wouldn’t be seeing her again.”
Christian nodded, then handed her the silver, which vanished in a quick, practiced movement from hand to pocket. Almost without thinking, Christian retrieved the spiked club from the floor. He didn’t know what good it would do—he sensed there was an art to wielding it, one that eluded him—but all the same, he liked the feel of the weapon in his hand.
“Go, boy,” said Mrs. Evans. The urgency in her voice told Christian that she was expecting someone important soon: a churchman, perhaps, or even a royal. She was anxious to have the gruesome scene cleared away. Christian took a last look at the dead girl, then ducked through the doorway and left the stable.
Mrs. Evans was right; he should disappear into the Deep Patch, the lowest levels, and hide there while Arliss’s people raged for him across the Upper Creche. That was the way to survive, yes, but Christian had never cared less about survival. He saw Maura as she had lain in her sickbed: her split lip, her pulped cheek. Then he blinked and saw Arlen Thorne, the scarecrow man of the Creche, smiling his nasty, knowing smile.
I am coming for you, Christian thought, striding up the tunnel with the club clutched in his hand. You’ll beg for death, believe me, and I will give it to you . . . as soon as you give me a name.
Chapter 11
THE BETTER WORLD
The better world is no easy undertaking, but difficulty does not frighten us. We are not discouraged by setbacks, for setbacks are only discrete steps on the road to victory. No amount of darkness can extinguish hope.
—The Book of the Blue Horizon, as preserved in the Glynn Library
I don’t understand this,” Elyssa said testily. “You want a better world, fine. Wonderful. But William Tear’s better world had no weapons. Every man in the Tear carries a knife, at the very least, so how on earth are we to get rid of weapons at this late date? Confiscate them?”
Gareth smiled. It was a smile that annoyed Elyssa, because it would have belonged better on a much older man. Whenever she sat at Gareth’s bedside, she felt very young. He was only twenty-three, if he was to be believed, but there was all the difference in the world between mental and physical age. It hadn’t been so bad when he was still laid up on his back, but now that his ribs were healing, he was able to sit up while they conversed. For Elyssa, it was like being in Lady Glynn’s schoolroom all over again.
“Confiscation of weapons wouldn’t work,” Gareth agreed. “But force isn’t the goal. The aim is to create a society where weapons would become superfluous. No one has to force a man to discard something he doesn’t need.”
Elyssa tried to picture such a society, and failed. Steel was wound into the very fabric of the Tearling. Rights in the Almont were essentially held at the point of a sword, and even in New London, where simple laws were at least nominally enforced by city constables and the army, no man dared to travel without a blade. And yet Lady Glynn, too, had talked this way . . . as though logic would have to win out someday, as though reason had ever been any part of why men carried weapons.
“What about robbery?” she asked. “Even a utopian society wouldn’t wipe out humanity’s tendency to covet. Surely people have the right to defend their own possessions from thieves.”
Gareth shrugged. “Thievery only thrives because it’s tolerated. In William Tear’s town, if someone stole something, he would never be able to keep it. There are no secrets in a connected society. Everyone would know, and someone would turn him in. There was no thievery . . . not in the beginning, at least.”
“How do you know so much about William Tear’s town?” Elyssa demanded. It was another sore point with her: Gareth’s impossible familiarity with the fledgling settlement of the Landing period. Even Lady Glynn, who had admired William Tear enormously, hadn’t had anywhere near as much detail. But then the Blue Horizon were fabulous propagandists; look how they had co-opted the True Queen prophecy, wrapped it so tightly around Elyssa that the city was singing ballads about her now. But all the same, Elyssa didn’t think that Gareth was lying about the past. He seemed to understand Tear’s world as one who had lived there.
“Not everything from the Landing period was lost,” Gareth