‘Where are you going?’ Iskaral demanded, hastening to catch up, the mule braying a complaint.
The Trell did not bother replying. He was fighting the desire to wring the little man’s scrawny neck.
A short while later the ground perceptibly rose, becoming drier, and open pockets of sunlit glades appeared ahead, walled beyond by stands of birch.
In the clearing directly ahead, half-sitting half-leaning on a boulder, was a woman. Tall, her skin the colour of fine ash, long black hair hanging loose and straight. She wore chain armour, glinting silver, over a grey, hooded shirt, and leggings of pale, supple leather. High boots fashioned from some black-scaled creature rose to her knees. Two basket-hiked rapiers adorned her belt.
She was eating an apple, its skin the deep hue of blood.
Her eyes were large, black, with elongated epicanthic folds tilting upward at the corners, and they were fixed on Mappo with something like languid disdain and mild amusement. ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘Ardata’s hand in this, I see. Healed by the Queen of Spiders – you foster dangerous alliances, Guardian.’ Her free hand pressed against her lips, eyes widening. ‘How rude of me! Guardian no longer. How should you be called now, Mappo Runt? Discarded One?’ She tossed the apple to one side, then straightened. ‘We have much to talk about, you and I.’
‘I do not know you,’ the Trell replied.
‘My name is Spite.’
‘Oh,’ said Iskaral Pust, ‘now that’s fitting, since I hate you already.’
‘Allies need not be friends,’ she replied, gaze flicking with contempt to the High Priest. Her eyes narrowed momentarily on the mule, then she said, ‘I am without friends and I seek no friendships.’
‘With a name like Spite, is it any wonder?’
‘Iskaral Pust, the Hounds have done well in disposing of Dejim Nebrahl. Or, rather, I begin to comprehend the subtle game they have played, given the proximity of the Deragoth. Your master is clever. I give him that.’
‘My master,’ hissed Iskaral Pust, ‘has no need to fashion an alliance with you.’
She smiled, and it was, Mappo judged, a most beautiful smile. ‘High Priest, from you and your master, I seek nothing.’ Her eyes returned once more to rest upon the Trell. ‘You, Discarded One, have need of me. We shall travel together, you and I. The services of the Magi of Shadow are no longer required.’
‘You’ll not get rid of me so easily,’ Iskaral Pust said, his sudden smile, intended to be unctuous, sadly marred by the mosquito carcass squished against one snaggled, crooked incisor. ‘Oh no, I will be as a leech, hidden beneath a fold in your clothing, eagerly engorging upon your very lifeblood. I shall be the fanged bat hanging beneath your udder, lapping lapping lapping your sweet exudence. I shall be the fly who buzzes straight into your ear, there to make a new home with a full larder at my beck and call. I shall be the mosquito—’
‘Crushed by your flapping lips, High Priest,’ Spite said wearily, dismissing him. ‘Discarded One, the coast is but half a league distant. There is a fishing village, sadly devoid of life now, but that will not impede us at all.’
Mappo did not move. ‘What cause have I,’ he asked, ‘to ally myself with you?’
‘You shall need the knowledge I possess, Mappo Runt, for I was one of the Nameless Ones who freed Dejim Nebrahl, with the aim of slaying you, so that the new Guardian could take your place at Icarium’s side. It may surprise you,’ she added, ‘that I am pleased the T’rolbarahl failed in the former task. I am outlawed from the Nameless Ones, a fact that gives me no small amount of satisfaction, if not pleasure. Would you know what the Nameless Ones intend? Would you know Icarium’s fate?’
He stared at her. Then asked, ‘What awaits us in the village?’
‘A ship. Provisioned and crewed, in a manner of speaking. To pursue our quarry, we must cross half the world, Mappo Runt.’
‘Don’t listen to her!’
‘Be quiet, Iskaral Pust,’ Mappo said in a growl. ‘Or take your leave of us.’
‘Fool! Very well, it is clear to me that my presence in your foul company is not only necessary, but essential! But you, Spite, be on your guard! I will permit no betrayal of this bold, honourable warrior! And watch your words, lest their unleashing haunt him unto madness!’
