We Lie with Death

by Devin Madson

  It took forever to reach the top, yet when the stairs finally levelled onto a blessedly flat path the sun still rode high. It could not have taken more than an hour, probably less, yet it had felt like a lifetime of torture. Many of my Swords gasped for breath and hissed at cramps—even Gideon slowed his pace—but the Kisian priest leading the way was not even out of breath. At least the Kisian soldiers and two of their lords had the grace to look pained.

  I had expected grandeur, but it was a small bird’s hollow of a shrine that welcomed us atop the mountain—a nest of interwoven metalwork hung with tiny paper lanterns. A small altar sat at one end where another pale-robed priest stood waiting. Jass stood just inside the opposite arch with his half of my Swords, but of Lady Sichi there was no sign.

  “She’s tidying herself up,” Jass said when I approached. “She has her people with her, and Nuru, but I left Anouke and Esi as well since she seems to prefer female Levanti.”

  I nodded, but not daring to stop lest my legs turned to stone, I strode a circle of the shrine. Gideon had removed his storm cloak to reveal a glorious crimson robe, and when Grace Bahain, his son, and the other lords did the same the space filled with bright, shining silk. Yet when Lady Sichi swept in dressed in a pale pink robe laced with gleaming silver threads, I held my breath. History would not remember my name, but it would remember this moment. For here in the hollow of Kuroshima Shrine the first Levanti emperor would take a Kisian bride with the blessing of her countrymen.

  Lady Sichi knelt across the altar from Gideon, each speaking what sounded like a prayer. The priest spoke prayers too, filling the space with his musical tones. Despite the number of Levanti crammed into the shrine his confidence did not waver, not then nor when he tied a white sash about Lady Sichi’s waist. The knot was more complex than any I’d seen a Kisian wear, yet he formed it with well-practised fingers while looking to the heavens.

  When at last Gideon rose from the altar the Kisians hailed him, their acceptance clear. He had married one of their own, had solidified their allegiance, yet it was a grim man who drew me aside as we prepared to descend the mountain. “When we get back to the horses send someone to Mei’lian with a message for Sett,” Gideon said.

  “One of my Swords?”

  “Yes, it cannot wait until we return to Kogahaera. This ceremony will not be complete for seven days, but…” His nostrils flared as he sucked a deep, calming breath. “I need Sett and fast. I fear I am running out of time.”

  “Seven days?” Jass lay naked on my sleeping mat. “Seven days? You mean after we walked up all those fucking stairs and walked back down and had a whole feast to the gods, he still has to wait seven days before they are married?”

  “Apparently. They wait seven days to ensure the blessing of the gods and only then is he allowed to untie the knot and bed her. At which point they are married.”

  He shook his head, the short stubble of his hair rasping against the pillow. “Kisians are very strange.” He went on absently stroking my bare arm, but his expression grew serious. “So that means anyone who doesn’t want this to go ahead still has seven days to kill one of them. Who’s on duty?”

  “Every single Sword who didn’t come with us.”

  I’d had the same thought after Gideon’s anxious demand for his brother, unable to quite bury my fear no matter how much I tried.

  Jass sighed. “It’s going to be a long seven days. Does it include today?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask Nuru in the morning.”

  He kept stroking my arm, his warmth a comfort against my aching body. Whether it had been the exhaustion of the day, the wine, or the constancy of his companionship that had led us here, I had no intention of moving again until I had to and he seemed similarly inclined. He had sat with me at the feast, and through a series of unspoken looks we had both known we would arrive here, a fact clinched when he had asked where I was in my cycle. “That’s what made me realise I’d been an ass to you that first time, you know,” he had said. “That I’d let years of respectful habit slide without a thought. My herd ought to be ashamed to own me.”

  Someone knocked upon the door, stilling Jass’s fingers.

  “Who is it?” I called, poised to leap like an arrow loosed from the curve of his arm.

  “Matsimelar,” came the translator’s voice, muffled by the door. “I’ve got that thing you asked for.”

