The Legend of Broken

again. “As soon as I am of age, my lord. My father would have me train and serve for a time, and then take a junior position on his staff.”

Isadora’s eyes widen with anger: this is another fact of which neither her husband nor her son has bothered to inform her.

“Excellent, excellent.” Baster-kin catches sight of his own, much larger and grander litter approaching, carried by four of Radelfer’s youngest household guards. “Have your men fall in behind my litter, Dagobert,” Baster-kin says. “For if there is trouble in the deeper parts of the Fifth, I would have my men face it first — I can always find more guards, or my seneschal can, while your family seems”—Baster-kin gives the bulger guards a slight smile—“quite attached to these apparently capable men …” At that, Dagobert watches his mother and the Merchant Lord step through the rich fabric that curtains the well- cushioned seating of the litter.

Within that larger and far more comfortable means of transport, his lordship does his very best to play the pleasant and concerned host, grateful for Isadora’s help in the past and now concerned with whatever threat to Broken it is that she has discovered along the southwest wall of the city. She will offer no specifics, saying that the sight of the mysterious occurrence will speak far more eloquently than any description she can give. She is also very clearly anxious to first discuss what arrangements the Grand Layzin and the Merchant Lord are making for the resupply of her husband’s force of Talons, which she insists must be carried out before he is headstrong enough to commence an attack against the Bane without all the supplies he needs. For his part, Rendulic Baster-kin offers comforting statements, one after another, assuring Lady Arnem that if the other merchants of the kingdom will not support the attack, he himself will authorize use of the central amounts of supplies that are contained in the vast array of secret storage supplies that lie beneath the city.

Isadora is genuinely mollified by all these assurances, believing, for the moment, that Rendulic Baster-kin’s boyhood romantic preoccupation with her has transformed into a deep sense of adult gratitude, something she had not expected; but Radelfer, as he walks beside the litter, is growing increasingly uneasy, a feeling that began when his master and Isadora met in the Kastelgerd; for the extent of Rendulic’s disingenuousness has gone far beyond playacting during this meeting, and smacks more of a man who believes he can use the present difficulties to some advantage. But what “advantage” that might be, Radelfer has yet to determine.

The party’s journey into the worst part of the city begins when they pass through the gateway in the stone wall that separates the Fifth District from the other, more respectable parts of Broken; and their further trip toward what is certainly the most terrible neighborhood in that already vile district begins as well as any such undertaking can be expected to, primarily because the mere sight of Lord Baster-kin’s litter — common enough in the other districts of the city, but remarkable here — followed by Isadora’s well-known conveyance, signals to even the most addled minds and depraved citizens along the Path of Shame the beginning of momentous events in the Fifth. The presence of so many armed guards, meanwhile, provides a seemingly absolute check against the inclination to mischief that is always rife among the more enterprising, if criminal, souls who lurk in the darkest recesses of the district, particularly as one moves away from its stone boundary and toward the dark shadows cast by the city walls. This inclination toward thievery and murder is one that runs as deep in such minds as does their fellow residents’ appetite for dissipation, fornication, and the production of filth, all amply revealed in the gutters and sewer grates of the Fifth’s every street. These sickening rivulets are the source of a stench that every minute grows ever more offensive, and the pieces of refuse that block those streams and prevent their serving their purpose become steadily larger and more hideous. Among these terrible sights one can find objects so sickening and foolish as to seem remarkable: sacks of vegetables and grains, rotted and worm-ridden enough that not even starving souls will touch them; enormous piles of every form of human refuse and waste, bodily and otherwise; and, most horrifying of all, the occasional cloth-bound package that bears the unmistakable, bloody shape of a human infant, either miscarried close to its time or disposed of in the simplest manner possible, and perhaps mercifully so: for it will be spared, first, the privations of the Fifth District, and later, entry (by no choice of its own) into the increasingly mysterious service of the God-King in the Inner City, where, even among the residents of the Fifth, the seemingly inexhaustible need for young boys and girls is the subject of steadily greater, if quiet, speculation …

“It seems strange to me,” Lord Baster-kin says, glancing through the break in the curtain on his side of the litter as he holds the edge of his cloak to his face, blocking as much as possible the stench rising from the gutters close beneath the litter, “that, after all we went through in a very different sort of place than this—”

“If you mean your lordship’s lodge below the mountain,” Isadora comments, “it was indeed a lovely spot, particularly in comparison to so much of this district.”

