Glen Cook - Wicked Bronze Ambition

Shadowslinger’s vast, wide mouth expanded into what she meant as a smile. She eyed me in a manner intended to be coquettish. My gorge rose. Gorge. Neat word. You don’t get to deploy it very often.

My dearly beloved growled, “Grandmother, behave. Father, be merciful. Tell us what’s going on. You’ve gotten poor Garrett out of bed six months before the crack of noon. You know how hard that is on him.”

Barate would do the talking. His mother liked it that way. That made everything creepier.

He sat up straight and slid to the edge of his chair. He extended his right hand, palm upward, toward the lean, bald man. “Richt Hauser.”

“Rich?” I said. He looked more like a Ned or a Newt.

“Richt.” Hardening on the end consonant. “Hauser.” With an “s” as in house, not as in hawser.

Strafa held my left arm with both hands. I was supposed to be impressed and maybe intimidated.

Richt Hauser did not so much as nod. That told me a lot about who he thought he was, which would be the most important man in the room.

Barate then indicated the woman. “Lady Tara Chayne Machtkess.”

Seemed I ought to know that name, at least the Machtkess part. She inclined her head in response to my bow, smiling thinly beneath narrowed, calculating eyes. I caught a whiff of something predatory. And, behind that, of something that might be a frightened little girl.

Barate shifted hands. He indicated the man in the other easy chair. “Kyoga Stornes. Often underfoot around here because he’s been my best friend since we were kids. But this time he’s here because he has some skin in the game.”

I knew the name. There were family legends about the adolescent adventures of Barate and Kyoga. At the moment Kyoga looked more like a victim than the perpetrator of malicious mischief.

Karma being a bitch?

Shadowslinger stirred impatiently. “Yes, Mother. Garrett, we need your expertise and resources.”

Remarkably polite. But these weren’t people I could tell to go away because I didn’t feel like working. Which I would never have to do as long as I remained hooked up with my wonder woman, Strafa.

“How so? In what way?”

Shadowslinger got some exercise by pointing at Hauser. Unhappily, Hauser reported, “Signs of preliminaries for a Tournament of Swords have begun to appear. We all have someone likely to be conscripted into the game.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Neither did Strafa. She asked, “What is a Tournament of Swords?”

Hauser’s instant response was irritation at being forced to explain. That morphed into an appreciation of the fact that this tournament business was not common knowledge even inside the highest levels of the sorcerer class. “Each few generations an uncertain supernatural process or power arises and compels a contest. .”

He stopped. Emotion had cracked his cool. He struggled to regain his composure.

Barate took over. “What happens is, a bunch of talented people, usually kids, get chosen to participate. Most come from families in the sorcery business. They aren’t asked if they want in. They’re conscripted. They’re supposed to fight until only one is left. That one wins the prize, which is a device containing all of the power of the defeated contestants combined. Back when the tournament was devised, the families wanted that so badly they all signed on. The final prize, power, would make the winner a minor god.”

I glanced from face to face. Nobody looked like they thought Algarda was pulling my leg. Kevans made a noise that sounded like a bleat of fear, which might be justified if this was on the up-and-up.

“No bullshit, Garrett. Those two have grandkids that could get pulled in. Kyoga’s son, Feder, seems to have gotten the news yesterday. Mother and I, naturally, are concerned for Kevans.”

“You’ve lost me and confused me. Somebody or something picks out kids. . always Hill kids? And they have no choice?”

“Almost always members of the founding families. But some of those don’t exist anymore, as much because of the tournaments as anything, so brilliant outsiders get dragged in to make up the numbers. Or, even uglier, the summons can go out to more than one member of the same family.”

That would be cruel. “All right. Cream-of-the-crop kids. And they’re expected to murder one another until only one is left standing.”

“Yes.”

“Crap. How? Why? And how come the whole damned world doesn’t know about it if it happens all the time?”

Strafa asked, “How can they make them fight? If they don’t want to?”

I said, “That would be a good place to start. Yes.”

“You have no choice. Say you’re a pacifist and you refuse to participate. Someone will cut your throat just because you make it easy.”

“In other words, what it is is an exaggerated and formalized, gamed-up version of what goes on among the ruling class every day, anyway.”

That got me unpleasant looks from members of the ruling class.

Barate said, “Some will fight, always, for the prize or just to survive. Some will try to win so they can get strong enough to end the tournaments forever. Whatever, young people will die, some of them horribly. Not all of the victims will be people directly involved in the game. There’s usually a lot of collateral damage.”

“But the public doesn’t notice.”

“Mostly it doesn’t happen in public. It’s no gladiatorial contest, like a bare-knuckles boxing tournament. It’s a secret war that, by its nature, can’t help having public effects. It leaves corpses and localized disasters. Unexplained magical encounters in the night are common and often lethal.”

Not unusual for TunFaire, really, until recently. Lately the city has suffered gut-wrenching spasms of early-stage law and order.

Barate said, “There is evidence in the historical record if you look. You won’t need to dig for it. We’ll give you a big head start by letting you interview several participants from the last tournament.” He extended his hand to indicate Hauser, the Machtkess woman, and his mother.

Kyoga reported, “My father kept a journal detailing his efforts and that of his two Companions.”

“But. .”

Hauser said, “Families were involved. Families hand down oral histories. We refused to play by the old rules. We sabotaged and aborted the tournament. We attacked the devil in charge instead of our friends. And we thought we had ended the tournaments forever.”

Lady Tara Chayne said, “We were wrong.”

I asked, “All of you?” Kyoga was Barate’s age.

Hauser said, “No. Meyness B. Stornes.”

Kyoga said, “I said my father. I was still in diapers.”

Hauser added, “Five of us rebelled. Meyness disappeared in the Cantard ten years later.”

All right. I looked from face to face. Sooner or later they would get around to explaining how they thought I fit. Sooner, I hoped. I was getting hungry. Strafa’s eyes had gone yellow with impatience. And Kevans was getting restless.

Hauser said, “We wrecked the last game because our grandparents got cut up bad in the round before that. That one didn’t work out according to plan, either, though we never found out why. Everyone involved died before they could explain. Some of us, though, were old enough to understand and friends enough not to want to kill each other over something that we didn’t believe was actually real.”

Lady Tara Chayne said, “There have been six tournaments, none of which went according to design. Something always went wrong, but a lot of people died anyway. When we were young we thought the whole thing might just be an entertainment for devils. I’m no longer as sure as Richt is that there’d never be an actual payoff, but I’m still set on ending the insanity.”