Perhaps an hour passed. It was impossible to tell. Csorwe’s existence stretched and narrowed, drawn into white-hot threads like molten glass.
The General grew tired of this, and sent for a pair of pliers.
“You’re young,” he said, reaching out to touch one of Csorwe’s tusks with a sharp-nailed forefinger. “These are new. Only a coward sends a child to do his work.”
“No,” Csorwe mumbled, too weak even to snap at his hand. She could hardly move her head. Every breath came shallow and tearing.
Psamag laughed. “No? Defending the one who put you here? This isn’t my fault, child. It’s my duty to protect my interests. What’s happening to you is down to the one who sent you to this place.” He fit the teeth of the pliers to her tusk, cold against the feverish heat of her cheek. “You know what you have to do to end this. Just one word, little friend, just the name of the one who sent you to kill me.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Csorwe, though the words came out slurred, not at all the cry of defiance she had hoped.
“As you please,” said Psamag. “Dead Tooth, pull her right tusk for me. Then we’ll see how much she likes her boss.”
* * *
Some unreckonable span of time had passed. Psamag had dismissed the revenants. Csorwe was still hanging from the beam.
“Whoever you’re working for, you’ve failed them,” the General was saying. “There’s no point holding out. I think you know that, at heart. You’re being obstinate, and it’s not achieving anything but more pain for you. You’ve tried hard, and that’s admirable in its way, but you’re clinging to a lost cause.”
Csorwe paid him no attention. She could still hear the tusk’s root breaking, like the creak of a branch as it snapped. There was a raw hollow where the tooth had been, like a bowl full of blood, and a sour taste in her mouth, mingling with the iron. Perhaps she had been sick. It was hard to tell: she drifted in and out of consciousness.
“Your boss is a powerful individual,” said the General. “So it won’t do any harm for you to tell me. We already have a good idea where you came from. And do you think that you really matter to them? This bit of stubbornness won’t do any good, and it won’t be noticed. It’s a shame to sacrifice yourself for no thanks and no reward. Nobody is coming to take you away from here. What happens is in your hands.”
“Kill me, then,” said Csorwe thickly. She felt the blood spill from her lips. In her mind’s eye there was a dark tunnel in a hillside, and a calling voice she could not name. She hoped that this was a premonition of death. She had given nothing away, but she didn’t know how much longer she could resist.
On the edge of her hearing, like a gleaming of white light, came the sound of a silver bell ringing. It hurt, like salt in the wound. Psamag shook his head as though trying to rid himself of a mosquito, then started as he recognised the sound. This was no product of Csorwe’s imagination. A bell was ringing.
Psamag frowned and drew back from her, then turned away entirely. The bell made such a soft sound, like a child’s rattle. He muttered in disbelief under his breath, and strode out of the room.
* * *
Csorwe was alone, and the binding on her right wrist had come a little loose. Psamag would kill her when he came back, and she was too weak to escape his apartments without help. But if she could reach the knife she had brought, she could end this on her own terms. The gift of Atharaisse might come good after all. As the seconds passed in silence, she worked her arm free, slowly, slowly, inch by inch, in agony. Her left arm alone could not hold up her weight. She fell with a snap as the bone broke, and passed out before she hit the floor.
The minutes passed, and she did not die. She crawled across the floor, dragging her broken arm, and reached the table where her dagger lay, and lived through every moment of it. She struggled in humiliation to knock down the dagger, and grasp it in her good hand, and shake it loose of the sheath. Atharaisse’s venom still shone on the blade, and she wondered whether Psamag had intended it for her in the end. But she was not dead.
She inched facedown across the floor, nudging the dagger after her. Minute by minute the pain caught up with her, and when it became too much she had to lie still. Every jarring breath steamed on the floorboards. She left a trail of blood, still pouring from the socket of her ruined tusk, and the old verses came back to her, out of the years behind her and The Dream of Fly Agaric: From those that are chosen, blood riseth to their mouths and spilleth from their lips, as nectar from the flower. Such a pretty way of putting it. She coughed and spat—blood and saliva and little shards of tusk enamel—and drew breath, and dragged herself upright, and hid behind the door to the room, propping herself against the wall.
