Saint's Blood

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘Don’t,’ I warned. It looked like I was having more trouble standing than the others.

  Aline shouted ‘Stop! Lady Ethalia – all of you! Cease this madness!’

  Ethalia looked down at her hands and the pressure was gone. ‘Forgive me. I simply couldn’t stand the rage in this room any longer.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Antrim said, bowing his head. ‘I meant you no harm, my Lady.’

  ‘Oh for the sake of whatever Gods remain, Antrim,’ Brasti said, ‘don’t you start hitting on Falcio’s woman too.’

  ‘She’s not—’ I closed my mouth when I realised Mateo, Allister and I had spoken at once.

  ‘What in all the hells is wrong with you people?’ Antrim asked, and despite everything, that caused the lot of us to laugh, if only for a moment. Ethalia walked over to the bench where Valiana sat silently in her iron mask. She took her hands, and once again tried to calm the madness inside her.

  Once we’d settled down, Talia said, ‘Fine: let’s talk about it. Let’s say we run: we board a ship bound for the Southern Islands or to Dieram, anywhere. We flee. What then?’

  ‘We live,’ the Tailor said. It was the first time she’d spoken since I’d arrived and she sounded different, and looked different too: sadder, older. Diminished. I wondered what it must be like to be so brilliant, to be unique, only to discover that you aren’t unique at all, and that there’s someone out there better at what you do than you are. She caught my look and returned a scowl. ‘We live, and we give the Blacksmith and his God time to fail and hope that the people of Tristia aren’t quite so willing as he believes to enslave themselves once again.’

  ‘One would think you’d never lived in this country,’ Darriana said, scowling. ‘Of course they’ll take to this new theocracy. It gives them what they’ve always wanted: a new master to serve.’ She locked eyes with me. ‘One who doesn’t complicate their lives with notions of laws and justice and the responsibility that comes with those things. One who tells them when to rise, when to work and when to die.’

  I felt someone take my hand. Aline said, ‘Falcio, I don’t want to run. If my father’s reign stood for anything, it was the hope that we could be better than our pasts. But if you believe that’s the only choice left to us, if you’ve lost faith then’ – she looked down – ‘then I won’t ask you to keep fighting for me if it will only bring us more bloodshed.’

  Her words carried no accusation nor repudiation, but I felt Tommer’s death between us now. ‘There’s nothing else we can do,’ I said to the others. ‘Don’t you understand? Our choice is to live or to die, that’s all there is. There are less than a dozen of us – they’ve got an army. They’ve got their crazy God’s Needles. They’ve got a fucking God. What do you want of me?’

  Ethalia spoke first. ‘Falcio? I can feel . . . Valiana’s trying to say something.’

  I sat down next to Valiana while the others scrambled to find something she could write with. After a few minutes, she had a pen dipped in ink and was scrawling on what had once been the tavern master’s book of accounts.

  ‘I can’t read it,’ I said.

  Aline took it from my hands; she didn’t need to do more than glance at it. ‘You know exactly what this says, Falcio.’

  Valiana reached out and Aline placed the book back in her hands. She wrote more, filling the page with jagged lines: I gave my oath to defend this country. I am the Realm’s Protector and I will not flee my duty for any man nor God.

  And then, beneath it, the same line she’d written at the beginning: Take off the mask.

  ‘You’ll go mad the instant that mask comes off,’ I yelled at her. ‘You’ll rip at your own flesh, and when we hold you back, you’ll tear your muscles and break your bones trying to break free – and when that fails, your mind itself will snap and you won’t last five minutes before your heart bursts in your chest.’

  She tore off the page she’d written and began writing anew. Then for those five minutes I will fight.

  ‘You stupid, stupid girl!’ I shouted. ‘It won’t do any good, don’t you see that? What difference does it make whether we die on our feet or on our knees?’

  It was Aline who replied, ‘When the dying is all that’s left, Falcio, it makes all the difference in the world.’

