‘I told him my story,’ Rubin went on, ‘and he listened.’ He looked at Valla. ‘Everything my father had told me made me believe Marcellus was cruel and ruthless. But he was friendly and sympathetic. He was interested in me and my life and asked me about my father and Indaro.’
‘Did he ask why you were in the sewers?’
‘No. But I told him everything about my time there, then he called one of his senior officers and ordered him to clear the reivers out of the Salient caves.’
‘And did they?’
‘I was told later that his troops slaughtered everyone in the reivers’ settlement – men, women and children.’
‘And the captives?’
‘Everyone.’ His eyes were looking inward again and Valla wished she hadn’t raised the subject when he clearly needed rest. She looked up. The moon was a silver sliver in the south and the stars shone in glory. She pulled her blanket out of her pack and wrapped it round her.
‘Sleep now,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps we will see the City in the morning.’
Rubin remembered the day vividly, for it was full of wonders.
He had never before set foot in the Red Palace. He’d spent all his first sixteen years in the house on the Salient, with its worn stone corridors, its shabby rooms overflowing with books and manuscripts on every flat surface. Perhaps he expected something similar, just bigger. But as the guards led him, shackled and filthy, towards his destiny he marvelled at the lofty ceilings and windows, the marble walls and echoing chambers, sunny courtyards awash with flowers glimpsed through carved and filigreed screens, the myriad turrets and minarets. Every few paces, it seemed, they went up or down a staircase, each one rioting with carvings and gilt and wide as a City street. The walls were hung with richly detailed tapestries, each worthy of a day’s scrutiny; the floors were rich with mosaics and decorated tiles; and everywhere tall statues gazed over the throng with blank eyes.
And the palace was in ferment that day. Bands of soldiers clattered down the corridors, most of them in the uniform of the City infantry or palace guards, some in the livery of the Thousand. Those elite warriors, in their black full-face helms with silver crests, their black leather body armour with silver decoration, were a sinister company. A detail of six followed Marcellus everywhere outside his own apartments, Rubin later learned, but he never became used to their silent, faceless presence.
Once the gleaming marble walls gave way to gold-encrusted alabaster, he was told he had entered the public places of the emperor and of the Vincerii – Marcellus and his brother Rafael. He was led at last into a dark, dusty chamber lit by sunlight slanting in from high windows. The room was decorated with a thousand birds and beasts, painted on walls and lofty ceilings, sewn into embroideries and upholstery, woven into rugs, their heads mounted on walls, their stuffed bodies prowling the hard stone floor. Not that he noticed all that at first. All he saw, standing in the centre of the room, was the man he recognized from his childhood as Marcellus Vincerus, First Lord of the City, its premier general. He was tall, taller than Rubin even, dressed neither in armour nor the rich robes of a nobleman, but in the austere, dark clothes of a scholar. He watched as Rubin was shoved forward by his guards.
‘What is your name?’ he asked, his voice neither deep nor high, his tone neutral.
Rubin drew himself up with the tattered remnants of his strength and looked into his black eyes. ‘Rubin Kerr Guillaume,’ he announced, though his voice sounded cracked and feeble.
Marcellus held his gaze for a long moment. Rubin felt his scalp begin to crawl and he had the urge to look away but the eyes held him captive. He could not move; he could not even blink. He heard a door open behind him. He became desperate to turn and flee through it but he could not escape. Then Marcellus’ gaze shifted and he was released.
‘This is clearly not the assassin,’ Marcellus said sharply to someone behind Rubin. ‘For one thing, he has his tongue.’ He waved the guards away.
Then he smiled and the room grew brighter. ‘Well, young Rubin, we have met once before, I think, in your father’s house.’
Rubin could not help but smile in response. ‘Yes, lord, I remember it well.’
‘But you were just a small child, staring at me from the balcony, grave as an owl.’
‘We had few visitors, lord, and never before one so eminent.’
Marcellus chuckled, then he ordered Rubin bathed and shaved and dressed, and later that day sat him down with fine foods and flagons of wine and quizzed him about his life.
