The bride and groom went the next morning to pray and light candles at the Temple; Orhan and Darath and March and Eloise went with them as bride and groom’s kin. The mad-eyed child High Priestess knelt ragged before the altar as she did now even on days when there was no sacrifice waiting, chewing on long fingers red ragged bloody at the tips. Glorious omen! But people tried now not to care. Days passed: Darath hung around Orhan’s bedroom complaining of the strangeness of having a woman living in his house; Bil slunk in her chambers, brittlely restless, swollen like a bluebottle in the heat. The hot weather continued, the world red and sweat-sticky, dust in heaps on the pavements, trees withering in the heat. Stone walls too hot to put a hand on. Plaster and gilding crumbling into more dust. Orhan stared dully at old ledgers in the palace offices, dictated letters, tried to govern an empire of one decaying city in a desert of yellow sand.
And then ten days after the wedding Darath came to Orhan’s study to tell him in triumph that March was dead.
“How did he die?” Orhan asked. He hadn’t heard anything. Must have been sudden. Or his spies were even more useless than he’d thought. But it still must have been sudden. Celyse would have been round to tell him otherwise. She’d already passed on the news that Elis had bedded Leada four times so far and the girl had very much enjoyed every moment of it. So that was something else Orhan would now go to his grave unable to forget.
“He technically hasn’t. Yet. Soon. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. By Lansday, anyway, or I’ll sue the man who sold it me for false trade.”
“That’s—” Orhan looked up at Darath’s glittering eyes. “God’s knives, Darath, what did you use?”
“I told you I’d take care of it. I have. You really want to know?”
“No! No. Yes.” Dear Lord. Dear Lord. Great Tanis have mercy.
“Deadgold leaves and sysius root and beetle’s wings and bear’s gall and powdered lead.” It sounded like a lullaby. “Poured in his wine with his lunch today. He complained of the sour taste but the man who gave it to him told him it was the heat affecting his tongue.”
“I …” God’s knives, Darath. “I mean …”
“You mean: ‘thank you, beloved of my heart, for killing the man who tried to kill me so I don’t have to do it myself.’”
“I … Yes … But … I mean …” But, I mean: it’s such a horrible, horrible way to die.
“This way everyone will think it’s heat flux. You would have done it all nicely with something cool and sleep-inducing and obvious like sana fruit? Would that have made you feel better about it?”
“I …” Silence. The ox heavy on Orhan’s tongue.
“Your plans, Orhan my love, have led to my brother saddling himself with an unwanted wife. Your plans have led to me being stuck with said wife strolling round my house like she owns the place. Your plans have cost me a great deal of money and almost seen both of us fucking killed. If I want to do something to help you the way I want to, you should thank me.”
And there’s nothing to say to that. Orhan looked at Darath and Darath looked at Orhan.
“Thank you.”
“Oh, your gratitude is like music.”
“Thank you.” Orhan took Darath’s hand, held it to his cheek. Hot and angry. His face and Darath’s hand. Long drawn silence, where they could hear the click of a house servant somewhere going about the house with a bucket and broom. The drapery at the windows fanned out with a snap. The air changing. A hot wind. In the central gardens the birds in the lilac trees felt it, rose up a moment all together in a puff like a skein of silk unravelling then came back to roost.
“You’re welcome.” A grunt. Grudging. Darath sat down again, leaning back in his chair. Orhan sat again also. The wind banged at the windows again, the open shutters creaking, hiss of sand blowing onto the marble floor. In her desiccation I am entombed in ecstasies of rain. Doesn’t some poet say somewhere that life is like the sand wind, blasting heat teetering on the edge of a storm from which one will never get relief? A house servant came hurrying in to close the shutters, the room dark for a moment before the candles were lit.
