Saradyn expected a retort, but Natanial said only, “Is Zezili next?”
“No, I’m tired. As I said, it’s not worth talking to her without the husband.”
Natanial nodded and went to the door. Dayns and Sloe whined outside. Natanial let them in as he left.
Saradyn sat across from Rosh’s body and petted the dogs. He stared at her in the flickering firelight. How did one guard against espionage from another world? It was as if some other being had shot down from the moons and started spouting off nonsense about another realm. He had trouble enough reconciling the fact that Dorinah could exist in the same world he did, let alone these aliens.
Dayns whined at him. He stroked her ears. “Hush now,” he said. “Have I not kept you safe?”
Safer than he had kept any human being in his care. Rosh’s limp head, the lanky hair, reminded him of the day he murdered the Thief Queen, Quilliam. She had been his ward for some years, but he failed at that, and farmed her out, and look what she had become; raised by fools and savages, running off into the woods to join with thieves and miscreants, intent on destroying all he wanted to build here. Who was she, to pass judgment on him? Just a foolish girl like this one. They blamed him for destroying her, but what choice did she leave him? What choice did any of them leave him?
Dayns whined again.
“What is it?” he said. “Come now, we are safe. We’re almost home.”
Sloe began to bark.
Saradyn frowned at them both and went to the door.
People were coming out of their houses, entering the damp streets; it had rained just that morning. They pointed and gasped at the sky.
Saradyn squinted at them. His vision was blurry. He called to Dayns and Sloe. They barked and ran through the line of figures, dispelling them like mist.
He huffed out a breath. Was he hallucinating an army of ghosts, now? A whole town of ghosts?
He gazed into the sky, and saw Para blazing there on the horizon. What star had those ghosts been seeing? He didn’t know. He feared to guess.
He got down on his knees, and raised his hands to Laine.
Saradyn prayed for clear vision, and a gift that felt less like a curse.
31
So this was Saradyn. Not a tall man, but broad, like a tree eclipsed by its fellows that made up for height with girth, crowding out all those around it. Blood rushed down Zezili’s face. She told herself that head wounds were all bluster. She wasn’t vomiting or confused, not any more than usual, but she bled all that first night, trussed up on the other side of the fire from Saradyn, self-styled king of Tordin, and his most intimate familiars. They were all men, which she supposed shouldn’t have surprised her, but she had never in her life been the only woman in a group, and it unsettled her. She was very obviously out of place, and it wasn’t just because hers were the only bound hands.
She saw the Rosh girl occasionally the first few days, but she noticed the girl didn’t come out of the tavern that Saradyn and his lackeys pulled her into at the end of the week. Why hadn’t they just killed her back there on the field? Who was she to them? Zezili did not speak Tordinian, and it put her at a distinct disadvantage. The tall man with the big nose had known who she was, but Saradyn hadn’t seemed to until they had a rapid-fire conversation over her body. She wasn’t sure what that meant. It crossed her mind that Big Nose may have been the same one to take Anavha, or at least the one in Saradyn’s inner circle to recognize who Anavha was and keep him alive for ransom.
But if she, too, was their prisoner, they’d get no ransom from her. Best case, they hoped to sell her back to the Empress, then have her buy out Anavha too. As the blood caked on her face that night, she feared they would find the Empress less than receptive to that offer. A second failure meant death, and though Storm and the rest of the force still had a head start on getting where she wanted them to go, Zezili’s fate was not tied to theirs any longer. She was on her own.
It was a week back to wherever it was they ended up – some no-nothing little town not much bigger than the one they’d just come from. The town stank, like they were still shitting in pots and throwing them into alleys. Plumbing seemed to be a thing of legend. The only evidence of its existence – in the past, at least – was a large, cracked fountain they passed just off the main road. It sprouted up from the center of a tiled floor of what once may have been some grand estate, but now lay in ruins, slowly devoured by the woods. The trees here were big, mostly everpines, and instead of burning out the vegetation on either side of the roads they lined them in big concrete blocks slathered in lye that ate through the concrete as surely as it did the vegetation that tried to survive there.
