* * *
For a moment Csorwe worried that he might take them straight back to the arena and the aim of the Emperor’s archers. Instead, the door opened into a back alley in lower Qaradoun, so narrow that it was in shadow despite the heat and brightness of the day. Several yards away, a man was pissing against the wall. At the sight of the three of them he took a step back in dismay. His eyes widened, and he ran for it, fastening his breeches as he went. They must have presented quite a picture. The wizard in all his magnificence. Shuthmili, in the rags of the condemned. Csorwe still dressed as an attendant demon.
Shuthmili opened her eyes, blinking against the sun, and said, “Enter stage left.”
The journey from there to the docks passed in a kind of fever dream. As long as Csorwe held on to the Reliquary, she was certain he wouldn’t do anything now to harm or resist her. Nothing—not even offended pride—could come between him and his own immortality.
Still, he wouldn’t speak, or look at her, and whatever she knew about him now, it was painful to walk at his side and know him as her enemy. She wasn’t proud of what she had done. She just wanted the day to be over.
The streets began to fill with people, all talking rapidly about the terrible scene at the Grand Arena and the sorcerer who had threatened the Emperor. Yet somehow nobody noticed that the sorcerer himself was walking through the crowd, towering over the Qarsazhi like a cat among songbirds. Still less did anybody notice Csorwe or Shuthmili. They made it to the maze-docks with no trouble, even when a troop of Wardens marched down the street toward them. The soldiers simply did not see them.
Up and down the waterfront were seaships at anchor. Dozens of mazeships were docked in cradles, and more were moored in midair. Somehow Csorwe had imagined that Sethennai could simply transport them wherever they wanted to go with a snap of his fingers, but of course, things were never so easy.
“From here, you may go wherever you wish,” he said. “Up to a point, of course. I see you’ve bound yourself to Oranna. I’m sure she’s very gratified to have taken you from me.”
“That’s not what happened,” said Csorwe, repulsed.
“Of course not,” he said. “At least I never made you carve anything into your skin.”
Csorwe raised a hand and, without breaking his gaze, traced the scar that curved all the way down the side of her face.
“I see,” he said. “I must say I think you’re making a mistake. The world is changing, Csorwe. Thanks largely to you, I am now fully aware of certain realities. The Lady of the Thousand Eyes is a generous patron, and the chances to come are beyond anything I have ever offered you. You could face them at my side.”
Csorwe wanted nothing more to do with that kind of power, and it hurt that Sethennai knew her no better than this, after all these years. But then, it was good to know that he could be wrong. His idea of her was a flat shadow that she could step away from.
“Give me the gauntlets,” she said.
“But of course.” He gave a half smile that was not remotely pleasant, and reached into the inside pocket of his surcoat.
He held out the gauntlets and she took them. They were very soft, warm, unassumingly bulky, like a pair of recently killed rabbits.
“Tell me, then,” said the man she had known as Belthandros Sethennai. “How much longer do you plan to hold me to ransom?”
Csorwe felt as though she had been awake for a hundred years. There was nothing she wanted to do less than threaten someone, but she didn’t see any other way to get it done.
“You know, obviously, that if I hear you’re looking for me, I can do this again,” she said. “You trained me too well, Belthandros. I don’t want to deal with you, or make trouble for you, or really ever see you again. I want to go away. But if you come after me or anyone I know then I can do this again, and I will. Do you understand that?”
“Perfectly,” said the wizard. “I understand the desire for a quiet life as well as anyone. But I feel I should warn you that you won’t find one. You already carry the mark of one divinity. That tends to draw attention.”
Csorwe shrugged. She didn’t trust him to tell the truth even if he wanted to, but after a certain point there was no use clinging to doubt.
“You will need to be careful,” he said. “Things cannot be put back the way they were. I am not the only one who has awoken.”
Lucky for Csorwe that she had no intention of putting things back the way they were. It wasn’t the first time she had left a whole life behind her. She knew how it was done, and how it hurt. This time she could set her own course.
She dropped the Reliquary into his waiting hands, and nodded goodbye. She did not wait to watch him leave. It was done.
* * *
At the time of the disturbance at the Grand Arena of Qaradoun, Talasseres Charossa was already gone. He left the Thousand Eyes and went down to the city to look for the next ship back to Tlaanthothe. The idea of returning had already begun to feel like a shoe that pinched. More painful the longer you lived with it, but arguably better than no shoe at all.
