Starless

by Jacqueline Carey

  “Oh, I should so like to see such things for myself!” Zariya said wistfully. “If I had two good legs, you could find a way to smuggle me out, couldn’t you, my darling? Think what adventures we could have!”

  The thought of the two of us exploring the dangerous quarters of the city was an alarming one, giving me cause to sympathize with Vironesh’s concerns. “You’ll have more freedom when you’re wed,” I said to her. “You can venture out in a litter with your own household guard.”

  “If my husband permits it,” she reminded me. “And never on my own two feet. Not unless…” She fell silent.

  I waited a moment. “Unless what?”

  Zariya gave me an apologetic glance. “There is one thing I have not told you, only because it is so dear a hope that I fear even to give voice to it. But I do not want secrets between us.” She rubbed the tops of her thighs in an uncharacteristically restless gesture. “There is the slightest, slightest possibility that partaking of the rhamanthus may heal me.” She shook her head at me as I opened my mouth to reply. “No, don’t even speak of it. I can’t bear it.”

  It was a grave revelation, but I nodded in understanding and changed the topic.

  In the final days leading up to the royal wedding, I gave up my futile quest. There was so much activity in the women’s quarter, seamstresses and jewel merchants and flower vendors and purveyors of cosmetics coming and going at all hours, that I was loath to leave Zariya unguarded.

  My own wedding attire was a matter of much heated debate. The royal women assumed I would wear one of my fine new gowns and were shocked when I refused outright, but there was no way I was attending Zariya at a crowded ceremony and a public procession less than fully armed. It would be Khai the warrior, Khai the shadow at her side, not this girl-Khai I barely understood other than as a useful disguise. The royal women were adamant that there must be finery, and for once, Zariya sided with them. In the end, we settled on a compromise in the form of a new tunic and breeches in a rich gold silk brocade.

  The wedding was held in the High Temple of Anamuht with Sister Nizara presiding over the ceremony, the Sacred Flame stretching toward the ceiling behind her, dozens of oil lamps casting their lesser glows over the proceedings. Women sat veiled on the left side of the carpeted floor, men on the right, while Princess Izaria and her groom, a minor lord’s eldest son, stood before us.

  I sat beside Zariya, a bare-faced anomaly on the left side of the sanctum. Her breath was coming quick and shallow, and I was concerned lest she overtax herself, but when I gave her a concerned look, she dismissed it with a quick shake of her head.

  During the long invocation, I stole glances at the men’s side of the sanctum, especially at Prince Tazaresh, wondering about his guilt. He sat straight-backed with a warrior’s discipline, his features fixed forward.

  The bride and groom exchanged the traditional blessing gifts, she offering him honey in a gilded bowl to symbolize the sweetness she would bring to the marriage, he offering her a pile of salt on a gilded platter as a symbol that he would provide for her. The groom—Parvesh was his name—took a spoonful of honey, and beneath her veil, Izaria lifted a few crystals of salt to her lips.

  And then it was time for the rhamanthus.

  There would be no dowry, only the promise of a dowry when the harvest came, but each would partake of a single seed pried from the king’s crown.

  Sister Nizara held them forth on a cushion of gold silk, glowing like living garnets. “Each of these seeds has been quickened by Anamuht the Purging Fire. Each bears a spark of the sun’s fire; each represents a year of enduring youth and vitality. Partake, my Sun-Blessed sister, and lead a long and virtuous life. Partake, my brother, and enter the House of the Ageless.”

  A soft murmur ran through the sanctum as they accepted the seeds; envy, perhaps. There were so very few quickened seeds remaining.

  Beside me, Zariya leaned forward.

  I could not see Izaria’s face behind her veil, but I watched the groom, Parvesh, as he put the seed into his mouth and swallowed. For a moment, there was no reaction, but then color suffused his features and his lips parted in wonder. “Oh,” he said. “Oh!”

