There were two or three bundles lying on the dais before the stone. As they drew closer, Csorwe recognised them for what they were. Talasseres gasped. They were bodies in servants’ shifts. Their blood had pooled around the base of the stone, only visible as a dull sheen in the light of the lantern.
“The cooks,” said Talasseres under his breath, numbly, as though he was not aware he was speaking at all. “Mother thought they’d run away…” He stepped toward them, and at that moment Olthaaros turned.
“Oh, Talasseres,” he said, with an air of weary long-suffering. “I heard you were back. Psamag really should have done the decent thing and pushed you out of a window.” He looked from Talasseres to Csorwe to Sethennai, and his eyes narrowed with anger. Csorwe pulled the door shut. If she saw Talasseres standing near a window any time soon, Olthaaros might get his wish.
Olthaaros’ mouth twisted with bitter laughter. “Well, well, Belthandros. Here you are. And I suppose you’ve convinced them all that yours is a righteous cause.”
“I didn’t sacrifice my kitchen staff,” said Sethennai.
“Do they know you murdered Akaro?”
“Akaro did your bidding willingly. And it really is embarrassing, you know, how little you understand.” He strode across the room toward Olthaaros, stopping a few paces away. “The Siren of the Speechless Sea is a fragment of one of the world’s most ancient powers. A shard from the broken throne. She does not serve unless it suits her. Unless she is courted. And you have ever been an inept suitor.”
“Always obscene,” said Olthaaros.
“Always accurate,” said Sethennai. “I suppose you imagined that spilling a few gallons of blood in her name would obligate her to serve your ends? She will not save you. I am here to take back my city, Olthaaros. If you wish to save yourself you will beg my forgiveness.”
Csorwe stayed back, pressed against the wall by the door, keeping an eye on Talasseres in case he decided to do something he would regret. At this point she became aware of a presence in her own mind. The touch of the Siren was quite unlike that of the Unspoken Name. This felt like a caress of warm water, rising slowly among smooth stones. Like the Unspoken Name she promised oblivion, but more softly. How sweet and soothing it would be to give way to her. Her voice curled around Csorwe like coils of vapour, gentle, ethereal.
Then it stopped and cold reality returned, sudden as a blast of wintry air.
You are already forsworn, said the Siren. I have no interest in a discarded vessel.
The presence receded sharply, and Csorwe was alone in her own body. To judge from the glazed look in Talasseres’ eyes, the Siren was speaking to him. She kicked him in the shins. He came back to life with a jerk, and glared at her.
“No hard feelings,” she hissed.
Olthaaros and Sethennai faced one another now, each braced to act.
“Beg your forgiveness?” said Olthaaros. “And am I expected to believe you would show me mercy? You are a monster of pride, Sethennai.” From the sheath at his side he drew a hooked dagger, already dark with the blood of his servants.
“Very well,” said Sethennai. His gauntlets sparked in readiness.
Csorwe had seen and committed enough violence that she no longer expected it to be impressive or exciting, but the two wizards in combat were like nothing she had ever witnessed. Each man moved like a spark, and raised dust in terrible shapes around him: waves and claws and kites of dust, great beasts of dust that warred in the upper air.
The whole room crackled, filling with the smell of hot metal. Csorwe’s surviving teeth buzzed in her skull, and blood seeped from the root of the gold tusk. She dug her nails into her palms. It was all moving too quickly. The two shapes moved faster and faster in the clouds, summoning flame against shield against blade of dust.
She and Sethennai had come so far together. She couldn’t bear for him to come this close to home and fail. But she could only watch, and wait, and trust.
At last there was a single convulsion—a single invisible shock wave—a single blow or strike or puncture. The dust cleared, and Olthaaros lay at Sethennai’s feet.
Csorwe let out a long breath. Talasseres Charossa observed his uncle’s defeat closely but coldly, without reaction.
Olthaaros was not dead. He scrabbled for purchase on the blood-slick floor, rising to an unsteady crouch. Sethennai stood and observed, hands folded behind his back in an attitude of casual grace.
