The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Quiet,” Galha snapped. For a moment the only sound in the chamber was the breathing of another of the guards. He was gasping, doubled over but looking at Galha. There was a smear of blood across his forehead. “Now,” Galha continued, “tell me, Shandhren: what was it you saw?”

  “Men,” the gasping one managed to say. “Strangers. Lizard-men. And ours too. They killed my companions—and there were more of them. In some of the hallways leading here. I took the Guardspassage to avoid them.”

  “Impossible,” the Queen said. “How did they get in? And from where?”

  “My Queen,” the guard who had spoken first said, his voice lower now but no less urgent, “you must summon all—”

  “I must?” she repeated. She took a step toward him and he fell back, nodding, swallowing convulsively. “If you are so certain about what—”

  The Queensbell’s first reverberation drowned out her words. As it tolled again, she turned to Malhan. The eddying light made shadows of her eyes and her parted lips. The third time the bell sounded, she walked to the staircase that led up to her bedchamber. Her bow was leaning against the steps.

  “I should not have doubted you,” she said to the guards, in between the clangings. She let her long sleeping robe fall to the floor and slung her bow over the thin knee-length shift beneath. Even now, as the bell called danger and death, the guards gaped at her. “They will be coming for me. You will all move back through the outer corridors, seeing if you can gather reinforcements or find pockets of guards who still live. If there are too many attackers, take the Guardspassage out of the palace and await me in the marketplace. They will have to emerge sometime. We will be waiting when they do.”

  “And you?” The Queensguards turned to Malhan with the surprise people always showed when he spoke in the Queen’s presence. “Where will you go?”

  She was walking up the stairway, adjusting her quiver across her back. “We,” she replied, not looking at him, “will go to find our daughter.”

  He followed her up. The Queenstower was joined to Ladhra’s by an arched, enclosed walkway. The door to Ladhra’s tower opened only from the passage, and only Galha had the key. The Princess had protested this arrangement years ago, railing about the lack of privacy and fairness and autonomy inherent in the walkway and the door she herself could never open. The Queen had assured her that, if it was used at all, it would be for the most pressing of matters. And she had never used it—not even as a young mother, sleeping apart from her child for the first time, or, later, when she knew Ladhra was sick or miserable. It had been enough to know that the walkway was there.

  She strode out onto the stones now as if she had done this many times before. Malhan stepped after her. The wind was strong this far above the ground, and it gusted through the wide embrasures on either side of them, snarling their hair and their breath. At the place where the walkway’s curve was highest, the Queen paused. She peered through one of the openings, angling her head into the wind. Malhan joined her. For a moment they looked together at the rivers of flame that were the great trees of the Queenswood. Then they continued on, running this time, to the door that had never been opened.

  There was no stone under Mallesh’s feet as he ran. Shells instead, and moss, flowers spattered with sea water from his body. He was slick with scales and light with air-breaths—breaths still new, damp earth still new. He was Nasran, and his people swarmed up the bank behind him, silently, pausing only to loose the weapons that would bring them home. Drylanders crumpled, silenced before they could flee or raise an alarm. His limbs coursed with power—his own and that of this place, whose song deafened him and turned his gaze to crimson. O Nasran, I am your son and I am you; I am next and greatest. . . .

  The noise of the waves hummed beneath his skin. The waves and the voices, rising tides that he commanded—but as he ran on, he knew that there was no ocean. A humming, yes: a deep metal sound that came again and again. In the breaks between, the voices hardened as the stone did, and Mallesh saw the palace corridor and the wide, darting eyes of his men.

  He stood still, wiped sweat from his eyes and forehead with the back of his right hand. The tip of his spear was bloodied, as was the knife in his chest-wrap. He had thrown and stabbed: that much was no battle-dream. The hallway that curved to either side was empty except for torches and tall ivy-mottled bodies: images in stone, of women with bows and bristling quivers.

  “It’s an alarm.” Mallesh did not look at the man who had spoken. “Mallesh, they’ve discovered us—let’s go back to meet them in the open. . . .”

