The City

by Stella Gemmell

  What is Arish getting into? he thought.

  By the time they returned to the Araby Gate Riis had made his decision. He could not save Amita or Saroyan. But he could save Arish, and Evan Broglanh, and his own men, and perhaps hundreds of soldiers loyal to the City. The assassination attempt could not happen if the emperor was already dead.

  So Riis had until the Day of Summoning to kill him.

  PART SIX

  The Day of Summoning

  Chapter 35

  The gods of winds and waters were many and various, and capricious in their moods. In the City the ancients had worshipped the deities of the four winds, although modern folk, of a less superstitious bent, prayed only to the god of the northerlies, whose ever-presence could scarcely be doubted. Simpler people worshipped the gods of the seas, the rivers, rain, snow, lightning and thunder. And the country folk, whose every activity was affected by the whims of the weather, prayed to the same gods, as well as the lesser deities of fog, frost and the kindly morning dew.

  Elija lay in the bottom of the boat, helpless in the coils of seasickness, and prayed to them all. At times he hoped he could detect a change in the movement of the craft, a slight lessening of the swell, and he prayed more fervently, imagining his ordeal was coming to an end. But then the seas would surge again, and so would his stomach, empty now except for the small sips of water he had managed to force down.

  He had spent the hours of daylight staring at the grey wood of the plank in front of his face. The vessel, once a fishing boat, now promoted to a military landing craft, stank of fish and he imagined he could see the pattern of scales imprinted into the timber. Often they looked like faces.

  They had been in the boat for three days and three long nights. The convoy of four vessels travelled under cover of darkness, and in the daytime hid in the lee of islands and rocks, evading the ships of the City. The boat was wide and low, unlikely to be spotted except from up close, and it wallowed and lurched, and few of the fifty-odd soldiers packed aboard had not suffered. Elija doubted that, when he reached dry land, he would be able to stand, and he wondered how the warriors could possibly fight.

  “Here, lad, have some water.”

  Elija shook his head miserably, then he felt a strong hand lift him by his collar, and a waterskin was thrust against his mouth.

  “Drink.” There was no refusing. Elija sipped some of the water, conscious that it tasted of old socks, and tried to hold it down.

  “Good lad.” Stalker set him back gently, and said, “Not much longer.” It was what he always said. Elija had stopped believing him two days before.

  The big northlander had taken it upon himself to look after the boy, urging him at times to take bread or pieces of dried meat. Stalker himself seemed unaffected by the movement of the boat, indeed he seemed to relish it, sitting looking out over the grey waves sniffing the air like an old dog. That morning, as the sun rose and while the boat still rocked at its night berth, Stalker had suddenly thrown off his clothes and clambered over the side and swam in the sea, for no reason. The other soldiers had jeered and shouted, and when the northlander had climbed back into the boat, his braids dripping, his white skin bright red in patches from the icy waves, he had muttered sheepishly, “Bit of a wash.” But Elijah thought he had done it for the fun of it, and he was cheered for a while.

  “Look,” Stalker said, pointing to the east. “Land.”

  But Elija had seen land before and was not to be fooled.

  He dozed for a while, dreaming he was climbing a high cliff. The cliff was made of cake and he had to keep stopping to eat some. Someone below was urging him onwards, but he had to eat the cake, even though his stomach was full, and the roll of plans under his arm kept slipping and slithering out of his grip.

  When he awoke again it was pitch-dark. He felt a bit better, for the lurch of the boat had lessened. He guessed they had stopped somewhere sheltered for the night. The ship creaked and groaned, and he could hear water slapping on the other side of the planks by his head. It was icy cold. The light snow which had accompanied them when they set off from Adrastto had quickly turned to a steady penetrating rain. His clothes were soaked. Around him he heard the snores and smelled the smells of too many soldiers packed together in a small space. And he could hear murmured voices.

  “How’s the ankle?” the woman asked Stalker.

  “All right.” The man bit off the words, not wanting to talk about his crippled limb.

