“Marith,” Osen Fiolt is screaming, “Marith! Marith!” He can hear it so clearly. “Marith. Please.” And a voice there in his head shouting, laughing, this can all end, he thinks, he can stop soon, he can be free of it. The swords come down around him. His sword sings in his hand. His enemies’ swords are bright as fire. The blades come down and come down. His wound hurts him. His enemies’ swords are numberless. His head is white and empty. His sword sings, but it is growing heavy in his hand. His wife is dead. His captains, his companions, all of them are dying or dead. His army is dying. His army! His heart sings.
Five men. Ten. Twenty. A pile of corpses. Kills and kills and kills and kills. The swords come down. So many of them. He strikes and kills, and another rises up in its place. His head is spinning. He cannot see. All there is in his world is blood.
“Marith!” a voice screams.
Die and become nothing. End it.
Pain. Blood. All I am. All I ever could be.
Cool dark. Like Thalia’s hair. Thalia’s skin.
Make it go away. All of it. Please. Yes.
Pain.
Light.
And the world ends.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Landra Relast, the gestmet, the gabeleth, the bringer of justice
Sailing to the White Isles on the ship Palle, that is the smooth sheen of a calm sea
In her mind again and again she saw her triumph. In the blue of the sky, in the dark water that moved beneath the hull of the ship. A man in armour, a red cloak and red-black hair, a sword shining bright as starlight, his face is buried in the filth and then he raises his head. He is smiling as the shadow of a sword falls over him.
Her fingers dug into the ship’s timbers, her skin catching on the rough wood.
Forgive me, Marith, she thought.
I’m sorry, Carin.
PART FOUR
THE KNIFE
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Orhan Emmereth the Lord of the Rising Sun, the Dweller in the House of the East, the luckiest man in the Sekemleth Empire
The Golden City of Sorlost
Coarse sunlight spilling through the shuttered window, making patterns on the wall. Swirls and spirals, a game of yenthes, catching all the floating dust motes. The shutters carved as a trellis of flowers, the shadows they cast hands and smiling mouths. Afternoon. Peaceful. Orhan sitting reading. Darath sprawled on the bed reading. A distant sound from the gardens that might be Dion playing an ivory flute. The flute had been a gift to the boy from Darath. Darath had realized very quickly that it had been a mistake.
“I had no idea about children. No idea. God’s knives, I nearly bought him a tin drum. Would he be upset if I accidentally trod on it, do you think?”
Darath had been living in the House of the East for weeks now. Since the news came of Arunmen’s sack. If the world is mad, hang on to the few things one can love. “There was no one left alive in Arunmen,” Bil had said. “This is your son’s house, and I don’t want you to leave your son, and I know you don’t want to leave him. So bring Darath to live here with you.”
Dion called him “Uncle Darath!” with a breath of happiness, because that was how Orhan had said it the first time Darath and Dion met. Even that, Darath seemed to rejoice in, embracing the child tenderly, teaching him to play knuckle-bones, running through the garden with him in games of hide-and-seek.
“Where’s Aunty Cese?” Dion asked once in a while. “Why did she have to go, when Uncle Darath came? Did they swap?”
“She still comes to visit,” Bil comforted him. “Soon she’ll have her own son back again. That will make her happy, you see.”
“Happier than seeing me?”
Bil would laugh, tousle the boy’s hair. “Maybe even happier than seeing you, my baby baby boy, my lovely thing.”
Celyse had gone to live in the House of Flowers. A somewhat irregular arrangement, not received with enthusiasm in all quarters of society, but one couldn’t have everything. A man, his lover, his wife and her son, his sister and her grief—too many relationships to keep track of there in one household. So throw the sister out and be done.
Celyse hated it, everyone else frowned on it. But, as Bil said, “Being frowned on means they acknowledge we exist.”
