by Rj Barker
“How does that help?”
“It proves what Rufra says for a start,” she said. “And, though I have no love for the Landsmen, I cannot believe they are all hypocrites. Many must not know. It may be only a very few who do. If we can find Darsese and take where he is held, the Landsmen will likely turn on those holding him when all is exposed.”
“How do we find him?” said Rufra.
“The Sepulchre of the Gods,” mumbled Aydor from the back of the room.
“What?” said Rufra. “That is the holiest place in the Tired Lands, and besides, it cannot be reached. It is—”
“Flooded,” said Aydor. “I know. But that is not true.”
“It isn’t?” I said.
“Well.” Aydor walked forward so he stood in front of Rufra. “It sort of is. Benliu, tell them,” he shouted at the priest of Torelc. “I wanted to see the statues so I asked him to look into it.” Benliu nodded and came forward. Aydor went back to standing by the wall.
“Blessed Rufra, Blessed Marrel,” he began.
“Just get on,” said Aydor.
“Very well,” said Benliu. “It is true that water blocks the way to the sepulchre—”
“I’ve seen it,” said Aydor.
“I thought you wished me to get on?” said Benliu. Aydor shrugged and leaned back against the wall. “The sepulchre is entered through a pool. The pool must be emptied and the supplicants go through the empty pool and up the other side to enter the temple. They are reborn from the water, as the dead gods will be, you see. The pool is emptied by some age-of-balance machines, and it is these that do not work.”
“So it cannot be accessed,” said Rufra.
“That’s what’s odd,” said Aydor. “Even if the machines are broken, it is not a massive pool. Nothing a week and a workgang with strong backs couldn’t fix with some handpumps.”
“So,” said Marrel, “you think they don’t want people going into the sepulchre?”
“Exactly,” said Aydor. “And Girton’s not the only one who can do a bit of investigating. Tell them the rest, Benliu.”
“My friend, Harrick,” said the priest, “told me that the sepulchre has been flooded ever since the high king died.”
“Then that is as good as anywhere to start our search,” said Rufra.
“If the high king is there,” said Marrel, “—and I am not saying I believe you—it will be well guarded. And who would be fool enough to risk going to look?”
“I’ll do it,” I said, though I had no idea how. Marrel looked to Rufra.
“Very well,” he said. “Though Girton cannot go alone. For all we know he could go to sleep in the stable and come back saying what you want us to hear. He must take another with him, someone who can be trusted.”
“But Marrel,” said Aydor, “Girton is well capable of sneaking about the castle. Anyone who goes with him is more likely to give him away than help.”
“Nevertheless, someone must. And it cannot be one of your men, Rufra. I will pick someone I think—”
“Tinia Speaks-Not,” I said.
“Leckan ap Syridd’s Heartblade?” said Marrel. “How will you get her away from him? And how will she tell us what she saw if she cannot speak?”
“She can write,” I said. “And she works for Leckan because he rewards her well. All you need to do is reward her better.”
Marrel slitted his eyes at me.
“And I suppose this comes out of my purse?”
“It is the biggest right enough,” said Aydor. “And even if Rufra is wrong, Tinia is a true assassin. You will have hired one of the best Heartblades in the Tired Lands.”
Marrel glanced over at his own Heartblade, Gonan, and the man shrugged, then nodded.
“Very well,” he said. “I will have to get a message to her. She may not even come.”
“I think she will,” I said. “She holds her master in no great esteem. Now, if there is nothing else, I am in desperate need of sleep. Please forgive me if I leave.” I turned on my heel, barely waiting for Rufra to give me a nod of acceptance.
Interlude
This is a dream.
This where the future calls to her.
This is a place where the sky meets the land. A rancid yellow line where one would be indistinguishable from the other if not for the languid movement of the yellow clouds crawling across the sky, desperate, but too sickly, to escape.