When Psamag came back, he realised at once that something was wrong, and his instinct was to hang back in the doorway. Csorwe meant to spring out from behind the door and cut his throat. Instead, she fell hopelessly against his shoulders, and dragged the blade loosely across his collarbone. The horror of failure made a white-hot pit in her guts. All she could hope was that she had broken the skin, that Atharaisse’s venom might at least slow him down.
If Psamag was a dead man, he hadn’t realised it. He stumbled into the room, roaring, and flung Csorwe at the nearest wall. The hilt of the dagger was slippery with blood and sweat, and it slipped from her hand like a fish as she landed. She jerked out a hand, but shock and terror numbed her reflexes, and the dagger clattered on the tiles before bouncing away across the floor of the General’s bedroom.
Psamag strode toward her, and turned her over with the toe of his boot. His steps seemed slower than before, unless she was imagining it. Please, she prayed. Unspoken and Unspeakable One—please—
Her eyes and mouth were full of blood, but she felt the concussion as Psamag’s body slammed into the floor. By some miracle he fell backward, away from her.
For some time—hours, perhaps—Csorwe just lay there, next to the General’s enormous corpse. She knew she needed to get up. Someone was going to come looking for the General, sooner or later, and then she would be dead. She heard steps and voices, far away and distorted, as the fortress began to wake up. Her mind was fogged and dizzy, and she wanted nothing more than to lie very still and wait for the pain to end or be ended.
At one point, she remembered why she had come here, and managed to get up onto her elbows to search Psamag’s body for the jet pendant. There was no sign of it. She crawled under the bed, and slowly faded into unconsciousness.
When she woke, someone was searching Psamag’s room, discreetly but methodically. Csorwe bit her lip to stop herself calling out for help, but one of her upper teeth sank into the socket of her missing tusk, and she made a noise like a wounded animal. The footsteps stopped.
“Well, well,” said a voice, and a hand worked its way under her shoulder. Someone picked her up and set her on Psamag’s bed.
It was Big Morga, the second-in-command, huge and fearsome as a warship in the closeness of the chamber. Csorwe could only groan.
“Ugly little thing, for one of the boss’s. Young, too.” Morga made a faintly disgusted noise. “You killed him?”
Csorwe was too dazed to process the implications of any of this. She must have made some motion that looked like nodding. Morga’s eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion but she looked delighted to see Csorwe, and Csorwe did not think she had seen a more terrifying expression in her life.
“Well, you’ve made my life a lot easier, so I’m sorry about what I’m going to have to do to you. They’ll be baying for blood downstairs.” Delight gave way to a carnivorous look of satisfaction. “Jawbone, come and bring her down.”
Jawbone was one of Psamag’s revenants. Clearly, he recognised Morga as his new commander. Jawbone hoisted Csorwe over his shoulder, and she bit down on a scream as her broken arm bent at an awkward angle. The pain obliterated all else as the revenant carried her downstairs. When it faded she allowed herself a moment’s surrender to bleak humiliation. Pinioned to the beam in Psa
mag’s quarters, she had clung to her purpose. She had been able to fight. Now there was nothing she could do to resist.
At last she was dropped with a yelp on some hard surface. Crockery clattered around her, and another white-hot lance of pain drove up through her arm.
With difficulty, Csorwe looked up, and the glassy eyes of a hundred mounted heads stared back at her. She was lying where she had been dropped, on her back like a dying woodlouse, on the table in Psamag’s dining hall. Cutlery and shattered plates all around her. The officers stood around the table looking down at her.
“The traitor, as I promised you,” said Morga. She grabbed Csorwe’s hair, wrenching her head up. Csorwe winced, trying to focus on the faces of the officers who surrounded her. “This is the spy. She killed the General. She’s been here for weeks, and none of you noticed her.”