  “No.” Mallesh removed his knife, wiped it on his chest-wrap in two long, sweeping strokes. “We press on. We take this tower and the next one, and we find Baldhron and his men where we agreed to.”

  The selkesh glanced at each other. Such a tattered group, all of them thin and cracked—but Nasran’s army had faced greater odds and triumphed. “Follow me,” Mallesh said. “There will be no retreat.”

  They followed him. He went more slowly now, his right shoulder almost brushing the statues. He led them to the left and up: west, he reminded himself, and north. When they reached an arched doorway at another bend, he gestured all his men to halt. “Carefully,” he mouthed, then stepped around the corridor’s turning.

  The Queensguards were waiting for them. The ones guarding the other towers had not been; some had been bent over food or games, others had been talking. Mallesh remembered this in fractured images that came to him all at once as he saw the seven Queensguards who stood across the hallway’s width, their bows raised and strung. There were four more facing the other way: eleven, when until now there had been only two. “Now!” Mallesh cried, and sprang forward. The Queensguards did not shout. They loosed their arrows as Mallesh and his men loosed their spears. Two selkesh fell beside him. Mallesh cried out again, and again as his spear flew wide. One Queensguard went down, and then another. There were nine of them, two drawing swords as the selkesh strained closer. Nine. Mallesh threw his knife. He did not see where it landed. He saw only one last arrow, skimming from somewhere, too straight and swift to dodge. He heard another of his men scream—and then he too was screaming.

  Not screaming—silent. He spun, his voice swallowed by fire. He scrabbled at his throat, felt wood, felt the fire roar as his fingers tugged and the metal in his skin tore deeper. He looked up at white stone and did not know what he was seeing until a body bent down to him and he realized he was lying on the ground. Someone said his name. He heard it; he heard everything so clearly, though his vision swam with wriggling black shapes. “Mallesh! Mallesh, they’re down, but more are coming. What should. . . .” The man was panting, babbling. Mallesh thought, And how do you expect me to answer you with this arrow in my throat, you sniveling fool? There were more Queensguards coming; he heard their hard, measured footsteps and even the clatter of their arrows. He tried to make his man understand: Go on. Leave me. Fight the ones who are coming. Die with me if you must, but fight. He could not. He was falling backward, away from them, his breath vanishing before it reached his chest.

  Nasran, Nasran, forgive me. He was up, his arms stretched and held, his legs dragging—or so he assumed, since he could not see them beneath him. He hardly saw anything; with every jolting step the black shapes spread and thickened. Only his ears did not betray him. They brought him the whimpering of his men and the scraping of their feet, the voices that were blooming in distant corridors and the metal being drawn. Let them take us, Nasran. Let us bleed our failure onto this singing stone—but now he heard different voices, screaming words that were neither Queensfolk nor selkesh, and there was wind on his face. They were dragging him outside. The warning bell was very loud here—outside, in the market, where other cowards were trampling each other in their desperation. It was over, then, truly. Baldhron’s planning, and his scores and scores of followers, had not helped. Nasran had not helped. Mallesh tried to twitch a hand or arm, or lift his head just
a bit, but could not—and it was too late in any case: they were lifting him, bearing him slowly down into darkness and water.

  It was the water that soothed the agony from his body. He felt it lapping up around his legs and waist, and it was so soft and sang so sweetly that he no longer wanted to see or struggle. When the arrow in his throat shifted again, sharply sideways, he screamed inside his head and thrust himself more deeply into the water. They had snapped the arrow shaft; the last conscious part of him knew this. Then the river rose to blunt all pain, all knowing, and he followed it away.

  Ladhra’s body is cool and supple. Leish holds her against him and uses his other arm to draw them both through the water, quite close to the surface, so that he will be able to give her air when she needs it. He recognizes the patterns of coral and rock beneath them, and he knows their singing. She hears it now as well; he feels her listening and her wonder, and he laughs up at the distant sun.

  Her body was warm and stiff. The ocean’s song was gone; in its place was the knell of Mallesh’s new land, and a grinding sound that was very loud. Leish’s eyes flickered open. Even though he yearned to dive until he became nothing in the darkness, he opened his eyes and looked past Ladhra’s head at the opposite wall and the tapestry upon it. A scene of plants, he noticed, curling, burgeoning petals and stems. The plants quivered; he tried to blink them into focus, but could not. Then the entire length of weaving rippled, and the grinding sound peaked and ceased, and two people emerged from behind the cloth.