“This is ugly and foolish, Olthaaros,” he said. “We are both thinking men. There was no need for this.”
Olthaaros stared at the ground and muttered a curse, summoning all the dignity he could manage before falling back, his neck craning upward like that of a tortoise flipped onto its back.
“Please,” he cried, breathless and rasping.
“There is no need to beg me,” said Sethennai, with great satisfaction. “I know what mercy is.”
“Not you,” said Olthaaros, with venom, and he raised his eyes again to the obelisk. “Please—please—”
No, said the Siren.
They all heard it, not so much a word as a great resonance, a single note of negation. Olthaaros snarled in defiance, rising again, and from the cuff of his right wrist he flung a small fletched dart at Sethennai. As he moved, his elbow skidded on the bloody floor, and the dart fell far short, hitting the ground with a faint silvery noise, perfectly audible in the silence that followed the Siren’s denial.
Csorwe glanced at Talasseres and saw his lip curl with some strong emotion. Disgust, she thought, or disappointment.
“How unworthy,” said Sethennai, picking up the dart and turning it over. He was beginning to settle into his triumph, radiantly amused. In such a mood he was inclined to be benign, and Csorwe wondered whether he would spare his enemy. But he strode over to Olthaaros, and pressed the toe of his boot down on his neck. They listened as Olthaaros choked, convulsed, and lay still.
So Belthandros Sethennai returned to his city, and so ended Csorwe’s education.
II
Buried, But Not Deeply
For seven days and nights the Traitor Goddess lay dying in the lap of the sea. Her blood drained into the dry sand, and her curse fell upon the creatures of the earth.
May your heirs suffer as I suffer. May they drink of my poison.
The inheritance of mankind was despoiled, and the corruption of the Traitor was in their veins, and in all generations her curse was known.
from the Qarsazhi prose epic The Shaping of the World
8
The Watchtower Bell
Five Years Later
DARYOU MALKHAYA PULLED ON his winter coat and boots, buckled on his sword, and set out into the end of the world.
It was midafternoon, and the feeble sun was already sinking, turning the sky to scarlet. This world had been a long time ending. Its name had been the first thing to go: when its people died out, they took their languages with them. Now the light drained away and the world froze slowly to death.
Cheerful stuff. The place had an official designation, assigned by Malkhaya’s superiors at the Imperial Survey Office of the Church of Qarsazh. Precursor World Alpha-Twenty-Something-Something. When Malkhaya had first been stationed at the compound, he had assumed the researchers would have a friendly nickname for the place, Snowball or East Nowhere or something, but he was soon put right. There were only two scholars at the compound and neither of them was the frivolous type.
Qanwa Shuthmili was already out in the yard by the gate, beginning her inspection of the inner security perimeter. This was a chain of flags and lanterns, suspended from the ring of stakes surrounding the compound. The red sunset made her white Adept’s robes look grisly.
“Aren’t you cold?” he said. She was wearing only a light coat, and she had taken off her gloves.
Malkhaya understood that Shuthmili was a highly trained and powerful Adept, that her resemblance to a twenty-two-year-old girl was basically incidental, but he still wished she would dress for the weather.
“I’m used to it, Warden,” she said, running her bare hands along the cord of the perimeter. The flags and lanterns looked to Malkhaya like a cheerless sort of festival, but the inner perimeter was their final line of defence against anything that might come up out of the dying world and try to devour them.
Well, technically, as their sole Warden, Malkhaya was the final line of defence, but the hope was that the perimeter would give him some advance warning.
He followed her around the circuit. The compound was built inside the enclosure of a ruined farmstead, on a ridge overlooking a frozen lake. The watchtower and the lodge had been constructed by the Survey Office a few years ago, and from the outside they looked as stark and unwelcoming as the landscape itself. The Nine-Petalled Rose of Qarsazh flew from the top of the tower, a flash of darker red against the bloody sky. The windows were dark: Lagri Aritsa had a bee in his bonnet about conserving oil and wouldn’t light the lamps until it was full dark outside.
