1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.4      An Artful Carnivale

1.2.4.31   Honor ante amorem

The deeper down the well they climbed, the darker it became. When Kafana couldn't even see the next rung she could make herself move on and just clung in place, until Tomsk rescued her by producing a lantern that he hung from a rope tied to his belt by letting go of the rungs with both his hands and using just the grip of his legs to avoid falling. He just smiled and started down again, leaving her no option but to follow in order to stay out of the shadows. She tried not to imagine all the scything blades, cursed needles, temporarily pacified wasp nests and other nasties a secret society of assassins might think were stylish accoutrements for a secret passage heading straight to their headquarters.

Kafana: “Tomsk, I’m getting spooked. Help distract me?”

Tomsk: “You were asking about my past, earlier. Now we’re not broadcasting, want to hear it? It isn’t exactly glamorous, but it might serve.”

Kafana: “I’d love to! I’ve always envisaged you being born from a stone egg or springing whole from the forehead of Ares, before being sent to train in some Tibetan lamasery.”

Tomsk nearly fell off the ladder with laughter and the shadows he cast upwards danced as the lantern jiggled beneath him.

Tomsk: “No, nothing like that. Here, I’ll move to private chat so assassins don’t hear us.”

Tomsk: {and so I can use names without giving them to XperiSense.}

Tosmk: {My mother, Ekaterina, was an amazing woman. She was on the Russian Olympic gymnastics team as a teenager and, when she grew too old to compete, she started a second career as a fitness trainer and a physiotherapist. Smart, beautiful, good at planning, dedicated, kind, loyal and loving. She had only one flaw, a tragic one. She believed in love.}

Tomsk: {She lived in Torfyanovka, near the border with Finland, and it was on a business trip that she met my father and he made an impression upon her. Which is unsurprising. I’ve seen pictures of him from that period. He was a helicopter pilot for the Utti Jaeger regiment, as proud as sin but dashing and humorous. Strong, tall, but with very fast reactions and good at thinking on his feet. He was loud and competitive - when Hämäläinen entered a bar, people noticed. They either loved him or hated him, but he always made an impression. And Ekaterina? She didn’t hate him.}

Tosmk: {They had an orthodox wedding, complete with crowns of flowers and drinking from a shared cup of wine. Half the regiment turned up to wish them well, and ten months later I was born. They might have lived a happy life, I think, if not for the crash.}

Tomsk: {There’s no escape from fate, they say. When I was eight years old, I didn’t know what “spinal cord injury”, “chronic pain” and “medical discharge” meant. I just knew my father was home all the time, hobbled around using a stick, and always had an open bottle of locally-brewed viina to hand. He wouldn’t talk about the crash, claimed it was classified, but as time wore on and full recovery grew less and less likely, he grew mean and started blaming others. We moved away from the base to a small town near the border. His friends stopped dropping by, and the only targets left for him were myself and Ekaterina.}

Tomsk: {She should have divorced him, should have had him arrested. Instead she hid the bruises and tried to carry on teaching me gymnastics, asking how my day at school had gone, like nothing had changed. I put up with it until I was 14 years old, by which time I was tall enough to pass as an adult. I gave her an ultimatum, she chose to stay with him, and I became homeless, never to return or see either of them again.}

Kafana: {How did you survive? Why didn’t social services in Finland find you?}

Tomsk: {They would have, if I’d stayed in Finland. But I had dual citizenship because of my mother. I crossed the border, found a city large enough to blend into, and did whatever I needed to do in order to get by. I’m in no position to look down upon criminals. I was one. Over the next two years I only avoided ending up dead in a gutter or shot by the police because I could run like a greased weasel, and climb buildings like a monkey on crack.}

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The lantern stopped moving and a few moments later she was standing in a low-ceilinged vault whose limestone walls were covered in a mosaic of time bleached skulls.

