The Grandmaster's Gambit

7. One Sabre

[Day-1 (19:20)]

(Ring Road at Foundry Yard Lane, Sector 8, Alexandria)

The Enforcer took one step, and the Weeper in front of him came apart at the waist.

That was the whole of it. One step, one turn of the hips, and the sabre cut through the thing on the diagonal. The blade was lit along its length, the yellow of lamp oil, with fine lines glowing in the steel like the veins of a leaf. The air above it shook, as it does over a stove. The two halves dropped either side of his boots. He did not look down. He was already looking at the next one.

Kai watched from twelve feet away, with an old man's elbow in his hand.

He had not meant to be there. For half an hour after the arch he had been part of the stream, going south at the speed of the slowest feet and looking for straw-coloured hair. There was a great deal of straw-coloured hair in Alexandria. None of it was Oren's.

Then an old man in a grey coat had gone down at the corner. Nobody stopped. The stream stepped over his cane and then on it. Kai felt his body keep walking, and he chose not to let it. That was the whole decision. He hooked the old man up by the collar and fought sideways across the current, ribs complaining at every shove. The first thing that held still was the mouth of a side lane. The undercurrent had left others there. They waited against the wall in a bunch, not looking at each other.

Two granite posts stood at the lane mouth, waist high and worn round by cart hubs. Beside them a stone trough ran along the road's edge, forty feet of it, black with soot and full of black water. Foundry carts had once quenched hot slag there. Steam rose off the surface in the cool air. Past the trough Ring Road ran north and south, packed from wall to wall. In the middle of it, facing north, the Enforcer stood alone.

The crowd did not go through him. It went round. A ring of empty cobbles ten feet wide stayed clear on every side, and anyone who came near it leaned away without being told. Kai leaned too. The back of his neck had gone cold, and the cold had a direction. It was like standing in front of a hill with a storm behind it.

"It's a Watchman - Order Contractor," said the old man at his elbow. His breath came short. "And not new at it. You feel the lean? Nobody pushes you. You just find you don't care to stand there."

"I feel it."

"Course you do. Even a child can feel a lean." The old man looked him over sideways. He was thin and stooped, with white stubble and a lamplighter's grey coat that had brass hooks hanging from the belt. Under each cuff a thread of orange glowed, faint as a coal in the morning. His cane had two brass collars along the shaft, like the joints of a fishing rod. "Third landing, Chandler Court. We live in the same building and you've never once asked my name. Tobin."

"Tobin," Kai said.

"There. That wasn't hard."

The Enforcer cut again, and Kai had time to look at him. He was a broad man in his forties, grey at the temples, with a thin scar from the corner of his jaw to the base of his neck. A charcoal coat with amber piping hung open over leather armour patched more than once. A brass bar on his collar read PENHALLOW. Under his right sleeve a rune ran down the forearm, out through the glove and into the sabre's grip. The channels cut in the steel took it the way a gutter takes rain.

He said two words before every cut, low and flat, like a clerk calling a number. *Ferrum, ardeo.* Kai had enough Latin from a school he had hated to follow it. *Iron. I burn.*

The Weepers kept coming down the road in twos and threes, walking straight at him. He did not hurry. Each one got exactly one cut, and he stepped over it. The blade rang as it passed, and the note climbed a little each time, like a glass being filled.

Then the Weepers stopped. That was the bad sign.

"This one was a quarryman," said a voice behind Kai. "Look at the stone on its body."

It walked down the middle of Ring Road, and the stream bent away from it as it had never bent for the Enforcer. Nobody leaned. They ran, or tried to. It stood nine feet tall. Plates of dull umber rock, each as big as a tea tray, overlapped across its back and shoulders like slates on a roof. When it moved, the seams between them opened. What showed there was grey and soft, like wet clay, and lit from inside the brown-red of a furnace banked for the night. It had a man's face, broad and heavy, running wet. The eyes were shut.

It passed forty people at arm's length. Its head did not turn for one of them.

"It follows the smoke," said the man behind Kai, to nobody. He was big and burn-scarred, in a welder's apron, with goggles pushed up on his forehead. "Look. It doesn't even see us."

Kai did not understand that.

The Hunter stopped thirty feet from the Enforcer. Its mouth moved. The voice that came out was low and flat, like a stone tapped on a stone.

"Stand clear."

It was a working call. Someone had shouted it every day of his life before a blast, and the habit had outlived the man. Kai's knees bent before he knew why. The Enforcer's did not.

A plate flew off the Hunter's shoulder and crossed the road, spinning. The sabre met it in the air. The slate split in two and the halves flew wide. One burst against the nearer post in a spray of grit. The other plunged into the stream, and a man there sat down in the road with his hands over his face, and then laid back.

Nobody screamed at first. Then everybody did.

The Hunter did not charge. It walked to the edge of the trough and stepped down into it, the way a man steps into a bath. Black water rose to its shins and hissed against the stone. It waited while the water ran down its legs, and the plates darkened and ran wet from the knee down. Then it turned its shut, weeping face toward the Enforcer.

*The blade is hot. The plates are wet. If he cuts them now, the water flashes to steam. The steam gets between the plates. It makes the armor harder to read, harder to grip, harder to see through. And the Hunter walked into the trough on purpose. It wasn't cooling itself. It was loading the armor. This old guy probably doesn't know that yet. Or maybe he does.*

Two Weepers slid round the Enforcer's flank while he watched. He cut one down. The other got three steps toward the stream before he caught it, and there were more behind. Every second he stood, the road leaked.

