Sorasa eyed her fingers with distaste.
Just as Corayne suspected. She pulled her hand back, her voice sharpening, meant to sting. “Enjoy watching us blunder our way toward what could be the end of Allward, for the sake of your pride and few more coins to rub together while the realm crumbles.”
A hiss rattled past Sorasa’s bared teeth, her eyes dancing in the torchlight. The ship bumped into its berth with the groan of wood and snap of rope. The Amhara swayed gracefully as the deck bobbed beneath them. Again her mask slipped. Corayne saw anger. The useful kind.
“Well, when you put it that way,” she finally snarled, shoving off the rail.
Corayne grabbed Dom’s arm and pulled him along by his cloak, like a dog on a leash. They shouldered through the crowd together, nearly losing Sorasa in the scrum. Her face flashed ahead of them, rigid with frustration. She slowed, letting the other travelers break around her.
“Keep up,” she snapped, before muttering more Ibalet under her breath.
Corayne smirked. She’d grown up with sailors. She was no stranger to foul language.
“I am not a meddling monkey,” Corayne answered.
Sorasa startled. Even she could not hide her flush. “You speak Ibalet?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Dom what you called him.”
Behind them, Dom huffed along, his boots calamitous on the docks. “I do not care for a murderer’s opinion,” he said, a clear lie.
Corayne suspected he would care very much. After all, Sorasa had called him a stupid, stubborn ass. Although, she thought, my translation might not be accurate.
The Ibalet words for stupid and handsome are quite similar.
11
THE ASSASSIN’S BURDEN
Sorasa
She did not think herself a woman of conscience. Whatever morals she’d been born with had not come with her past the gates of the citadel. No Amhara could be made with such weights. And yet she felt the pull of something unfamiliar and sharp, tugging her off her path, like a hook in the gills of a fish. Sorasa wanted to rip it out, flesh and blood be damned. Be off with the current, to wherever opportunity might lead. Instead she found herself grinding her teeth in Wayfarer’s Port, assaulted on all sides by stink and noise, with two very persistent hooks buried deep. She dragged them along the streets against her better instincts. Certainly the Cor girl and the Elder can find their way to the New Palace without dying. Or, if they die, so be it.
But Corayne’s words gnawed at her. The end of Allward.
Those specters of another realm had certainly felt like it, fleeting as they’d been. Sorasa had seen men gutted, burned, crushed, poisoned, and devoured, in all states of death and decay. Killed for contract, practice, sport, or Mercury’s favor. Assassinations disguised as cult rituals or gruesome accidents. Corpses dismembered, scattered, or dissolved in lye. Bodies wrung out by torture or deprivation. She’d witnessed all and done most. But there was nothing, not from the snows of the Jyd to the jungles of Rhashir, that rattled her so much. This memory refused to be forgotten, the taste and smell of it sharp in her mind. Blood, rot, iron. And heat like she could not understand. For a woman born in the sands, that was the most unsettling piece of all.
She swallowed hard. There will be no Amhara Guild left if the realm shatters. This is just good logic. Simple business. A means to an end.
There were other routes onto the island that was the New Palace, walls and gates and bridges be damned. If the Elder did not want to be seen, despite all his preening, then Sorasa would make it so. She adjusted her cloak into something shapeless, a bland form of nameless color, smudged between sand and gray smoke in the torchlight. As a woman with a good face and a body carved by years of training, she was more likely to be noted on city streets. Sorasa had no intention of being noticed, let alone remembered by any guard in the street.
If we can even make it out of the port, she thought bitterly. Between the gawking girl and the sentient tombstone, it will be a wonder if we get there by midnight.
And Corayne did gawk, her mouth slack as she drank the city in. If not for Dom, she would have been a fine target for pickpockets and beggars. The Elder, hooded behind her, was a sentinel none would trifle with. Except, of course, the drunks, the brawlers, and the drunken brawlers. They clustered outside the dock taverns and free houses, half in shadow, waving flagons and shouting at the Elder in a spray of languages.
Dom faltered, his lips pursed beneath his hood. “I believe those men are asking to fight me,” he said, confused.
“I can’t blame them,” Sorasa muttered under her breath.