  I gazed around the room, searching for one of the others to step forward and tell Valiana how foolish she was, how wasted this death would be, but no one spoke a word. One by one they nodded, as if their assent held any meaning, as if their admiration mattered, as if Valiana’s noble act would even be remembered. Maybe they were right: maybe some last futile act of bravery was as worthy an ending as we could hope for, but I was tired of fighting, and even more tired of losing. Nothing I had done – nothing any of us had done – had made the country one jot better. I lacked the courage to do what they wanted and hadn’t the strength to face down their stares. In the end, I simply turned and fled.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  The Boy and the Cat

  Every turn I made as I walked through the city streets set me more and more at odds with myself. I kept expecting to be attacked, by God’s Needles, Church Knights, the God himself – hells, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a pair of Dashini assassins waiting for me around the next corner. But despite the fact that I wanted the mercy of a quick death, my body was rebelling: every time a man or woman in the crowded streets glanced at me, my hand went reflexively to my rapier. I kept watch on every shadow-filled alley I approached, my heart pumping fast, readying my muscles for combat. I might have given up on the world but my instincts had not.

  Find a riverboat, I told myself, or a barge – hells, even a decent-sized log. Get them the hells out of here and figure out the rest later.

  Despite the grand events playing out in the world at large, the shops and market stalls remained open; families loitered around butcher shops and fruit stands, negotiating prices and going about the daily business of life as though nothing had changed. A traveller from a foreign land might have been forgiven for thinking that what he was seeing was simply the normal ways of this country; that he had come to a place where people lived and died and perhaps prayed a bit too much, but were otherwise a simple people.

  He would certainly not have believed they were in the process of trading what little freedoms they had for the relief of servitude, or the ease with which they were slipping into their shackles. I wanted to scream and rage at my countrymen, but lacking the will, I just kept walking until finally I found myself staring at a bridge spanning a narrow point in the canal about thirty yards away; hawkers selling passage on the river boats sometimes plied their trade here.

  A group of boys were playing on the bridge, shouting to each other, laughing and giggling as they tormented a large orange cat they’d trapped. The creature struggled against them, scratching and clawing, hissing and spitting even as they forced it inside a cloth sack and tied it closed. For a moment they dropped it on the stone surface of the bridge, chortling as the bag tumbled around on the ground as if possessed. One of the boys wasn’t laughing, though. He was smaller than the others, and I realised he was trying to reach for the bag, but one of the larger boys was holding him back, a big hand on his forehead. That, too, was prompting merriment from the other boys.

  A small part of me thought about intervening, but I quickly lost the will to do anything. Children torturing cats – how many times a week did some nasty little wretch come to this very bridge to drown the kittens they’d found starving in some back alley? How many boys in other cities were, even at this very moment, repeating this same cruelty, this odd, almost ritualistic act of devotion to their own desire to watch things struggle and die. What purpose would it serve for me to stop them when they were acting in accordance with the natural order of this world?

  Creating fear was, it appeared, the only way any of us knew how to cope.

  Finally the bag stopped moving. One of the bigger boys kicked it and got a few more laughs when the cat inside s
truggled once more, but they’d grown bored. One of them picked it up and tossed it in the canal and it bobbed along on the surface for a few moments as the boys shouted angrily and threw rocks at it, trying to drive it down. It was the currents running along the canal that finally dragged the bag down, taking the cat to its final destination.

  I turned away, disgusted by my inaction. Piece by piece the Blacksmith had been working to destroy our faith in justice, and he’d succeeded.

  A shout caused me to turn just in time to see the smaller boy kick his captor in the shin. One of the others clubbed him across the face, a massive blow that sent the boy reeling, but he managed to wriggle free. Before anyone could stop him, he’d dived into the canal.

  You’re wasting your time, kid. Even if he did manage to bring the bag back up, the other boys would simply take it from him and toss it back in the canal. If anything, his attempt at valour was only prolonging the creature’s suffering.