‘If he has withstood yours this long, priest,’ she said, ‘then he is proof to all madness.’
‘You, woman, would be wise to be silent.’
She smiled.
Mappo sighed. Ah, Pust, would that you heeded your own admonishments…
The boy was nine years old. He had been ill for a time, days and nights unmeasured, recalled only in blurred visions, the pain-filled eyes of his parents, the strange calculation in those of his two younger sisters, as if they had begun contemplating life without an older brother, a life freed of the torments and teasings and, as demanded, his stolid reliability in the face of the other, equally cruel children in the village.
And then there had been a second time, one he was able to imagine distinct, walled on all sides, roofed in black night where stars swam like boatmen spiders across well-water. In this time, this chamber, the boy was entirely alone, woken only by the needs of thirst, finding a bucket beside his bed, filled with silty water, and the wood and horn ladle his mother used only on feast-nights. Waking, conjuring the strength to reach out and collect that ladle, dipping it into the bucket, struggling with the water’s weight, drawing the tepid fluid in through cracked lips, to ease a mouth hot and dry as the bowl of a kiln.
One day he awoke yet again, and knew himself in the third time. Though weak, he was able to crawl from the bed, to lift the bucket and drink down the last of the water, coughing at its soupy consistency, tasting the flat grit of the silts. Hunger’s nest in his belly was now filled with broken eggs, and tiny claws and beaks nipped at his insides.
A long, exhausting journey brought him outside, blinking in the harsh sunlight – so harsh and bright he could not see. There were voices all around him, filling the street, floating down from the roofs, high-pitched and in a language he had never heard before. Laughter, excitement, yet these sounds chilled him.
He needed more water. He needed to defeat this brightness, so that he could see once more. Discover the source of these carnival sounds – had a caravan arrived in the village? A troop of actors, singers and musicians?
Did no-one see him? Here on his hands and knees, the fever gone, his life returned to him?
He was nudged on one side and his groping hand reached out and found the shoulder and nape of a dog. The animal’s wet nose slipped along his upper arm. This was one of the healthier dogs, he judged, his hand finding a thick layer of fat over the muscle of the shoulder, then, moving down, the huge swell of the beast’s belly. He now heard other dogs, gathering, pressing close, squirming with pleasure at the touch of his hands. They were all fat. Had there been a feast? The slaughter of a herd?
Vision returned, with a clarity he had never before experienced. Lifting his head, he looked round.
The chorus of voices came from birds. Rooks, pigeons, vultures bounding down the dusty street, screeching at the bluff rushes from the village’s dogs, who remained possessive of the remains of bodies here and there, mostly little more than bones and sun-blackened tendons, skulls broken open by canine jaws, the insides licked clean.
The boy rose to his feet, tottering with sudden dizziness that was a long time in passing. Eventually, he was able to turn and look back at his family’s house, trying to recall what he had seen when crawling through the rooms. Nothing. No-one.
The dogs circled him, all seeming desperate to make him their master, tails wagging, stepping side to side as their spines twisted back and forth, ears flicking up at his every gesture, noses prodding his hands. They were fat, the boy realized, because they had eaten everyone.
For they had died. His mother, his father, his sisters, everyone else in the village. The dogs, owned by all and by none and living a life of suffering, of vicious hunger an
d rivalries, had all fed unto indolence. Their joy came from full bellies, all rivalry forgotten now. The boy understood in this something profound. A child’s delusions stripped back, revealing the truths of the world.
He began wandering.
Some time later he found himself at the crossroads just beyond the northernmost homestead, standing in the midst of his newly adopted pets. A cairn of stones had been raised in the very centre of the conjoined roads and tracks.
His hunger had passed. Looking down at himself, he saw how thin he had become, and saw too the strange purplish nodules thickening his joints, wrist, elbow, knee and ankle, not in the least painful. Repositories, it seemed, for some other strength.
