by Morgan Rice
How could Thanos explain that in a place whose people would never understand it?
“It was the right thing to do,” he said. “How did you come to be there? Don’t you have a family looking for you?”
He could see the hurt in the boy’s eyes, and guessed at the answer even before the boy said it.
“My father gambled at the Greatest Wager. He bet me first, then himself. My mother lives under the overhang.”
“Then we’ll get you there,” Thanos promised.
Again, the boy looked at him as though not understanding why someone would want to help him. He cocked his head to one side.
“I can help you too,” he said after a moment of consideration.
Thanos frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I have friends who run the gutters,” the boy said. “I bet they’ll know where to find Prince Lucious.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
From the balcony where she stood, Ceres should have been able to see the bustling mass of the city’s people heading out to its merchants or making their way to their jobs. She should have been able to hear the calls of people greeting one another and the sounds of animals being herded to market.
There wasn’t silence below, but it was far too close to it. The only people Ceres could see in the streets were the members of the rebellion and the remnants of Lord West’s forces. If she’d thought that her fight at the gate would stem the flow of people from the city, she’d been wrong.
Ceres could still see people heading for the gates. The stream of them had slowed, but that had more to do with the number who had already left than anything she had done. They kept leaving, taking what they could with them. There were even merchants at the gates and the docks, organizing caravans and boats trying to escape.
Ceres knew she couldn’t keep them in the city like prisoners, even if it was for their own good. The best she’d been able to do was to ask the rebels to make sure that those organizing the caravans weren’t bandits or slavers.
To make herself feel better, she made herself look away from the refugees fleeing the violence to come, and examine the walls of the city.
Those were far stronger than they had been, thanks to the efforts of her father and the rebels. They’d repaired and reinforced the gates with iron bands. They’d added spikes to some of the walls, sawn from spear points or forged from swords. There even seemed to be a crude catapult taking shape down toward the harbor, facing out toward the water.
They’d put so much effort into making the city’s walls strong again, yet without its people, Delos was like a body from which the blood had been let. It was inert, lifeless in a way that Ceres wasn’t sure could ever heal.
“I don’t know how to make this better,” Ceres admitted to the air.
There was no one there to hear it. The combatlords who guarded her now were keeping their distance, obviously trusting that Ceres would be able to handle a threat long enough for them to hear it. Her father was off forging swords and armor for the violence to come.
The others Ceres might have talked to were further away, if they were in this world at all. Her mother… well, she’d never been able to talk to the woman she’d thought was her mother, even before she’d sold Ceres as a slave. Her real mother was on an island Ceres wasn’t even sure she could find again. Her little brother had grown into someone whose advice Ceres could trust, but he was away, trying to bring the message of their reborn Empire to every corner of it. Akila she barely knew, and he was away on the ships anyway.
Anka was dead. Her older brother Nesos was dead. Rexus was dead. The list of the dead stretched so long that Ceres could barely remember every name on it. Every one of them brought her pain.
Thanos… no, even if he’d been there, Ceres didn’t think she could have talked this through with Thanos. There were too many other things to say and do first. He wasn’t there, in any case. He was the biggest absence in a city full of them.
Ceres needed to find someone to talk to, and the combatlords weren’t going to be enough, so she set off through the castle. She didn’t ask for directions. She half remembered the way, and in any case, she felt as though she deserved to be lost. She was the main reason the city was so empty, after all.
She walked through the castle, and even that was emptier than it should have been. Many of the servants who had been there had left with the others, obviously afraid of what was going to come. Ceres recognized some of the nobles there, trying to make sense of looking after the ancient building, trying to find something useful to do there, but even with them, there were fewer than there had been. She guessed at least some had run to their estates in the country.
The library’s doors were wide open when Ceres got there, the books, scrolls, and tablets in even greater disarray than they’d been the last time she’d been there. She saw the bald figure of Cosmas standing in the middle of it all, picking things up one at a time.
Ceres didn’t know him well. Thanos had introduced them before, but she hadn’t grown up around the royal scholar the way Thanos had. She’d heard the stories of a man who’d served several kings, providing advice and instruction, but she wasn’t sure what that meant for her. She wasn’t even sure whose side he would be on.
Ceres moved in to help him, bending to pick up two halves of a shattered slate.
“Leave that,” Cosmas said without looking around. “It’s hard enough putting everything back in its proper place without people getting in the—” Ceres saw him turn then “—oh, please forgive me, your majesty. I didn’t realize it was you.”
Ceres hurried to reassure him, because after all, it was probably the rebels who had caused this mess in the first place.
“I should probably be the one apologizing,” Ceres said. “Are you sure I can’t do something to help?”
She saw Cosmas shake his head, continuing to pick up scrolls and put them away in an order that only he seemed to understand. She understood the futility of the question even as she asked it. She couldn’t hope to guess how Cosmas would want things ordered. She was just trying to make herself feel better.
