I had thought it passing strange, I’ll admit, that there should be a gaming room hidden behind a public baths in a city where gambling houses were perfectly legal. There was a reason for that, of course, but it wasn’t anything I had expected. I hadn’t expected it because I hadn’t really given it any thought, and that was a failure on my part. I promised myself then that I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Up until that moment I had just assumed that Arch High Priest Rantanen liked to bet on cards like the other rich folk did, but it seemed I was wrong about that. There was a reason this place was secret. Gambling houses might be perfectly legal in Dannsburg, but slavery very much wasn’t.
It was horrendous.
Slave pits, that was what confronted me in the back room of the Spring of Mercy.
If ever a place was misnamed, this was it. There was no mercy here. The smell was foul but still there were twelve richly dressed patrons in there, lounging on couches with drinks or poppy pipes in their hands as they watched two poor, naked, filth-caked wretches beat each other to death with their bare hands in the circle of Hell below them.
I’d never seen the like before but I’d heard tell of it, during the war. I’d heard it in the sort of tall stories that soldiers tell each other, when they’re trying to drown out the horrors of the day with tales of even worse things that someone they said they knew had seen once, somewhere they had never been.
All those old soldiers’ stories came back to me then, and I realised that some of them were true after all. I knew how this worked.
The pit-fighters fought to the death, and the winner got to eat.
It was as fucking simple as that.
These poor bastards were starved to the point of madness and then offered food, if they would just kill each other for it.
Hunger can drive people to obscene extremes. I had seen that in the war. I had seen it in Messia, and I had seen it again when we finally broke the siege of Abingon and saw the horrors that had been going on within the walls of the city. They were eating their own dead in Abingon before the end, and we had heard tales of children being killed for meat by the starving soldiers. Tall tales, perhaps, but you never could know for sure. After what we had seen in Abingon, I could honestly have believed it.
Here in the Spring of Mercy those hellish conditions were being recreated, on purpose, for the entertainment of the sort of people I wanted to stamp on until my boots were wet.
They had bloodthirsty smiles on their faces, those rich men and women, and sometimes someone called out a new bet or perhaps a word of encouragement to the fighter they had backed. It reminded me in a way of Lord Lan Yetrov’s bear pit, but for all his faults Lan Yetrov had at least seemed to care for his prize bear, if not for his own wife. The slaves here obviously weren’t treated half so well as that bear had been. It reminded me of the bear pit, and of Messia, and of the burning rubble of Abingon.
I didn’t want to remember any of those things.
Something happened to me then, happened in my mind, and I don’t know what it was. I’m no doctor, and I’m no philosopher either, but I know something happened even if I can’t put words to what it was.
The fighting pit was open at the top and the couches were arranged around its upper edge, but beyond it I saw the caged top of the other pit, where the slaves . . . no. No, I can’t bring myself to write ‘lived’, because they didn’t, not really. Where they clung to existence, perhaps, in conditions worse than any I had seen even at Abingon.
There were fifty men at least crammed into a space not twenty feet across, sitting in a reeking mud of their own shit and piss. No one seemed to have noticed us come in, so intent were they on their vile sport, so I took a moment to survey the faces of the patrons.
After a moment, I saw him.
There he was, the Arch High Priest Rantanen, the holiest man in the land.
He was masturbating under his robes with a glass of wine in his free hand as he watched one of the men in the pit drive his thumbs into the other’s eyes so hard that one of them burst in a squirt of jelly and clear fluid.
‘Oh, jolly good show!’ shouted a tall fellow with perhaps twenty-five years to him, with long oiled ringlets of hair sticking to the sides of his sweaty neck. ‘Blind the dirty bastard, and I’ll throw you half a loaf!’
I think I wasn’t quite of sound mind, right then. I walked straight up behind the tall man’s couch, and I found that I had Mercy in my hand. That seemed appropriate to me, given the name of the place we were in, so I stabbed the cunt through the neck.
That got their fucking attention all right; had them off their couches and shouting in moments.
‘Sit down!’ Bloody Anne roared in her best sergeant’s voice, and that stilled them where they were.
Even the men in the pit stopped fighting for a moment, to see what the commotion was.
I held up the Queen’s Warrant in my hand, Mercy still dripping red in the other. The man I had stabbed slumped sideways off his couch and hit the floor like a sack of wet shit.
‘My name is Tomas Piety,’ I said, ‘and you’re under arrest. The fucking lot of you.’
Chapter 27
I’m not made quite right in the head, I know I’m not.
I never have been, and as my aunt
