by Matthew Ward
“Akamha.” Jasaldar Tarbarit, silks stained with blood not his own, turned about. “You should have stayed on the wall.”
At last, Akamha found his voice. “What is this, jasaldar?”
“The start of something overdue.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but then Akamha hadn’t needed one. The winding room offered an embarrassment of explanation. The creak of foot on floorboard behind warned of what would follow. And yet he knew only anger. Close enough to courage in a man’s final moments.
“Saranal Aregnum!”
The words more howl than speech, Akamha hurled himself at Tarbarit.
Forty
Surrounded as it was by taller buildings, the narrow balcony of Apara’s house offered no view of the commotion. Instinct cautioned her to head back inside, pour something sublime from the carefully stocked liquor cabinet and leave events be. The timbre was too familiar, for all that she’d never heard its like in Tregard.
But that wasn’t how it worked, was it? Tregard was her home. Either everything was her business, or nothing was.
With a last mournful glance at her lace-edged gown – bought with proceeds from a recent commission and first worn today – she sought higher vantage.
Drainpipe, rain-sodden trellis and a semi-dignified, dress-tearing scramble across contoured tiles brought her atop a neighbour’s roof. Four storeys, where her own modest dwelling was two, and a view clear into the heart of Tregard’s Old Quarter.
“No… This isn’t happening.”
The streets were crowded with bodies. Most fleeing, some dead. Those advancing carried the rust shields of Silsaria. No… Redsigor, though the difference mattered little. Apara watched, shivering with an echo of cold her eternal constitution no longer truly suffered, as a coordinated charge of riders and shieldsmen overran a knot of warriors in Rhalesh green. Further south, smoke gathered above the warriors’ lodgings. And scarcely visible through the rain, the looming bulwark of Triumphal Gate, a vast Redsigoran banner streaming from the inner rampart.
Screams rose skyward. Bells fell silent, replaced by the screech of steel and the cries of battle.
With them came realisation. Cold hadn’t set her shivering. Nor fear.
“How dare you!” she screamed to an uncaring sky. “I was happy here!”
Go inside. Better yet, leave. Be happy somewhere else.
That was the old Apara talking. The one in thrall to the Crowmarket. Who’d stolen and killed for the pettiest scores. Who’d found strength almost too late. It wasn’t the woman who’d saved a sister-in-law she didn’t know. It wasn’t the woman who counted an Empress as a friend.
Four storeys below, a Rhalesh warrior died beneath a Silsarian sword. The woman and child he’d sheltered fled deeper into the alley, unaware of the dead end.
No one to save them.
Only… that wasn’t true, was it? There was still a choice.
“Oh, this is going to hurt.”
Apara stepped off the roof. The fall gave just enough time for regret to blossom into terror.
Bereft of warning or an eternal’s constitution, the Silsarian crumpled beneath her with a dull huff and a crackle of breaking bone.
Impact drove the breath from Apara’s lungs, leaving her no means to howl the pain of dislocated knee and snapped ankle. Her head chimed against flagstone, adding nausea and blurred vision to the dizziness of the fall. The woman dragged her daughter close, a hand across her eyes.
Already reknitting, Apara’s ankle held as she struggled upright. Not so the knee, which folded, tearing muscle and ligament anew. She bit into her hand to muffle the scream, then jack-knifed onto her side. Gripping her lower thigh with both hands, she braced her thumbs against the offending kneecap. A scraping, wrenching shudder, another scream. It snapped back into place.
Not as bad as the aftermath of her teenaged fall from Vordal Tower – she’d barely clung to consciousness as Erad had relocated the bone – but bad enough.
The next time she tried to stand, both legs held. “Not my finest idea.”
The woman backed away, the girl shoved behind her. “I pray you, serathi, spare my daughter.”
The woman thought her a serathi? Apara stifled a gasp of unintended mirth. But then she was paler of feature than most in Tregard, and she had plunged from the sky. Speaking Tressian hadn’t helped. Perhaps the woman could be forgiven for overlooking the lack of wings.