The cairn’s message was plain to him, for it had been raised by a shepherd and he had tended enough flocks in his day. It told him to go north, up into the hills. It told him that sanctuary awaited him there. There had been survivors, then. That they had left him behind was understandable – against the bluetongue fever nothing could be done. A soul lived or a soul died of its own resolve, or lack thereof.
The boy saw that no herds remained on the hillsides, wolves had come down, perhaps, uncontested; or the other villagers had driven the beasts with them. After all, a sanctuary would have such needs as food and water, milk and cheese.
He set off on the north trail, the dogs accompanying him.
They were happy, he saw. Pleased that he now led them. And the sun overhead, that had been blinding, was blinding no longer. The boy had come to and now crossed a threshold, into the fourth and final time. He knew not when it would end.
With languid eyes, Felisin Younger stared at the scrawny youth who had been brought in by the Unmanned Acolytes. Just one more lost survivor looking to her for meaning, guidance, for something to believe in that could not be crushed down and swept away by ill winds.
He was a Carrier – the swellings at his joints told her that. Likely, he had infected the rest of his village. The nodes had suppurated, poisoning the air, and everyone else had died. He had arrived at the gates of the city that morning, in the company of twelve half-wild dogs. A Carrier, but here, in this place, that was not cause for banishment. Indeed, the very opposite. Kulat would take the boy under his wing, for teaching in the ways of pilgrimage, for this would be his new calling, to carry plague across the world, and so, among the survivors in his wake, gather yet more adherents to the new religion. Faith in the Broken, the Scarred, the Unmanned – all manner of sects were being formed, membership defined by the damage the plague had delivered to each survivor. Rarest and most precious among them, the Carriers.
All that Kulat had predicted was coming to pass. Survivors arrived, at first a trickle, then by the hundred, drawn here, guided by the hand of a god. They began excavating the long-buried city, making for themselves homes amidst the ghosts of long-dead denizens who still haunted the rooms, the hallways and the streets, silent and motionless, spectres witnessing a rebirth, on their faint, blurred faces a riot of expressions ranging from dismay to horror. How the living could terrify the dead.
Herders arrived with huge flocks, sheep and goats, the long-limbed cattle called eraga that most had believed extinct for a thousand years – Kulat said that wild herds had been found in the hills – and here the dogs recollected what they had been bred for in the first place and now fended the beasts against the wolves and the grey eagles that could lift a newborn calf in their talons.
Artisans had arrived and had begun producing images that had been born in their sickness, in their fevers: the God in Chains, the multitudes of the Broken and the Scarred and the Unmanned. Images on pottery, on walls painted in the ancient mix of eraga blood and red ochre, stone statues for the Carriers. Fabrics woven with large knots of wool to represent the nodules, scenes of fever patterns of colour surrounding central images of Felisin herself, Sha’ik Reborn, the deliverer of the true Apocalypse.
She did not know what to make of all this. She was left bewildered again and again by what she witnessed, every gesture of worship and adoration. The horror of physical disfigurement assailed her on all sides, until she felt numb, drugged insensate. Suffering had become its own language, life itself defined as punishment and imprisonment. And this is my flock.
Her followers had, thus far, answered her every need but one, and that was the growing sexual desire, reflecting the changes overtaking her body, the shape of womanhood, the start of blood between her legs, and the new hunger feeding her dreams of succour. She could not yearn for the touch of slaves, for slavery was what these people willingly embraced, here and now, in this place they called Hanar Ara, the City of the Fallen.
Around a mouthful of stones, Kulat said, ‘And this is the problem, Highness.’
She blinked. She hadn’t been listening. ‘What? What is the problem?’
‘This Carrier, who arrived but this morning from the southwest track. With his dogs that answer only to him.’
She regarded Kulat, the old bastard who confessed sexually fraught dreams of wine as if the utterance was itself more pleasure than he could bear, as if confession made him drunk. ‘Explain.’
