Llun wondered if Aspidían had read the riddle in the tracery. Was that why he was so astounded? Or was it true appreciation? It was bad enough not to have any visible representation of the Raven in his smithy, as was required by the so-called Great Father. But to blaspheme him by association with something as unclean as the falcon—the sigil of Voran, the Healer and the great enemy of the Raven—that would be reason enough for a high inquisitor to pay a visit to the first reach of Vasyllia. Or was it simply that someone had reported Llun in hopes of gaining his smithy as a reward? Llun knew of too many such cases to consider it impossible.
Too many thoughts. Like someone banging an iron pan with a wooden spoon inside his head. Llun decided to take the long way to the Consistory.
He looked in on Mirodara sleeping in the back room. She was sprawled on the floor, snoring. As though she had not a care in the world. He couldn’t help smiling, though that only brought back the pain of memory. The way her nose bent slightly to the left, giving her mouth a soft quirk, as though she were always on the verge of laughter—that was her mother’s most obvious feature. Rubbing his eyes until the stars exploded on the inside of his eyelids, he hurried out into the street.
I will not be maudlin this early in the morning, he thought.
He still thought of his smithy as belonging to the first reach. Only a few houses down, Siloán the potter’s home stood, now even smaller-looking than usual after the mead-house had swallowed two neighboring houses to become the largest building in the reach. The roads were as meandering, the refuse as omnipresent. The poor still bickered at street corners, fighting for the rights to an intersection as though their eternal soul depended on it. But it wasn’t the first reach any more, he reminded himself. Just a few roads down was the new merchants’ quarter—part of the “Great Father’s” efforts at equalizing opportunities for all citizens. Or some such unintelligible nonsense.
The walls that had stood between the three reaches of Vasyllia for centuries had been torn down. The stairways joining them together now seemed naked without the walls buttressing them. They were a pitiful sight, and most Vasylli instinctively avoided the stairs, preferring the new, wide gravel roads that joined all reaches in stark, over-straight lines, so counterintuitive to the gentle roll and sway of the mountain’s side.
In the other direction from the merchants’ quarter was the other great equalizer—the pleasure quarter, as it was officially labeled. Llun flushed with sudden disgust, remembering the dog-man’s offer. The air of the first reach had always been redolent with aroma. But it had been good and clean, for all its earthiness. The first reach had had its problems, but people had been principled, keeping to a code that separated them from the corruption of the upper reaches. It had been important before, to keep oneself clean of the base and the vile. Now, worker and noble alike drank sour ale in the wide anterooms of the whore-houses. Equality indeed.
The former second reach was now a shambling mess. Most of Nebesta’s refugees still lived there in tottering canvas tents. Every hundred paces or so, a pile of those tents was set apart from the next by a line of spears stuck into the earth, their points directed at the people in the camps. Guards with longbows patrolled the spear-lines constantly. Whenever they passed, silence fell.
Cutting into the silence like a knife into flesh was the sound of children. Two Nebesti boys, dressed in barely anything but loincloths, chased a much smaller boy through the pile of tents, screaming something menacing. The small boy turned directly toward the lines of spears. Llun felt his vision go dim as he saw that none of them were stopping. Two grim Vasylli warriors converged toward them. One of them grabbed a standing spear from the ground and pointed it at the children, shaking it menacingly.
The children tried to stop, but their momentum was considerable. The first one—a ratty-haired boy of about six or seven—managed to dig his heels at a suitable distance. But his assailants, who were both muscular and seemed large for their age, were not as quick to stop. They scratched and pulled at each other, trying to stop in time. At the very last moment, even the Vasylli guard paled. But he didn’t move.
The small boy, pushed toward the spear, managed to twist aside at the last minute. He wasn’t impaled.
But his side was slashed open. There was a lot of blood, even from the distance where Llun stood, clutching his chest for horror. A young Nebesti man ran into Llun’s field of vision, his hands shaking in those ridiculously expansive gestures that all Nebesti indulge in. Behind him was a young woman. She stopped as soon as she saw the boy. Her sunburned face blanched, and she screamed.