Indeed: the Emmereths had some kind of status again now. The other high families could walk past without having to pretend they did not recognize Orhan’s face. Orhan had no longer done whatever it was he had been accused of doing. A good man again. A loyal man. A true servant of Sorlost. The Immishman Lord Mylt had said so himself, and what could be higher praise than that? The Lord of the Rising Sun, the Warden of the Immish Marches, the Dweller in the House of the East: men with titles such as these cannot ever really have done bad things. And money: Lord Emmereth had been seen publicly spending money; Lady Emmereth went every day to the Great Temple, wearing a new dress each time, offering a purse of gold to the God. No one could ignore the sound the coins made each day as she put the purse down.
The past is like sand, shifting, changing, the wind blows and the sand moves and one cannot remember how it looked before it was changed, as a shiny bright new poet brightly said. And the metaphor is perfect, because it looks just as it looked before, it looks like yellow sand, and no one remembers because no one cares, because it is so dull.
This city is a dream city. Thus, as in dreams, there is no thought for the future, no memory of the past.
Philosophical musing interrupted by a particularly shrill noise from the garden. Orhan winced. “If you don’t tread on it, Darath, I will.” A howl that, if the Great Tanis was merciful, was Bil confiscating the damned flute.
The book Orhan was reading was a good one. A new one: he was enjoying getting to understand it. In Pernish, a long tale of the old kings and queens of Ith. Pernish literature, Pernish poetry, White Isles style clothes—anything with a connection to Marith Altrersyr suddenly quite the thing. “Romantic,” “exotic.” These mad kings, their scheming wives, their ungrateful children, their endless cycles of rage and pain. Half the city must dream of savages with red-plumed helmets, huge spears raised erect… The more Orhan read of it, the more sensible the Empire and the Emperor seemed, in contrast; celibacy in a ruler very clearly a good thing. Which was in itself a very good reason to read a book.
The book’s pages were perfumed. The scent varied: a few pages might have a faint scent of lilies, sweet and sad, to match a scene of love and heartbreak; the next page might smell of pine resin, bracing, clearing, when the story turned to a hero king come to restore his people’s pride. This too was new and fashionable, a flippant new little wonderworking. The page he was reading now was a genealogy of the kings of Bakh, shocking in its lack of scandal, incest and murder, and smelled of green leaves.
The most sought-after book in Sorlost was the three volume True History of the King Marith Altrersyr Amrath Returned to Us, the pages of which were said to smell alternately of blood, semen and human excrement.
Janush the bondsman knocked and paused for a while outside the door and finally came in. Weeks since Darath moved in here, still everyone tiptoed around in terror in case they walked in on Lord Emmereth and Lord Vorley doing it. We’re both almost forty, we’ve been together for… longer than I care to acknowledge. We don’t actually do it very often. We should probably make the effort to do it more, in fact. I bet Darath thinks of savages with sweaty spears. There’d really be nothing to see, if anyone did walk in on it. Two middle-aged men having uninteresting, “usual brief bit of foreplay, usual standard position, be back reading your book again before you know it, barely broke a sweat, do you have to fart like that immediately we’ve finished?” sex.
The joy of it, after everything. A dull married couple are Orhan and Darath, and God’s knives it’s sweet.
“My Lord Emmereth?”
Orhan put the book down. “Yes?”
Darath sat up. “What?”
“My Lord Emmereth, My Lord Vorley… Lord Lochaiel is downstairs
, waiting for you. He says it’s urgent.”
Ah. Darath said, “He wants advice on toddler tantrums, perhaps? Tell him never, ever to buy his boys any kind of musical instrument.”
Selim Lochaiel was in the courtyard garden. There too the scent of green leaves, less real than in the pages of the book. He was standing running his hands over the lip of the dry fountain, seemed deep in thought. Heard them approaching and turned around. His face was lit up.
“Selim? You have something… good?”
“I have news from Turain,” Selim said. His voice was shaking with excitement, which certainly made a change from voices shaking with grief. “The demon has overreached himself. His army is destroyed. He is dead. Dead!”
Dead! A lot of time and planning and bribery and begging and hope and…
“You’re sure?” said Orhan. “I was rather under the impression he kept boasting he couldn’t die.”