Everything she saw gave the impression the Tordinians were rats, maggots living on the bones of some collapsed civilization. History told her that was truth – the Empress’s cousin, Penelodyn, had ruled northern Tordin for almost a hundred years, bringing civilization to great swaths of the locals. But they’d rebelled and tossed her out and this is where it left them – worshipping some mad king and shitting in buckets.
Two big male soldiers hauled her into the rickety main hold of the shitty little town. The hold was mostly wood, built on the massive stone base of some far older building. She wasn’t much up to resisting by then. She sweated and shook with fever. Her wrist hadn’t been tended to, and it was bruised black and swollen. But the fever came from some other wound, something open – either the throbbing, oozing lump on her head or the blazing score on her back. She hadn’t even noticed the wound in her back until hours after the end of the battle. Some ax had caught her there. It wasn’t deep – her armor had resisted most of the blow – but nine days without even a wash and it was a burning brand on her shoulder now, like someone had set a hot stone on it.
They dropped her in a cell in the basement – cold, no windows – and shut the door. The darkness was total.
How long she was there, alone in the dark, she didn’t know. The fever took her under. She dreamed of little black dogs with paws as big as their faces. They opened great mouths and ate their own feet. Anavha was there, writhing under her, squealing that she was hurting him, and just as she was about to reach her own release, reveling in her power, her absolute control of this beautiful body, the eye of Rhea glared down at her, filling her whole vision.
The eye filled her cell with light.
Zezili shielded her eyes. The pain left her body. She felt the blazing gaze of Rhea on her. It saw all of her worst acts – her slaughter of countless dajians, the genocide of an entire people, heaped on her willing shoulders. And the others – the dajians in her own care who she maimed and murdered; the husband she abused; the women she sent on fools’ errands she knew would end in death, just to avoid the troubling politics of discharging them.
“But I did it in your name!” Zezili said. “For the will of the Empress! I am yours. I am hers. I am–”
Rhea knew what she was.
She belonged to herself. She had made her own life, forged in fire, on the bloody backs of others. No choice, though, no choice. If she was not stepping on another’s back, someone else would step on hers. She had not made the world, but she had to live in it.
She had thrived only because she had given up her humanity.
The light went out.
Zezili gasped and opened her eyes. A plump man stood next to her, dressed in some white garment. He hushed her. She was tied to a table.
“What is this?” she said.
“For your own protection,” he said. His head was shaved bald – his eyebrows, too.
A fire blazed in a hearth. The room was lined in clay jars, and stank of incense and cardamom and other spices she could not discern.
“Where on Rhea’s tit am I?” Zezili snarled.
“Just doing a bit of cleaning up,” the man said in heavily accented Dorinah. He picked up a very large saw, the length of his forearm.
Zezili’s gut roiled. She looked at her left hand, her good fucking hand, the bloate
d, blackened flesh. “Set the bone, you fool!” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s gone to rot.”
Zezili jerked in her restraints. Four big men came up from behind her. Held her down. She tried to bite them. Her fever had broken, and she was exhausted, weaker than she should be.
The Empress and her cats. Saradyn and his men with saws.
“Where is my husband!” she yelled. “Where is he? When I get out of this shit I will murder every last one of you. Every one. I’ll impale you with this bloody fucking stump. I will impale the fuck out of you, cut off your fucking cocks, shove them down your cowardly throats. You’ll suffocate on your own testicles, you fucking–”
Her tirade made the plump man tremble.
Then a voice from the doorway, in Tordinian, said something like an order, and again, in Dorinah, “They’ll do it.”
It was the lean man who’d spoken of Anavha, the one with the beak of a nose. “They’d take your tongue, too,” he said, “but Saradyn needs that, he says.”
