by Devin Madson
It took a long time for the inn to grow silent. I had tried propping myself against the wall to keep from sleeping, but this body felt fatigue like I had never known and even sitting I managed to doze off and on, in and out of strange, twisted dreams, until the innkeeper and his wife eventually went to bed. Then the soldiers downstairs stopped talking and moving, stilling to the occasional creak of a floorboard. And then even that stopped.
I slid from the warm covers into the chill of the shabby room, its reeds too damp to crackle beneath my feet. Pausing in the doorway I listened for any sounds before very slowly sliding open the screen. It was dark in the passage, but I had counted the number of steps between my door and the hieromonk’s on the way up. I counted it now as I took each carefully, one steadying hand upon the wall, the weight of the dinner knife in the other.
Thirteen and a half steps. I reached out and found one of the door’s smooth paper panes pulled taut like the surface of a drum. Spider-like, my hand crept along the frame to the handle, and with even more care than I had taken with my own door, I slid it slowly back. Just far enough to slip through.
Faint trails of lantern light snuck between the shutters to fall upon his sleeping figure, outlined in the gloom. Having waited to be sure he lay still, I crept in, glad of the soundless matting. Easier and easier, though having to end the hieromonk’s life with a dinner knife would be as messy as it was memorable.
Marking the rhythm of his breath, I eased out one of my own as I bent an aching knee to the floor and adjusted my grip on the knife. It was far from sharp, so I lifted it to plunge from a height.
The hieromonk’s eyes snapped open. His hand leapt, closing around mine so tightly I thought the empress’s fragile bones would snap. “Thought you could trick me?” he said, the words like velvet against my ear as he pulled me close. “You thought if you lulled me with your compliance and your illness I would be stupid enough to let you creep in here and kill me. Well, Miss Marius, you’re playing with the wrong man if that’s a game you want to win. I have survived the political dance too long to be such a fool.” He drew out the last word almost lovingly, his lips to my ear and his hot breath sending a shiver through my skin.
“Is this all you’ve got?” he mocked. “Where’s my spitfire?”
His tongue touched my ear and I turned, snapping my teeth in search of something to bite. The hieromonk laughed. “You disappoint me,” he said, and rolled, pulling me with him. My shoulder hit the floor and then all his weight was on me, hot and heavy and pressing me into his mat. “I thought you’d fight me. I thought you’d want to kill me more than you wanted to fuck me, but I see the whore wins out every time.”
The words sounded crude upon his pious tongue and I tried to buck him off only for him to slam my tailbone into the floor and tear open my robe. His warm hand gripped my breast. Not my breast, Empress Hana’s breast. That ought to have made it easier to bear, but it only made it worse. This body was not mine to treat as I wished, not mine to shame. She might have abandoned me, but the thought of him defiling her flesh made me grip his ear and yank it hard, sinking my fingernails deep.
The hieromonk yelped and rolled, dragging me with him. It ought to have been easy. I knew how to snap a man’s neck and where to bite for maximum pain, but no matter what I did he swatted me away like an annoying fly, laughing all the time as though enjoying our silent struggle in the darkness, crashing from one side of the floor to the other. I wanted him dead and he ought to be dead, and had I been inside my own body he would have been, but this stupid, weak, broken thing couldn’t do what I needed, couldn’t maintain pressure without cramping, could not lift his weight without trembling, could neither escape nor finish the task, and the longer we wrangled the more sure I became of how it would end.
A feeble cry of frustration escaped my compressed lips and the hieromonk laughed. “You sound as if you are not enjoying this, my dear,” he said, breathless with exertion or excitement or both. “Surely you cannot be sick of your illustrious profession?”
I tried to spit in his face but had barely enough saliva to wet my tongue. “Fuck you,” I snarled instead. “Get off me.”
“Oh, you’re worried about Empress Hana? Don’t be, she wasn’t called the whore of Koi for nothing.” He sat back and, gripping my hips, pulled me to him. “You should know well enough that a woman’s only power is between her legs.”