But his first question was, ‘Tell me how you happen to speak Odrysian?’
Rubin explained about weapons master Gillard, whom Marcellus knew. This surprised Rubin at the time but he later learned his lord had a remarkable memory for faces and names and he had met very many people in his long life. He spoke admiringly of the old weapons master and Rubin, abashed, felt obliged to confess his deficiencies as a fighter. Marcellus listened without judgement. Then he spoke Odrysian himself, testing Rubin’s skill with the language. And that was the first time Marcellus said the words, ‘I have a mission for you, young Rubin.’
That first time he stayed in the Red Palace for ten days. Marcellus spent long hours with him, walking him round its great chambers as if he were an honoured ambassador from a foreign land, pointing out wonders of art and architecture, many of them made with skills now long forgotten. They strolled through lush gardens dressed with rare plants and Marcellus showed him the great aviary filled with brightly coloured birds from all over the world. At its centre a huge eagle, almost the height of a man, ignored them from a lofty log perch. Rubin was told it was an emperor eagle, caught as a chick and brought to the City from the Mountains of the Moon. The rare creature had been easy to trap for when hatched it had only one wing. Now it spent its days, its years, sitting immobile, eyes closed, dreaming its dreams of flight. But after dark the eagle was forced to climb gracelessly down the ladder that had been built for it and scuffle in the years-thick guano for food with lesser birds, hunting the sick and wounded and scuttling night-crawlers.
As they wandered the palace Marcellus would speak to its lords, generals, common soldiers, serving maids and horse boys, and all of them he knew by name and all he treated with a similar friendly interest. He introduced his brother Rafael, and Rubin hoped they might meet the Immortal, but was told the emperor rarely left his quarters in the Keep, deep in the heart of the Red Palace.
One day, as they made their way towards Marcellus’ apartments, Rubin was startled to see a huge beast step sedately from behind a columned stairway. It was a gulon. How strange that one should walk the palace, proud as a courtier. He had seen several of the beasts in the Halls, usually sitting high and distant, staring down at the Dwellers from the top of some gate or rocky shelf. They were a bit like cats, a bit like foxes, longer-legged than both, with strangely human eyes. This was a big one, twice the size of any he’d seen before. It wore a wide golden collar round its long, almost serpentine neck.
Rubin held out his hand, making clucking noises as if it were a friendly dog. He felt no fear of it. Gulons rarely attacked men, and then only when cornered or starving. This was clearly neither. It sidled up to him crab-wise and sniffed his hand cautiously. He was about to stroke it but thought better of it. Its short fur looked oily and unclean and its smell made his gorge rise.
‘This is Deidoro,’ Marcellus told him. ‘He is the emperor’s—’ He seemed to be about to add something more, but stopped.
‘It has a name?’ Rubin was amused.
‘Horses have names,’ Marcellus argued mildly.
‘It is not a horse. Although it’s very nearly as big as one.’
‘Deidoro is very old. Perhaps the oldest living creature in this palace.’ Rubin recalled those words later, when he knew more about the Serafim, and he knew then that it was a lie.
Marcellus called to the beast and it looked at him, its dark eyes gleaming. ‘Be off. Go find your master,’ Marcellus said softly, and
it favoured them both with its disconcerting human stare before sliding behind an embroidered wall hanging. The air it left behind smelled of spoiled meat.
Though Rubin became familiar with the palace and its inhabitants, he never again met the imperial gulon Deidoro or ever saw its master. He was always welcomed by Marcellus as a valued friend, made to feel one with the rich and powerful. He looked forward to his visits to the palace, in fact he lived for them. His time spent on spying missions abroad or dwelling, disguised, in the shabbiest quarters of the beleaguered City in a bid to infiltrate the bands of the disaffected who flourished there, were just necessary chores before returning to the presence of his lord.
One day during that first stay Marcellus quizzed him closely about the Dwellers and it became clear that a raid had been planned on the High Halls beneath the Red Palace. Rubin could give him scant information. After nearly two years living down there he was an expert at finding his way through the labyrinth, but he could not relate that knowledge to the geography above ground. If Marcellus thought he was being unhelpful he gave no sign.
