Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  I felt my legs give and he stepped forward to take my arm and bring me upright. It was an effort to walk with the poison deadening me. Thankfully it took some of the pain out of my belly too.

  “Tell him his people need him,” said the boy after me, once he’d helped me up them steps.

  As I entered the hall two were fleeing, a heavy voice bellowing after them. One had Post robes on. I realised the voice was Mirisham’s. He was a mountain-caller as a boy, had a bit of the horse-singer about him. His voice could shake you through if he chose to sing.

  The space between rows of benches that was normally reserved for those facing court was full of tables, covered in maps. About the floor and on the benches were huge bronze candle stands, their light a small orange pool only in the middle of this huge hall.

  Kigan was leaning on one of the benches, shuddering with the effort. Mirisham come to him from the tables. He caught Kigan as he was about to give way and fall. Kigan’s sword was on the floor. There’d been no struggle and it didn’t look like a subterfuge either. Mirisham looked up at me, then he looked back across to a figure dim in the candlelight.

  “Kailen, get his other arm, let’s sit him down.” Kailen? The man himself come out of the shadows there, like a ghost in a player’s tale. I couldn’t believe it. Kigan too stopped at this and looked up. Behind Kailen was Laun, but she didn’t move.

  “Kailen, let’s sit him down.”

  “Kailen!” I shouted. “Kill him! Kill that fucker what just killed Shale in the street, or I will.”

  He looked at us both and shook his head before going over to help Kigan sit at a bench.

  “He’s dying, Gant, we don’t need to hasten his death, least of all I don’t. I want it to last, and you can barely stand anyway. Sit with me, we’ll watch him die together.”

  He nodded to Laun, who come over to me then and helped me to a seat near the tables, opposite Kigan. Right then I didn’t think I was getting out of that hall, I had a fever starting and I was getting a bit spasmic.

  “Heard you died, Kailen. I were sorry fer it too, Shale were an’ all. We come to the Crag when you summoned us, quick as we could.” I stopped, thinking of what had happened the last few days, my last words with Valdir, and Shale just then. “I’m glad to see you alive all these years since Argir, fierce glad,” I said.

  Kailen sat next to me, heavily, a burden on him. Still, he put his arm about me and touched his head to mine, pleased to see me. Then he gestured over to Kigan, what were slumped next to Mirisham, blood dripping to the floor from where he sat.

  “Kigan tried and failed to kill me. I took a mix that made me seem dead and it worked. But while it saved my life it cost my wife hers and all I’ve built since being a mercenary. What do you say, Kigan?”

  “She was a broken-up bag of meat at the end, when Alon’s guards had finished with her,” Kigan leered.

  “Not Araliah,” I said, and I looked at him, fierce sorry for it. “She saved us; Achi and Stimmy and your boys come and… look, just fuckin’ end him, Kailen.” He’d balled his fist but his self-control took over, the calm he could put on that was what made him the difference for all those years among the leaders of mercenary crews. He put his hand on mine then.

  “Achi’s crew… They were good boys.” He was quiet a moment, staring at Kigan, who was struggling now, fumbling uselessly about the pockets on his tunic for plant to help himself. “But look at you, Gant. Still a strong colour, taking purses all these years. I’m sorry for Shale and so help me you look done too. I’m sorry all this came to pass as it did. I only tried to warn you and keep you safe. Now you’re all dead.”

  “You got nothing to be sorry over either, for we’d have done no different than come at your call, me, Shale and Valdir. I know you wants him to suffer, but just stick him an’ be done with it. I don’t care for his sufferin’ for it won’t ease mine, but I still want to see it before I’m dead meself.”

  “Shale’s killed me, Gant, I’ll die soon enough,” said Kigan. A pool of blood, for all his drudhaic work, was dribbling into a crack in the stone tiles of the floor by his boot.

  “I didn’t know if I would see you or Shale here,” said Kailen. “I put these Agents I hired out to look for Kigan, but I needed to stay here with Mirisham in case he got through. If I had any idea you were out there I would have come. Valdir didn’t make it?”

  “No, Kigan killed him an’ all, in a valley a few days south, along with yer man Achi an’ yer crew what Araliah sent after us, thank her.”