Stepping over the Silsarian’s corpse, Apara stumbled to the alley’s end. The fighting had moved on. “Get to the palace, savim,” she replied, this time careful to speak in the Rhalesh tongue. “You’ll be safe there.”
The woman nodded, but made no move.
“Now!” shouted Apara.
The other flinched and fled the alley, girl in tow. Apara sank against the wall, memory of pain now more pressing than its present. Something else buzzed beneath it. Welcome and unfamiliar. Pride. The same pride she’d felt during Rosa’s rescue. Seemed heroics were intoxicating. Worth a little pain. Worth a ruined dress.
“I just know I’ll regret this.”
She picked up the Silsarian’s sword anyway.
The icularis cut down the two city wardens immediately to their front before the victims realised their loyalty lay elsewhere. Others perished in the same moment Haldrane spun around, his own sword whispering free too late and his habitual smugness given way to a mask of terror.
True to Cardivan’s expectation, the spymaster didn’t hesitate. An icularis collapsed, hand at a bloody throat. The second managed three whole parries against his former master’s onslaught until he lay dead, run through as cleanly as a pig on a spit.
But Haldrane had made the mistake of setting his back to Brackar. Closing meaty hands about the spymaster’s wrist and neck, the champion slammed him into the wall. Haldrane grunted as he dislodged plaster, leaving pale trails across his dark robes. Twice more, and the sword dropped from his grasp.
“Enough, Brackar,” said Cardivan.
After a fourth collision – Brackar never being one to leave a task half done – he spun Haldrane about. Murderous eyes glowered from beneath a mottled, swollen brow.
Cardivan stepped closer. “We were discussing arrogance, I think. An organisation is only as strong as the men in its service. I’ve taken the trouble to discover which of yours value coin over loyalty.” He glanced at the dead icularis. “I hope you weren’t close.”
“Your death will come an inch at a time,” gasped Haldrane, the words whistling from the loss of a tooth.
Cardivan shook his head. “My fate – anyone’s fate – is no longer yours to command. You can expect no rescue from your men outside. By now, they’re already dead.”
A glare was his only reply.
Cardivan drew a dagger from concealment in his sleeve. “You’ve expended so much effort encouraging me to indiscretion that you never questioned whether or not I could do it without you. Do you know how many swords I have in the city? The palace? You’ve been blind, Haldrane. And you chose it for yourself.”
The spymaster went rigid as the dagger punched low in his belly, then jerked as Cardivan twisted the blade clear. But for Brackar’s grip, he’d have fallen. The lack of a scream was somehow disappointing, and Cardivan considered indulging a second thrust in hopes of coaxing one free.
Deciding against, he stepped back. The gut wound was a slow, painful demise. Not quite the death of inches Haldrane had promised, but enough to serve as down-payment on decades of indignities. A second would only speed matters along.
Besides, the hollow look in Haldrane’s eyes was worth a dozen screams.
“The Empress is as bad,” said Cardivan. “So busy tearing down traditions, she’s not thought about those she destroys alongside. I’m not saying it was easy. Not everyone will take my coin, and few of those who do hold any love for me. But they hate her more.”
Haldrane said nothing. A breathless, sagging bundle in Brackar’s grasp. Beaten. Pathetic. Cardivan grimaced. This
was the man he’d been afraid of all these years?
Stooping, he wiped his dagger and hand clean on the robes of a slain icularis. The murmur of the city gave way to new sounds. The tolling of bells. Hoofbeats on flagstones. Raised voices. Screams. At last.
“You hear that?” he said. “My son is already in the city. Though you won’t live to see my coronation, you might last long enough to see your precious Empress’ head on a spike.”
“No,” gasped Haldrane.
“Come now, this will be over by nightfall.” He withdrew to the window and drew aside the veil. Between the garden’s unkemptness and the rain, he saw nothing of the streets. “I’m sure you can hang on that long.”
“Not… what I… meant.” Haldrane’s voice hardened, the threadiness of recent moments banished. “You will never… wear the crown.”
Brackar bellowed in pain. Cardivan spun around in time to see Haldrane lurching towards him, one hand pressed to his wound. The spymaster’s gaze was no longer hollow, but determined.
