The two goons didn’t react to this in any way. Oranna raised an eyebrow faintly.
He had no idea what he’d find himself saying next, where Oranna’s next question would cut him, but she rose, as though snapping shut an irrelevant book, and turned away.
Tal wondered whether he should have pretended to be more useful or important. She didn’t open him up again, at least. She looked back at him, half curious, then stalked out of the cabin, taking her people with her, leaving Tal where he was.
For the next few hours Tal curled up on the bunk and tried to sleep. It seemed like the best way to put his head back together. Half drowsy, beyond shame, he tried to imagine that Sethennai might be on his way to rescue him, but even in his imagination it didn’t seem all that likely.
A smaller, older potato servant turned up eventually and led him out of the cabin and back to the cutter, where the original big bastard stood at the wheel.
It was a relief to see daylight again, even the cold grey daylight of the dying world. Ejarwa was anchored in a valley; up ahead, a Gate burnt green and gold, a disc of fire set into a sheer cliff.
Tal experienced a flare of brief hope, like a struck match. The Gate was a way home, or at least a way out. If he could only get there …
They landed the cutter on the hillside. The men were muttering to each other, perhaps assuming Tal couldn’t hear them, or couldn’t understand their language.
“—she says just kill him quickly and leave him here,” said the small man.
The boy chewed his lip and nodded, then turned to Tal. “Up. Out,” he said, pointing Tal over the side of the cutter. Tal did as he was told. Once over the edge he pretended to trip on the scree, dropping to the ground to grab the other knife from his boot.
The boy hauled him up with a curse, but he hadn’t seen the knife. Tal twisted and stabbed, aiming for his throat, but the blade went wide, slashing across the boy’s cheek. The boy howled and dropped Tal, grabbing at his face as blood dripped between his fingers.
Tal scrambled for his life, hoping he’d at least bought enough time to get away. Then he slipped on a piece of loose slate and went down. They were on him in seconds. One of them stamped on his wrist until he let go of the knife.
They picked him up and shoved him against a broken bit of wall.
“Lady Oranna is merciful,” said the boy. His face was streaming blood where Tal had cut him.
“We aren’t,” said the small man. He smiled, showing brown and missing teeth between his tusks. Then he hit Tal in the face.
They kept hitting him. They weren’t very bright. Tal thought they would probably kill him by accident before they could do it on purpose.
“Fuck, you might be getting better at this, I nearly felt that one,” said Tal. He was pretty certain the latest blow had loosened a few teeth. The boy hit him again.
“Anything smart to say to that?” said the boy.
Tal’s head swam. A stream of blood was running down the back of his throat, warm and slimy. He realised, with shame, that he didn’t have anything smart to say to that, so he just grinned at the boy and tried to stop his ears twitching. Foreigners were mad about Tlaanthothei ears. Once they noticed them they couldn’t keep their hands off them.
The small man kicked his legs out from under him. This was bad. Once you were on the ground you were basically fucked. At this point Tal welcomed oblivion, but he had always intended to leave a beautiful corpse. It was hard to imagine anyone regretfully cradling his toothless carcass once it had been kicked around the landscape and dumped on the hillside. Oh, well.
He curled into a ball instinctively, shielding his head and neck, because his treacherous lizard brain wanted to live more than he did. His eyes were squeezed shut and there were new sounds of fighting, so it took him a moment to register that the next blow hadn’t struck home.
At length there was silence, punctuated by groaning. The toe of someone’s boot jabbed Tal in the shoulder.
“Get up.”
“Ugh,” said Tal.
Another jab. With some difficulty he propped himself on his elbows, inhaled a quantity of bloody mucus, and looked up.
“Get up, Tal,” said Csorwe.
Tal started laughing, like a gate banging in the wind.
Of course. As if Csorwe was going to let someone else beat him to death. The sense of what she was saying didn’t really register. If she chose to flip him over and crush his windpipe there wasn’t much he could do to stop her at this point. That was how Belthandros Sethennai had killed his uncle. He laughed harder and harder.
Csorwe rolled her eyes and hauled him up, shoving him against the wall. Tal and the wall were becoming fast friends by now.
