Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  His foot hesitated above the first tread. There was still light below, he could see it shining softly up, but all his life he’d been taught to stay within the sun’s reach. At Madam Aeronwen’s he’d chosen a room on the second floor, because everyone knew the First Death came from below. Still, the Servants had built their city here and the staircase was part of it. They’d have warned him if there was any danger, wouldn’t they?

  Then again, none of the other husbands seemed inclined to explore, content with their comfortable existence. Maybe the Servants hadn’t warned him of what lay below because they didn’t think it necessary. And the existence here was comfortable. It was boring but not filled with any risks a boy shouldn’t take just to entertain himself of an afternoon.

  He was still hesitating, one foot on stone and one on ice, when the voice boomed up from below. ‘Come then, morsel, if thy will is to come.’

  ‘Rii!’ He was more pleased to hear her than really made sense. But she was familiar and, if not friendly, then at least more interesting than the Servants with their endless lessons and rules.

  The stairs were smoothly polished, ornamented only with patterns of lead hammered across the rock. The patterns were quite unlike the writing he’d seen in the many books of Salvation’s library. They were curved where those letters had clean lines, twisted and hard to follow. He could almost sense the mind behind the markings, though he wasn’t sure it seemed a very friendly one.

  After fifty steps or so he found himself in a network of corridors very like the maze of ice above, only a little darker. There was still light though, a diffuse golden glow, and he shivered to think Mizhara’s machine could bring sunshine even where there was no sun.

  ‘Lower,’ Rii’s voice echoed up to him.

  He wasn’t keen on descending further, but it was clear Rii couldn’t squeeze her immense body into these narrow corridors. Eric wandered them a while, sometimes reaching out to trace the complex patterns of metal fixed to the rock walls, before he found the next stairs down. The light was weaker here and he couldn’t see the bottom. It wasn’t pleasant to think about walking into that unknown space. He swallowed and made himself do it, step after step downward and no sign of an end.

  He couldn’t judge how long it had been when he finally reached the bottom. The ceiling was hidden in the darkness above him, and the walls – if there were walls – were lost to distance. He could see only a score of yards along the floor in each direction. Ahead of him and running into the distance to right and left was a row of statues, some dressed as warriors and others as sages in long robes, but none of them human. They looked, Eric realised, like the missing males of the Servants, tall and thin with misshapen ears. They were carved from stone, but their hair and large round eyes had been faced with silver. It wasn’t an altogether pleasing effect.

  He heard a sudden rustling in the darkness behind him and spun to face it, heart pounding. A shadow approached and he would have run for the stairs if his legs hadn’t turned to water, but then he saw that it was only Rii. Her hulking form moved further into the light, leathery wings folded against her back and her claws skittering on the rock. The smell of mouldy cinnamon wafted ahead of her.

  ‘Well, morsel, thou art bolder than thy brethren,’ she said.

  Eric forced a smile. ‘No one ever said I ain’t game.’

  ‘And what makest thou of this city, so much less fair than that above?’

  He might not be educated, but he knew a loaded question when he heard one. There was a proprietary air in the way she studied the space around them, her small black eyes perhaps piercing the darkness better than his. She opened her mouth wide, revealing her fangs, and let out a horrible series of chirps. The echoes flew back from a very long way away.

  ‘It’s good down here,’ Eric said. ‘More like a real home. It weren’t built by the Servants, was it? This place is solid. It takes a different kind of person to make a whole bleeding castle out of ice, with no privacy and light everywhere. It’s like they’re afraid of what hides in the shadows.’

  Rii let out a thin, yipping laugh. ‘Thou speakest true. The Servants of cursed Mizhara fashioned their Salvation on the ruins of this, my home.’

  ‘Your people made this place?’ He eyed her long, curved claws, wondering how they’d ever held the tools.

  ‘Not we, but our brethren. At the moonrise of the world, our master Yron bade them build here, where he would ensure for us an endless night. It was he who fashioned the great machine that kept us ever in darkness, though the Servants who corrupted its purpose now claim it for their own.’