This is the sourlands slave auction and she is here to kill a man. She has hounded him through the Tired Lands. He is the last, one of many cruel men who use others as they see fit. This one is special to her. She has left behind her a trail of bodies. Of facilitators, of hangers-on, of useful contacts, of family members. Little by little she has whittled away at the network he has built up, at the places which bring him bits to spend, at the people who will do him favours and at those he loves until he has become a pariah.
None will deal with him because death follows him.
And he is scared.
She is glad he is scared.
She wants him scared.
She was scared, that day long ago when he ripped her world apart with a knife.
She slips through the crowds as the slave-father sings his song of selling: ten bits, twelve bits, eight bits, nine bits. The market is full of the men and women of Festival in thick triangular clothing which insulates them from the sickness of the souring, a smell like a wall. She watches for her quarry but she cannot concentrate. She is distracted. Distracted in a way she has never been before and in a way she does not understand. There is a feeling in the air and it is more than the dust and stink of the souring. It is more than the inevitability of a death. It is something she hasn’t felt before but knows as intimately as the scarred body hidden behind the wraps and clothes that cover everything but her eyes.
It draws her.
But she has a purpose. She has a long-held purpose and the feeling has to wait. They have almost finished with the girls now. Most have gone to Festival and she is glad. They will be cared for there—as much as anyone in the Tired Lands is cared for. She would save them all if she could, the Tired Lands grind up women and girls, suck the life from them even as they produce it for the men who rule. Older ways are forgotten, trampled. Lost for ever.
Some girls do not go to Festival. Some go to the blessed hanging around on the outskirts of the crowd and she notes them. Remembers them. Asks quiet questions as to who each one is and where they come from while she buys food, drifts through the people like a shatterspirit.
The slave-father sings his song of selling: nine bits, ten bits, twelve bits, fifteen bits.
Boys come up and go out. They hang from the rope. Hands go up. Hands go down. Money is produced and crying children are exchanged for coins.
She would end this here if she could, destroy it all. But she cannot. She is not the cure for all ills, she can only cure what ails her and she has come a long way to do that. Another boy sells—he screams a name she does not recognise as he is dragged away—she does not care about the boys.
She cares about her quarry.
He sits alone by a fire, shunned, as if the fear that comes off him in waves can be sensed by those around him and they cannot stand to be near it. The fire is of burning dung and a column of black smoke rises from it to mark the place where her quest will come to an end.
And the slave-father sings his song of selling: nine bits, ten bits, twelve bits, fifteen bits.
“It’s brave, to sit with me,” he says as she sits by the fire. Around them people are leaving. The slave market is drawing to a close.
“Last lot. I know he’s a cripple but as you can see he’s got plenty of fight in him. Bright too, from what I’ve heard.”
An angry wind pushes the wisps of hair that have escaped the wraps around her face into snakes that bite at the smoke.
“Brave, why?”
“People who sit with me die.” He stares into the fire. “Friends, family, all gone.”
“There is
just you now?”
Members of the crowd start to drift away in ones and twos. “Ten bits, ten bits for a boy? I’ll take ten bits for a boy,” the man sings out in a deep baritone.
“Just me. And even that, not for long.”
“Oh?”
“Xus follows me.” He looks up. He was round-faced, once. Young and handsome on the day he tried to kill her. Now he is hollow-cheeked, teeth missing, eyes red from chewing too much miyl and never sleeping enough. Never being allowed to rest.
“I am safe from Xus,” she says. The man stares at her, but now—now—he really looks.
He drops a tone. “Eight bits for a boy? Five? Five bits for this boy, five bits for this boy and we can all go home.”
“So, it is you, finally,” he says. He sounds calmer than she expected, accepting even. “I met a priest in Maniyadoc who said you would skin me alive. My father’s ex-wife, she’s a queen now, she said you would castrate me and make me eat what you cut off. Another man said you would take my eyes. So, which is it to be?” She turns away, looks into the fire.
The wind begins to howl. Small bits of wood and bones from food cartwheel across the dirt between the few woebegone tents.
