The Tower of Living and Dying

by Anna Smith Spark

  (Not my mother, he thought. She killed my mother. She hoped I would die that day, I expect. Was begging Eltheia for that. Wasn’t she? Closed the thought away.)

  But this …

  Hard to kill, the Altrersyr. Famous for it. I always knew, he thought. Always.

  “I saw you wounded,” Thalia said. “I saw your blood.” She pointed to ruined bedding heaped on the floor of the ruined tent. “There. There is your blood.”

  Thalia sat running her hand over and over his shoulder. Where the wound should be. In the morning light flooding in through the rent in the tent’s roof, with bright lamps burning, his skin was perfect as a child’s skin. Creamy white like new milk. Smooth lines of muscle and bone and sinew. His skin tingled deliciously under the touch of her hand.

  “Yes. That’s my blood.”

  “Amrath conquered the world,” Marith said after a while. Her hand on his shoulder was distracting. He lifted it off. “He fought a lot of battles. Survived them all.” He drank wine. Looked at her. Rain was still coming in through the rent in the tent’s roof, glistening in her hair. But neither of them could bear to leave the tent, step out into the world beyond, now they knew what they had both already known about him.

  There were leaves and flowers on the floor of the tent at their feet. Spatter of blood. Flakes of rust.

  “You knew that Landra was alive,” he said.

  Thalia pulled her hand away from him. “How do you know that?”

  “Someone recognized the necklace you gave her.”

  “Someone?”

  “A servant in the palace.” It came out of his mouth so smoothly. Didn’t know if she could tell he was lying. Didn’t think she could tell he was lying. “I should have your guards flogged,” he said, “for letting you talk to her.”

  “They didn’t know who she was,” said Thalia. “I told them she was a beggar. They are my guards. Not yours. She was cold and hungry,” said Thalia. Oh gods, she looked so beautiful. So earnest. “She was alone and broken, and I pitied her.”

  Pitied her? “She wanted to kill us!” Marith said. It came out as a shrill shout.

  Landra kneeling in his tent, burned … she had looked so much like Carin did in his dreams, with his sword sticking into him. “She wanted to destroy me. She hates me. She hates you.”

  Thalia said nothing.

  “And Tobias. And that … that thing. You were talking to that thing. You were conspiring with that thing. I know that.”

  “The gestmet,” Thalia said. “That is what your people call it, I believe. Did my guards tell you that, too?”

  “I needed to know. Don’t you think I needed to know?”

  Silence. Her face was unreadable. “I speak with whoever I choose,” said Thalia.

  “You were conspiring against me! That thing just tried to kill me. Landra Relast just tried to kill me.”

  “I drove the gestmet away,” said Thalia. “I did not speak with it. I did not let it speak to me.” But there was something in her face. Some guilt. “I speak with whoever I choose,” she said again.

  Marith thought: that’s it? That’s all you can say?

  “I did not know that Tobias was alive,” she said. “I … If I had …”

  Marith thought: oh, didn’t you know? Something in her face. Days, he thought, Thalia and Tobias had travelled together, with him Tobias’s prisoner. Days and days and nights.

  We called a dragon together, he thought. We saw all the wonder of the world in its eyes and in the beat of its wings. A dragon, dancing! And now this.

  Remembered how Tobias had once looked at him, in the lodging house called the Five Corners in Sorlost, after he had stolen the company’s money to buy firewine. Tobias had trusted him, for a little while. Had then realized with disgust what a mistake that had been.

  He had feared that he would die, he remembered, in Sorlost. Stared at the walls and been so, so afraid of death. He looked at the ruined bedding on the floor. Laughed.

  Thalia’s face was cold, watching him. Angry.

  Wedded bliss! He thought: if I had known what you would do …

  Felt the blood rush to his face. Sickness and shame. Horror. My father killed my mother, he thought. My father killed his wife. I killed Carin.

  “I love you,” he said to Thalia. “I do. I do.” Got down on his knees on the bloody bedsheets. “I love you.”

  “Even though you think I am conspiring against you?” It was difficult to hold in his mind, sometimes, what it was that she had been, before he met her. The High Priestess of the death god of the Sekemleth Empire, killer of men and women and children for the glory of her god. And he felt now as her victims must have felt, bound and naked beneath her knife.

