And so on and so on. It’s meant to be confusing, yes, obviously. Says absolutely nothing and nothing and nothing and nothing; methinks those involved in drafting it may protest perhaps a little, a tiny bit, too much.
“But if that’s what Cauvanh wants to say,” Darath said with a shrug, “let him.”
Ragged cheers at Darath’s appointment as Nithque. Also a few laughs. Little real interest apart from at the mention of the Immish troops leaving. At that a group of street women groaned aloud. When the proclamation was finished a small crowd milled around for a while uncertainly before dispersing.
“They know it’s lies,” said Orhan to Cauvanh. “Look at them.”
“Everyone knows it’s lies,” said Cauvanh. “But you have what you want, and I have what I want. Thus what does it matter?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Orhan.
Cauvanh said, “Your city is liberated. Congratulations, Lord Emmereth.”
Some soldiers. Taking a walk. That’s hardly the worst thing in the history of Irlast.
Orhan thought: so many years, I’ve worked for this.
A crowd had tried to put a crown of roses on the statue of the demon at around the same time as Cauvanh’s proclamation was being read out. Another crowd had gathered a little later, tried to bind the statue with ropes and tear it down. Fighting: knives, stones, new-forged new-bought swords; the beautiful pouting stone mouth smiling down at the bloodshed. The Immish soldiers did nothing, the Imperial army did nothing, the fight dragged on, ten people left dead or dying, over thirty injured, it had looked, briefly, as though a more general riot would start up. More people involved than had been there to listen to the proclamation.
Darath had his things moved into the Nithque’s chambers in the Summer Palace. He looked genuinely sorry for it. “God’s knives, I’ll miss Dion. I won’t spend much time here,” he told Orhan, “I’ll come back to visit him.” The rooms were as beautiful as Orhan remembered them, jewelled mosaics, silk hangings fine as breathing, the balcony with a view of gardens lush with flowers and bright water, the House of Silver winking in the sun. Sweetmeats, wine and tea waiting on an ivory table; a servant boy with golden curls pouring him a drink with a movement of the arm as elegant as dancing. “We did well kitting it out, didn’t we?” said Darath. “Masters of the Sekemleth Empire! I’d forgotten just how nice it all is.”
Servants carrying Darath’s things in crossed with servants carrying Lord Mylt’s things out. “Distribute it to the poor and the starving,” Orhan ordered. “Tell them it’s a gift from the new Nithque.”
Selim Lochaiel came into the room, looking pale. There was still a splash of blood on the toe of his left shoe. “They’ve got rid of… of Lord Mylt’s body. And Cauvanh… has got rid of the soldiers who killed him.” Selim sat down, chewing at his hands. “I should get back to Elolale and the boys,” he said. Cheer up, Selim, Orhan thought. In a few years it will all feel fine. Just another sordid palace coup, Selim. In a few years’ time you’ll be doing this without a second thought.
“Cauvanh’s sending the Immish soldiers to Cen Elora,” said Selim. “Poor men.”
Darath said, “Poor men?”
“From a nice warm posting here doing less than nothing to march across the world to wage war?” Selim shuddered. His eyes still full of Lord Mylt dying, you could see Lord Mylt’s blood in his pupils. “So yes, poor men.”
The whole of Irlast was in uproar. The demon is dead, the cities of his empire have declared themselves free. The Immish Great Council hears the word “free” as a challenge. Forty thousand men under arms and an empire has fallen? You’d be a fool indeed not to seize that opportunity with both hands. Famine and pestilence, ruin, desperation. Every village declaring itself a kingdom, turning on its neighbours, every man with a sword dreaming of cutting himself a throne. The Immish with forty thousand trained men under arms looking on. Smiling.
Cauvanh himself was so happy he might be dancing. “Ith… The White Isles…” Orhan had left him in his rooms pouring over a map of Irlast, his fingers tracing out cities’ names, thinking how best to break them to his will. “Immier… Chathe, even… If we can raise the men…” Part of the agreement was to pay the Immish ten thousand gold thalers upfront, plus two thousand every year indefinitely. Orhan could almost hear the coins clinking in Cauvanh’s mind. As had already been established, two thousand thalers that could buy a lot of very useful things.
“That fool Mylt with his fixation on your city.” Cauvanh lisped out a parody of his former master. “‘Keep it, hold it, make it ours, make them bend to accept our rule.’ Idiot. Milk it for all it’s worth and move on.”
“Like Marith Altrersyr did, you mean?” Orhan had almost said.
“So now we just need to raise the money,” said Selim.
“We can sell the Imperial furniture and fittings,” said Darath. “The Emperor is barely out of clout clothes. He doesn’t need gold cups. Also, Cauvanh can’t possibly be expecting us to honour the agreement in full.”
“Of course he isn’t,” said Orhan. “Five thousand upfront, a thousand a year for maybe the next two years. If that.”
“Almost a bargain,” said Darath. He sipped tea from a tea bowl so fine his hands showed through the porcelain. “If I sold this bowl for a talent, how many deaths could I buy?”