  The other boys shouted insults at him, promising retribution on an almost mythical scale, but they too were wasting their time. The boy couldn’t hear them under the water.

  I was transfixed by the scene: it was as if the Blacksmith’s God had staged the perfect performance for me: a metaphor of my life, of the futility of the Greatcoats and everything we’d striven to do.

  Suddenly the boys on the bridge stopped their shouting. One of them saw me and shouted to the others and they all pelted across the bridge and scattered into the mean little streets. It took me a moment to understand why: the smaller boy hadn’t resurfaced. He was drowning, and they weren’t going to be caught at the scene.

  *

  My feet pounded against the cobblestones as I raced for the bridge. My hands reached up of their own accord and tore off my coat, discarding it on the street even as my eyes searched for some indication of where the boy had ended up.

  The currents in these parts didn’t travel especially fast, but the water was deep. I sucked in air as I leapt over the stone railing, realising too late that I probably should have removed my boots before diving into the canal.

  Cold water – far colder than I would have expected for this time of year – embraced me, pulling me down under the surface. I forced my eyes open and the world became a blurry haze of green and brown mist, dirtied by silt and the filth of the waste dumped into the canal. I could barely make out their yellow tendrils but the water-whips rising up from the river bottom were stinging my cheeks. I let myself sink down a little further, wondering if I might even now be mistaking the boy’s filthy clothes for the grimy bottom of the canal bed.

  I felt the first stirring of my lungs wanting air as a discarded piece of fruit drifted by me. Damn it – the currents! He’ll be further down the canal by now.

  I swam out, following the flow of the water, searching for any sign of the boy, cursing my poor vision underwater, but after the third return to the surface to take in air I was beginning to tire. I had to let the current carry me for a few moments before trying again. I passed a heavy stone pillion that had to be one of the supports for the next bridge. Heavy rocks covered the bottom, covered in some kind of brown plant that shifted and waved in the current.

  There, I realised, that one’s not a rock—

  A few feet ahead of me was the boy, on the floor of the canal, struggling to lift something. I kicked harder, pushing myself lower, until my feet were touching the ground. The boy’s clothing must be stuck between the rocks, I suddenly realised. How long has he been without air? I reached out and grabbed his hand and started to pull him up, but he tried to yank his hand free: he was still pulling something from under the heavy rock – it wasn’t his trouser leg after all. His wrist slipped from my grip as I recognised the sack: he was trying to pull up the bag with the cat inside.

  You’re going to die, you fool – leave the damned cat! But he wouldn’t; I could see that. Then suddenly the boy turned to me and nodded, I grabbed his arm and pushed off from the bottom as hard as I could. My own lungs were trying to force me to suck in the canal water, but I managed to hold back the need, though the burning in my chest was moving up to my eyes and I could no longer see.

  A moment later, we broke the surface, I tried to breathe too quickly and ended up swallowing a great mouthful of water, which set me to coughing so badly I began to slip back under the water, pulled down by the weight of my sodden clothes and boots. The boy had already grabbed onto the stones lining the canal and heaved the bag onto the bank and was now hoisting himself up, but he reached out a hand for me and kept me from sinking back under until I could anchor myself on the side of the canal.

  After several minutes of hard coughing I finally had enough strength back to pull myself out of the water. The air tasted crisp and sweet. It appears it doesn’t matter how little the mind thinks it cares about life – the body is going to fight to hold onto it.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ I shouted at the boy, trying to wipe my eyes. ‘Were you trying to die?’

  ‘Of course not, Falcio,’ he said. ‘That would be silly, don’t you think?’

  I looked at him, seeing his face clearly for the first time.

  It was Tommer.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  The Prayer Stone

  I scrambled backwards, scraping my palms against the rough cobblestones. I reached first for my rapiers, then my throwing knives, but all my weapons were with my coat, lying discarded several hundred yards upstream.