Csorwe checked him over. How many fingers was she holding up, could he count to ten, et cetera. At least she didn’t seem to expect Tal to be grateful. If she had, he would’ve spat blood in her face.
“You’ll live,” she said. “We’ve got a ship. Time to get moving before anyone realises this lot are missing.”
From this vantage he could see that the big boy and the small man were flat on the ground a few feet off, unconscious or dead, hopefully in a puddle of their own frozen piss. The ferrety Qarsazhi girl was standing over them, looking disdainful.
“Hope she was worth it,” said Tal.
“Fuck off,” said Csorwe.
He twisted round, looking back at the cutter. He couldn’t see Ejarwa anywhere. “She’s got the Reliquary. We could—”
“No. Get in the boat,” said Csorwe. “We’re going.”
* * *
Daryou Malkhaya lay trapped in the ruins of the tomb-monument for two nights and two days. His right arm was crushed beneath a fallen pillar. At first the worst part was the pain. Then it was thirst.
He lay there as the revenants swarmed in the ancient fields, like an algal bloom—now thickening, now dispersing. His throat was too dry to make a sound. His mouth was sour and full of dust.
Time came apart, like a severed string of beads. Malkhaya, as he had been—Warden of the Church, Maya to his friends—ceased to exist. There was only a stuttering awareness, brief flashes of lucidity, like a candle extinguishing itself again and again.
I failed, he thought, when he could think of anything. I failed in my duty. He couldn’t remember what it was that he had failed to do. He remembered the name Shuthmili, though not who it was or what it might mean to him. He tried to hold on to it for as long as he could, and then, along with everything else, it was gone.
* * *
Malkhaya’s body was still lying in the ruins when the Gate illuminated itself again. It lay there as the Qarsazhi frigate Reflection in Tranquillity descended toward the ruins of the Hollow Monument like an angelfish toward a dying coral. Tranquillity flew three pennants: alongside the Nine-Petalled Rose of Qarsazh were the Inquistorial violet and the white banner of the Imperial Quincuriate.
The five Adepts who made up Vigil Quincury disembarked from their shuttle barge and began to sweep the rubble. There were footsteps and voices, which Malkhaya might have heard if he had lived another day.
And then they brought him back. He felt this as a vivid flash of effervescent heat. He ought to be in agony, but they had taken his pain away, or else perhaps there wasn’t enough left of him to feel pain. He had no sensation in his limbs at all.
A purple-black shadow loomed over him, surrounded by ghosts.
“Can you speak? Give your name,” said the shadow. Malkhaya complied, in a voice that felt and sounded like sandpaper on the tongue.
Another point of awareness: he was lying flat on his back on bare earth. The Quincury stood around him in a circle. Five pairs of linked hands, bare skin to bare skin. The differences in size and colour of these hands were the only indication that the five members of the Quincury were individuals, or had once been so. In their robes and veils they were ageless, eyeless, and androgynous. Their gauze visors looked to him like the eyes of houseflies.
Shuthmili was meant t
o become like this, he thought, without any recollection of who Shuthmili was, or how he felt about that.
A woman stood outside the circle, dressed in Inquisitorial regalia, black and purple. Malkhaya tried to say something and came out with a kind of rattle.
“I am High Inquisitor Qanwa Zhiyouri,” said the woman. The light from the white sky was somehow too bright, blurring her features. Qanwa Zhiyouri. The name should have meant something to him, but he couldn’t place it. High Inquisitor meant something, though. It meant that Malkhaya should obey.
“I’m afraid you are dead, Warden,” said Inquisitor Qanwa. Her voice was cool and clipped, every syllable like a pellet dropping into a saucer. “Soon, Vigil will release you to rest at the Hearth of the Mara. Before then, I’m afraid there is one last thing we must ask of you, to complete your duty.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Malkhaya.
“We have found no survivors,” said Inquisitor Qanwa. She knelt beside him, the better to hear him. “Tell me, Warden, what was the last you saw of my niece?”
