We Lie with Death

by Devin Madson

  Kocho watched them go without a word, then thrust the walking sticks at me. “You’ll want these to help you get around,” he said. “And let me give you a word of warning. This place is as easy to get out of as it is to get into. There are no gates or walls or guards. You can, in theory, leave at any time. Most of the master’s subjects are here voluntarily—he prefers it that way. But you”—he poked a finger into my face—“you heard me right in the cart the other day, he needs you. He needs you alive and he needs you well and if you do what he asks he might just give you what you came here for. If you don’t do what he asks then that wound in your leg won’t be your last.”

  “I’ve heard better threats from drunkards in Genavan gutters, old man.”

  Kocho grinned. “But I know something those drunkards don’t. I know you’re nowhere near as cold and nasty as you try to be, so let’s just play nice and get this done without all the snark, shall we?”

  He walked away along the passage without looking back. For a few seconds I considered not following, but with one walking stick gripped in each hand the prospect of attempting a getaway in the rain was not enticing. I hobbled after him.

  The passages of the run-down house were thickly swathed in shadow. Dim light filtered through open doors and lattice-screen windows, but the endless pitter-patter of the rain found no holes in the roof. It must once have leaked, for the floor owned dark blotches of scrubbed mould and the ceiling had been patched with a distinct lack of craftsmanship. Better an ugly roof than no roof at all, yet Kocho averted his gaze from each hasty repair like they upset him.

  “It didn’t always look like this,” the old man said, half turning his head to address me as I clunked gracelessly along behind him. “It was grand in its day.”

  “The Witchdoctor isn’t as good at taking care of houses as arrow wounds then?”

  Something like a sneer twisted Kocho’s lips. “He doesn’t own this place. He just uses it. I grew up in the nearby town, Esvar, at the bottom of the hill. As kids we used to dare each other to run up here. There were all sorts of stories about the Laroths. They ate children. They could turn into bats. You’d die if you ever met one’s gaze. Silly stuff. The manor was getting worn out back then too, but you could still see the glory of it. If we’d come in through the front doors you would have seen the Wisteria Court, overgrown of course, and flooded at this season, but nobles used to come from across the empire for Errant tournaments.”

  “What happened to the family?”

  “A decaying bloodline.”

  I stopped beside a faded portrait of an expressionless young woman, and a few steps farther on Kocho halted too. “You make it sound like the family started rotting like the house.”

  The old man shrugged. “It’s as good an analogy as any. They certainly didn’t like each other very much by the end, nor were any of them entirely sane. Misunderstood soul anomalies do that to a man, and by the look of their records they stopped birthing Normals a few generations ago. The master found it quite fascinating, which means it’s probably unusual.”

  He walked on, and as though caught to him by a string I followed, eyes lingering a moment on the portrait. “So a falling-down house and a dead family. Why are we here?”

  “Rumours keep prying eyes away.”

  “So do walls and gates and locked doors.”

  Kocho took a corner and veered deeper into the building. Light had been following alongside, but it called to us from ahead now, its glow faint upon the floor. “You’re not going to tell me why, are you?”

  Again a shrug without turning. “If you’re curious you might not need as many arrows to keep you from running.”

  “I am here against my will, old man,” I said, my irritation turning the words into a snap. “If I get the chance to run you can be damn sure I’ll take it.”

  “If you say so.”

  He walked on in silence, past closed doors and more patched sections of roof, the light getting steadily brighter until it filled the passage. With it the scent of dust thickened into something sweet, and I coughed. “What is that smell?” I said, wobbling on my sticks as I tried to lift a hand to my nose.

  “Flowers.”

  “What flower smells like that?”

  “Rotting ones.”

  I stopped breathing through my nose and I could still taste its stink. “Even rotting flowers don’t smell that bad.”

  Another shrug. Kocho seemed untroubled by the smell, though when he turned to glance at me his eyes were watering. “You get used to it,” he said in the stuffed-up way of one holding their nose.

  “Get used to it? You’re crying.”

  “All right, it’s fucking awful and doesn’t get any better, but it’s impossible to get from one place to another without going through the central hall so just… cover your nose with your sleeve and keep moving.”

  I gestured to the sticks. “Not so easy when I’m injured.”

  “Consider it payback then,” he said through the sleeve of his plain robe.

  “Fuck you.”

  His eyes crinkled in amusement.

  From the passage it had looked like nothing but a grand room, brightly lit, but hobbling out in Kocho’s wake, I stopped and stared up. The tree stood taller than both floors of the house, its canopy so broad it spread beyond the broken hole in the roof. It had spread inside too, limbs and roots covering everything from the floor to the balustrade of a great staircase, the wood twisting around it like snakes. And what I had at first taken to be a patterned carpet upon the floor was a thick spread of rotting flowers. Great iridescent purple and blue blooms rotting to dross upon what might once have been a wooden floor now turned to earth.

  Holding both sticks in one hand, I bent to pick up a flower. It was much heavier than I had expected. The flowers on the tree looked heavy too, weighing down their host boughs like fruit.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “A tree.”

  I let the shimmery flower splash back into the water and gave him a look. “A tree? All this talk of souls and rotting bloodlines and that’s your answer?”

