She sat and waited.
“Well?” he snapped.
“Do I have your majesty’s permission to speak?”
“Oh, Mother of the fucking Revelation, Archeth, don’t sulk! Yes, speak. Speak. It’s what I pay you for, isn’t it?”
She marshaled her words with care. She’d come to the palace with the avowed intention of scaring the shit out of Jhiral. Now she wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.
“My lord, according to the Helmsmen, the dwenda were a race with mastery of worlds that lie parallel to our own, worlds that in some way seem to occupy almost the same space as ours, that are no farther away than your bedchamber is from where we sit now. I can’t say I understand how this is supposed to work, but it does correspond to some of the common Aldrain legends in the north, which claim that certain places are inhabited by otherworldly creatures in a way that is hidden from human eyes. An isolated mountain crag becomes a fairy-tale castle at certain hours of the night, or in the midst of a powerful lightning storm; you can knock on a forest oak and it will be opened to you like a gate, but only on certain nights of the year; and so forth. I find in these stories an echo of the Kiriath tales of voyaging here from another world, which is why I am inclined to take them seriously, but there is one major difference. My people were forced to seek out the deepest, hottest, most pressurized places in the bowels of the earth before they could find a way to pass between worlds.” She paused, measured her tone again before she plunged on. “The dwenda, it seems, can effect this passage anywhere they choose. They can enter this world at will, at any given point.”
Her words seemed to evaporate into the quiet. Small, domestic sounds seeped in from elsewhere in the palace. Banging of doors, voices giving instructions. Behind the wall, water gurgled in pipes. The Emperor looked at his hands again.
“You’re saying this isn’t just a northern problem, then,” he muttered.
“I’m saying, my lord, that until we have a clear idea of what the dwenda want, geography as we understand it is largely meaningless. These creatures could show up anywhere from the Demlarashan wastes to the palace gardens right here in Yhelteth. We simply do not know.”
Jhiral grunted. “And this stone idol? You seemed pretty fucking convinced last night that it was the key to the incursion. Changed your mind all of a sudden?”
“No, my lord. I still believe it is important. But it’s the first of its kind that I’ve ever seen.” Though both Angfal and Kalaman recognized it from my description and nearly shit rivets when they did. But you don’t need to know that right now, my lord. “Elith brought it with her when she was resettled, but she was already at that point a deeply disturbed woman. It is heavy, bulky, and far from attractive in aspect. I think it’s safe to say such things are not a common possession of Naomic peoples, either here or in the north. A few might exist, here or there, but—”
“We could always institute a search. House-to-house, immigrant districts throughout the Empire.”
Hoiran’s fucking balls. “We could do that, my lord, but I am not convinced that it would be an efficient use of manpower. In fact, I have an equally direct but somewhat smaller-scale plan of action that perhaps my lord would—”
“Yes, all right.” Jhiral gestured wearily. “Don’t sugarcoat it to death. I already guessed you wouldn’t have come all the way up here at this time of day unless you wanted something. Come on then, let’s hear your bright idea.”
It felt like stepping off a bobbing coracle and onto a slippery but solid jetty. Archeth tried not to let her relief show. Carefully, then, very carefully:
“The woman Elith and the idol she brought with her are originally from Ennishmin, more precisely from the eastern fringes of that province.”
The imperial lip curled. “Yes, that’s a godforsaken corner of the world. You’d think she’d have been glad to get south to some decent weather.”
“Uhm—yes, my lord.”
“That was a joke, Archeth.”
“Yes, my lord.” She patched together a smile. “Ennishmin is not blessed with ideal weather.”
The look in Jhiral’s eyes hardened. “Don’t fucking humor me, woman. You really think I’d have put up with your drug-soaked insubordination and superior airs this long if I didn’t value you for something other than sycophancy? Revelation knows, I get enough of that from the rest of the court. You, Archeth, I trust to tell me the truth, even if it upsets me. So get on with it. Upset me, if that’s what you’re planning to do. What about Ennishmin?”