  “When we go ashore in the morning you must hang behind,” Indaro told him, for she was in charge of the boat. “Three days in this and your ankle will have stiffened up. If we meet opposition straight away I don’t want you in the front ranks.” The northlander made no reply and his silence spoke loudly. “You’ll get your chance,” Indaro added.

  “You want me to babysit the boy?” Stalker asked gruffly.

  Indaro hesitated. Elija knew that was not what she meant.

  “No,” she said. “I have assigned two bodyguards to Elija. I want you to stay to the rear because you would be a liability in the front ranks until your ankle has warmed up.” She added briskly, “That’s an order.”

  Elija had been a little frightened of Indaro when he first met her at Old Mountain. He had no experience of women warriors. The only women he met in the Halls were whores or crones, who smiled most of the time, to appeal or ingratiate. Indaro seldom smiled, and there were deep vertical frown lines between her dark brows. Elija had avoided her. But the day after they first met she had approached him and stiffly told him she had seen Emly with Bartellus after the flood. She told him every detail and nuance of the meeting, then patiently told him again when he asked. He had known for some time that Em was alive, but this was the first time he had met anyone who had spoken to her, even if it was eight years before, and he absorbed every word.

  In turn he told her of his time with Rubin. She had known her brother was there, and that was why she had followed him. She had spent two years in the Halls but had not been able to find him. Elija wished he could tell her what happened to his friend.

  Then news reached Old Mountain of Amita’s death, followed, days later, by the crumbling roll of papers, the plans of the palace and sewers she had given her life for. No one could tell Elija how she had died, but he knew she was fearless and he guessed she had died bravely, determined to give him a chance of success. For many nights Elija wept over his loss, and for as many days he sat with Indaro as they pored over the captured plans, conjuring stone walls and tunnels and waterways from the faint cold lines on sheets of flimsy paper spread out in front of them.

  He was impressed and daunted by Indaro’s knowledge of the Halls, and he found it impossible to imagine such a woman living down there. She told him she knew only a small area—beneath the south wing of the palace which housed the Library of Silence and the Hall of Watchers and the city to the south of that. He, on his part, had kept to the main routes used by Dwellers to cross the vast network of tunnels, but knew no area well, except for that around the Hall of Blue Light which, they worked out, lay beneath the Great Library and was therefore useless to them. Neither of them knew anything about the caverns below the Keep, nor anyone who had been there.

  One morning the two were joined by a stocky, fair-haired soldier called Garret, who had arrived with Indaro and Fell at Old Mountain and who, unlike most soldiers, could read. After watching and listening silently for a long while, Garret asked them, “What I don’t understand is, if the Hall of Watchers, which leads up to the palace, is flooded, you say, then surely the whole of the Halls, everything we are looking at”—he gestured to the plans—“is underwater too.”

  Indaro said curtly, “It’s more complicated than that.”

  She said no more, so Elija explained, “Gil has put scouts in, from the Salient caves, which is where I escaped from the Halls. They found someone who still lives in the sewers, a Dweller, who says the flooding and the shifting of debris over the last two years has blocked some tunnels and
made areas that were previously flooded now above the water, just as some areas that were once dry are now flooded.”

  “Can’t this Dweller show us the way up into the palace?” Garret asked.

  “I don’t think so. It is hard to explain what it is like down there.” Elija thought about it. “You see, every day is a struggle for life in the Halls. Everyone keeps their eyes on the ground, looking for treasure, as they call it, or at their backs, fearing an attack. There are areas where Dwellers never go, because they are too dangerous, or because they are heavily patrolled. They…there is no curiosity about the world above.”

  “But there must be escape routes, in case of flood.”

  “Each centre of population, like the Hall of Blue Light where my sister and I lived, has its own escape route. But these are all out into the City, up vertical drains with ladders, called high funnels, which the engineers used to use to get to certain parts of the sewers. These supply air to the Halls. But none come up in the palace, that I know of. There are none on the plans. And the palace is too closely guarded. At least, it is now. Indaro says there used to be a way from the palace to the Dungeons of Gath, and a path from the dungeons out into the City, in Lindo.”

