by Patty Jansen
By the skylights.
He turned around, glaring at the back of the Knight who had brought it. “Hey, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”
“Check it. The Supreme Rider says you know about this stuff.”
Carro turned the first page. Crops, fences, many words he didn’t recognise. He let his shoulders sag. “What is this? A farm budget?”
“You got it. Did you think this place ran on thin air, did you?”
“So . . . it belongs to us?”
“Smart boy.”
A few men laughed.
“Anyone got a dictionary?”
“You’re smart, you make it up.”
Carro cursed silently. “Why do you need me to do this?”
A few quick footsteps, and the man leaned over him, menacing. He wore a Senior badge. “Look, pup, I don’t care who you are, but in this room, we shut up and work.”
* * *
The figures at the end of the page do not add up. Carro sits and stares at them, through eyes gone teary with cold. His hands hurt and his feet hurt and his father is waiting outside the room. But he knows his numbers, and these ones do not add up.
His father yells, Hurry up, the tax collectors are nearly here.
But something is wrong, he says. In fact, it’s more than that. The numbers are very wrong, and to check them, he needs a lot more time than his father is willing to give him. There are so many stupid mistakes.
Then make the numbers right.
Carro squeaks. I can’t. The tax collectors will notice. He knows these men and they can add up better than he can. They will notice that there is a huge sum missing from the books.
But his father grabs his collar and shakes him. Make it right.
So Carro does the only thing he can think of: he rubs out a few lines and a few numbers. He makes expenditure higher, and income lower. Quickly, he adds the amounts until the columns balance, and hopes the tax collector will not ask to check the money in the safe.
* * *
Carro worked, his pencil scratching over the paper. Sweat rolled over his back. He didn’t want of these Knights to notice that he drifted off; he didn’t want these visions. He wanted nothing to do with this book.
The draft that went through the room was cold, reminiscent of the warehouse. There was no fire, like in the warehouse. The Senior Knight was pacing like his father used to do. With every step he heard his father coming closer.
Add up numbers.
No, that was wrong. He rubbed out his calculations.
Add up again.
The result was wrong. The two columns didn’t match, like in the warehouse. Any moment now and his father would come and scold him. He was no fighter, not much of a spy, no hunter, and he’d also fail at accounting.
* * *
Why are you all blue around your neck? Isandor asks.
Seated on the lid of a rubbish container in a narrow alley, Carro sips his soup and tells Isandor of the columns of non-matching figures. He tells Isandor of how he rubbed out and changed the numbers, with his father watching over his shoulder. He tells how his father grabbed him around the neck as if he was going to choke him to death, but then shoved him in the cold cupboard and left him there while the tax collector went over his father’s books, saying things like, Your business hasn’t done very well this year.
And all the while his father was explaining about how he was robbed and how his wife’s family was asking for return of a loan they had given only a few years earlier.
It was all nonsense, he says and looks into Isandor’s blue eyes. There’s despair inside him, bursting to come out.
Maybe your father doesn’t want to pay his taxes, Isandor says.
But he should. He makes a lot of money.
Lies are the worst thing in the world.
* * *
Yes, Carro remembered that. He’d been ten or so, just a little boy.
And now all these figures danced before his eyes. They didn’t add up either, far from it. Someone had made a big mess of this book.
The touch of a hand on his shoulder made him gasp. He whirled around and looked into the face of Rider Cornatan, smiling.
“I’m glad to see you made it, son.”
Carro didn’t know what to say. What had his father heard from the hunters? That they hadn’t killed the Queen? That he’d let her escape?
Finally, he said, “I’m glad that you’re safe, too.”
His father laughed. For that he was a refugee, he was extra-ordinarily well-groomed. His uniform was as crisp and clean as it had been in the City of Glass. Not like Carro’s which had stains that didn’t come out no matter how much he scrubbed it.
“We managed to get away just in time.”
“But . . . what happened in the City of Glass?”
His father’s face went serious. “There was a huge explosion. Some saboteur blew up our experimental installation, and it set off a chain reaction.”
“The Heart?”
“No longer there, I’m afraid.”
Carro thought of the cellar where his father had taken him, where he’d seen the merchant treated with that machine. He remembered the table with metal implements. The eerie feeling as he hesitated to touch anything. The metal of the staff going cold in his hands. It seemed such a long time ago. Back when his life had been innocent.
“Much of the City of Glass has been destroyed. There is too much icefire even for us. It will take a long time before it is safe for anyone to go there again.”