  He closed his eyes and had a deep breath. When he opened them they were full.

  “You took everything from me, Kailen. I’ve taken everything from you.” Kigan coughed and spat some blood on the stone at his feet.

  I hadn’t seen Kailen in so long and like Kigan he looked somehow younger and better than he had a right to. He was in leathers, full belt. His hair he kept the same way as he always had, close cut, plain, and it was still dark, which was a surprise. Mirisham sat with Kigan across from us. He’d eaten well over the years, chest and belly like one big barrel. His hair had grown long, streaked through with grey and the big round nose still commanded his face despite his neck and cheeks filling out like a squirrel’s.

  “Kailen here told me that you, Kigan, could not be dissuaded from looking for me, no doubt bent on revenge, while you, Gant, have a bounty on you a king would trade his kingdom for, killing a bunch of Reds in Issana I hear, then more in Jua near Cusston. The Post isn’t what it used to be, eh Kailen, but you’d know better than me.”

  “We din’t get so soft as you all these years, Miri,” I said. He ignored me. I was bitter, and didn’t feel much like talking.

  “What happened out there?” said Kailen to me.

  “Are you going to tell them?” said Mirisham, looking at him. Kailen was assessing me, seeing how bad I was, and he give a stern look to Mirisham regarding whatever his question was about.

  “Shale took the Flower o’ Fates,” I said. “Seems Kigan’s got plant beyond any of us now an’ Shale made the odds an’ did what he had to do. If yer Agent had a straw hat an’ fighting staff, he’s dead too. Laun, she helped us but we shoo’d her in here to look out for Mirisham, for I din’t know you’d be here.” Word of the manner of Shale’s death had given Kailen pause.

  “Been many winters since I saw a man use the Flower. You became a remarkable drudha in the Hanwoq, Kigan, and a finer sword than I had known if Shale, on both the Honour and with a Flower of Fates, could only kill you at the cost of his own life.”

  “Had that army of Caragula’s been his target, I daresay he’d be waist high at the gates now and drawing them on,” said Kigan, though not meaning to make much of his own skill by saying it.

  “Your mistake was not killin’ him when you had the chance, Kailen, back in Snakewood. That’s what Valdir said an’ it’s true as we sit here,” I said. “You fucked up, you an’ Miri an’ The Prince, sparing his life an’ now we’re all dead more or less.”

  “Do you have a command under this Caragula then, Kigan?” asked Mirisham.

  Kigan shook his head. “Petir does. Do you remember the name?”

  “Indeed, your seeking me could only have been revenge for what we did to you. Remarkable that that spoiled boy lived to become a captain of Caragula’.”

  Kigan looked up. “Not a boy any more. We both came back to end you.”

  “Well, I’m not going to sit here and wish it could all have been different. I didn’t care for you enough then or since. You were a vicious, self-interested bastard.” He said it with enough conviction, but his shoulders dropped a little then. He rubbed tired eyes before folding his arms on top of his firm belly.

  “Valdir told me some of it before he died,” said Kigan. “How you, him, Moadd, The Prince and Kailen all stole what was the children’s, betrayed the purse. What did you do with it all?” he asked, adjusting how he sat from some sharp pain he must’ve felt. His voice was thick with muke in his throat.

&nb
sp; “It burns all around us, it lies dying or dead in the streets, it is rounded up for captivity by the horde outside and it stands afraid in the square, waiting for me to offer its surrender to this wild pig that covets the sty of the Old Kingdoms. It’s a fine irony that Petir is looking to revenge the theft of his heirlooms and yet is in the midst of destroying what they built.”

  Mirisham stood and went to one of the tables on which were unrolled maps and other documents. He took something, a book or a box maybe, hidden in some oilcloth.

  “I know what you’ve become, Kailen, but I never spoke to you since we split up all those years ago, not until I got your letter. You may remember that I hailed from the mountain people who lived here, in the passes and the plains about, surviving off the edges of Issana and Vilmor and Jua. You decided it was over for the Twenty as the guilds had decided of King Doran, all those winters back. Fifteen fucking gold pieces and little but more bloodshed waiting, unless I wanted to eke out that purse in a slum for the twenty winters I thought I might have had left.