“And we’ll need to get the Emperor tutored so that he can actually understand Literan,” said Selim. Trying not to hear what Darath had just said. “Apart from the money, that’s the first thing we must do, surely. It was absurd, seeing him unable to understand a word of the Temple ceremony. Then… The Imperial Army needs strengthening. The guard house at the Maskers’ Gate needs to be rebuilt. The streets damaged in the rioting… I thought we could rebuild them, improve them. Some of the buildings… disgusting. Rancid. And people still live there! I thought, the other day, in the Grey Square while we were waiting for the ceremony . . . we could use this as a chance to tear them down, rebuild them as something people could decently live in… Improve things.”
All of this sounds oddly familiar. “We could,” Orhan said.
A servant came in, bent and whispered in Darath’s ear. Handed over a note. Darath read it, burned it in the flame of a lamp. “Good. Thank you.” Turned to Orhan. “Well, then. Lord Tardein the Lord of the Dry Sea the Dweller in the House of Breaking Waves, ex-Nithque to the Ever Living Emperor, the Emperor’s Counsellor and Friend: what do we want done with his body? Disposed of quietly so nobody knows anything, or publicly and ceremonially displayed?”
Selim said, “What?”
“I don’t know.” Orhan put his head in his hands, closed his eyes. “I don’t know. Why ask me? What do you think we should do?” His hands were dry, calluses on his fingertips rubbing on his face. Need to put something on them. Almond oil, Bil uses, I think, to soften her skin. “Put it out that Lord Tardein the former Nithque slipped on the stairs, fell, broke his neck. Have them take the body out on a litter, bury it publicly somewhere near the Maskers’ Gate. Send someone to offer prayers in his memory in the Temple tonight.” A thought occurred. “I’ll send a message to Bil, telling her to go too, with Celyse. To bring Dion with her, give him an offering to make. Tell her to get him to say something nice about Cammor Tardein in a loud voice.”
Darath nodded. Sipped tea.
Selim looked at them. Two grim weary middle-aged men scrabbling for power. Playing the game for the sake of playing the game. Nothing more.
Selim said, “You didn’t have to kill him.”
Darath said, “Probably not. But it’s done. So, now: you were talking about your ideas for rebuilding the city and restoring the army. Orhan was about to ask you about the cost…”
There on the desk sat the treasury ledgers, written in gold ink, said to be bound in human skin. Orhan pulled one over to him. Oh look, all these years and there’s the stain where Darath got honey on the cover, reading it in bed. There’s one of my hairs, still stuck to it. He flipped through
it, found an entry for Cammor Tardein’s stipend as “Watcher and Warden of Enia Beyond the Mountains,” wherever that might have been. Crossed it out. That’s, oh, two talents saved. How many deaths can we buy with that, do you think?
Darath signalled to the serving boy to refill their tea bowls. “And the excitement’s all ended. Back to ledgers and balance sheets and work. God’s knives, I’d forgotten how dull this all is.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Landra Relast, the vengeance demon, who will destroy all who serve him
The White Isles, the island kingdom of the Altrersyr the descendants of Amrath and Eltheia, the dragon kin, the demon born. Her home
There was the headland. There, the grey rocks, a tiny smudge on the horizon, grey against the grey of the sky. Only her eyes deceiving her, and she stared, her eyes watering with the effort, and it was real, the cliffs of Fealene Isle the most northern of the White Isles, bare winter woods at their heights, and there, to the west, surely, that must be Morn with the smaller islets behind it, “the sow and the piglets,” small islands off Fealene Isle’s coast. Ah, Eltheia, you are merciful, to let me see my homeland again. And yet, Landra thought, all I can bring here is death. Thus am I punished for everything I have done and failed to do.
They had followed the ragged coast of Illyr, the blank coast of the Wastes, around the long spits of land that the sailors called the Blades, all of it almost as new and unknown to the sailors as to Landra, “the fourth time,” they said, “the fourth time we’ve made this journey,” “my father,” one of them said, “he refuses to believe I have sailed to Illyr, says I’m joking with him.” The tracks of the water, even the stars, were new to them. Making a new road across the water: it was true, as the fishermen had said, that the sea creatures came up to the ship out of curiosity, fish in vast numbers visible as patches of darkness beneath the surface, dolphins and whales nosing up in the ship’s wake. For the first few days, many seals seemed to follow the ship.
Landra slept on the deck, wrapped in her cloak, the spray soaking into the cloth around her head, making her scalp itch. In the day she stood and watched the coastline spooling out. Saw Marith’s death in her mind over and over. Smiled at it and grieved at it. Wondered what would be happening in the great expanse of his empire. How long the news would take to spread. It could take years, she thought, for the certainty of his death to reach the far ends of his empire. Men could go on for long months, for years, thinking themselves his subjects, praising him and worshipping him. An impossibility and a certainty, that a war leader will one day be brought down by war. In the White Isles, even now, people would be sitting talking in smug satisfaction of their mastery over the world as a certain unarguable thing. She thought then of course of Ethalden, the silver tower falling, breaking—how many of them are left alive there, she wondered sometimes. Did all that live there die? Did any of them escape? The innkeep’s son, the boy in the harbourside inn’s stables, the man who had sold her the blanket. Are they alive there still? And what do they think, if they are alive? Do they understand? Long ago under the first Amrath the people of Illyr rose up, sickened by their bloodshed.