  ‘That thing up there used to make it dark, not light?’ Eric looked at the glow that had followed him down the stairs and died in the folds of her dark skin and fur. ‘Don’t tell me – Mizhara took exception to it.’

  ‘She wished all to be light and beautiful. There was no room in her world for ugliness or doubt, and so she quarrelled with her brother, who was master of the moon and all its mysteries. They fought a great war, the greatest the world has yet known.’

  ‘And she won. I heard this story already. Well, I suppose the sun’s stronger than the moon.’ Which made it even more unlikely that he’d betray the one for the other, as her dream had predicted. But he didn’t think he’d tell her that.

  Rii growled, a sound a little like the vibrations of the machine above. ‘The sun hath no greater strength. Yron was the god of secrets, which are always more powerful than that which is known.’

  ‘But he did lose. It’s the winners what get to build their cities on top of the losers, ain’t it?’

  She reared up above him, her wings beating so close to his face that one of her claws scratched his cheek. ‘My master’s forces were defeated, it is true,’ she hissed. ‘Lord Yron was killed and his servants driven to madness and to life beneath the ground. My own people were slain, every last one but I, and I have been made to linger on in this bright age of the world, a slave to those who conquered me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eric said. But after a moment, he couldn’t stop himself asking, ‘Why did they spare you when they killed everyone else?’

  ‘My brethren fought to their last breaths. I chose surrender.’

  ‘But why? It don’t take a genius to see how much you hate the Servants.’

  ‘Ah …’ Rii said. Her long black tongue flicked out to wet her lips. ‘My reasons are my own, morsel. Perhaps if thou shouldst return, I will share them with thee.’

  There was a leathery flap of wings, a mustier, more rank stench than her breath, and then she was gone into the vast darkness.

  26

  When Krish woke there was water in his mouth and nose and his heart thumped with unreasoning panic. Then the sound of laughter penetrated the sleepy fog and he rolled on to his back to see Dae Hyo standing over him with a bowl in his hand.

  Krish half rose to his feet, angry enough to attack the other man, before good sense returned and he fell back to his knees and shook himself like a dog. There was still a last chill of departed winter in the air and he shivered even as the sun began to dry him. They’d camped beneath an apple tree where the petals floated in the air, fragrant freckles of colour across the blue sky.

  ‘Awake now, boy?’ Dae Hyo asked.

  Krish nodded, still nervous around the other man and his changeable moods, though it was too early for even Dae Hyo to have started drinking.

  ‘Get up, then. It’s time you learned to be useful.’ He threw something at Krish’s feet: a wooden sword, crudely carved. Krish wondered if Dae Hyo had made it himself that morning. There was another in Dae Hyo’s hand, equally crude. He twirled it casually, then rested the long, blunt blade against his shoulder.

  Krish stayed kneeling on the ground and didn’t reach for the sword. ‘I can’t use that.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’m going to teach you. It’s all right, you can leave the sword for now. We’re going to run first. I’ve seen you panting for breath whenever you have to walk. You’ve got no
stamina. You wouldn’t last five minutes in a fight.’

  ‘I don’t want to fight.’ Krish intended to find people to fight for him – he’d meant Dae Hyo to be the first – but maybe a leader needed to know how to do the things he ordered of his men.

  ‘What, I’m to do all the bleeding for you?’ Dae Hyo asked, as if to confirm it. ‘You can spit a rabbit so it isn’t burnt and you know how to shut your mouth when a man wants some quiet. Apart from that, you’re fucking useless. So if you want to stay with me, follow me.’

  He’d dropped his own wooden sword and set off running before Krish could respond. There was nothing he could do but jump up and follow after.

  Krish knew that Dae Hyo was slowing his pace for him, and yet he struggled to keep up. His lungs had cleared in the warmer, richer lowland air, but now he felt the breath catch in them with every step and his muscles burned. The grass felt like it was pulling at his legs to hold him back and he was soon going at little more than a stumbling walk. And still Dae Hyo ran on. Krish would have begged him to stop, but he couldn’t spare the breath.

