Fortune's Blight

by Evie Manieri

  Eofar tailed off as he drew his knife and chipped away near the face, bit by bit, until he could reach in and pull chunks away. Her flesh had stuck in places and came away with the ice. —he slashed through the cord of the eye-patch and slowly peeled it back, as if he was paring the loose skin from a piece of ripe fruit—

  Two silver eyes, both the same. Eofar slammed down the axe into the block of ice one final time and left it there.

  said Emperor Gannon, slapping the woman on the back and radiating a sense of triumph as hot and bright as a burning bridge.

  said Vrinna.

  The guards at the front of the cart moved out of the way for the emperor as he circled around it. The dogs paced behind their master, panting and slobbering, but no one else moved. Suddenly Gannon put his shoulder under the shaft and tipped the front of the cart up. The wood creaked and the ice-block slid off and crashed to the floor, scattering people out of its way as it shot forward like a runaway sledge. It finally smashed into the doorframe and the ice cracked in half along the fault Eofar had already made. The imposter’s frozen flesh cracked along with it, splitting apart until bone and muscle came poking out.

  said the emperor, sweeping them all up in his churning, grasping eagerness as he pulled the axe from the ice. He brought the blade down with more force than Eofar had been able to put behind it and dug another cleft into the unknown woman’s torso. Jellied blood stuck to the axe when he pulled it back. He brought it down again, and again, until he had hacked the body in half, and then he turned his attention to the head and neck, striking over and over again until he had mashed them to a pulp. Finally sated, he threw the axe aside and the ear-splitting clang of the heavy blade striking the stone floor startled the crowd as if from a trance.

  The guards pushed them back and out of the throne room until they were able to close the doors on them.

  the emperor told the captain, sending ice shards spinning away over the floor as he stalked back to her. The imperial notice swung at last to Rho, as heavy as the axe he had just wielded.

 

  he asked as another figure swept forward out of the darkness.

  Kira answered.

  Kira.

  Rho’s memory had been kinder to her than she deserved. Her eyes sat further apart than he preferred, and her neck wasn’t nearly as long or as graceful as painted by his imagination.

  said Gannon.

  Rho bit back his first thought: that it was a shame they’d never know if Trey would have lived if they’d brought him to a physic. The emperor’s attention had already turned to Eofar anyway.

 

 

  Gannon studied him.

  Rho watched the white fur of Kira’s robe move softly against her arms and throat as she drifted toward him. The torchlight lent a warm glow to her deep-colored jewels. She looked different, but that wasn’t all; the more startling change was the hollow core where her heart had been. She was like green-glass, glittering and prettily wrought, but with nothing at the center; put her close to a flame and she would melt into nothing. He pushed deeper, trying to peel back that shiny veneer of affectation and found nothing but more of the same.

  Kira asked, referring to Dramash, who was still squashed up against the back of Rho’s legs.

  Her knowledge of events caught Rho off-guard, as did her flippancy.

  the emperor informed him.

  Rho waited with his heart pounding, hoping that Eofar had worked out what he wanted to say. They would never get a better opportunity than this one.

  said Eofar.

  Rho asked Eofar in dismay, only to have a mental door slammed when he reached into his friend’s mind to find out what he was thinking.

  Eofar went on with hardly a pause.

  Rho felt like he was going mad. He must have hit his head somewhere; or this was another nightmare and he would wake up to the sound of his hammock scraping against the iron rings.

  said the emperor, rubbing his hands together like he had just been served a meal.

  Eofar came and knelt down beside Dramash. “That man is the emperor, Dramash. Just stay quiet and calm and do what I tell you.”

  asked Rho.

  said Eofar, drawing his sword and laying it on the ground in front of Dramash. “Move the sword.”

  “No.” The boy looked up over his shoulder at Rho. “I can’t.”

  Rho swallowed. “You only need to move it a very little.”

  “No,” Dramash said again, shaking his head at Eofar. “I don’t want to. You can’t make me.”

  asked Gannon, and motioned two of his guards forward.

  Rho warned as he grabbed the back of Dramash’s coat. He wanted to draw, but Fortune’s Blight would be no good against a dozen or more imperial swords.

  The first guard flew thirty feet across the room and smashed into the wall. Then the sword ripped out of the second guard’s hand and fired straight up to the ceiling as if shot from a bow. Rho pulled Dramash back as everyone else jumped to avoid the tumbling blade. The rest of the guards darted forward to surround them, but Dramash ripped every one of their swords away the moment they came close. The guards shook their stinging hands in shock and watched speechlessly as their weapons slid out of their reach.

  Captain Vrinna charged forward, but her sword pulled her hand down as if its weight had increased ten times. She managed to force herself forward a few more steps before falling to the ground along with her weapon.

  “Dramash,” Rho said, but he wasn’t sure the boy could even hear him. Tears were running down his cheeks, wetting the fur into clumps. Rho dropped to his knees and raised his voice until he could feel the burn in his throat. “Stop, Dramash. Stop now.”

  Emperor Gannon drew his own sword, only to have it whip his arm around in the opposite direction. He hung on doggedly, but he looked like he was trying to drag a lagramor out of its hole by its tail.

  “Dramash,” said Rho, “it’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you. You can stop now.” Then he saw two guards armed with steel swords—not imperial swords—rushing toward them.

  Rho shouted to them, but of course they weren’t listening to him; their only purpose was to protect the emperor at all cost. Rho did the only thing that he could think of. He stripped off one glove and pressed his bare hand down on Dramash’s neck.