Csorwe just lay there, looking up at them blearily, too weak to struggle.
“And who do you think was paying her?” said Morga, hauling Csorwe half upright. She held the point of a dagger to Csorwe’s forehead. Pressed it down, puncturing the skin. “Who envied our place?” She dragged the blade. Blood ran in burning streams down Csorwe’s face. “Who is it that’s envied Psamag since we started?” She slashed downward, cutting Csorwe’s face open from cheek to chin. The carelessness was more startling than the pain. Morga looked around at the table with a mirthless grimace. “You notice who’s missing from our table today. Looks like Talasseres has gone back to his uncle.”
Muttering went around the table. Csorwe couldn’t distinguish one looming face from another.
“We’ll hunt Olthaaros down, you hear me?” said Morga. “He’ll die for this. But in the meantime, what do we do with traitors?”
“The snake pit,” said one of the officers, as though it was obvious. “The sand-wife.” The others realised this was the right answer almost at once, and the cries of approbation turned quickly to a chant. Sand-wife, sand-wife, sand-wife, punctuated with the stamping of feet and the pounding of fists on the table.
Morga smiled. “This piece of shit sent our friend Tenocwe to die in her place. It’s time to make it fair.”
Jawbone plucked Csorwe from the table by the scruff of her neck as if she were no more than a stray dog. Vomit rose in the back of her throat and she swallowed hard, futile as it seemed to resist another humiliation among so many. Fear smothered all other suffering as Jawbone strode toward the pit. Atharaisse’s ivory coils were heaped in the dust below. Csorwe had no hope that she would show mercy twice.
The great intricate head rose above the lip of the pit, and Atharaisse’s voice sounded, with a hiss like the wind that scoured the plains. It was some time before the company realised she was laughing.
“This is the sweetness of our longevity,” she said. “Between rust and rot, time devours all enemies. Endurance is all. But we see thou hast a morsel for us.”
Morga nodded and Jawbone strode toward the pit. Csorwe’s fear dissolved. Of all the monsters she had met, Atharaisse was the most honourable, and her weapon the most merciful. No slow death on the rack, no dissolution in the presence of the Unspoken One, but a venom that destroyed with swift kindness.
Jawbone held her out, like a falconer offering his glove, and Atharaisse plucked her free. And then she was raised above the company, dangling, as the glassy eyes of dead things wheeled before her.
“Have no fear, hatchling,” said Atharaisse, soft in the aching interior of Csorwe’s skull. “Thou hast shed the blood of the tyrant. Thy courage is worthy to be honoured, and I honour thee.”
The dirt floor of the pit swooped down to meet her as Atharaisse slid back down into the pit, snapping her jaws in imitation of feeding. Morga made some more remarks, and the company returned to a kind of uneasy merriment, as Csorwe was held safe in a curl of smooth white scales.
There were shallow tunnels woven in the stone around the pit, and here Atharaisse left Csorwe to rest, slumped in the dust by a still pool of water. For days, it seemed, she slept, and drifted in dreams. In these visions she saw Echentyr alive again. Stars wheeled above the great city. All the windows were illuminated, and beneath them a parade of serpents moved, their jewel-bright scales glinting under garlands of flowers. A gaze of understanding fell upon her. She was perceived, and she remained whole.
When she woke she drank from the pool, and washed as best she could, flaking crusts of dried blood from her face. Every part of her body was in agony, as though her limbs were competing to see which could hurt more.
Atharaisse was gone. There was only one way to go now. She picked herself up and stumbled away into the dark.
At the bottom of the stairs, on the step above the curse-ward, lay the amulet, as though it had been thrown up from below. The chain was wound firmly around a roll of paper, only slightly charred at the edges by the action of the curse-ward. Csorwe hunkered down on the steps, unfolded it, and read in disbelief:
No hard feelings.
