A good feeling, to need such a thing again.
“One in silver,” the stallholder said.
“One in silver?” It was carved from the shinbone of a cow. Any of her father’s men could have carved her one themselves.
“And how much is a loaf of bread now?” the stallholder said.
The price of her room and her food was going up, Landra thought. And the one thing that was not being sold in abundance here was anything to eat. Yet she had seen a ship setting out only yesterday for Immish, laden down with grain, its owner seeing it off fat and expensively dressed.
“One in silver,” the stallholder said. Landra paid her. Took the comb. In an alleyway looked around to see that she was alone, ran it through her hair. She went next to an inn in the market square to listen to the talk. The cup of beer she bought, she noticed now she was thinking about it, was expensive also. She thought of the fields burned and sown with salt and ashes, Marith shouting and his men echoing after him: “Burn it! Destroy it!” The rivers running poisoned. Great forests hacked down for firewood. Soldiers grumbling for their dinner, hungry after a long day’s march or another battle. Soldiers’ cookfires numberless as the stars, scattered all across Irlast.
The spoils of conquest to the White Isles! she thought.
The inn was crowded, as always. As always, there was nothing said of any interest to her. People would gossip about distant battles, far away and impossible to imagine and quickly washed over with local matters, a sister remarrying beneath her, a son making a success in his trade, a neighbour’s child falling sick.
“Old Lord Ronaen is dead,” a man would say to his companion.
“No? That was quick? Unexpected?”
“You could say that.”
“Ah. Yes.”
“Yes.”
“And, hmm, his daughter… she’ll be off to the wars now, I suppose?”
“I won’t bet against it.”
And Landra would start up, thinking, feeling, voices whispering inside her heart, vengeance, vengeance, I am his death, kill them. But the men would move to talking of a mutual friend of theirs whom old Lord Ronaen had once been friends with, and then onto the friend’s son who had been a wastrel and a trial to his father but was now a fine young man a credit to his kin. “If the wars end…” they would say, wearily, as one might hope for an end to winter rains. And Landra would sink back in her chair, sip her beer, silence the gabeleth the death voices, trying to feel something.
Another ship went out that evening, loaded with well-forged bronze weapons and ardent young men. Briefly, even, she thought of trying to join it. Find Tobias. Find someone. I will go to Malth Salene, she thought, as she thought every day, I never buried them, never said goodbye.
She thought suddenly: I never told them how sorry I was.
She thought suddenly: What would Marith have done if I had asked him to forgive me for the things I did to him?
The ship slipped away into the evening sea leaving its white wake. None of them sailing off to war will ever come back. She thought suddenly: Eltheia, merciful one, be kind, bring them back here to their family’s embraces; let them win glory in the far corners of the world, be proud, settle themselves in peace to grow old somewhere. Eltheia, you grew old, you saw your son grow to manhood. Always the world is ending for someone. But some, she thought, some must be kind even as the world ends. And suddenly after the hatred a warmth filled her. A memory of happiness.
“I’ll be leaving,” Landra said, “tomorrow, early. If I could buy some bread and some beer, for my journey?”
The poor innkeep, who had thought to keep her forever, paying out silver without a thought to the cost. “Tomorrow?”
“Early, as I said.”
“Ah?”
She went past him, reluctant to end up drawn on anything. It felt strange, she thought, talking to him. Now it was said, she thought, it could not be unsaid, she could not change her mind and stay. Up in her room she packed up her few things; most of her possessions, such as they were, already lay at the bottom of her pack. Her father’s ring, gold, stamped with a design of a winged horse; it had been too big for her to wear, and now her fingers were too swollen, the knuckles puffed and heavy, she had seen the innkeep wince at them, and the weight of it on her skin would be painful. A spindle carved of horsebone, it had been chipped before she was given it, in the long journey across the Wastes with Raeta and Tobias it had somehow been broken almost in half, was as raw as her skin in the place where the break was. A scrap of cloth, faded to grey, little more than a loose collection of thread. She squeezed the cloth tightly in her hand.
