CHAPTER
33
Down from the Forest
Gont Asch spent most Sixthdays at the Silver Spur Cockfight Pit & Bar, which was owned by his cousin, a Lantern Man in the Mountain clan. A longtime aficionado of the sport, Gont owned and played a dozen prize gamecocks that his nephew bred and trained for him. Right now one of them was finishing off his opponent in a feathery melee of flapping, pecking, and flashing steel spurs. Excited shouts and disappointed groans rose from the bettors ringing the arena. Money exchanged hands as the referee lifted both birds, depositing the twitching loser in a blue plastic bucket and handing the victor back to his smiling trainer.
The arena and seating took up the main level of the Silver Spur. The open second floor contained the restaurant and bar where half the tables overlooked the action on the floor below and those without a direct view could see the fights on the hanging closed-circuit televisions. In between watching the matches, Gont was having a late lunch and talking business with three of his Fists when a messenger barged through the door and ran straight up the stairs to his table with the news: Kaul Lan was dead, and Kaul Hilo was coming here now to kill Gont himself.
The Horn was taken aback, but it didn’t show on his face. Gont was an expert at keeping his thoughts and emotions to himself. Only his First Fist, Waun Balu, noticed the small shift in his expression—a flaring of the nostrils, the tightening of his mouth into a skeptical scowl. Gont looked
around himself. He was in a building in the south Wallows, deep inside Mountain territory, in broad daylight, surrounded by several of his Green Bone warriors. Was Kaul really so insane as to try to attack him here?
Gont decided he was.
“Call every Finger you have nearby,” he demanded of his Fists. “Clear the people out of here. Send lookouts to either end of the street and guard the doors.” His men scrambled to obey. Gont found his nephew and told him to take their valuable birds out the back door and far away. The owner of the Silver Spur refused to flee with the customers, so Gont made him and his staff lock themselves in the kitchen with a pair of shotguns pointed at the door.
The battle to come would be bloody. The second Kaul son was a heavily jaded and ferocious fighter, and for all the Mountain’s internal assertions that No Peak was in decline, Gont knew that it was still a formidable clan with committed young warriors. After the failed assassination attempt and the duel at the Factory, Ayt-jen had instructed everyone to be more careful, more focused on the Mountain’s eventual goal. So Gont had not expected a violent showdown so soon. As much as he looked forward to separating Kaul Hilo’s head from his body, he wondered what had gone wrong, why their plans had failed. No time for speculation now.
Green Bones filled the Silver Spur and its surrounding streets. In a few minutes, Gont had a total of fourteen men in and around the building—three Fists and eleven Fingers. They took up positions near the door and in the upstairs windows. Half a dozen more jade warriors were gathering down the street in the Mountain-owned Brass Arms Hotel, where they would close in behind the No Peak fighters and attack from the rear. Gont expected No Peak would outnumber them, but this was Mountain turf and he held the advantage of ground.
He considered phoning his Pillar but decided against it. Reinforcements would not arrive in time, and besides, he intended to meet and kill Kaul Hilo himself.
The ruse was Shae’s idea.
Before she’d arrived at the house, Hilo had been ready to head straight
into the heart of Mountain territory to kill Gont and as many of his men as he could. He’d already drunk a shot of hoji and cut his tongue on a knife with his Fists—the traditional Green Bone ritual before undertaking a mission one expected not to return from.
She faced him down from across the kitchen table the way she used to when they were children. “We have to be smarter than that. If we die today, the Mountain wins.” They had to think ahead, even in this terrible time.
“Gont will be ready and waiting for us. Even if we kill him, we won’t defeat the Mountain. Won’t destroy it.”
Perhaps this unfettered outburst of emotion, surging Shae’s jade aura with a vehemence that Hilo could not ignore, forced the Horn back into thinking clearly. He looked at his most trusted senior Fists and saw some of them nodding at what Shae had said. He turned to her. “I wish to the gods it hadn’t taken this to bring you back,” he said. “But you’re green, and one of us again, so tell me what you have in mind.”