  “The Dungeons of Gath?” Garret asked.

  “The oldest dungeons in the City,” answered Indaro. “They lie under the Shield. Although the palace dungeons are almost certainly underwater, the Dungeons of Gath might not be.”

  “It is a long way from the Shield to the palace,” Garret said.

  “It is even longer underground,” replied Indaro. “And there is a very good chance part of it is flooded.”

  Elija and Indaro looked at one another. “So we have dismissed that idea,” explained Indaro. “We will seek an entry directly into the Keep. Gil’s contact claims there is such a way, although there is no indication of it on any of the plans we hold.”

  “And if it is not there?”

  “Then we will fail and Fell and Broglanh will have to manage without us,” she said bleakly.

  Elija was pulled from his reverie as a sudden flurry of movement rocked the boat. He sat up, feeling cold and stiff. The dim light of dawn was all around them, but all he could see to the east was the dark shape of a high cliff looming above. After three days of inactivity the soldiers were cheerfully repacking their packs, donning body armour, and chewing on last-minute rations. Elijah peered over the gunwale to the rocky shore where the first boat, the supply vessel, had already tied up. Supplies were being carried ashore—coils of rope, weapons, food and water, medical supplies, and boxes of the strange lanterns Gil had recently showed them.

  Elija’s boat was the next to disembark. Ropes were thrown to soldiers on the shore, and the boat was hauled towards the rocks, where mooring posts had been driven into cracks and crevices. Elija saw the first person leap ashore. It was Indaro, a light pack on her back, her sword-belt held high. Then the rest of the soldiers poured over the gunwales.

  “Elija!” Garret, now one of his bodyguards, gestured for him to leave. Elija levered himself up.

  “May your gods guard you, lad,” said Stalker, and Elija turned and nodded to him, his heart full of fear. He never thought he would be reluctant to leave the boat.

  But now he had to go back into the sewers.

  Bartellus no longer prayed to the gods. He no longer believed, as he once had, not so long ago, that soldiers who had died with valour in their hearts would be received by the Gods of Ice and Fire in the Gardens of Stone.

  Now he lay in a dungeon once again, with the terrible threat of torture and slow death hanging over him, and he grieved for the people he had betrayed. He tried to close his mind’s eye, but it was lidless, remorseless. Over and over he imagined Em being dragged away, struggling and crying. And he saw again, with merciless inevitability, his small sons waving goodbye to him in the sunlit garden, his pregnant wife smiling tiredly as he left his family to pursue his shiny military ambitions. These old ghosts from the past clung to him with sticky fingers, and they would not let him go however much he begged their forgiveness.

  His ancient body ached all over. Since the stabbing and fire he had never recovered his full strength, and the long walk through the tunnels to this cell had been a torment. Two fingers of his left hand had been broken in the struggle for his capture, and he had not the courage or will to straighten and bind them. His mind felt muddled, enmeshed in grief for the past and terror for the future. He was on his own in a large cell intended for many men. The floor of slimy stone sloped slightly and the lower half was flooded. He curled up in the driest corner, away from the water, cradling his broken hand, and tried to ignore the scurrying of rats’ claws in the dark.

  He was tormented by not knowing. He did not know why he was in prison. The gods alone knew there were many possible reasons. Had Fell Aron Lee’s conspiracy, and Bart’s part in it, been found out? Had someone discovered his real identity? Or both? Or was it simply that he had been imprisoned for concealing Emly’s true age? When he had tried to speak to his silent guards, on the torturous walk to this cell, asking them why he had been imprisoned, offering them all his wealth in return for a chance to speak to an advocate, he had been at first ignored, then cuffed impatiently to the ground.