  Each step had become an agony when his legs suddenly gave beneath him, tumbling him to the ground. It must have taken Dae Hyo a little while to realise he’d lost his follower, because Krish lay gasping miserably for a long moment before he felt the other man’s boot in his ribs. He curled round the blow and gasped some more.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’ Dae Hyo asked. He bent at the waist to peer into Krish’s face. His expression was halfway between annoyance and concern.

  ‘Tired,’ Krish gasped. ‘Hurt.’

  Dae Hyo rested a hand against Krish’s sweating brow. ‘You’re hot.’

  ‘You made me run ten miles!’ Krish gritted.

  ‘Not even two.’ Dae Hyo rose, his spine cracking. ‘Well, it takes time. You’ll get better. I tell you what, a bit of swordwork will loosen you up.’

  He strode away. Krish had just about enough strength to rise to his feet and follow. ‘What about breakfast?’ he said. ‘There’s rabbit left, and those boiled roots.’

  Dae Hyo cast a jaundiced eye back at him and sighed. ‘Breakfast, and swordwork after. But hurry. You’ll never be a warrior if you slouch along like that.’

  The sword felt like stone in Krish’s hands. ‘Again,’ Dae Hyo yelled and he swung it at the tree to watch it clatter against the bark. It barely broke off a splinter.

  ‘Again,’ Dae Hyo said, and ten more times, before he sniffed and stepped forward to inspect Krish’s work. ‘Useless. You haven’t even dented it.’

  ‘The sword’s made of wood!’

  ‘So’s the tree. Try again.’

  But Krish’s arm refused to obey him and the sword wilted at the end of it, its tip drooping towards the ground.

  ‘Fine. Rest, then,’ Dae Hyo said, but after ten minutes he had him up and at it again, to even less visible effect.

  When Krish’s arms were as exhausted and weak as his legs, Dae Hyo finally told him to mount up, and they set off again on their trek through the plains. It was an aimless wandering whose purpose Krish had yet to fathom. He knew that soon he’d need to start directing the other man where he wanted to go, but he thought there was currently little chance of being listened to. Maybe if he learned to fight as Dae Hyo wanted the other man would be more willing to follow his cause once Krish explained it to him.

  The plains, he’d learned over the weeks on his own and the days in Dae Hyo’s company, weren’t entirely featureless. After an hour’s ride they saw something black swell on the horizon until they drew close and found themselves passing a huge round rock. It rested on the grass as if a giant had dropped it there. No vegetation clung to it, not even moss, and Krish wondered at the mystery, but Dae Hyo just shrugged at his questions.

  He’d been equally uninterested when they’d passed the crumbled remains of a huge stone structure, listing to one side and nibbled away by time and rain. ‘Not a Dae place,’ was all he said. He’d only once said more, when from the top of a small hill, Krish had seen a yellow stain on the horizon. He’d turned to Dae Hyo to find the other man scowling. ‘The Rune Waste,’ he’d said. ‘Men who go there get sick. All except the Chun.’ He’d walked fast in the other direction and Krish had been happy to follow.

  There were hills sometimes too, and meandering rivers. Once they’d even skirted the lily-fringed shore of a great lake. The air had been filled with the high, forlorn cries of the stilt-legged white birds that waded in it. Krish thought he might come to love this land, if he could only get used to the wide sweep of the sky above him.

  They ate their lunch after a few hours, some unnameable creature Krish had caught in his traps. It was plump and the meat juices dribbled down Dae Hyo’s chin as he carefully stripped the fat from its skin, then hung the hide on his saddlebags, maybe for later trade. For once, he didn’t swig the foul vodka in his flask to wash down his meal, and Krish guessed it was for his sake Dae Hyo remained sober. He knew he should feel honoured, but the other man was at least jollier when he was drunk. When Dae Hyo had finished, he took out his bow and handed it to Krish.

  ‘I’ve loosened the string,’ Dae Hyo said, ‘but we’ll make you your own when I’m sure you won’t accidentally stick me in the back with an arrow.’

  Krish was a little more confident with the bow. He’d grown up using a sling to scare the hunter birds from the goats and he had a good eye. His first few shots went wide of the target Dae Hyo had carved in one of the lonely sentinel trees that scattered the plain. Then two shots landed inside the ring and Dae Hyo smiled and clapped him on the back. The next was true as well, but then the arrows started to fall short until Krish found he didn’t have the strength to pull the bow at all. His shoulders had failed him along with the rest of his body.