Once she explained her idea, he smiled with a cold, satisfied determination and seized upon it with as much conviction as if it had been his own. He gave quick orders to his men, who sprang to carry them out. While the Maik brothers organized the attack parties, Shae went to the armory room behind the training hall to find herself some weapons. When she returned, Hilo was sitting on the stairs with Wen, saying goodbye. Their heads were bent close together, and they were speaking quietly. Wen’s eyes were dry, but her fingers trembled as she smoothed Hilo’s hair behind one of his ears with a tenderness that made Shae turn away, feeling like an intruder witnessing a private moment. She went to stand outside and watch as the Duchesse and five other cars departed the estate.
The convoy of vehicles would be sighted entering the Lo Low Street tunnel, and word would reach Gont Asch that Kaul Hilo was on his way to seek a showdown at the Silver Spur. The Mountain would rush to mount a defense while the Duchesse-led convoy took its time circling the Wallows district before returning to No Peak territory.
Seconds after the decoy cars exited the roundabout of the Kaul house, the Maiks and three other Fists pulled up in nondescript vehicles hastily borrowed from a nearby Lantern Man’s car dealership. Hilo came out. Gone was the gentleness Shae had glimpsed earlier—he strode down the front steps, then turned to face the house. There he fell to his knees and touched his
head to the concrete. The Horn rocked back and raised his face to the sky.
“Can you hear me?” he bellowed, and Shae was not sure who he was screaming at: his troops, the window of their grandfather’s room, the departed spirit of their slain brother, or the gods themselves. “Can you hear me? I’m ready to die. The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master.”
Shae had always strongly disliked Hilo’s penchant for dramatic gestures, but she bowed her head and swallowed thickly at the sight of the assembled Green Bones falling to their knees and crying out in a fervor, “Our blood for the Horn!”
The three largest and most profitable betting houses in the city were the Palace of Fortune, the Cong Lady, and the Double Double. They were located side by side on the same strip of Poor Man’s Road in the south part of the Armpit still belonging to the Mountain. Ranking among the Mountain’s most well-known holdings, they were where high-rolling Lantern Men conducted after-hours deals and where the clan’s business and political associates were rewarded or bribed with luxury and entertainment. A fitting place for an unprecedented retribution.
Hilo had nodded in admiration of Shae’s choice: “Lan fought for the Armpit, and it’s ours by right—all of it.” They crossed Patriot Street with a dozen of No Peak’s strongest Fists. Shae took the Cong Lady with the four other fighters Hilo sent with her, while the Maiks stormed the Double Double with another crew, and Hilo went with his team to destroy the Palace of Fortune.
The whole thing felt like a violent fever dream to Shae. The car pulled up right in front of the casino; Shae got out and strode past the shocked valet attendant who shrank aside at the sight of them, past the lighted fountain with the statue of the dancing lady in the center, up the marble steps to the revolving glass doors. No hiding in the crowd now; the waning sunlight flashed on her jade bracelets, and fearfully expectant eyes followed her every move. She felt sick with eagerness, and powerful in a way she hadn’t felt for years. The foreigners were right: The Kekonese were savages. Lan had not been savage, not at heart, but he was dead now.
The senior Fist next to her, a gray-eyed man named Eiten, seemed unsure
of how to deal with her presence. He was one of Hilo’s higher-ranked lieutenants, but she was a Kaul; he couldn’t decide whether to order her around or defer to her. “What’s the plan, Kaul-jen?” he asked just before they reached the doors.
She drew her moon blade and held it out to him; he spat on it for luck.
“Kill anyone wearing jade,” she said.
That was simple enough to agree upon. Screams erupted when they came through the doors. Shae picked out the four other jade auras in the room like a cobra sensing body heat. They stood out like beacons amid the rest of the irrelevant motion and noise. A couple of them had already Perceived the murderous approach and were ready; they leapt upon the intruders at once with drawn moon blades.
It had been years since Shae had last fought to kill. For a few minutes on the drive over here, she’d wondered if she still had the skills, the reflexes, the instinct for it, or if two and a half years of jadelessness and peaceable Espenian life had ruined her.
So she was almost surprised when she cut the first man down in a few seconds. She deflected his first attack, white metal singing against white metal, then made an obvious swing for his abdomen. The man Steeled and curved his spine away from her attack. His head tilted forward with the motion and Shae’s left hand whipped up to thrust her talon knife into his unprotected throat. She bounded Light over his body, yanking out the knife and already moving on to the next target.
