City of Lies

by Sam Hawke

  “In his private bathhouse,” An-Hadrea noted with the faintest of smirks.

  “He listened, and our men believed him when he told them that he would investigate. And truly, only a few weeks later he came to Losi. Just he and Credo Etan, and a handful of servants. I met them, Honored Chancellor, and I know they genuinely wanted to help. I believed he had not known what the Families had let happen.”

  “That is no excuse,” said An-Hadrea, her chin high as she looked both of us in the eye, daring us to disagree. “He was the Chancellor. What good is a government if it does not know its own people, if it does not care what happens unless it is two treads from its door?”

  “Hadrea.”

  “It’s true! And he did not believe us about the spirits, either.”

  “He was respectful of our beliefs, even if he did not share them himself,” Salvea corrected gently. “As was your uncle, Credo Jovan. Though he spoke little, I could see how disturbed he was. Not just disturbed. Ashamed. I believe they were both good men who blamed themselves for their ignorance.”

  I had lain awake last night, unable to go to sleep for the questions playing over and over in my head: Why had Etan kept this from us? Especially, why had he not thought to give us this information as he lay dying? But now I remembered his last attempts at speaking. Go home, he had whispered, with a mouth thick with suffering. Not an expression of his own desire, but a final instruction. You go home. Faced with the realization there would be no more time for him, he had tried with his last energy to turn our attention to our own family holdings. Why had he not spoken sooner? I could make a guess. As our Tashi he had been our moral guide. He had been ashamed. Ashamed and proud and so afraid of failing in his duties to the Chancellor and to us.

  “You’re right, though, An-Hadrea. It’s no excuse that we didn’t personally know.” Tain’s usual exuberance was dimmed; he seemed diminished. “So many things I believed were just fantasies. I should have known that.”

  If anything, Tain’s humility seemed only to spur An-Hadrea to greater anger. She had wanted a fight, an outlet for the whirlpool of frustration and injustice that must have been bursting to escape her, and he was denying her that.

  On the ground, as if sensing his sister’s rage, little Il-Davior tugged at her skirt. “Too much talking, Haddy,” he moaned. “I am bo-red.”

  Her anger visibly fizzled as she crouched down beside her brother. “They like nothing more than to talk, in the city,” she agreed, with a tiny sidelong glance up at me. A bit rich, I thought, considering I had done nothing but patiently listen this entire time. But as she helped Il-Davior build a small tower out of pebbles I appreciated the distraction all the same. We deserved to be shouted at, but it wouldn’t help us end this siege.

  “So. The last thing.” Salvea’s voice slowed even further, and I tried not to be impatient at her long pauses and carefully considered words. “The Chancellor left word among all the estates, quietly, that he wished to meet with our elders, and confront the Council with our matter. Our wisest elders and Speakers left to meet with him in Silasta.”

  I frowned. Marjeta had mentioned a contingent that had been supposed to come, but had never arrived. “My Tashi planned to meet your elders,” Tain said, confused. “But we were told they never showed up.”

  My heart sank as An-Hadrea’s thin-lipped face supplied the other half of the story. “They never came back, did they?” The dull pounding of blood in my head was so loud I could barely hear my own words. No wonder the rebels wouldn’t respect our peace flags or trust our messengers. They’d tried that, and we had betrayed them. We were the ones without honor.

  After that, Salvea told us, things had moved swiftly. There was no more room to protest the uprising after the elders had never returned; it was assumed that they had been imprisoned, at best. Her face held such hope as she said that, and Tain looked like a broken man as he shook his head; something much worse had befallen that group. Someone had prevented that meeting from happening, and when that hadn’t been enough to deter Caslav … The roaring was so bad I couldn’t open my eyes, or focus on anything but my own wild heartbeat in my ears. Someone—or more than one someone—had not wanted any disruption to the arrangement making them so rich, and had been willing to murder anyone who put their luxurious lifestyles at risk. And potentially our own relatives had participated in this. Easy enough to believe Nara complicit in such evil, or Bradomir, but Mother? Our cousins?