“And yet you choose to live here still?” Baster-kin queries.

“Like me, my husband was born here,” Isadora answers. “And wished, as he wishes, to remain.” Now it is her turn to glance outside, with an air of some slight despair that Baster-kin finds oddly encouraging. “I do not know that I could have lived my entire life in this part of the district, which was my home until I met him.”

“I cannot pretend to comprehend how dismal a place it must have been for a child,” Baster-kin says slowly. “Nor why you and your husband would have chosen to stay — particularly now, when the sentek has been promoted to the leadership of the whole of the Broken army, and you could live in any part of or residence in the city that you might choose to request of the God-King.”

“Look about yourself once more, my lord,” Isadora says. “Many of these people are victims of their own perfidy and vice, but many others are merely unfortunate victims of circumstances that made this district an inevitable home. Citizens, for example, whose ill fortune is not the result of dissolution or of ill intent, but of the loss, many years ago, of the head of their family to war, or of a limb of that family elder to those same conflicts. It is a cruel and unjust truth, my lord, that many Broken soldiers, having left the army and returned to the district, are unable to find work that would allow them to leave, while some cannot even afford shelter, here, and so haunt these streets night and day, begging and stealing, many of them, and forming a new sort of army: an army of ghostly reminders of the occasionally cruel ingratitude of kings.”

Baster-kin holds up a mildly warning hand. “Be careful, my lady, with the words you choose,” he advises earnestly.

“All right, then — of the ingratitude of governments,” Isadora says, with an impatient nod of her head. “Then, as well, there are workmen — masons, builders — who have suffered crippling injury during the continual construction of this city’s and its kingdom’s houses of government, worship, and wealthy residency, and who are similarly left with no choice but to bring their families here, to the Fifth. You shall meet some such men when we reach our destination — but I ask you now, do not such people deserve at least one capable and honest healer to assist them, and does that not justify my staying and trying to help?”

“They deserve more than that, Lady Arnem,” Baster-kin replies. “And the worst residents of this district deserve certain things, as well — and, before long, all shall receive them, you have my word.” Despite the apparent charity and condescension embodied in these statements, it occurs to Isadora that there ought to be a sharp difference in quality between Lord Baster-kin’s first and second uses of the word “deserve.” She has no time to dwell upon the subject, however, as Baster-kin suddenly draws the curtains of his litter wider apart. “By Kafra, where can we be? A place of rare evil, if even the stars offer little light.”

“We approach the southwest wall, the shadow of which grows ever longer,” Isadora replies. “Deeper into the district than even I will venture, any longer — although I did as a child. It was my happy habit, then, to investigate most such neighborhoods, sometimes at foolish risk. But I learned much …”

“No doubt.” Lord Baster-kin looks to Lady Arnem and studies her face for a moment. And that, he muses, is what will make you such a superb judge of what this city and this kingdom will require, in the months and years to come …

“And one thing I learned, above all,” Isadora says, completing her thought. “There are at least some citizens in this district who recognize that the original planners of the city—”

“‘Planners’?” Baster-kin interrupts, a little less enthusiastically than he has sounded, to this moment: “You mean the planner, don’t you? For there was but one — Oxmontrot.”

Isadora deflects the man’s critical tone with a charming smile. “Forgive me, my lord,” she says; and Baster-kin, of course, cannot help but do so. “My husband has told me of your great dislike for the founder of the kingdom, and I did not wish to tread upon your sensibilities. But, yes, Oxmontrot, whatever his other faults,