A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4
concentration it demands is fundamentally different from the concentration necessary in a duel. In any
case, you can spend the next two months mastering the
art of spearing a ring, or two months mastering the art of
staying alive against a skilled enemy, and not just staying
alive, but presenting a true threat to that enemy, in turn.'
He shrugged. 'Your choice, of course.'
Bellam Nom grinned suddenly and Murillio saw at once
how much he looked like his oh-so-distant cousin. 'I still
might try it – in my own time, of course.'
'Tell you what,' Murillio said. 'Master spearing a
suspended ring at the close of a mistimed lunge, an off-balance
recovery to your unarmed side, two desperate
parries, a toe-stab to your opponent's lead foot to keep him
or her from closing, and a frantic stop-thrust in the midst
of a back-pedalling retreat. Do that, and I will give you my
second best rapier.'
'How long do I have?'
'As long as you like, Bellam.'
'Extra time with an instructor,' said a voice from the
shaded colonnade to one side, 'is not free.'
Murillio turned and bowed to Stonny Menackis.
'Mistress, we were but conversing—'
'You were giving advice,' she cut in, 'and presenting this
student with a challenge. The first point qualifies as instruction.
The second is an implicit agreement to extracurricular
efforts on your part at some time in the future.'
Bellam's grin had broadened. 'My father, Mistress, will
not hesitate to meet any extra expense, I assure you.'
She snorted, stepping out from the gloom. 'Any?'
'Within reason, yes.'
She looked terrible. Worn, old, her clothes dishevelled.
If Murillio had not known better, he would judge her as
being hungover, a condition of temporary, infrequent
sobriety to mark an alcoholic slide into fatal oblivion. Yet
he knew she was afflicted with something far more tragic.
Guilt and shame, self-hatred and grief. The son she didn't
want had been taken from her – to imagine that such a
thing could leave her indifferent was not to understand
anything at all.
Murillio said to Bellam, 'You'd best go now.'
They watched him walk away.
'Look at him,' Stonny muttered as he reached the gate,
'all elbows and knees.'
'That'll pass,' he said.
'A stage, is it?'
'Yes.' And of course he knew this particular game, the
way she spoke of Harllo by not speaking of him, of the life
that might await him, or the future taken away from him,
stolen by her cruel denial. She would inflict this on herself
again and again, at every opportunity. Seemingly innocent
observations, each one a masochistic flagellation. For this
to work, she required someone like Murillio, who would
stand and listen and speak and pretend that all this was
normal – the back and forth and give and take, the blood
pooling round her boots. She had trapped him in this role
– using the fact of his adoration, his love for her – and
he was no longer certain that his love could survive such
abuse.
The world is small. And getting smaller.
He had walked the pauper pits south of the city, just
outside the wall between the two main trader gates. He
had looked upon scores of recent unclaimed dead. It
was, in fact, becoming something of a ritual for him, and
though he had only second-hand descriptions of Harllo,
he did his best, since no one who knew the boy would
accompany him. Not Stonny, not Myrla nor Bedek. On
occasion, Murillio had been forced to descend into one of
the pits to make closer examination of some small body,
a soft, lime-dusted face, eyes lidded shut as if in sleep or,
on occasion, scrunched in some last moment of pain, and
these mute, motionless faces now paraded in his dreams at
night, a procession of such sorrow that he awoke with tears
streaming from his eyes.
He told Stonny none of this. He'd said nothing of how
his and Kruppe's enquiries among the sailors and fisherfolk
had failed to find any evidence of someone press-ganging
a five-year-old boy. And that every other possible trail
thus far had turned up nothing, not even a hint or remote
possibility, leaving at last the grim likelihood of some fell
mishap, unreported, uninvestigated – just another dead
child abandoned long before death's arrival, known only in
the records of found corpses as the 'twice-dead'.
'I am thinking of signing over my stakes in this school,'
Stonny now said. 'To you.'
Startled, he turned to stare at her. 'I won't accept.'
'Then you'd be a fool – as if I didn't already know
that. You're better suited. You're a better
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