  “Best one I’ve got. Come on. You’re upstairs.”

  Kocho picked his way across the floor, following a path of solid stones through the mire. On each he stopped to sweep away rotting blossoms with his sandal, muttering that they would be slippery beneath my sticks. While he worked, I watched raindrops ripple the surface of the water, plinking far more musically here than outside.

  A patter of fat drops followed us all the way up the staircase. It wound around the great, enthroned tree, every bump upon its knobbly trunk like the features of an ancient face.

  At the top of the stairs two passages branched away. “This way,” Kocho said, taking the one straight ahead. As we left the tree behind the smell faded fast as if too heavy to follow, leaving every breath choked with dust and old incense once again. But for the shimmering pollen upon my fingers I might have imagined it all.

  “Here we are.” Kocho stopped outside a door that looked no different to any other, except for one paper pane missing like a rotten tooth in an otherwise orderly smile. “I’ll have a fresh sleeping mat sent up. Food comes three times a day and when the master needs you, someone will fetch you.”

  “And when he doesn’t, I just sit here like a prisoner?”

  “You can wander the house if you like, but it has some unpleasant parts that haven’t been fixed or cleaned and it’s easy to get lost. There’s a library downstairs. If you can read.”

  I gave him a look and he held up his hands in mock surrender. “A lot of people can’t,” he said, sliding open the door. “I make no assumptions.”

  “I want to see the Witchdoctor.”

  Kocho shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. He decides, not you.”

  “I’m not here to be his plaything. I’m here so he can fix me.”

  The old man laughed, and gestured to my room. “Get comfortable. You have a lot of disappointment in your future.”


  My room was nothing more than an empty space owning fresh matting. No furniture, no sleeping mat, nothing but a high, narrow window, its original shutter closed to stop any rain blowing in beneath the overhanging eave. “So that’s it? I just get to—?”

  But Kocho’s footsteps were already fading away along the passage.

  Almost I followed, but I knew better than to harry him for more information now. Better to wait, to tease it out of him slowly, to play along.

  Then you’ve finally decided we’re staying? She said, breaking Her long silence.

  “For now. But once the Witchdoctor takes you out of me, I’ll be gone.”

  Kocho said—

  “I know what he said,” I hissed, checking whether the shadows still hid the old man. “But if he thinks—if they all think I am cooperating they’ll let their guard down. I’ll be a good little girl until then.”

  She laughed a bitter, sneering laugh and said no more, and not for the first time I wished I could see Her thoughts as She could see mine.

  I hopped into my room and closed the door, shutting myself inside a calm, quiet box smelling of fresh matting and rain. Outside the storm continued unabated and while I listened to it pour upon the roof, I checked each wall for hidden doors in the panelling, checked under the matting for hatches, and dragged a storage chest from the passage to beneath the high window so I could see into the garden below. There were no lower roofs or nearby trees, which meant even if the window was large enough to escape through, it was two floors straight down into overgrown bushes. Better to just walk out the door. Cassandra Marius had enough confidence to do it, but then Cassandra Marius would already have stabbed all these weirdo bastards and been on her way, seducing anyone more intractable to get what she wanted. Clearly Cassandra Marius was losing her touch.

  Why are you thinking about yourself like you’re someone else?

  “Shut up.”

  Why should I? We might not be together much longer, but I still deserve better than shut up and fuck off after all we’ve been through.

  “If you wanted better treatment you should have hijacked someone else’s body.”

  This is my body. This has always been my body.

  “Bullshit. It’s mine. It’s always been mine and it always will be mine. Now shut up while I go find the Witchdoctor.”

  I had expected her to argue, but she slid back into silence as I took up my sticks and hobbled into the passage. Lechati appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a sleeping mat, but rather than bring it toward me he took the other passage and disappeared from sight. By the time I reached the corner there was no sign of him, but a distant hum of voices filled the air. With Lechati busy, it was the perfect time to go in search of the Witchdoctor, and yet curiosity caught me. I crept along, moving slowly with my sticks to keep them quiet. Step after soft step the voices grew louder, only to be punctuated by the thud of the sleeping mat hitting the floor. Fussing footsteps followed as it was unrolled and made. I crept closer. A door halfway along the passage stood open, the weak light from its own shuttered windows diving through the doorway to fall upon the passage floor.

  “It is beyond the Sands, Your Majesty,” Lechati was saying when I drew close enough to make out his words. “A very long way from here.”

  “Then why are you here?” came Empress Hana’s voice, ever imperious.

  “I’m here with Master Torvash. Normally we move around a lot, but for the last year or so we have been here. It is very beautiful, but I cannot say I like the cold.”

  I stepped within the spreading arc of light and out of habit reached for my dagger, only it wasn’t there. Even the one I had so often relied on hiding in my boot was long gone. I was unarmed in an unknown place with unknown people. My heart hammered with rising panic as Lechati spoke again.

  “Food shall be delivered soon, Your Majesty,” he said. “Is there anything I can get you in the meantime?”

  “No.” A weary answer. “I will rest.”

