Nineteen #2
“Very good, miss.” The clerk spills the coins into a tray and counts them, fingers blurring. “I make it ten stripes, two tenths, and five hundred eight bits.”
“Perfect. Thank you very much.”
And then we just leave, the whole transaction lasting less than a minute. Ky has explained to me how the bank works, but I still can’t bring myself to believe it.
“But how do you know they’ll give it back?” I say to her in low tones as we leave. “They’re the ones with the big building and all the guards. Why wouldn’t they just keep it?”
Ky sighs. “It’s like I’m lending it to them. Do people borrow money in the undercity?”
“All the time.”
“So why do they pay their lenders back?”
I scratch my cheek. “Usually ’cause the lenders employ some big fucking guys who’ll beat the shit out of you if you don’t?”
Ky chuckles. “That’s one way to do it. Up here we prefer to rely on reputation.”
I give up. She clearly believes it, at any rate. “Who’s Eclamia Ginnick?”
“My great-aunt once removed, I think. I stole her name off our family tree.” She stretches her arms. “That’s one obstacle down, anyway. When we go up to Hod, we can withdraw the money and pay the entry fee.”
When we go up to Hod still sounds absurd, but not quite as absurd as it did at the beginning. “I’m starting to think we might actually get there.”
“Me too.” She grins at me. “This deserves a celebration. Have you ever had ice cream?”
“What cream?”
She guides me to a nearby stall, where a deep metal bucket is wrapped in sigwork. I stare for a minute at the sigils—there’s CHANNEL, which I normally associate with force, but it’s bound to HEAT and a web of threading wire…
“Here.” Ky counts a couple of weeks’ wages into the vendor’s hand and passes me a paper cup with a lump of white stuff in it. She demonstrates using a little scrap of wood to spoon a bit into her mouth. “It’s good.”
I cautiously follow suit, then slap my free hand against my lips. It’s cold. The sweetness comes a moment later. Ky is grinning, and I get the uncomfortable feeling she’s laughing at me.
“You don’t have ice cream in the undercity, I take it,” she says as we stroll away with our cups.
“We don’t have ice,” I say. I’d only heard of it in stories before coming to Malkuth. The ice cream is probably the coldest thing I’ve ever touched. “Who thinks of this stuff?”
“Probably some bored chef on Hod,” Ky says. “Most people on Hod are bored most of the time, if you don’t count the servants.”
I take another bite and let it dissolve on my tongue. “And that’s what you’re so eager to get back to?”
“I have things I need to do.”
“Like revenge.”
“Like revenge,” she agrees. “Gestian is going to die screaming, but not before he tells me who was pulling his strings.”
“Let’s say all that works,” I say. “You win, the bad guys are all dead, hurrah hurrah. Then what?”
“Then what?” She laughs. “That’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves, isn’t it?”
“A celebration deserves a bit of daydreaming, right?”
“I suppose.” Ky cocks her head. “I’ll take my father’s seat on the Council, and I’ll take over all the family businesses. There’s a lot of work to do there.”
“What does all that work get you?”
She shrugs. “Money. Respect. Power.”
“Is that what you want?”
Ky purses her lips. “I honestly don’t know. If you’d asked me a few months ago, I would have said…”
“Yes?” I guess when she trails off.
“Not exactly. More that it was my duty. To my father, to the family. What I want didn’t really signify. I’d grow up and take over, and that was that.” She sighs. “Then bear another generation to do it all over again.”
“Do you want that?”
“What, children?” Ky snorts. “Maybe eventually. It’s not something I think much about. Depends on… a lot of things.” She turns to me, curiously. “What about you? What are you going to do if we win?”
“Keep my family safe,” I say immediately. “Get them out of the undercity. Here, maybe.”
Her eyes twinkle. “Why stop at Malkuth? Bring them to Hod.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh, because this is obviously absurd. Her face goes serious.
“You could, you know,” she says. “I’d help you. Stars know I owe you enough. I can take you on as family retainers.”
“There’s three of us.”
She waves a hand. “Our house has so many bedrooms I don’t think I’ve even visited them all.”
“I—”
I stop, not sure what to say. Something about the idea makes me uncomfortable, and it takes me a moment to put my finger on why. In this imagined future we’d live on Hod, but we’d live at Ky’s sufferance. She’d be grateful now, yes, but how long would that last? What happens when Spike grows up?
It’s not that I don’t like Ky. I even trust her, as far as it goes. But life in the Heap has taught me the dangers of putting yourself under anybody’s thumb.
“I don’t think I could ask that much of you,” I say eventually.
“Please. You’ve saved my life a couple of times already. If you win the Ascent for me, you have no idea how much I’ll owe you. You could ask for my hand in marriage and I don’t think I could refuse.”
My cheeks flush. “Well—”
“That’s all assuming you don’t fling yourself into the unknown,” she says with a laugh. “But I suspect you have better sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.” She finishes the last of her ice cream. “If you win the Ascent. The prize.”
“Money, right? And prestige for my sponsor.”
“And ascent. It’s in the name.” She shakes her head. “I keep forgetting you didn’t grow up with all this.”
I stop walking and turn to face her. “Explain like I’m an idiot, then.”
“The Ascent is a grand tournament, I told you. It starts here, but it runs through all of Above.” She licks a stray drip of melted ice cream from one finger.
“Or so we’re told, anyway. In theory, the top two competitors win the right to keep fighting.
Up Above. In the next round, or however it works. ”
“They can…” I trail off, absorbing this. “Really?”
“That’s in theory. Nobody actually goes. You’d have to be crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody has ever come back, obviously. Not even in pieces. Whatever the next fight is, it’s not something people survive. Why risk that when you’ve just set yourself up for life?”
Why, indeed? Why try to take the cap off the world and see how high it goes? What does it matter if the stars are really up there?
“What if you win the next fight?”
“Who knows? Probably there’s another one after that, and another, and another. Probably Above goes on forever.”
“It can’t go on forever. There has to be a top somewhere.”
“Maybe there is!” Ky sounds like she’s getting annoyed. “Who cares. You’re not seriously thinking about this, are you? I was making a joke.”
“I’m”—not, really I’m not. I have people here who depend on me. But—“just daydreaming, like I said. We’ve got a long way to go.”
“Right.” She brightens. “Ooh, next we have to try—”
[Alarm: something is wrong.]
Star? His mental voice sounds strained. I left him in his thief body back at Weslai’s; the Mark 4 is in storage at Venci’s pit. I haven’t actually tried talking to him over such a distance before. Are you okay?
[Status: I am concealed. But several people have entered the warehouse.]
It’s probably just some of Weslai’s other clients—
[Interruption: I hear screaming.]