“We’ve raised hands against a noble,” Aislinn went on, feeling her voice grow stronger. “We’re all dead men walking, and there are too few of us to accomplish much. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Lady Andrews has profited from us for far too long. She has food hoarded up there, and water too, an entire cistern. It’s wrong, and no matter what we might lose, someone has to make the fight. I’m going, and anyone who wants to can come with me.”
In the end, some thirty people followed her up the hill. Many of them held torches, a few knives, but all of them looked grimly determined. Aislinn would never know who began to sing, but she recognized the tune: a reaping song, a song of the scythe. Gradually Aislinn became aware of more voices raised, and then more still, and when she looked back, the flat field at the bottom of the slope was empty. They had all followed her now: more than five hundred farmers, the tenancy of the entire acreage, all of them moving steadily up the rise toward Lady Andrews’s manse.
Chapter 16
A BUBBLE IN THE ALE
Expecting nothing, one may gain everything.
—Cadarese proverb
Wake up, boy. Wake up.”
But he didn’t want to. His head felt as though it were full of boulders.
“Wake up, Lazarus. Lazarus.”
My name isn’t Lazarus, he wanted to say. But he couldn’t seem to find the energy to open his mouth. He was no longer bound; he sat slumped in a soft chair, softer than any piece of furniture he had ever encountered. His arms and legs were free, but he could barely move them.
“Christ, he’s turned to mush. What did you dose him with?”
“Nothing, boss,” another man’s voice answered, high above him. “We didn’t need to. The witch had already put him out.”
“Ah, the witch,” the first voice replied. Christian knew that voice: high and tinny, its accent broad and flat. “And did you pay Thorne?”
“Yes, sir. But he demanded assurances too, that we meant to kill the prisoner.”
“And did you give such assurances?”
“ ’Course I did, sir.”
“Good. Leave.”
Footsteps shuffled away, then: “Almost forgot, boss: Thorne said to give you this. He says it’s yours.”
“Leave it on the table.”
The man dropped something with a heavy clunk, then closed the door behind him. Light bloomed behind Christian’s closed eyelids, then he felt heat. A flame had just been placed close to his cheek.
“Your eyes are wiggling around beneath their lids, boy. You’re just playing possum now. Come on, wake up.”
After another long moment—for Christian did not want the dealer to think he did anything by his orders—he cracked his eyelids and found himself in a low-ceilinged room. There was something wrong about this room, though Christian could not have said what. It was no different from any other room in the Creche, tiny and cramped and dark . . . but something was not the same.
Arliss sat across from him in a high armchair, so big that it made the dealer’s frame seem childlike in proportion. The armchair was upholstered in a thick, rich material that Christian thought might be velvet. He had never seen such a luxurious piece of furniture in his life. Arliss’s legs and torso were swaddled in a thick blanket, hiding his injured hip. Behind the chair, two lamps sat on either end of an enormous oak desk, dangerously close to the unwieldy piles of paper that covered the surface. In fact, as he sat up, Christian saw that paper was strewn all over the office as well, covering the surfaces of chairs, the spread of the floor.
“I would think a morphia kingpin could afford a tidier life.”
Arliss shrugged. “This is my private office. I have a system. It works for me.”
Christian sat up, clutching his head. Whatever Thorne’s witch had done to him, it wasn’t finished yet; the ache was terrible. His chest throbbed, and his legs felt loose and wobbly.
“I’d hoped that the bounty would bring you in, but I didn’t expect it to happen so fast,” Arliss remarked. “Going after Thorne on your own? Are you mad, boy, or just stupid?”
“Stupid,” Christian replied, massaging the nape of his neck. “How’s your hip, old man?”
“Shattered. The doctor said I’ll never walk right again.”
If Arliss was waiting for an apology, he wasn’t getting one; Christian sat in truculent silence. But now Arliss looked at him with a strange expression, one so foreign to life in the Creche that it took a moment for