“Do not worry yourself unduly, your majesty. I have done this before. Kings are so rarely peaceful.”
“I’m not royalty,” Ceres insisted.
The old man shrugged and went back to his books. It seemed strange to watch him piecing order together out of chaos with such painstaking slowness.
“The first rulers of the Empire declared that they were not the Ancient Ones who had come before them,” Cosmas said. He gestured to the books around him. “Look, and you will find a hundred different titles for a ruler, a thousand different ways of getting one. The Angak of the Oilsir used to be selected according to who received a black bean in their bowl, if I recall. Until the day they sacrificed him though, people listened to his commands.”
“I don’t want to give commands,” Ceres countered. She hadn’t wanted to even at the start. There had simply been no one else to do it. She saw Cosmas shrug.
“Give three people a task, and they will have three different ways of doing it. It is why you will not be picking up my scrolls. It is also why you lead, whether you want to or not.”
It was the “or not” part that was the problem. It wasn’t as though she knew what she was doing when it came to leading. It seemed as though she was stuck here, trying to piece together the wreckage of the Empire, trying to protect those around her, while the looming invasion threatened all of them.
“I can’t imagine you’ve come here just to watch an old man try to come up with a new shelving system for his tomes,” Cosmas said.
That was true, but even then, it felt to Ceres as though she was interrupting.
“Thanos said he valued your advice,” Ceres said. “And I’ve heard the stories about you.”
“The ones where I supposedly know everything that has ever been known?” Cosmas asked with a smile. “Or the ones where I’m supposedly the power behind the throne, and all one must do to achieve on
e’s aims is petition old Cosmas?”
Ceres understood the lesson he was trying to teach there. Everyone had expectations they had to live up to, and plenty of people other than her had stories they found it hard to live up to. Even so, that did nothing about the problem of the army every bird, every spy, every rumor said would be coming their way.
“People are leaving the city,” she said. “You say I’m a leader? It’s hard to be one when there aren’t any people there to lead.”
“People have the choice to leave,” Cosmas said.
Ceres couldn’t tell if he was being deliberately provocative or not. Was he like this with Thanos? With everyone else? Ceres had no way of knowing.
“It’s a stupid choice!” Ceres insisted. “They’re running away because they think it will make them safer, but it won’t. When the army from Felldust comes, being outside the city won’t save them. They’ll just be easy prey.”
Cosmas lifted a heavy book of maps onto a lectern. “You’ll notice that I’m putting my things back in their places, not running with the others.”
Was that his way of saying that she was right? Of saying that he agreed with Ceres? What use was an advisor who spoke in riddles? If there had been anyone else, Ceres would have gone to them. Instead, she found a space between two piles of books in which to sit down.
“If people are only free to do what you think they ought to, they are not free,” Cosmas said. “The Ancient One philosopher Xarath wrote that. Of course, he ended up arguing against any freedom, but philosophers are like that sometimes.”
“Cosmas, you’re speaking in riddles,” Ceres said. She was starting to think that it might not have been such a good idea to come here. She’d been hoping for answers. Instead, she just felt more confused.
Cosmas was still putting books back where they belonged. “Did you think that I would have all the answers for you? A wise man doesn’t have answers. He just asks better questions. And has a large library, of course.”
“And is there anything in your library about what to do with a city that’s about to be attacked?” Ceres demanded. “About how you deal with a city without any people in it, or a country where half the people seem to want to kill the other half?”
Cosmas just went back to putting his books back where they should be. A part of Ceres wanted to grab him and shake him. She even reached out to start to do it, until it occurred to her that maybe he was giving her an answer.
He looked around, and Ceres was certain.
“You’re saying I should just get on with putting things back together, aren’t you?” Ceres guessed.
“I have said nothing,” Cosmas said. “Merely asked questions. I will say something, though. People are leaving, but they will come back. You merely have to show them that you are worth coming back to.”
Ceres didn’t ask how she went about doing that, not least because she guessed Cosmas would only answer with a question of his own. Besides, she already knew the answer. She had to be the leader they hoped she would be, which meant that she didn’t get to leave. She had to stay there, defend the city, and prove to the people that it would be safe for them to return.
She had to defeat the invasion.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Sartes made his way through the graveyard near the city, slipping between the statues and picking his way between the graves. He should have felt reverence, sorrow, even peace in a place like this. Instead, he mostly felt guilty.
He felt guilty because of the role he’d played in putting so many here. How many people had he killed now? He could remember the faces of the men he’d fought. The guard who had tried to kill him in the tar pits. The officer he’d faced during their ambush of the Empire’s forces. He suspected that those faces would be with him for the rest of his life.
