Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘No. No, Nethmi, I think you did absolutely the right thing. Tell me, where are you staying?’

  The sudden change of topic confused her, but she answered, ‘In a room I’ve rented above one of the taverns. The One-Legged Stool.’

  ‘I know that place,’ Marvan said. ‘It’s cramped and noisy. You deserve better and I can provide it. Why don’t you come and stay with me? I’ve a room and a bed that’s big enough for two –’ he held up a hand before she could protest ‘– where we two can sleep chastely with a sword between us if that makes you feel safer. I’m told that’s how the maids liked to do things in the old tales.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she began, and he laughed.

  ‘I’m never kind, but I won’t hurt you, I swear it. Smiler’s Fair is a chancy place if you don’t know the rules, or when there aren’t any. Let me teach you a thing or two, just enough so you can make your own way here. I think I can be a good friend to you, Nethmi of Whitewood.’

  She wasn’t sure how good he was, but she did need a friend. In Su had tried to help her and had died for his generosity. Marvan of Fell’s End seemed like a man who could survive her company.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Just for a little while.’

  24

  On the second day they came to the end of the pass as the rocks of the valley floor melted into soft soil beneath the feet of their horses and mammoths. Here, it was far easier for Sang Ki to see the trail Gurjot and his men had been following. The grass had been trampled to mud in a swathe nearly five hundred paces wide.

  Their own force seemed dwarfed by the one they were following. If their quarry marched with an army this size, what chance did they stand? But after a while, Sang Ki began to notice objects scattered in the mud, scraps of clothing clinging to piles of dung and then, finally, a ragged pennant caught beneath a clod of dirt. He’d never visited Smiler’s Fair, but he recognised the rayed sun that was the symbol of Journey’s End, the company of traders.

  Gurjot rode beside him, his horse in the shadow of Sang Ki’s mammoth. The carrion mount strode at his side, its scraggly feathers a sorry contrast to the glossy black hair of its master’s stallion.

  ‘Smiler’s Fair?’ Sang Ki asked, pointing to the pennant. ‘You think to find our fugitive there?’

  ‘The prince is just a boy, and an uneducated goatherd at that. You forget that I’ve met him. There’s nowhere else for him to go. Smiler’s Fair is like a beach after a storm: everything washes up there eventually.’

  Sang Ki couldn’t fault his reasoning. He’d thought the same of Nethmi. He’d sent a man to the fair to demand the return of the murderers if they were present, but he didn’t imagine his demand would be heeded. The fair cared for its own and Thilak’s kidnapping of Jinn and Vordanna would not have been forgiven.

  So for three nights they camped in the mud Smiler’s Fair had left in its wake and sent outriders into the grasslands to hunt game and ensure no other trail led away from the one they followed. But it was clear the fair had passed many days ago, and if they were catching up to it, they weren’t doing it fast enough.

  ‘Shouldn’t they be stopping?’ one of Sang Ki’s armsmen asked him in frustration on the fourth day. ‘When will they turn back from a caravan into a town?’

  Sang Ki caught Gurjot glancing his way and realised the other man was interested in the answer too. It always astonished him, the aversion most people had to the knowledge to be found in books. ‘Smiler’s Fair won’t make its pitch here,’ he told both his questioner and his surreptitious listener. ‘We’re crossing Dae lands now – have you not observed the distinctive rabbits? – and the Dae are dead. There are no customers here for the fair and its pleasures. They’ll travel to the territory of the Four Together before they stop, I’d lay money on it.’

  The trail led onward with no end in sight, confirming his prediction, and Gurjot seemed content for them to follow it. Then, on the third day, it veered left. Sang Ki knew why, of course. Every tribesman did. He turned his mount to follow the fair’s path, but he hadn’t gone many paces before he realised Gurjot and his men weren’t doing the same.

  It was a ponderous thing to turn a mammoth around. The palanquin swayed alarmingly and Sang Ki’s checked shirt flapped in the breeze as he rode back to Gurjot.

  ‘What happened?’ Gurjot asked. ‘Why veer from their course after so many days?’

