Sean

The week blurred on, in that peculiar way that summer weeks occasionally do. Weather turns fitfully in Ildathach, so my outfits hewed to a blustery tempo. I wore a shooting jacket during my last session with a client of mine at the beginning of the week, a pleasant enough coxcomb who needed to learn how to wear the cavalry swords that are just now teetering on the brink of fashionable. For my midweek classes with one of the more belligerent department of Gallowglass and Grimm, I taught in nothing but a shirt and a thin coat. By the end of the week, I had returned to the shooting jacket, and shivered quietly at the unseasonable cold.

Ildathach bustles around me. Hundreds of blank faces- shuffling, uncurious crowds. It is, at least on this street, an onslaught on the senses. Smells and sounds. Of the former, nothing positive can really be stated. I’m not, thank the Saints, living near the tanneries anymore. But the pack animals that clog the muddy roads create an odour that cannot be beaten back by the restaurants, the perfumeries, or the swarms of street florists. Orchids are particularly popular this year. Every fashionable soirée or café or lounge, must be draped and cluttered with endless bushels of flowers, imported at great cost from Cabochon on the Far Coast. In response to this demand, the city has become infested with flower sellers. Social status means that I’m wearing one now, pinned to my lapel.

Street hawkers raise their voices over clacking hoof steps, competing with creaking wagon and tromping feet. I step neatly around a young boy who is currently hurling eye-curdling insults at a woman leaning out of a balcony two stories up. He’s clutching a wicker basket, which is attached to a rope, which is attached to a pulley, which is clutched by the woman. He’s claiming that she’s stiffed him, though he phrases that sentiment in a way that is uniquely and improbably crass. Their background bickering is swallowed by the general murmur of the street, and I pace forward over uneven, poorly-set cobblestones.

The threshold between the neighbourhoods of Browne Lane and Coin and Woe is obvious, as the road is abruptly flanked by uniform clutches of stark-white townhouses. The street here is clean, at least: cows, horses, naemi, and other pack animals are all banned from the district. I carve my way through the streets, dodging the crowds down Hackcloth Road. Uncharacteristically, Incandescent Square seems relatively empty, and I plough directly through it, scattering a horde of idle pigeons in my advance. There are a handful of pilgrims at the cage in the centre of the plaza, robed and knife-wielding adherents of Saint Mantis. The Saint’s corpse, still wearing her ancient armour, slouches on a throne in the centre of the cage. The amulet on her chest is beautiful, and filigreed in unreadable Saint-language. Given Saint Mantis’ history, it almost certainly implies something unpleasant.

I heard a rumour that the rubies and diamonds coating her ancient bones are fakes, and that the real ones had been stolen centuries ago. One of the dazzling stones in the centre of her jawbone catches the light as I walk by. The parts of her skull that were shattered by her sisters have been covered with tasteful ornamentation. I pass the corpse, the sad mortal remnants of an immortal Saint, and quicken my pace. The pilgrims don’t look up at me at all.

Past the square, down the streets again, through a sea of brown wool coats and light summer hats. A handful of waist-coated men lounge in a whitewashed doorway, sharing a loaf of bread and pulling eagerly at a narrow shin of beef. One of them, noticing me, raises a water flagon in salute- though whether this is friendly or mocking, I do not know. I nod back.

My route takes me past the borders of Coin and Woe, down streets and alleys that I’ve trod a hundred times. I stroll past shops I’ve never been to, even after spending years wandering past them. Truth be told, I couldn’t recall the names of half of them, even if you pressed me. I pass under the gantries of the Liar’s Bridge, breathing a lingering redolence of rust and spiderwebs. Overhead, the webwork of riveted iron strains silently under the weight of the water from the canal it supports. I first saw this bridge two decades ago, and I remember gripping my mother’s hand as hard as I could when she walked us under it.

A woman with the burn scars of a musketeer watches the foot traffic from a perch about head-height off the ground. She’s wedged herself in a sitting position in the pigeon-infested gantries, and is swathed in a threadbare, stinking blanket. One leg is poking out of her rags, the skin practically scarlet, and has a texture more like wood than like flesh. She is bolt-upright and sweating, her cheeks flushed and bloated with a mouthful of henbane leaves. I don’t meet her placid stare.

