To the Dead City

by Alex Bentley

  “If you are treating us as spedig tiles,” says Syrunn, “I will cut a hole in you, fill it with dirt and watch you die in agony for hours. Hilder? Keep your arrow-point on him.”

  Syrunn walks to the bags, keeping wide of Casmel.

  “The larger of the two,” says Casmel. “It is in a green oilcloth.”

  Syrunn empties the bag onto the forest floor and kicks the contents about until he finds the green package. Once he has the mamera leaves, he strides back toward me.

  “Girlie,” he says. “This is going to hurt.”

  He kneels down next to me and, without warning, grips the shaft of the arrow where it has passed through my leg.

  I scream.

  “I told you you’d hear her scream, boy,” says Syrunn and pulls the arrow through my leg.

  I feel every inch of its shaft, the grains in the wood, and the fletching, as if a flock of birds is passing through the wound. I scream again. Or, perhaps, it is the same scream continued.

  I know only that I have lost consciousness when I find myself crawling out of the darkness, drawn by the sweet scent of rosepulp and the heady aroma of mamera. I can only have been absent for less than a minute because Syrunn is still applying the poultice. I blink tears from my eyes and look across at Casmel.

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Alys,” he says. “It was just one arrow. Not an entire quiver of them.” He widens his eyes on the word ‘quiver’.

  I am too dizzy with pain to catch his meaning at first.

  Then it comes to me.

  An entire quiver of arrows. On my back.

  I look down at Syrunn. He is busy with the poultice. I glance across at Hilder. His attention is entirely on Casmel.

  I feel unconsciousness threatening again.

  I grit my teeth against it, as I did during the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups. This is just one cut, I tell myself, and it will not best me.

  In a single fluid motion, I take an arrow from my quiver and shove it into Syrunn’s neck. He snaps upright, shock in his eyes, his hand going to the arrow and pulling it out. There is blood, but not as much as there ought to be. I realise I hadn’t the strength to deliver a killing blow.

  Casmel scoops his sword up into the air with his foot. But fails to catch it. I see his face fall slack with dread. He knows Hilder’s arrow will find him.

  With my good leg, I lash out at Syrunn. The flat of my foot catches his hip and he staggers away from me, still staring in disbelief at the bloody arrow in his hand.

  And then he has another arrow, this one in the side of his head. Hilder’s arrow.

  “Ged!” the slaughterman barks, and he begins to nock another arrow.

  Casmel grabs his sword and sidesteps, putting Syrunn between himself and Hilder. He barges into Syrunn, sending him flailing toward Hilder. The stalker and the slaughterman go down in a thrashing of limbs.

  Hilder kicks his way out from under the now-shrieking Syrunn. His sword is only half unsheathed when Casmel puts his blade into his chest. And then Syrunn jerks upward and is somehow standing, his eyes looking in opposite directions, his face a bloody mask, shrieking still. He scrabbles at his belt for his knife, almost finds it, then collapses face-first into the dirt and leaves, his shrieking muffled for a few seconds before ceasing entirely.

  “Eyes all puffy and blood-tinted, like a suffocating bladderfish?” I say and lose consciousness once more.

  Chapter 22

  Resurrections

  “Alys.”

  I open my eyes and see Casmel staring down at me, just for a second, then I black out again.

  “Alys!”

  I open my eyes again and force them to stay open this time.

  “I don’t know how long we’ve got to help Ethra. I know you’re very tired and you can sleep soon, I promise, but for now you need to shake yourself awake. Here, drink this.”

  He pours a little water into my mouth, and I manage to swallow it without choking.

  “Now let’s get you up,” he says, looping an arm around my waist and lifting me. “Don’t put any weight on that gammy leg, mind.”

  I want to tell him I’m not stupid, but I can’t summon the energy to speak.

  He guides me over to Ethra.

  The sight of her jolts me awake more effectively than any herbalist’s tonic. A glassy eye stares at me from a bed of muscle through a distorted hole in a face too big but still horribly familiar. Only it doesn’t stare, that eye. It is already becoming milky.