  Worst of all, by far, he did not know what would happen to Em. Her best hope was that she would be treated as a deserter and sent to some training camp before going to war. The thought of gentle, sensitive Emly being forced into body armour, a sword thrust into her hand, and sent to kill enemy soldiers was a torment to him. But that was her best hope. Her worst was that they had guessed her part in the conspiracy against the emperor, or discovered she was the daughter of general Shuskara. Her future then was one he could not bear to contemplate. He kept telling himself, repeating the comfortable story to himself over and over, that Broglanh would hear of their capture, would go to her rescue as he had saved them both before. He was resourceful and courageous, and he had a network of friends. But Bart had not seen Evan Broglanh for many days before the dawn raid. He had no idea if he was even in the City.

  Bartellus wondered if he had been left there to die, abandoned without food and water for a terrible, but comparatively brief, death, and some traitor part of his mind hoped that was the truth. He could not face torture again. But he knew this was not so. His captors would scarcely have gone to the trouble of bringing him all this way through the dungeons when they could have executed him at his home. He had been brought there for some dark purpose.

  He cursed himself for his pride and his vanity, both teased out of him with small effort by the ambitions of Fell Aron Lee. He was told only he could save the City and, in his dotage, he chose to believe it. He had forgotten the vow he had first made deep in the Halls, to keep Emly safe, his first and most important task, had abandoned it when offered the chance of being Shuskara again, the victorious general at the head of his adoring troops.

  Again his pitiless memory, like a cheap mummers’ show, showed him his daughter being taken away. She was dressed only in her nightshift and they tied her hands and threw her into a cart like meat on a butcher’s slab. He could not remember if that had really happened, or if it was a nightmare. His captors had hit him over the head and he thought the only thing left in his skull now was headaches. He recalled being forced into a carriage, black and closed. He squeezed his old eyes closed in pain, trying to close his mind’s eye, yet the two small boys waved to him, and his wife smiled wearily. But now the boys’ faces were wizened and contorted like those of malevolent imps and Marta’s soft lips opened to reveal a flickering red tongue, and Bartellus moaned.

  He felt something move against his foot and his leg twitched convulsively. He had heard of prisoners being eaten alive by rats, and his courage failed and he wept in the darkness.

  Indaro leaped ashore. The rock felt wonderfully solid under her feet. She clasped her sword-belt around her hips and looked around. The cave mouth in front of them, across a terrain of sharp rocks, was low and
very wide, a murky slash in the cliff from which a dark river poured. The stench of sewage made her nose wrinkle, and she smiled grimly to herself. She had thought that part of her life over.

  Looking up she could see in the growing light the cliffs of the Salient rising above, dark grey against the lighter grey of the dawn. Her father’s house was up there, just out of sight. She was closer to it than she had been in years. Yet she knew in that moment, a moment of sad clarity, that she would never see it again.

  Putting aside the thought, she turned to see the last of her men climbing from the boat, Stalker in the rear moving awkwardly. There were fifty-five in her group, including Elija, Garret and Stalker. The rest were Petrassi and Odrysians, the Petrassi dark and slender like their leader Gil Rayado—silent, pitiless killers, she had been told; the Odrysians were fairer and with a boisterous temperament. They had joked and clowned around on the boat, apparently unaffected by nausea or fear. Indaro reminded herself that it was only days since she had thought of them all as Blueskins, the enemy. Now she was leading them into battle. They had no women warriors, and she had caught many curious glances in the days at sea. She had wondered, back at Old Mountain, if she should be put in charge of a team, but Fell had insisted and Gil had conceded graciously enough.

  She had last seen Fell Aron Lee three days before at the Paradise Gate. His leave-taking to her was a dour nod, then he rode up to the gate alone, while she and the others had turned and skirted the wall and headed north to the port of Adrastto. They were to meet again, in the Keep of the palace, if that proved possible, at noon on the Day of Summoning. Tomorrow. Indaro knew their mission, and Fell’s ambition, was to kill the emperor and end the war, but hers was to survive to see Fell again and to ensure his safe escape. If she had to kill the emperor to achieve that, then so be it. She would walk through the Gardens of Stone and take on every warrior who had ever lived if she could save Fell.