Page 36

Always kick a man when he’s down, I say. It’s the best chance you’ll get.

The Liar’s Key , by Mark Lawrence

Evar

Evar pulled free of Starval’s blade, turning to confront his brother as the blood ran from the wound in his lower back. The physical pain was bad, but less so than Evar might have guessed—less so than being shot. It was the emotional pain that rocked him on his heels.

“You stabbed me! You actually stabbed me!”

Starval stood there, his blade raised between them.

“That’s not even how you do it.” Evar couldn’t believe he was complaining about how he’d been stabbed. Shock had hold of his tongue. But he was right. It wasn’t how Starval had taught him, and the fact he was still standing showed it to be an inefficient method. Was Starval being cruel? That wasn’t the assassin’s way.

“No,” Starval agreed woodenly.

“Did he pay you to hurt me first?” Evar would never have imagined Mayland putting a contract on his life, much less anything less than a clean, painless one.

“I have to.” Starval continued to stare at his knife and the blood black upon it. “This truth is all I am.”

Evar took a step back, one hand pressed to his wound, the other raised towards his brother. The closed square offered no retreat, its walls rising on all sides, the scarce windows all shuttered, as if the buildings themselves were looking away. Kerrol would know what to say to Starval. Evar could understand the knot his brother had tied himself in, or that Mayland had tied, but couldn’t see how to undo it.

Starval’s escape from a life sentence amid the book towers of their chamber had been to retreat from it. To distance himself from everything. To make a game of it. To say it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered, and to repeat that mantra a million times until the boy that had emerged from the Mechanism lay buried beneath that rejection. He stood beyond emotion now, beyond appeal, armoured in so many layers of denial that nothing could reach him.

Or that had been the plan. Because if everything about sunny Starval had been a lie, Evar would be sprawled in the mud, his heart pierced by his brother’s first blow. But the next blow, the final thrust of the dagger, was coming. Evar could sense it. Starval had built his life upon a particular contract with reality. He had been paid. He allowed himself no choices.

“This—” Evar bit back on the pain. “This is like Jaspeth and Irad. Brothers at war. Their grandfather invented fratricide. That’s the story. And—”

“I have to do this.” Starval advanced.

Evar saw it. The stack of crimes Mayland had piled upon Starval, using him as the weapon he’d shaped himself into. If Starval had refused this commission, the poisoning of a whole city would become a choice. If one thing mattered—everything did. In one moment, Evar saw the only way to undo the knot, and how it would be impossible to do so. He had to beat Starval. And despite the chance his brother had given him, he stood unarmed and wounded before the most skilled of assassins.

“Ready?” Starval jabbed and Evar skipped back despite his injury. The look in Starval’s eyes promised there would be no more chances.

In a knife fight perhaps even Clovis would not have been Starval’s equal. Evar had been trained by the master, but even on his best day he would stand no chance in a fair contest. And this wasn’t fair. He had no knife.

There, in the dank shadow of the nameless square, inspiration struck.

Evar whipped his arm across the space between them, even though his brother was too far away to punch. Starval, ever cautious, lifted his dagger to block the non-existent blow, and tensed, ready for any projectile that might leave Evar’s hand.

Evar had no throwing stars, no blade, no handful of sand to blind an unwary opponent. He had nothing in his hand save his blood, and even that was not his own. Mayland had, under the scrutiny of Kerrol and Clovis, healed Evar. The blood of the library ran in Evar’s veins now. And Starval had set it free.

Evar didn’t form the weapon until the swing of his arm had passed Starval’s blocking manoeuvre. He made a black rod, as thick as the volume of blood allowed. Even Starval’s breathtaking reflexes couldn’t save him entirely. The cane struck him around the temple. He staggered back.

“Clever.” Allowing Evar no time to think, Starval spun in, sweeping a leg, knife moving.

Evar jumped the leg sweep and, in mid-air, deflected the lunge of Starval’s blade on a black buckler of his own blood. He tried to kick his brother in the chest, but the knife wound in his back robbed the attack of strength. He landed badly and Starval was on him. The blow to the head must have dazed and slowed the assassin: his knife struck sparks from the flagstones. Evar wrapped the blade in a thickness of black blood, taking away its sharpness. In the same moment he kneed Starval in the stomach, throwing him clear. Both of them rolled to their feet at the same time.

“Very clever.” Starval spat blood and turned his now-useless blade this way then that. He tossed it aside and drew a new knife from a hidden scabbard on his chest, a thinner, sharper one.