“We hired a troop of sellswords to assassinate the Emperor,” said Darath. “We killed hundreds of people, we killed Tam Rhyl, we almost burned the palace down. We desecrated the Great Temple. We’ve told so many lies I can barely keep up. We did all that because you told me March Verneth was conspiring with the Immish, that the Immish would invade the city, that the world would be over if we didn’t do something. Remember? Remember, Orhan? All those things you told me? ‘The city’s dying, Darath. The Empire’s a joke. The Immish will come with twenty thousand men and a mage, and we’ll fall in days.’ ‘We’re too weak, the way we are, sitting on our piles of gold pretending nothing exists beyond our walls. We need to be ready. And yes, that does mean blood.’ Remember?” Pause. Cold eyes. “And now you’re getting squeamish about March dying?” Slammed his fist down, hard, on the arm of his chair. “I could have died that night, Orhan. Stop claiming morality at me.”
God’s knives, thought Orhan, God’s knives, Darath, what have I done to you?
“I—”
Darath shouted, “Stop bleating ‘I’ like a bloody goat.”
They sat and looked at each other. The wind smashing on the shutters. Flickering candlelight.
A tap on the door, an anxious-faced door keep. Orhan snapped at him, “What?”
Poor wretch. Hardly his fault, he’d had to come up this moment, hear this. Terrified fear in the man he’d be punished. Dismissed. “Excuse me, My Lord. My Lords. Lady Amdelle is waiting downstairs.”
Celyse. Dear sister. Thank her and curse her for turning up now. Orhan rubbed at his eyes, wiping away tears. Celyse came in in a sweep of satin, rearranging dusty hair.
“Lord of Living and Dying, it’s horrible out there. My bearers were being blown around like flagpoles and the curtains were almost ripped off. I should have gone back home, sent a note.” She stopped when she saw Darath and Orhan’s faces. “Shall I leave again?”
Darath got up with a crisp, angry smile. “No need. I was just leaving myself anyway.”
Her face changed. Recognized Orhan so very much wanted Darath to stay, perhaps. A clever woman, his sister. Even sometimes a kind one. “You’ll want to hear this too, Darath. March is sick. Took to his bed this hour past with a fever. Very sudden, it came on.”
Darath said, “Do they know what it is?”
“The rumour among the servants is heat flux.” Celyse said after a moment, “But you two know exactly what it is and so I’ve come to ask you.”
And there’s nothing to say to that. Orhan looked at Darath and Darath looked at Orhan.
They sat and looked at each other. Wind smashing on the shutters. Flickering candlelight.
“You really think people aren’t going to guess?”
“It’s heat flux,” said Darath.
“You could at least act like you’re surprised.”
“There’s nothing particularly surprising about a man getting heat flux in this heat.”
“Does it matter what people think?” said Orhan. “Nothing can be proved.” Darath shot him a look that was part confusion, part sneer. Why are you pretending you did it, Orhan my love? his face said. Just to be even more superior and make me feel even more ashamed? Orhan made a movement with his lips, turned his head away. Why am I pretending I did it? But in the end which is more shameful: killing someone, or asking my lover to kill someone for me because I’m a better person than him and too good to do it myself?
I’m the thing at the centre of this, he thought. The knife. But I’m only trying to build a better world. Make things safe. Make us good again.
And so does Marian Gyste compare love to the storm that is the soul of those few who suffer damnation. Raging heat and noise and madness, not for them the cool eternity of death. Not for me. God lives in His house of waters; Tam and March are dead and gone and damp rot. We who live: we’re the ones who’ll burn.
&nb
sp; “He got to see one of his daughters married,” said Darath. “It would have been very sad if he’d sickened before that.”
“Is that supposed to be a consolation?”
“Oh come on, Celyse. You know how this works. Such things were done once without anyone raising an eyebrow. Them or us. You know that.”
“Them or us because my brother was stupid enough to start this.”
Orhan said, “Them or us because things would have gone to pieces in fire if I hadn’t. Them or us to save Sorlost.”
Celyse opened her mouth, closed it again. Wind smashing against the shutters. Hot dry storm without rain or relief. The sky outside would be so dark now like the death of the sun. Sand clouds black-golden like Darath’s hair.
Celyse laughed. “My dear fastidious brother. Even you can’t keep your hands clean any longer. You killed people so you could get power. That’s all you did. Kill people. For power.”
Darath laughed.