  Did it hurt, I wondered? No, it seemed some other sensation entirely, one to which one could not put a name. And knowing what I knew, I envied him on Zariya’s behalf. We had not spoken further of the matter, but I had learned that she would not be allowed to partake of the rhamanthus until she turned eighteen or was wed herself, whichever occasion came first. Since the Sun-Blessed wed later than most, it was likely to be the former.

  If Anamuht came to quicken the harvest; if the king’s crown was not stripped bare by that day.

  Sister Nizara invoked a final blessing and pronounced the pair wed in the name of the Sacred Twins. Izaria unpinned her veil, and she and her groom embraced in the sight of all assembled. She looked happy; he was indeed a well-favored young fellow. I hoped for her sake that he was kind, too.

  Thence, the procession.

  It was in truth a splendid sight, at least from my perspective at the rear. King Azarkal led it astride a fine black horse. Behind him, his two eldest sons rode beside uncurtained litters carrying the two senior-most queens, Adinah and Makesha. The litters were borne by members of the Queen’s Guard, spears in their free hands, and flanked by a score of Royal Guardsmen on foot. Behind them was the new royal couple in a shared litter, given special pride of place for the occasion, then came the daughters and husbands of the senior queens, although I noted that Princess Fazarah was not among them. Next were the junior queens and the sons they had borne, followed by their daughters and husbands. Another two score of Royal Guardsmen were staggered along their length on either side.

  Because she was the junior-most queen and had borne only daughters, Zariya’s mother, Sanala, was the last of the royal women in the procession; because she was a daughter and the youngest of the Sun-Blessed, Zariya’s litter was last of all. A quartet of mounted Royal Guardsmen rode behind us.

  I walked beside Zariya’s litter, watching the procession snake down the mountainside before us. In the west, the sun laid a shining path across the ocean. Although the sun was still high in the sky, a soft blue twilight was gathering in the shadowed streets, dispelled by the oil-wood torches carried by the Royal Guardsmen who were on foot.

  The plan was that the procession would descend to the second level of the city and return to the palace by sundown. In less fraught times, it would have ventured to the very base of Merabaht. Having spent a number of days haunting those quarters, I was glad it was going no lower.

  We descended past the fourth level, which was largely occupied by the barracks of the Royal Guard.

  On the third level, the denizens of the stately houses there turned out to cheer the newly wedded couple and throw orange blossom petals; in turn, the new royal couple tossed out silver coins that were received with a laugh and a salute.

  On the second level of Merabaht, it was an even livelier affair. As a precaution, members of the City Guard were stationed along the main thoroughfare, but folks spilled out of the teahouses that lined it, calling out blessings and begging for coins. It was reckoned good luck to catch a coin thrown by a member of a royal wedding, and everyone in the procession had been given a purse of copper for the occasion.

  Zariya leaned out from her litter to toss her coins, laughing with delight, her breath catching in her throat.

  My skin prickled.

  There were too many people lining the streets, and among the revelers were scores of silent and robed figures, hanging back behind the City Guardsmen.

  I felt Pahrkun’s wind rising, rising within me.

  I tasted violence in the air.

  Zariya caught my expression and sobered. “What is it, my darling? You look grim.”

  “Something’s wrong,” I said in a low tone. “There are—”

  “Children of Miasmus!” a voice thundered behind us. “Rise!”

  The mob swarmed out of t
he shadows. There weren’t scores of them, there were hundreds; and they were armed with daggers, not rocks. They took out dozens of the City Guardsmen from behind, stabbing backs and slitting throats, revelry turning to slaughter in the blink of an eye.

  Zariya.

  I was in motion without thinking, my yakhan and kopar in my hands with no recollection of having drawn them. Zariya’s litter clattered to the ground, dropped by the terrified guards carrying it.

  “Children of Miasmus, the end is nigh!” the voice called out in the traders’ tongue. “Rise up against those who oppress you! Seize what you can while you can!”

  One, two, three … I lost count of the number of men I killed after three. There was no artistry or finesse to my fighting. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that no one harmed Zariya, because if they did, my heart would die inside me. The cobbled street was growing slippery with blood and crowded with corpses. Zariya’s litter-bearers had rallied enough to put their backs to the conveyance and level their spears, helping keep the mob at bay and giving me space to work.