“What about . . . all the people?” His father—no, not his father—the merchant, his snarky wife, his sister, Isandor’s mother. By the skylights, would he ever find ichina to cure his infliction now?
“Many of the Knights got away,” Rider Cornatan said.
“And the other people?”
Rider Cornatan’s eyebrows went up in a I didn’t know you cared about them kind of look. “The Outer City was destroyed in a fire. I don’t know how many got out.”
Carro stared at him.
What, are you saying that they’re all dead?
His eyes pricked, and that made him angry. He’d always said he didn’t care about the merchant and the rest of the family. But . . . all gone?
His neighbours, and Isandor’s mother, and the girls he’d eyed in the marketplace, and . . . all gone?
Rider Cornatan’s voice came from far off. “I understand that you didn’t find the Queen.”
“No.”
Carro sat stiff, with his hands clasped in his lap and waited for his father to speak, for punishment.
But Rider Cornatan said nothing.
Hatred burned in his father’s eyes, but Carro didn’t know who was the subject of the hatred. So he sat and waited to be punished.
Then his father said, “Come.”
* * *
Carro stands in his father’s study. By the light of the fire, his father sits at his desk. His face looks old.
Why are you so late?
I was out with friends.
You don’t have any friends. Only that cripple boy and if I see you with him again I will come and chop off his other leg. He gives you ideas.
What ideas? I only want to play. Isandor comes from a poor family, but he still has more toys. He has a box of colourful blocks made from real wood. He has no father, but Isandor’s mother cares a lot about him.
* * *
Rider Cornatan went out the room, a little way along the dark corridor, and into another door. The room on the other side was huge, with dust-sheet covered furniture towards the far end. The windows were dirty, with lots of
cobwebs in the corners.
Carro’s footsteps echoed against the ceiling.
“Nice mansion, isn’t it?” Rider Cornatan chuckled. “This is the country house of the old southern ambassador. While the people starved in the City of Glass, the King’s cronies lived in luxury.”
In the far corner of the room, near the window, the sheets had been pulled off two couches and a low table between them. There was a cabinet against the far wall on which stood a selection of bottles.
Rider Cornatan gestured to sit, so Carro sat, the muscles in his legs stiff with tension.
“And, what have you found out so far?” said Rider Cornatan while settling on the other couch.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been checking the accounts, as far as I know.”
“Yes, but why—”
“With what’s happened in the south, we’re going to be here for a while. The icefire bubble is still expanding. This place has been allowed to become run-down, and I’m aghast at how poorly the caretaker has looked after it. I had hoped there would be a nice little bit of farm income for us to buy essentials, such as food. But the caretaker fled as soon as we turned up here, and the books are not up-to-date. At this rate, we can’t support the troops still coming from Arania. We need money, and we need to obtain it in such a way that is not going to anger the Chevakians. Your work is extremely important. You need to find us that money.”
Carro nodded, but his inner voice squealed, But what if there is none?
Rider Cornatan continued, “Of course, it could well be that it could take us a while to retrieve that money. In that case, we’ll need to look for opportunities to get some.”
“Why don’t we hunt our own food?” The Knights always did that.
“There are too many of us here. The Chevakians would be upset. There are not enough large animals in this country anyway.”
“Why don’t you offer to help the Chevakians and they might give us food or money?”
Rider Cornatan smiled. “That’s exactly the idea. Except that damn upstart of a new proctor is too suspicious. I sent two men to act as interpreters for the camp of refugees, but the refugees didn’t like them and now the Chevakians are suspicious. We need to work harder at gaining their trust. Us, over the Brothers. But the people in the camp can’t be allowed to see who we are. I must remain hidden. I want you to be the face of the Eagle Knights.”
* * *
Carro’s father says, Don’t be afraid. They only ask stupid questions.
But Carro feels very small and scared. His father leaves the room and goes to open the door.
Carro sits at the desk in the chair where his father never allows him to sit. He can hear the footsteps in the warehouse. The voice of a man. Laughter.
Go and see my son, sir. He does the accounts.
Carro glances at the books, and counts the steps. One, two, three.
Any moment now and the tax collector will knock on the door.
* * *
Carro turned to the window, feeling chilled and sweaty at the same time. He was no prince, and he was no leader, and he had no intention to become the person to blame if things went wrong. Forcing the common people of the Outer City into accepting Knight rule was wrong. Knights did not rule, they protected. The queen ruled.
“Pour us a drink, son, and I’ll tell you our plan.”
