the big man cops his whack, you’re in. It’s so
Gerd took a bite from his roll, swallowed, and erupted in a coughing fit.
“What… the hell… oh my Gods that’s hot…”
“Don’t you like chilli?” Marius clapped him on the back. “You have to eat rat with chilli.
Here. Ethren! Here, girl!”
The young girl from the stall ran up past curious onlookers, spared Gerd a quick look of
contempt, then handed two cheap looking bottles to Marius. He uncapped one and handed it to his still- coughing companion. “Drink this, it’ll help.”
Gerd took a long swig, then sprayed it out again as another cough overtook him. “You…
bastard,” he managed between hacks. Ethren shook her head in derision.
“Country boy?” she asked. Marius nodded.
“I’m educating him. Here.” He produced a coin from his sleeve and handed it to the girl. “That’s for the speed of service. No commission for the old man, understand?”
Ethren smiled and slipped the coin into her shift. Marius nodded in satisfaction.
“Good girl. You’ll know when I need you?”
“I’ve got lots of chores,” Ethren slipped a stray strand of hair behind her ear and glanced
down the slope towards the stand. “I can make detours without being noticed.”
“Good girl.” Marius held out his hand, third and fourth fingers folded down. Ethren took
it in the same manner, bumping folded fingers together in three quick knocks – slum handshake, from gutter rat to gutter rat. Then she was away, racing back towards the stand to carry out another of the old man’s orders.
“What was that all about?” Gerd had recovered enough to stand upright. He eyed the
departing girl with a sour expression.
“Kids and servants,” Marius said, raising his bottle and taking a long draught, sighing as
the peppery Kessa Water burned his throat. “They’re always worked too hard and they’re never paid enough. Makes for an easy friendship. It might never pay off, but it never hurts to make friends.” He turned back to face the distant cathedral. “Now, it’s about time I showed you how to eat this stuff properly.”
They progressed up the hill, one step every thirty seconds, as the sun reached its zenith and began the slow descent towards night. Twice more, in the hours of their journey, they came across stalls at the side of the avenue, selling meals of meat and bread to the passing visitants. Twice more, though they were no longer hungry, Marius chatted to the stallholders, gathered gossip about the city, bought food, and secured the loyalty of the child who brought them Kessa Water with gold coins and guttersnipe handshakes. The cathedral loomed over them, a massive, brooding presence darkened by the sun hanging behind it. Its shadow crept down the boulevard towards them, eating the light, until it reached out and covered them. The quality of the air changed, then: the countless little stirrings and shuffling of people in line stilled; the muttered conversations died away; the sense that each member of the queue was somehow together on their journey, a silent and unspoken camaraderie born of common intent, melted. The shadow devoured them, and each individual was left alone with the knowledge that the object of their journey was upon them. Soon, the journey would be left behind, and they would face their King, lying dead on a stone pallet in the bowels of the great bone building. It squatted, waiting, only a thin slice of its vast bulk visible at the end of the avenue – its great bone doors, open. A mouth, waiting to devour the line that wound towards it in solemn silence. Only Marius seemed untouched, chewing enthusiastically upon his magrat kebab, slurping Kessa Water, pointing out items of interest to his young companion – the library that Vissel the Reader built with his bare hands, dragging the stones up from the river in the dead of night after the rest of the royal family were long asleep; the monument down a side alley in remembrance of Rackno’s first, unsuccessful, experiments with manned flight; the hand-dug runnels down either side of the boulevard, scooped out by residents during the Blood Nights to divert the flow of ichor around their houses and down the hillside into the city. The Radican was a living museum, the depository of a thousand years of the Scorban people’s most significant moments. Marius knew them all, and delighted in Gerd’s silent astonishment. He ate, and talked, and only stopped when the boulevard ended, and they faced the full facade of the Bone Cathedral across the empty space of the Royal Parade Ground.
The Parade Ground itself would be enough to take a man’s breath away. A massive clearing, gouged from the top of the cliff, flattened by the feet of ten thousand workmen. Cobbles the size of a man’s head had been quarried from walls of black granite in the heart of the Brooth Mountains to cover it. It lay between the balconies of the Royal Apartments and the Bone Cathedral like a vast stone lake, its open sides exposing the city two hundred feet below, inspiring a sudden vertigo in those who looked sideways after travelling up the crowded building-sided channel of the main boulevard. Nine thousand men had stood here, ranked in perfect squares, during the time of the Defence, when Trechyan nomads from the north had swept down out of the upper plains and threatened the city. Nine thousand soldiers had crowded the square, turning in perfect unison to hail the King as he stood on the balcony above them, wheeling off in utter synchronicity to march twelve abreast down the boulevard and out of the city gates, a thunderous cavalcade of boots on the stone streets, a mass of military might that had never before been seen within the city walls. Only after they had stormed out onto to the plains to confront the marauding nomads, and been slaughtered to a man, did the city learn: in open ground, nomads cannot be defeated. But it is impossible to conquer city walls twenty feet thick with a pony and a short bow. The nomads moved on, Scorby City wiped the defeat from its collective memory, and the Parade Ground never again held such a concentration of men. Now it served as a silent reminder to all who crossed it – bigger things than you move the world, bigger moments exist than your life. No matter where the boundaries of the Square were viewed, from Royal Apartments to cathedral or vice versa, the vast space held the same message: bow your head, show humility, remember that you are worthless.
Marius looked around, and spat out the last of his Kessa Water.
“Fuck me,” he said. “They could do with planting a tree or two, hey?” He ducked out of line, scurried to the front of the Royal Apartments, and looked over the edge of the cliff.
“Gerd! Come and see this! You can see right down into the Red Quarter.” He waved, looked back over his shoulder. Gerd shook his head, and gazed down at his feet. Marius frowned, and ran back to grab his companion by the sleeve.
“Come on, you’ve got to see this. You can see right onto the roof garden of the Cat Tails. They do business up there too, you know. All dressed up. You should see…”
Gerd shook his head again.
“What? What’s the matter? You’re not–”
“I’m afraid of heights, okay?”
Marius frowned, puzzled.
“But… you live on the side of a mountain.”
“It’s not the same.” Gerd waved his hand at their surroundings, his eyes firmly fixed on the ground. “This… it’s…” He drew a deep breath; sighed. “It’s closed in and open at the same time. Everything feels tall. And thin,” he added, risking a glance to either side. “I don’t like it.”
Marius stared at him for several seconds, then laughed. “It’s a hundred feet wide, you great girl’s blouse. You couldn’t fall off of here in an earthquake.” He laughed again, then stopped at the look on Gerd’s face. “There hasn’t been an earthquake in Scorby in seven hundred years. You’re not going to fall from this extremely large and stable flat place because of an earthquake.” He sighed, and stepped back into line, casting a wistful glance over his shoulder at the hidden brothel roof. “So you’re really struggling with the sudden height, hey?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Well,” he reached an arm around Gerd’s shoulder and tugged him upright. “You’re really going to drop your lunch when you see this.”
Across the square, at the very tip of the Radican, stood the Bone Cathedral.