Under the Liar’s Bridge, through another cobbled street, then finally onto the dirt roads that mark my emergence from the old city, from the centre of Ildathach. The shopfronts change abruptly, happy to revert back to their normal panoply of competing colours and sizes once freed of the restrictions of the heart of the city. Most of the buildings in this part of town are in the process of being raised by the Chaplain’s battalions of labourers. The road and half of the street is significantly lower than the buildings on the other side, which are supported and braced by hundreds of jackscrews. I peer into the cement-packed darkness below the building fronts, and wonder how long it’s going to be before my own home is hoisted as part of this fight against the rising banks of the Ilda River.

Only half of the buildings around me are now in the venerable style, their architecture fading and cracking. Of these, only a handful are not wearing their age well. Some are entirely new, the fevered workings of Ildathach’s steadily maddening corps of architects and artists. What the Tecuani and the Dunaidh family did not destroy, the city itself has begun to dismember. I pass an ink-seller in tweeds who is unhappily sandwiched between an oyster monger and a just-opening cockfighting ring, each swarming with pedestrians and workmen. He gives me a bedraggled look, then points with his chin at a sight down the road. I turn my head to follow.

A Constabulary pack marches down the street towards me, five guards in olive overcoats and spiked helmets. One of them looks like he could be one of my students, but I know better than to ogle too long to find out. One is slight, but the remainder are broad-shouldered, genderless beneath those immense green coats. Completely impractical for the summer weather, but certainly imposing. No weapons or hands visible.

They trample past me, barely giving me a second glance. I’m close enough to smell the sweat roil off the coarse-spun overcoats, to see the worn patches on their arms. The Dunaidh family crest, the new one, stitched in scarlet over a cream background. Crown atop a crucible. They’ve left a perfect track of boot prints in the sucking mud, and I watch them march like clockwork down the road, before turning a corner. I walk on, in the opposite direction, glad to have avoided the attention of this patrol. Not that this is the last one I’ll see today.

I think it’s quite unlikely that the Constabulary will ever inspect me without at least some forewarning. To be clear, I’m not hiding anything, though realistically a Constabulary pack has never really been stopped by something as trivial as a lack of evidence. It’s been decades since the Chaplain’s Office declared certain families enemies of the city. The Whelan family, homed in distant Llancreg, has never really attracted the attention of the Chaplain’s Office. Luckily for us, we never had any real allegiances to Ildathach’s royals, so when the Dunaidh family slaughtered all of them my grandfather’s father was more than happy to continue swearing fealty to the new rulers of the city. In Ildathach, the horror stories of the Chaplain’s reach have started to die down. The midnight raids have stopped, or at least become exceedingly rare. A certain amount of largesse has been established and cultivated with the city, as the Chaplain’s Office is slowly transitioning towards eradicating cholera and typhoid instead of political rivals. We all pretend to accept that ‘Chaplain’ should be a hereditary title.

Still, though. The Chaplain’s Office is, very rarely, fantastically unpredictable. I met one of my former students for a drink, a few weeks ago, after he had been promoted to a Watch Captain. He’d mentioned, amongst a variety of other tall tales, the stories of the Chaplain’s fondness for eels, and the ponds in which he kept them. After a goliath measure of gin, he’d coloured these stories with what the Chaplain did to certain political detainees, and how fat the eels would be after he’d thrown those unfortunate parties, alive, into the ponds. The Watch Captain had insisted, multiple times, that those creatures had fangs the length of his thumb.

Allegedly, eels are one of the Chaplain’s favourite dishes. He has a reputation for serving them to prisoners.

Just drunken stories. Probably. My feet slip slightly in the mud as I cross the street to my home. Walking down to the front door is tricky, for two reasons- the steps down to the door are narrow, original pre-Calamity stone that were likely never fitted well when they were originally set over a century ago. Additionally, I have clogged as much space as possible with greenery, most of which I have yet to attend to after a fortnight or two of neglect. A begonia shrub, set in the wall beside my window, is aggressively attempting to colonise as much of the façade of my flat as possible. Similarly, my petunias and my antirrhinums are waging a slow war of attrition against each other, crowding patiently towards the sunnier parts of the steps. Ildathach does its best to fill my little garden with litter, and I really have neglected clearing out the detritus of dung and playbills from the various alcoves in which they’ve gathered.

I slip past the plants on my way down from the street to my apartment. My new door handle is snug and unweathered. It should be. I spent hours getting the fit right.

*

Morning in Ildathach is, on the surface, beautiful. The air is atrocious, compared to Llancreg’s, as it is full of soot and chemical effluent and smog and presumably whatever arcane energies are bled into the world by the city’s industrial knotwork. The last time I returned home, my lungs ached with the taste of the countryside. In the city, when I wipe my nose the kerchief is always stained grey by the dust.