Kafana: {There must be thousands, no tens of thousands of them! How old is this place?}

Tomsk: {Pretty old, I’d guess. A bit naughty of them - the laws in Torello forbid keeping corpses inside the city boundaries as a precaution against maledic necromancers. I suspect this place pre-dates the law and Rac’s priesthood were probably put in charge of enforcing it. No wonder they made the entrance secret.}

Kafana: {I guess we better search for the passage under the canal. I hope we don’t have to poke the skulls to reveal it. Alderney could probably glance once and her skills would make it glow for her.}

Tomsk: {Let’s just look around first. If we don’t find it after ten minutes, you can try Finding, echo location or one of your other cool magic tricks.}

Kafana: {Ok. But carry on with the story. Is that when you learned compassion for the underdogs?}

Tomsk: {Hell no. Back then I didn’t care for anyone; even myself. I was a jerk. I didn’t just inherit my father’s size; I’d also got his pride and competitiveness. As someone not in formal schooling I felt ignorant and stupid, so the one thing I felt good at, climbing buildings, I couldn’t stand not being the best at. If someone took a picture of themselves standing on the roof of a tall building they’d climbed, the following week I’d post a picture of myself on a taller one, doing a handstand. I became an adrenaline junkie - I needed the rush to feel alive, to feel worthwhile.}

The vault had three exits, with symbols carved over them, leading to additional vaults which in turn branched again.

Kafana: {This is enormous! It’s a catacomb. What do you suppose the symbols mean?}

Tomsk shrugged. {No idea. I leave that sort of thing to Wellington and Bulgaria. I notice the walls look a little melted, like it gets wet here sometimes. The Hunters Guild talked about that when covering cave navigation. Lots of monsters have lairs underground. Maybe there’s a downhill slope we can follow?}

Kafana: {See? I wouldn’t have thought of that. How could you not realise how smart you were?}

Tomsk: {I wasn’t big on introspection. It took an external force, meeting Nadezhda, to change the path I was on.}

Kafana: {What was she like?}

Tomsk: {She was like no one I’d ever met before. She was bisexual, polyamorous, and took nothing seriously as a matter of principle. She was in the process of hanging a protest banner from top of Mikhailovsky Palace when she saw me climbing up. She paused her protest, videoed my climb instead, and we ended up having sex there on the roof, wrapped in the banner. Then she hung it up, stains and all, and waved goodbye.}

Kafana giggled: {I take it that wasn’t your only meeting?}

Tomsk: {No indeed. She posted the video, which gave me her full name, then I found out everything I could about her. She used to be part of a protest art group called Voina, who did things to get media attention like turning up at dubious trials dressed as a punk rock band named “Dick in the Ass” then using smuggled instruments and amplifiers to play at full volume a song “All Cops are Bastards, Remember This”. What newspaper could resist reporting that? After Voina got too violent for her taste, throwing Molotov cocktails and declaring it was a Bonfire of the Vanities, she joined an even more in-your-face group called Pussy Riot. The authorities hated them with a passion, and she spent more time in jail than out of it, but that didn’t put me off.}

Kafana: {Every sixteen year old thinks they are immortal.}

Tomsk: {Right. I tried seducing her, tried to become indispensable to her by putting up banners for her where nobody else could. And she, in return, gently taught me that love doesn’t mean possession, that it is ok to share, and that what’s important is that all parties give their enthusiastic consent and don’t deceive each other. She taught me that the actions of others can never shame you or reduce your worthiness, only your own. And she introduced me to her primary female love, Aminat. The rest you know.}

Kafana: {You owe her a lot. Do you still stay in touch?}

Tomsk’s face darkened. {The trips to prison took their toll. Too much privation, too many beatings. Her kidneys gave out, and she’d never been rich, never held a ‘proper’ job. Being herself, being an inspiration and changing society had been more important to her. I hadn’t yet been recruited for Cirque du Soleil, I couldn’t afford to warm the officials in charge of allocating transplants with ‘weighty’ arguments. She died just another statistic.}

Tomsk paused a moment, holding up a wet finger, trying to detect any breezes.

Tomsk: {I can’t pay her back, but I can pay it onwards.}