“These legs?” Making use of the breathing room he had given me, I hooked one leg then the other over his shoulders, squeezing his neck. Like all men who had never had to fight for their lives, he tried to pull back, but with my feet linked at the ankles, I drew him down with every ounce of strength I could find in these weak limbs. He flailed, hitting me wherever he could and hissing like a snake, but I gripped my shin and pulled it to me, crushing his throat. The hieromonk thrashed. He twisted. He tried to pull free. If I could just hold on, if my fingers had more strength, if their knuckles didn’t scream with agony as I tightened my hold… But no matter what I did pain flickered its darkness across my vision and I trembled and cramped, and wrenching back hard he slipped red-faced from my grip, sucking rattling breaths.
A blade appeared at his throat. It did not threaten, did not pause, just dug hard into his flesh and in one graceful movement slid across his neck. Blood poured in its wake. The hieromonk’s struggling breaths grew wet and he clawed uselessly at his throat, hands slick. For a few horrible moments he loomed over me, gasping for a breath that would never come, swallowing convulsively to stem blood that would never stop, and then like a falling tree he gave in to a force greater than his own and fell. Unable to roll out of the way I braced for his weight, but the body was lowered gently onto the reeds beside me. And there, blade in hand and a disgusted sneer upon his lips, stood Swiff.
“Where the fuck have you been?” I said.
“Trying to catch up,” the empress snapped with the dead man’s lips. “These dead bodies don’t tire, but it still takes a long time to run the same distance as a carriage. I had to stop and ask after you at every inn too, and dissuade everyone from sending for a physician. And the guards were looking for me. Idiots.”
The gashes in Swiff’s neck had dried but did not look any better for it. His face was pale too, and when the empress crossed the room to light a lantern his gait was stiff. The fingers must have worked though, for light soon flared and its sudden brightness brought horrors forth from the night. The hieromonk lay face down in a pool of blood, soaking into the matting as it spread, staining one side of his face and swallowing his silver pendant. His dead body didn’t call to me, and without the song’s tugging insistence I found something even more terrible. Swiff’s feet. Empress Hana had removed his boots, but his ankles were so swollen and dark that he looked to still be wearing them.
“Oh yes. Running with these slabs of meat was no easy thing,” the empress said in the dead guard’s low voice. “I wasn’t worried. I thought if there’s someone who can handle herself it’s the famous Miss Marius.” She looked meaningfully from the dead hieromonk to my open robe. “It looks like I was wrong.”
“I can take care of myself just fine,” I said, pulling the robe to cover a revealed breast.
“You didn’t appear to have the situation well in hand. And those are my breasts you’re covering, so don’t bother. I’ve seen them before.”
I could have done without her body’s propensity for flushing red in angry embarrassment. It did so now, causing a smirk to twist Swiff’s lips—a smirk I could have borne better had I not known it was the empress making it. “I could have killed him a dozen times if your body hadn’t been so weak.”
A heavy silence fell, and I stared at the fallen hieromonk. I ought to have been glad he was dead, glad of the revenge and the freedom that were now ours, and yet the sight of his body upon the floor sank an anxious stone in my stomach. He had taken too many secrets with him. Had left too much unknown.
“If we leave now, we can put a lot of distance between us and he
re before anyone finds him,” I said at last, though the prospect of travelling again so soon made my already aching body protest. “Kaysa has kept going north. She’ll have to stop sometime and if we keep going, we can catch up and—”
“No.”
“No?”
Swiff crossed his arms, and with the empress’s scowl upon his face he looked more ferocious in death than he ever had in life. She pointed his finger at the dead hieromonk. “We have an opportunity. That’s not just any dead body, that’s the hieromonk of Chiltae. Think of all the things we could do with that.”
“What happened to just wanting to be rid of me so you could die in peace?”
The empress didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. For a dead man there was fire in Swiff’s eyes.
“You heard about Miko.”
