*
Rishinira’s Rage was so packed with human bodies that there didn’t seem room for a pair of arm-wrestlers, let alone for two bare-knuckle fighters and the ring to put them in. People packed the main floor—men, mostly, lake sailors and canal boat hands, judging from their bare feet—bellowing to be heard by companions standing half a pace away. The sound was a wall, and the hot, sweet reek of sweat and spilled plum wine almost choked me. After the dry, open air of the Ancaz Mountains, even a crowded city square could feel tight. Walking into Rishinira’s Rage was like shoving my way down the gullet of some house-huge, fetid beast. I felt as though the place were digesting me.
My companion didn’t seem to be having the same problem. Despite the fact that he’d been ready to beat me bloody outside the temple just a little earlier, he seemed to have forgotten all about me as we made our way through Sia’s winding streets. He didn’t appear to have much regard for anyone else either, walking straight past the four cudgel-bearing louts at the tavern door. When we hit the press of bodies inside, he didn’t bother to raise his hands, didn’t bother to slide past or push people out of the way. He just walked straight ahead, leading with his chest. He wasn’t a very big man, but when he bumped into people he just kept walking, like someone striding through a dense field of wheat, deaf or indifferent to the curses that he kept jolting free. Sailors would round on him, sloshed wine forgotten, fists half raised until they saw his face. Then, eyes wide with sudden recognition, they’d take a step back, hands falling to their sides. The young man ignored them all. He might have been alone.
My passage through the room wasn’t quite as effortless. I was smaller, for one thing, and I was a woman moving through a room of loud, drunken men. I broke the hand of the first idiot who reached for me, then stepped past him as he howled. As I slid on into the crowd, the sounds of other conversation closed over his bellows. By the time I caught up with my bruised, music-loving fighter, I’d shattered two ankles and twisted one idiot’s scrotum so tight he couldn’t stand. If there had been fewer people, the scene could have turned ugly for me; even Ananshael’s most studied priestesses can’t stand against dozens of men at once. The crush and press actually protected me. Each time I tended to a would-be suitor, I had only to move away, move forward, to lose myself in the crowd.
Despite the unwanted attentions, I was almost enjoying things. Ever since arriving in Sia, I’d been trying to be circumspect. Ministers of my god aren’t generally encouraged to embark on campaigns of indiscriminate slaughter. Those of us still in training leave Rassambur mostly to learn the ways of the world, to start to understand the minds and manners of the uninitiate. Certainly, I was required to make a number of offerings during my year-long sojourn in the city, but for the most part I was there to study, to learn. It felt good to use my body again as I’d been trained. I’d even managed to slide a cup of wine from the hand of one man as he fell, and I was sipping happily from the chipped rim when I almost ran into my own young fighter, who had stopped abruptly in front of me.
It took me a moment to understand what was happening. The press of human bodies gave way to a large open space at the center of the room, a square cordoned off with a waist-high rope. When I stood on my toes to look over my companion’s shoulder, I realized that the floor fell away, marching down in graduated benches to a dirt ring several paces below. Most of those seats were already filled, and, judging from the clothes and comportment of the men and women sitting there, filled by people who had more money than the ripe-smelling sailors crammed into the room above. A dozen brutes with cudgels—hired muscle, evidently—kept back the throng.
At first, no one seemed to notice the young man standing at the rope. Then one or two people glanced up, pointed, exclaimed. A moment later, a massive woman who had been sitting in the lowest rank of benches rose from her seat, turned to face us, then smiled a wide, gap-toothed grin. When she spoke, her voice was a gong, crashing through the surrounding tumult.
“Ruc Lan Lac!” she declared, staring at my battered fighter. “I was starting to think you had gone soft at last.”
That was the first time I heard his name. Ruc Lan Lac.
I’d suspected from the moment I saw him that he wasn’t from Sia. Not many people in the city had his shade of skin, that glossy black hair, the same tilt of the eyes. Either his parents were foreign, or he’d come from somewhere to the south, Channary, probably, maybe even Dombang. His name all but confirmed it. Lan Lac was an old name in the city of my birth, a noble one once, though long fallen from grace.
The crowd behind had pressed me almost up against him, but I shifted to the side, putting space between the two of us, lifted the cup of plum wine and drank deep. The joy of moments ago had evaporated, though what it was I felt in its place, I couldn’t say; something brighter, but barbed.
At the sound of Ruc’s name, the clamor inside the tavern ground slowly to quiet. Shouted arguments settled into heated debates, cooled to murmurs, then faded, finally, into silence. It took a little time—Rishinira’s Rage was a large place—and I used that time to turn my attention forcibly from Ruc to study the woman who had spoken his name. She stood at the center of that pit now, a giant, half again as tall as me, her chest like a barrel. She must have been nearly forty, but there was no softness to her. The muscles in her arms and shoulders rolled lazily over one another when she moved. When she smiled that jagged smile, the tendons in her neck stood out like ropes. Someone had torn away half of one ear years earlier, and her crooked nose had obviously been broken and reset half a dozen times. No one would have declared her a beautiful woman, but there was an irresistible vitality to her, a joyous strength in the way she moved, a humor in that broken smile, that almost erased her body’s many breakages. I found myself wanting to know her, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her gray eyes were fixed on Ruc Lan Lac.
“You look like you’ve been kicked by an ox,” she exclaimed.
Her voice was a bronze bell; his the ring of good steel hammered on an anvil.
“Hello, Nayat,” he replied. “I was starting to suspect that bastard you had me fight last night wasn’t fully human.”
The crack brought laughs from the crowd. The huge woman, Nayat, smiled wider, but there was something keen and calculating in those gray eyes.
“And yet here you are again, one night later.”
Ruc spread his hands, that same empty invitation to embrace that he’d given me in the street earlier.