“The great thing about immortality as a drinking boast,” said Darath, “is that you’re never going to have to go through the embarrassment of admitting you were wrong.”
Selim said, “A messenger arrived an hour ago, his horse dying under him. There was a great battle south of Turain. The demon lost. There were almost no survivors. The demon’s men would not surrender, the messenger says, fought on long after it must have been clear all was lost. Not, of course, that the men of the Mountains of Pain would have accepted a surrender. By the end, the messenger says, the demon’s men were throwing themselves onto the mountain men’s spears; the bodies were piled ten, twenty deep. They did not count the dead, they counted the survivors. And then they killed the survivors, and left them with the rest. The king’s tent, his treasurers, all of it has been taken. The Army of Amrath has been wiped out as though it had never been. Every last trace of its pestilence has been cleansed from the face of the earth.”
“Apart from the huge pile of corpses,” said Darath. “And I hope they’ve got a plan for cleansing that.”
“But him,” said Orhan. “Marith Altrersyr. He is dead?”
Selim said, “The messenger assures us that he is.”
“‘Assures’?”
“They could hardly send us his body,” said Selim. “He is dead. Alleen Durith saw it.”
Darath coughed. “Alleen Durith is well?”
“As far as he says in his letter, yes.”
“Typical. We’ll have to find the rest of the cash, now. He couldn’t have gone and died a hero, could he? No, no, selfish bastard has to stay alive.”
“Darath.”
“Turns on his king, his beloved friend, his trusted companion, his kin—related, aren’t they, somehow?—his kin, blood of his blood, brother of his sword, cries out ‘Die, monster!,’ cuts him down. Dying, Marith Altrersyr the demon the enemy cries out ‘Traitor!,’ stabs him, the two fall together, their blood mingling, their filth mingling where they’ve pissed and shat themselves in death, white hands entwined… The demon and the hero, the demon’s murderer, together in death. Written on shit-scented pages. Now there’s the best ending for us.”
“That’s the other one,” said Orhan. “Osen Fiolt. Alleen Durith’s just a man he drinks with.”
Darath looked at Orhan pettishly. “Yes, yes, I know. Anyway. Hurrah, rejoicing, Irlast is saved, children still unborn shall praise our names, thank the God Great Tanis. So now we have to pay Alleen Durith off?”
Selim said, “Yes. Unfortunately we do.”
“Three thousand gold thalers. God’s knives. What possessed you?”
“It wasn’t me,” said Selim. “It was Lord Mylt.”
“Lord Mylt! It’s not Lord Mylt’s money,” said Darath.
“Alleen Durith originally asked for four thousand,” said Orhan. “Be grateful I bargained him down.”
“God’s knives. Remind me again what we paid to have the Emperor killed, Orhan?”
“Darath. Please.”
“Alleen Durith writes that he will arrange to collect the money shortly. He will be passing through the western desert, of course, on the way back to Ith. It is possible…” Selim looked thoughtful. “He will be wanting men, of course. Supplies, weapons and so forth. There are any number of things for sale in Sorlost that might be of interest to the new King of Ith with two thousand thalers to spend. Perhaps we should encourage him to come here.”
Orhan thought also. Interesting possibilities. A grateful young man with an army behind him, only too eager for our gold? “Yes. We should certainly encourage him here.”
Selim laughed. “Indeed.” Darath was looking a bit lost.
“If the demon is dead,” said Orhan, “I think we need to start talking about Lord Mylt.”
“Wait. Wait. What about Lord Mylt?” Darath was looking very lost. It suited him.
Letter from Lord Durith of Ith to Lord Emmereth: “I want Ith and Immier and the White Isles and Illyr.”
Letter from Lord Emmereth the Lord of the Rising Sun to Lord Durith: “Ith, and that’s it.”
Letter from Lord Durith of Ith to Lord Emmereth: “Ith and Immier and the White Isles. Or the deal’s off.”