  Galha’s eyes found him first. He saw her stillness, as she looked at him. Even when she walked across to the bed, she seemed still, as if there were no breath within her. Hollow eyes and cheeks and veins; an emptiness beneath her skin, which he could almost see through. Only when she was directly above the bed did she shift her gaze to her daughter. For a breath Galha was torn, bent into a different shape—but then she saw the knife that lay at the edge of the bed, and she was still and straight again. Leish closed his eyes.

  Send me back, he thought. He heard his hearth pool, with its starmoths and its river path. Perhaps he would return as one of the starmoths, for once one song was done, there was another, and who knew what its notes would be. He would draw circles in the pool and his parents would know him and be comforted. Send me now, he thought, and waited for the knife with a joy that was nearly silent.

  A voice cried out very loudly, louder than the bell or the sudden, frantic clamour of Leish’s heart. He opened his eyes just enough to see the Queen turn away from him toward the man whose name, Leish remembered, was Malhan. It was he who had spoken the word. Leish had never heard Malhan’s voice, had never even seen him approach the Queen, as he did now. He wrapped his fingers around hers so that they both held the knife, and said another word, quieter and less steady than the first. She made a shuddering, dissolving sound that seemed to come from somewhere beneath her throat, and Malhan looked away from her, at Leish.

  “Did you do this?” Malhan asked him, the yllosh words quick and flawless. Although he did not want them to, Leish’s eyes opened very wide. Before he could find his own voice, the Queen spoke several low, clipped words that were nearly strong enough for anger. Malhan replied, slow and deliberate, and she lowered her gaze once more to her daughter.

  “Did you?” Malhan said. This time Leish stirred. His muscles stretched and throbbed, and his injured webs ached, and he had to breathe away the pain before he replied.

  “No,” he said. He tasted old blood and swallowed, but the taste remained. His need for water was another ache, and he cringed from it, ashamed, alive.

  “Who, then?” Malhan demanded, and Leish told him. “Where is he?” Leish said he did not know but that he knew where Baldhron had come from. He heard himself describing the wells and tunnels, the chambers and pools, as if he were eager to do so—which was strange, since he felt only spreading cold. The Queen had laid a hand on Ladhra’s hair as Leish began speaking; as he continued, she drew it back again and lifted her eyes to his. All these words, which had waited in him during the months of his imprisonment, the words he had not spoken when she had laughed at him and had him beaten and railed at him so fiercely that Wollshenyllosh had not been able to translate quickly enough—he gave them to Galha now, one by one, each adding a bit to the numbness in his veins. He gave them to her over the Princess’ body and thought that the knife would have been an easier way.

  When the words were done, Leish waited again. So much waiting, these past few months—though now, at least, he was not afraid. Not even when the Queen bent down and hissed her own words into the space between them.

  “She says,” came Malhan’s voice, from somewhere above, “that we will go together to the place you have described. She says it does not matter what we find there, for no one will ever know of it. Your people attacked this city, and you alone—” he faltered, then spoke as smoothly as he had before, “—you killed the Princess. This is the story that will be told.”

  As Malhan’s voice was fading, two Queensguards, panting and blood-spattered, ran into the chamber. They stared at the bed in silence for a moment; silence, for the great bell was no longer sounding. Leish did not know when it had stopped. Then one of them spoke, and the Queen rose and spoke as well, in short, sharp words. She pointed at Leish, and the guards strode to the bed, reaching with hands and metal. One of the men jerked Leish down to the foot of the bed and up, gripped him as the other man pressed his knife against Leish’s throat. He did not flinch. When the guard held the dagger up, its tip was dark and wet. Leish smiled, and the knife thrust close once more. Galha called out, and the guard wiped his knife onto the cloth that wrapped Leish’s thigh.