A tap on the door and Bil came in, heavy and tired and her scars standing out on her face. The heat still sickened her, she spent long hours floating in the cool bathing chamber where her body blurred into the oily water. The skin on her hands was wrinkled, odd white.
“News,” she said. “March Verneth is sick. Heat flux, they say, or that Lord Emmereth poisoned him at Leada’s wedding feast.”
Celyse clapped her hands to her mouth.
Chapter Sixteen
When they had all left, Orhan went to his books, tried to work. The ancient tomes of the Imperial ledgers. Give himself something else to worry about.
Any fool could assassinate someone, if they really put their mind to it, as the history of Irlast so often proved. Making things better. That took effort. That was the work. March Verneth is dying. So what? The weary business of remaking the world, that must still go on. This city is dying, the richest empire the world has ever known, her beggars wear silk and satin, eat rotting scraps off plates of gold. Immish and Chathe and the other great powers laugh at us and do not bother to cover their mouths. Sorlost is a dead man’s dreaming. A useless heap of crumbled rock. Weak and defenceless and worn down. But I, Orhan lied to himself every night in the dark, I am a capable man, a learned man, I can change that.
Several streets had been destroyed in the rioting that had followed the attack on the palace. Fine, lofty shops and town houses, and, behind them, tenement buildings with broken-down walls and ceilings, floors running with human sewage, whole families crammed into single windowless rooms. “Tear them all down,” Orhan had ordered, “rebuild them, clean them up.”
“And the cost, My Lord Nithque?” Secretary Gallus had asked him.
“Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.”
“And the cost of expanding the Imperial army, My Lord Nithque?”
“Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.”
“We do not need an expanded army. We do not need to rebuild a few ruined houses. This is Sorlost!” the Emperor and the Emperor’s High Lords told him curtly, when he suggested any of these things.
The outbreak of deeping fever in Chathe had flared up again. Worse than before. The gates must be closed again to Chathean travellers, trade would suffer, everyone from the hatha addicts in the gutters to the High Lords who refused to fund his army would complain.
The Immish were outraged by the accusations made against them concerning the attack on the Emperor, demanded compensation for their people’s losses in the riots, had expelled several hundred Sorlostian merchants from Alborn as tit-for-tat. Some of them spoke little if any Literan. Most of them were now destitute. All of them blamed the Emperor and the Emperor’s Nithque for their plight.
The rains had failed in Mar and the grain harvest this year would be poor, raising prices. Even if one ignored the fact that Chathe acted as the middle man for the Empire’s grain trade with Mar. Those who didn’t riot for lack of hatha might well riot for lack of cake.
The guard house at the Maskers’ Gate to the east of the city had finally fallen down. A family of exiles from Alborn had been killed when it collapsed. The merchants had gnashed their teeth at the tax levied to pay for repairs. Nobody now knew where the tax levied to pay for repairs had been spent.
Futile. Great Tanis: Lord Emmereth and Lord Rhyl and Lord Verneth had locked themselves in the death struggle, for this?
Charge your guards’ upkeep to the palace and award yourself a new stipend or two, Orhan. You can do that.
Gold ink and old leather, all the words blurred. Here, look, on the cover of one ledger: a smear of honey, where Darath had sat reading it and stuffing himself with candied apricots. Would it be too symbolic, Orhan thought, to note the dirt now stuck to the honey, on the leather that was said to be human skin? But “stipend” reminded him: Orhan turned the pages, found the list of March Verneth’s Imperial stipends. “First Lord and Viceroy of Riva.” “Protector of Maun.” Comic, absurd, empty lies. Orhan crossed them savagely out. A whole six talents saved with one pen stroke!
At the bottom of the page a human hair was stuck to a smear of honey. Bile rose in Orhan’s throat.
He threw up his hands. Slammed the book shut.
Watched the dusk come. The bell rang for the twilight. Seserenthelae aus perhalish. Night comes. We survive. The little girl in the Temple, killing. Bringing death for those who are dying, life for those waiting to be born. From Bil’s rooms came the sound of a boy singing, Bil listening to songs and music to nourish the child in her womb.