  I jumped up from the mat, already grabbing my clothes. “Hold on a moment,” I said, thrusting one leg after the other into my worn breeches, fingers trembling upon the ties.

  There was an annoyed grunt from the vague outline outside the door, and in a low voice Jass whispered, “Do you need me to hide?”

  I shook my head as I yanked on my tunic and strode to the door, the old reed matting as sharp as a thousand pins beneath my sore feet. The door slid easily, and having leaned out to be sure Matsimelar was alone, I waved him in and closed it behind him.

  A low-burning lamp lit the interior of my all but bare room, leaving the saddleboy nothing to look at but Jass lying propped upon his elbows. The two young men acknowledged each other with a nod, and Matsimelar, shaking back the long strands of hair escaping his ponytail, withdrew a book from beneath his tunic. It was the worn volume Livi had kept her hand upon while we talked, but the saddleboy didn’t immediately hold it out. “What do you plan to do with this?” he said, sitting the spine on his palm. It fell open. “It’s all in Chiltaen,” he added, licking his finger to turn a few pages. “Even I can only understand half of it. Maybe less. They were far more interested in teaching us the spoken language than the written language, and when they did it was all straightforward words. This stuff looks… poetic. Like this, it’s something about a door upon a coast that you walk through and find yourself exiting through a door in a desert, like someone wrote down their dreams and now people worship it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to try. I’ll find a way.”

  Matsimelar sighed. “If you can’t find anyone else to help, I’ll translate it.” He licked his finger again and turned another page. “If you’ll have me Made.”

  “I gave you my word.”

  He snapped the book closed and held it out. “Thank you, Captain. I have… been afraid of meeting the gods without any sign of the sacrifice I made for my people. Careful,” he added, wiping his hands upon his tunic. “It’s all sticky from those herbs she was burning.”

  It was sticky. It had also brought Livi’s scent with it, like her spirit clung to the beloved book even in death. Matsimelar lifted a hand to his nose and sniffed, making a face. “Gross. I had better get back now before someone wonders where I’ve gone.”

  He coughed as he turned, thumping his chest with a balled fist. Jass sat up. “Are you all right, Matsi?” he said as another wet hack burst from Matsimelar’s mouth. The saddleboy spun back, his eyes wide. He closed a hand around his throat, foam spilling from the corners of his mouth as he opened and closed it like a fish.

  “Fuck!” Jass was up in a billow of sheets, but even as he rose, Matsimelar fell, crumpling to his knees as more foam poured forth. His panicked eyes bulged, and he scratched at his neck, tearing trails of blood into the flesh.

  “No no no!” I said, dropping the book to kneel before Matsimelar. “Shit, what do we do?”

  “Stick your fingers down his throat! We’ve got to make him bring it back up.”

  I pushed my fingers into his gaping mouth, digging through foam and mucous, but everything had swollen to a ridiculous size and I couldn’t make him gag.

  “I can’t! Something is blocking the way!”

  The saddleboy’s face turned purple and his eyes rolled. Foam poured down his chin as Jass stumbled about the room throwing things as though in search of something, anything that might help, but he must have known as I did that there was nothing we could do. Before I could speak, Matsimelar toppled face first onto the reed matting like a falling tree. There he lay unmoving, his eyes wide. He stared at Mona’s
scales now.

  Jass froze in the sudden silence. “Don’t put your hands anywhere near your mouth,” he said, his gaze caught to the book upon the floor. “The redcap is on the cover.”

  I stared at him, grief constricting my throat. Jass stared back. “You haven’t, have you?”

  “I… I don’t think so,” I said, grateful I could form words.

  He let out a shaky breath and looked again at the still form of Matsimelar. “That’s… that’s not an accident, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you think someone tried to kill you but got him instead?”

  I nodded. “It’s Leo. I’m sure of it,” I whispered. “I talked to a pilgrim and she died. I asked for a book and they were all destroyed. There is something in that thing”—I pointed to the book on the floor—“that he doesn’t want me to know. Doesn’t want us to know.”