The warriors tensed as the Nebesti man approached them. The warrior who had not hurt the boy stood in front of the one who had. His fists were bunched, and he yelled at the Nebesti to back down. The father did not. His eyes’ whites grew, and his hands waved more and more frantically. All the while, he moved toward the spears. The second warrior drew his sword, yelling. Llun couldn’t make out the words in the general mayhem of women and children screaming. The stricken boy moaned not at all, which was even more frightening. The father shoved his face into the warrior’s face, his raspy torrent of words turning into shouting. The warrior’s eyes bulged, and his face grew red. He kept repeating something again and again. Not once did he look at the boy.
Something twanged by Llun’s ear. The boy’s father twisted back unnaturally and fell to the ground. An arrow shivered in his shoulder.
“Move along!” A rough voice yelled near Llun. A huge Gumir, his face twisted into a grimace, making his already angled eyes disappear in the folds of his dirt-brown face. “Not your concern, Vasylli. Great Father’s business. Move along.”
Llun looked away and moved along. As he walked, he heard the familiar laugh of the Gumiren as they closed in. Then the thudding began. The sounds of fists on flesh and bone. Gritting his teeth, Llun ran on.
Where the Covenant Tree had once stood, a pile of kindling reached as high as a two-story house. It stood as a dour reminder of that day Vasyllia fell, when the Gumiren had nearly thrown the children of Adonais’s faithful into the fire. It had been a cruel joke of the Raven. Deny your divinity, your Adonais, he had said. And I will spare your children. And for what? For an existence of fear and no hope of a brighter future? Perhaps it would have been better for the children to burn.
Above the pile of logs—it obscenely resembled a huge raven’s nest—was the Raven’s totem: a stone obelisk that branched out into a pair of jagged wings. It was black as obsidian, but without that stone’s glass-like sheen. Whatever it was made of, the material seemed to suck light in, making it not so much black as absent—a hole in the fabric of the world shaped like an obelisk.
Llun stood before it, his hatred a hair’s edge from boiling. He forced himself to move on toward the third reach.
Of all the former reaches, the third was the one least affected by the Gumiren. Most of the damage of the battle for Vasyllia had been quickly repaired, as the Gumiren took residence in the mansions of the wealthy third-reachers. Many of them had kept the nobles as their servants. More like slaves, in fact, especially the women. Some old noblemen had been quietly dispatched during the now-infamous “night purges” that the Gumiren conducted every so often. Llun had heard that the purges continued, but now it was not the Gumiren, but turncoat Vasylli who would rat out their own brothers for a chance at a better set of table knives.
Seeing the mansions still sparkling like the jewels of great Vasyllia that was—it gave Llun vertigo. For a brief, brilliant moment it seemed that everything—the Gumiren overlords, the horrors of the nightly purges, the baseness to which everything had sunk—was just a dream. After all, wasn’t the palace of the Dar still standing, its seven towers like beacons of hope leading toward a glorious future?
Except now the palace was the dwelling place of a demonic Power who had the brazenness to call himself everyone’s father.
The gates to the outer courtyard of the palace, which now housed the Consistory, used to be op
en at all times as a sign of the Dar’s closeness to his people. After the fall of Vasyllia, the gates had been shut. So, when they opened to admit Llun, he had the sinking feeling that he was being invited to step into the gullet of a hungry monster.
He had been inside once only, during the matriculation ceremony of the warrior seminary. In the old days. He, as one of the preferred swordsmiths of the seminary, had received a place of honor in a front row of the viewing gallery. It was an impressive sight—the pentagonal courtyard filled with silent, unmoving, black-robed warriors, all with their swords drawn. At the whip-like calls of their cohort elders, the hundreds of warriors had demonstrated, as one man, every step of the sword-forms. It was like a dance, and it had taken his breath away.
Now, he was struck by the emptiness of the square, save for a few scurrying forms of servants. Instead, his eyes were drawn to the huge banners flapping on the walls of the keep—the red raven obelisk on a black field. Like a bad joke, Sabíana’s sign of the gold sun on black field flitted small and insignificant from a pole jutting up above the smallest of the seven towers.