“Why would they want to do that?” the Elder asked. “I’m twice their size.”
He scrutinized the taverns again, looking over rat-faced men in greasy clothing. They looked back, jeering, showing yellow teeth if they had teeth at all.
Sorasa waved him on with a tug of her gloved fingers. “Boys do stupid things to feel like men, no matter how old they are.”
Inns and taverns sprouted like weeds all over Wayfarer’s, its streets narrow and overcrowded. Most people left the port quickly, creating a steady tide into the city. Sorasa kept them deep in that current, snug within a group of robed pilgrims more slack-jawed than Corayne. She breathed a sigh of relief when they escaped the jostling island and crossed the Moonbridge, named for its smooth, half-circle arch over the Fifth Canal.
Corayne’s gaze snagged and she slowed to stare at the monstrous Fleethaven, just as intimidating as the navy it harbored. It was dug into the next island, with a long channel leading to an interior circle. There were berths for each ship of the fleet, stalled like a horses in a stable.
“It’s a cothon,” Sorasa said, shoving the girl along. “And not much to look at. A shadow to the war ports of Almasad and Jirhali, a bad copy.”
Both flashed in her mind, the cities of Ibal and Rhashir thick with heat haze and palm shade. Where Galland could dock twenty warships at a turn, the others could hold a hundred with ease. The streets of Almasad went gold in her memory, glittering like they never had before. Sorasa forced another breath, the air sour with the beer stink of the northern capital. It was like a bucket of cold water.
“Such is the way of Galland. Everything stolen well and poorly remade,” she added, keeping her grip on Corayne’s arm. “If you insist on stopping to look at every cobblestone and corner ditch, I’m going to make Dom carry you.”
The city unfurled, dark and spattered with flickering lights like globs of red and gold paint. They bled on the waters, dancing in the wake of boats, ferries, and little skiffs rowing the canals. Sorasa got her bearings as they walked, resetting the points of her internal compass. Corayne tromped at her side, doing her best to gawk and walk at the same time.
“The Konrada,” Sorasa said, gesturing to the tower before Corayne could ask. It spiked up from the center of Ascal, black against the stars, windows glowing from within as if fire burned deep in her spine. “A cathedral to every god of the Ward, all twenty, built by Konrad the Great.”
Behind her, Dom did his best to smile. The look seemed foreign on his face. “For someone who hates traveling companions, you make a talented guide.”
His steady voice and superior tone split Sorasa’s head. “The tower is open inside, two hundred feet from dome to floor,” she continued, glaring at him. “Do you know what happens to a man’s skull when he falls that distance?”
The Elder soured. “Is that a threat, Sarn?”
“Just sharing happy memories,” Sorasa replied. “I have many in this city.”
Next to him, Corayne’s eyes nearly rolled out of her head.
They tried to avoid the main streets, sticking to alleys. The avenues connected the bridges like veins through a body and would have been easier, but more obvious. Even at night, market stalls and performer pavilions crowed, fountains choked with people washing clothes and filling buckets. Carts wheeled; dedicant priests walked in their rows; dogs nosed for scraps while cats shrieked. The city garrison patrolled, l
anterns raised and faces slack beneath their helmets. Children laughed or wept around every corner.
Where Corayne gaped, Dom glowered in disgust. Sorasa could not help but agree. Ascal is a foul place, she cursed, stepping over a black puddle. Between the bridges, the stinking canals, and the many hundreds of thousands of people who lived within the walls, the capital was an experiment in how not to plan a city. Everything was infinitely more chaotic than any city of the south or west.
But chaos makes ease, she knew. In a crowd, on a street, in a city’s foundations.
They rejoined a grand avenue to cross the Bridge of Faith, its length set with great iron torches like spears. In daylight it would be rammed rail to rail with pilgrims seeking the Konrada and the blessings of the gods. Now it was all but empty, scattered with a few errant priests mumbling to themselves or preaching to beggars.
They stepped off Faith and onto the plaza, wide and round. Sorasa fought the familiar urge to run. She felt exposed, a hawk reduced to a mouse in the field. The cathedral tower loomed, watching over them with proud indifference.