“Yes, my lord.” The krin was building a shrill desire to scream in his face. She held it down, barely. “When I mentioned the origins of the idol to the Helmsmen, both of them independently concluded that the Khangset incursion was probably a navigation error on the part of the dwenda. That they had intended to arrive in the east of Ennishmin and the relocation of the idol threw them off. Imagine trying to follow a map that’s thousands of years old. It would be easy enough to make mistakes.”
“So these creatures are not perfect, then. Not angelic essences condensed to flesh, the way the Revelation promises. I suppose that’s some relief.”
“They are very far from perfect, my lord. What the Helmsmen told me suggests a wildly impulsive nature, barely governed by the wisdom they must have accumulated over a million or more years of unchanging existence. And—” She hesitated, because even remembering this next piece of the puzzle still sent a chill scrabbling up her spine. “According to Angfal, they may not even be sane, not as we would understand the concept.”
Jhiral frowned. “I’ve heard that said about outlanders and enemies before, and I don’t generally trust it. Just too bloody convenient, the quick and easy way to deal with difference. Oh, they’re not like us, they’re insane. It saves you having to think too much. They said the Majak were insane when we first ran into them, said they were semi-human beasts that howled and ate human flesh, and it turned out they were just a lot tougher than us on the battlefield. Come on, Archeth, I’ve heard it said on occasion that your people were insane by human standards.”
“Yes, my lord. Which is precisely Angfal’s point. The mental . . . changes . . . that the Kiriath went through on their voyage here appear to have been the result of a single passage through the spaces between worlds, a single exposure. The dwenda, it seems, live in these spaces, inhabit them as a matter of course. I don’t like to think what that must have done to their sanity. I’m quite certain a human could not survive it undamaged.”
Jhiral sat and thought about it for a while. He rested his arm on the chair, put his chin on a loosely curled fist, and stared at Archeth as if hoping she’d go away. He sighed.
“So you’re telling me—you seriously believe this, Archeth—that these immensely powerful, possibly insane beings have some special interest in Ennishmin.” The coughed-up laugh again, the throwaway gesture. “Well, I mean, they’d have to be insane, wouldn’t they? A shit-hole northern province that grows turnips or hunts swamp snakes for a living, and barely makes its tax bill each year. What possible earthly use is it going to be to them?”
“The Helmsmen have an explanation of sorts, my lord. It seems what is now eastern Ennishmin was once the site of a decisive battle against the dwenda. The swamps at the eastern end of the province are apparently not wholly natural. According to Angfal, they were originally created by some cataclysmic weapon the Kiriath deployed there. I wonder if that weapon didn’t have some effect on the barriers between worlds, perhaps make them easier to breach than elsewhere. Stories of hauntings and apparitions apparently persist in the local culture, and there’s some kind of trade in so-called Aldrain artifacts, things retrieved from the swamps that are reckoned to have magical powers.”
Jhiral snorted. Archeth nodded a measured dose of agreement.
“Yes, it’s improbable, I agree. In fact, these artifacts are probably mostly bits and pieces left behind by the Kiriath armies in the past. But there may be an element of truth to the tales as well. In the market
s and specialist shops in Trelayne, where Aldrain lore is an affectation among the rich, I quite often saw objects that didn’t appear to be of human manufacture, but were not reminiscent of anything my people might build, either.”
“You’re saying the dwenda have come back to the site of an old defeat. What for, revenge?” Jhiral shook his head. He even smiled, but she thought there was an edge of bitterness on it. “Well, they’ve come a little late for that. Perhaps someone should go up there and tell them they just missed their ancient enemies on the way out the door at An-Monal. Maybe then they’ll leave us alone.”
“Or maybe not, my lord. The war against the dwenda was apparently an alliance of Kiriath and human, in much the same way as the war against the Scaled Folk. If your enemy has fled but his dogs remain guarding the hearth, what will you do with those dogs?”
Jhiral nodded. It was logic he understood.
“So you want to go to Ennishmin. Is that it?”