  Sang Ki smiled, glad that once again he knew something Gurjot didn’t. ‘Their course still lies straight ahead,’ he told the other man, ‘but so does the Rune Waste. They’ll have skirted its edges and then returned to their north-western path.’

  ‘Hmm … Well, we don’t need to do the same. We can carry enough food and drink to cross it safely, surely?’

  ‘It’s not the lack of water that keeps travellers from the Rune Waste.’

  ‘Superstition, then?’ Gurjot smiled thinly. ‘But we’re Ashane, aren’t we? What do we care for the fears of the tribes? If we cut through the waste we might finally catch our quarry, or have your men become as credulous as those you rule? Would they refuse an order to travel here?’

  Before Sang Ki could reply, his mother snapped, ‘My son’s men will follow him anywhere, even the Rune Waste.’

  Gurjot looked surprised that she’d spoken. Among the Ashane, Sang Ki knew, a woman’s words carried little weight. But the tribes respected the wisdom of women, and Sang Ki couldn’t ignore his mother’s veiled order, however much he might wish to. He hesitated only a second, then clicked his tongue and used the thin willow switch to turn his mammoth towards the bleak and forbidden waste.

  The place didn’t have a clear beginning. They travelled for hours and only gradually saw the grass under their mounts’ feet wither away to reveal the sandy ground beneath. Sang Ki’s men hid their feelings, but most had lived among the Seonu long enough to know the tales and he sensed their fear in the way they touched the hilts of their weapons as they glanced around. The day was hot, far hotter than any spring day had a right to be, and the sky above had the same sullen and lowering cast as his men.

  All the vegetation had gone before they saw the first rune. Even Gurjot’s troops shifted uneasily at the sight of it. A black line, unnatural in its straightness, crossed the landscape ahead, cutting brutally through the yellow. It continued until lost to sight in either direction, thousands of paces long. Within half an hour, the blackness was beneath their hooves and Sang Ki realised that it was ash. It sucked in the sunlight and gave only a few crystalline glitters back while the whiff of soot hung over everything.

  All speech ceased as they crossed the blackness. No animals lived in this desolation and no birds overflew it. The ash muffled their steps so that the silence was absolute. And then a line of yellow appeared on the horizon and shortly they were back in the ordinary desert. It almost seemed comforting by contrast.

  Sang Ki wondered which stroke of which huge rune it was that they’d just traversed. It was impossible to know. No one at their level could comprehend them, any more than an ant could read the letters of a scroll no matter how often it crawled across the parchment. Indeed, the runes’ very existence hadn’t been known in Ashanesland until a hundred years ago, when King Jagraj’s regent, Gurman of High Water Fastness, had sent a division of carrion riders to scout the plains and the runes had become suddenly and startlingly clear to the airborne men.

  The Chun blamed the Dae for the runes and the desolation around them. They said the neighbouring tribe had once struck a bargain with a powerful mage of Mirror Town, only to renege on their end of the deal. The Waste had been the mage’s terrible revenge, rendering uninhabitable the Dae’s old hunting grounds so that the tribe had moved to the south to steal the Chun lands. The Dae, before their destruction, had told exactly the same tale about the Chun.

  The mages themselves were silent on the matter, but when had they ever shared their knowledge with anyone? The folk of the Moon Forest gave their Hunter credit for the ruination. They claimed it had come in r
etaliation for a great wrong once done to her Wanderers. Sang Ki had read all the accounts and concluded that none of them was to be trusted. In his judgement, the Rune Waste had been present long before the tribes began their exile and the Ashane crossed the great sea. And now that he could see it for himself, he imagined it would outlast them all. When the lands were empty the runes would remain, immutable and incomprehensible. It wasn’t a very comfortable thought and he shivered in his palanquin.

  It was late in the day when they saw their first sign of habitation. At first it looked like a small building on the horizon, lonely in the midst of the sand, but when they drew nearer, Sang Ki saw that it was a gateway: the stone-built mouth to a broad tunnel leading down. Its entrance gaped wide and threatening and the light seemed shy of entering it. It was impossible to say how deep the tunnel delved or how far it went. There was no similar structure marking an exit in sight.