/>   The boy screamed in pain and Rho felt it like a spike straight through his head: a single, sharp pitch that made every Norlander in the room double over and clap their hands over their ears. He kept his hand on Dramash’s skin, telling himself that the flesh of his palm was not singeing and peeling away—which was how it felt—and that the pain would stop when he finally pulled his hand back.

  Dramash slumped to the floor in a dead faint and Rho staggered back with his stomach heaving and his hand on fire, struggling to keep from joining him on the floor.

  the emperor ordered. He sheathed his sword while the stunned guards scrambled to retrieve their own weapons.

  Rho did nothing to stop the guards as they picked up Dramash and took him away. He didn’t even watch them go, and he couldn’t look at Eofar either. Instead, he bent down to pick up the glove he had dropped and carefully pulled it back on. Kira had taken shelter on the far side of the cart. Despite her heaving chest, the emotions he sensed from her still had no depth; she remained the same shallow, reflective puddle she had been from the start.

  Rho said to Emperor Gannon,

  he said, waving a hand, already turning away. His coat—hundreds of lagramor pelts, like a whole swarm of the vicious little beasts—billowed out behind him as he headed for the doors to the throne room. The dogs were summoned back from where they had been chewing on the mangled body, clicking into step behind their master’s heels.

  Rho pulled up his hood and went back out into the gallery, down the steps and outside, drawing no attention at all from the crowds still lingering there. He had expected to be followed, and he had expected someone to call to him as he headed down the steps to the Front, but he did not expect the hand now on his shoulder to belong to Eofar.

  Rho asked him, seizing the front of Eofar’s coat.

 

  Rho admitted, releasing him. He walked down a few more steps, then stopped and asked Eofar,

 

  Rho asked.

  said Eofar, raising himself up. Now he was more like the haughty governor’s son Rho had known in the old days and less like a used bar towel.

  said Rho, even though he did have a problem; he just couldn’t articulate it.

 

  said Rho.

  said Eofar.

  Rho looked out over the black Front, at the cracks in the rock glowing faintly from the mists far below.

  said Eofar, before he trotted up a nearby set of steps and strolled into Eotan Castle as coolly as if he had been walking in and out of those iron-banded doors every day of his life.

  Rho realized his biggest problem was the degree to which he trusted Eofar. Which was not at all.

  Chapter 14

  Kira found Aline waiting in the gallery, holding her cloak.

  Aline asked as they made their way outside and down onto the Front.

  said Kira, pulling her gloves straight as they headed back through the crowded streets toward Arregador House.

  Aline blanched.

  She stopped at a crossing to let a cart rumble past.

  asked Aline, shivering under her wool cloak.

  said Kira.

  They walked down the curve of Vine Street and through a series of little courts where the green-glass casters, book-binders, goldsmiths, stonemasons and other artisans occupied themselves adorning and amusing those of her station. People gathered inside and in front of the workshops, but few were working, or even pretending to work. Kira lifted her chin as she felt them staring at her and added a little sashay of unconcern to her walk. She needed Rho to meet the same person he had just met in the throne-room: the emperor’s empty-headed mistress, unconcerned in anything outside of her own shallow interests. She had played her role well enough to fool these people; after three years without a word from him, she was certain she could fool him as well.

  The green-glass statue of Arregador, complete with pine-bough wreath and an armful of drooping branches, watched them approach from a niche above the entrance of the crypt. Kira glided up the steps behind Aline, her feet already numbed with cold. A supply of tapers waited just inside the entrance, but a light was already flickering far back in the corner, near Trey’s tomb. The crypt wasn’t very large—the building itself dated from just after the Stonewood Treaty, like most of the buildings in Ravindal, and had been intended only for those few Arregadors who, for whatever reason, could not be buried in the crypts on their family estates. Even so, the Arregadors couldn’t stop jostling each other out of the way in the service of their ambitions, and in angling for the most prominent positions, the placement of their tombs made it look as if someone had dropped them in this haphazard way and then forgotten to come back and arrange them properly.

  They made their way inside, winding slowly around pillars, tombs and sarcophagi, breathing in the smell of cold stone, frost and lamp-oil. Kira let her fingers slide over a stone arm here, a carved cheek there, noticing how the decorated lids became less and less ornate the further back they went.

  she told Aline as she stopped next to a plain, square tomb where a husband and wife slumbered sweetly with their arms around each other’s waists. She went on alone until she walked into the circle of light from Rho’s lamp, which he had set down on the crossed hands of the effigy on the next tomb over.

  he asked her, without lifting his eyes from the face of the effigy on his brother’s tomb.

  Kira took off her gloves and hood and tossed them down by the lamp.

 
said Rho.

  Kira said, loosening her coat at her throat, even though cold bled from the stone all around her.

  said Rho. He leaned against the lid and dug out a bit of dirt from a crevice with his fingernail. He was pretending to be the same old Rho and was apparently unaware of how miserably he was failing. She had already noticed the circles under his eyes in the throne-room, and the sag of his shoulders looked more like fatigue than his former indifference.

  Kira walked toward the wall past the foot of Trey’s tomb and looked up at a blackened torch in an icicle-bejeweled bracket.

  asked Rho. She could feel him shrinking behind her until he was little more than a floating point, like a beacon in the far distance.

  said Kira, still facing the wall.

 

  said Kira. Trey’s words came back to her, slippery with his wet blood: I think you owe me that much.