When she left the inn the next morning she left her hair uncovered. Close tight curls: there was a mirror hanging in the common room, an ancient thing of polished silver, splendid with crystal flowers around its edging if one ignored the marks where someone had hacked at it with what might have been an axe; there were still traces of plaster on the back that came from the walls of Malth Tyrenae itself, the innkeep said. The most precious thing he owned, after the brooch that had belonged to the king. In its watery depths Landra saw her hair looked almost like a lamb’s fleece, or a mass of yellow spring flowers crowning her head. She set out quickly, forcing her aching legs to go fast, up the street inland towards the Thealeth Gate. She stopped once, to gaze up at the gates of Malth Elelane that she had once thought would be her home.
“Make him promise to do it, Carin. Make him swear it.”
“I’ll try.” The pale eyes so like her own eyes, unable to meet her face.
“You will.” Her father’s voice. “And the other thing. He must swear to it all, Carin.”
“I said I’ll try,” Carin says. A trumpet sounds from below, a summons to the hall for a state audience, they leave off their plotting, go down together, the tall strong Lord of Third Isle and his fine strong children, how much many of the lesser lords must envy him. In the hall Marith will disgrace himself, turn up barely able to stand, the king’s guards have had to drag him out of a tavern, in front of all the court the king his father will scream at him in what she thinks then is shame and hatred but what she now understands is guilt and grief. “You’re no son of mine. You disgust me,” the king will rant. The queen his stepmother will wring her hands. Her own father’s face will smile in bitter triumph, even as Carin weeps.
Landra walked on more slowly. The gabeleth and the gestmet, all the dead of Illyr and the White Isles. A dog howling over the grave of its own heart.
She went through the gates out into Thealan Vale. The corn was high and pale gold as her hair, studded with red poppies and blue cornflowers. A breeze made the ripe ears dance. Green stuff had softened the burial mound of King Illyn on the Hill of Altrersys. She went on and there were elder trees growing up very close to the Heale river, heavy with blossom like new milk, smelling like a child’s breath. A cart went by her, oxen kicking up the dust of the roadway, carrying a great load of wood. She crossed the king’s bridge over the Heale, soft yellow stone carved with beast-heads, Marith’s grandfather Nevethlyn had had it repaired and strengthened, before he sailed off to die in Illyr. After the bridge the road divided running east and north and west. A gibbet hung at the crossroads, black with flies; someone had made an offering beneath it, left the skull of a bird in the hope of health or coin. On the other side of the road across from it, a godstone seemed to envy the dead its gift. Landra went west at the crossroads, the poorest of the roadways, badly made with deep cracked ruts from the timber carts. The forest had come up close to the road, before. Now the earth was raw, nettles growing up, sawdust patches, tree stumps. Further off, where the trees were still thick and green, she could hear the thud of an axe.
The road ran down back to the coast, narrowed to a horse track. In places she stood almost on the edge of the sea. It was warm, she slept out in the open, in the shelter of an ash tree, in the morning it rained blurring the boundary between the land and the water, she walked enjoying the feel of the rain soaking into her
hair. The feel of her body drying off, damp clothes and damp earth, as the sun came out. In three days’ walking the land became wilder, gorse and heather moorland in which bees drowsed. Yellow and purple, and the grey of the rocks, and the blue of the sky, and the clear blue of the sparkling sea. The ache in her legs raged at her; her hands were sore and swollen, looked like bad meat. She walked on faster. She was almost there.
There was something in her pocket, caught in the lining. A little grey stone, small as a fingernail. It must have been left from when she had thought of drowning herself. It had a hole running through it, clogged with broken shell and dark sand. Wards against the powers of dark, the fisherfolk thought them. She rolled it in her hand, it felt pleasantly rough against her hot rough skin. Made her skin feel very dry. She thought about keeping it, but threw it away into the yellow gorse.