  Not wishing to be caught up in the rebellion, and still hoping to be able to present their case to Chancellor Caslav, Salvea and her children had fled Losi, seeking refuge in the city. Upon arrival they had found it difficult to get into the city without documentation from the Ash estates. “We snuck in,” An-Hadrea said, chin high, cool eyes daring us to criticize. “A merchant from the southern mountains let us hide in her wares.”

  “We smell like potatoes,” Il-Davior put in brightly.

  I grinned at him, and out of the corner of my eye noticed An-Hadrea doing the same, her face transformed. She caught me staring, and the warmth of an indulgent sister snapped off faster than I could blink.

  “We tried to make an appointment to see the Honored Chancellor Caslav,” Salvea said. “But it was too late. He died before we could see him.”

  “On the day you came back,” An-Hadrea muttered, and again focused her glare on me rather than Tain. This wasn’t the first time someone had relayed that fact in an accusatory fashion, and it rankled me. Tain, without looking, put a conciliatory hand on my shoulder. Of course Salvea and her family had good reason to distrust us, but that didn’t make it feel any better to be thought of as the kind of person who would murder their own Tashi.

  “Do you … Do you know who killed him?” Tain asked, his words a tight spring of ungrieved pain and hope. And though expected, Salvea’s regretful negative cut deep.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “My feelings about violence were too well known, so I was never privy to any planning. I could not tell you who the rebels were working with in the city, or even whether this action was at their hands, or the hands of whoever stopped our messengers from reaching the Chancellor.

  “Our story ends there. But of course our people’s does not. I deeply regret that it has come to this, Honored Chancellor. I thought we would have time to stop this, but it was too late.”

  I doubted her reaching Caslav before his death would have achieved much; the seeds of the rebellion had been germinating for so long under our oblivious and selfish noses. Greed and corruption and secrets in our own estates and probably in our own Council had fed the uprising, and once the travelers had arrived to give it teeth, the uprising had been inevitable. Another question still remained: Who were those travelers? If indeed they had been made up of people from all different backgrounds, including some of our own disgruntled Sjon soldiers, it was likely they were mercenaries. Which led us no closer to knowing who had hired them, but it was a start.

  “We have spent too long here. You have the information we came to give you. Now we must go.” An-Hadrea looked back through the garden again. “Someone might come looking for you, Honored Chancellor.”

  Tain offered his arm to help Salvea, and she stood gracefully. “It’s inadequate to say, but I’m so sorry,” he said. “It is the Council’s fault, and the Families’ fault, and our fault. I won’t beg you to forgive me for my ignorance, because I wouldn’t deserve it. But I’m not too proud to beg you to help me find a way to stop this siege. I don’t want anyone else to die. If we can stop the siege and talk, we can change things. Together, on my honor I swear, we can change things. Thanks to you, I know where to start.” He squeezed her hands. “There’s one more thing I need to ask of you, Salvea.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you let the Darfri people hiding in the caverns know that I will protect them? We only just found out what’s been happening in the streets, but I know they’ve been victimized for a while. We’ve put three men in jail so far and I plan to find more of
them. Everyone in this city is under my protection and anyone who threatens that will find out what sort of Chancellor I plan to be. Please, I just want them to know they can come to me and I’ll keep them safe.”

  “No,” An-Hadrea said, before her mother could speak. She crossed her arms across her chest and took a step closer to Il-Davior. “No, Honored Chancellor. We will not let them know that we have seen you. It is not safe.”

  “You keep saying that,” I said. “Are they just cityfolk scared of being targeted, or are they rebels down there?” The rebellion had been organized over time. There must be agents in the city as well, and where better to find them than among the Darfri hiding away from the fighting?

  “Why shouldn’t they be? Why would we side with you, when those outside would welcome us instead of attacking us in the dark like cowards?” She looked at me, anger simmering in the cold depths of her eyes. They were an earthy brown, mottled with green like interwoven leaves. I found myself unable to break the contact.