Okay. Okay. Seeing as I have absolutely no authority over any of these places anyway and frankly never will, and, even more frankly, neither will you. Letter from Lord Emmereth the Lord of the Rising Sun to Lord Durith: “Ith and Immier, and five thousand men from Immish to help you hold on to them for more than a week.”
Letter from Lord Durith of Ith to Lord Emmereth: “Ith and Immier and the men and four thousand thalers in hard cash, my Lord Emmereth, I’m throwing away being best friends forever with the Lord of the World here, don’t forget. I want something worthwhile back.”
“Two thousand thalers, Lord Emmereth,” Lord Mylt saying, “and Sorlost pays it. And he can hire his own bloody men. Who does that treacherous little shit think he is? He’s nothing. Drinking-friends with someone.”
Lord Emmereth the Lord of the Rising Sun to Lord Durith: “Look, just bugger off, won’t you?” I won’t write that down, obviously, in case someone accidentally rides the length of Irlast to deliver it.
God’s knives. How difficult should it be to get people to rise up against the King of Death? Dion was less demanding than this.
The rumour ran around the city in hours. Marith Altrersyr Ansikanderakesis Amrakane was dead and his army dead around him. He rode into the Mountains of Pain on a white horse with the light shining from him, and the mountains claimed him. Stories of starving men in the Nor Desert, lips black with thirst, wounded, screaming, babbling of gods and demons, cutting their own throats with bronze swords. “All dead. All dead. Everything’s dead.” White-robed merchants who had made the long journey from Mar across the Nor Desert told of vast battles, the sky over Turain turned to silver with mage light, the very air reeking of dead meat. “All dead. All dead.”
“And yesterday a woman drunk on firewine stood up in the Court of the Fountain and screamed that King Marith was dead, that the world was ending, that all would fall in ash and blood,” said Darath. “When she’d finished speaking she cut her own throat. If I hadn’t heard it from Selim Lochaiel, I’d certainly believe it after that.”
The streets ran with wine and honey, celebrations from dawn to dusk to dawn again. A great weight that the city had not fully realized it felt lifted away. This is Sorlost the Unconquered, the Unconquerable, we had no fear of Marith Altrersyr’s little wars, they were far away, unreal absurd things. We’re safe! We’re safe! Toasts drunk to victory over the demon, any one in Sorlost who could claim to be from Turain or the mountains feted, personally thanked. The owner of the wine shop in the Street of Yellow Roses suddenly announced Arunmenese ancestry, embraced Orhan, gave everyone a free drink. Poems describing the final battle could be bought on every street corner. Were sung every night. The whores offered a new position called “the enemy in defeat.”
Three days after the news broke Orhan came down to breakfast to a strong smell of burning from the gardens. “What’s that? Is something on f
ire?”
“Bilale ordered her new White Isles-style dresses and Pernish scented books burned,” said Darath. “If I hadn’t heard it from Selim Lochaiel, I’d certainly believe it after that.”
In the Court of the Broken Knife a shrine was rising, a monument to the dead king. At the statue’s feet refugees from half the world piled flowers, lit candles, cut locks of their hair in offering. The statue was weighted down with crowns of flowers, crowns of ribbons, crowns of silver and gold. The Immish soldiers did nothing now to remove them. Some of the soldiers, indeed, stopped there themselves to lay offerings, stood or knelt before the statue with a drawn sword, wept for the new dead war god. After a few days, a rumour flew around the city that drinking wine mixed with flowers from the shrine would cure impotence, help a woman conceive, ward off fever and weakness of the limbs. A few days later again, a woman left a dead ferfew bird there in offering, claiming that the bird’s death would give her long life. A few days later again, a man opened the veins in his left arm, let the blood pour out at the statue’s feet. The Imperial guard had to take some action, then, to stop the whole square stinking of rot.
The Emperor decreed a ceremony of thanksgiving in the Great Temple. They went by litter, the curtains closed, Orhan and Darath in one, Celyse, Bil and Dion following. Dion was still crying when Orhan and Darath left. Bil had refused to let him take the ivory flute with him. Even in a bag. Even if he promised not to play it.
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