by Ben Galley
Nilith hung back a few paces to run her hand along Anoish’s snout. The desert horse was not a fan of the streets and night-noises. She could see the tension in his haunches and flanks, sitting right alongside tiredness. She didn’t blame him. It seemed as if they had been running for years, not just a handful of weeks. Every fibre in her cried out for rest, even if it meant slumping into a gutter for half an hour. She was cold too, and aching, as if her blood carried seawater in it.
Making sure Heles was watching the streets and not her, Nilith dug her fingers under the hem of her cloak so she could look at her arm. Patchwork wrappings betrayed the cold glow underneath them. The light reached up to her elbow now. The numbness had spread further, making her shoulder tingle. Pain spasmed across her chest. Nilith prodded gingerly, and found her finger pressing deep into her sleeve, far more than flesh and bone would allow. She felt the cold and wrenched her hand away, catching some of the cloak with it. A lance of blue fell across the street.
Heles froze, eyes darting about. She raised her makeshift club; a rusty piece of gate. ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing,’ Nilith replied, voice hoarse. As luck would have it, Farazar poked his head from his coverings, and the scrutiniser looked at him accusingly.
‘Better stay hidden,’ she said. ‘Majesty.’
Farazar muttered something foul and irritably pulled the sackcloth back over him.
Satisfied, Heles moved onwards, face moody in the darkness. It had been some time since they had heard the last scream. It seemed even murderers had a bedtime. Nilith looked again at the shadows of bruises under the scrutiniser’s eyes. She had wanted to ask for hours, and now the question bubbled up. ‘What happened to you, to bring you out here? You have no uniform. You’re clearly injured.’
‘Long story, Empress.’
‘Nilith.’
‘What?’
‘Call me Nilith. It’s my name, after all.’
Heles frowned. ‘Still a long story.’
‘I think we have the time. I can make it a royal order if you like, Scrutiniser.’ It was strange to utter such words and see another person’s will crumble before hers. It had been some time since Nilith had played empress, and it was a bitterer taste than she remembered.
Heles frown deepened, but duty held sway. ‘I was investigating the murders of several tors and tals.’
‘What murders?’
‘You have been away for a long time, Majesty. Several citizens have grown rather bold in your absence. The empress-in-waiting has taken steps, but tors and tals keep dying. Merlec. Askeu. Yeera. Kanus. Urma. Busk. Probably more since I’ve been gone.’
Nilith knew a few of those names. ‘And what did my daughter’s “steps” look like?’
‘Well… she put soldier-shades from the Scatter in the streets to help Chamberlain Rebene. Her own stock, apparently. Not much else, aside from enjoying your disappearance.’
And issuing royal decrees, Nilith thought.
‘Soldiers, taken away from my wars?’ Blue light bathed the sand as Farazar reared his head once more.
‘Stay hidden, you dolt.’ Nilith reached to thwack him.
‘No love lost between you two, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, Empress.’
‘Nilith. And you haven’t answered the question.’
Heles pursed her split lips. ‘I am here because Tal Horix deemed it fit to put me here. I was investigating her property. Somewhat… spontaneously. I had assumed she was involved with a soulstealer named Boran Temsa, the man I think is behind the murders. Instead, I found she was hiding something under her tower. She was building something. I was caught before I could find out what.’
‘And this Tal Horix did this?’ Nilith pointed a finger to Heles’ bruised face as they walked.
‘Horix ordered it done. Killed a proctor, too. Jym. A good young man from these very Sprawls. She was foolish enough to leave me alive, however. As such, I will bring her to justice.’ Her tone was cold and sharp as knapped flint.
‘Sounds more like revenge to me.’
Heles shrugged. ‘Revenge and justice are not too different. In the end, somebody still has to pay.’
Nilith couldn’t argue with that. In fact, she rather agreed. She shook off a shiver, hating the cold ache in her arm. ‘Tal Horix. Boran Temsa. I don’t know these names.’
‘I have a feeling you will, soon enough.’
‘And they still believe the emperor to be in his Sanctuary?’
‘They did before I was dragged out to the Sprawls.’