  Footsteps sounded, and I stumbled a few steps toward the aperture, not wanting to be caught lurking.

  You were lurking.

  “Shut—”

  “Deathwalker Three!” Lechati said, falling back as he almost walked into me. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I’m sorry, I did not mean to startle you,” I said, once more making use of my well-practised routines. I smiled at him, my body naturally falling into its accustomed stance only made more difficult by the walking sticks. Breasts out, hip jutting—Kocho might be too old and jaded to take an interest, but young Lechati could be the weak link I needed to get what I wanted.

  The young man’s eyes slid down my body and he swallowed hard. I made no sign of noticing, though there really was nothing more obvious than an inexperienced young man. “I came to see the empress,” I said. “But if she intends to rest perhaps you could show me around instead.”

  He opened his mouth, already nodding, but Empress Hana’s voice emerged from within the room. “I am not yet resting, Miss Marius. Leave the poor boy alone and come pick on someone closer to your own age.”

  Lechati squirmed, glanced back through the door, and with a bow to me instead of the empress, he darted off along the passage in a mire of confusion.

  Empress Hana strode into view, her arms tightly folded and an eyebrow lifted. “Although,” she said, “I think that for all your beauty you are significantly older than I. Your face owns many lines if one looks past those oh-so-perfect features. You would have been quite the beauty if you’d ever learnt to smile properly.” She smiled herself, and gestured regally for me to enter. “You wish, perhaps, to apologise for the deaths of thousands of my people and the destruction of my city?”

  I did not move from the doorway. Her smile did not reach her sharp blue eyes and her lips were pressed into a thin line, yet despite the palpable anger I did not want to run. My own anger flared, and clenching the handles of my walking sticks, I stepped into the room. “I am not here to apologise. We all do what we must to survive, you should know that as well as I do.”

  “There are limits. How many dead innocents is your life worth, Miss Marius?”

  “As many as it takes because there are no limits. Honourable sacrifice won’t keep you warm at night once you’re dead. Go on, tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you wouldn’t let a whole nation die if it meant getting your son back.”

  She fixed me with a hard stare. “What do you want?”

  “You looked at my arm. Back at Koi, in that stone room with the dead.”

  “I did.”

  “Why? Were you expecting to see the same mark Kocho has?”

  Genuine surprise lit her features and her eyes darted to the doorway almost fearfully. “And what symbol is that?”

  “A long curve, like a snake.”

  Relief? She certainly seemed to sag. “I don’t know what I was expecting to see on your arm, Miss Marius, but I know what I feared.” The empress pointed at the shuttered window. It owned the same carved pattern as the shutter in my room, but no matter how hard I looked at it, it meant nothing.

  “That,” she said, when it became obvious I did not understand, “is the one I fear. Do you see it? Once you notice it you will see it everywhere in this house, because the Laroths were exceedingly proud of it. They thought themselves gods amongst men. And Kisia nearly burned for it.”

  I tilted my head. It was just a pattern of lines, some straight and some diagonal. “What does it mean?”

  “Is this the information you were hoping to get out of Lechati?”

  “An easy enough method.”

  Empress Hana once more folded her arms. Her room contained some simple furniture, even a small table, but she had not invited me to sit or made any move to close the door. I was an unwelcome intruder in her space despite her imperious invitation.

  “If I tell you will you leave that young man alone?”

  I laughed. “I wasn’t going to torture him. I assure you, Your Majesty, I am very good at my job
. He would enjoy it immensely.”

  “He is young enough to be your son.”

  “And Emperor Kin was old enough to be your father. In fact…” I tapped my chin, feigning an attempt at recollection. “Wasn’t he in love with your mother? I’m sure that was why all the rich folk in Genava laughed when news of your marriage reached us.”

  She kept her expression impressively impassive, even as I went on. “And then when you gave him bastard children, well!”

  The empress lifted thin brows. “Are you finished?” she enquired, coldly polite.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good. You will have to try a lot harder than that to hurt me, Miss Marius. You are hardly presenting me with facts and assumptions I have not heard a hundred times before. It has, however, been all too long since I traded insults without also having to serve tea and smile and hope my headdress would not pull loose from its pins and tumble onto the table, so do, by all means, find some more. At least, whatever my transgressions, I am not a freak like you.”

  My words might have glanced off her armour, but hers cut me deep. That single word, freak, contained within it all the jibes of the hospice kids, every time I had been kicked or spat on, the horrified looks upon my parents’ faces, and a whole lifetime of putting up with Her. And by Empress Hana’s faint smile, I knew it showed on my face. “Ah,” she said. “More weaponry at my disposal. I really thought you would be a more worthy opponent.”

  I clenched my walking sticks, wishing more than ever for a bottle of Stiff to relax my muscles. What I wouldn’t have given for a whole flask of it to drown my troubles.

  Footsteps sounded in the passage outside and we both turned, more in accord in that moment of sudden unease than we had been in every one preceding it.

  Kocho appeared in the doorway. “There you are,” he said, something of relief showing in his face. He turned his gaze to the empress. “I’m sorry to disturb your rest, Your Majesty,” he said, wryly emphasising rest with a glance flicked my way. “But the master wants to look at you.”