and simple, peaceful lives above all else. Those of wealth and power, like their own Michinè nobles, were often spoken of with a kind of bitter sympathy, as if the painted men and women of influence were ill of spirit, warped by their own desires to lord it over others.
Speaking with other refugees living in the area, those who had travelled the Mercian Isles and knew them well, Curl had heard how it was the same with all the peoples of the Free Ports – if not even more so – where people lived with no nobles at all. She still found the notion a hard one to grasp.
Curl glanced back to the dross in her lap. At breakfast, one of the lodgers had said that the imperial invaders were from the Sixth Army. The same men who had laid waste to Lagos.
Curl thought of a town on fire, a pale sky obscured by smoke. Her family’s cries lost amongst the tumult of so many others. The tears spilled down her cheeks. For long moments she sat there, shaking and awash with heartache, a wet hand covering her burning face.
When a sob finally forced its way from her chest she sat up straight and shook her head in self-admonishment. She sniffed, and brushed a hand across her cheek as though to swipe away a cobweb.
She looked up at her little shrine to Oreos, a decision somehow made within her.
‘Shit,’ Curl said.
The interior of the Stadium of Arms was larger than she’d imagined from its outer facade of pillars and curving stonework.
As she stood in its main entranceway, pressed against the side to stay clear of the soldiers rushing past in both directions, she looked on a scene of barely contained chaos. Men in their hundreds occupied the sandy floor of the amphitheatre, where every Fool’s Day the zel races were held, and every other day it was used for the training of recruits.
She saw Red Guards and Specials, Greyjackets and Free Volunteers. Many of the older men were dressed in civilian clothing. Some men even wore dirty rags, and were having manacles removed from their ankles. Amongst them all, soldiers ran back and forth humping loads of equipment, which they were piling into mounds scattered across the sand. There seemed no order to it. Yet men bawled commands as though they knew the lie of this land.
Curl pressed even closer to the stonework as a company of Red Guards began to march by in rank and file, some of the men jeering and whistling at her as they stamped past, even though she wore the plain boy’s clothes she had been wearing on her arrival to the city. She ducked her head and hurried past, fleeing into the wide arcade that ran beneath the tiers of seating overhead.
A zel was rearing beneath the arches as men tried to hitch a cart to it. Its hooves clattered on the flagging. Blacksmiths hammered away at swords or spearheads; soldiers brushed past without a second glance, or cursed her out of the way. Curl felt her blood beginning to rise at the confusion of it all. She stopped a young man with a quick smile, and asked where she might find the recruiting office.
He thought she was joking at first, but she scowled until he relented. ‘On the right,’ he said with his glance darting all over her body and a hand flapping vaguely. ‘Through the doorway there. Then take the second on your left.’
When Curl followed his directions through a bustling passageway she found herself standing in a latrine. A row of armoured men were lined against the trough talking and pissing. In an instant a dozen faces were calling out to her in the close confines of the stinking room, while they tried to pierce her eardrums with their whistles. She ignored the flashes they gave her; instead she raised a single eyebrow, and left with a tirade of curses tumbling from her lips.
Curl was hot and flustered by the time she finally found herself at the door to the recruitment office, a room that turned out to be busiest she had yet seen. She slipped past a man hurrying through the doorway and made her way into the centre of the room, where a heavy desk stood piled with papers, and behind it sat a man who by all appearances was in the midst of a heart attack. His face was redder than any Curl had ever seen before. The