Kulat sucked at the stones in his mouth, swallowed spit, then gestured. ‘Look upon the buds, Highness, the buds of disease, the Many Mouths of Bluetongue. They are shrinking. They have dried up and are fading. He has said as much. They have grown smaller. He is a Carrier who shall, one day, cease being a Carrier. This child shall lose his usefulness.’
Usefulness. She looked upon him again, more carefully this time, and saw a hard, angular face older than its years, clear eyes, a frame that needed more flesh and would likely find it once again, now that he had food to eat. A boy still young, who would grow into a man. ‘He shall reside in the palace,’ she said.
Kulat’s eyes widened. ‘Highness—’
‘I have spoken. The Open Wing, with the courtyard and stables, where he can keep his dogs—’
‘Highness, there are plans for converting the Open Wing into your own private garden—’
‘Do not interrupt me again, Kulat. I have spoken.’
My own private garden. The thought now amused her, as she reached for her goblet of wine. Yes, and we shall see how it grows.
So carried on her unspoken thoughts, Felisin saw nothing of Kulat’s sudden dark look, the moment before he bowed and turned away.
The boy had a name, but she would give him a new name. One better suited to her vision of the future. After a moment, she smiled. Yes, she would name him Crokus.
Chapter Fifteen
An old man past soldiering his rivets green, his eyes rimmed in rust, stood as if heaved awake from slaughter’s pit, back-cut from broken flight when young blades chased him from the field.
He looks like a promise only fools could dream unfurled, the banners of glory gesticulating in the wind over his head, stripped like ghosts, skulls stove in, lips flapping, their open mouths mute.
‘Oh harken to me,’ cries he atop his imagined summit, and I shall speak – of riches and rewards, of my greatness, my face once young like these I see before me – harken!’
While here I sit at the Tapu’s table, grease-fingered with skewered meat, cracked goblet pearled in the hot sun, the wine watered to make, in the alliance of thin and thick, both passing palatable.
As near as an arm’s reach from this rabbler, this ravelling trumpeter who once might have stood shield-locked at my side, red-hued, masked drunk, coarse with fear, in the moment before he broke — broke and ran — and now he would call a new generation to war, to battle-clamour, and why? Well, why – all because he once ran, but listen: a soldier who ran once ever runs, and this, honoured magistrate, is the reason — the sole reason I say — for my knife finding his back.
He was a soldier whose words heaved me awake.
‘Bedura’s Defence’ in The Slaying of King Qualin Tros of Bellid
(Transcribed As Song By Fisher, Malaz City, Last Year Of Laseen’s Reign)
*
Within an aur
a redolent and reminiscent of a crypt, Noto Boil, company cutter, Kartoolian by birth and once priest of Soliel, long, wispy, colourless hair plucked like strands of web by the wind, his skin the hue of tanned goat leather, stood like a bent sapling and picked at his green-furred teeth with a fish spine. It had been a habit of his for so long that he had worn round holes between each tooth, and the gums had receded far back, making his smile skeletal.
He had smiled but once thus far, by way of greeting, and for Ganoes Paran, that had been once too many.
At the moment, the healer seemed at best pensive, at worst distracted by boredom. ‘I cannot say for certain, Captain Kindly,’ the man finally said.
‘About what?’
A flicker of the eyes, grey floating in yellow murk. ‘Well, you had a question for me, did you not?’
‘No,’ Paran replied, ‘I had for you an order.’
‘Yes, of course, that is what I meant.’
‘I commanded you to step aside.’
‘The High Fist is very ill, Captain. It will avail you nothing to disturb his dying. More pointedly, you might well become infected with the dread contagion.’
‘No, I won’t. And it is his dying that I intend to do something about. For now, however, I wish to see him. That is all.’
‘Captain Sweetcreek has—’
‘Captain Sweetcreek is no longer in command, cutter. I am. Now get out of my way before I reassign you to irrigating horse bowels, and given the poor quality of the feed they have been provided of late…’
Noto Boil examined the fish spine in his hand. ‘I will make note of this in my company log, Captain Kindly. As the Host’s ranking healer, there is some question regarding chain of command at the moment. After all, under normal circumstances I far outrank captains—’
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