There was a clipper to Tlaanthothe that would leave that afternoon. Tal watched them loading up, hoisting aboard all the rolls of paper and the cans of olive oil and the crates of sugar and sacks of coffee and barrels of wine, and almost without thinking about it he turned away and boarded the next ship he saw. It turned out to be a small passenger shuttle—not even Gate-worthy—taking day-trippers out to the coast. There was a single large Qarsazhi family on board, with half a dozen little children climbing up on the seats to peer over the edge.
Tal didn’t have it in him to be annoyed by them, even when they started singing a song about the beach. He couldn’t even remember what it was that would have annoyed him. He sank back in his seat and shut his eyes. Nobody at home knew where he was, and nobody here knew who he was. He felt as if his strings had been cut.
It couldn’t last, of course. He had to go back. Tlaanthothe was where he belonged. Sethennai would want some kind of explanation. He would have one day to himself. Then he would go back to the capital that evening and catch the mailship home.
The shuttle landed and he followed the other passengers along a green headland. The top of the cliff was bright with gorse, and a sweet-smelling breeze blew in from the sea. Tal wandered along at a distance, betting with himself on which child was most likely to fling itself into the ocean.
What was he going to say to Sethennai? There was no way to avoid seeing him. All of Tal’s things were still at the Chancellor’s Palace.
Of course there was the fantasy of telling Sethennai exactly what he thought of him. He tried it out in his head a few times, wondering what kind of reaction he would hope for. It was impossible to imagine Sethennai apologising. The only thing he could really picture vividly was the prospect that Sethennai wouldn’t ask why he had left because he wouldn’t even have noticed Tal was gone.
The idea was enough to make him surly again. He turned around, intending to go straight back to the shuttle, but it had already taken off. Up ahead, though, a flight of steps was carved into the side of the cliff, and at the bottom was a beach of silver sand like a drift of pure salt.
The bay was sheltered on both sides from the wind and from the open sea by the cliffs, like two enclosing arms. Within their span the water was the blue-green of stained glass, clear enough that you could see the beds of kelp, washing back and forth as the sea rose and fell.
Tal made his way cautiously down the steps. After all he had been through at the Lignite Spire and afterward, he didn’t entirely trust his balance, and dying at the bottom of a cliff was not yet his idea of a good time.
At the foot of the stairs was a stall with a white awning, where a woman who looked like a dried apricot was selling cones of nuts and cups of some kind of horrible wine punch. Tal bought a cup and was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t terrible at all, but sweet, cold, and soothing.
The Qarsazhi family set up their encampment along with a few other group
s, farther down the beach. Tal went in the opposite direction, spread out his jacket on the sand, and sat down on it to sip his drink and watch the sea.
He shifted his weight, feeling the warm sand pressing back against him. There were no wizards here, no divinities, nobody for him to chase or catch or kill, nobody to hate him.
He could just stay here for a while. The idea came to him as if someone else had whispered it in his ear, if anyone had been in the habit of whispering nice things to him.
For a moment he felt as if he were floating, adrift, and approaching disaster. He couldn’t just do what he wanted. You had to stick somewhere. Otherwise you were nothing more than this, a failed son of the Charossai, a man with no friends, no loyalty, and no calling.
A man who could lie on the beach in the sun, perhaps. A man who could rest for as long as he needed.
He tried to remember the things he had left at the Palace, and concluded that he had no use for them. Sethennai deserved no more of an explanation than he had ever offered Tal for anything he had done. Let him keep Tal’s shitty knife collection and see if that helped him figure it out.
* * *
From the docks of Qaradoun, you could see the sails and canopies of hundreds of mazeships rising to the Gate, white crests one above another, like so many waves. Shuthmili stood beneath them, looking as if she had lately been pulled from a burning house, whole and unconsumed.
“Well. These are for you,” said Csorwe. She held out the gauntlets. “I don’t know if they’ll help, but they might.”
Shuthmili took them, turned them over. They were far too big for her, of course—each one was like a much larger hand encompassing her own. Csorwe wondered whether she should have bargained with Sethennai for something else, perhaps a ship of her own, or an enormous pile of cash.
“Where are you going to go?” said Shuthmili, still looking dazed. Csorwe wondered whether she regretted what had happened on the roof of the Traitor’s Grave. It was easy to say and do things when you didn’t think you were going to live to face the consequences.
“I don’t know, yet,” said Csorwe. “There are lots of places I’ve never been.”
All she knew was that she wanted to go far enough that Oranna would really have to make an effort to enforce the blood-pledge. It would catch up with her inevitably—these things did—but Csorwe had no intention of getting hooked back in any sooner than fate mandated.
