by Evie Manieri
They left the square and climbed yet another set of steps, then turned the corner and there was the black door with the red tower painted over it, right where it was supposed to be.
“Dramash,” said Rho, crouching down in front of the boy until he could see his eyes, “you can’t talk in there. Do you understand? We don’t want anyone to know you’re from the Shadar. Not yet.”
Whatever Dramash said in reply was unintelligible but at least he nodded. Eofar pushed open the door and stepped across the threshold before Rho could add anything else from the long list of warnings he had been compiling.
The elapsing of three years had not touched the Red Tower. The heavy beams overhead, the pitted stone floor underfoot and the surrounding walls hung with ancient furs were all just the same. The ursa head over the mantle still glared down through lifeless glass eyes. Barrels of cheap wine were piled up in the dark corners and the tavern’s unique aroma of sour wine, resin, salt, grease and damp fur hung in the air.
The place boasted a decent crowd for the time of day, but no one did anything more than look up briefly before turning their attention back to their companions. Five mid-clan merchants were crowded around a corner table, and eight soldiers in a mix of Aelbar and Eotan colors had pushed two more closer to the fire. Two women sat by the wall with their heads close together, talking earnestly and pushing a scrap of paper back and forth between them. The general attitude was unusually somber for friends drinking together in a tavern, and Rho thought he detected an undercurrent of tension. He also counted at least eight imperial swords, not including Strife’s Bane.
Then Old Peel came out from the little storeroom in that same leather coat, just a little more worn down at the elbows. His hair still brushed his shoulders in the fashion of a decade ago, only a little grayer now. Rho relaxed a little for the first time since they came into the harbor.
“I’m hungry,” said the boy through the layers of fur.
Rho put his finger to his lips, but not before Peel had stepped back in surprise.
The little warmth Rho had absorbed since coming inside drained out of him all at once, leaving him as cold as the green-glass statues outside. Eofar downed his wine and poured another one, ignoring Rho’s silent growl of warning.
Peel’s relish rose to new heights, but he spoke with solemn reverence.
Another customer summoned Peel away before they could ask him any more questions, and as he left Rho felt Eofar’s anxiety rising like bile in his throat.
Eofar’s silver-gray eyes grew a little brighter behind his white lashes.
Eofar turned his attention back to his wine.
A chill ran down the back of Rho’s neck, even though the tavern was starting to feel uncomfortably warm. Eofar said nothing more, and when Rho reached out to his mind, found only the darkness.
Dramash pushed his empty plate across the table. “I’m still hungry,” he said, and every single person in the tavern turned at the sound of his voice.
Rho bent down to him so he could speak as quietly as possible. “We’ll find something for you,” he said, before turning to Eofar.
Eofar lurched up and reached into his coat.
Rho slapped his hand down over the coin, but not soon enough. Dramash had already locked his eyes on it. The hilt of Eofar’s sword rattled against the top of its scabbard.
“Dramash,” said Rho slowly, sliding the coin from the table with his hand still covering it. “It’s all right.” The last golden eagle Dramash had seen had been the one covered in his mother’s blood. That coin—retrieved, kept se
cret, held back like a notched arrow—had triggered the temple collapse and all of the death that had followed.
The soldiers around the table jumped up, reaching for their quivering weapons, reading the build-up of emotion at the other end of the room.
“Dramash!” Rho said again.
Then the front door flew open and startled Dramash out of his distress. A soldier in an Arregador tabard straddled the threshold, yellow flares of excitement shooting out of him.
He’d barely finished speaking before everyone else in the tavern was grabbing their outerwear and rushing for the door. Eofar snatched at the coat of one of the women before she got away.
The woman’s incredulousness hit them like a punch.
Eofar dropped her sleeve.
But Eofar walked around him and out the door. Rho helped Dramash back into his mittens and hood and followed after him, pausing briefly to place the coin on the bar.
Night had fallen in the short time they’d been inside. People were running through the streets, many of them still pulling on cloaks or hoods or gloves, all heading toward Dock Road. The excitement of the whole city pulsed around them.
Having just convinced Eofar that the body could not possibly belong to Lahlil, Rho found himself in no position to object.
“What’s happening?” asked Dramash. “Where’s everybody going?”
“To Ravindal,” Rho told him, “and so are we, apparently.”
Chapter 13
Rho kept a firm hold on the back of Dramash’s coat like he was carrying a kitten by the scruff of the neck as they joined in the unruly procession heading up the wide road. Everyone was pushing to get a closer look, and one enterprising youth even climbed up onto the back of the bulky, slow-moving marmont pulling the cart before the guards plucked him off and tossed him back into the crowd. Through all of the excitement Rho could feel the same undercurrent of anger he had felt in the tavern. He and Eofar might be the only people in Ravindal besides the emperor hoping that whatever was frozen in that block of ice was not the Mongrel’s dead body.