Mouth dry, Cardivan stumbled, hands upraised to ward off the inevitable blow. He quite forgot the dagger in his trembling hand, and that Haldrane was dying.
“Guards!” he screamed. “Guards!”
Voices sounded on the landing. Haldrane shot him a look of pure contempt and veered towards the window. At the last moment, he toppled. A pane of glass shattered beneath him, and then he was gone into the grey afternoon.
Still shaking with fear and humiliation, Cardivan reached his feet as the first guard entered the room. Brackar was on hands and knees, gasping for breath but unharmed.
“Well?” howled Cardivan. “Get after him!”
Thief’s instinct kept Apara to the shadows. Eternal or no, she wasn’t a creature of the battlefield. She’d be a burden on a shield wall, and it on her. And besides, what few defences she saw of any kind seldom outlasted the sight. Tregard had relied too much on its walls and the promise of warning. Its garrison, thinned first by Govanna’s aftermath and again by the blockade at Mergadir, had little chance of rising to the day’s bloody challenge.
What Rhalesh warriors remained fought to the last. Street corners and alley mouths were thick with waterlogged dead. That emerald green tallied equal with Silsarian rust spoke of oaths fulfilled to the last breath, and heroes forgotten in the rain.
But Thirava had more men. And numbers mattered.
By the time Apara made it halfway to the palace, fractious battlefronts had disintegrated further, and Tregard’s winding streets were full of triumphant men seeking plunder. Bodies of traders and travellers, householders and servants joined those of the warriors who’d perished in their defence. Children cried out for slain parents. The wounded crawled for the shelter of doorways.
Tregard, the heart of the Silver Kingdom – a city where Apara Rann had finally found a measure of peace – was drowning in spite and blood. Her heart broke to see it thus.
And here, in narrow roads similar to those in which Apara had learnt a vranakin’s trade and yet so different, she found her hunting ground. In her wake, she left a trail of dead Silsarians who’d seen no danger in the bedraggled woman with tangled hair and a torn, filthy dress.
Those she saved from the sacking, Apara hurried to safer streets, or else hammered on nearby doors until frightened souls within offered sanctuary. Those moments were the only shafts of light in a miserable, soul-wrenching day. She found no joy in the killing, deserved though it was, but nor did she shrink from it.
As she reached the Great East Road, she spied Silsarians moving with purpose through the maze of broken traders’ barrows. Four in all, and with a lumbering brute in a champion’s finery at their head. Apara knew his sort, though they’d never met. An enforcer, moving with a bully’s confidence. She read it in the sidelong glances of those who advanced in his shadow, as wary of their ally as whatever waited elsewhere. They crossed the line of dead, the brute casting glances up and down the street, then ran on into the opposite alleyway.
Apara halted in the shadow of a minaret and peeled matted hair from her eyes. Four trained warriors? Her stolen blade had long since lost its edge, and the day had offered plentiful reminder that the sword wasn’t really her weapon. For all that they healed fast, the wounds still hurt. But the brute… He’d the look of a man on the hunt. A man who dealt only in spoils that screamed.
Hefting her blunted sword, Apara ran across the flooded street.
A high-pitched howl from deeper in the alley set her running, the torn sole of her left shoe slapping at her heel. Unable to stop as she rounded the corner, she all but collided with the rearmost Silsarian. She twisted mid-stride and thrust. Steel grated against golden scale, and he fell. The blade, trapped between his ribs, ripped free of her grasp.
Warned by his dying scream, the others turned from the robed figure lying in the gutter, waters swirling pink as they trickled away from the unmoving form.
The brute spat into the rain. Lips twisted to a grin beneath his lumpen, disjointed nose. “And what are you meant to be?”
Apara recognised him now. Part of Cardivan’s entourage. His champion, Brackar.
The others laughed, and stepped as far apart as the alleyway allowed. They the flanks, the brute to the centre.
Apara stared up into the rain. Grey clouds stared back. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see. Maybe the goddess who’d made her eternal, witnessing what she did with the gift.
“I’m still working that out.”