  “Is it too late?” asks Casmel, his arm still around my waist.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Sit me down next to her.”

  Casmel lowers me gently to the ground. I look at Ethra’s slack and lifeless face. I try to find an ember of rage, a spark of fury, something that might start a fire inside me, an inferno. But there is only the ache of sadness, the numbness of loss, as I felt when my mother died.

  “It only works when I’m angry,” I say. “And my anger is smothered with sadness.”

  “But it’s still there,” says Casmel, sitting down next to me. His voice is quiet, reflective. “It never goes away. Mine doesn’t, at least. Sometimes, it seems it has, when I am laughing and living, when I am winning. But I never have to look hard to find it again. And, for some stupid reason, I can’t help looking for it. I’m like a child who can’t stop picking at a scab until it bleeds afresh. If you’re like me, your anger will still be there. It might always be there. It is the same with sadness, and with fear. They lurk and skulk.”

  “I’m not like you,” I say, without thinking.

  “No,” he replies. “Fair enough. You are not like me in many ways. But in this, I suspect we are the same. I suspect we are all the same.”

  I am about to dismiss him again when I remember El saying:

  Listen when a person talks. Always. Think on what they say. Even if it seems like horseged at first. There may be something in it of value. Even horseged can help the roses thrive.

  “I am afraid most of the time,” I say. “Even when I appear not to be. The morning I went hunting with my father, when the slite attacked and my Glyst let itself be known, I was thinking about that. About how I bury my fear like a crow buries its food. It was not so before the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups. Only since. It was as if I bled courage into each of those cups.”

  “My father was like that, when he came back from the Battle of Thelland. He jumped at shadows and cried in his sleep. When he wasn’t crying or jumping or sleeping, he raged. Anger and fear sit very close to one another. They intertwine like trees planted too close together.”

  I look at him, but his eyes are fixed in the distance, or in the past.

  Anger and fear sit very close to one another.

  I cannot find the anger, but the fear, as always, is easy to find. I bury it like a crow buries its food, and a crow does not bury its food deep. It sits, my fear, in my belly, like a too-heavy meal. I examine it. It is mostly a thing of acids and oils. It is greasy and it burns. If it were a creature, it would be a fensnake. They are an unpleasant yellow colour with a venom that causes bloody vomiting, and they live in the slimiest waters.

  “Hello, Master Fensnake,” I say.

  “What?” says Casmel, but I ignore him.

  At first, I see Master Fensnake as coiled up tightly in my belly. Sitting there, heavy and pleased with himself. But then, I realise that is not the case. My belly is just where the largest portion of him sits. The upper length of his body rears up, as he would were he about to strike. He reaches as far as my head. My brain. My mind. That is where the worst of him is, the bit with the fangs and the venom, inside my mind. But between gut and head is my heart, around which Master Fensnake has made a knot of himself. And inside that knot is an ember, its heat largely hidden by the competing coolness of the fensnake’s body.

  My anger.

  I reach out with my mind and loosen Master Fensnake’s knot, as I would a bowstring that needs adjusting. The worst of him, the portion
in my mind, hisses and shows his dripping fangs. I surprise myself by finding I am able to ignore its threat so long as I concentrate on the business of loosening the knot.

  The knot falls slack and the heat of my anger escapes in a wave, in a pulse.

  It spreads out from my chest, through my limbs and down to my fingertips and the tips of my toes. I even feel a little of it pass from the wound in my leg, and it is a strangely satisfying pain.

  All thoughts of snakes and knots and embers fall away, all those abstracts, and I am pushing my hands into Ethra’s wound. It is cold, the blood thickened to a tackiness. But there is a hiss nevertheless, and ribbons of steam coil upwards. I feel Casmel shuffle away from me. Ethra’s flesh billows a little.

  And then I am in the Nowhere once more, that place of troublelessness where it would be so tempting to stay.

  But the ripple comes, as it did before.

  The stone has hit the lake.

  It is a about the Big Things. The Gods.

  Suddenly, I am back in the forest of frail, old-man trees, still haloed by the steam from Ethra’s blood.