  “We need to leave,” he said. Change the subject. Everything felt so soiled. The wonder of it, the joy, the melancholy. Get away, block this thing out. Remembered the inn in Reneneth, trying to find anything to say to her, knowing she had seen him drugged out of his mind on hatha, soaked in his own filth.

  Days and days and nights, she had spent, travelling with Tobias, while he lay drugged out of his mind in his own filth.

  Why do you stay, Thalia? he thought.

  He walked out of the tent. The campsite was all chaos: they were supposed to be leaving today anyway and no one seemed to know what to do, whether to pack up. The tents were fuzzy with the rain. The mountain turf was beautiful, in the rain. Heavy raindrops like jewels. A gorse bush, hung with raindrops. A white flowering thorn tree. There was a spider’s web between two of the tents, beaded with rain. The sky was soft pale grey. The clouds had come down, hiding the higher slopes of the mountain.

  Different, strange, looking at it now. All this living beauty. A living world. And he was what he was.

  “Amrath was a living man,” Carin had once said. “A lucky man with good armour and a chronicler who lied about certain things.” Carin had rolled his eyes. “I seem to remember, it might just be the drink confusing me, but I do seem to remember that Amrath died.”

  Thalia came out and stood beside him. Did not touch him. She, too, looked around her at the grass and the gorse and the thorn tree. The spider’s web. The low cloud. She, too, he saw, was thinking of life and death and other things.

  “Marith—” she said. He turned away. He felt her walk away.

  Alleen Durith came up to him. Knelt. Very formal. Everyone in the camp should be flogged, Marith thought, for letting danger get so close to him.

  “Five men dead,” said Alleen. “And Lord Parale. We’ve buried them. There’s a trail, very faint, the scouts say, goes off south over the ridge.” He pointed into the cloud. “Did you want us to pursue?”

  “Shouldn’t you already be pursuing them?” Marith asked lightly.

  Alleen Durith shifted from foot to foot. “In the … the cloud … The … My Lord King, the men …”

  Are terrified and confused and terrified and perfectly well aware of what’s out there. Marith stared at the raindrops on the spider’s web. Tried to think.

  Poor Lord Parale. He’d been so excited when Marith let him come along.

  “We leave them,” he said. “Pack up, as was arranged. I have done what I came here to do. We will rejoin the army, as was arranged. March for Illyr.” It felt good in his mouth, saying it. Solid. Bronze and iron, he thought. Swords and spears. Solid things. And rejoin Osen Fiolt. The air grew colder. He wondered if the dragon was flying, up above the clouds. Athela! he thought. Athela, Tiameneket! That would cap everything. Calling the dragon down and riding away on its back.

  He drank wine and looked at the raindrops on the spider’s web, until the servants had to dismantle the tent. Thalia kept away from him. They rode down the mountain, to rejoin the Army of Amrath marching through the Wastes.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Marching through the Wastes. Marching to the edge of the world. Trying to find a way to kill a man who cannot die. Landra and Raeta and Tobias went very slowly. Tobias and the Raeta-thing slow as old women, accompanied
by grunts and groans and crunches and yelps. Difficult bits, the Raeta-thing had to hold on to Landra’s elbow on account of how she couldn’t see properly out of one eye. So they were going to walk across the Wastes to Illyr? Take them, what, several years? Marith Altrersyr King Ruin King of Shadows Invulnerable would be dead of old age before they got to him.

  The landscape got bleaker as they travelled. Bare high grassland, broken every few miles by outcroppings of grey rock. Like a sea with whales breaching, said the thing that had once been Raeta. The rocks tumbled into shapes that tricked the eyes into seeing patterns: pillars, doorways, faces, thrones. A perfectly round lake reflected the sky pale and empty. Nothing moved on it. Smelled funny as they got closer. The water was smooth, solid looking, glistening dark. Fine silk velvet, picked out with gold thread. The water bottles were almost empty, so Landra suggested they get water there. Maybe even wash.

  “Water’s poison,” said Tobias.

  “Poison?”

