Vincus rose slowly. The square was empty now. But tomorrow the vendors would return, and the day after, and for five days after that, unless the impossible actually happened. Unless the mythical rebels, who were scarcely more than a fleeting, unpleasant dream amid the chanting and ritual of the Tower nights, stepped into the waking world, closed down the festival, captured the Tower, and liberated Istar.
Liberate. It made Vincus smile again-that confi shy;dent, foolish word. Oh, he had heard talk from the other servants that, if Fordus seized the city, there would be freedom for many who now were enslaved. Each would receive a handful of silver, a cart, or a tun of ale-depending on the version of the rumor.
But the elder slaves, the ones who remembered the old Kingpriest and the times before the Siege on Sor shy;cery, said that freedom talk always arose, drifting like smoke into the corners of the city, when a new leader threatened old power. The grayheads did not believe in Fordus, did not believe in a coming freedom.
After all, they had seen the years, seen Kingpriest and liberator come and go. And they still wore the collars-brass, copper, or silver-and the slave trade continued to boom in Istar.
Now the square was empty, the lanterns shut and darkened. With a cautious glance toward the torchlit Tower, the young man crossed the open Market shy;place, headed toward the School of the Games and the ramshackle houses that lay in the western slums of the city.
There he had grown up, his friends and compan shy;ions the child thieves and pickpockets of Istar. They would receive him back, and he could lose himself in the narrow streets and alleys, where neither Istar-ian Guard nor clergy nor the Kingpriest himself would bother to look.
It would be like it was before.
Vincus slipped past the Welcoming Tower, past the great Banquet Hall to where the streets nar shy;rowed and darkened, the older wooden buildings leaning in on each other like wind-felled trees, the faint scent of the harbor lost in the sharp stink of tan shy;nery and midden.
Pale faces peered out of the darkened windows. An old woman in an upper story lifted her hand in a warding sign. Someone in the mouth of an alley, cloaked and bent, hissed at him as he passed.
He knew better than to stop or even look back. This was a part of the city untouched by the festival, by the priests or the merchants or the guards.
These were the ones whom Fordus would liberate.
Vincus quickened his steps. He was south of the arena now, somewhere south of the School of the Games. At a decent hour, he could have located hinv self by the sound of the crowd at the gladiatorial combats, could have told the street name and the nearest alley by the echoing roar. But it was far past a decent hour now, and dark.
He was not exactly sure where he was. It had been longer than he remembered. Things had changed.
He found himself on a commercial street-a shabby line of storefronts on the slum's edge. A dozen or so darkened buildings, boarded and barred, lined a road that led to a small, circular court, in the center of which stood a broken foun shy;tain, littered with ashes and refuse and crawling with rats. No doubt the night had turned toward morning, for every shop hung in uneasy quiet except a small pub, the Sign of the Basilisk, outside of which three torches sputtered and popped, casting a blood-red light on the fountain square and streaking the storefronts with long shadows.
A solitary watchman, lantern in hand, passed from storefront to storefront. Vincus slipped back into the shadows until the lantern weaved into the darkness and vanished. Laughter from the Basilisk broke uneasily in the close, humid air, and from somewhere in the vaulted shadows of the buildings there came the unmistakable sound of wingbeat, the harsh cry of a bird.
Cautiously, Vincus stepped into the torchlight. The Basilisk was as good a place as any to start-a run-down pub, not far from his childhood haunts. There might be someone here who would remember him-certainly someone would remember his father. And once he had made the connection, had touched on old friendships and older memories …
There would be a safe place for him somewhere in the city's intricate, anonymous alleys. This was his big chance.
As he watched the door of the pub, it swung open. Four young men walked out of the smoky light and into the square. One of them, a lean, wiry type dressed in a tattered gray tunic, shielded his eyes against the torchlight and returned Vincus's stare.
"Y'got an eyeful, pup?" he shouted. He was well into his cups, and the wine blurred his thick street accent.
Vincus was not sure what the man said next. Something about "feast" and "come on over," but his gestures were large and violent-waving his arms and beckoning dramatically-and it could have been greeting or challenge. The other three brushed by the drunkard, headed up the street between the storefronts, and when Vincus stepped uncertainly toward the gesturing man, one of them turned and regarded him.
"Vincus?" the man asked, his tight face breaking into a grin. " "Us you, old post? Old cat-tongued barnacle?"
He recognized the taunts, the pet names. Pugio, who used to tease him when the gang of boys stole loaves from the bakery by the Welcoming Tower. Vincus walked toward the young man, smiling sheepishly.
Sure enough, it was Pugio.
Vincus gestured. It has been a long time, his hands said.
Pugio laughed and shrugged. "I don't remember none of that hand-jabber. No use for it in Bywall."
Bywall. Vincus had forgotten the name.
The worn, crowded settlement pitched in the shadow of Istar's original fortifications was known as Bywall. When the city had expanded beyond its original boundaries, wealthy Istarians had moved north of the Tower, or south into outlying country villas, leaving the older buildings to the itinerant, the unhoused, the poor.
The buildings had collapsed and burned in a fire two years before Vincus was born. In the midst of the rubble and ashes, the destitute survivors had built a city of tents and lean-tos, of capsized wagons and abandoned vendors' booths, carried from the festival grounds and the Marketplace to the filthy, shadowy strip at the foot of the ancient walls. While Vincus was growing up, he and his friends had avoided that part of the city where the plentiful and average dangers turned large and unmanageable.
Vincus approached reluctantly, already misgiving his hopes of renewing old friendships.
Pugio was hard, almost stringy, and there was an ashy sallowness about his skin. He was scarcely a year older than Vincus, yet his hair was wispy and matted, and a long purple scar laced jaggedly across his right forearm. No more than twenty, Pugio looked three times his age, and the men with him were even worse for wear-toothless and scarred, but not past menace and danger. Vincus watched warily as the three men spread out, walking slowly toward him across the torch-haunted square.
"Y'member Anguis," Pugio said, nodding at the man to his left. "And Ultion. Ultion done the games at the School under Angard."
Vincus nodded and lifted his hand to both men. He remembered neither of them, though Anguis looked faintly familiar-a face recalled in the red light of Lunitari… something about knives.
"Y'member us all, don'ya, Vincus?" Pugio asked, his street talk thickening the nearer he drew to Vin shy;cus. "Y'member us well enough for the handlin'?"
The- handling. Vincus raced through his memory for the word.
He remembered, shook his head.