A goat bleated, appeared scrabbling over the crest of the hill above her, two white kids following it. She walked on until the roofs of the village appeared below her, where the path wound down and inland. She had to go down, the path dipping to cross a stream tumbling away to the sea in a little waterfall, a cairn of stones beneath a hawthorn tree beside it to mark it a sacred place, she should have kept the stone, placed it there, she thought, though the cairn had a tumbled, weather-worn, abandoned look; the path went up again steeply, she had to scramble over rocks; a place where a great mass of vegetation had sprung up, the path almost blocked, more stunted hawthorn trees closing around it in a tunnel, a tumble of stones all overgrown with honeysuckle where a cottage must once have been. Then very suddenly she was on scrubby wind-cropped turf, soft underfoot, an outcrop of stone like a huge version of the stream’s cairn; she was standing above a cove where the sea broke with a hiss on black shingle and the path ran inland to the village or on along the cliff towards the next point. The horizon ended there ahead of her with a steep slope of gorse and heather and bracken, another rock outcrop black against the skyline. A hawk hung above the stones and was gone in a dark flash. On the other side of the headland there would be another stream running down, and then a little cottage, low to the shore, where an old woman who was a god lived. Or had lived.
“Ru?” She called it nervously. The cottage was quiet, the windows dark. The garden looked very overgrown, a mass of nettles in which butterflies flitted, brambles humped over what had been the garden wall. But smoke rose from the smoke hole in the roof.
“Ru?”
A goat bleated, behind the cottage, up on the moorland. She’s dead and gone, Landra thought. She’s found her seal skin, gone back into the sea.
A bent figure came up the path from the seashore. Thin, crumpled, brittle as driftwood. Her skin had a grey tinge to it. Her hair was very thin showing a grey crusted scalp.
“Lan?”
A great scream of seabirds, gulls wheeling over the figure, almost mobbing it. Its arms beat upward, driving them off.
“Ru!”
The woman held up her hands to Landra. Grey skin. Grey as stones. Grey as a seal’s pelt. Her fingers were clutched together. Changing back into a seal’s limbs.
“Lan, girl.” Rheumy eyes, black as pebbles. Seal eyes in a woman’s face. “Come in, then,” Ru said, “make some tea, will you, Lan?”
Landra followed Ru into the cottage. The door stuck; Ru had to shove at it, hard enough that her paddle-like hands shook.
“Where’s the girl who came to look after you?”
“Gone.” Run off, the moment Lan left her with Ru, doubtless. Foolish, Lan: be thankful she left Ru with a roof over her head. Inside, the cottage stank of fish. The furniture was all still there, the thick long housewife’s table, the bed, the chair by the hearth with the spinning wheel and the wool basket beside it where Ru had taught Lan to spin. Everything was covered in grease and dust.
“She found my skin,” said Ru. “Her and her brother, they searched the stones behind the house, and they found it. I asked her not to, like I asked you. But I couldn’t go back,” said Ru. “I couldn’t go back to the sea. Not now, like this.” She drank her tea, smiled at Lan. “Sit down here, Lan, girl, get out that spindle I gave you, and I’ll teach you to spin.”
Landra the gabeleth the gestmet the bitter hating dead held out her ruined hands, swollen, clumsy, red and puffy as rotted meat. “My hands are too damaged to spin thread, Ru. And the spindle you gave me is broken.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Orhan Emmereth the Lord of the Rising Sun, the Dweller in the House of the East, the Nithque to the Ever Living Emperor and the Undying City, the Emperor’s True Counsellor and Friend
The City of Sorlost the Golden, the Eternal, the Undying, the decaying heart of the mummified remnant of the Sekemleth Empire the Yellow Empire the Empire of the Rising Sun’s Light
Chief Secretary Gallus and Orhan between them run the Empire, write carefully in gold ink in a thick new Treasury ledger that is certainly not bound in human skin. The question of rebuilding the guard house at the Maskers’ Gate at least is now resolved, the gate having been destroyed. As is the question of rebuilding the Imperial Army, there being no one left in the Empire to defend. The balance of trade has improved, nothing travelling in equalling nothing travelling out. And the poor live in hovels of sweetwood and marble and onyx and melted bronze. In twenty years, or thirty, or fifty, Orhan pretends, there might be something to show for all his efforts. He has certainly been able to strip things down to the roots and start again. He’ll probably have to kill Chief Secretary Gallus soon. Before Chief Secretary Gallus kills him.
The Asekemlene Emperor is a child again, like the last one and the one before that. It took thirty men to move the Emperor’s throne back from the Great Temple to the ruins of the Summer Palace. The High Priestess recognized the child as the Asekemlene Emperor when one of the thirty men fell down dead from exhaustion in front of him.