Carro crossed the room to the cabinet against the wall, where dusty glasses stood amongst an assortment of jars, carafes and bottles. He wondered how the ambassador had left all those years ago, and why he has such a wild range of chemicals in his drinks cabinet. A jar of salt, all gone hard and stuck together. Lumps of an unidentified white crystals in a bottle of oil. Carro opened the lid. A sharp scent made him cough. Phooey. What was that awful stuff?
A tiny glass vessel with an ornate glass lid contained something he did recognise: light blue cyan crystals. Weren’t they used as a crude method of assassinating your political opponents?
What sort of man had this ambassador been? Maybe his departure had less to do with the south’s involvement in the border raids than with the behaviour of their representative in Tiverius.
“What are you doing over there, son? The carafe of bloodwine is on the shelf,” Rider Cornatan said.
Carro hesitated, the jar of cyan crystals in his hand. Drop a crystal or two in someone’s drink and they would die a painful death. He imagined the merchant writhing on the floor, but got no satisfaction from the image. Everyone in the City of Glass had died.
This was not about him and his petty problems, it was about the people of the City of Glass. It was about the City of Glass that didn’t exist anymore, and all its citizens forced to live here.
Rider Cornatan had known what was happening and had not warned the people. Rider Cornatan wanted to destroy the royal family, and anything that was outside his control. Rider Cornatan didn’t care about the Chevakians, the ordinary people who had done nothing wrong.
“What’s keeping you, son?”
“Uhm—nothing.” Carro set the jar of crystals down, hidden behind two larger bottles. “It seems you expected something like this to happen.”
He picked up the carafe, poured two drinks, and handed one to his father. Rider Cornatan drank deeply, then breathed out satisfaction.
“Always be prepared for everything, son. Now let me tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to send you to talk to the Chevakians.”
BOOK 3
BLOOD & TEARS
BLOOD & TEARS
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 1
* * *
IT WAS WELL PAST midnight when the truck stopped at the gate of Sady’s house. Orsan got out of the seat next to the driver, walked around the side and opened the door for Sady, who let himself down, pulling the sides of his cloak together against the biting wind.
“Thank you,” he said to the driver.
“My pleasure, Proctor. Get some rest. I’ll be back here tomorrow morning, as usual.”
Sady nodded. Thank the heavens for faithful staff.
He walked through the gate, where Orsan exchanged a few words with the young guard Farius. Then across the path flanked by meticulously-clipped bushes, up the steps to the front door.
The night was darker and even more quiet than normal. Low scudding clouds stopped any moonlight reaching the ground, and ever since the bell had rung, the people of the city kept indoors. For the first time in Sady’s memory, the famous street lights of Tiverius remained unlit.
The only light in the hall was the lamp that Lana lit every day after dark and that normally
burned all night. By its flickering light, Sady turned to Orsan.
“Any word from my house guests?”
Orsan shook his head and fixed him with an intense stare. “Sady, they can wait until morning. Get Lana to make you some soup and go to bed. I’ll be out at the gate if you need me.” He gave a customary bow and left.
Sady couldn’t argue with Orsan’s reason. Soup sounded great. Bed even better, although he suspected that once he lay down, sleep would be the last thing that came to him.
After the skirmishes in the refugee camp, he had gone back to his office to deal with the polite unhappiness of the senators, and with the much more rude complaints of the citizens, who told him bluntly that they did not want this southern menace in their city. Mercy, could these people just explain to him what they would have done with all those refugees? Turn the trains around and send the poor wretches back to their ravaged country?
He took his cloak off in the hall, and with it, the stoic façade of strength. He let his shoulders sag and dragged his hands across his stubbled face. He didn’t think he’d ever been so tired in his life.
But even here, in the comfort of his house, he still saw the people on the platform. He saw the stack of bodies. A tangle of arms and legs, coated in indescribable filth. He saw the wretched survivors with weeping sonorics wounds. He smelled the incredible stench. He saw the angry faces of the refugees in the camp. They only asked to have the bodies of their dead relatives returned to them to observe the proper rituals. They’d been robbed of all dignity, and clung onto what little they had left. But all those bodies would have to be burned to stop contamination. He didn’t look forward to dealing with the aftermath of this necessity. From what he understood, burning your dead amounted to sacrilege in the south; burying them was even worse. It made sense how the southerners left their dead for animals to eat, so that the people could eat the animals in turn. But you just couldn’t do a thing like that in Chevakia’s climate. Not to mention the uproar it would cause to the citizens of Tiverius.
How could he possibly solve this?