Chapter Nineteen The Principles of General Lauturo
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL LAUTURO
L ORENT B ICARDA WAS not exactly the most personable companion, but Lythlet understood at first sight why Master Dothilos had paired him up with her.
He was a broad-shouldered brute with many scars pockmarking his face, his ears cauliflowered to a grotesque degree, and his knuckles seemingly permanently swollen.
He spoke purely in grunts and shrugs, and she decided very early on to keep conversation minimal between them for the sake of her own sanity.
But having him as an escort made Hiligna Ward a little less daunting: it was a part of town best described as seedy after sunfall, and little better in daylight.
They passed rows of dilapidated, abandoned shacks which soon gave way to fields of weed and red-raw earth, occasionally punctuated by a lone building in equal amounts of neglect. Eventually, she came upon a long and wide-gabled storehouse—the address of Khavi Monul’s dogfighting ring.
Remembering a technique from one of Rentavos’s heists, she stepped only upon the stones dotting the landscape, preventing her tracks from being left in the soil. She passed the same trivia on to Lorent, who glared at her before reluctantly tiptoeing upon the same stones she did.
Master Dothilos had assured her the entire area would be empty so early in the day, as dogfighting took its spectators only at night.
Nonetheless, Lythlet remained on guard, peering around for any unwanted persons, straining her ears for voices, footsteps, stray coughs.
All she could hear were snuffling noises, but those were distinctively canine.
At the door, she pulled out a lock pick. It’s been a while, old friend , she thought fondly at it, one of the two she’d bought as a child, spending the entire fee earned as a funeral flag-bearer on them. The lock popped open after a few seconds of fiddling around.
Few windows lined the building, and the interior was dim, drenched in shadows from every angle.
A single desk and a cupboard were all that filled the ringmaster’s administrative quarters.
But search as she might, with Lorent standing guard mutely, she could find nothing of value, neither records nor clues of Khavi Monul’s black tax evasion.
The only thing of merit was a memorandum written in fat, brash letters left on a desk:
DO NOT FORGET:
MEETING WITH E.M.
NICHAVIND HALF PAST NOON
HIS OFFICE
Lythlet peeked at her pendant watch. It was a couple of hours away from high noon.
Very good. He won’t be home then. I’ll investigate the rest of this storehouse, and if there’s nothing here, I’ll head over there. She turned to the only other door at the end of the room, and the knob gave way immediately.
A thoroughly bare room greeted her, the flooring removed to reveal dry red earth underneath, a wooden enclosure forming a ring in the center—the fighting pits for the dogs.
She crossed the room, anger and disgust welling up at the faint trails of blood staining the earth. There was another door, and she pushed at it.
The hinges squealed, and a chorus of barks and yelps overwhelmed her, the sheer volume drowning out all thought.
Both the administrative quarters and fighting pits had been dire and dim, but they were kept respectably tidy, all things considered. The kennels, however, were a shamble of stink and rot, the only things gleaming in the barren light being metal bars caging row after row of hounds.
A foul stench forced her hand over her nose, yet she wished she could cover both ears as well. Scores of canines were driven wild at the sight of her, and they sent their cages rattling in metallic excitement, echoing alongside their growls and yelps.
She was not na?ve to the realities of dogfighting, but to see the beasts firsthand, housed in their own filth with barely enough room to lay on their bellies, awoke misery in her gut.
These were sun-blest animals, created to be sweet and docile, yet dogfighting handlers had starved and beaten them to induce aggression, feeding them a steady diet of ill roots and powders to force them into beastly proportions.
Pity took over her, and she went toward the nearest cage, pulling out her lock pick.
But the hound within lurched forward, a brown beast swathed in abnormal bundles of muscle and sinew. Even on all fours, it came to the height of her ribs, and it snarled at her, dirty yellow fangs gnashing at the bars. She stopped in her tracks, silently regarding it, weary with helplessness.
The pick in her hand felt as worthless as a twig. There was no feasible way to unlock the cage and not have the hound maul her where she stood. It was a beast so damaged by its own life, so trapped in the cycle of torture and starvation, it could never have freedom.
“I don’t know how I can help you,” she spoke quietly to it, apologetic. She could barely hear herself over its snarling.