Of the remaining twenty-nine men, well over half of them are now either dead or fucked off. Excuse the undignified language, so unlike Orhan’s usual civil turn of phrase. No other term is fitting, however, when you watch the population of your city decline before your eyes day by day. It would be nice to be able to order the gates shut, keep the bastards from fucking off into the desert. If. It would have been nicer to have been able to order the gates shut a year ago, keep the plague out. If.
The city’s population would be still smaller, were it not for the wretches that stumble out of the desert, running away from war or famine or plague or all three at once and other things. An accursed death-worshipping wasteland in the desert is a blessing, a wonder, a promised home, when you’ve nowhere else to go and everything you’ve ever loved is dead. They beg the Emperor’s Nithque to let them stay and sometimes, sometimes, if he’s feeling generous, he agrees. Chief Secretary Gallus warns against it; the Emperor, Orhan suspects, will warn against it too if he lives long enough to learn to talk. Can’t have people thinking the Sekemleth Empire is soft and weak.
Though perhaps the Emperor will have other things on his mind to worry about, if he lives long enough. The Emperor has a palace with five habitable rooms including the famous bathhouse. The Emperor has an empire that runs from the ruined palace to three feet beyond the line of the ruined city wall. The Emperor has a Nithque who doesn’t sleep at night without dreaming of his murdered wife and murdered child and murdered sister, winces and shakes dripping cold sweat at the memory-sound of his sword blade cutting the previous Emperor’s throat and his sister’s throat.
All day every day Orhan starts up, hearing that sound. Darath puts his arms around him, when he’s there with him, holds him, tells him it’s fine, killing Celyse was a necessary thing to do. It probably was a necessary thing to do. “It’s all right,” Darath tells him. “It’s all right, Orhan. Believe me.”
Darath? Oh, Darath’s there beside him like any old married couple, they live together in the ruins of the House of Flowers, Darath keeps the house, stays at home, reassures Orhan, puts his arms around Orhan when he wakes screaming at n
ight. In his secret heart Orhan knows that one day Darath himself will break under his own guilt and grief and suffering that he never speaks about, that being Orhan’s strength is a crushing weight that will one day prove too much. Until then, what can either of them do but carry on and carry on.
They go to the Temple together every week to offer flowers, beg for something. Though many in Sorlost now worship the Death God in His statue in the Court of the Broken Knife.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Tobias, senior squad commander in the “Winged Blades” in the Army of Queen Kiana the True Heir to the God Marith Altrersyr the True Ruler of All Irlast
Besieging the city of Arunmen. Again. Three bloody times, now, it’s been besieged. No, wait, tell a lie, four
Killed by a dragon! Gods, he’d wet himself laughing when he heard. Cried a bit, too, maybe. Stupid boy. But it’s bloody great now. He can fight and kill and sack and plunder, and know he isn’t doing it for that degenerate diseased poisonous little shit. All the kings looking to hire good old hard old soldiers. Work for a bit, defect, get a pay rise from your last boss’s sworn mortal enemy, work for a bit, defect, get a pay rise, work for a bit. Quids bloody in. Only a shame Rate and Alxine aren’t here to see it.
“She pays how much, Queen Kiana? No! No. Get out of it.”
“No word of a lie. And King Alleen… rumour going round he’ll pay double that, if we come over to him again, he’s that bloody desperate since King Ryn took Immier off him.”
“King Ryn? What’s he paying?”
“He’s not paying anything. He’s dead. Lord Cauvanh of Immish killed him. Lord Cauvanh now… he pays so little he might as well be paying his soldiers in goat shit, doesn’t exactly lead from the front, either, that one. But he knows what he’s bloody doing. Hasn’t lost a single bloody battle yet.”
The Blades don’t rape and they don’t torture. Which is rare now. So piss off with it. Not the greatest job in the world, in all confidence and honesty, shit stinks, wet leather stinks, his legs ache and his back aches and he’s got a shiny new wound to the face. Always another twenty men queuing up behind, though, every time a vacancy in the Blades comes up.
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