  I turn to the lifeless form of Chayn Syrunn, pointing my bloody right hand at him, the left pushed harder into Ethra’s wound.

  “It is coming,” says Syrunn’s dead, motionless mouth. “It is coming. The Gravene.”

  “Yes, yes,” I say. “The Gravene is coming. I know. I know. Don’t the dead ever stop going on and on about it?”

  The pale-pink lifelight lifts from Syrunn’s head. His body collapses a moment later, as if everything beneath the flesh has been in the grave six months.

  The light floats toward me. The scent of blackberries and rose petals swirls in the air. I reach out and touch the light.

  And then Ethra is looking down at me, smiling.

  “It is gone,” she says. “The darkness. It is gone from my blood.” Then her brow knits with concern. “But what are we going to do with you? You look terrible.”

  “Like a suffocating bladderfish?” I ask.

  “A little,” says Ethra.

  I sit up, wincing as the wound in my thigh ignites.

  “Where’s Cass?” I ask.

  “He has gone to get something. He said he has a plan.”

  “Gone to get what? What plan?”

  “He didn’t say. He just said it would be up to you.”

  “Up to me?”

  “If you were able.”

  “Able to do what?”

  Ethra shrugs. Then she shivers and I see a little fear in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “It was as Cass described it,” she says. “There were no Unrim, and there was no River of Honey. It was here, but colourless. Tiny grey mushrooms sprouted from everything. I could feel them on my tongue. I could feel them under my eyelids when I blinked. It was silent. The silence of being underwater. And there were skinny people-things with holes instead of faces, and they were made of sticky smoke, as when a fatty animal burns.” She looks at me. “What is that place, Alys?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I have not seen it.”

  “You are lucky. It will stay in my head for some time, I think. For a long time.”

  I hear someone approach.

  Casmel emerges near to where he darted into the woods when he was being pursued by Hilder. He is carrying my bow, and my quiver is on his back. In his other hand is a rather poor example of a welpa.

  I point at the welpa and say, “We can’t risk a fire. Besides, that thing has barely enough meat for its own purposes.”

  “It’s all I could manage in the time,” he says. “Anyway, we’re not going to eat it.” He looks at me with concern, then. “But you do not have to do this if you haven’t the strength or the inclination.”

  “Do what?”

  “I have a plan,” he says and grins.

  Chapter 23

  Angenga

  Hilder opens his eyes and screams.

  He screams for a long time. Until, in fact, Casmel places a hand over his mouth and says, “Hush, slaughterman. Enough of that now.”

  “I was dead,” he says. “I was dead. You put your sword in me.”

  “Yes, I did,” says Casmel. “I’d apologise, but you were trying to kill me.”

  Hilder tries to launch himself at Casmel, at which point he realises he is bound, hands behind his back, to the tree behind him.

  “Let me loose,” he says. “Fight me like a man. I will—” His mouth hangs open and a look of horror stiffens his face. I have never seen an expression on the slaughterman’s face other than stupidity or meanness, and it is troubling. “I was dead. And I was… what was that place?”

  “Never mind ‘that place’,” says Casmel. “It is only where you belong. We have a message for Slek Mydra.”

  “Never mind?” says Hilder. “Never mind? It is in my head now and forever. I can still taste it. It tasted as it looked, grey and damp. And… those things. Those things. Like people, but as if made of… ligaments. And… oh blessed Fryth… they came for me and they dragged me through the woods—through these woods but with all colour bled out—and they took me to a circle of stones, like the Wyrsan Stones that stand at the heart of the Freewood, and they threw me in the middle, kicking and punching me. They bound and pegged me to the ground, face to the sky.” He strains at his bonds again. “Untie me! Please, untie me!”

  “No,” says Casmel. “Now, stop blathering and listen. A message for Slek Mydra.”