“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I’ll take your fucking cock too,” Zezili said. She was frothing. Spit flecked her mouth.
“You’re welcome to what I have of one,” he said. “My name is Natanial Thorne. I expect you’ll remember it.”
The saw bit into her wrist.
Zezili howled.
32
Anavha whiled away his days in the great, drafty hold playing board games and learning to play cards with the guards, both men. They thought him ridiculous, he knew, but they seemed to soften to him after a time, as if he were some child in need of tending. He learned about their families. One, a widower with six children; the other, a young man not much older than Zezili, courting a woman in a neighboring village. Anavha found himself both fascinated and horrified at their courtship practices. The young man said he’d never had sex with a woman, and intended to wait until she accepted his proposal, at the very least. Anavha admitted he had probably had sex with a dozen women before he married Zezili.
They both looked at him as if he were some horrifying insect, crawled up from gnawing on a corpse. Then the widower laughed, slapping his great knee.
“Dorinah!” he said. “What a place that must be!”
“It was not very pleasant,” Anavha admitted. “It wasn’t… it’s not what you think.”
But the younger one started joking as well. So Anavha pressed a smile onto his face – smile, smile, and pretend at joviality. He had spent much of his life smiling, but in that moment, with these two unbound, gregarious men, he found that he was very tired of smiling.
He was given new clothes, clean but plain and garish, like something a prisoner would wear, yes, but most men in Tordin seemed to wear these blandly cut trousers, tunics with square-cut collars, leather vests that fell to their knees, cinched with a belt. Drab green and brown and dark blue colors. Anavha had not seen a flash of red since they left Aaldia a month before.
In truth, he missed the Aaldians. Their broad smiles. Easy laughter. The intentness of their gazes when they spoke to you, as if what you said was the most important thing in the world. He and Natanial had spent two nights with an Aaldian friend of Natanial’s, a broad-cheeked woman with an absurd yellow hat like a cone who taught him the Aaldian alphabet and numbers, all written out into practice books of expensive paper that she let him take when he left. He liked the look of the Aaldian script. It put him in mind of running rivers, and the eddies of currents. But he had lost the books during their difficult crossing of the Mundin mountains, and now he drew the symbols of the script from memory on the wall of his cell with a charred stick; the guards thought it was some kind of art.
Outside his artistic scribbling, Anavha spent a lot of time staring at the window above his bed, remembering his long days at Zezili’s estate, waiting for something to happen to him. A year into their marriage, Zezili had been pregnant for a time. That had excited him terribly. The men he knew from his days in the mardanas were all fathers within a year of their marriages, raising strong, beautiful children for Dorinah. But when he met with them during the early days when Zezili was still sharing him with her sisters in the city, he had no children of his own to speak about. Their little tea house meetings – always out on the sidewalk, as unescorted men were not allowed inside – became awkward. He would listen to them talk, smiling beatifically, saying nothing, while one of Zezili’s sister’s dajians watched him from a nearby table to ensure he didn’t get into any trouble.
As soon as Zezili’s sisters bore children, he rarely saw them. Their care was relegated to house dajians. He longed to be a father, and spent endless nights after learning of her pregnancy thinking up names, and the stories he would read to her, and the trees he would help her climb, and how much she would love him, and he would love her, and they would be a family.
But that was all just dreamy nonsense. Zezili miscarried three months into her pregnancy, as she would miscarry twice more in their marriage. She was not a woman built to make life, she told him. Just take it.
That left him here, alone in Tordin with two jailers, losing time, his life, to chatter and nonsense. Nothing had changed but the scenery of the bedroom.
Two weeks into his gilded captivity, the younger guard, Mays, came to his room. Anavha glanced up from his Aaldian writing – he was writing a poem, he decided, about birds in cages. It was too early for cards.
“The King is back,” Mays said, “Natanial with him. Thought you’d like to know they ran into some of your friends. Dorinahs.”