Malkhaya told her all he remembered, about the heretic priestess, the bath of blood, the singing pillar, and all the other horrors they had found within the tomb-monument. His dead voice rasped away as if the story was a mass of timber that he needed to saw through.
The Inquisitor’s face never changed, never expressed any interest or surprise. “Unfortunate,” she said sometimes, or “I see.”
He finished the story, telling Qanwa the last he had seen of Shuthmili. He was aware that he ought to feel something about the things he had seen, or at least about his own death. Daryou Malkhaya had been a man of bright, simple emotions. His friends had teased him about it. He remembered the man he had been as though they had been to school together, and not seen one another since.
“Thank you, Warden,” said Qanwa. “That’s all we ask of you. Your body will be returned to your house.” She straightened up, her voice becoming brisk. “Vigil, that will do. Cut the connection.”
The circle of people around them broke apart, and with it the light faded, and Malkhaya no longer seemed to be anywhere at all.
* * *
“A matter of regret that Dr. Lagri’s body was damaged so severely,” said Inquisitor Tsaldu. He was Qanwa Zhiyouri’s new aide, one of the new breed of ascetics who shaved their heads to show their devotion.
“Agreed,” said Zhiyouri. She was back at her desk in her own stateroom, rereading the transcription of her interview with Malkhaya’s corpse.
Vigil Quincury had tried and failed to revive Lagri Aritsa three times before succeeding on the first try with Daryou Malkhaya. Now both their corpses were stowed in Tranquillity’s cold storage, so that Vigil could make another attempt on return to its sanctuary at the Traitor’s Grave. She hadn’t lied to Malkhaya. His body would be returned to the Daryou house eventually, once it ceased to be of use to the Inquisitorate.
“But the Warden’s testimony was clear enough,” she said. “I think we know what our next move must be.”
“Yes, ma’am?” said Tsaldu. He was at least thirty-five, but Zhiyouri could not help thinking of him as a young thing. He was unusually pale for a Qarsazhi. Zhiyouri assumed he had some provincial ancestry.
“My niece must be found, and soon,” she said. “You’ve read the reports from the Traitor’s Grave. Shuthmili is urgently needed to restore Archer Quincury to full function.”
Archer Five had died suddenly only a few weeks before, and the four remaining Adepts of Archer Quincury were clinging to life in protective stasis. Unless its numbers were restored, Archer would fail fast, and Shuthmili was the only viable candidate. Zhiyouri had seen her niece’s preliminary test scores. There was simply no other unassigned Adept with power and control to match her, none even remotely fit to become part of the most powerful weapon in the Qarsazhi arsenal.
“If Shuthmili is alive it is a fair assumption that she has been—let’s be charitable—rescued by the Tlaanthothei operatives,” said Zhiyouri. “I’ve already set a course for Tlaanthothe. Sethennai will be cooperative, I’ve no doubt, since I did him a favour by giving him access to this world. We’ll find Shuthmili, stabilise her, and return to Qaradoun to begin the tether immediately.”
“Inquisitor, might I…” said Tsaldu. “What if she cannot be stabilised?”
“It would be preferable to bring her back to the Traitor’s Grave before making any decision about that,” said Zhiyouri sharply. She had known Tsaldu was going to make trouble. Most Inquisitors gained a certain flexibility as they matured. Tsaldu was as rule-bound as the day he had graduated from the University.
“Yes, of course, Inquisitor,” said Tsaldu. “If it is possible to subdue her in time. But if not, it is a mercy to end such a life. Your personal connection—”
“You are getting ahead of yourself, Tsaldu,” said Zhiyouri, mildly. She tapped her fingers lightly on the surface of her desk. “No, I can’t say I relish the prospect of euthanising my niece. But you know we cannot afford to waste resources. The School has nothing else of Shuthmili’s calibre to offer, and the enemies of Qarsazh are always watching. The Tarasenese, for instance, already know of the death of Archer Five. Archer is our deterrent. It cannot be allowed to fail. We need her.”
Zhiyouri knew what Tsaldu perhaps did not: if Archer was lost, there was nothing to replace it. There were lower-ranked military Quincuries, Sabre and Aegis and the like, but Archer had been shaped and refined over more than a century. It was not just a weapon but a testament to the continuity of the Imperium.
