How many times had he helped with the other man’s gambling debts?
“Irrien is not here to challenge,” Borion pointed out.
As if there was no precedent for that. Did he think that Ulren hadn’t seen every permutation of the council in his time as one of its Stones?
“Then that should make it easier, shouldn’t it?” Ulren said. He moved forward to take Irrien’s seat.
To his surprise, Borion stepped in front of him, drawing a slender blade.
“And you think you’ll make yourself First Stone?” he said. “An old man who took his position so long ago no one can even remember? Who keeps the Second Stone’s spot mostly because Irrien doesn’t want disruption?”
Ulren moved out into an open section of the floor, stripping off his formal robe and wrapping it loosely over one arm.
“Is that why you think I hold onto it?” he said. “Do you really want to try me, boy?”
“I’ve wanted it for years, but Irrien kept telling me no,” Borion said. He lifted his blade into a duelist’s posture. Ulren smiled at that.
“This is your last chance to live,” Ulren said, although in truth that had passed the moment the other man lifted a blade against him. “Note that Kas and Vexa have more sense than to try this. Put your weapon aside, and take your seat. You should even be able to move up a place.”
“Why move up one when I can kill an old man and move up three?” Borion countered.
He lunged forward, and Ulren had to admit that the boy was fast. Ulren had probably been faster in his youth, but that was a long time ago now. He’d had plenty of time to learn the skills of war, though, and a man who judged the distance right didn’t have to be fast. He swept around his balled up cloak to swirl and tangle with Borion’s sword.
“Is that all you have, old man?” the Fifth Stone demanded. “Tricks?”
Ulren laughed at that, then attacked in the middle of it. Borion was quick enough to jump back, but not without Ulren’s blade scraping across his chest.
“Don’t underestimate tricks, boy,” Ulren said. “A man survives any way he can.”
He stepped back, waiting.
Borion rushed in. Of course he rushed in. The young reacted, they moved in line with their emotions. They didn’t think. Or they didn’t think enough. Borion tried for a measure of cunning, with feints that Ulren had seen a hundred times before. That was the peril of being young: you thought you had invented things that had gotten many men killed before you.
Ulren stepped aside and threw his cloak over the younger man as he passed with his real stroke. Borion flailed at the fabric, trying to clear it, and in that moment, Ulren struck. He moved in close, gripping Borion’s arm so that he couldn’t bring his sword to bear, then started to stab.
He did it methodically, consistently, with the patience that he’d built up in years of fighting. Ulren could see the blood seeping through his cloak as it wrapped around Borion, but he didn’t stop until the other man fell. He’d seen men come back from the worst of injuries. He wasn’t going to risk anything.
He stood there, breathing hard. It had been bad enough climbing all the stairs. Killing a man felt as though his lungs might burst with the effort, but Ulren disguised it. He moved over to Irrien’s seat, positioning himself behind it first.
“Do either of you wish to object?” he asked Kas and Vexa.
“Only to the mess,” Kas said. “But there are slaves for such things, I suppose.”
“Hail the First Stone,” Vexa said, without any particular enthusiasm.
It was a moment of triumph. More than that, it was the moment that Ulren had worked toward for years. Now that it was here, it felt strange to actually sit in the First Stone’s seat, lowering himself down onto the granite of it.
“I have already taken Irrien’s interests,” Ulren said. He waved his hand in Borion’s direction. “But feel free to help yourselves to the boy’s.”
They would. Ulren had no doubt that they would. That was what this city was, after all.
“And, of course, we will need new Fourth and Fifth Stones,” Ulren said.
That should have been their cue to move up a space. Neither did, though. They kept the seats that they’d fought for, leaving the Second Stone’s seat empty. Ulren wasn’t sure he liked that, even if he could understand the fear behind it. They weren’t coming for his new seat, but it was a sign that they didn’t consider this settled, and that they weren’t going to fall into line with the new order.
They were hanging back the way he’d hung back when Irrien had first come to power.
More than that, they were acting as if this wasn’t over.
CHAPTER SIX
Stephania woke to a world filled with agony. The whole universe seemed to have screwed itself up into a ball of pain wrapped up in her stomach. She felt as though she’d been torn to pieces… but then, she had been sliced open.
That thought was enough to make her scream again, and this time there weren’t any priests or warriors there to hear her agony, only the open sky above her, visible through the blur of her tears. They’d dragged her outside somewhere and left her to die.
It took all of her strength to lift her head even enough to look around.
When she did, she quickly wished she hadn’t. Trash surrounded her, as far as the eye could see. There was broken pottery, animal bones, glass and more. All the detritus of city life spread out in a seemingly endless landscape of despair.
The stink hit her in the same moment, fetid and overwhelming, seeming to fill the space around her. The stench of death was mixed in with it too, and Stephania saw the bodies then, simply abandoned as if they were nothing. In the distance, she thought she saw funeral fires, but she doubted they were the elegant pyres of funerals. They would simply be pits, waiting for more and more bodies to consume.
Stephania knew where she was now, in the garbage area beyond the city, where a thousand middens found themselves emptied, and the poorest of the poor scavenged for what they could find. Normally, the only bodies that ended up there were those of the people who couldn’t afford a grave, or who were there to be lost in death, victims of criminals.
Stephania collapsed back for what seemed like an interminable time, the sky swimming above her in waves. Only strength of will kept her from giving in and succumbing to the blackness that threatened to consume her. She forced herself to raise her head again, ignoring the pain.
There were figures moving over the garbage heaps. They wore ragged clothes and their faces were smeared with dirt. Many of them were little more than children, their feet wrapped with rags against the sharp edges.
“Help… help me,” Stephania called out.
It wasn’t that she had much of a belief in the generosity of others. It was simply that she had no better choice. After everything that had happened to her, there was no way she could survive without help. They’d cut her child from her to sacrifice. They’d stolen him!
As if the thought summoned it, agony shot through the wound in her stomach, and Stephania screamed. Her cry for help hadn’t brought the scavengers, but her scream did. They came stalking over the heaps of broken things as if certain that this was all some kind of trap. They didn’t look like Felldust’s people, though. It seemed that the lowest of the low could survive even a war with nothing changing.
Stephania wished that things had been so stable for her. She’d been so certain that she could control things in the city; that she could wait out the siege and come to an arrangement with Irrien. Now she was lying discarded on a garbage heap, and she barely had the strength to keep breathing.
“She’s alive,” someone said.
Stephania looked up, and the presence of the garbage pickers so close to her took her a little