  “The sky,” Hilder continues, as if Casmel has not even spoken. “The sky, it was not right. It was as milk curdled by a drop of vinegar. Pale and clotted, thick here, thin there. And there were things moving through those thin parts, like fish but also like snakes and like spiders but of one body. The ligament-people started dancing and singing. The singing was horrible, so high it drilled into my ears, and the words gibberish. They danced like they were afire. And then…” He begins to shake now, and for a moment I think he is trying to demonstrate the dance of the ligament-people. “And then… oh blessed Fryth… that curdled sky parted and… it came. It. It was vast. The colour of an old man’s milky eye. It had no shape but was filled with teeth and claws and rats’ tails, and it turned and turned like a boiling stew, and there was something like guts, like bowels, and they were translucent… and I could see… people… people in them straining to get out. And. And. And.”

  Casmel slaps him then.

  Hilder glares at him, straining against his bonds again. But it is obvious to me that even were he to free himself, he would be no threat. He’s weak. Even his build is diminished. His clothes hang loose, like Ethra’s flesh when she lay lifeless. And there is something lifeless about him, too. He is pale and drawn. His eyes are yellow where they should be white. I remember one Wealdnight, when Roisa and I were just seven or eight, we tried to scare each other with stories of spirits and puccas. I told the story of the slootath, a creature that comes with the heavy snow and will eat the limb from a man without him even noticing until he goes to scratch himself and screams. Roisa told the story of the angenga. The angenga are men brought back to life precisely one week from their death to carry out some task for Wealm. Usually it is to deliver a message of love or lust to the latest mortal woman who has caught his eye. Once they have undertaken Wealm’s bidding, the god forgets about the angenga and they wander the land, slowly decaying until they cannot walk, only crawl. They never die, the angenga. There are stories of disembodied angenga hands strangling a man in his sleep, and even of a clump of angenga hairs finding their way into someone’s throat and choking them. Hilder looks like an angenga newly risen. The wound in his chest, which I can see through the tear in his tunic, is not completely healed. It is red around its edges and looks like it is eager to begin breaking and suppurating. Perhaps the welpa was not enough, its lifelight too dim. Or perhaps he was dead too long.

  He stops struggling with his bonds but continues to glare at Casmel with his sallow eyes.

  “I am listening,�
� he says.

  “Tell Slek Mydra to cease his search. Tell him that dealing with us has not been quite the trouble-free undertaking he doubtless imagined it to be.” Casmel points at the sunken corpse of Chayn Syrunn to illustrate his point. “Tell him to go to the Jarl and explain that Alys Clainh is dead. Dead at his hand. The job is done. If he does this, I will see that the Sceada receives a heavy bag of coin before a month has passed. A heavy bag. Do you understand?”

  “I understand that you have lost your mind,” says Hilder, grinning. His gums are pale as the belly of a toad. I don’t think he will last long. “Mydra will not be bought. The Sceada are fools for honour and loyalty.”

  “Everyone can be bought,” says Casmel. “Everyone has a price. Everyone has a coin, the weight of which will take them down.”

  “Not the Sceada. And certainly not Slek Mydra. His loyalty to the Jarl is absolute.”

  “Just tell him,” says Casmel.

  “For what good it will do, I will tell him. He is still going to gut you.”

  “Everyone has a price,” says Casmel, and turns away from Hilder. “Right,” he says to Ethra and me. “Let’s get away from this place. It has the stink of death about it.”

  “That’s him,” says Ethra, pointing at Hilder and pinching her nose. “I thought it was the other one, the dead one, the one that killed me, but it isn’t. It’s the slaughterman, the one who is pretending to be alive.”

  “I am not pretending,” snaps Hilder. “I live. I live, you little gedknot! I live.” But there is a thread—no, a thick rope—of doubt in his voice.

  “If you say so,” says Ethra.

  We are ready to go in just a few minutes. I am sat behind Casmel on Skep, my arms about his waist, and Ethra is on Lata. Casmel has his mare’s rein tucked into his belt.

  “You only have to concentrate on not falling off,” he says to Ethra.

  “I think I can manage that,” Ethra replies, but not with any confidence.

  As we begin to ride away, Hilder shouts, “Untie me! You can’t leave me bound. There are nef here about.”