  Only there were so many of them, and they kept coming.

  Behind us a horse was screaming in pain, hamstrung and floundering, throwing the quartet of Royal Guardsmen into chaos. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw a darting figure low to the ground, the flash of a blade, and another horse down in agony. I didn’t dare abandon my defense of Zariya, but I shoved my yakhan into an assailant’s dead body, freeing my right hand to whip one of my zims into the back of the horse-mutilator’s neck, taking vicious pleasure in seeing him fall.

  “Do the Sun-Blessed not live by the sweat of your brow? I have seen nothing else since I set foot on Zarkhoum’s shores! Have they not taken from you, taken and taken and taken? Children of Miasmus, it is your turn to take! Take now, before it is too late, for the world will be swallowed in darkness!”

  “Get the priest!” I shouted at the guardsmen, yanking my blade out of the corpse.

  “Fuck the priest!” one shouted back at me. “Ward the king!”

  The two guardsmen with hale mounts left to them pounded past Zariya’s litter on either side, flesh and bone crunching beneath the horses’ hooves. For the first time, I was left with a clear view of the Mad Priest.

  The Priest of the Black Star.

  Based on the fact that he spoke the traders’ tongue, I had guessed he wasn’t Zarkhoumi. The Mad Priest was younger than I had expected, fair-skinned as a Therinian, with long, unkempt black hair and a thin scruff of beard clinging to his cheeks and chin. He wore ragged breeches and a filthy vest that hung open to reveal a black starburst symbol etched into his pale chest.

  A second mob stood behind him.

  Someone to my right launched himself at me with a blood-curdling scream, dagger raised high; I slashed his midsection open absentmindedly with a back-handed blow of my yakhan, spilling his bowels onto the street.

  The Mad Priest pointed at me. “Kill the shadow!” he cried. “It is the will of Miasmus! Kill the shadow and seize the princess!”

  With a roar, the mob behind him raced forward, hurdling the floundering horses, bowling over the remaining guardsmen.

  I fought like a spinning devil, Pahrkun’s wind blowing through me in a gale, finding the spaces between; between the mind’s intention and a dagger’s blow, between incitement and hesitation, between rage and fear.

  I built a wall of corpses.

  They came and came and came until there were no more of them.

  At the forefront of the procession, I could hear the sounds of battle subsiding; the groans of the surviving wounded, the exhausted utterance of orders, and a rising ululation of grief.

  Alone in the thoroughfare, every supporter to his cause slain or fled, the Mad Priest wavered on his feet.

  I crouched beside Zariya’s fallen litter and peered into the window, filled with the urgent need to know that she was alive and unharmed. “My lady?”

  “I am fine.” Her tone was shaken and furious, her eyes flashing. “Do what you must, my heart. Take the priest alive if you can.”

  I straightened and took stock of the scene. There were no more assailants. The battle had ended, and it had ended badly for them. “Ward the princess,” I said to her litter-bearers. “Ward her with your lives.”

  I vaulted over the wall of corpses I had built. Shoving my yakhan into my sash, I unwound my heshkrat.

  The Mad Priest gave me a strange, tranquil look. His lips were parched and bitten, and the black starburst etched on his chest seemed to pulse with the beat of his heart. “This is only the beginning. You cannot stop it, you know. Miasmus will swallow the world in darkness.”

  I twirled the heshkrat. “We’ll see.”

  His eyes rolled up to show the whites and he crumpled to the ground as I released my heshkrat, its lines twining around his throat as he fell, rather than his legs as I’d intended. He lay motionless on the street.

  I hesitated.

  Behind me, the ululation continued to rise as though sparks were passing from throat to throat and kindling a blaze of grief. There was no one here, I thought, to mourn the slain Children of Miasmus; that meant there had been a death in the House of the Ageless.