“If she is corrupted she would be worse than useless to Archer,” said Tsaldu, who had evidently become very daring. There were two spots of colour on his pallid cheeks. She raised an eyebrow at him. “I am simply trying to explore the possibilities,” he said.
It was not the first time on their voyage that Zhiyouri had found Tsaldu irritating, and she was sure it would not be the last. She kept her voice level. “Have you ever seen a corrupted mage, Tsaldu?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Over the course of my career I have prosecuted almost a dozen,” she said. “On one occasion, the wretched creature got loose in the courtroom. We lost three Wardens and an Inquisitor before he was put down.”
Zhiyouri’s memory of that day was disjointed, but she remembered the mage, laughing, his teeth picked out in ichor, black spittle dripping from his chin. Death had never seemed more merciful.
“I am fully aware of the possibilities,” she said. “And I know what our last resort must be. We prepare for the worst, as always. But I do not want you hoping for the worst. Is that understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tsaldu.
Zhiyouri nodded and rose from her desk. “Inconvenient in more ways than one that Archer is out of commission. We need to cauterise the trouble on the surface, and there’s really nothing like Archer for tidying up a mess. Still, we have Vigil, and it should be more than capable of stepping in. Come up to the observation deck and we’ll see it done.”
Important to keep Tsaldu friendly, since she had no prospect of acquiring any other aide for the time being, and he would enjoy watching this.
Tranquillity was still hovering above the Precursor world. From the observation deck they could see the ruins of the monument, and the scuttling grey shapes of the revenants, still pouring out of the ground. It had been difficult for Vigil to hold them off long enough even to retrieve the bodies.
Below the ship, five shuttle barges moved with purpose. Aboard each barge was a Quincury Adept, in black mask and white surcoat.
Zhiyouri gave the signal and each of the Quincury barges came to a halt, forming the points of a pentagon in the air above the broken necropolis. Down in the ruins, the revenants wandered in aimless shoals, as though waiting for something to happen.
“Have you ever seen a Quincury in this formation?” said Zhiyouri to Tsaldu. She handed him a pair of goggles, the lenses coated with black gauze like the visor of a Quincury Adept. “Not many peo
ple have. This is a privilege. Just a pity it isn’t Archer, or we’d really see some fireworks.”
On board their barges, the Vigil Adepts removed their gloves and raised their hands. Qanwa smiled as she tightened the strap of her own goggles. She always liked to see this. There was nothing like the Quincuriate to distil order out of chaos.
Five points of light sparked, one for each Adept. The light brightened, swelled, blotting out the Adepts and their barges, blotting out everything, as though Tranquillity was gliding into the sun.
A shadow of heat from the blast reached them even behind the wards of the observation deck. To Zhiyouri, it felt like the warmth of a summer’s day. There was a perfect moment, when she felt as if she was floating in light, a clean white illumination that scoured away all impurity.
The light faded. Beneath Tranquillity and the barges, the surface of the dying world glowed like a bowl of molten iron. Then the glow faded, leaving behind a gleaming pool of oil-black glass, twenty miles across. The ruins were gone. No more boundary wall. No more fallen graves, nor petrified trees, nor outlines of forgotten houses. No more revenants. It looked as though the void had taken a bite out of the world.
“This is why our Adepts are so feared,” said Zhiyouri. “Corruption is a risk, as you so rightly identify. But even Vigil is capable of glassing a city, and it is a middle-ranked Quincury, honed for fine work, not for violence on the grand scale. Imagine the consequences if an Adept of Shuthmili’s power were to fall into the wrong hands. Imagine what our enemies would do with such a weapon. We must find her, Tsaldu. There is no time to waste.”
III
The Tether
The Reliquary of Pentravesse resists pursuit as a bank of briars resists the passage of a bare-legged traveller. It forbids the rational mind, it tempts even as it forbids, and ultimately it wounds the heedless.
Olthaaros Charossa, from a letter to Belthandros Sethennai, prior to his exile
The Unspoken Name Page 24