But he asked an odd question. ‘Are there tales, rumours, of a lone woman who lives in the lower Halls, perhaps more than one?’
‘Most Dwellers fear the wraiths,’ Rubin told him, nodding. ‘They are said to be women, tall and ghostly, who walk the lower depths and steal children.’ He did not say that some Dwellers feared the wraiths more than the reivers, for at least the reivers were human, probably.
‘Have you seen one such?’ his lord asked.
Rubin shook his head, sceptical. ‘Lone women in the lower depths? No. I don’t think so. The lower depths are the haunt of reivers. If there were such women then their fate would be terrible.’
Marcellus nodded thoughtfully and changed the subject.
Valla could not sleep and, after tossing and turning for a while, she looked up to see Rubin still staring into the glow of the campfire.
She sat up and pulled her blanket round her shoulders. ‘Are you kin to the Vincerii?’ she asked him.
He frowned at her. ‘No. I don’t think so. There are seven ancient Families and Marcellus is a Vincerus and I am a Guillaume. I’ve no reason to think we are related, though we might share ancestors.’
‘Marcellus can do what you did, end a battle, stop everyone fighting. I’m surprised you don’t know, being good friends with him.’ She was a little jealous. She had known Marcellus for years and he had always treated her with courtesy. But Rubin was his friend.
Rubin nodded, understanding completely. ‘I have never been in battle alongside him, though I have heard soldiers gossip that he can call on sorcerous powers. I always thought it superstitious nonsense. Until now.’
Valla bit her lip. ‘I have seen him win a battle against the odds by launching death on everyone around him. Friend and foe.’ It had happened to her only once, in an encounter in the east with an overwhelming force of Buldekki. She had never spoken of what she’d seen, nor had her comrades who survived the day, but she found it impossible to forget.
‘But I felt contentment and peace when you did it,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t want to fight any more. Has nothing like that ever happened to you before?’
He paused, thinking. ‘When I was small, maybe six or so, I found a dead bird, a plain brown thing, in the garden at the foot of the house. It had flown into something, a wall, a window, and broken its neck. I showed my father. He said, “Perhaps you can make it live again.” I was only young so I thought he was probably right. I willed the creature to get up and fly away. But it just lay there cooling in my hands. Then,’ he went on, ‘when my mother was dying – I was fourteen – my father brought me to her bedside and told me to place my hands on her head. I remember being frightened for he was weeping. He seemed beside himself, desperate. I had never seen him show deep emotion before or since.’
‘He thought you had healing hands,’ Valla whispered.
‘He hoped, perhaps.’ He looked at her. ‘But I clearly don’t. For if I had I would heal your broken wing.’
The kindness in his voice threatened to overwhelm her and she rolled over, away from him, cradling her bad arm. Then she realized for the first time that it was barely hurting. Despite the jolting of the ride and the fatigue that dogged their every day, her arm was less painful than it had been since it was first injured. She looked at the fingers, but they still peeped out white and lifeless from the bandage.
‘Your arm is feeling better,’ Rubin said.
‘You read minds too?’ she asked a little snappily.
‘I do not have to read your mind to see your arm is not bothering you so much.’
She thought about it, unlooked-for hope rising in her breast. ‘It has been less painful. Perhaps you did something to help it, with . . . whatever you did.’
‘Or perhaps it is healing now you are away from the presence of the dead and dying.’
Unwilling to jinx it by talking about it, Valla sought a change of subject. ‘You must tell me what your message for Marcellus is,’ she said, not for the first time.
He shook his head. ‘I cannot.’
‘But we might be spotted by the enemy,’ she argued. She had been giving this a lot of thought. ‘If so, you are more likely to be killed than I am, for I am a warrior of the Thousand and you are, you tell me, an incompetent soldier.’
He raised his eyebrows, but did not argue.
‘Unless you can use this . . . ability of yours at will,’ she added questioningly. He shrugged. He had no idea.
