Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

‘You got a message for me, Bello?’ Holden asked. The Fly youth looked at him seriously. This was the part that he had not rehearsed.

‘I–I need to talk to you,’ he said. Holden was sharing a table with two other Beetle-kinden brawlers, and they were already smirking. Bello pressed on. ‘It’s really important. Please, Master Holden.’

‘ Master Holden,’ one of the others snickered.

Holden grimaced and stood up, stretching. ‘Ignore them, boy. They’re just jealous because they haven’t pissed off the Gladhanders like I just did.’ Holden’s drinking fellows looked a step more threadbare than he was.

‘Right, be quick,’ the fighter said when he got Bello out of earshot. ‘I’m looking to pick up another job this evening.’ He did not say it, but he might as well have done: being seen talking to a ragged Fly-kinden youth would not help his image.

‘I. . want to hire you,’ Bello got out, before his nerve could fail him.

‘Yeah?’ Holden grinned at him, delighted. ‘With what, Bello?’

Bello reached into his pockets and brought out a handful of change. Most of it was ceramic bits, but there were a few silver standards in there. It was all the money that Bello had ever kept back from his parents, all the money he had kept secret and hidden for the right moment. This had to be the moment, and the money had to be enough. ‘They’re going to throw us out. They’re putting the rent up,’ he blurted out. ‘You must have heard.’

‘So put this towards the rent,’ Holden said reasonably.

‘But what about next month? And what if they put it up again?’ Bello asked. ‘I need to hire you to fight the Firecallers, Master Holden. Because then it’ll be done, and we can go back to the way things were.’

Holden’s face had soured when the Firecallers were mentioned. He closed Bello’s hands over the money. ‘Listen, boy,’ he said. ‘Two things.’ Sympathy twisted at his scars. ‘One: the Firecallers are on the up. They’re doing well these days. I’d charge a lot to start spiking their engines. Two: what you’ve just showed me is less than what I charge for a consultation, let alone to actually draw a sword.’

He let that sink in, giving Bello time to consider it. In Bello’s head the fly was walking up the pane, trying to work out why it could not get out that way.

‘Anyone around here’s going to be the same,’ Holden said. ‘Marlus’s place is for the doing-wells.’ He grimaced. ‘Course, there are other places. Someone might be desperate enough for rep to take on the Firecallers.’

Bello stared at him desperately. Holden scowled. ‘The world isn’t fair. Know it and move on. You don’t want to get mixed up in this.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ Bello asked him. ‘Please, Master Holden, I have to find someone . At least tell me where to look.’

‘Listen, boy, you want to go to these kind of places, it’s on your head. They ain’t safe, not any way.’ The fighter sighed. ‘But I can tell you, if you want.’

Holden’s first recommendation was a gambling house on the riverfront. Helleron’s river trade was halfway to nothing since they had put the railroad in. What had been rich men’s warehouses and offices were fallen into rot and ruin, and all kinds of vermin had moved in. The place had no name but there was a picture of a scorpion painted crude and yellow above the door, just like Holden had described. Nobody stopped Bello going in.

The first two bravos he tried to speak to, a Beetle and some kind of halfbreed, just cuffed him away. The second one had struck hard enough to knock him to the floor. He righted himself with a flick of his wings. He found a third. She was a lean, elegant Spider-kinden woman, slumming it or down on her luck. There had once been gems in her rapier hilt but the sockets were empty now. When he told her what he wanted she nodded across to one of the house staff and took Bello aside into a little room.

‘Let’s see your money,’ she said, and he showed it to her, all two handfuls of it.

She laughed. She laughed for a long time, having seen that, and something went out of her. ‘You little idiot,’ she said, when she could. ‘I was going to rob you, you fool. Kill you, most likely.’ She said it quite merrily. ‘Not for that, though. I don’t soil my blades for potsherds and tin-tacky. Hire me? You couldn’t hire a man to drink with you for that.’

Bello found, in the face of her laughter, that he was shaking. She was two feet taller than him, armed and a professional, but he had to hold himself back from doing something rash.

‘But,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘I need-’

She shook her head. ‘You’re mad,’ she told him. ‘Mind

you, I value that. Look, I’ve a man you can go to. Don’t tell him I sent you. It won’t help your case. I just happen to know he’s down at Scaggle’s tonight, after a job.’

There were even lower dives than the scorpion-fronted gambling den. Scaggle’s was one of them. It was further down the river, built under a bridge so that there were water marks halfway up the stone steps. Scaggle was a Beetle-kinden crone, burly and round shouldered. She was all the staff she needed, all the guards too. Even as Bello came up the steps he had to flit aside as she hurled a drunk down onto them, careless of whether he hit rock or water. She squinted at Bello, then hulked back inside.

It was very dark in there. The place was little more than a cave. Fly-kinden eyes were good, though, and Bello could pick out a dozen men sitting round five tables, lit only by wan candlelight. They were Beetles and half-breeds, save for one. That one was the man Bello had come here to find.

He was as outlandish as anyone Bello had seen: tall and straight and fair, with sharply pointed features and skin that was very pale. He wore an arming jacket secured with an elaborate pin. He looked as though he had stepped out of another world, from a story.

He eyed Bello narrowly, saying nothing as the boy approached him. When he raised his earthenware mug to drink, Bello saw the flexing spines of the Mantis-kinden jutting from his forearm.

He said nothing, neither invitation nor dismissal. It was left to Bello to say, ‘Excuse me, you are Master Tisamon?’

A nod only. Bello forced himself on before he dried up. ‘I need to hire you, Master.’

The man Tisamon’s mouth quirked at that and he put his mug down. ‘Do you know why I come here?’ he asked. His voice was as dry and sharp as the rest of him.

Bello shook his head.

‘I come here because people hiring men like me do not,’ Tisamon finished.

‘I need to hire you,’ Bello repeated.

‘Go away.’

‘I can’t. I won’t.’

Abruptly Tisamon was standing, and Bello felt as though he’d swallowed his heart. There had been no transition between ease and edge. The edge had always been there, just out of sight. On the man’s right hand was a metal gauntlet that ended in a two-foot blade jutting from the fingers.

‘Please. .’ Bello said, through a throat gone dry.

‘Can I help you?’ Tisamon asked, and he was looking over Bello’s head. Not wanting to take his eyes off the man, Bello forced himself to crane back. There were three newcomers there, burly Beetle men squinting in the gloom.

‘Don’t want to disturb you, chief,’ said one of them. ‘Just need a word with the little fellow here.’

Bello choked, flinched back from them. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘We’re the fellows you’re walking out of here with,’ said their leader. ‘You’ll excuse us, chief, won’t you?’

‘Certainly,’ Tisamon said, relaxing back, only it was not really relaxing. Bello saw the edge still there, though the Beetles missed it. ‘When I’ve finished speaking with my client, that is.’