  ‘Well,’ Dae Hyo said. ‘You show some promise there, at least.’

  Krish thought that, surely, must be the end of it. But when the sun was touching the horizon and they’d started to make camp, he saw Dae Hyo clearing a square of grass, stamping the long stalks and the blue spring flowers among them flat with his boots.

  ‘Gods of my hearth,’ Krish said. ‘What now?’

  Dae Hyo shrugged out of his shirt, revealing a chest thick with both scars and muscle. ‘A warrior fights with hand as well as sword. Strip, boy, and come and face me.’

  Krish was so tired it made him reckless. He folded his arms, pulling against the burn in his shoulders. ‘That’s crazy. You’ll crush me.’

  ‘I’ll go easy.’

  ‘You’ll still crush me. I’m half your size. Don’t worry: if I’m disarmed and facing someone like you, I’ll surrender.’

  ‘Surrender?’ Dae Hyo looked so baffled Krish wondered if he genuinely didn’t understand the word. ‘Come here, boy. Or are you a coward as well as a weakling?’

  Krish knew the flare of rage was exactly what Dae Hyo wanted. He tamped it down and kept his place. ‘I’m not stupid. I’ll never beat a man in that sort of fight, and I’m not going to try.’

  He turned without waiting for an answer and went to their packs, where the fire needed feeding and another rabbit skinning. After a few moments Dae Hyo stomped over to join him and they ate supper in a frosty silence.

  Once tiredness had crept into every part of Krish, including his spirit, he began to regret his words. But he didn’t need Dae Hyo, not really. He could trap his own food and keep a better eye out for enemies now he knew they were there. And there must be other possible allies on the plains besides him.

  Krish was too exhausted to worry about it overmuch. He wrapped his aching body in his blankets, turned his back on the fire and almost instantly fell asleep.

  In the morning, he was woken by another splash of water in his face.

  ‘What?’ Dae Hyo said when Krish glared at him. ‘Not giving up already, are you? Or did you think I had? I’m made of stronger metal than that, boy, and you don’t want to test it. Now get up.’

  Running was, if anything, even more painful
this morning. His legs had stiffened in the night and his stomach felt like he’d swallowed splinters, though it had seemed the one part of his body he hadn’t exercised to exhaustion yesterday. He barely managed fifty paces at a run and then he was forced to stumble after Dae Hyo’s disappearing figure like a cripple chasing the man who’d stolen his crutches.

  Then, without warning, Dae Hyo stopped. Instinct sent Krish to his knees before he knew the reason. It was an ambush. Three men leapt from the long grass towards them and the sword thrust meant for his throat passed through air to be knocked aside by Dae Hyo’s blade. Another weapon came for him, a hunting knife. Krish couldn’t avoid it, but Dae Hyo was there, stabbing his own knife into the attacker’s guts and ripping upwards so that blood and intestines tumbled on to the grass in a steaming heap beside him.

  The two remaining men didn’t bother with Krish after that. The fight had at first seemed like it would last only a moment, but now they stepped back, one with two hand axes hefted and the other with a curved sword, keen only on one side. Their clothing was black and their turbans were silver. Their eyes were hard when they looked at Dae Hyo and his were full of venom.

  ‘Chun scum,’ Dae Hyo grated. ‘These are Dae lands.’

  ‘Not any longer,’ the swordsman said, smiling. ‘We killed the Dae. They screamed as they died.’

  ‘You fought women and children,’ Dae Hyo said. ‘I tell you what – now see how much you like fighting a man.’

  The swordsman spat his contempt at Dae Hyo’s feet and the two Chun warriors moved to flank him, the axe-wielder standing in his shadow. Krish’s mouth was dry with fear and he hated his helplessness, but when the tribesman swung his axes at Dae Hyo’s undefended back, Dae Hyo twisted and blocked so smoothly it left his attacker with one weapon on the ground and a thick welling slash on his arm. After that the pair were more cautious, circling and circling and never attacking.