  ‘The Night Roads!’ Sang Ki said with sudden inspiration, then cursed himself as he saw the wave of fear that passed through the company in the wake of his words. ‘A legend only,’ he added, but the legends said that the subterranean tunnels were the domain of the worm men, the means by which they travelled the world. He allowed the men to march until the crumbling stone structure was lost to sight before calling for them to make camp.

  The tents went up more quickly than usual, as if the men were keen to put something between them and the view of the wasteland. Sang Ki found he felt the same.

  While the day had been subdued, the evening turned into a raucous letting-off of tension. It started harmlessly enough, with drinking and singing, but the atmosphere soon soured. As Sang Ki tried to enjoy his supper of cured venison and spring greens, he heard the sound of a loud-voiced argument and prayed it wouldn’t end in violence.

  His prayers were naturally futile. He sighed as his lieutenant approached, knowing the news wouldn’t be good, and five minutes later he was standing above the body of one of his armsmen as he whimpered out his life in a pool of his own urine. The knife was still sticking out of his kidney, bobbing up and down with every laboured breath until it stopped moving entirely.

  ‘Who’s responsible for this outrage?’ Sang Ki asked, rather hoping that no one would know.

  ‘The lowland scum,’ one of his men told him and, alas, there’d been sufficient witnesses for the culprit to soon be named. That left him no choice but to summon Gurjot to deal with the matter.

  ‘One of my men has been murdered,’ Sang Ki told him. ‘I’m afraid there’s no question of this man’s guilt.’

  The killer was shaking, but it was impossible to tell if it was with fear or rage. Sang Ki certainly felt the anger all around him. With blood spilt, there was little chance of the two groups forgetting their enmity now. He looked to Gurjot, wondering how the other man intended to handle it, but the justice said, ‘I think it’s only fitting that you choose the punishment.’

  He made it sound like a favour; Sang Ki knew it was quite the opposite. Harshness would alienate Gurjot’s troops and mercy would sit ill with his own men. Gurjot could clearly see no right answer and was glad to pass on the responsibility for making a wrong one to someone else. He half-smiled as he watched Sang Ki, no doubt enjoying his dilemma.

  Sang Ki smiled too, because he understood his own people better than Gurjot could. Like his father, most had gone native during their time in the mountains. That was why his mother had chosen them. They were Ashane enough on the outside to satisfy the king, but Seonu on the inside where it mattered.

  ‘The Rune Waste is to blame,’ Sang Ki said. ‘It spreads its destruction inside men’s heads and they lose their senses and their self-control. Your soldier wasn’t himself when he struck mine; it would be wrong to kill him for it.’

  He could see Gurjot’s men sniggering behind their hands. No doubt they were delighted that the tribe’s foolish superstitions would spare their comrade. His own people nodded, though, pleased with his words.

  ‘Let the land be his punishment, then,’ he told them. ‘Send him from us without food or water. If the Waste lets him leave it then his life is his. If not, his bones will bleach and become a part of it.’

  The killer smiled, pleased at his reprieve. His mates slapped his back and laughed and made plans to reunite with him back in Ashanesland. Sang Ki’s own men said nothing, but their eyes glittered as they looked at the soldier, and he knew they saw a man marked for death.

  Gurjot nodded curtly to confirm the sentence. His expression when he turned to Sang Ki was a mix of annoyance and grudging respect. Sang Ki had never mastered the Seonu habit of controlling his expressions, but he managed not to show his self-satisfaction as he turned and made his way to his tent.

  It was shortly after sunset the next morning when they saw the first evidence that the waste was changing. At first Sang Ki thought it was snow, a scattering of ice across the black stroke of the rune ahead. But when their mounts were crossing the ash he realised that the white pinpricks were blossoms.

  ‘Moonflowers,’ he said, stopping the mammoth to gaze down at them. He would have liked to dismount and examine them more closely, but his ungainly flop from the beast’s back was too humiliating to undertake more often than absolutely necessary.

  His mother felt no such constraint. She clicked her fingers at one of her personal guard, then climbed deftly down the ladder rested against the mammoth’s hairy flank. The guard held her arm as she squatted to examine the flowers more closely. When she reached out to pluck one bloom, Sang Ki was startled to see her smile. It happened so seldom that he always forgot how the expression transformed her. It made her face look almost pretty.