  “You, Kigan, were sitting there with us in Snakewood, on top of thousands of gold pieces tied up in that treasure. I thought of the hasts I grew up in; the brothers and sisters of mine still in the Aldenvale here, but hunted as slaves or else thieves when the want of food was their only crime.” He sat back down again, facing us, the thing he had he covered with his hands.

  “As a child I listened to my grandda, never tired of it. He told me of the Sixway, the old routes of the mountainers that run through from the vales hereabouts across to Mount Hope and from there of course down to the Sar itself.

  “Bandits run out our hasts, gangers that did too for the Post. The Post made its name for making the Sixway viable, doing what the kings and guilds about could not. The Post used to stand for something brave and good, wearing the Red every boy’s dream. Well, Mount Hope was exporting heavily with the routes east and west open, but this just drew the mobs in. They thrived and soon grew in number, which we suffered for. I remember my da, he got me up by my scruff, my legs dangling, held me up with a single arm, kissing my cheek and that of my ma. It was an ambush our hast had planned, fighting for the valleys and hills we’d grown up on. He didn’t come back. Ma sent me away when I started learning to fight with whoever I didn’t care for and the pits became a good place for a boy to work out his rage.

  “Hast Fathin, my hast, these people, I visited once or twice in the Twenty. Gave what I could but they lived like animals, dressed in skins and sunk fully, as is the way, with the view that it was all they deserved.”

  “So you reclaimed the Sixways,” I said, “hires a crew with your bit of that wealth and goes on a spree and brings your people home.”

  “I did, and this is Fathin, home to mine and those other hasts that were dispossessed of their old lands. This is what Doran’s gold built; good commerce, a livelihood for hundreds of men and women, craftsmen and merchants. Trade builds on itself and those in the farmsteads about themselves thrived with supplying this citadel. Despite what then happened with the Post coming in having learned I was one of those that had taken Argir’s wealth, I stayed, because as long as I had paid out, and I was alive, my people were what mattered. I’m sorry for Valdir, wasn’t anyone but the Post’s fault, but they kept their word. Tell me young Petir would have done as much, for as many.”

  Kigan spat some more bloodied muke on the flagstones before Mirisham. “Glad you felt ours was a price worth paying. What did my life compare after all, the suffering visited on me? I can’t say I’d have given a shit for your hasts, Mirisham, but I would not have betrayed you.”

  “Tell yourself that, Kigan, if it helps you die straight.”

  “We all paid the price, Miri, Kigan killed us all to get to you an’ Kailen,” I said. I turned to him then. “I expect you killed all the rest of us?”

  He shook his head, a quiver of something like amusement across his face. “The ephedra and the Droop took my memories, just pieces came back to me all these years. I recovered a memory only recently of most of you being there with me in Snakewood. Most of you knew what Kailen, Mirisham and the others had planned and you did nothing. I didn’t, for a long time, know it was these that had sold me into slavery, not until I found Milu, Kheld and Digs. I could not afford any of them warning you, less still let them live for their part of it. Everything had been taken from me. I was saved only by Lorom Haluim, saved as somehow Galathia was from her awful trials after Snakewood, and it was she that killed the rest, her own revenge on you in accord with mine. All of you are killed or dead except for we who are sat here, about to die ourselves.”

  “You spoke of Lorom Haluim, the magist?” said Mirisham. “You are one of those worshippers that hold to some set of sayings or way of life?”

  “No, he saved my life in the Hanwoq jungle. It was by his plant that I gained the strength to pay you back.”

  “He speaks truly, Mirisham,” said Kailen. “I recently read an account of his time there. His recipe book will now be the envy of all the world, as it is the cause of the end of ours.”

  Kigan was about to say something to that, as if there was some import in it. And I wasn’t aware of what that was until afterwards. Hearing that Kigan had met with a magist was incredible, almost a trick, but it was a strong explanation for his plant.

  Mirisham took a moment to consider what Kigan had just said. Some part of him probably didn’t think it was more than a tale.

