by Devin Madson
“But then,” I went on, “you are helping me get this shit out of here.”
“I don’t know what your mission is,” he rasped, every word an enormous effort. “I don’t know what he told you, but they aren’t dangerous. They just want to go home. And since Tor disappeared from Mei’lian, likely to join them, they may also be the only hope you have of finding a translator for that book.”
And I was being sent for their heads.
20. CASSANDRA
I had been a city girl all my life. I had been born in Genava, had worked in Genava, killed in Genava, and I had fully expected to one day die in Genava. It hadn’t only been my home, it had lived in my soul with its broken gutters and dark laneways, its broad squares and its columns and its ever-present shuffle of merchant traders along the docks. Confined once more in a carriage, I could not but yearn to be back there in my old life instead of cooped up with only the hieromonk for company. We stopped to sleep and we stopped to change horses, but otherwise we stopped only for news.
It was all really boring news gleaned from terrified or wary Kisians, little more than gossip about where Levanti had been spotted in the surrounding area, until one day the carriage began to slow with nothing but open fields visible beyond the window. I settled back into the corner and tried to recapture my doze, but the hieromonk scowled and slid open the hatch that separated us from the driver up front. “Why are we slowing?” he called.
“There’s a pair of scouts ahead, Your Holiness. Captain Aeneas has ridden on to see if they have news from Koi.”
The hieromonk grunted. “Very well.”
The carriage stopped with a jolt. The hieromonk sat taut in his seat, radiating impatience and tapping his foot until at last Captain Aeneas opened the door. As ever he did not smile.
“News, Captain?” the hieromonk snapped.
“Yes, Your Holiness. The scouts have just come from Koi.”
“And what did they have to say?”
The captain cleared his throat, glanced at me, then back at his master. “They are just on a routine scouting mission, but they did mention… back in the city… the presence of”—another glance at me—“Leo Villius.”
“What?” The hieromonk jumped up, hit his head on the low roof of the carriage, and sank back onto his seat hissing. “Leo? Are you sure?”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
“Can there be a mistake?”
“No, Holiness. I checked. It’s Leo.” A third glance at me, wary and unfriendly.
Leo, whose life had been my commission. Leo, whose head I had taken, ready to hand to his father in a sack, only for Leo himself to retrieve it.
“How did the damn boy get there so fast?” the hieromonk said. “He ought to have still been days away.”
“I couldn’t say, Holiness.”
He gnawed at his lower lip, scowling like a thwarted child. The captain remained unmoving in the doorway, sunlight gleaming on his damp hair. I must have stared too hard for he turned, a small notch appearing between slanting brows. Our eyes held and the scowl deepened, puckering some of his scars.
Don’t give yourself away, the empress said.
How can I? He can only see you.
Always assume people are smarter and more astute than you think. There is nothing more dangerous than underestimating an enemy.
It was a basic precept and I felt stupid. You sound more like an assassin than me.
You’re used to being the one with power. I’m used to protecting myself on fear of death; it gives one a very ingrained perspective on such things.
“Where are we?” the hieromonk said, returning suddenly from his place of deep thought.
“The scouts said we’re about five miles from the Rice Road, though they suggested we go the long way up the Willow Road to avoid—” Captain Aeneas broke off as the hieromonk shooed him out of the way and, leaning out, looked around. Not just ahead and behind but all around at the hazy trees and fields. “We must hide it.”
Captain Aeneas left a beat of silence. “Hide it, Holiness?”
“Yes. It will not be safe in Koi now.”
Another pause. Tension hung between the two men, while outside sunlight sparkled upon the damp landscape. “Someone will have to stay to look after it.”
“Yes, someone will have to stay to look after it. Someone I trust.”
That silence again, heavy and fraught with unspoken words. Then, with the smallest of sighs, the captain said, “I will stay. I will need supplies. And someone to help carry it.”
A smile broke the hieromonk’s deadpan expression. “And you shall have both, Captain, along with my gratitude. I shall send someone back for you when it’s safe.”