Though she despised Ascal, even Sorasa could not help but admit the city was grand in every sense of the word, for better or worse. Such was the way of the northern kings, who saw themselves as emperors, burdened and blessed to rule from every corner of the horizon.
The New Palace was no exception, a giant hunched beyond the cathedral.
Corayne breathed a sigh, the gasping sort. Not in awe, but in fear. “I had a picture of it in my head,” she murmured as they walked. “What I thought the palace would look like.”
“And it came nowhere close,” Sorasa answered. I know the feeling, she thought, remembering the first time she saw the sprawling palace. The great seat of the Gallish kings, the fist of this land. It stole her breath then. It almost did now.
The palace rose at the city’s heart, walled on its own island, its towers and keeps a soft gray that flickered gold under the flaming braziers upon the ramparts. Galland’s lion snarled from a hundred green banners, streaming like emerald tears. Gargoyles and spires clawed the sky from the rooftops. Torches flared on the ramparts of a dozen towers. Lights pulsed behind gleaming windows of stained glass. There was another cathedral on the palace grounds, the Syrekom, monstrous in size, with a rose window like a gigantic jeweled eye. Parts of the palace were brand-new, the stone almost white, the architecture flamboyant and daring, a stark contrast to the rest. The gate was a mouth of iron, jaws wide at the end of the Bridge of Valor.
Two dozen knights lined Valor, armed with spears, their helms donned. They wore green silk over their armor, each embroidered with a roaring lion. At night they looked inhuman, unfeeling, in service to their queen and country.
“That is too many guards to bribe,” Dom said dryly from beneath his hood.
“I don’t plan to use a bridge,” Sorasa replied with equal bite.
“Do you intend to swim in that . . . substance?” he said, sneering at the fetid canals.
Before she could spit a retort at the Elder, Corayne did it for her. “Clearly there’s some kind of tunnel,” she said softly. Her eyes darted to the Konrada, then the palace. “There’s more below us. In the Old Cor ruins.”
“Yes,” Sorasa replied stiffly.
She glanced at the girl, looking her over again. In Lemarta, Corayne had seemed unremarkable, another daughter of the Long Sea, with a sun-kissed face and salt-tangled hair. Smart, curious. Restless, maybe, but what girl of seventeen is not? There’d been only a flicker of something in her. It burned now, a candle catching light. And Sorasa could not say what it meant.
“There used to be a stadium here, where the Cors raced their chariots on sand, or staged navy battles on the flooded grounds,” Sorasa explained in a low voice. “Only a sliver remains, at the east end of the palace. But the foundation, below us—below the canals, even—it’s a maze of tunnels, some decades old, some two thousand. Many burned when the Old Palace fell; others have collapsed or flooded since the days of Old Cor. But not all.”
Corayne narrowed her eyes at the Konrada again, looking to its roots rather than its pinnacle. The wall dedicated to Immor faced them head on. The great god of time and memory held the moon and sun in his hands at equal height, with the stars like a halo behind his head. In his chest was a rose window, burning with blue and green light. A doorway arched between his feet, one of twenty, spilling the sound of evening worship.
Sorasa beckoned them both toward the cathedral, a smile on her lips. “The Konrada vaults hold nothing of value anymore, but they do go deep.”
“That will suffice,” Dom said grimly.
Corayne could only nod. Her eyes went wide again, and she seemed once more the girl in Lemarta, not the daughter of a dead prince, with the realm’s fate laid between her hands.
“I think the tunnels smell worse than the streets,” Corayne said, her voice muffled. She drew her shirt up over her nose and mouth, leaving only her black eyes visible. She glared at the walls and the dirt floor, searching for faults. Her eyes seemed to eat the meager light.
Dom’s growl echoed. “I did not realize that was even possible. And yet here we are.”
“Funny, the Elder legends don’t mention how fussy your kind is,” Sorasa snapped, though she had to agree. The tunnel air was somehow both sour and stale. The canal ran above them, and clearly the walls were perpetually wet, covered in moss that gleamed by the weak light of her torch.
The Elder muttered a retort in his own language. It echoed down the tunnel, passing away into the blackness. The Konrada vaults were behind them now, occupied only by a gray priest who would regain consciousness sometime around dawn.