“I think leading an expeditionary force there might be advisable. A thousand men, say, with engineering support, could—”
“A thousand men?” Jhiral seemed genuinely aghast. “Where exactly do you think I’m going to snap my fingers and get a thousand men from? This isn’t wartime, you know.”
“No, my lord. Not yet, it isn’t.”
“Oh, that’s a ridiculous thing to say.” The Emperor surged to his feet, stormed to the window, and stood staring out. Came back. “And—look—even if it’s not, Archeth, even if this is the prelude to some kind of conflict—the attack came from Khangset, from the west and from the ocean. You’re asking me to commit a major force twelve hundred miles away on a completely different frontier, all staked on not much more than some mumblings from senile machinery and a theory you haven’t slept on yet.”
“My lord, I realize—”
“Well, I don’t think you do, Archeth.” His voice trod hers down. “I don’t think you’ve noticed, in the depths of your drugged-up self-pity and obsession, that we’re trying to run an Empire here. Currently, we’ve got the Trelayne League stamping their collective feet and making angry diplomatic noises about trade restriction again—those motherfuckers certainly forgot pretty fucking fast who kept them afloat during the war—and by all accounts they’re building a new navy into the bargain. We’ve got an upsurge in piracy along the southern coast, some kind of horseshit religious schism going on at Demlarashan that’ll probably need riot control before the end of the year. And on top of that I have provincial governors marching into my throne room every fucking month like clockwork to whinge at me about supply lines and banditry and public health crises, but not one single one of them ever wants to come up with the taxes we’d need to solve those problems. The long and the short of it is, Archeth, I can’t fucking give you your thousand men, because I don’t fucking have them to spare.”
AND THAT WAS THAT.
Archeth collected her horse and wended her way back down into the city, muttering to herself and grinding her teeth; clear indications—as if I fucking needed them—that she’d overdone the krinzanz. The strengthening midmorning sun stung her eyes, layered her shoulders with the promised heat of the day to come. Worst of all was the knowledge within her that Jhiral had a point. The Empire didn’t have a lot of excess military capacity. The war dead numbered in the tens of thousands, and the devastation wrought by the Scaled Folk was massive. Across the whole imperial domain, the population was only just starting to get back on its breeding feet. Most farms and manufacturies were still desperately short of labor. The levies had been cut back as soon as a workable peace and a stable frontier could be hammered out with Trelayne, not because the Empire was weary of war, but because Akal’s economic advisers had bluntly told him that if he didn’t slacken the demand for soldiers soon, his harvests would rot in the fields and his subjects would starve. It was that as much as anything else that brought imperial ambitions in the northwest to an abrupt, conciliatory halt.
Bring me some evidence, Jhiral told her as she was leaving. Something solid. I’ll put the army back on a war footing if I have to, but I won’t do it for rumor and conjecture and a few trinkets you once saw in a shop window in Trelayne.
Then give me a reduced force, she’d pleaded. A few hundred. Let me—
No. I’m sorry, Archeth. He did genuinely seem to be. Quite apart from anything else, I need you here. If there is a crisis, I need to be able to point you at it pretty fucking fast, and I can’t do that if you’ve gone haring off to the wrong end of the Empire.
Perhaps he was even right. Degenerate lifestyle aside, he wasn’t a stupid man.
She thought abruptly of Ishgrim’s pale curves, thought about owning them the way Jhiral had, the way he owned the three sleeping girls in his bed now. Owning the belief, no not even that, owning the knowledge that this was flesh you had a right to use like any other purchased thing you might have in the house. Like the flesh of the fruit you kept in the larder, the leather of a jerkin you liked to wear.
Perhaps you’re the stupid one, Archidi. Ever think of that?
She dismounted into the sunlit quiet of the courtyard, beset by her own murmuring, circling thoughts. No sign of the stable boy. Well, he wasn’t the sharpest pin in the box, but still, he should have heard Idrashan’s hooves on the cobbles when she rode in. She glanced sourly toward the stables, felt a spike of krin-driven anger, and tamped it back down with great care. You don’t take it out on the servants, Flaradnam had told her when she was about six, and it stuck. She led Idrashan over to the hitching rail by the stables, looped the reins there, and went to look for Kefanin.
