Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

As he passed the landing he ruffled Bello’s hair. The Fly youth mustered a smile for him. ‘You off to work, Master Holden?’

‘Always, son.’ The fighter paused, rolled his shoulders to loosen them. ‘Some fellow in the Gladhander fief’s getting too big for himself, needs a taking-down.’

Bello followed the news of the fiefs, Helleron’s criminal gangs, as avidly as all his fellows did. Men like Holden were the heroes, the free spirits, who passed through their lives. The simple news that Holden was off to pull the Gladhanders’ noses sent a vicarious thrill through Bello. He would surely lie awake tonight, imagining the man in chases down alleys, fights on the rooftops, stealthy stalking through the halls of his enemies.

‘Good luck, Master Holden!’ Bello said.

‘Ain’t no such thing as luck, son. Skill’s all,’ Holden told him, setting off down the stairs. ‘Remember that, boy, and you can’t go far wrong.’ As he went, Bello heard the door open, realized his father’s voice had ceased its sad tirade.

The long-faced old Beetle-kinden man who now came past him on the stairs was the landlord’s agent, whom Bello had known and disliked all his life. He had become a symbol of the family’s hopelessness, its lack of prospects. He turned up every month for his money, and Bello’s father would scrape together what they had, and sometimes it was enough and sometimes it was short. If it was short, then the man would be back the next week: slow, mournful, patient, three times the size of Bello’s father, insistent. He always got his due eventually. By some grotesque chance he was called Joyless Bidewell. He carried the weight of that name like a sack of coal.

Bello stepped in before the door closed. His nose told him it was the remains of yesterday’s thin vegetable stew his mother would be serving. His father was at his customary place already, cross-legged on the floor before the low table. He looked at Bello without expression until the boy had handed over the half-dozen bits he had made that day. It was not any threat of retribution that made him part with the money, but the crippling knowledge that there would be none. His father would not even rise to a confrontation with his own son.

‘Saw Bidewell on the landing,’ he said, sitting opposite his father. ‘What’s he want now? Rent day was last week.’

Bello’s father’s haunted eyes flicked up to his wife, who was kneeling at the fireplace and spooning out the stew. He said nothing. He never did. He locked up his troubles, always, where they could be neither goaded nor charmed from him.

They preferred Bello to stay indoors after dark, but lately he could not bear to. Tonight, with the unspoken something hanging in the air between his parents, he was out of the door the moment he had finished his meal. There were a dozen Fly-kinden families in the same tenement, and more next door. They did not mix with other races but had formed a little community of their own. Bello would go and find his peers, and scrap and gossip and boast about imagined connections with the fiefs and the street fighters. His nodding acquaintance with Holden was hard currency of far more worth than the ceramic chips he was paid in, which were legal tender no further than Helleron’s outlying settlements.

He almost ran into the man sitting on the stairs before he could stop, his wings flaring awkwardly at short notice, carrying him in a great leap over the man’s head. He landed in a stumble, catching himself with another ghostly flash of his Art. At first he thought it was some tramp off the streets who had come in from the weather. Then he saw it was Joyless Bidewell himself. The Beetle-kinden man was staring at him with that lined face of his. His creased lips moved. Bello hesitated, torn between rushing off and witnessing the prodigy of this man, the Big Man of their tenement, for all he was some bigger man’s agent, sitting on the steps like a drunk.

‘Master Bidewell?’ he said eventually. Politeness to the Beetle-kinden, to their faces at least, had been slapped into him.

Joyless Bidewell frowned, obviously not placing him, then said: ‘You’re Frenno’s boy, no?’ When Bello nodded, the big man sighed, gathered his coat closer about him. ‘Well, I’m sorry, boy,’ he said. He sounded as tired as Bello’s father, as tired as Bello himself had been when he came home.

‘Sorry for what? What’s going on?’ Bello demanded. ‘Tell me.’ And then, ‘Please.’

Bidewell glanced up, up towards Bello’s apartment. He shrugged. ‘Rent’s going up, boy. Quite a step up.’

‘What?’

‘Not my fault. Not my doing. Been all day telling people like your folks that they can’t afford to live here any more.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do.’ There must have been something in Bello’s face that showed more fire than his father’s, for the old Beetle levered himself to his feet. ‘Two day ago, boy, this street changed hands. The Firecaller fief’s here now, kicked the House of Maynard out. Fire-callers want more cut than old Maynard ever did. Nobody going to pay that ’cept for all you folks who live here. My boss sure ain’t.’

‘Then. . don’t pay,’ said Bello, knowing as he did that this was stupid.

‘Don’t call ’em Firecallers for nothing,’ Bidewell mumbled. He pushed past Bello, shaking his head.

Bello had not gone to his friends. They would have to brag the night through without him. He had sat on the steps where Bidewell had sat, and thought. In his mind the image of a fly battering at the glass came again and again. So go around. Find another way. Bidewell himself was nobody. Take him away and another servant would fill his shoes. Bidewell’s faceless master, some factor of a city magnate, was so far away that to beg of him would be like pleading with the sun. Bello’s parents, like most of the people in the tenement, would be moved on, kicked out. There would be some worse place awaiting them, and then some worse place again. Perhaps they would share a room with another family. Two other families. Already the room they had was only half of one, split down the middle to fit more families in. Everyone knew the Fly-kinden, the little people, needed hardly any space to live in.

But we were born to have the sky . However, the Beetles, clumsy and industrious and bound to the earth, did not see it that way.

There was only one way to push, and he had only one means of putting the pressure on.

There was a taverna seven streets away in the big Gold Boys fief where the fighters met. The Gold Boys had been around for ever. They were comfortable, pally with the guard and the magnates, paying all the right people. They ran entertainments: brothels, gambling houses, illegal fights. It was the high end of the fief culture and it gave them an oft-pawned respectability. The Taverna Marlus had become the fashionable place for the well-to-do to gawp at the lowly but brutal. Thrills for the one, money for the other. Marlus and the Gold Boys did well out of it.

There was always a gaggle of youths hanging about the doorway. They were a mixture of Fly-kinden and Beetles, halfbreeds and a few others. Bello was not one of them and, if he gave them the chance, they would have knocked him down a few times. His wings flung him straight past them, through the open door and skidding on the rugs of the floor.

‘Out, you!’ bellowed Marlus. The proprietor, a pitch-skinned Ant-kinden, was playing dice with several of his richer patrons. He stood up, scowling. The sword at his belt, no less than the crossbow hung above the bar, reminded everyone of his boast to be a renegade soldier from a distant city-state.

‘Here to see Holden!’ Bello gasped out, looking frantically around to find the man. For a swooping moment he could not see him, anticipating a hasty ejection and maybe a kicking from the locals. Then he saw the Beetle-kinden fighter at one of the tables, nodding at Marlus. The Ant narrowed his eyes, but sat back down.