When the sun is low, though. Something about the way it strikes the manufactories, which have been belching acrid clouds for hours, is truly gorgeous. I stare at the smoky kaleidoscopic spray of the mid-morning sun, then continue walking and devour the remains of a fist-sized loaf of brown bread. I veer east out of Quilton, to the border of Jejune.

This edge of the district is the eventual residence of the wealthier sort of captains and industrialists, and is avoided by many who want to avoid the dock’s otherwise surly reputation. I plough through another flock of pigeons, who coo darkly as they reform into a mob behind me. Minutes later, while strolling past the lobelias in one of Jejune’s many tiny, flat-cobbled parks, I take the longer route around a similar gang of crows. Pigeons are one thing. Crows remember you.

My boots are covered in street-muck by the time I make my way to the low, long Gallowglass & Grimm building. I am stricken with a moment of superheated panic when I step behind a horse on the street and am immediately almost crushed by a caravan of frantic squawking naemi. The birds don’t bother me, but the stressed whinnying of the horse does, and I am paralysed for a moment with memories of grinding hooves and the long, bloody spears of howling knights.

The Aergan traders sling countryside curses at me in Aerinic as I stumble backwards, avoiding the idiot gait of their awkward, massive animals. Naemi are somewhere between cows and trees in terms of general intelligence, but every Aergan child knows the threat a nervous bird represents. These naemi have had their beaks blunted and their claws cut, but being kicked by a five hundred pound bird is fairly unpleasant no matter how you slice it. In the ensuing fracas I manage to stumble squarely into a muddy puddle with my first step and a mound of cow shit in the second. Thus spattered (and, sadly, mocked by a passing child), I make my way to the dark warehouse of my employer and prepare to remove my shoes.

Luckily, this is part of the plan anyway, because we are fighting. I enter under a huge, looming portcullis, holding my boots apologetically as I say hello to the scrivener at the front desk. Mercifully, he brings me a pail of water and offers no cutting remarks.

Minutes later I pad socks-only into the building, shuck my rucksack in a chosen courtyard, and wait for the mercenaries to arrive.

They emerge as an obstreperous pack. Mostly men, a few women, from all over the continent: Yvreathans, Wraithwilders, even a few scattershot Al Khazraj, far from home. All are dressed in red trousers and red shirts, some of them sport red sashes or red bandanas. Their sandals are red, their weapons are held in red sheaths. On their chests, red on red, the stylised G of their employer. The fighting wing of Gallowglass & Grimm, the other half of what is an already ruthless banking organisation, and as permanent a fixture of the belligerent part of Ildathach as the army is. In polite company, both halves of the Red Bank are noted for their simplicity, thoroughness, and dogged determination. In more honest conversations, or in villages or boroughs that have been visited by the various specialists that make up the more intimidating parts of the company, we use crueller adjectives.

Every Red Bank mercenary in the city is always happy to practice fighting. There aren’t as many as there used to be, during the war, but you see them on ships and caravans, sometimes lurking outside of banks or manors. This pack knows me, and treats me with a modicum of respect. They all know how to fight, but they don’t necessarily know how to fight together, which is the job that Gallowglass & Grimm has hired me, and a handful of other veterans, to do. I adopt a less friendly persona, greet them, and begin.

Forty-five minutes later, I stand before a pair of Gallowglass & Grimm brawlers, one of whom is currently doing his best to strangle the life out of the other. They’re doing what I taught them- the currently winning fighter has taken his opponent down and is positioned behind him, choking him with one sinewy arm. Rank straw sticks to his bare back. They struggle, thrashing along the floor. I take a moment to read the massive tattoo that has been scrawled on the front of the victim’s writhing chest. Orthodox liturgy, inked just under his clavicles:

ONE HUNDRED MEN ONE HUNDRED SAINTS ONE HUNDRED SINS ACCUMULATE

The technique is good. I say so, before any serious damage is done by the choke, and the pair detach. They take a moment to breathe- the loser has bent over double and has both hands on his hips. Half a minute later they’re clashing again, practicing the same manoeuvres. Say what you will about the mercenaries, they’re relentless. Last week, we had to extract a tooth out of Yeoman Owain’s hairline after he rammed his head into the now-hospitalised Mister Meagher’s jaw.