Planting her foot on the Silsarian’s corpse, she ripped the sword free.
The rightmost Silsarian screamed a challenge and flung himself forward. Apara met his sword with her own and punched him full in the face. The close-set metal helm buckled under splitting knuckles. Cartilage crunched and he dropped, blood slicking his armour. The leftmost slipped on the treacherous flagstones and died with Apara’s sword in his throat.
A shadow blotted out grey skies.
Apara barely felt Brackar’s sword punch through her chest. It was when the point burst from her back, the hilt flush against her ruined dress, that pain found her. A lung spasming and sucking, she collapsed. Her sword fell from numbed fingers. Every breath tasted of iron. Every motion was exquisite agony. Worse than the dislocated knee. Worse even than when Hawkin Darrow had knifed her, years before.
“You’ll never be anything now,” growled Brackar.
Letting go his sword, he turned back towards his erstwhile victim, who in the confusion had crawled a pace deeper into the alley.
Apara closed her eyes and forgot the pain. Fingers splayed against the wall, she regained her feet, inch by painful inch.
“I don’t… know,” she gasped. “I think I’m… just getting started.”
Brackar paled and stumbled away. It had been long enough now that he had to have realised she wasn’t bleeding. For a bully, even one a good head taller than her, that would always be enough.
Slack-jawed and eyes wide with horror, Brackar turned tail. Hurtling past his victim, he vanished deeper into the alley.
Somehow, there was more triumph in his flight than in his confederates’ death.
Apara’s flesh only reluctantly gave up its grip on the sword, but she somehow got it free without screaming fit to alert every Silsarian for three streets. Black blood hissing silver along the blade, she cast it to the ground.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” she swallowed hard, urging the pain to fade. It did so with uttermost reluctance. “Damn it!”
Brackar’s victim reached up a trembling hand and drew back his hood. Mangled features stared out into the alley’s sodden gloom. “Rann?”
“Haldrane?” She staggered closer, stride complicated as the ailing shoe at last gave up its sole. “You look terrible.”
Bright blood trickling from his lips, he gave a wheezing, pained laugh. “I’ll… hold the Raven back long enough for you to get me… to the palace.”
She knelt beside him, at last noting the belly wound beneath his hand. Black robes had hidden t
he blood from a distance, but there was no disguising it now, nor the pallor to his face, or the sickly copper smell.
“You need a lunassera’s care,” she replied. “I’ll call the mists, get you to Mooncourt.”
“No time. Empress… in danger.”
“In the palace? It’s the safest place she could be.”
He laughed again, bleaker this time. “Enough that I’ve erred today. Don’t… follow my example.”
Something in his tone set a chill racing along Apara’s spine. “What did you do?”
Haldrane’s chin sunk to his chest. “It’s only treason… if Cardivan loses. If he wins, he’s Emperor. One house falls… another rises. Tirane Aregnum.”
She glowered at the evasion. “What did you do?”
But Haldrane’s wits had flown, a stuttering, febrile chest betraying that the rest of him was soon to follow. Apara stared down, frustration and sorrow battling for mastery. Both yielded to rising fear. The House of Saran was more than Melanna.
Kaila. Was Cardivan so determined to rule that he’d harm a child?
Of course he’d do it. Brides of Brief Moonlight. Women and girls wed long enough for the husband to steal their dowry, and then the knife. A man like Cardivan wouldn’t even blink at the prospect, not with the Imperial throne as the prize.
Her last weariness falling away into a bit of black, bitter wrath. Apara hauled the dying Haldrane onto her shoulder.
Forty-One
“Empress.”
Elim Jorcari bore himself with a warrior’s pride. The stiffness of back and shoulders that age could not entirely unmake. The eyes that promised defiance or respect according to status. A man, in other words, unimpressed by the throne room’s splendour, or the stern visages of the golden godly statues staring down from on high. That he wore civilian silks and not armour – well cut, though the cloth was not the finest – struck a jarring note. But not so jarring as the rigidity of his tone, a man offering politeness but sparing no attempt to hide distaste. A warrior with attitudes as mired in the past as his battles.