“All of them,” she says. She expects him to run but he does not. She notices he is shaking slightly. The hand that holds his miyl stick is wavering but he does not run. Does not even try to.
“Why?” he says.
She untwists knots, unties lengths of material, unwinds the cloth that covers her face and throws it into the fire. An end catches just as the wind grabs it, and it is caught up, twisting and writhing in agony through the air as the flames consume it.
He stares into her face.
And there is nothing there. Nothing in his eyes. No recognition for the hurt he caused her, for the pain, for her family, for her child. His eyes search her face and there is nothing. Then a twitch, not of recognition, not of knowing, but as if there is an itch in the back of his mind.
“I knew a dark girl once,” he said. “I killed her. Are you her mother?”
She doesn’t know what to say. Behind her the slave-song starts to end and her fingers itch to apply the touch of sleep to this man. To take him back to the place she has prepared and carry out her slow vengeance on him.
“The Tired Lands are hard,” he says, and she knows he is right. She knows that from his blood a hundred others just as cruel will spring up. She is surrounded by them. She would destroy it all if she had the tools.
“Come on, any less than five bits and I’m better off selling him to the swillers as animal feed.”
She glances over her shoulder at the last boy on the stage as he screams and cries and spins on the rope.
And he burns.
He burns.
He burns with a power like she’s never seen before. It is held within him and it may never rise. She is caught up in it, this wave of destruction, this crumbling of the world, this unthinking, unreasoning and uncaring annihilation. Unless someone teaches him. Unless someone shows him how, and then? Her knife darts out into Gart ap Garfin’s throat. Her single-minded quest for revenge is suddenly forgotten in a swift killing blow. The man who killed her child and her lover and her family doesn’t make a sound as he dies. He simply falls face first into the fire and the air fills with the stink of singeing hair followed by the smell of roasting flesh.
That was small vengeance.
Real vengeance is on the stage. Up there, crying and spinning. There is an end to all she’s grown to despise, the unthinking cruelty and the hate. Up there is the tool she needs to wipe the Tired Lands clean. She stands, walks toward the stage. The slave-father sings out.
“Three bits. Three bits and I’ll break even. No? Then the swillers’ pigs will eat well tonight …”
“Does he have a name?” she says and the boy’s screaming stops.
The world stops.
She is about to change the world.
Everything will change.
“Five,” she says, because he is what she needs and she does not intend to lose him. “I’ll pay five bits for him.”
This is a dream.
Chapter 26
I woke before dawn, not refreshed, not happy, but alive enough that dipping my head into a barrel of water brought me back to feeling like some semblance of myself. My master met me outside the Low Tower with make-up.
“I brought these,” she said. “You will feel more yourself if you are painted.” I took the sticks from her. “And a message came last night, I did not want to wake you. She handed me a slip of folded paper and I opened it, read it.
“My face will have to wait.” I shook my head trying to chase away the remaining sleep then squinted through the portcullis at the faraway horizon. The sun was beginning to show as a glowing arc punctuated by the dark blocks of shanty houses. “Boros wants me to meet him on the battlements.” I passed back the note, a scribble, a small map. No doubt she had already read it, she was ever curious. “I will be able to pass through the castle more easily as a slave than as Rufra’s Heartblade, the famed Death’s Jester.”
“True.” She nodded and dipped into her bag. “I have a slave’s tunic in here somewhere.” She looked up, grinning at the puzzlement on my face. “It is often a useful thing to have. I am surprised you do not keep one yourself.”
“I will from now on,” I said, pulling it on over my head. “I must find Boros.”
“Call him Barin, Girton,” she said quietly. “If you do not get used to it then you will both end up in a blood gibbet.”
I nodded and left, hurrying through the castle past guards. At first, I felt a frisson of nerves, the same thrill that went through me before action, one I often tried to fight down, but there seemed no harm in letting my nerves loose now. It didn’t last long. No one showed any interest me and I quickly became bored. The nearest I had to any true excitement was when one of Gamelon’s courtiers, dressed in a tunic with silver and gold edging and still drunk from the evening before, tried to order me to undress and accompany her to her room. She would wake later with a sore head and hopefully think twice about doing anything like that again.