  Gurjot dismounted too, tramping the blossoms beneath his boots as he approached. ‘I thought nothing grew here.’

  ‘It was always said that nothing did,’ Sang Ki agreed. ‘And these flowers aren’t native to the plains. They grow only in the great northern forest.’

  ‘Clearly not,’ Gurjot said, and stomped back to his horse, gesturing for the column to proceed.

  The white grew thicker on the ground as they moved forward, and Sang Ki began to see droplets of red, bloodbells from the far east of Ashanesland, and then a rainbow of colours strewn across green as grasses and flowers from around the continent changed the waste to a meadow.

  When they came across the spring, rising from the once-blasted earth to trickle a bubbling stream through the greenery, all order broke down. The men had been on short rations for two days and they broke from their ranks to fling themselves down at the stream’s bank and lap up its water.

  It was while they were scattered and inattentive that the other force arrived. The thunder of their hooves announced them seconds before they crested the hill on the stream’s far bank. The Ashane force leapt towards their mounts or to draw their weapons, but the intruders already had recurve bows at the ready and arrows nocked.

  ‘Hold your arrows!’ Sang Ki shouted, panicked and in Seonu first and then more firmly in Ashane.

  Despite his words, a handful of arrows flew from his own side, one finding its mark in a screaming horse. But nothing came towards them from the other and when Gurjot realised it he repeated the order and the threat of violence retreated one short pace.

  Sang Ki realised that the newcomers were quite few in number. There were no more than a hundred of them to the near half a thousand he and Gurjot had mustered between them. They were tribesmen, that much was clear from their pale faces and almond eyes, but he didn’t recognise their clothing. No tribe of the Fourteen wore black robes and silver turbans.

  ‘Come no closer!’ Gurjot shouted to the newcomers. His men had formed themselves into something resembling ranks by then, swords and scythes and a few bows at the ready, and his voice reflected the new confidence this gave him. ‘Lower your weapons and state your purpose.’

  A ripple moved through the facing line and a horse stepped forward. Sang Ki admired the rider’s courage. He saw more than one Ashane hand tighten on its weapon, but
none was raised and the tribesman smiled and touched his forehead in salute.

  ‘It’s strange you challenge me,’ he said, ‘when you’re in my lands. I’m Chun Cheol.’

  Chun. But the Chun had recently become something else entirely. ‘The Brotherband,’ Sang Ki replied. ‘How delightful. And I’m Seonu Sang Ki, and this is Justice Gurjot. It’s wonderful to meet you here, of all places. What an astonishing coincidence. Or am I mistaken in calling it that?’

  Gurjot was frowning at him, uneasy with his light tone. His frown deepened when Cheol shook his head and dismounted.

  ‘Chance didn’t bring us here,’ the tribesman said. He snapped his fingers and the ranks of horsemen parted for another figure to stumble through, bloody and bruised. ‘He did.’

  It was the soldier Sang Ki had passed judgement on the previous night. The man’s eyes were almost swollen shut but a narrow slit of white showed as he glanced up at his fellows. His smile was ghastly, full of broken teeth.

  ‘He was slow to speak,’ Cheol said. ‘We encouraged him.’

  ‘You had no right to questions my man!’ Gurjot snapped. Around him, his soldiers shifted and muttered.

  ‘He wasn’t your man. He told us he was dismissed from your army.’ Cheol shrugged. ‘No matter. We’ll pay blood gold for his injury if you wish it. Our purpose here isn’t war.’

  ‘Then why come armed?’ Sang Ki asked. ‘You certainly don’t look peaceful.’

  ‘We brought our arms to offer you their aid. We’ve come to join you.’

  Sang Ki couldn’t help smiling at Gurjot’s sour expression, so like the one he’d worn when Sang Ki had offered his own assistance. ‘Why would you help us?’ Gurjot asked. ‘Our mission is nothing to you.’

  ‘Your fugitive is nothing to us, but you follow him to Smiler’s Fair. If there’s to be a sack, we want a part of it. You take your man, and we’ll pick through the riches of the fair. What say you?’