  Without the presence of a dead Levanti he might have scoffed, have argued, but he did neither. “What do we do?”

  “We have to hide the book somewhere until I can figure out what to do with it,” I said, holding my foam-slick hands at arm’s length. “He might know Matsimelar was bringing it to me, but if the book just disappears and we drag Matsi out into the passage then there’s no proof he got here with it. Leo might suspect but he won’t know where it’s gone.”

  “I can take it,” Jass said. “I know somewhere I can hide it. It’ll take a while, but I can be back by morning.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Don’t come back.”

  Jass stared at me, opening and closing his mouth in a way all too reminiscent of Matsimelar struggling for breath. “What do you mean don’t come back?”

  “I mean stay with the book. Hide. I… I don’t know how Leo knows what he does but I’m sure you aren’t safe here anymore.”

  “And you are?”

  “No, but I’m your captain and I can give you a direct order.”

  Jass’s incredulous look darkened to a scowl. “Dishiva—”

  “We don’t have time to argue. Take the book and go. Please, Jass. That’s an order.”

  For a moment he glared stubbornly at me, before he lifted his fists to a stiff salute. “As you wish, Captain.”

  I couldn’t thank him with words, only a grim smile. He returned it as he dressed but said no more until he had picked up the book using a spare tunic from my pack. “Wash your hands,” he said then, glancing at Matsimelar on his way to the door. “And don’t die, Captain. You can consider that an order too.”

  He disappeared without another word. Left alone, I dragged Matsi’s body out along the passage, trying not to think of his fear that he would die unmade, trying not to think of his frightened face, trying not to think at all.

  18. RAH

  The cart stank. I didn’t want to know what it stank of; it was too great a relief not to be walking anymore, to be moving faster. Unlike the Levanti Plain, Kisia was full of rolling hills and jagged mountains, of curly trees, dense groves, and raging rivers. It had more flowers and animals than I had ever seen in one place, but step after step across its endless landscape I had only come to hate it. At first for what had happened here, and then for its rain.

  Rain had once been a welcome respite to be greeted with an open mouth. Now it was a curse. It even dripped through the cover of today’s cart, no doubt adding to the foul smell clogging my nostrils. Shishi’s damp coat and my own unbathed musk weren’t helping.

  But at least we weren’t walking.

  Empress Miko sat cross-legged just out of the rain, as far from me as it was possible to get without braving the weather or the cart’s suspicious contents. She had been quiet since we left the inn a few days back, and I had found myself disinclined to fill the silence. I’d finally experienced something of everyday Kisian life, and while its food and drink were strange, sleeping upon the floor had been familiar enough to make me wish for home. To remind me what I was fighting for.

  “I wonder how you would do on the plains,” I said to Shishi, curled up beside me rather than risk the rain by her mistress. “I’d have to cut your fur short or you’d overheat. You could be shorn like a true Sword of the Levanti.” I ran my hand over my overlong hair. “All right, a true Sword of the Levanti who has a scalp blade.”

  I had sawed off a few tufts with my knife the night before, but by the empress’s fleeting grin it must have looked ridiculous.

  “The Torin don’t have a lot of dogs, but the Oht use them for hunting.”

  The empress looked around, eyes wide in question.

  “Your mistress looks shocked,” I said, still talking to the dog. “Perhaps I said something rude. Was it hunting? Or Oht?”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked back out at the rain.

  “Definitely Oht. I wonder what it means. Whatever it is, I love that I can sit here and say fuck shit horse dick and get no reaction at all, but Oht”—she glared over her shoulder at me—“is a problem.”

  Gideon would have laughed. Hell, even Tor would have laughed. Shishi just wagged her tail. “I’ll take that as high praise for my sense of humour.”

  The empress glanced back at us again, but whatever her opinion, I’d take talking nonsense to a dog over having to think.