Tobias’s voice, clear in her mind: “What do you think they bloody think, Lan?”
I wonder what Tobias is doing now, she thought. I hope that he is somehow not dead.
Two weeks into the journey they had put in at the Halien Islands to take on food and water, the three lonely islands that humped out of the Bitter Sea like the whales for which they were named. Barren, empty islands, wretchedly poor; so battered by storms the few houses were half-buried in the earth like the burrows of animals. Like Ethalden the air smelled of stonedust and sawdust, new buildings were rising around a new harbour; the people were dressed in White Isles-style finery, loaded with new wealth; children ran to greet the ship, eager to practise speaking Pernish, shouting for news. In the centre of the new town, a half-built temple to the new god Marith, decorated with whale skulls. They sailed again the same evening, “Dangerous, at night,” the sailor with the black beard told Landra, “the people here never had money, never had anything, now they have money to spend… In ten years’ time, gods willing, this will be a great city, a staging post on the great sea road from Malth Elelane to Ethalden. You can see it, if you squint at it. But at the moment, it is merely not a safe place.” Muttering among the crew, Landra gathered, that everything in the town had doubled or tripled in price. How strange it is: great battles are fought, the clash of armies, cities are sacked, a hundred times a thousand lives are shattered into dust, and because of this a child on the other side of the world has a new house to live in, new clothes, better food, a new chance at a different kind of life.
From hugging the coast in safety they must risk the last run out into the open sea. Landra’s heart had leapt, to be on a ship looking out over the Bitter Sea, but she had shivered with fear as the lights of Halien Town fell away from them. The sea has no bottom. The sea has no end. Drop a coin into the waters out here and it will sink forever. Sail a boat north or east and you could live and die a thousand times and never reach land. “Hail to the sea!” the sailors shouted. “Sea and sky, have mercy! Sea and sky and wave and wind!” The ship’s captain threw a cup of sweet water into the sea from the prow. Sailors did drop coins down. In cold winter sunlight Landra sat on the deck watching the sky. Other journeys, other homecomings, other desperate flights away. “Pretty.” “Pretty enough. Not much different to yesterday. Bit more cloud.” “One of nature’s wonders, the sunset. Never the same twice.” The delusion of hope. She saw the people of the White Isles dying, Matrina Fiolt, Alis Nymen’s wife and children, saw Morr Town in ruins, Malth Elelane burned down. Suffer, she thought. You who can bear to live through this. You who sit in peace at home and do nothing, you who profit from this. My brother and I, we plotted, we sought to profit from cruelty and another’s pain—look what has become of us.
There was the headland, the grey cliffs of Fealene Isle the most northern of the White Isles, the yellow cliffs of Morn and its children. The wind dropped, they crawled at oars down the coast of Fealene. The sailors eager to be home. Landra twitching and fearing to be home. We will not go near to Third Isle, she told herself over and over, it will be all right. She thought of Ben and Hana in their cottage by the sea on Third Isle, Ben’s fear that he would be taken for a soldier in the Army of Amrath. If he has gone off to war, she thought, I will go back there and I will kill Hana and their son. The ship passed Fealene Isle and the north shore of Seneth rose before them, they curved west around Tha Head. “Hope,” in old rune tongue of the White Isles. The first point of land that Eltheia and Serelethe saw when they fled across the Bitter Sea from the ruins of Ethalden, “which suggests they took a very odd course,” as Marith had once said, “terrible sailors, my ancestors, obviously.” A pillar of bronze there as a marker, set with a shard of mage glass. Landra could see it as a smudge of green and a flash of light. The coastline of Seneth closing in on them, golden coves, winter fields flanked with winter woodlands, smoke from the village of Pelen Tha, on the water ahead of them the red sails of a fishing boat. So close to the shore here she could almost reach out and touch the cliffs. A spit of rock drawing out into the water, and beyond that a beach of shingle and yellow sand.
Now was the time for it. Landra looked at the ship and the sailors bent over the oars. They are carrying cargo that was stolen in war, she thought, they are merchants of the White Isles and Illyr, they are profiting from Marith’s wars, they must know this. She placed her hands on the ship’s rail. Bent her head. On the sea the waves began to rise. An oily, rotten smell, rank sweet. The sea was bubbling white, boiling white, waves ripping at the sides of the ship. The temple of Amrath, falling, crumbling, the side of the ship crushed, giving way. Grinding of teeth beneath the surface. Shapes moving deep down. White foam. The sailors at the oars went on, blind to it, the sailor with the black beard was humming as he rowed, the captain watched them and urged them on. Spray broke in their face
s, they shook it away. Spray stinging Landra’s lips. Her hands were hot and red. Puffed up like a dead man’s hands. She felt the gabeleth and the gestmet inside her hiss. The ship’s timbers crunched open. The sailors did not move from the rowing benches as the ship went down. Teeth in the water. The water stained red. The bundles of goat hides split apart and gold coins poured out in the water, they shimmered like a shoal of fish as they went down.
The House of Sacrifice Page 26