Still no answer.
“Even if the stories are true and she’s still alive, what can masquerading as the hieromonk for a day achieve? Don’t fool yourself it can be longer. You’re starting to look stiff in that body already.”
“We are less than a day’s hasty journey from Koi.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question.”
I wanted to lie down upon my mat and let sleep carry me away, but the empress stepped forward in her Swiff-skin and pointed at the hieromonk. “This man is all that’s left of the Chiltaen command this side of the border. Koi is his city now. The Chiltaen soldiers left there are his to command. There are hundreds of ways we could make use of them, of him, and there will never be an easier way to get inside the castle.”
I closed my eyes. “Getting inside is one thing, how about getting out again? This is the only body we have and once you have to abandon his, how does Empress Hana of Kisia just walk back out?”
“Why walk out at all? I have made many deals with the Chiltaens in my time and now we have a common enemy. If there was ever a time to forge an alliance it is now.”
When I didn’t answer she began to pace across the matting with her blood-swollen feet. “I have many allies in the north, people who will fight when an Otako calls, and with them and my knowledge of Kisia, a combined Kisian and Chiltaen army could destroy the Levanti before they take root. Especially with winter on the way. I doubt they’re used to snow as we are.”
“After the Chiltaens conquered half your empire you want to be friends?”
“I will do whatever it takes, Miss Marius, to help my daughter. I made a promise and I don’t intend to break it now.”
I was too tired to argue. In my own body I might have shouted her down, but all I wanted to do was sleep. Perhaps in the morning I would be able to make her see reason. “Why would the Chiltaens even want to fight with you?” I said, making one last attempt at carrying my point. “They have their own borders to defend. They’ve lost too many soldiers to waste more clearing Levanti from your lands.”
“Kisia today, Chiltae tomorrow. Having seen what they are capable of, what makes you think this Levanti emperor will stop at ruling half of Kisia? The south is still whole and strong so why push that way when it’s much easier to head north and take a weakened Chiltae? All he needs are some strong allies desirous of seeing Chiltae destroyed and he could be done within the year, and then take his time squeezing the south when it suits him.”
“Perhaps you should go and make a deal with the Levanti emperor instead; you seem to have his plans all worked out for him.”
Silence reigned for a few long minutes, nothing but gentle night sounds to invade our lantern-lit sanctuary. Servants would come with the sun, but until then we were alone with the dead.
“Have you ever felt loyalty, Miss Marius?” Empress Hana asked eventually. “Do you feel it toward your country? Your people? Your family? Your… sister whores?”
“You may call it loyalty, but it sounds like another form of servitude to me,” I said. “To be loyal to Chiltae is to give my life for it and get nothing in return. You can persuade fools into thinking that’s honourable, that their sacrifice means something for the greater good, but what are they really dying for? Chiltae isn’t a person. It’s not a thing. It’s just the name of a place.”
“It’s an idea.”
“That’s even worse. Die for an idea?”
She folded her arms, bulging Swiff’s muscles to look intimidating. Weak little Empress Hana was enjoying the strength and freedom of a dead skin all too much. “What is justice if not an idea?” she said. “What is freedom if not an idea? What is culture if not an idea? If you do not fight for it then someone can take it from you. Can take your way of life. Your freedom. Are those things not worth fighting for?”
“Worth fighting for? Perhaps. Not worth dying for. If you want to travel to Koi in the hieromonk’s body then you can go on your own. I don’t want any more part in this. I just want to get my body back and get out of here. But right now, I’m going back to my room to sleep.” I gestured at the hieromonk’s body and staggered to my feet, almost falling. “You can explain all this to his guards.”
She was there, the arm of the dead guard held out to catch me. His skin was cold. “Let me help you to your mat,” she said, the deep rasp of his disintegrating voice oddly kind.
