Sunbright only shook his head. "Karsus's finest assassins and its finest youth," he said to himself. "This empire is naught but a rotten melon infested with insects. One good kick would crush it. And will."
He was more angry with himself than with the spoiled brats. This city life was infecting him, making him grow soft, for he'd committed the second-worst crime a barbarian knew.
He'd left an enemy alive.
Passing the narrow street where he'd fought, Sunbright paused a moment in curiosity.
The city guards had been efficient, at least. They'd laid the four bodies of the thugs at the head of the street, neatly in a line, heads out, even the pulped head of the man they'd beaten to death.
A bony mule hauling a long-sided wagon clomped to a stop near them. An old man and woman, both wearing gasglobe helmets, got out. Together they dragged the bodies and heaped them in the cart. The red lamp of the alehouse glowed as bloodily as before, and the noise from inside it was just as loud.
"What are you doing?" Sunbright asked.
"Eh?" The old man tilted his head. Sunbright asked again, louder. "Oh. Cleanup crew, milord. The local waste buckets are too small to swallow a body. We have 'ta take 'em to a locked room and drop 'em down there."
"Waste buckets? Locked room?"
The old man peered, as if to ask: where are you from? But he minded his betters. "Yes, milord. The city guard don't want no one stuffin' folks down the garbage chutes. So we take 'em to a locked stoneroom and slide 'em down there. The magic eats 'em up, makes more magic. Nothing left."
Sunbright still didn't understand how magic "ate one up," but it didn't surprise him the empire would feed on magic generated by its dead. A form of cannibalism, he reckoned it.
"Do you do this every night?"
"Eh? Oh, yes, milord. All night, every night. But we gotta be off the streets by sunrise or the straw bosses scream. But me and Mandisa, we're slow, but steady. Still, we gotta be off soon…"
"Why soon?"
"Oh," the man avoided his eyes, fussed with the dead men and woman in the cart. The old woman shuffled slowly, helmet lamp making a white blob bounce on the ground, and sorted through the trash on the street for anything valuable. "Some nights the city's more boisterous than others, is all. There's what, nineteen cleanup crews, all told. We're busy, but glad for the work."
Sunbright supposed they were. This man looked as starved as the bodies he'd loaded onto his cart. He didn't understand what "boisterous" might mean, but a casual comment had arrested his attention. "Nineteen teams work all night, every night, just to pick up corpses?"
"Aye, milord. 'Course, that's just the poor 'uns, you understand. Strangers or folks no one cares to give a funeral to. Good families take care of their own, of course. Some of 'em are even buried down on the ground, I hear tell. Now look at that, ain't that curious?" He took hold of a white object suspended around one tough's neck and broke the thong. Peering, waggling his head lamp, he still couldn't see, so he handed it to the barbarian. "What is that, good sir?"
Sunbright took the thing. It was yellowed by sweat and grime, but polished from lying between the dead man's skin and clothing. "It's a hunk of knucklebone. Too big for a deer's."
The old man waved a crooked hand. "Good luck charm. Worthless. Keep it. Ready, Mandisa?" He helped his wife climb onto the seat with creaking knees, checked that their next stop, according to the guards, was the Street of Lilacs.
As he clucked to the old mule, Sunbright asked, "Can you point me to Castle Karsus?"
The man squinted, nodded with the reins, indicating a yellow-lit structure high up in the distance. Sunbright nodded: he should have known. Of all the odd buildings in this city-state, it was the only one with tilted walls that met at odd angles.
The old man said another curious thing. "You better be off the street by sunrise yourself, young master. Rumors are milling again…"
"Rumors of what?"
"Oh, troubles in the marketplace. Same old same old…" The deaf man slapped the reins and rolled away.
The barbarian found himself still clutching the knucklebone, the only artifact left of a man he'd killed for no clear reason, except that the man had tried to kill him. Somehow, it didn't seem a good enough reason right now. He pocketed the polished bone and trudged on.
His opinion of the empire sank lower with every new sight, if such were possible. Before the doorway of a large meeting hall, citizens had dragged a man with pointed ears by his hair, lashed him to a signpost, and doused him with strong liquor, probably brandy, for when they applied a torch, the man (or half man) ignited, to die screaming while the crowd cheered.
Sunbright saw it all in the length of a block. His legs wanted to run that way, but he stood rooted. There were fifty or more villains, yowling men, and shrill women. He couldn't save the victim, could only get himself killed. Wondering what had become of his pride, or common sense, he trudged until the flaming pyre was past. Farther on, he saw a man and woman sprawled in the gutter, their throats cut, their clothing looted. He saw starved horses hitched to glittering coaches, saw a row of gap-mouthed heads spiked on iron pilings around a park, some of them children's. He saw more children pick through garbage and fight with dogs for a bone, and city guards chase both with silver-tipped clubs.
There was no end to the corruption of the empire, he saw. It was built on the bones of the unjustly-treated dead, and the hunched backs of the dying living.
Back in opulent Castle Karsus, Candlemas was learning the opposite. And the same.
Chapter 6
One second Candlemas was pinned against a wall and throttled, then Karsus waved a hand and Sunbright flickered away like a snuffed candle flame. The pudgy mage dropped, lost his footing, and plopped on his bottom.
"There," said the younger mage. "He'll be a while returning. Servants are such a bother, aren't they? I turned one into an orc last week. The soup was cold."
Candlemas rubbed his throat and nodded absently. Sunbright was hardly a servant, nor was he a proper apprentice or even an equal partner. That was the problem with their relationship: neither was really certain how they meshed. The barbarian was too quick to hammer things for a solution: a man of pure action. Yet Candlemas, a man of science, was too quick to ply magic as a cure-all. Between them, he reflected, they should be able to solve any problem. Instead, they only seemed to end up stalemating, sinking deeper into a morass of trouble.
Karsus had wandered off, calling orders to attendants and lesser mages, sailing like a war galley scattering tiny ships. Massaging his throat, Candlemas trotted to catch up.
He soon forgot his troubles, for Karsus's workshop-which stretched over many buildings-proved a wonderland of spells and magic that Candlemas could only have dreamed of. Karsus had hundreds of experiments going on simultaneously, and kept track of each in his tousled head.
One room sported a stone fountain and pool. A dozen mages were at work, and when Karsus swept in, they scurried to show him their latest results. Holding hands in a ring around the pool, they chanted a short command. Instantly a rainbow fountained up from the center well. Streaks of color shot upward, fanned out, and spilled into the retaining pool. Karsus clapped his hands with delight, like a child, and Candlemas joined him. But there was more. The rainbow looked and behaved like water, but maintained its stripes. So as the colored fan hit the pool, the streams separated out, and made a swirling whirlpool of color: a circular rainbow.
A mage leaned over the pool, gesturing. "There's more, Great Karsus. Look!" Dipping his hand into the pool, he demonstrated that the color stuck to his hand. Fingertips stayed green, his palm blue, his wrist violet. Shaking his hand, the colors spattered on the floor to make a tiny rainbow-like from a prism glass-that slowly faded.