“Stop this…” Evar could feel himself weakening.

“Stop me,” Starval replied. A hint of helplessness ran through the words, faint but there for Evar to hear.

Suddenly he was angry. Angry with everything: Mayland, Starval, himself as well. “I’ve better things to do, godsdammit.” Evar strode to the nearest wall, reached up, and with a snarl of effort ripped down one of the shutters. “I’ve got better things to do than fight my stupid brother in a dirty hole over some war I don’t even care about.” And with a roar he charged, holding the shutter before him like a shield.

Starval’s acrobatics had no match among his family. Wherever Evar leapt, Starval would no longer be there. He would sidestep, and he would stab.

Evar threw himself at his brother anyway, both feet leaving the ground. He could see his target through the slats of the shutter, already moving now that Evar had placed himself in the hands of gravity and momentum, slave to both. The assassin had made his calculation, as inflexible as his contract, and as deadly.

The fight ended here.

It would have ended with a knife thrust, but for the fact that Evar’s blood moved to his will, outside his veins, and inside them too. By force of will he steered his whole body through the air on an impossible, unexpected curve. The shutter caught Starval’s knife thrust. It caught Starval too, slamming him into the wall. Evar’s weight followed. Then his fists. And in a flurry of angry blows, he set his brother senseless on the ground.

Groaning and limping, Evar hobbled away to recover the discarded knife and the much-needed blood around it.

“I know you’re awake.”

“Only because I got bored and let you know.” Starval’s voice sounded thicker, a painful rasp.

“What happens now?” Evar asked. “Does the mission carry on until one of us is dead? Or now I’ve beaten you can I buy out the contract?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never failed before.”

Evar shook out the contents of the purse he’d taken from Starval. “This looks like enough.” He flicked two of the coins at his brother, who lay propped against the wall of the alley Evar had dragged him to.

“Paying me with my own money?” Starval shook his head. “That’s low.”

“Lower than stabbing your brother in the back?” Evar shifted his stance and winced. “Besides, it’s not your money. You stole it in Oldo’s pub.”

“I can’t pick it up unless you untie me.” Starval flexed his shoulders as if to prove it. His hands remained behind his back.

“You don’t expect me to believe you’re still tied up?”

Starval rolled his eyes and reached out for the coins.

Evar pinned his wrist to the ground with one foot. “This better be over. I need to find Livira. And I’m going to have to go through anyone who gets in my way.” He hoped he sounded convincing. He felt convinced.

“Understood,” Starval answered through gritted teeth.

“I’ve no idea if you’re lying. Still.” Evar released the hand. “None at all.”

Starval took the coins. “I’m not sure either.”

Evar helped him up. The wound in his back hurt, but it no longer bled. It seemed that all Evar had to do in order to stop bleeding was to will himself to stop bleeding. Whether he would bleed to death when he next slept remained to be seen.

“What now?” Starval asked, still unsteady from the beating that had taken him down.

“Sneezes,” Evar said.

“Sneezes?”

“You said this was a maybe place. I said that it has to matter as much as where we came from. Everything matters, or nothing does. And we’ve seen where nothing mattering gets us.” Evar still couldn’t believe that Starval had stabbed him, or that they were standing together now almost as if it hadn’t happened. “The barrel being loaded into Oldo’s pub sneezed. I want to know why. It seems to me that there’s no more reason to find Livira over there”—he pointed in a random direction—“than in Oldo’s cellars. So, let’s look there and satisfy my curiosity. After all, the Exchange spat us out there. And the Exchange has always put me somewhere significant.”

“It put us in that bookshop to be specific.”

“I’m checking out this damn barrel. Are you in or out?”

“In.”

“You’d better lead the way then, because I have no idea where we are.”

The night deepened and the mist grew shallower. The streets felt familiar, though whether his feet would lead him to the Stained Page if Starval stopped showing him the way, Evar couldn’t say.

“What was that?” Starval spun, seeking the source.

Before Evar could answer, it came again, a blow struck from beneath, as if some giant were striking up from below with a great hammer. The impact made the bedrock shudder and set every rooftile rattling. But whatever the effect on the buildings around them might be, it was as nothing to the shock that ran through Evar. He lurched into the air and hung there as if on a butcher’s hook, both his stab wound and the older stick-shot wound starting to pump black blood.

“Evar!” Starval ran for him.

A third shock came, like the tolling of some bell both far away and bigger than the world. And it took everything with it.