I’ll go out, Orhan thought. Go for a walk. Get out of this house.
Foolish, he thought, to go out alone. March and Eloise will be wanting vengeance.
I don’t care, he thought. If it’s dangerous. He dressed simply; simple to disappear by removing a few gems, donning a cheaper cut of coat. An anonymous man walking the streets.
The wind had dropped, leaving sand piled everywhere, the leaves of trees and bushes ripped to shreds. The city was slowly working to right itself, sweeping off the dust, setting awnings and scaffolds back where they had fallen, clearing up broken glass and damaged stone. Still very hot, but the air felt cleaner, after the wind.
He walked towards the palace. Habit, the path he so often now walked. At the gates to the palace Orhan stopped and looked at it. The golden dome haunting in the moonlight. The silver towers. The white porcelain walls. But the palace windows were dead and empty. No longer glowed with mage glass. There were dark streaks on the white and the gold and the silver, where no man could reach to scrub it clean. I did that, Orhan thought. My shame. My guilt. Incomparable, irreplaceable, the mage glass windows of the Imperial Palace of the Asekemlene Emperor: by which, of course, he meant that there was no money to spend on getting them replaced.
He went back away from the palace, into the Street of Closed Eyes where people were moving, sliding through the shadows, shimmering in flickers of torchlight. Flash of jewels, the rustle of silk, the chime of women’s bells. Onwards into the Court of the Fountain, where the knife-fighters circled. One had been fighting, lay dying with his hand still closed on the hilt of his knife, bleeding wounds turning the dust of the flagstones to mud. Orhan flicked a silver dhol onto his chest. Burial fees. The dying man blinked back weakly, moved his lips. I could, I suppose, kill him, Orhan thought. End his suffering. But I won’t. We don’t. Not even a drink of water from the fountain he’s dying beside.
He stopped his walking at a street corner off the Street of Yellow Roses. The noise of a wine shop caught him, a man’s voice singing, the music of a flute. Stood and watched the light moving through the thin curtain covering the door. The poet sang of the desert hills of the east where the sun rose over golden sand, ending in a long wordless ululation of sorrow in imitation of a bird. His audience applauded; the flute picked up again, calm and soft. Good taste, these musicians. The listeners too. Orhan pushed the door curtain aside, went in. A small, crowded place, clean and well kept, mostly ol
d men sitting over tiny cups of spirits, lined faces nodding to each other silently, listening to the song. In the corner a man and a woman played yenthes, clattering ivory tiles. A few of the others watched them, murmuring quietly as the game flowed. A faint smell of keleth seeds.
People turned to look at him, saw nothing of especial interest, turned back away. A woman looked him over with greater interest. She was not attractive and was aging, her hair streaked with silver, her body sagging to parched fat, but she moved elegantly, a calm soft tone to her like the flute. Orhan shook his head at her. He bought wine and a plate of cinnamon sweets, sat down to listen to the flute then found his attention drawn to the yenthes game. The tiles rattled past. Chance, as much as skill. A game of luck. Not something Orhan really had much interest in playing, but he liked the sound the tiles made. The woman drew green, spread green and blue tiles in a spiral on the table top. The man sucked his teeth. The man drew blue, set out a square of blue over the woman’s spiral. Their audience nodded approvingly.
The game went on for a while, patterns moving across the table, the clatter of tiles, the quiet of the old men content to sit, the music of the flute. Then the poet rose to his feet again to sing. Older than his voice sounded, his black skin had an ashy grey tint, his hair was white. Wearing a woman’s coat of pink and silver peonies, threadbare. Oh, but his voice was beautiful. He sang unaccompanied this time, a slight waver at the end of each line, deep and clear like a bronze bowl.
“Oh golden Sorlost, from whose embrace I am exiled,
The beautiful, the ever shining,
The bride of all the cities of the earth.
Her high towers of cedar wood, her high turrets,
Her bronze walls strong as lovers,
Her gardens where the penthe birds fly.
Sweet evenings of grief and love and music,
Long afternoons beneath the lilac branches,
The wet scent of her streets in the morning warmth.
The Tower of Living and Dying Page 11