  “The people in the catacombs are not rebels,” Salvea said. “They are scared, and they are angry, and many have family outside the walls. They likely sympathize with the uprising because many of them came from the estates and understand the struggles we have faced. They do not want to take arms against their brethren outside. But they do not want the city destroyed—it is their home, too.”

  “Then why do you fear them?” I asked. “You went to such trouble to contact us secretly, An-Hadrea, and you’re still checking no one can see you now. If you believe the Darfri in the city are loyal to the Chancellor, why are you worried about them seeing you talking to him?”

  She scowled. “Like my mother, I have heard no treason. That does not mean I trust that everyone down there means the Chancellor well. No one openly speaks of working for the rebellion, but there are whispers, and rumors of what the Council has done to the secondworld. Many may hope that the Council falls for these crimes. I am certain some would regard our family as traitors for coming to speak with you.”

  “Will you be safe going back there, then?” Tain asked, looking down at Il-Davior, who was peeking out at Tain from behind his mother’s skirts. “You don’t have to. All of you could stay in the Manor; you’d be safe there.”

  I shot him a look. We had just met this family, and critical as Salvea’s information was, and genuine as her desire to help seemed, trusting them in our space was absurd. And as An-Hadrea had already made clear, they had little cause to trust us.

  “Mother,” An-Hadrea said, her voice tight.

  Salvea looked at her daughter, brows drawn, but did not speak. I glared at Tain.

  “I want to go to the Mander,” Il-Davior announced into the silence.

  It broke the tension. Even An-Hadrea smiled, though it slipped quickly away as she looked at her mother again.

  Salvea sighed. “It is kind, Honored Chancellor,” she said. “But I think it safest if we remain in the Darfri community and do not attract notice. We will meet you here, to talk more, whenever you like.”

  Before Tain could protest, I said, “We’ll leave a stone on the sundial here, marking the hour we should meet.”

  “I will send Hadrea to check daily,” Salvea said, avoiding looking at her daughter. “And we will help in any way we can.”

  As Tain helped Salvea back into her cloak, An-Hadrea shrugged hers on as well, brushing close to me as she did. She gave me a scowl while the others were occupied.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. And I was. For everything.

  But no mere apology would ever fix what had been done, and we all knew it.

  Eel brain

  DESCRIPTION: Brain of common river eel, ordinarily removed during cooking (although toxicity greatly reduced after exposure to heat).

  SYMPTOMS: Vomiting, diarrhea, excessive salivation and perspiration, dehydration, loss of appetite, death.

  PROOFING CUES: Taste in toxic raw form is mild but has an intense, greasy mouthfeel and thickens liquids noticeably.

  14

  Kalina

  The first pink rays of sunlight warmed the pale stone beneath my fingers. I stretched out my stiff back, moving my aching joints through a greater range of motion, and squinted out at the army, which was stirring to life like some great beast coming out of hibernation.

  For the first time in my life, I understood my brother’s desire for routine and repetition. Everything had fallen to pieces, but there was some semblance of comfort in a routine; get up, go to our sector, walk the length of the wall, meet with Chen and our other leaders for an update.

  Armored poppets stood at intervals around our stretch of the wall with only a skeleton crew of real people patrolling. The rest of the Oromani section was assisting with moving key supplies from the other side of the lake. We prepared for evacuation in earnest now. Daily our watchers in the towers reported additional functional-looking contraptions rising from the army outside. The rebels had been working on some kind of tower, adding height each day—my eyes found it now, rising in the midst of their forces, menacing and silent. Eliska speculated when finished it would be the height of our walls, and would be wheeled over to allow them to cross without the vulnerability of ladders.

  Chen drew my attention now to the configuration forming. “Do you see the machines there, and there? They’re moving them together. They’ll be aiming at the damaged wall.”

  One of the engineers had tried to explain to me how they expected the weapons to work. I hadn’t been able to feign understanding of the mechanics of it. The tower would assist the rebels to reach the top of the wall, and the engineers suspected it would also house other weaponry at the lower levels; perhaps a suspended ram. There could be other surprises out there, waiting. But we wouldn’t be waiting much longer.