  ‘That’s a bit of an overreaction, don’t you think?’ said the boy who looked exactly like Tommer as he busied himself untying the bag.

  Can I really have lost my mind so easily?

  ‘You’d think someone who’s been around insanity as much as you have would have developed a more refined sense of it by now,’ the boy added. ‘But hey, if you want to see something really mad . . .’ He opened the bag and the cat leaped out, soaked fur flying in the air, and hissed at me with a fury that would have sent a bear running for its cave.

  The boy with Tommer’s face grinned at her. ‘She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’

  I had no idea how to respond to that, so I answered honestly, ‘She is quite possibly the ugliest cat I’ve ever seen.’

  The boy ignored the slight and pointed behind me into the streets. ‘There was a little puppy in the alley back there yesterday. Those other boys were throwing rocks at it for fun, trying to see who could get it to bleed first. Suddenly she was there, growling at them, forcing them back.’ He reached out to pet the cat, who promptly swatted his hand. He pulled it back: a line of red blood was appearing on his palm, and it apparently set him to grinning.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ I said, quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.

  ‘It’s funny, don’t you think?’ the boy asked, ‘a cat protecting a dog? But there she was, like a mountain lion protecting her own cub.’ He looked over at the bridge and sighed. ‘The boys came back today and trapped her. She could have run if she’d wanted, but she wouldn’t leave the puppy.’

  The cat, satisfied that she’d removed any question as to who was in charge, ambled towards me. She gave me a perfunctory hiss and then sat on my lap and went to sleep. ‘She’s . . . very brave,’ I said.

  The boy looked surprised at that. ‘Brave? No, no – don’t you get it, Falcio? Those weren’t her kittens she was defending. It was a dog: a completely different kind of animal, completely unrelated to her. It was something she had no need to protect.’

  ‘I don’t understand – isn’t that bravery?’

  He threw his hands up in the air. ‘That’s not mere bravery, Falcio; that’s valour.’ He smiled in wonder. ‘Who would have thought that that would be the last missing piece I needed?’

  ‘Needed for what?’

  ‘To be, Falcio. Come on, I know we’ve never met – well, to be fair, there was no way we could have met before today, but still, don’t you recognise me?’

  In the past weeks I’d been stabbed, beaten and tormented, and I had watched as everything I c
ared for slowly disappeared. So I really wasn’t at my best. But I wasn’t stupid, either.

  What if the Blacksmith deceived us . . . what if the Gods aren’t dead . . . if those bodies we found hanging outside the chapel were just . . . bodies.

  ‘You . . . you’re a God?’ And when he grinned, I asked, ‘Which one? You aren’t War, and I can’t imagine you’re Coin or Death or even Craft.’

  ‘I am none of those,’ he said.

  I though about his story of the cat protecting the puppy. ‘Are you Love?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nope. You’re running out of guesses, Falcio.’

  ‘Regret?’ Even as I said the word it sounded odd to me; I’d always pictured Regret as an old man, weary of the world.

  ‘Nope, wrong again. Regret died with all the rest of them.’

  ‘But—’ The implications of what he’d just said were beyond my mind’s ability to comprehend. For a moment I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I looked down at the cat instead. The creature was purring as it slept, as normal and natural a sight as you could imagine. ‘I’m hallucinating this,’ I started. ‘I drowned down in the canal and now I’m imagining all of this.’

  ‘That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?’ The boy was starting to sound a little bored. ‘Come on, Falcio. Has the Blacksmith really got you so twisted around that you believe Faith can’t lead to anything but darkness?’

  ‘Then how?’ I asked, my voice breaking. ‘How can anything good come from a place where all I can see are cruel, petty men ruling the world?’

  He shrugged as if the question were irrelevant. ‘A grouchy old cat leaps to the defence of a frightened pup. A boy faces down a God to protect a woman he knows isn’t his sister.’ He reached over and tapped me on the forehead. ‘A broken-hearted man rushes into every fight, every duel, still trying to save a woman who died years ago.’