  I dashed back to Zariya’s litter and saw Vironesh coming toward me through the carnage in his City Guard uniform, blood-splattered and limping. Of course, he would have been posted among them; later, I learned that his efforts had broken the spine of the attack in the middle of the procession. Even so, it had not been enough to prevent a royal casualty.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  Vironesh met my gaze. “Prince Tazaresh.”

  Inside the litter, Zariya drew in a sharp breath, but she did not lend her voice to mourning him.

  “You didn’t—” It was a dishonorable thought and I didn’t complete it. “No, of course not.”

  “What became of the Mad Priest?” he asked.

  I pointed past the wall of corpses. “He collapsed. Dead or alive, I don’t know.”

  “Let’s find out.” Vironesh called over an additional handful of guardsmen to stand watch over Zariya’s litter and I hauled dead men out of the way so he wouldn’t have to clamber over them.

  The Mad Priest was lying motionless where he’d fallen, my heshkrat wrapped around his throat, a trickle of blood that looked black in the gathering dusk at one corner of his mouth. At close range, the symbol on his chest was a more gruesome thing than I’d reckoned, a craterous pit of a wound with radiating lines. Although his chest did not rise and fall with breath, the black star continued to pulse.

  I reached to prod it with the central tine of my kopar, and Vironesh caught my wrist. “Don’t touch him. There’s something unnatural about this. Go find a torch.” There were a number of oil-wood torches still burning where they’d been dropped. I grabbed the nearest, and Vironesh and I bent low over the still figure.

  Something was crawling out of the abscess in the Mad Priest’s chest, one spindly black leg at a time.

  Vironesh and I watched in horrified fascination. It looked like a black spider the size of a man’s hand, with a tiny body and a profusion of long, skinny legs. It dragged itself out of the priest’s chest, crawled down the right side of his torso, and crouched on the cobblestones, pulsing up and down on its splayed legs, its carapace glinting in the torchlight.

  Both of us backed away from it.

  “What the watery hell is that?” I whispered to Vironesh, hoping he had an answer.

  He shook his head. “It looks like a sea-spider, but I’ve never seen a black one; and anyway, they’re harmless. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  I gazed at the ruin of the Mad Priest’s chest and swallowed. “Brother, I think we’d best kill this thing, and quickly.”

  Vironesh drew his kopar. “Be ready with the torch in case steel’s not enough, Khai.”

  The spider-thing shuddered when Vironesh drove the point of his weapon into its body; shuddered, and began hunching its way up the tine, the ends of
its legs somehow gripping the smooth steel.

  I thrust the torch at it, bathing it in flames. For a long moment it seemed not even fire would deter the thing, then at last came a sizzling sound and it stopped moving. After another moment, its long legs shriveled and curled in against themselves. Still, I held the flame to it until Vironesh bade me cease. He used the blade of his yakhan to scrape the burnt black remnant of the thing free.

  I glanced back to assure myself that Zariya was being well guarded. “What about the Mad Priest?”

  Vironesh grunted. “I think it’s fair to assume he’s dead. Bring the torch over here, let’s make certain there isn’t another one of those things inside him.” I let the torchlight play over the priest’s pale torso. Nothing pulsed within the abscess, and I was beginning to think about reclaiming my heshkrat when Vironesh swore under his breath. “Raise the torch, let me see his face.”

  I obeyed and watched him study the priest’s features. “What is it?”

  He looked up at me. “I’ve seen this man before. When I was with the coursers of Obid. He was first mate on a pirate ship we chased and lost in the Nexus on more than one occasion.”

  I shivered in the warm evening air. “Whatever he was, he wanted me dead. ‘Kill the shadow,’ he said; ‘kill the shadow and seize the princess.’ He said nothing of Prince Tazaresh.”

  Vironesh lowered his voice. “Someone armed this mob with daggers wrought of Granthian steel, and that doesn’t come cheap. You’ve been in Three-Copper Quarter. No one living there could afford such a thing, let alone hundreds of them. I am not sure it was one of the Children of Miasmus who killed Tazaresh.”

  “A conspiracy, then?” My clothing and my hair were drenched with blood; my fingers were sticky with it.