Anavha had not thought Mays his friend, but it seemed a kindness, to tell him that. “Did anyone ask for me?”
“Natanial’s coming up. He’ll be upset you haven’t gotten fat.”
Much of the guards’ good humor, Anavha always suspected, was because they were trying to get him to eat more than was good for him. Until now, he didn’t realize it was some order from Natanial, who had pressed lard-soaked rice and pork fat at him for most of their journey in Aaldia.
“Thank you,” Anavha said.
Mays hesitated, and his clear, bright face darkened for a long moment. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Anavha said.
“Sure, of course,” Mays said.
“Can you bring me clean water? I want to wash up.”
“Of course,” Mays said, and shut the door.
Anavha waited for the water before he undressed. It was not Mays who brought it up, but a guard he’d never seen before. The man set the bucket down inside the door without a word. It was barely lukewarm.
Anavha sponged himself off and dressed in his cleanest clothes, the terrible Tordinian ones. Natanial hadn’t even let him keep his Aaldian garments, the broad robes and heavy purple drapes and deep cowls. He admitted he missed Aaldia more than he missed Dorinah. No one treated him like a man in Aaldia. They treated him like a person.
He was reading over the poem on the wall when Natanial entered. He carried a tray of rice and buttered greens circling a gravy-soaked hunk of some kind of meat, most likely bear. Anavha hated bear.
Natanial slid the tray onto the table on the other side of the room. The table was a battered but functional piece that Anavha mostly used for the card games.
“Well,” Natanial said, peering at the Aaldian script on the walls. “Are you out of paper, or run to madness already?”
“They said the historian wouldn’t authorize any paper for me,” Anavha said. “There’s a shortage.”
“We’re at war with the province that makes most of it,” Natanial said. He made as if to expand on that, but stopped. Motioned to the table.
“Come sit with me,” Natanial said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat.”
“I told you, I’m not hungry.”
“Mays and Foryer say you haven’t eaten a full meal in three days.”
“I like staying slim.”
“You’re starving.”
“
Zezili likes me thin.”
Natanial grimaced. “Of course she does. Starving people are easier to confuse and control. Ask any dictator. Get up here.”
Anavha reluctantly sat across from Natanial. His stomach growled, betraying him. Trying to keep his expression stoic made his whole face hurt. Natanial once listened to him cry for three hours in Aaldia, and in the end, he’d had to eat it all anyway.
“You telling me to eat is no better,” Anavha said.
“Don’t listen to me then. Listen to your stomach. Listen to yourself.” Natanial tapped the plate.
Anavha’s stomach hurt, but his stomach always hurt. Hunger was a vice. If you worked hard enough at it, you could capture and contain it. If you were strong enough, you could eliminate hunger all together.
“I don’t know what that means,” Anavha muttered, and pushed his plate away. He saw the blobs of glistening fat tremble on the plate. Definitely bear meat.
Natanial sat across from him. “I have good news. Saradyn agreed to leave your care and training to me, for a time.”
“What does that change?”
“It means he won’t turn you over to his wind witches to be beaten and tortured.”
“Oh.”
“Thank you would be nice.”
“Thank you for–” for kidnapping me, he almost said, and bit his tongue. He told Natanial the truth of what he felt far too often. Natanial had never struck him. Maybe that made him too bold. Maybe Zezili was right, and he needed a firm hand to keep him on the path to Rhea’s embrace. He certainly wasn’t going to get there speaking everything that came into his head.
Natanial laughed. “You say what you want,” he said. “Go on. I’m not Zezili.”
“If it wasn’t for you,” Anavha said slowly, “I wouldn’t need protection from Saradyn.”
“That’s true,” Natanial said. “You’d be cutting yourself open in front of a monstrous spouse who was as concerned with that as she would be with a dog that bashed its head repeatedly into its kennel. You know what she’d do with the dog, eventually? She’d have it put down.”
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 80