In chess there is a word for a position where the side that has to move is the side that loses. The Hunter had found it. It had a spare tempo, and the Enforcer had a street at his back. All it had to do was wait.

The Enforcer looked at the trough for one second. It was the only second he spent on anything. Then he walked along its dry edge, said his two words, and went in from the side.

He went low on the Hunter's left. Two plates overlapped at the knee, and where they parted the soft grey stuff showed. The sabre slid into the gap and through. Steam burst from the cut. The shin plate hung on a strip of clay and the leg folded the wrong way. The Hunter dropped to one knee in the trough with a noise like a cart of gravel being tipped. A sound rose from the crowd. It was the first time anyone had made a sound for him.

He was winning. Now the neck. At the base of the skull four plates met, and the seams ran together in a dark point. It was the one place on the thing where nothing overlapped. Kai could see it from twelve feet. The Enforcer saw it too, and stepped in.

The Hunter's head turned, and a plate slid across its nape like a hand over a mouth.

The sabre struck the plate. The note that had climbed all fight rose out of hearing. The blade did not snap. It burst, in a spray of bright pieces, and the light died in the grip all at once. A sliver of steel hissed past Kai's ear. The Enforcer stood holding a hilt with a hand's length of blade on it, and his glove was open across the palm.

The Hunter's right fist swung in a backhand. He jumped clear. It missed him by a hand's breadth and landed on the trough's stone lip, and the lip burst.

He landed beside the posts. For the first time he looked at something that was not the Hunter. He looked at the people against the wall. His mouth opened.

"Into the yard. Bar the -"

A chip of the broken lip, no bigger than a fist, hit the far post with a sound like a dropped hammer. It rebounded off the granite at the height of his head and took him under the ear.

He stood a moment longer, the way men do before anyone has told them. The word was still in his mouth. Then his knees went, and he sat down against the post with his legs out in front of him. The hilt rolled out of his hand and stopped against Kai's boot.

There was nothing to do for him. Kai's hand picked up the hilt anyway. It was a scavenger's hand, with a scavenger's habit. The metal was warm. He put it in his pocket without deciding to, and decided afterward to leave it there.

"Go," said Tobin. His voice cracked on it. "Don't watch. Go."

"Move!" It was the welder, already shoving. "Down the lane! Move, move, move!"

The old man could not run, so Kai took his arm and they moved at his pace. Behind them the trough water slopped as the Hunter hauled itself out on its ruined knee. Kai looked back once from the third doorway.

The Enforcer's coat lay against the post with its collar bar turned up. It had stopped being a coat with a man in it. Glitter was lifting off the cloth like sparks off a forge, and the shape under it was going out of the world a grain at a time. A single bright mote of amber rose from the chest. It climbed through the trough steam and past the roofs until the Curtain's lamps took it.

"That's how you know," Tobin said. "Watchmen and those above them turn to glitter. People like me leave a body."

The Hunter stepped over the empty coat without looking down. It dragged its left leg. It lifted its face to the lane, and Kai felt the word in his teeth more than he heard it.

"Wait."

The gate was two iron leaves, twelve feet high, chained, with a padlock as big as a fist. The boy with the split lip ran into the back of it and sat down. Beside him a lanky young man in a leather apron two sizes too big was already on his knees at the lock, a roll of picks open on the cobbles.

"That's a Hargreave," he said. "They look hard but the shackle's soft. If I had a minute. I don't need a minute. I'm Wick. Wick Tolliver, I'm a locksmith's - there."

The padlock fell open. Wick looked at it as if it had done him a personal kindness.

Inside laid a yard of beaten slag, fifty paces square, with brick on all four sides and a cold furnace shed along the north wall. They crowded in. The welder and a ferryman put their shoulders to the leaves and swung them shut. Two iron brackets at the height of a man's chest sat empty on the inside of the gate. Somebody had taken the bar for scrap.

"Bar the gate," the welder said. "That's what he said. There's no bar."

"There's a cart," said Kai.

It was a slag cart, a low iron tub on wheels. They dragged it across the leaves, and it held about as well as a hand holds a door. Kai counted heads while they worked. Twelve of them, counting himself, and a baby. Tobin, leaning on his cane. The welder, whom someone called Kestrel. Wick. A young woman with a shawl crossed over her chest and the baby inside it, one hand cupped over its head as if it were raining. She said her name was Ysolde when Kestrel asked. The boy with the split lip, who belonged to nobody and kept a hand on the wall. Then six more, known by their trades. A ferryman in oilskins. A seamstress with a pincushion still strapped to her wrist. Two brothers in matching caps. A clerk with ink to the elbows. A dyer with blue hands.

Outside, a heavy foot fell in the lane, dragged, and fell again. It stopped a long way off.

The last of the daylight had long gone. What was left was the Curtain's amber, thin and far off, and the yard sat under it like the bottom of a well. Tobin had hitched his sleeves to take the cart's weight and had not noticed. His arms glowed orange to the elbow, a low steady colour, like a stove with the door shut. Everyone else had noticed.

Kestrel looked at the gate, and then at the old man's arms.

There was no bar for the gate, and no other way out. The only light in the yard came off an old man's arms.