I let her help me back to my room and the blessed comfort of my sleeping mat, and I lay down while she moved about the space on those swollen feet. I listened until fatigue drowned even the wracking pains and I fell asleep. But it was not an easy sleep; too often was I roused by little sounds like the swish of fabric, the clink of buckles, and a deep, musical humming. Lantern light flickered around me whenever I stirred. One time I rolled over to find Swiff sitting over a chamber pot, knife in hand, letting the blood from his swollen feet run into the bowl.
“Just testing,” he said. “Didn’t dare to on the way in case they stopped working.”
The dead guard went on humming as his blood trickled out like thick, clumpy soup.
Later the touch of his skin was cold and Empress Hana pressed close, her soul a flitting presence full of determination and shame and grief. Always grief.
Touch him, quick—we’re running out of time.
More voices joined the myriad of waking dreams as the night wore on. More footsteps. I opened my eyes a second time to see the innkeeper and another man, both in their night robes, struggling to carry out the now limp and lifeless form of Swiff. But even as I parted my lips to call them back, to beg they not take him away, the hieromonk appeared and set a heavy hand upon my forehead. “Back to sleep,” he said with a grim smile. “Everything is all right, they are taking the assassin away.”
Voices whispered on. Water sloshed. Silence did not come until dawn when at last I found something deeper than a doze, though dreams continued to trouble me. I dreamed of walking through the pale dawn, of a wind that whipped rain into my face and bit deep into my bones, chilling them until I felt they would never be warm again. I dreamed of aching legs and doubt. Of freedom and loneliness. But more than anything I dreamed of walking. Always walking. Pressing on toward a horizon yet often looking back like a leaf caught in a current that tugged in both directions, forming an eddy from which I could never escape.
Kaysa?
I was sitting huddled beneath a blanket that stank of horse and damp, watching the sun rise. A cold wind battered my face, blowing loose strands of hair. I kept pushing them back behind my ear only for them to be swept forward again, forcing me to peel them off my lips. It was frustrating, but somehow… glorious, even the dullest sensation something to be revelled in for its novelty. Its richness.
So much to see. So much to do. I would forget Cassandra soon enough, I thought, but anger tore through me at the very sound of my name, the feeling bitter and sharp and twisting. So much she had stolen from me. So much time. So much hope. So much life.
Kaysa?
I woke to the sound of still more rain. Rain and the thunder of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels flying fast along a road. A real road, not the pitted dirt tracks we had travelled of late. Every limb ache
d and memories filled my mind like a half-formed nightmare, yet I forced open heavy, itchy eyes.
The hieromonk of Chiltae stared at me from the opposite seat, something like his usual mild smile dawning in response to my confusion.
“Good morning, Miss Marius,” he said, and it was his voice, even down to the mocking drawl. Had I imagined it all? Surely Empress Hana could not manage so fine an impersonation of him, even using his skin. A cloak covered his throat, but his eyes were bright and there was colour in his cheeks—neither normal for a corpse.
I didn’t answer, but when I tried to push myself up to face him, a chain clanked between my wrists and I could not part them. “What—?”
“Sorry about that,” he said. “But you made it very clear last night you wouldn’t come with me, and as I need my body, I can’t let you walk away with it. You really left me no choice.” The hieromonk set a finger to his chin in mock contemplation. “I never thought I would live to be grateful for my debilitating disease. How pleasant it is to be wrong.”
“You fucking bitch,” I said. “After all that grand talk about loyalty and freedom you tie me up and drag me along just so you can be revenged on the people who took your city?”
“You took my city from me,” the empress said, her words peeling the hieromonk’s lips back from his teeth in an ugly look. “You are the reason Koi fell. You are the reason I no longer have my body. So you’re damn right I’m going to drag you along, but not for vengeance—for duty. For my daughter. Because if I’m going to die, I want to die knowing I did everything I could to protect Kisia, to protect our way of life, to protect her.” She made a gesture that was all too like flicking hair out of her face, though the hieromonk’s was too short to get in the way. “Really, I’m only taking my own body by force; the fact that you’re squatting in it is none of my concern.”