“I could take Swiff,” he said. “He is quiet. Discreet.”
Again a beat of silence. Outside, birds were singing, making the close space of the carriage feel all the more unreal. “Very well,” the hieromonk said at last. “Do so. Tell all the others to sit in the cart to wait, and ensure you make no sound that might give away your direction.”
“Yes, Holiness.” Captain Aeneas nodded, military promptness returning as he stepped back into the sunlit day, leaving the hieromonk to close the carriage door himself like a commoner. He made no complaint, just drew a curtain across the window and sat back. Outside muffled voices moved around the carriage. Thuds emanated from the cart. Slowly the sounds began to fade, until Captain Aeneas’s clipped words dropped into silence.
“Where is he going?”
Don’t! Just keep your mouth shut.
The hieromonk lifted his brows. “Where is who going, Majesty?”
His mild smile was punch-worthy. “The captain,” I said, ignoring Empress Hana inside her own head. “This seems a very odd place to leave someone.”
“Does it? Good.”
Leave it there. We don’t need to know what he’s doing. We just need him unsuspecting.
What was it you said about underestimating people? I said. Being wilfully ignorant is just as stupid. Knowledge is power, which you damn well know. Now shut up and let me do what I do best.
Seducing people? Or killing them?
“I saw your son’s body,” I said, ignoring her. “When your army took Koi. I saw him, lying in his own blood upon the floor without a head—”
I didn’t.
“—and now you say he is alive and in command of my city?” I was proud of having thought to say my city, and of the haughty way I lifted my chin. Perhaps I was getting the hang of the imperial thing after all. “Either someone lied and your son was not my prisoner, or someone is lying now. Which is it?”
“Neither.” He no longer looked over my shoulder. “We are the chosen of God. We serve him and in return he looks after us.” He touched the silver mask pendant hanging about his neck, but despite the smile his fingers trembled.
I had grown up in the shadow of the One True God, had been told that to serve him would be my salvation, but never in all those lessons, in all those lectures at the hospice, had God’s miracles been more than stories. Arguments bit at the inside of my lips, but I could voice none of them without giving myself away, could only rant to the disinterested empress, who watched me like a cat sleeping with one eye open.
If I could trust you, I wouldn’t need to.
When I made no answer, the hieromonk stared unseeing at the drawn curtain, his fingers still touching the necklace. But what had started as a mere acknowledgement of his faith was now a fevered thumbing of the metal, as though rubbing it hard might bring God himself into our presence.
The silence stretched. Every part of the empress’s body peppered me with pains and complaints, but she folded its hands and I kept it upright, watching every twitch of the man’s expression, every movement of his hands, and understanding none of it. Why trade us for the box? Why steal us back? Why fear Leo finding it? So many questions whose answers lay within the box even now being hidden by Captain Aeneas.
Noise eventually returned, every footstep and voice loude
r and stranger than before, as if my ears had forgotten what they sounded like. An awkward laugh. A shout to the driver. Then at long last the carriage door was pulled open. Sunlight bright like fire streamed in, pricking my eyes, and upon the glinting road stood Swiff, Captain Aeneas’s man.
“Is it done?”
“Yes, Your Holiness, we—”
“Say nothing! You know the rules. Nothing. You have told no one?” The hieromonk’s gaze flicked one way along the road and then the other.
Swiff shook his head. “No one, Holiness.”
“Good.”
The hieromonk held out his left hand, and awkwardly wedged in the doorway, the soldier bent to kiss it. Unseen by Swiff, the hieromonk’s other hand crept beneath the carriage seat. Before a warning cry could escape my lips, he had buried a knife in the back of the soldier’s neck. Swiff jolted and thrashed, half attempts at words spilling from his lips. The hieromonk yanked the knife out and struck again, cutting only the meat of the man’s neck. The carriage shook all the more as the narrow doorway impeded his death throes.
Hating the messiness of the kill, I snatched the bucking dagger hilt from the hieromonk’s slippery hand and jammed the blade into Swiff’s throat. A few final twitches and the man slumped, half in and half out of the carriage like a limp set of steps.