  I left Chen after the report and returned to the main streets, which teemed with traffic. People carried litters or pulled small carts full of supplies, transported from the lower city. We were attempting to move not just people and possessions but also our industry facilities; all our metalworking, leather, cane, and textile works were currently in the lower city, and we needed to retain the ability to make weapons and armor if we were forced to defend from the upper city. People were being forced to work long hours in physical jobs to which they were not accustomed. Everywhere the darkened mood of the city showed itself in scowls and bickering and microaggressions.

  Discontent wasn’t confined to the common man, either. Last night I’d heard Credola Nara arguing with her nephew Pedrag, the Craft-Guilder, outside their apartments; a rare sight for family members to allow such a display in public. Tain had insisted that Councilors, like everyone else who had housing in the upper city, billet residents from the lower city after the evacuation, and it was causing tantrums. Jov was moving all his essential proofing supplies and research materials out of our apartments and into the Manor. Bank staff had been released from city duty for the present to deal with all of the requests to store valuables; none of the wealthy upper-city families wanted to share their homes, let alone their portable wealth, with strangers.

  Down toward the lake I passed a ration station, where several arguments had broken out in the line.

  “This is half the size it was a week ago,” someone complained, causing a ripple of anger in the still-waiting crowd.

  “Reduced again?”

  “I heard more food’s gone missing,” a woman near the back muttered, and I ducked my head and moved swiftly, hoping to go by unnoticed. We had exhausted all the vegetables; rations had become blander and less satisfying. I couldn’t be the only one sick of thin fish broth and millet porridge. Things would only escalate as our supplies of the last essentials dwindled.

  If the streets were teeming, the bridges were worse. People had been assigned to direct traffic on Trickster’s to cope with the congestion. Strange shapes hung from the sides of the Finger and below the bridge; drawing closer they became people, suspended in slings on great ropes. Engineers, examining the structure for pot
ential weaknesses that could be exploited. There were no series of smaller supports that could be attacked as with the much smaller Bell’s, which had been built only for lighter pedestrian weight. Looking up at the beautiful, immense white stone joining the two halves of the city, it seemed both an impossible task and a criminal one.

  I checked in with Eliska, who directed an orchestra of papers and babbling Guild members outside the foot of the Finger. She took me through the day’s progress on the new fortifications. “If we run out of time, or we can’t take the bridge down, or if”—she glanced over her shoulder, dropping her voice—“if the Council were to change its mind about destroying it, we could hold the bridge from the Finger, at least for a while.”

  Like spirits rising from the dead, the remnants of the old fortifications were being rebuilt. The two wedge-shaped walls, which spread from either side of the tower like stone wings, had been reinforced and freshly equipped with ledges and crenellations for archers. The old murder holes in the Finger itself had been cleaned out. The layout of the west side of the lake and the buildings on the opposite side left limited space for the rebels to set up catapults. They would have to set them within the range of the Finger’s archers. All our ships, even small fishing boats, were anchored or moored on the eastern shore, clumped together.

  “This place was built for defense,” Eliska said, almost grudgingly. “The bridge is beautiful, but you can see how it used to form a formidable barrier. See there, how the wall would have stretched along?”

  I nodded. Our ancestors must have feared something, that they had built this city under no apparent threat to withstand an attack that had never come.

  And now it had finally come, centuries later.

  I left Eliska to her work. She didn’t seem too optimistic about, or committed to, taking the Finger down. Some part of me hoped it would not come to surrendering half the city. Perhaps word had reached Aven from some source. Tain would not attempt any other messengers; the gruesome slaying of the originals had scarred him. It was a continuing source of tension between my brother and him, and the cause of several arguments in Council, where he still pretended we did not know what had happened to the messengers—if word got out about the runners’ desecration, there would be no persuading the city residents that the rebels had a just cause. But perhaps help might still arrive from one of our allies, assuming we had any.