Reluctantly, she stepped away from the cage.
If only there were some way I could shut this whole monstrous ring down.
But turning to the watchmen for help would be in vain.
She had been disappointed by the city’s withered justice system one too many times in her life to have any hope in them.
Even if she were to alert them of what was happening within this storehouse, the ringmaster could easily bribe his way out of gaol.
She gave one last glance at the sea of rusted cages and the hulking beasts within, the stench of unwashed filth permeating the walls.
“This is not the life you were meant to live,” she whispered sadly to them, turning to go.
The hounds were unceasing in their growling, their baying. But somewhere in the din, a high-pitched squeal made her pause. She strained her ears, listening curiously. Her footsteps led her to the back of the room.
One cage was separate from the others.
“Little ones,” she exclaimed, bending down to greet the litter squished inside.
It was a pack of black and brown pups, too young to have seen a full moon.
They yipped at her, clumsy paws stepping over one another in the crowded excrement-smeared cage.
Likely a new acquisition of the ringmaster, yet untouched by harsh hands.
Either they would be trained and damaged to join his kennel, or used as bait in a match, thrown into the wooden pits for the bigger hounds to tear apart and feed themselves with.
“I can help you yet,” she said with a growing smile. Perhaps saving these pups would help her atone for what she had done to the bugbear cub in some small way. She hadn’t quite shaken off the shame of that match, despite Desil’s assurance she had not marred her divine record with bloodguilt.
“Leave them be,” Lorent said, startling her. She’d almost forgotten he was there, so mindlessly quiet was he.
“Master Dothilos told me I could cause a ruckus if I wished, and I think seeing his business get meddled with might spook the ringmaster into obeying the Eza,” she argued, refusing to admit that mercy was simply getting the better of her.
He shrugged disinterestedly, receding back into silence, arms crossed over his burly chest. She was quite certain he suffered some degree of brain damage.
With no assistance from Lorent, she dragged the heavy iron cage across the floor with all her strength, sweat running down her arms. She kicked open the door leading outside, sunlight flooding the kennel.
She winced, having grown used to the dimness, but continued heaving the cage out.
Once clear of the room, she knelt and finally, with overwhelming relief that she could be useful at last, withdrew her lock pick.
The latch on the cage loosened, and she delivered each pup one by one into the open field, their furry bodies snug in her hands.
“You’ll have to run now,” she ordered, watching with relief as they bounded away. “Go as far as you can. The streets of Setgad may have problems of their own, but you’ll find much better lives there than in this awful place.”
A weight brushed against her foot, and she looked down at a very small, very quiet pitch-black pup clinging to her ankles. It looked up at her with its big brown eyes and wagged its tail once.
“Aren’t you a tiny thing! Were you the runt of the litter?”
“ROO.”
“Goodness, what a peculiar noise that was,” said Lythlet, privately charmed. There really was no other word for the sound that had come out of the pup’s throat: it was a polite, truncated howl that sounded more like a mild request than anything else. “Do you not know how to bark properly?”
“ROO,” the pup replied politely once again.
“That’s all right, it took me a long time to learn how to speak properly, too. Now, carry on,” Lythlet said. “Your brothers and sisters are leaving you behind.”
She tried to help the pup along, carrying it across the field, but when she set it down, it only rested its little head on her boot, staring at her with drooping eyes, making her heart ache.
“I have an errand to run, and you’re taking up a lot of my time.” She wagged her finger weakly, trying to sound cross but failing. “I can’t keep you, if that’s what you’re hoping for—the kataka flats are no place for a pup. Shoo! ”
But she gave the pup only a few seconds of failure before scooping it up into her hand and blowing a kiss at its dirty face. “You won’t last a day out in the city if you’re going to be like this, you silly runt. Come, we must hurry.”
· · ·
T HE S TEAM D RAGON opened late every other Nichavind, lifting their shutters at noon instead of the usual seven a.m. start.
When Lythlet arrived—alone, as she had sent Lorent ahead to meet her at Ringmaster Khavi Monul’s private residences, not wanting to be bothered by his hulking presence—she had to squat low to enter the small gap beneath a semi-lifted shutter.
Schwala wagged his tail at her, then froze, spellbound by the puppy in her arms.