“Give me that.” The hieromonk snatched back the blade. Almost I tightened my hold and kept it, but we had drawn a crowd and every soldier left in the priest’s entourage watched on, staring with slack jaws at the fate of their comrade. “You know the rules,” the hieromonk said, addressing them with his usual haughty assurance. “No one can know. No one.”
As he stared defiantly at the watching soldiers, he tensed and untensed his jaw, causing a muscle to bulge in his cheek. “Well? What are you staring at? Remove the body and continue on to Koi.”
Touch it.
“What?” I said aloud, too shocked to think before speaking.
The hieromonk glared at me, his jaw still working.
Touch the body. Quick. Put me into it. We can’t save ourselves from in here.
Two soldiers had already stepped up to remove the dead man from the narrow doorway. They half pulled, half lifted the body, and with no time to make it look subtle, I flung out my hand, brushing his forehead. The empress escaped like the letting go of a deep breath and my whole body relaxed, growing lighter. From the opposite seat the hieromonk’s gaze narrowed. My cheeks had hardly ever reddened, but the empress’s did now, and in an attempt to mask my odd behaviour I muttered a few words of prayer as the soldiers dragged the body out of reach. Some grunts of effort, the scraping of boots on the road, then once again the carriage door closed, shutting me in with the hieromonk.
Having expected exclamations of shock and horror, the silence from outside was deafening. It stretched on, endless and empty. Footsteps shuffled. The carriage shook. Then it started forward, the thud of hooves muted by the mud.
Minutes passed that felt like hours and still there was nothing.
Clever of her to play dead and be dropped upon the side of the road, but if she waited too long to attack, she would lose her chance.
Despite the pervasive stink of blood coming from the crimson-washed floor and the hems of our robes, the hieromonk began to relax. A mile or so farther on he leaned back against the cushions and let out a sigh, fixing his smile upon me.
“Well, Miss Marius, it seems you and I are alone at last.”
I stared at him, unable to find the clever words I needed.
“You ought not to be surprised, you know,” he said, resting one pale, blood-flecked hand upon my knee. “You are a very unique personality with a very unique turn of phrase. I don’t know what that madman did, but I ought to thank him. You may not be so alluring in this body but you are far more useful.”
And still there was no sound outside but the occasional laugh and the grind of carriage wheels.
“Hoping she’ll save you? Even if the body survives long enough to find us, she’s no assassin and my guards will catch her.” He laughed. “Maybe I’ll lock her up like that. I’ve always wondered what would happen if the body totally disintegrated. I’m sure it’ll be quite the experience for her.”
No shouts outside. No cries of pain. The empress was gone.
The hieromonk smiled triumphantly at the spoon like it was the finest thing he had ever seen. “Ah,” he said, holding it like a chalice before him. “It is not until you leave civilisation behind that you realise how much you miss these simple things. A spoon, able to hold all sorts of food within the curve of its bowl, whether it is liquid or solid. Easily held, easily cleaned, easily used. Even the Levanti use them, you know? But the Kisians, who claim to be the pinnacle of culture and knowledge, slurp their soup from the edge of the bowl like animals bending their heads to the stream.”
My own soup bowl stood before me, and while my Chiltaen soul had been about to pick up the spoon, it was a Kisian heart that sustained my life. So I picked up the bowl and, flashing him a smile, set my lips to the rim and began to slurp—a long, drawn-out sucking noise like his aforementioned animal was struggling to get the last dregs from the bottom of its trough. Empress Hana would have been horrified, but Empress Hana wasn’t here.
The hieromonk scowled into his bowl. I slurped on.
We had travelled well into the night after leaving the empress behind in her dead Swiff-skin. Taking advantage of a brief break in the rains, the hieromonk had ordered we press on toward the Willow Road and lodgings more befitting his position, yet inn after inn had been abandoned or burned to the ground, and it had been midnight before we stopped.