“There’s a dereshadi,” said Dramash excitedly, “no, look! Two, no, four!” The triffons swept low over the crowd, then met up with two others. A full wing, thought Rho; someone must have been worried about the crowd getting out of hand. The cart and its frozen trophy bounced up the last steep rise to the South Gate and was immediately admitted by the guards. Everyone else was kept back, and the crowd, muttering, spread out across the ledge. Rho stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He couldn’t decide if the pain in his side was real or imaginary.
“Why are we stopping here?” asked Dramash.
“No reason,” said Rho, pulling his eyes away from the blood-and-frost-stiffened hair and gaping, snow-filled mouths. “I just thought I saw someone I knew.”
They forced their way through the crowd without apology, hardly slowing when the guards moved out to block their way. The bejeweled hilt of Strife’s Bane was enough to open a channel toward the small side gate and they walked straight through.
The cart acquired a new and much better dressed crowd of followers as it rumbled on through the upper city’s streets. Rho found himself surrounded by familiar walls of black-streaked stone, with torches set high up so as not to burn the people crowding through the narrow concourses. They mixed in with servants in thick woolen capes carrying bundles or escorting their masters, and mid-clan soldiers in high-clan colors. He felt the presence of people who might once have been his drinking buddies: the high-clans’ lesser lights who would never bother to hold a breach, or sit out a siege, or ride a triffon into a volley of flaming arrows. They wore silver ursa or lagramor or striped crag-cat fur, and every one of them had a black-bladed imperial sword strapped to his or her back. The kind of damage Dramash could do here made Rho’s head spin.
“That’s Arregador House, where I used to live,” he told the boy, walking a little faster. “Each clan built its own house here after the Clan Wars ended. See that bridge up there? Someone dared my little brother Trey to climb it when he wasn’t much older than you, and he did.” And then, “Through there, all the way back, that’s where the triffons—the dereshadi—sleep.” He regretted this last one, because of course Dramash immediately grabbed his sleeve and tried to pull him in that direction, but luckily, the crowd blocked their way and he was able to pull Dramash past, saying, “We can’t see them now because they’re all going to sleep soon.”
Rho had assumed the cart would be unloaded once it reached the Front, but instead they unhitched the marmont and pulled the cart straight through the gates and into the castle. Rho kept Dramash as close against his side as he could as they followed the cart bumping up the shallow steps toward the throne room. He found himself looking for Kira in spite of himself, but there was no sign of her—but of course, she had probably left Ravindal altogether by now, especially if she thought war was coming. She was barely competent with a sword, and he remembered joking with her that if she ever went to war, she should go as a spy. She had taken the remark more seriously than he had intended, assuring him that she would have made a very good spy.
By the time they entered the throne room, they were right behind the cart. A woman in the uniform of captain of the Eotan guards led a phalanx of her command toward it. Rho briefly wondered what had happened to old Kurt, the nemesis of Ravindal’s children for as long as he could recall—he and his friends had victimized the man by throwing nuts at him, trying to make them ping off his helmet.
He could feel the presence of several people at the back of the room, back by the throne, but the torches had not been lit at that end and all he could make out were a few glowing shapes.
She didn’t trust him, but Rho could feel something deeper underneath, something naked and a little bit desperate. The moment she stepped out of the way, Eofar strode toward the block of ice while the guards kept everyone else back. Rho had little choice but to pull Dramash along after him.
The frost had been scraped away and the ice was remarkably cl
ear. Inside lay a woman with gray skin, black hair and an eye-patch. She had the long, muscular limbs of a Norlander, and a revolting collection of scars on her face and one of her bare arms.
Rho could feel the outrage of the assembly behind him like the yowling of cats thrown into a sack. A chorus of denials and demands for Eofar to prove it battered into his head.
Eofar went over to the wall and grabbed a broad-axe from a display of weaponry.
Eofar pulled down the back of the cart and leaped up onto the platform, then he swung the broad-axe and sank the blade deep into the ice until it stuck fast. Chips flew into the air as he worked it free again, then he struck at the block once again, twice, three times … By the last stroke he had chopped out a wedge close to the corpse’s neck. He changed the angle and struck sideways. A chunk broke away near her face and he stopped and rolled his shoulders, giving his arms a moment to recover.
As the emperor came toward them out of the darkness, his dogs bounded back to him and craned their necks up for a scratch from his bejeweled fingers. Rho had not seen him since before Trey’s death, but he had pictured “Emperor” Gannon many times since then: covered in his brother’s blood as he walked away through the trees.