  “So if you had the secrets of a magist’s plant, how is it your poison hasn’t yet killed Gant?” he asked.

  “He was wounded before I found him in the streets outside. I would have said he got it at the vineyard, but it smells like a special Blackhand.”

  “Crossroads job,” I said. “Blackhand sauce, a few weeks before we got word from Kailen the Twenty were bein’ killed. Din’t get me guaia in it an’ now the skin’s dead an’ me inside’s a mess your poison is finishing.”

  Kigan nodded. “Shale did for me before I could get to you. He was the threat, not you.” He give a hiss then, coughing, his breathing a watery rattling now. He looked me up and down. “If the special’s in that deep you’ve got little chance. I’ve got something here though, in this pocket, blue tube. Mix a thumb’s worth with some boiled water and flush out your wound, then drink the same till it’s gone. Of course, I see no reason to give it to you.”

  It was so quiet then for a moment that only the spitting candlewax could be heard, the fighting outside done. Like Kailen I had a moment where I’d have put my last breath behind a knife in his throat, but it passed quick with a flush of pain that I nearly passed out from.

  “Your father would have thought differently, Kigan,” said Mirisham. “For him, plant was an ease for the sick and dying, not a weapon, not withheld for revenge.”

  “What could you know of him?”

  Mirisham placed the object that was in his hands on his knees and he unwrapped the oilskin. It was Kigan’s old recipe book, taken from him at Snakewood. We’d all seen so much of it those years we’d been together. He give it to Kigan.

  “Your father never used a cyca to hide what was written, he never kept his recipes a secret from others. It saved a lot of lives, your recipe book, for that reason. In your father’s hand we read only cures and plant to ease pain and put things right. So much of that book that is by your hand is poisons. Perhaps if all you drudhas were like your father there’d be a lot less suffering in the world.”

  Kigan held the small pigskin-bound volume gently, running quivering fingers over the stained skin, the colour of mottled wood. He opened it at the first page and gasped. I couldn’t see much in the light; drawings and sketches, some were beautiful renderings of flowers and their roots, others seemed to be simpler drawings, a child’s, all squeezed around faint writing crammed onto the leaves. It was the book of his lifetime as a drudha.

  “Her name was Ilina,” he said. “Ilina.” He was lit up, tears filled his eyes. He was remembering it all, like the memories we
re real enough to shake him in his seat, and he addressed us then, all around us and what was happening forgotten, as though it was still years ago and we were sitting telling stories as we often did, though he struggled to tell us with his weeping. “She was my sister. She fell from a dry-stone wall we would play on, hit her head on a stone and it was bleeding fiercely. She was still, wouldn’t wake. I ran down the hill behind the rooms we stayed at, Vargas Lane. And the hill was Speaker’s Hill, yes, Speaker’s Hill. We all used to play up there in the foundations of that gatehouse to the old fort. I ran for him to come, he… I can see him now… he ran, he was brown and scarred, he’d been washing himself in the barrel, my da. He had his belt in his hand and he took quick, mighty strides, left me behind. Some others were there, but when I got there he had taken her head and got an ambin out from his belt, squeezed out its juice, which stopped her bleeding, and then it was a simple kannab leaf, then another. He’d kept them in a solution of black bistort, it’s here on this page. And then he put a pinch of euca over her nose and she opened her eyes shortly after and held up her arms to him, as though she knew all along it would be fine, because he was there, this big smile on them both as he lifted her up and spun her round, the boys and girls around me cheering him and joining in because when he was off the ships he was always good to them with limey sticks and apples. They all loved him. I held her hand as we walked back to our rooms, wondering what it felt like to save a life like that, how it must fill your heart up to see people get well because of something you did. The rest of this book we wrote together.”

  He forgot us for a time, lost in his da’s book and the discovering of his old life what he must have forgotten in the years since we last saw him, and what the ephedra must have took from him.

  Some men come in then and said a captain was there to talk about Mirisham meeting Caragula. Mirisham thanked them and bid them leave.

  He stood again and straightened himself, though one hip wasn’t allowing him his full bearing. He took a cloak from a bench behind him, some gold needlework in it from the looks, a judge’s cloak. Kailen stood with him.