Tal Charossa
There were no more curse-wards like the first one, only a silvery blue seal a few feet farther in. She flinched back from it, and it emitted the soft sound of bells, exactly like the ones that had distracted Psamag before. Talasseres Charossa must have passed this way, and inadvertently saved her life.
The stairway opened up on a cavern. In places you could see the cave had once been graciously paved and vaulted, a broad underground boulevard. There were two archways, more or less whole, and beyond the arches two passages branched off from the cavern, pointing in opposite directions. There were waymarkers at the mouth of each passage: CITY and OUTLANDS.
Csorwe had no idea how she made it out of the caves. She emerged from a crack in the outland hillside half a mile from the fortress.
It was midmorning. After weeks in the dimness of the fortress, the sunlight was blinding, and she half wanted to recoil back into the darkness and hide again.
She had found her way through. She could get Sethennai back into his city. But it was hard to feel triumph when her mouth was full of her own blood. She could hardly think in a straight line long enough to tell what success meant.
Morga must have closed all the doors to the fortress, because the traffic tailed back a good two miles into the desert.
Csorwe crept nearer to the queue of wagons. Somehow, there were still people in the world talking and laughing. Somehow, people were still selling food at the stalls. The smell reminded her of the curse-ward—hot fat, burnt meat, charred bone—but she was so hungry she would’ve eaten her own leg if someone had put it on a skewer.
She stumbled toward one of the stalls, trying not to cower any time someone looked at her. She must have been quite a sight, caked in blood and dirt and rags. The stallholder backed away from her, holding out a fan of meat skewers to her as if to ward off the devil. She took them, turned her back on the fortress, and walked away into the desert.
7
The School of Transcendence
“YOU SHOULD BE DEAD,” said Sethennai.
“I know,” she said. “I made some mistakes.”
She was lying on her bed in the boardinghouse, stiff as a corpse. Her arm was in a sling. Sethennai had given her some kind of draught that numbed the pain, and she felt dull and puffy. The cold air tugged at the open wound in her face, and she observed it with detachment, as if it were a feature of the landscape. She probed the place where her left tusk had been and found the ragged socket. Nothing but a splinter of enamel remained, half-buried in the gum.
“I’m sorry,” she said, although really she was too tired to be sorry for anything, too much in pain, and too surprised that she was still alive.
“If a man breaks his sword on something it was not made to cut, he can only blame himself,” said Sethennai, somewhere above. He faded from her vision. “Csorwe, you are my sharpest edge. We will repair you.”
She curled her hand at her side, testing whether she could make a fist. Blood was drying in uneven sediments on her palm.
“Go b
ack to sleep,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, mangling the words around the gap in her gums.
“Sleep,” he said, and touched the lip of the bottle to her mouth again. The drink was just as bitter as before, but this time she fell asleep at once.
When she woke again, Sethennai was still there, and he held out a mirror so that she could see herself. On the left, her one remaining tusk curved up, strong, white, and shining. On the right was its mirror image, wrought in yellow gold. Where it met her gum the flesh was still raw, and there was a tightness of stitches in her slashed lip, but she seemed more or less whole. She snapped her teeth and the golden tusk rang with a reassuring solidity.
“How?” she said.
“Gold outside. Living bone inside, apparently. I contributed a little sorcery. Don’t ask me where the doctor found living bone. The gold is a little bit of showmanship. It’s stable, but not very strong. Don’t try to gore anybody.”
“Expensive,” she said. “How much?” She didn’t even want to think about sorcery. Sethennai used his power so sparingly that she had spent her first two years in his company half-believing he called himself a wizard as a joke.
Sethennai smiled. “I told you. Sharpest edge and all that. Consider it a gift.”
Csorwe nodded, and winced. She was beginning to regain sensation in her face: the stitches that curved down her cheek and through her lip looked and felt like a black centipede crawling on exposed flesh.
“I’ve asked the doctor what we can do about the scarring,” said Sethennai. “Here, drink again and he can take a better look at it.” Again he held up the bottle of sleeping draught. Csorwe tried to shake her head, and raised a hand.
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