Found him.
Bloodied and crawling on hands and knees, just inside the main door. He’d heard her come in, was trying to get up. The blood made a darkened, matted mass of his hair on one whole side of his head. It dripped off his face onto the flagstones, spotted them in a line where he’d crawled.
She stopped dead, rigid with shock.
“Kef? Kef?”
Kefanin looked up at her, mouth working, making the repeated silent gape of a gaffed fish. She dropped to her knees at his side, gathered him up, and got his mouth close to her ear. She felt the blood smear on her cheek.
“I’m sorry, milady,” he uttered, voice clicking and breathless, barely audible. “We tried to stop them. But they took her.”
CHAPTER 25
For Ringil, the days that followed were like fever dreams from some battlefield injury that wouldn’t heal.
He couldn’t be sure how much of it Seethlaw was inducing for his own purposes and how much was just a levy-standard human reaction to time spent in the Aldrain marches. Either way, it was pretty horrible. Landscapes and interiors he thought were real would suddenly melt without warning, collapse around him like walls of candlewax bowing to the flame; worse still, behind them was a radiance that glimmered coldly like bandlight on distant water, and a sense of exposure to the void that made him want to curl up and cry. Figures came and went who could not possibly be there, stooped close to him and bestowed cryptic fragments of wisdom on him, each with the chilly intimacy of serpents hissing in his ear. Some of them he knew; others brought with them a nightmarish half familiarity that said he ought to know them, maybe would have known them if his life had only turned out fractionally different. They at any rate affected to know him, and the dream logic of their assumption was the thing he came to dread most, because he was tolerably sure he could feel aspects of himself ebbing away or shifting in response.
If it’s true, Shalak pontificated, one warm spring evening in the garden behind the shop, if it’s really a fact that the Aldrain realms stand outside time, or at least in the shallow surf on time’s shores, then the constraints of time aren’t going to apply to anything that goes on there. You think about that for a moment. Never mind all that old marsh-shit about young men seduced by Aldrain maids into spending a single night with them and going home the next day to find forty years have passed. That’s the least of it. A lack of time presuppos
es a lack of limits on what can happen at any given point as well. You’d be living inside a million different possibilities all at once. Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane.
You think about that, he repeated, and leaned in close to whisper. Give us a kiss, Gil.
Ringil flinched. Shalak wavered and went away. So did a large chunk of the garden behind him. Flaradnam stepped through the blurry space it left, seated himself opposite as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Thing is, Gil, if I’d taken that attitude at Gallows Gap, where would we be now? I’d never have made it back in one piece.
What attitude? Ringil shook his head numbly, stared back at the seamed anthracite features. You didn’t make it back, ’Nam. You never got to Gallows Gap in the first place. You died on the surgeon’s table.
Flaradnam pulled a face, as if he’d just been told a joke in very poor taste. Oh come on. So who led the charge at the Gap, if it wasn’t me?
I did.
You?
Yes! Me! Shouting now. You were fucking dead, ’Nam. We left your body for the lizards.
Gil, what’s the matter with you? You’re not well.
And so on.
“DO YOU EVER GET USED TO IT?” HE ASKED SEETHLAW ACROSS A SOFTLY snapping campfire in a forest he didn’t remember walking into. Thick green scent of pine needles mingled with the smoke. He was shivering, but not with cold. “How long does it take?”
The dwenda cocked his head. “Get used to what?”
“Oh, what do you think? The ghosts, the visitors I’m getting. And don’t tell me you don’t fucking see them.”
Seethlaw nodded, more to himself than to the human he faced. “No, you’re correct. I do see them. But not as you do. They are not my alternatives, they mean nothing to me. I see a faint gathering of motion around you, that’s all. Like a fog. It’s always that way with humans.”
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