After he had a bath, after he had his clothes cleaned, Bueralan walked up to the wire fence that surrounded Vach Sala. ‘It wasn’t supposed to go like this,’ he said. The lamp he held revealed her bare cage, her solitary world. ‘Everything was supposed to end tomorrow. It looked like it would. Everyone was in position. All I had to do was leave. But Syl came back just a little too early.’
‘I feel like a fool,’ she said quietly. She wore a long gown of red and black, and her make-up was perfect. Aerala – who not so long ago had been a musician by the name of Sabine – had brought Sala the change of clothes and cosmetics with her dinner. ‘What will happen to me now?’
‘I’ll speak to Kana when he arrives tomorrow,’ he said. ‘He’s a good man. He’s run this town for a long time because of that. He’ll treat you fairly. I’ll make sure of that.’
‘You could open this gate.’ Sala rose and approached the wire fence. ‘I could be gone by the morning.’
‘You came here to work this town. You knew what it was about when you rode in.’
‘I – I did, yes.’ She hooked her fingers into the mesh. ‘Inen. Sorry, Zean. Your blood brother. He would often tell me how awful slavery was. It would be in the early hours of the morning, when it was quiet. He would tell me how it stole so very much from a person. He would shake those bells at me and I would just nod.’ The bells, Bueralan did not tell her, had been the way Zean had talked to Ruk and Elar beneath the floorboards of The Last Courtesy. They had slept there at night, beside the stolen building materials from the port. All the other buildings next to the brothel had been filled with them too. ‘He told me stories about Enaka,’ Sala continued. ‘He told me that before the War of the Gods, Enaka had only unlocked the chains of slaves once a year. Then he would lock them at the end of the day. Inen – Zean, I mean – told me it was the worst thing the god could have done because it gave false hope, and false hope was the chain that was tightest around a slave’s neck.’
She fell silent after that and, after a while, Bueralan left Sala to her thoughts and continued down the streets of Zajce. Beneath the water towers were cages full of sick mercenaries, many of them being watched by the slaves who had been freed. Somewhere in there were Lord Makara and Lady Jaora. He’d heard that they hadn’t believed they were being taken prisoner at first. Then they had begun to beg, each selling out the other.
Bueralan would talk to Kana, like he’d promised. He supposed he owed the mayor an apology for the way he’d behaved during their planning, but maybe he would just press the case of Vach Sala’s youth and how the experience of being in Zajce had changed her. Bueralan hoped that it had changed her, at any rate. He had met enough people to know that, a year from now, a life could be the same, no matter how much you disliked it. You could repeat the same horrors you saw, year after year, if you were not careful. It was something you had to guard against, he believed. No one else could be held responsible for your mistakes if you repeated your crimes after witnessing their consequences. It did not matter if you did it out of greed, or pleasure, or because you didn’t yet know how to change. If you continued, you were responsible and, in Bueralan’s opinion, the consequences were earned.
Around him, the dark shapes of the water towers loomed high against the night sky, like giants from a child’s nightmare. But Bueralan Le, the exiled Baron of Kein-turned-saboteur, did not fear them. They were nothing compared to the horrors he had been part of, so many years ago.