half stunned. Kallion was on the floor, but he was sitting up.
“Are you all right?” Nikias asked.
“Just slipped and fell avoiding the stool.” Kallion gathered himself up and got to his feet. “Nice work, thanks.”
Nikias rolled his shoulder, which hurt. His back was stinging ominously, too.
Two guards had arrived, and they escorted Agron out, slumped limply between them.
“What set him off?” one of the clerks near Kallion asked.
“He was a client of my late master,” said Kallion, his voice flat. “He was not treated fairly.”
“You’ll press charges, of course?” someone else asked.
“I’ll consider it,” said Kallion, and Nikias guessed that meant, “No.”
The others drifted away to return to their own business when it became clear that they were not going to get any more information than that. Kallion looked at Nikias.
“Are you all right?”
“Eh. Have a feeling I’m going to start bleeding through my tunic in a minute, which will look bad—but otherwise.” He stopped himself just in time from shrugging. “We’d better get this mess cleaned up.”
Kallion gave him a tired smile. His hair was coming out of its neat ponytail, and Nikias almost felt as if he could have reached out and tucked it behind Kallion’s ear, without it being strange. He found he still wanted to do it.
They gathered up the scattered documents and righted the desk. Kallion produced a satchel and put several scrolls into it.
“I just bought this. I thought it might come in handy if I’m ever attacked in the street again.”
Nikias snorted. “In case I’m not at hand to gather up your things for you.”
“I’m going to call it a day, you may not be surprised to hear. There’s a physician in the street behind Court Row who could take a look at your back. My treat?”
“Sure,” said Nikias. “Let’s go.”