The Kisian innkeeper had greeted the hieromonk and his entourage with popping eyes, and for a horrible moment I had been sure he would turn us away. How could a Chiltaen holy man and his Chiltaen soldiers be welcome when Chiltaens were responsible for so much death and destruction in the north? Yet though the innkeeper drew himself up and refused to bow, his courage had failed at the sight of the armed guards and he had welcomed us in. I had considered begging them for help, but in Empress Hana’s body I looked even more Chiltaen than I had in my own. Golden ringlets! It was a miracle she had been accepted as an empress of Kisia for so long, Otako or no.
While I slurped my soup, leaving behind all the tough shreds of cabbage floating in it, the innkeeper’s wife slid the door and bowed, tea tray in hand. I stopped slurping while she served, swirling the pot and pouring the pale golden liquid into first one bowl then the other, in the opposite order to how she had removed them from the tray. The urge to catch her eye and signal for help rose again only to be suppressed. No one would believe me an empress without finery.
“You must be well placed for news here,” the hieromonk said.
Whether he interrupted her task deliberately or accidentally, the woman swallowed the insult and said, “Yes, your lordship. Many come this way.”
“What news from Koi?”
“Your people still hold the city.”
He seemed to want more and waited, but when nothing else was forthcoming the hieromonk said, “And from the capital?”
The woman finished pouring and placed the teapot in the centre of the table. “Nothing from the capital since it was lost, though we will hear fast enough when it is retaken.”
“Retaken by whom?”
“By the empress. Our living god.”
“Empress Hana?”
The woman had completed her task but stayed kneeling beside the table, the tray upon her lap. She shook her head without looking up. “No, may Qi bless her passing. Empress Miko.”
I still held the soup bowl an inch from my lips, and though my arms trembled I kept it there, determined not to draw attention to myself. The hieromonk’s bland smile faded. “The last I heard, Empress Miko was dead.”
“Oh no,” the woman said, and despite her bowed head and humble demeanour, there was strength in her words as she went on: “They may want us to believe that, but the Otakos are gods
and our gods will not fail us.”
His smile was amused. Pitying. “That is belief, my good woman, not truth.”
The woman looked up, her gaze fierce enough to make the hieromonk flinch. “The truth is that she lives. That she is gathering her forces to retake the capital. She will crush those who did this to us and make every Chiltaen and every Levanti sorry they ever stepped across our border.”
She lowered her gaze to the tray again, and in the heart-thudding silence that followed I could believe I had imagined the whole, so quietly and humbly did the woman go on kneeling beside our table. No longer able to hold my bowl aloft, I set it down. If only I could make them understand who I was. Who I wasn’t, She would have said, and berated me for even thinking of putting commonfolk in danger fighting for a fake empress.
The hieromonk’s brittle laugh broke the silence. “Ah, the hopeful stories of the downtrodden,” he said. “The more hopeless their situation the more grand and embellished the stories become. She will be hailed as an immortal goddess next and defeat her enemies in battle with a spear of sunlight.” His mocking gaze rested on the greying hairs atop the woman’s bowed head. “If you have no real news to share you may take your stories elsewhere.”
The woman’s knuckles whitened upon the edge of the tray as she rose. “Your Lordship,” she murmured from the doorway, bowing first to the hieromonk and then to me. The door had closed before the hieromonk could do more than work his jaw in anger. And while he glared at the closed door, I slid my dinner knife from the table into my lap.
When he turned back, I picked up my soup bowl, lacking the grace Empress Hana would have achieved with the very same hands. “Are you sure that’s wise, Your Holiness?” I said when he lifted a spoonful of soup to his own lips. “I don’t think the cook likes you very much.”
“If it comes to that, I don’t think she likes you very much either,” he said, and drank it defiantly. “May the gods bless your passing.”
The innkeeper’s wife led me to my room, but under the watchful gaze of one of the hieromonk’s guards I could say nothing. She pointed out the house’s amenities in clipped tones and disappeared before I could be rid of the man, leaving me to help myself out of this mess. As usual.