Perhaps she is alive, he thought. The thought did little to comfort him. What was a crippled young woman with no army behind her supposed to do to change the fortunes of Vasyllia?
“What, you as well?” Aspidían materialized out of nowhere. “It’s the strangest thing, Brother Llun. Whenever one of you old Vasylli come up here (oh, it’s rare enough, I grant you) their eye is always drawn to that pitiful banner. I wonder why?”
“Brother Aspidían,” said Llun, bowing in greeting. The wiry inquisitor was dressed in simple linen trousers with a billowing linen overshirt—the picture of leisure and relaxation. Only his eyes still smoldered behind his smile.
“Come, Brother Llun. I want you to meet someone.”
They took an unobtrusive door in the keep’s wall that led to a twisting staircase. It was dusty and disused, and Llun was sure that this was where he would be suddenly attacked from behind and thrown into a dungeon. Instead, at the top of the staircase, Aspidían opened another unobtrusive door. Facing the golden light that streamed into the stairwell was like staring into the sun. When Llun’s eyes adjusted, he saw they were in a vaulted chamber covered in frescoes. Every inch of the curved ceilings and walls burst with giant-sized fancies on the theme of flowers and birds. Bumblebees painted with actual gold leaf seemed to buzz on purple and red petals of peonies. Strawberries and blueberries burst from the confines of their green and yellow leaves.
“He likes it. How pleasant.”
Llun’s stomach lurched at the sound of that voice. It was more than one voice. It was like a voice with a hundred echoes, coming from one mouth. When he saw the speaker, it took a strong effort of will not to cringe.
He was…well, beautiful. Flawless skin, like polished ivory. Soft eyes, almost lavender colored. Long-fingered hands, the nails reflecting the golden candlelight in the room like polished metal. Llun had heard that Yadovír, the Mouth of the Raven, had grown younger and more pleasing to look at in the five years since the fall of Vasyllia. But the beauty was somehow… wrong. As he stared at Yadovír, unable to look away, it seemed to Llun that something shivered in his face. No, under his face. Like his entire surface—skin, face, hands—was an elaborate costume for something foul underneath.
Yadovír cocked his head to one side and slitted his eyes, assessing. “You’re a bear of a man, aren’t you? But my friend here says that you have talent.”
“That he does,” said Aspidían, coming close to Yadovír. Too close. Llun felt sick to his stomach.
Yadovír’s eyes wandered over Llun, from head to foot, lingering. He smiled, a predator’s smile that was not his own. Llun had the sensation that he was being judged as potential food.
“For all your strength, Brother Llun,” said Yadovír, with a hint of a growl. “You are rather soft, aren’t you?”
Aspidían chuckled, and they both turned away from Llun and walked to a strange contrivance in the middle of the room. It was so out of character with the general opulence that at first Llun didn’t understand what he was looking at. The he realized it was a hole. In the floorboards. In that hole was a hearth, the simple kind that you find in a first-reacher house. There were pillows around the hearth—simple, red pillows of no especial value. A small table stood by the hearth. Three goblets and mead. Mead? Llun couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Why, in this palatial room, was there a sliver of commonness more appropriate to Llun’s own back room behind the forge?
Aspidían and Yadovír sat on two of the cushions, leaning into one another in a way that bespoke more than casual intimacy. It was unsettling. The whole picture was unsettling. Was this part of an elaborate plan to confuse him so much that he would somehow stumble into revealing some dangerous truth? Did they know about Mirodara?
“Why do you gawk?” Aspidían guffawed. “Sit. That cushion’s for you.”
Llun did as he was told. Yadovír continued to look at him hungrily as Aspidían poured him the mead. Llun tried to focus his attention on the cup, and once again he lost himself in the quality of the work. The wrought iron tracery woven like ivy around the wooden goblet was exquisite. It nearly rivaled his own abilities. Then he drank the mead and nearly drowned in the pleasure of that taste. He had not had good mead—hearty, first-reacher bread-ale—in years.