The souring below still bothered me. It was different to others we had travelled through and the longer I spent within it the more apparent this became. It did not stink for a start, though that may be because it was covered by a castle, but past that was something more: it seemed to throb, to pulse as if it were constantly changing beneath me. It had taken time for me to work this out, not because I could not feel it, but because I could not recognise it. I knew sourings, understood them, and they did not change. It was in their nature to stay the same because they were dead. But I was sure this strange pulsing was why I had found myself so lost within Ceadoc, so confused. But once it was identified I could use it. The strangeness became a fixed point for me to find my way around the castle to the place on Boros’s map.
The battlements were reached by a spiral staircase. As I put my foot on the first of the stone steps I heard someone coming down, the heavy tread of someone big, and I slipped away from the stair and into the shadows, my stomach fizzing with trepidation. But it was only Barin’s Heartblade. He stopped at the bottom of the stair, and it felt like he stared straight into the shadows where I hid, though I could not really tell as his face was hidden behind a visor.
He stood there for a long time.
One, my master.
Two, my master.
Three, my master.
Four, my master.
Five, my master.
Six, my master.
Then he let out a breath—a long, reptilian hiss—and walked away. I let myself reach out and feel that strange fuzz of gold and red. It was easier than feeling the normal gold of life, another quirk of this place. When he was far enough away that the feel of him had melted from my mind I let out my own breath and headed up the spiral staircase, emerging from the coolness of the enclosing stone into the hard heat of the day. Even at this height the air was still
and I was denied the small relief of a breeze. Around Ceadoc town, which spilled from the castle walls like offal from a butcher’s bin, the Tired Lands stretched out. They were flat as far as the eye could see. Only occasional scattered trees broke up the monotony. Roads stood out against the parched and yellowed grasses like a child’s fingermarks scratched into sand. If I had not been able to feel the tiny lives out there, moving through the grass and the earth, it would have been easy to believe the whole land had soured. Heat had sucked the life from the land as quickly, though not as thoroughly, as any sorcerer. At least the land would recover from the heat: the grass would return, the trees would survive and water would flow. I was so lost in the view that it took me a while to realise I was alone. A guard patrolled the wall, but he was far from me and when he saw me he raised a spear. I waved back, the small breeze from my hand making a cold patch when it swept across the sweat on my face.
Where was Boros?
Ceadoc’s wall snaked around the castle and I estimated it could take me half the day to walk all the way around it—it would be a fruitless task. If Boros was somewhere, hidden by the shadow of the castle, he could just as easily walk in the other direction and we may never see each other. I squinted against the harsh sunlight as I looked the other way along the wall. Nothing. Why would he invite me up here and not come?
No. I had seen his Heartblade so he must be here. Unless he had wanted to avoid his Heartblade? Maybe he had seen him and decided to postpone our meeting, walked away and I would receive another note from him with another place and time.
A light wind sprang up. It brought with it the sullen stench of the town but it also brought coolness and that felt like a blessing. I closed my eyes, moved to the edge of the wall and put my hands on either side of the battlements which grew above me in half-hexagons. I let out an involuntary sigh of pleasure as I pulled on the neck of my jerkin, letting the cool air run over the lines and scars on my upper body, lifting the sweat and cooling skin. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come, the momentary gift of the zephyr stolen away by the same whimsical currents which had brought it. I opened my eyes, looking down from the wall on to one of many small courtyards that sat within and without the main walls. This one was created by two large houses, at angles to one another and overgrown with vines that had died and become a tangle of crisp brown lines. The centre of the mess of vines was crushed. Lying within the nest of old foliage there was a body. Though it was frail and thin-looking from this height, little more than a man made of sticks, it was identifiable by the long strands of hair that stuck out like petals, stained with crimson where blood had seeped into them.