“Everything is in order,” said Shuthmili when they reached the gate again. Her breath smoked in the air.
“Do you need to rest a minute?” said Malkhaya. He knew magic was exhausting. Part of his duty was to keep Shuthmili from crashing.
She looked at him blandly. “I do this every night, Warden,” she said. Malkhaya had tried to encourage her to call him by his given name—after a few months even Aritsa had given up on calling him Warden—but formality seemed to come to her more naturally than familiarity.
“We could take Prosperity when we do the outer perimeter,” he said, just in case.
They were lucky to have been assigned a cutter. Normally the Survey Office was stingy about these things, or possibly the Church as a whole felt that it was spiritually valuable for a person to have to walk around on his own two legs. Malkhaya suspected their good luck had something to do with Shuthmili’s aunt. In theory an Adept had no personal ties, but it couldn’t hurt to share a name with a senior Inquisitor.
“I’d like the walk,” she said. “I’ve been inside all day.”
Malkhaya supposed that if he’d been sitting at a desk with Aritsa deciphering inscriptions all day, he wouldn’t mind a walk either.
They made their way to the outer perimeter, down to the shore of the frozen lake. There were ruins here, ploughing up from the shore at an odd angle.
“This was a fort, once,” said Shuthmili. “The Precursors fought over this lake.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Malkhaya. It was so rare for her to volunteer conversation that he felt he ought to encourage it, but he didn’t know what he could add.
“They’re all gone, now,” she said. “The lords and their fortress-builders.”
Malkhaya had been assigned to the compound for almost a year, and he still hadn’t grasped what was important about this particular Precursor society. According to the Survey Office, they were among the ancestors of modern Qarsazhi civilisation, but nothing about their ruins and barrows felt familiar to Malkhaya. The Precursors had built masses of tombs and carved yards of inscriptions, and then they had died out, along with anything else that lived in this world.
His ignorance made it difficult to understand what Shuthmili and Aritsa were talking about most of the time. Malkhaya had been a Warden of the Church all his adult life, and had worked for the Survey Office for most of that time, and he had never thought much about his charges’ research. His job was to keep them safe, not to get distracted by the flotsam of lost Precursor cities. But then, he usually had at least one other Warden to keep him company. Spending months with nobody but Aritsa and Shuthmili often made him feel that he was shepherding two fractious children—and sometimes that he himself was the fractious child.
The full patrol of the outer perimeter was a little more than three miles, an hour’s walk in near-silence. Occasionally Shuthmili murmured something to herself as she reached up to check the flags or rekindle the lanterns, but she didn’t say anything to Malkhaya.
The red sunset had faded by now, and the flags of the outer perimeter were the only bright colours to be seen in the grey dusk. Everything else in the dying world was the colour of earth, ash, or ice. The only sound was the sighing of wind among the ruined fortifications.
There was no vegetation left in this world. It would be very difficult for anyone or anything to sneak up on them. Malkhaya should have felt secure. This was a nice, safe billet. This world’s greatest threat to them—as he regularly reminded Shuthmili—was the cold.
Sometimes when a world died quickly, it began to decay, and all kinds of nasty things could happen. On previous assignments Malkhaya had seen the dead rise and mouths open in the ground. He had seen the teeth of the Maze beginning to bite through the sky. But this world was fading so slowly and quietly that they hadn’t seen even a single revenant. The Precursor dead had slept peacefully for centuries.
Oddly enough, this didn’t make Malkhaya like the place any better.
“Warden, look,” said Shuthmili. He turned, expecting that she was pointing out yet another Nine-blessed inscription—and stopped dead.
In the sky above the far end of the lake, visible in the gap between two hills, was an unfamiliar mazeship.
“Mother of Cities,” said Malkhaya under his breath.