Nilith sensed some of the weight lying on her shoulders dissolve, but not as much as she would have liked. The slatherghast’s poison filled her with a dull pain, and a weariness she hadn’t felt since Krona’s clutches.
‘How exactly did you pry His Imperial Majesty from his Sanctuary, then?’ Heles asked. She didn’t look at all apologetic for her boldness.
A shout stole the moment, and they both froze in their steps. Another shout answered, somewhere closer, and Heles nodded into a side street. Nilith tugged the horse after them. Bezel momentarily awoke with a yawn, and she caught his bleary gaze. He looked exhausted. Death’s door had swung ajar for him, but he was healing, just as he’d promised.
They hovered between houses with barred iron doors and boarded windows. Here and there, where a few people still practised the desert charms, woven palm wreaths and glyphs drawn in sand offered protection where locks and deadbolts could not. No lights shone.
‘Is it always like this? In the Sprawls?’ Nilith whispered, and Heles offered another shrug.
‘Did you expect better? If I am honest, the whole city has gone from bad to worse ever since your husband locked himself away and forgot his city. People like Temsa don’t flourish on good deeds.’
Nilith fought not to smile. Weeks – months – she had been trawling the desert, repeating her reasons privately to herself almost as often as she’d put boot to sand. Doubt had plagued her more than any other villainy the desert had offered. Secrecy had kept her silent, and when an idea was solely kept in one mind, it was no firmer than a ghost’s vapour. To hear it whispered by another gave it skin and flesh. Vindication was a sweet and heady liquor.
Nilith thought she heard a whooshing noise in the air, faint and muffled by the stubborn fog. She was about to crane her neck when a black figure flitted across the entrance to their street. Without a word, they pressed themselves to the walls of a grand-looking bakery. Even Anoish tucked himself into the shadows, his big backside nudging the orange shutters.
‘What now?’ Nilith muttered.
Heles made fists, cracking knuckles. ‘Trouble, is what. With any luck they won’t—’
A whistle split the air, sharp and damning. Others joined in, sounding out from nearby streets. A head poked around the edge of the building, scraggy-haired and featureless in the darkness.
A set of shoulders followed the head, then a scrawny body of a young man, barely more than a boy. The curve of a dagger lurked at his side. He walked without pause or fear, coming straight at them. Another shout rang out, closer now, sounding higher than the streets. The strange whooshing was growing louder, closer. Even in that moment, as tense and full of hammering heartbeats as it was, Nilith looked up. High above, the mists swirled suspiciously, but no shape accompanied the strange sounds. Nilith swore she could hear harsh and frantic voices. Arguing.
Fists raised, Heles limped forwards to meet the boy. He was lifting his fingers to whistle again, drawing his fellow soulstealers closer. The scrutiniser limped faster. There came a whistle, but not from the boy’s lips. It was short-lived, and culminated in a loud crunch.
Something black and silver plummeted out of the dark fog. It struck the boy on the crown of his shaggy head, and drove him to the sand with a speed that would have snapped his neck had it not already been full of steel. The momentum impaled him against the earth, a dark blade bursting from his collar before burying itself in the ground. The boy’s head, tongue lolling and eyes
crossed, was pinched between crossbar and sand.
Missing her swing, Heles stumbled over the body, and ended up on her arse. Nilith was too shocked to move. Her eyes switched from the bleeding corpse to the sky, hearing the whooshing and arguing diminish somewhere to the south.
‘That was fucking lucky,’ Heles wheezed, clearly hiding some more injuries beneath her rags.
Nilith didn’t dare comment, as if admitting it would break whatever fortune the desert had left with her. She thought of the beldam, and the visit she had dismissed so easily as a dream.
The scrutiniser wrenched the sword from the boy’s brain and quickly tucked it into her rags. ‘There’s an Arctian saying—’
‘Whatever falls from the sky in a desert is a bounty. You forget how long I’ve spent in the empire.’
‘Hmph,’ Heles grunted. She tucked herself into the shadows and scuttled past like a scarab beetle. ‘This way.’
Nilith joined her, and with the horse and his sorry baggage trailing behind her, they continued to weave their zig-zag path from street to street, avoiding the cat-calls and whistles that rose up like ugly birdsong behind them. At least they had left the soulstealers with a corpse as a distraction. They travelled silently, hurriedly, and with their hearts in their mouths.