The memories came with each step. Her first contract behind the walls of the New Palace was fifteen years ago, the last only four. Both ended with men dead in their chambers, missing ears and fingers, contracts fulfilled and messages relayed. She took no pride in them nor satisfaction. Duty was done for its own sake—at least, it was then.
Beneath Ascal, in the chilling damp, Sorasa had never felt farther from the Amhara and the citadel. She chewed her cheek, the air cold through her clothing, like a touch of sickness.
After a long while, the tunnel began to slope upward. Dom brushed the back of his hand over the wall, feeling the stone. “We’re out from under the river,” he said, his knuckles coming away dry. “We must be under the palace now.”
“Oh, good,” Corayne said. Her voice held the edge of panic. “Now I can stop worrying about being drowned and focus entirely on being crushed.”
A rare chuckle passed through Sorasa’s teeth. “It’s not so bad,” she replied. “Protect your skull and ribs. You’ll be all right.”
The girl blinked at her. “You’re a very strange person, Sorasa Sarn.”
“It’s a strange world out there,” Sorasa said. Her eyes met Dom’s as he brought up the rear of their trio. He fell into his constant scowl. “And growing stranger by the second.”
The Elder opened his grim mouth but stopped himself, squinting, his immortal eyes seeing farther than her own could. There was something in the darkness.
Corayne glanced at him, worrying out of her skin. “What is it?” she hissed, dropping her voice. One hand stole to her boot, where she kept a small and useless knife.
Someone should teach her how to use that, Sorasa thought, noting the girl’s poor grip.
Dom only raised his chin. “You’ll see.”
The gate came, barring the passage. It was good, old iron, with no lock and no hinges, welded into plates on either side of the tunnel. This was meant to stop anyone who stumbled this way, from either direction.
“Is this new?” Corayne offered, searching for answers as was her way. “Or do you have a trick around it?”
“I’d wager this is near two hundred years old,” Sorasa sighed, eyeing the ironwork. “And yes, I have a trick. He is quite large and quite annoying,” she added, looking pointedly at Dom.
He sneered down at her. The tor
chlight turned his golden hair to fire and cast shadows along the sharp lines of his stern face. Darkness pooled in his scars.
“I’m annoying?” His green eyes burned like the embers. “You brought us to a locked gate.”
Sorasa looked over his broad hands and wide-set shoulders with a sniff of indifference. She remembered the bull in Byllskos, tossed and toppled by the immortal.
“I brought you to a locked gate about to be knocked open. There’s a difference,” she said.
The Elder pursed his lips and looked back at the iron bars. His brow furrowed deeply, his body unmoving.
“What, afraid of a few bruises?” Sorasa prodded.
He made a noise low in his throat, somewhere between a growl and a huff.
There were a few bruises.
12
THE LAST CARD PLAYED
Erida
The Queen knew why her future husband demanded roses for the morning. Scarlet, crimson, ruby, red as the sun at the first light of dawn. Red was the color of the old empire, and roses bloomed in its shadow, red ghosts to remember ruins gone. They grew all over Ascal, especially in the gardens of the New Palace. They did the same in Lecorra, the once capital, and in the old cities of the provinces from Kasa to the Gates of Trec, where Corblood once ruled. Erida had to admit, she craved roses too, and she thought of ways to wear them in her hair for the ceremony. Bound with silver, braided, pinned. Woven into a crown, perhaps.
Her maids busied themselves in her apartments, laying out gowns for the morning in the grand solar. They would be working well into the night, inspecting every square inch of silk and brocade for flaw while the seamstresses looked on, worrying their hands. Every other servant who could be spared from the preparations or the feast hunted roses. She watched them through the windows, picking through the gardens by torchlight, shears in hand.
Erida’s gown for the ceremony would be cloth of gold trimmed in green, with a cream veil over her crown, as was Gallish tradition. But tonight she favored crimson, to please her future consort. The color felt odd, but not unwelcome. Erida looked down as she walked, her skirts flowing, the silk reflecting the lights of the long hall. Her fingers twitched, winking with the emerald ring of state. It was not a long walk from the residence to the great hall. She could do it in her sleep, every turn and stair etched in her memory.
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