She would have to make a decision eventually. That was something she was going to have to get used to. There was no home to crawl back to, nobody’s judgment to fall back on, nobody to keep her safe except her own ingenuity, nothing to live for except what she picked for herself. She couldn’t fool herself into thinking it would be easy.
“Well,” said Shuthmili. “There’s always the mealworm tour of the Echo Maze. I hope you don’t think I’ve forgotten about it.”
Or maybe it would be that easy. There were all the vast worlds of the Maze, endless and intricate and alien, and there were familiar station canteens, where she could sit and eat reheated vat food with Shuthmili, and they could keep each other safe. Maybe she could have both.
Or maybe it was too much to expect. She couldn’t make that kind of assumption, and she didn’t want to be followed out of gratitude. “Look,” she said, “you don’t have to come with me. You can go wherever you want. I have some money left—I can take you anywhere you like—if you have friends anywhere—I don’t want you to owe me. You don’t owe me anything.”
“Only my life,” said Shuthmili.
“Not even that,” said Csorwe.
“I think, traditionally, I have to follow you, now, until I can save your life and thereby redeem my debt.”
“You have saved my life,” said Csorwe. “Twice. Maybe more than twice. We have to call it quits eventually. And look, you deserve a better chance. I know we said a lot of things back when we thought we were going to die but you’re not—you’re not bound to me, or anything. A normal life, whatever you want—”
“Csorwe. Do you think—does anything you’ve seen—have I ever done anything to suggest that I’ve been pining for a normal life? Have you ever heard me utter the words When this is all over I hope to settle down as a prosperous greengrocer or If only I could achieve my ambition of modest success in the civil service?”
“But what do you want?”
“You said you wanted to take me to places. I want to go away from here. I want to go with you. And I’m a tremendously powerful magician, so I’d like to see you try to stop me.”
“Oh,” said Csorwe.
“Yes. And if I get to save your life again, I will regard it as a privilege.”
* * *
They went aboard a ship. They sailed through the Gate. And it seems certain they were seen again, in some place far from here.
Acknowledgments
With enormous thanks to:
Mum, Dad, Katie, Toby, Daphne, and Rowena, for years of forbearance with how much I like wizards.
My agent, Kurestin Armada, a being of pure wisdom who still encouraged me to write about Talasseres.
My editor, Lindsey Hall, without whose efforts this book might make a modest paving stone but would not be much good for reading.
Emily Tesh, for telling me to make things worse. She was right.
Tamsyn Muir and Matt Hosty, for keeping me company in this ancient sacrificial pyramid.
Rachel Alday, Jennifer Giesbrecht, Arkady Martine, Everina Maxwell, Alice Sharp, Waverly SM, Heather Watson, and Livali Wyle, for their fellowship, good counsel, and extreme flattery of various early drafts.
Everyone in the Armada Slack, for their endless and sensible kindness.
And to Maz, who actually is the greatest genius who has ever lived.
About the Author
A. K. LARKWOOD studied English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and now lives in Oxford with her wife and a cat. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Those Persons Involved
Pronunciation Guide
I. The Chosen Bride
1. The House of Silence
2. The Maze of Echoes
3. The Curse-Ward
4. The Withered City
5. Two Completely Predictable Things
6. The Serpent
7. The School of Transcendence
II. Buried, But Not Deeply
8. The Watchtower Bell
9. The Hollow Monument
10. The Divinity Underground
11. Entirely Gone Away
12. Salvage
III. The Tether
13. No Hard Feelings
14. Reflection in Tranquillity
15. The Life of an Adept
16. Handmaid of Desolation
17. Young Blood
18. A Machine for Prophecy
19. The Chrysoprase Door
IV. The Traitor’s Grave
20. The Sword Has Its Regrets
21. Thrice Warded and Thrice Bound
22. Obligation
23. The Emperor’s Cutlery Drawer
24. Neither a Blessing Nor a Curse
25. Glass and Ashes
26. The Throne and Earthly Mansion
27. Leverage
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
&n
bsp; THE UNSPOKEN NAME
Copyright © 2020 by A. K. Larkwood
All rights reserved.
Original cover art by Billelis
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Larkwood, A. K., author.
Title: The unspoken name / A. K. Larkwood.
Description: First edition. | New York: Tor, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019042768 (print) | LCCN 2019042769 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250238900 (hardback) | ISBN 9781250238917 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250762542 (international, sold outside the U.S., subject to rights availability)
Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6112.A766 U56 2020 (print) | LCC PR6112.A766 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042768
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042769
eISBN 9781250238917
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First U.S. Edition: February 2020
First International Edition: February 2020
The Unspoken Name Page 48