  He picked up a handful of soil, threw it into the lake. The water hissed, closed over the soil without a ripple. Perfectly smooth surface, like muscles and skin and good cloth.

  “Poison.”

  Landra blanched.

  They tried to camp every night in the shelter of the rock formations. Woke each morning at dawn to the cawing of crows. High off screams of kites and kestrels. The crows sat on the rocks hoping they’d die soon. Flies buzzed round Tobias, drawn by the smell of his smaller, just about scabbing wound. Left Raeta alone.

  The Army of Amrath were ahead of them. Spurred on by its exploits in Tyrenae. Eager for more. Three days down from the mountains they had seen the dust clouds behind them, the sound and smell of ten times a thousand horses and men. Kept their distance, cowered in the cover of some rocks when a scouting part rode by.

  “Let them get well ahead of us,” Tobias said. “Safer that way. Try and fall in with the idiots following them. If any of them survive this.”

  That Marith knew they were all three alive and following him in order to kill him was a stumbling block they didn’t mention. Like the broken sarriss they came across: entirely pointless. That Marith might be unkillable was a stumbling block they didn’t mention either. Like the next broken sarriss they came across: even more pointless.

  “What are you?” Tobias asked Raeta. “What is he? Explain!”

  She only shook her head, slowly and painfully, and Tobias saw leaves dancing and birds flying and heard the sound of the wind in bare dead trees. “Death,” she said.

  They stopped in a place where a troop of soldiers had camped before them. A discarded water bottle, an empty pork barrel, bits of pig bone alive with flies and beetles. They were running out of bread. So the thing that had been Raeta suggested they eat the beetles. Landra looked sickened. Tobias felt his stomach heave. They crunched almost nicely, you shut your eyes and your mind to what it was. Landra blushed scarlet when she traced out graffiti on a rock reading, “Sarene is the most beautiful of women. Sarene likes it up the arse.”

  Gods, reading it was wonderful, out here in the filth. Someone out here thinking about sex and love and women, feeling alive enough to scratch it laboriously into solid rock.

  Once they found the body of a soldier, stretched out with a clawing hand reaching off to follow his comrade’s tracks. Sword wound deep in the belly. A very slow way to die. The next day they came across a cart and cart horse, abandoned in one of the smooth dead pools. The horse was so covered in insects it was thrashing around like it was still living. So was the man who’d fallen in trying to rescue it. Made a funny sort of high-pitched squeaky clicking sound. Another two dead men a few hours later, floating face down. Another cart sunk and broken. Another dead horse. No more graffiti or salt pork bones. Occasionally they came across groups of stragglers, camp followers staggering dying of thirst and hunger and exhaustion, unable to keep up to follow the army, unable to go back. “Gold,” one woman repeated over and over as she died in the dirt. “Gold. Gold.” “The Illyians killed my father,” a man shouted, stumbling away from them into the dusk. “Revenge!” Tobias felt a nagging horror they would come across Sweet Face.

  Landra pointed. “Look there.”

  Raeta followed her hand, squinting. Her face all screwed up. “Interesting,” Raeta said.

  After days and days walking through the dead landscape, actual living breathing moving not dying life. Or some of it wasn’t dying, anyway. They had caught up with a squad of soldiers. A baggage wagon, floundering hopeless in a patch of shimmering poisoned marsh. A thousand yellow irises, a thousand blue and silver dragonflies, the smell of mint. And a dying horse in the water, five men gathered around cursing. Frantic attempts to unload a cargo of grain sacks.

  “Fucking gods don’t let the sacks sli—”

  Splash. The horse jerked. Poisoned water sprayed up. Sparkling. Dancing. Raised a cloud of dragonflies iridescent in the evening sun.

  “Oh gods. Oh hells.”

  “Get the rest of the damned sacks.”

  Watched sympathetically as the soldiers wrestled most of the remaining cargo onto dry land. The wagon and the horse slowly sank.

  “Let me give you a hand there.” Tobias helped a young man lug a sack clear of the marsh water. His leg and arm and ribs shrieked like the horse.

  “Bastards fucked off and left us. Thank you.”

  Tobias blinked. “Acol? Sweet Face’s friend?”

  “Tobe, man! What in all gods happened to you?”