There were others, though. Ones whose faces he knew, and whose faces he didn’t. There were all the others who’d died in the ambush he’d helped to organize. There were those who’d died fighting because he’d helped to recruit them, or because he’d tried to help the rebellion. There were the three he’d executed for their own violence, not wanting to leave it to anyone else to do.
It was hard to believe he was still young some days, when he had enough regrets for what felt like a lifetime.
“I’m not here for that,” Sartes reminded himself.
He didn’t have long, either, because the others from the convoy would be waiting for him. He’d asked for a little time here, but if he left it too long they would assume he was in some kind of danger and come looking for him. Sartes didn’t want that. He needed to be alone for this part.
It took him a while to find the grave marker he’d been looking for, the space overgrown with weeds, the marker itself little more than a piece of carved wood, with a single word cut into it.
Nesos.
“Hello, big brother,” Sartes said, as he knelt and started to clear away some of the vegetation from around the grave using his knife. He hacked it back, trying to think of what he wanted to say here. What he wanted to do.
“I wish you could have seen how things turned out,” Sartes said.
Sartes knelt there by the side of his brother’s grave, starting to tell him all the details of it. He told his brother about being conscripted and about escaping. About joining the rebellion, about Rexus and Anka, the ambush in the graveyard and the fights they’d had trying to free the city. He could imagine the way his brother would have reacted, the smile he would have had hearing about the rebellion rising up in the city, the worry on his face hearing about the tar pits.
Somewhere as he talked, Sartes found himself starting to cry, the tears falling to the hard earth by the grave. Sartes kept pulling away the weeds, and the tears continued to fall.
They weren’t just tears for his brother, although the sorrow that rose up at the thought of Nesos’s death built behind them, until Sartes found himself wishing that he could have his brother back, if only for an hour or two. He found himself begging any of the gods who were listening for it, but there was no reply. He hadn’t been expecting one.
There were so many others gone, and each one felt like a fresh hole picked in the fabric of his being. Sartes hadn’t been allowed to join the rebellion by Rexus, and maybe he would be the one dead, if he had. Anka had helped to save Sartes from the grip of the Empire’s army, and she’d found herself strangled in front of an audience of baying onlookers.
He even had tears for his sister, despite Ceres being safe. Despite her being in a position most people would have envied. Sartes knew what it meant to be a leader now. He understood some of the decisions leaders had to make, and he wouldn’t have wished that on anyone, least of all Ceres.
He offered up prayers by the side of his brother’s grave then. Prayers for the gods to look after his brother, but also prayers for the living. He prayed that Ceres would know what to do in leading the city, that his father would be safe in his efforts to rebuild the walls, and that they would all come through the attack that was rumored to be coming.
There was something peaceful here now that Sartes was done. A part of him wished that he could stay here among the monuments, but he knew he couldn’t. The others would be looking for him soon.
He stood and readied himself, trying to remind himself that he was supposed to be a leader. Soon, he would have to be. For now, at least, though, he had one more task to perform. He set off back through the graves, looking around for wildflowers that might make a fitting tribute for his brother.
Sartes was partway through when he heard the sound of singing from among the gravestones. It was a delicate, keening song, the sound of it both beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. There was something about the sound that suggested the singer didn’t know anyone was listening, and part of Sartes knew that the sensible thing to do would be to slip away unseen, not intruding upon someone else’s grief.
Instead, he found himself moving toward the sound, as quietly as he might have if there had been a unit of the
Empire’s soldiers ahead.
He rounded a patch of statues and saw a girl kneeling in front of a rough brick mausoleum. She had dark hair threaded through here and there with flowers and strands of silver wire that made it look as though her hair had been turned into some work of art. She wore a dress that had probably once been white, but was now stained with the dirt of the graveyard. She was singing what Sartes now recognized as a long prayer, her fingers tying prayer knots in strands of the wire that she wrapped over parts of the monument.
Sartes found himself staring at her. She seemed like something completely different from the women and girls he’d met on his travels. She was his age, and as he looked at her, it seemed that the rest of the world faded into the background. Her movements were precise and elegant, her features delicate and pale. Even her eyes were a deep brown that it seemed to Sartes he could get lost in, and probably had, because it took him several seconds to realize that she was staring back.
“Are you… are you going to kill me?” she asked.
Sartes realized how he must look then, with his weapons and his pieces of scavenged armor.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, spreading his hands to show that they were empty. Even so, the girl looked as though she might run. When had he turned into something so fearsome?
“I’m Sartes,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She didn’t answer, but stared at him instead for several seconds. “You’re Sartes? The boy who has been fighting the Empire? Who has been killing bandits?”
Sartes didn’t want to think about the fighting then, but he still nodded.
“That’s right.”
He hoped that the admission wouldn’t frighten her away. He could see how it might. She had the look of someone who had already seen far too much of soldiers.
“I’m here because my brother is buried here,” Sartes said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
That seemed to bring some animation and life into the girl’s features. Sartes could see the sympathy there.