‘So you must tell me what is so important that Marcellus must hear it,’ she urged. ‘In case you die and I survive to pass the message on.’
He thought about it, eyes lowered. Then he shrugged. ‘It’s probably far too late. But you’re right.’
He told her that before he was injured, in his role as third messenger he had infiltrated the Blues’ camp in the night and was taken to the command tent.
‘I stood outside in the cold,’ he said, ‘and listened. There were two civilians in there, a man and a woman, as well as senior soldiers, both Odrysian and Petrassi. I don’t know who the man was, some fat old man who looked as though he’d dressed in the dark. But the woman took my interest. She was tall and thin, with grey hair and a clumsy, ungainly gait.’
He looked at Valla. ‘You must understand how unusual it is to see a woman in an Odrysian force. They are not permitted to fight and, though there are camp-followers, they are fewer than you’d expect. So this woman caught my interest.’
Valla smiled. It came as no surprise that in the midst of a desperate mission, with time against him and far still to go, Rubin was inquisitive about this midnight meeting.
He said, ‘I cudgelled my brain to remember where I had seen her before.’
He paused and, dutifully, Valla nodded to him to go on.
‘I have kept this to myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve told only Saul Gaeta, and I was reluctant to do that but we needed the horses.’
‘I would tell no one but Marcellus,’ she promised, thinking, Who could I tell?
‘It came to me at last. I had seen the woman in the Red Palace. She was with a group of people, including the Vincerii, at some meeting.’ His eyes were anxious as he said, ‘She is the City’s Lord Lieutenant of the East. Her name is Saroyan. She is in charge of troop deployments in the palace and if she has turned traitor then the City is in desperate trouble!’
PART TWO
The Feast of Blood
CHAPTER EIGHT
A FEW DAYS later and far to the south a chill wind howled through the streets of the City. It blew along the alleys and twittens, lifting tarpaper roofs from the hovels of the poor and slates from the roofs of the wealthy. It whipped round the towers and minarets of the Red Palace, sighing through its iron gates and flaying reddened leaves from trees in its parks. Rain rattled the windows, as if seeking entry, then found its way in around ill-fitting frames and through cracks in stone.
The quarter called Lindo, or
the Armoury to those who remembered the old days and the old ways, was a maze of lanes and pathways, cramped squares and hidden passageways. One alley, so narrow and obscure as to be nameless, led off Dumbwoman’s Lane, and at the corner of these two ways, on this rainy autumn morning, sat a gulon.
Gulons, half-fox, half-cat, half-forgotten by their original masters, had been brought to the City more than a thousand years before and, as they had been designed to, had mated with the local cats and dogs. Most of them, over the generations, had lost the identity of their bloodlines among those of the mangy mutts and malevolent mogs that thronged the City. But some retained their purity, though much diminished, and the gulon which waited that rain-soaked morning was one such. Small for its species, less than half the size of the imperial beast Deidoro, it was a patchwork of orange and white and black fur, with chewed, misshapen ears and a healthy colony of fleas.
The sideways rain dripped off its snout and formed fat pearls on its waterproof coat, but it kept its eyes fixed on the north, thick lashes half closed to protect its eyes from the rain and wind. The sun would not show itself that day until much later, but at the time when its first rays would have reached the tallest tower, the bells of the Temple of Themistos started their daily clangour. If the crash and clang of the huge iron bells caused discomfort to the beast, it merely closed its eyes a little more, as if that would help, and continued to wait.
When the tall figure, caped and hooded, strode into sight the gulon made no sign it had seen her, but as she swept past, bringing to its nose the scents of leather and horses and herbs and the faintest sting of alcohol, it fell in behind her and padded down the nameless alley, treading in her bootsteps.
The alley, narrow at its mouth, tapered further until it zigged sharply to the right, then zagged to the left, opening out again to embrace a few shabby shops – a shoe repairer, a potter, a maker of vellum – and came to an abrupt end at the rear of the temple. Only the sharpest of eyes would notice the ancient door set into the wall, beneath a wide and heavy lintel, half hidden by dusty ivy, apparently unopened for generations.
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