‘You need to rest, Majesty,’ said Heles when they had breath spare for talk. She had slowed to a hobble. Her eyes had been roaming over Nilith for some time now, taking sidelong peeks.
‘Speak for yourself. Neither of us are in prime condition at the moment.’
‘Fine. I need rest. And you can afford to spare an hour. Maybe two. The shittier stealers get more desperate the closer it gets to dawn. We’ll hole up somewhere.’
Nilith saw what the scrutiniser was trying to do. Heles was trying to save her the shame of needing to sit down for a spell. It wasn’t shame that kept her from halting, but rather the need to keep moving.
‘It would be a shame, to go through all you’ve undoubtedly been through, only to die here, in the Sprawls. Be sold off like some house-shade.’
Nilith narrowed her eyes. Heles was clever – coercive, even – but right. With a tut, Nilith relented and let the scrutiniser sniff out a place to hole up, as she had put it. It sounded contradictory to her.
It took a short while to find one: a broken door in the wall of a tiny abandoned house. The building clung to the base of a tall warehouse like a baby mouse to its mother. Its mudbrick walls were scorched and cracked by the sun, and the door was no more than a stolen table wedged into a hole. Somebody had kicked the original door out of its makeshift frame some time ago, and no doubt had their way with whatever poor souls had lain within at the time.
Nilith was surprised, and somewhat sickened, to be greeted by a severed head. It still lay where it had been dropped, its eyes swollen like raisins left too long in milk. It was a man of the north, a foreigner here, face as pale as porcelain even despite the rot.
The house was more of a hovel, bereft of furniture or wall-hangings. Just the faint smell of death. The rug was crispy with dried blood, the mattresses slashed to ribbons and straw, but two stools lay unbroken. Heles propped them up as Nilith tried to get Anoish to back into the hovel. The horse seemed as eager as she was to get off the hellish streets. By then, Heles had found a resting place for the head, and scattered sand across the gore. The horse still grumbled and ground his teeth at the new smells. It seemed Farazar’s body, still strapped across his back, had finally stopped reeking. Perhaps whatever squelching parts of it were left had finally dried to leather.
Bezel reared his head as Nilith scooped him up and laid him down. Farazar waggled his hands expectantly at Heles, but she loosened none of the knots.
‘What are you playing at, woman? One of you was bad enough!’
‘Charming, isn’t he?’ said Nilith. To Farazar, she replied, ‘This is what you get for trying to run away. I can’t trust you any more. Not that I ever could. Now, are you going to be a good little candle for us and stay silent? Or will I have to cover you up?’
‘Unleash me, fucking damn you!’
Nilith covered him with the sacking. He thrashed around before she gestured for the sword that had fallen from the sky. Heles gave it up immediately, and Nilith thwacked the ghost on the head with the flat of the blade with a musical chime. He cursed her viciously, but fell still.
‘Good ghost.’ She pulled back the sacking from his head so they had some light.
The empress held the sword up to him. In his paltry, wavering glow, she saw the copper veins running through its obsidian blade. It was a truly ornate sword, straight as a lance and vicious at its edges. Nilith tested it lightly and instantly found a crimson bead on her fingertip.
‘Dead gods, that’s sharp.’ She glanced at its silver handle, twisted like tree roots and gripping a black pommel stone, where a sour, tight-lipped carving of a face stared back at her.
‘If I can say so, Majesty,’ ventured Heles, ‘you haven’t answered my question, and I have to know: how did you sneak him out of the Sanctuary?’
Farazar snarled at her. ‘She didn’t, Scrutiniser Heles. I did! Now remember your place, you useless worm of the Chamber! I’ll have Chamberlain Reb—’
The blade sang as it cut the air, coming to rest against Farazar’s cheek. His vapours sizzled softly.
‘Please give me an excuse, husband. I’m in the mood for some drastic reshaping of your face,’ Nilith warned coldly. The ghost muttered something about women and swords but stayed otherwise silent. The coward still resided in him, even after all his rebellion. She retreated to the other side of the hovel, letting Anoish lie down and crush Farazar’s legs beneath his side. The ghost was distracted enough by that to stay out of their conversation.