Laughter jolted him out of his contemplation.
“You’re right, Aspidían,” said Yadovír. “He really is…an artist.”
Llun felt his face get warm, and suddenly he was angry. Sick of it all. His teeth creaked as he tensed his jaw.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, surprised at the audible growl in his own voice.
“Oh, how disappointing,” drawled Yadovír. “No small talk? Cut straight to the heart of the matter, eh? Artists.” He sounded faintly disgusted with the idea.
“You never understood us,” said Aspidían. “We operate on a different schedule than most. Don’t we, Brother Llun?”
Llun refused to be included in the offer of intimacy. He had no desire to be named the kind of artist that Aspidían was. If they wanted something of him, they would have to pry it out of his hands. The thought gave him shivers.
“As you wish,” said Yadovír, putting his cup down, then yawning as he stretched against Aspidían, who still seemed amused by everything. “We want you to take on a commission. For the Consistory. In fact, we want it to be the last commission you take.”
There was a double meaning there, Llun knew it. But he pretended not to hear it. “You want me to be your exclusive smith? But why?”
“We have a…sudden vacancy.” Aspidían’s eyebrows came together, shadowing his eyes.
Llun picked up his cup and offered it to them, significantly.
“Yes,” said Yadovír. “These cups are his work. As you see, he was very good. But he had an unfortunate slip in judgment. He can no longer help us.”
“You killed him?”
Yadovír looked disappointed. “No, of course not. They only took his hand. The Gumiren.”
“So…wait, I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that you and the Gumiren are not…on the same side?”
Aspidían’s eyes were no longer smoldering. They burned. “Now that is a comment unworthy of you, Brother Llun. What makes you think any Vasylli would willingly collaborate with those animals? No. Compromises were made, yes. Necessary ones. But never think, not for a moment, that we do not anticipate with great joy the moment when we can slaughter them in their beds.”
“What about the Raven?” said Llun.
Aspidían tensed, and his hand went to his boot. Something gleamed there.
“Do…not…utter—” he whispered menacingly.
“Oh, don’t worry, Aspidían,” said Yadovír. “He’s brave, for all of his goggling at the fine things in life. Perhaps not as soft as we thought.” His smile stretched his face. “Brother Llun, I’ll let you say it once. But never again. The Great Father, for
your information, is well on his way to becoming a figure of speech. Soon the Vasylli will forget about the Raven. Just as he would want it. His desire is not Vasyllia itself. It is something else. He has promised me that, soon, we will have Vasyllia back to ourselves.”
“How can you trust him? He seems willing enough to turn on those he needed to get into Vasyllia in the first place.”
“I don’t trust him, you fool,” said Yadovír. Something shimmered in the shadows behind him—a suggestion of huge, jagged wings. Llun’s heart plunged to his ankles. “I’m useful to him. And I’m making the Gumiren less so. Soon, their time will be over.”
“And high time too,” said Aspidían. “They’ve all become so fat and complacent. The Ghan himself can hardly walk now, he is so round. He must be carried around on a litter.”
Llun’s curiosity got the better of him. “Is it true, what’s been said in the first reach? That there are troubles in the Gumiren ruling council?”
Aspidían put on an entirely new face. Intense concentration, with a hint of anticipation. Llun had a suspicion that was the sincerest Aspidían face yet. “Do tell, Brother Llun. What sort of gossip are the commons bandying about?”
Llun resented the tone, but forced himself to speak evenly. “Well, in the first years of the occupation, the Gumiren were everywhere, weren’t they? Patrolling streets, eating at the public houses, propping up the spear lines in the refugee camp. But over the years, fewer and fewer of them were seen in the lower reaches. Then the rumors started that the Gumiren had taken to Vasylli luxuries. Particularly wine and mead. Not surprising, given their nomad bloodlines. And they were willing to give more and more of the ruling responsibilities to the collaborators.”
The Curse of the Raven (Raven Son Book 2) Page 2