“There’s no delivery scheduled,” said Shuthmili. The Survey Office sent a ship once a month to drop off fuel and supplies. It had already been and gone earlier that week.
“No,” said Malkhaya. “That’s not a Qarsazhi ship.” He stared at it, as if he could wish it away. “The lights are all wrong.”
“Then who is it?” said Shuthmili.
“I don’t know,” he said, tracking the ship until it passed irrecoverably behind the hills and away. “Bigger than Prosperity. Much smaller than a standard Imperial frigate. I don’t think it’s a warship, unless it’s a very tiny corvette—” He realised Shuthmili was looking as bewildered as he did when she talked about inscriptions, and tried to take a more reassuring tone. “It’s not ours. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to be afraid. It was moving away from us.”
“There shouldn’t be anyone here,” said Shuthmili. She sounded less frosty than usual, more like her actual age. “Nobody else comes here. That’s part of the reason I was assigned this placement. My Quincuriate assessment is in two months, and—”
“No, I know,” said Malkhaya, keeping his voice level. Shuthmili did not need to know how much the ship worried him. “We’ll go back up and tell Aritsa. See what he thinks.” They had almost completed the full circuit of their patrol. It wasn’t far to get back up to the compound.
He glanced back, watching for a moment longer, but there was no more sign of the ship. It might just be looters. They would soon discover there was no treasure in this world worth taking, and leave again without doing any harm.
He knew exactly how vulnerable they were here. Their isolation was their first defence, but it also meant they couldn’t easily call for help. The nearest Qarsazhi world was many Gates away.
“Should we go and investigate?” said Shuthmili, sounding calmer. The perimeter lanterns lent her eyes an inquisitive gleam. Malkhaya would have preferred her to stay at least a little bit alarmed.
“We’ll see what Aritsa thinks,” said Malkhaya again.
Shuthmili lifted her chin as though about to object.
“We can’t do anything now,” he said. “It’s dark and we’ve lost sight of the ship. And like you said, you’ve got your assessment coming up. You need to stay quiet.”
After a second’s reluctance, Shuthmili nodded.
“What about the rest of the patrol?” she said.
“Don’t worry about it now. We need to get you back up to the compound.”
Malkhaya truly hoped it was looters, and that they were the usual kind of ill-informed chancers, without any information about the Qarsazhi compound or its personnel. There was no treasure in the Precursor ruins, but that didn’t mean there was nothing valuable here that could be stolen. The
ir research work for the Survey Office was real enough, but it wasn’t the only reason they’d been stashed away in this distant and forgotten world. Malkhaya just had to hope that, whoever was on board that ship, they didn’t know about Shuthmili.
* * *
The watchtower bell rang once as Malkhaya and Shuthmili crossed the inner perimeter into the compound.
Dr. Lagri Aritsa was waiting for them at the door of the lodge. He had lit the lamps at last, and the slit windows cast golden reflections that flickered on the frozen earth. Above the watchtower, the sky was starless black, marked in places by large pale shapes, like cat’s eyes in darkness.
“You two were gone far too long,” he said, rubbing his thin hands together to keep warm. Everything about him was thin, from his lips to his greying hair. Malkhaya suspected he had only come out because he was concerned about them, and wished he had stayed inside in the warmth.
“Shuthmili, you are freezing,” Aritsa went on. “Come inside. And we must get you fed.”
“Please don’t worry about me, your reverence,” said Shuthmili, following him in.
The lodge was invitingly warm after being outside, smelling of incense and pine logs and freshly made coffee. Malkhaya draped a blanket over Shuthmili, who sat down before the fire without complaint. Aritsa brought her a bowl of rice and beans before fetching the coffee for himself and Malkhaya.
Malkhaya drank gratefully, helping himself to two biscuits despite Aritsa’s disapproval. He was glad to have the chance to fortify himself before breaking the news about the ship they had seen.
Aritsa took it better than he’d expected. He paced a little before the fire and muttered a prayer to the Mother of Cities, and then seemed to compose himself.
The Unspoken Name Page 14