It felt like an exercise at the Academy, another timed trial. Training and experience took over. She became focused and efficient, and the jade energy playing through her blood was like a song she hadn’t heard for a while but still knew by heart. She fought another man on the first floor until Eiten cut his throat from behind. Shae leapt Lightly onto the balcony of the second floor.
A woman Fist guarded the room where the staff had taken refuge. She greeted Shae with a battery of hurled Deflections that overturned chairs, sent cards and betting chips into the air like confetti, and rattled the walls. Shae weaved through the barrage, scattering the attacks with her own Deflections, until she closed in and they matched talon knives in the narrow hallway. The woman’s Steel could not be broken by the knife. In the end Shae landed a crushing stomp kick to the woman’s kneecap. As her opponent buckled
forward in agony, Shae dropped her elbow down on the back of the Fist’s head with all the Strength she could summon, caving in the skull.
When every Green Bone in the building was dead—six in all—they tore the door to the back room off by its hinges, and Shae addressed the huddled, cowering staff members of the Cong Lady. “All the businesses on Poor Man’s Road are now the property of the No Peak clan,” she said. “You can leave now with your lives. Or you can swear allegiance and tribute and keep your jobs with equal terms and pay under new management. Make your choice quickly.”
A quarter of the employees left—the ones too senior or too well connected in the Mountain clan, who were truly loyal, or too frightened of the repercussions if they turned. The rest stayed and recovered from the disruption remarkably quickly; the Kekonese are accustomed to local changes of administration and treat them like natural disasters—incidents of sudden and unpreventable violence, the damage calmly dealt with afterward so business can return to normal. Soon the remaining casino staff were busy righting furniture, sweeping up broken glass, and blotting bloodstains before they set into the expensive carpet or upholstery.
Shae gathered the jade from the enemy fighters she’d killed, then walked outside, leaving Eiten and the rest of Hilo’s men in charge. She found her brother on the street, shouting orders, pointing here and there with the tip of his bloody talon knife, his face and aura bright with battle mania. The Double Double was on fire—whether it had been set accidentally or deliberately, by the Mountain as it fled or by an overzealous No Peak fighter, no one seemed able to tell. The smoke curled out of the upper-story windows, mingling with the washed-out hues of the sky.
Hilo glanced at her as she approached, at the handful of jade she clutched, and his mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile. He turned his face back toward the melee—the fire, the running people, the intermittent sounds of continued fighting. Not just from Green Bones; people from the No Peak side of the Armpit were pouring across Patriot Street. There was shouting and clashing in the streets between civilians rallying in support of one clan or another.
“It’s not enough,” Hilo muttered. Shae was not sure what he was referring to—the amount of jade in her hands, the betting houses themselves, or the number of Mountain Green Bones killed that evening. She was too rattled to
respond.
It took another thirty minutes for the fire in the Double Double to be put out and for the chaos to fade into the silence of an eerie aftermath. At some point, when the sun sank out of the smoky sky, Hilo organized his people to carry on through the night, and Shae ended up in the rear seat of a car headed back to the Kaul house. It was all a blur to her by that point, a surreal art house film of revenge and brutality.
Gont Asch took the phone call in silence, but every one of his men with any skill in Perception shifted away from him. Gont felt cold with astonishment.
Then his neck flushed red with rage.
Twenty-one members of the Mountain clan were dead in the surprise attack, Fingers and junior Fists who’d hastened to defend the trio of betting houses on Poor Man’s Road but were no match for the killers Kaul Hilo had assembled from No Peak. A couple of foolish Lantern Men who had fired on the attackers were in the hospital. Every square inch of the Armpit was under No Peak control. It was an outbreak of clan-on-clan violence such as Janloon had never seen.
Gont hung up. For several seconds he was motionless. Then he tore the phone and its casing off the wall and hurled it across the room with such force that it embedded into the far wall on the other side of the Silver Spur.
His men froze, shocked by the uncharacteristic outburst.
“Kaul Lan is dead,” Gont said. “His family has come down from the forest. We are now at open war with No Peak. Their lives and livelihoods are for the taking, and jade goes to the victor.”