Nilith rested upon the other stool, finding a position that didn’t ache or stab her, and ran her fingers through her sandy, mud-clumped hair. ‘As much as I detest admitting he’s right, he is,’ she said with a sigh. ‘He pulled it off. Conned the whole city, the Cloud Court, even his wife and daughter. For years Farazar managed to convince us all he was safe and sound within his Sanctuary while he enjoyed the delights – and daughters – of Belish.
‘I realised after far too many years of passing his decrees to the court. A loathsome job, with time. They became erratic. Sometimes odd. He refused to speak to me through the door or even emerge at all, as he used to. He ignored us all, and I was the one blamed for it, especially by Sisine. When I began to suspect something was different, I couldn’t shake the inkling, as preposterous as it sounded. I started to track him down. It took a year of questions, asked as quietly as possible, but when I found out where he was, I left immediately. That was almost three months ago. I haven’t stopped since.’
‘The Court and Chamber thought you had run east to Krass, back to your father.’
Nilith nodded. ‘And that was the story I let them believe while I went south. There were more than a few times on the road when I wished I had gone east, and seen my father, grey and sitting by his fireplace. It would have been a short-lived peace. Araxes’ evil will spread in time.’
Heles worked her jaw while she thought. ‘From here to Belish and back. A treacherous road.’
‘You wouldn’t believe.’
‘How long has it been?’
There seemed to be no avoiding that question. It was a cloud that had followed her since raking the knife across Farazar’s throat, and it had grown darker and stormier each day. It’s only when a person is running out of time that they curse not using it more wisely. Perhaps that was the entire reason Nilith sat there, beaten and exhausted, with the ghost of her husband draped over her horse. She could remember staring at the intricate workings of the Sanctuary door and wondering how a decade had swallowed up her life in a blink. Minor trinkets had distracted her here and there: learning Arctian history; playing the Court’s games; staying alive, of course, which was always an accomplishment in the City of Countless Souls. All petty things. No true deeds of wonde
r besides a daughter whom Nilith had been banned from raising. Nothing to etch into the base of her statue when they erected it beside Farazar’s in time to come. No great imprint upon the world. Nilith could remember staring over the railing of her Piercer balcony, contemplating the streets far, far below, and letting her mind ponder them for too long.
Heles cleared her throat. ‘Hard to count them?’
‘Not at all.’ Every day was lodged firmly and vividly in her mind. Even when she had spent them in bleary, swollen-eyed dazes, she had logged them.
‘Thirty-five days.’
The scrutiniser tried to whistle, but a loose tooth proved problematic. ‘Five left.’
In the corner, the ghost growled bitterly.
Heles looked stiffer than she had before, and Nilith found her eyes avoiding her. She began to replay her words, wondering what she had said, but the scrutiniser had enough confidence, or enough exhaustion, to challenge her empress. Perhaps murder lowered the need for respect.
‘And so this is your great deed?’ said Heles.
‘What?’ This echo of her thoughts threw Nilith.
‘To claim the throne? Be the first empress in, what – three generations to forge a new family line?’ Heles met Nilith’s gaze then, and with accusation in her eyes. Her voice was a strained whisper. ‘I told you duty bound me to your side. Well, that’s a lie. My duty is to the city and its salvation. When I first saw you in that cage, arguing with the ghost, I heard you say something I don’t think this empire has ever heard uttered. You said, “When I’m out of this cage, you’ll know what it means to have a ruler, instead of a monarch”. I never thought I would hear such words from a royal, not in twelve years fighting for justice in these bloody streets. I have worked for it, tortured and killed for it, and I have even prayed for it on more desperate nights. I had all but given up hope, about to take matters into my own hands for the last time, when your cage came past. Well, you’re out of that cage, Majesty, but you’re not sounding like any ruler I would want in the emperor’s place.’
Nilith drew herself up, her royal blood and breeding kindled. You forget yourself, were the words poised on her tongue, but they sounded far too similar to Farazar’s, and she bit her lip. ‘You do not and cannot know what I have in mind, Scrutiniser Heles,’ she replied, trying to restrain her regal tone. ‘And if you did, you wouldn’t doubt me. Your empress.’