  “Take us there,” Malhan said, such strange yllosh words that did not bubble in the throat. “Now.” Both guards were holding Leish now, with hands like skeins of seastrangler. He could feel the hatred in their skin. Before they dragged him out the door, he looked back at the bed. One more glimpse of pooling blood and hair—and the Queensguards shouted and struck him so that he had to turn away from her.

  He closed his eyes against the noise and light outside the tower. More guards joined them almost immediately; he heard their voices and the pounding of their feet, and he heard the hissing of their arrows. They were all running except for him. The two guards dragged him between them, calling out sometimes to their companions. He smelled smoke and burned cloth and dying. He heard the dying, as well, in sounds that were selkesh or Queensfolk or unrecognizable as either.

  He kept his eyes squeezed shut until the air around him changed. He coughed and gasped, trying to breathe this new, fresher air, and he opened his eyes. They were hauling him through the marketplace, which seemed empty. Only the Queen, Malhan and the two guards were with him now; the others must have remained at the palace, or near it, to wait for more to kill.

  The well shaft was moonlit at its top stones and black within. One of the Queensguards went down first, holding a lantern that swung and blurred into a distant point of light that looked like a starmoth. The other guard pushed Leish to the well’s mouth. The numbness seemed to be spreading to his skin; he did not feel the stones or the metal hand- and footholds within, though he descended as swiftly. The other guard clambered down after him, then Galha, then Malhan. They crowded close together in the water. The first guard had hung the lantern from the nail the scribes’ bag of clothes usually occupied; the light glanced off skin and water and penetrated nothing.

  “And now?” Leish saw the Queen turn to Malhan as she had in Ladhra’s chamber when he had first spoken the yllosh tongue to Leish. Leish told them where they would swim, and how. After a moment of silence, the Queen did speak; a moment after that they were all beneath, Leish in the lead and everyone holding onto everyone else like a line of baby water rats. Despite this line and the tug of the guard’s arms on his thighs, Leish drew them quickly through the water. I could shake myself free, he thought. I could be out beneath the city walls before they even
surfaced again—if they surfaced. His body did not seem to acknowledge this thought; it propelled him. And in any case, Baldhron would be here somewhere. Baldhron, who had promised glory to the selkesh, who had thrust Ladhra’s body into a bloody knot on her bed.

  Everyone except Leish and Galha coughed after their heads emerged into the air of the tunnel. She was up on the ledge before any of them. She cried out to them, and they scrambled to join her. She walked beside Leish, her strides so long that he had to force his own limbs to match her pace. Once or twice he slowed, and each time felt the prick of a knife against the small of his back or his neck, where the life-vein pulsed. He led them through the torchlit tunnels that flashed with cut glass. They turned after him, crowded around him, until he had to look down into the water to keep his dizziness from upending him.

  He saw selkesh, ten, twenty, more, all swimming far enough below the surface that no one would know they were there—no one except Leish, who recognized the silent shadows speeding south, east, away to where the river foamed free in the desert. He did not falter, and he looked up again almost immediately: no clues, no reason for them to lean out over the water. The knife nicked at his skin, and his people surged homeward below him, and he rejoiced even as he despaired, for this, at last, was punishment.

  He slowed when he saw the glow of the scribes’ pool ahead. “There,” he mouthed over his shoulder at Malhan. Galha pulled an arrow from her quiver. They watched her, and she stood still, lifting her shoulders, placing her back so that she seemed as tall as a selkesh. Then a voice called from the chamber, and another answered it, and Queen Galha moved forward.

  “Faster!” Baldhron shrieked. “Faster, you fool.”

  Pentaran’s hands shook as he reached up to snatch another bag from its hook. He had been shaking since he had seen the child, one of his students, who had gazed up at him with eyes as filmed with shock and horror as Pentaran’s probably had been. The child had run, and Pentaran had watched him vanish into the fire-limned darkness of the Queenswood. Only after the boy had disappeared did Pentaran follow. He had called the boy’s name among the whistling, snapping trees, though he had not expected an answer. Pentaran’s blade was bloody, as were his clothes. He had killed Queensfolk as they slept—the boy had known this. But still Pentaran called as he reeled like a drunkard over moss that was brittle now instead of soft.