There are a handful of other bouts occurring about the straw-strewn plaza, and I take a moment to observe each one. All the mercenaries are good enough that most of what I do is minute: a sentence or two of instruction, a nudge with the toe or the tip of a practice sword to show them better positioning. A few minutes later, I find myself being stared down by a fatigued yet baleful Al Khazraj sergeant.

She’s dropped the wooden practice sword that she was supposed to be using. I, because I am not an idiot, have not. The rest of the troupe coagulates in a semicircle around us- some quiet, some laughing, all exhausted. Sergeant Al Khamdi, flush with her victory over Mister Moss in the spar previous, had joked about being good enough to teach the class. I doubt she’d imagined I’d actually rise to her implicit challenge, but I know what happens when you let these things fester.

They’re all good at this. This is the primary issue with teaching the Gallowglass and Grimm pack. Half of them served in the Ildathach military, and the other half come from pugnacious backgrounds from across the continent. Some of them are undoubtedly better than me at certain things- Mister Soames, for example, is an Aerganite who grew up within a hundred miles of me, and every tenth shot he can split one arrow with another from twenty yards. I’ve watched all of them, over these last few weeks, and I must admit that in a fair fight Sergeant Al Khamdi would, occasionally, kill me.

She’s circling to my left, away from the arc of my swing, and when I switch my sword to my off hand she too shuffles and reverses her footwork. There’s a calculation from her side, to attempt to negate my swordsmanship by throwing her own weapon away, to utilise my gentleman’s gravitas against me and disarm me with social rather than literal pressure. This is a trap I recognise, and I will not humour her, so the first thing I do is completely reverse my grip on my practice sword until I am clutching the blunt wooden blade, swing it low, and hook her lead ankle with the cross guard.

Sergeant Al Khamdi drops, startled, but recovers enough to not break anything or lose her composure. I toss my sword to the audience and grin, arms wide, eliciting a braying laugh from the crowd. The Sergeant worms her way forward, now recovered to a low crouch, and instead of letting her seize my ankles or my wrists or trip me or throw me or rise under me I crouch down myself and pull her bodily over me, so that she is above me and I am below her. Entirely taken my surprise by this manoeuvre, the sergeant slots neatly into my plan and begins grappling me in earnest.

I have a fairly sizable number of these little tricks that I can employ on the unexpecting, but unfortunately I’ve already displayed a number of these to the mercenaries.

There are a lot of things that happen, all at once, but none of them are particularly important. I am much larger than the Sergeant, I am not tired, and, most importantly, I am fairly certain I know what she will do, because I have been teaching her. This is the difference between using the sword or the fist or the knee and wrestling- here I am patiently building towards an inevitable goal, and if she does not resist in certain small ways I will eventually win. She struggles, writhing and fighting, seizing my clothes in a shockingly strong grip. I wedge my feet between her flexed legs and lift her, keeping her off balance.

Perhaps it is the cheering from the crowd, or my own overconfidence, but I am surprised when she surrenders her wrestling position, and rears up, pulling her body into a moment of immense strength, then drops her weight down on my face via her elbow.

Saint, I am seeing stars. My entire vision goes black and the back of my head slams into the cobblestones, audibly. I taste sand as my teeth grind together.

She shifts again, pulling for another thunderous strike. I can’t actually see her, but this time I buck my hips, and her attack is sloppy, robbed of power. It glances off of my forehead, and my sight swims back. She moves again.

Saints. I can’t even see her face.

I end it. There is a limit to her ferocity, and although with swordsmanship there is something to be said for recklessness and bravery, the same does not ring true when tangled like this. I switch the position of my limbs around her, seize her opposite arm, thread it between my body, and position myself to break it. This does not take her by surprise, but she has been fatigued by nearly an hour of hard training, and I have not.

She grunts, squirming, and for a moment I think she will escape, but I raise my hips just slightly and she yields almost instantly.

When she asks me later how close she was to winning, she does so with a humility and a respect that I don’t expect. I laugh it off, because I have a reputation to uphold. My advice is earnest, and my compliments aren’t forced. But I tell her she’ll have to try much harder in the future, which is a lie.

I should’ve been more careful, less overconfident. If you tell someone that no holds are barred, you can’t be surprised when they try to kill you. Something my mum used to say. The kind of pain that the sergeant inflicted on me is far from the heart, and I’m more disappointed in myself than I am legitimately injured.

When the mercenaries leave, they do so with a measure of deference, a boisterous troubadour swagger, and a probably decreased chance of challenging me the next time we meet. I wait until I’m home, far from any prying eyes, before I inspect the damage in the mirror and cool my face with a fist-sized block from my icebox.