  So there was nothing for it but for Acol’s squad of soldiers to adopt them for the duration, promise solemnly to help them get all the way to Illyr. The bulk of the army was well ahead. Days. Maybe weeks. The going was, uh, maybe a bit harder than anyone had anticipated. King Marith had split his forces in two, sent them up along the north and south coasts. The baggage wagons were getting further and further behind. Getting lost. The army was starving, must be. But rushing on. Leaving them behind. Curse it, Friend said, the war will be over, by the time we get the bloody baggage to Illyr.

  “You should have joined the army, Tobe,” said Friend. “Still could, you know. You’re still about young enough. You should have seen what we did to Tyrenae! Oh, gods, you missed out there.”

  Death, Tobias thought. The sum total of my life now. Raeta wheezed out a breath that sounded like waves crashing on the shore.

  I followed him. I was part of his army. I’m no different to these guys. Why me? Why do I have to see it? See him? A little house in Alborn, and a girl to clean it, and a beer or three in the evening, and a fat soft flatulent gut … But we go on, because there’s nothing else. Me, and Landra with her face burned and her heart broken, and a dying wounded cursed damn god.

  At night, the soldiers sat round and told stories about Amrath. Every. Single. Night. The Treachery of Illyr. The Wooing of Eltheia. The Fall of Tereen. The Burning of Elarne. The Burning of Balkash. Even the Song of The Magelord Symeon and the Gabeleth. Name a city. Name a way of blowing it to buggery. Yell “Victory!” Repeat.

  Gods, that last one brought back happy memories. If he’d known. If he’d only bloody well known.

  “Tyrenae was like that. Like something from the songs. Like the Fall of Tereen. We went through it like we were slaughtering cattle.” Acol’s eyes were rapt. “They put up no defence: gods, the look on their faces, when we marched back in through the gates, they thought maybe we were retreating, had given up on the idea of invading Illyr, you could hear people sniggering at us. And then we went for it! Their faces were a picture.” Acol held up a gold necklace. “Look at this! Even nicer than the one I found in Morr Town. And a lot more fun to get.”

  Tobias tried to introduce a bit of variety, tell a story from Immish. They told him as one to shut the fuck up.

  Landra writhed in discomfort, listening. Every night.

  Raeta’s wound was getting worse. It stank. She looked old and grey faced and terrible. Cold grey like the cold grey stones. She sat and listened every night to the stories, her eyes close
d, her face turned to the west. Searching for him, Tobias thought. The nights were very dark, out here. The stars were very bright. Hateful, staring down on them. The red star of the Dragon’s Mouth looked huge, out here. Tobias found himself staring back at it.

  Acol said, “We’ll be at the Nimenest soon. Three days, tops, if the wagons can keep from getting stuck.” And then bloody what? None of this is real, thought Tobias. I’m dying, somewhere in Sorlost, in the Emperor’s palace, that mage is torching me, I’m bloody dying delirious, I’ll wake to see myself die and that, gods, I’ll feel so relieved about. Oh gods. Please.

  “Anyway,” said Acol. “I’m turning in. Need to keep rested for the fun ahead.”

  “Good idea, mate. Keep your strength up.”

  “Gods,” Tobias said when the soldiers were all bedded down in their possibly familiar looking wool blankets, “any chance I can kill him?”

  “I … I have an idea,” said Landra.

  “What?”

  “To kill him.”

  “Him?”

  Landra’s face was pale. Her voice had a shake in it. Oh. Him. Tobias thought: this is not going to be good. I really think this is not going to be good.

  Landra gestured to them to move a little further away from the soldiers’ campfire. “I …” She looked at them, edgy, frightened, eager. “I … There is something,” she said, “the stories … made me think of it. There is something in … in Illyr. In Ethalden. That might … that could … Bronze and iron cannot kill him. Men cannot kill him. But there might be something in Ethalden, a thing powerful enough to destroy him. Might be.”

  Ethalden. The Tower of Life and Death. Shit yourself in terror saying it even as you marvelled at just how naff the old bastard’s taste in names had been. No. Please. No. I’ve been there once. I’m not going there again, with Marith there. Said kind of trying for casually witty: “The Illyian army, perchance?”