  Our slow progress had become my daily struggle. It was so hard to keep walking at a pace I could maintain, to keep doing all I could without collapsing and no more, because my thoughts had only to wander and I was back with my people, imagining their new Kisian allies slaughtering them once they were no longer useful, just as we had slaughtered the Chiltaens. I thought of Yitti and Himi and Istet, of Dishiva and Sett, and of Gideon, always of Gideon, standing proud and betraying our tenets with such belief in a future that might never exist. And in the darkest moments I imagined them all dead because I could not get there in time. In those waking dreams I was alone again, that shame-filled child sitting at the edge of the herd knowing he had failed his people, only now there was no herd, no plains, and no Gideon, the weight of his arm around me nothing but a bitter memory.

  You cannot win a battle you killed yourself reaching.

  It was not an old Levanti saying, for all too often battles had come to us, but it had become a recent adaptation of the old adage “If you expend all your energy in the hunt you have none left for the kill.”

  Evening was coming on fast and I hoped we would not stop. Better to doze against the juddering side of the cart and get closer to our destination than try to find somewhere dry to sleep.

  Unfortunately the carter showed no interest in continuing through the night. When the cart stopped, the empress immediately began what sounded like negotiations, returning after a few minutes with a triumphant smile. Shishi leapt down to greet her, and speaking to me for what felt like the first time that day, the empress pointed to the middle of a clearing where the driver had dumped a rolled-up tent.

  “Fire,” she said in Levanti, and though she didn’t need to tell me it was always nice to hear her use my language, that one single word a testament of value and respect.

  I repeated it in Kisian before falling into our routine. Find the driest spot. Collect wood for a fire. Scavenge for food and water. All before checking Shishi was well, and settling down to a cold and uncomfortable half sleep shivering beneath the stars. It had been warm when we first arrived in Chiltae, but the farther south we travelled and the closer winter crept the more I yearned for the dry heat of the plains.

  The empress had bought food back in the town, and while we ate we huddled close to the flames, sheltered by an angled half tent the driver erected over the fire. When we had finished, Empress Miko checked my wound, giving me something between a nod and a grimace, before settling down to sleep. Shishi lay with her, pressed against her back, and the driver was soon snoring.

  Despite the tired ache in every part of my body, I could not sleep. As we didn’t travel much in winter, it was a time for giving back to the gods and the earth and remembering our dead. With su
ch chill breezes blowing, I ought to have been carving a stone for each of my lost Swords. Eska. Orun. Kishava. Gam. Fessel. Hamatet. Amun. Asim. Ubaid. Hehet. Maat. Ren. Dhamara. Juta. My Swords had removed me from my captaincy, but I was still bound to them, my every failure linking me more strongly to a responsibility I could not run away from this time.

  The names of the lost circled my thoughts until I fell into an uneasy doze, afraid I was forgetting someone, there had been so many.

  Some hours later the rumble of cart wheels filled my dreams only to live on into wakefulness. They were approaching along the road, bolts of lantern light shearing through the drizzle to light the road ahead.

  “Empress,” I said, rolling to find her already awake, propped on an elbow with her breath held. Perhaps sensing her mistress’s tension, Shishi had also lifted her head, the approaching light shining on her watery eyes.

  In a flurry of movement, the empress was up, dashing toward the road with her arms waving. She hailed the driver, and caught in a beam of lantern light, she made a bedraggled figure.

  The pair of horses slowed. Heavy with fatigue, I propped myself up to catch the tone of their conversation. The driver seemed disinclined at first, answering in gruff, short snatches, but she wore him down with poetic strings of words, his light falling upon her like she was a performer in a shadow play. I had once put one on with Eska, the pair of us caught in the silent world between campfire and woven screen, nothing but darkness above and the low-voiced murmur of our audience.

  Eska. Orun. Kishava. Gam. Fessel. Hamatet. Amun. Asim. Ubaid. Hehet. Maat. Ren. Dhamara. Juta. A whole other life to which I could never fully return in spirit even if I could in body.