Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

‘There are people I need to speak to, Adofo. Would you like to meet them?’

  The little lizard monkey made a gesture that might have been a shrug and Olufemi smiled wearily. ‘Better not, I suppose. They’re not fond of the moon’s servants here, and your eyes will make them think of nothing good.’

  Vordanna laughed at her for talking to the monkey, but she hadn’t been there at the beginning. She didn’t know what it meant that he seemed to understand. Olufemi did. She remembered the day she’d heard that Samadara had killed herself and her unborn child with her. She remembered the despair she’d felt – and the rage.

  ‘Even after those wretched truthtellers spread their poison, I had it all arranged, didn’t I, Adofo?’ she said. ‘I had guards bribed and servants paid to spirit that baby out of there the moment he was born. It never occurred to me the queen might take things into her own hands.’

  But she had, and everything Olufemi had planned had been for nothing. King Nayan had announced that his cursed son had been slain by his own mother and Olufemi had returned to Mirror Town and to Adofo, only two years old then and so wild that he had to be caged.

  She’d meant to end the creature’s life. He seemed like nothing but a symbol of her failure: a mocking echo of the dead baby and her dead ambitions. But when she’d walked to Adofo’s cage – though he hadn’t had a name then: he’d seemed too wild to own one – the lizard monkey had sat up and regarded her with something other than mindless violence in his strange eyes. Olufemi had reached a hand into the cage, not really caring if she lost it, and when Adofo had sniffed and then gently licked it she’d thought that maybe, just maybe, the King had lied and the baby had lived after all. For what, other than the entry of Yron’s heir into the world, could explain such a change in one of his creatures?

  The rumours had emerged a little while after that: that the queen had cut the babe from her own body, that it had clawed its own way out, that buzzards had swooped down to snatch the infant away. And so Olufemi had begun her long, long search. But eleven years passed with not even a trace of the child and her despair had grown once again, until it was a monstrous thing turning the world grey and all her hopes to dust.

  But in the twelfth year of her futile hunt, when she’d retreated to Smiler’s Fair to live with all the other fakes and failures, Adofo had changed again.

  She remembered the day with a clarity that time hadn’t dulled. She’d been discharging her duty in the Temple with Vordanna, taking coin from those gullible enough to believe their empty prayers were listened to. When she’d returned to their rooms she’d expected to find Adofo where she’d left him, lounging in front of the fire. But the little creature must have grown bored, because he’d opened the door, crept downstairs to the kitchen, pried open the pantry and used a knife to carve himself a hunk of cheese, which he’d always inexplicably loved.

  Olufemi had stared dumbstruck at the lizard monkey sitting at the kitchen table and nibbling on his snack. Adofo shouldn’t have known how to open a door or how to use a knife. He never had before. In the past, Olufemi had seen him throw himself against a locked door, frustrated that it wouldn’t open and failing to understand that he simply needed to reach up and turn the key. Now something had changed again. Yron’s heir, she had thought and still did, was growing into manhood and his creature was changing with him. Olufemi had always spoken to Adofo, her only constant companion, but from that day five years ago, she suspected that he understood her.

  ‘Best for you to stay here, I think,’ she told him. ‘I’ll bring you back some food. We’ll remain the night and then move on somewhere more hopeful. And cleaner.’

  She found the biggest crowd at a nameless bar that was currently opposite a whorehouse. When Olufemi looked through the bar’s front door she judged that there must be thirty men present along with the two barmaids and a tall, scarred bruiser, who eyed her assessingly then stepped aside to let her pass. Word of her presence had spread, as it usually did, and a hush fell as she entered.

  It wasn’t an entirely friendly silence, but she was used to that too. With her skin darker than any Ashane’s, her broad nose and the small, tight curls of her hair, once brown but now silver, she looked like what she was: a mage of Mirror Town. The other nations had always feared more than they knew of her people.

  ‘What’s your business here, milady?’ someone asked, as someone usually did. The tone wasn’t disrespectful – it didn’t dare to be – but it implied that she was less than welcome.

  ‘I’m admiring the sights,’ she said.

  ‘In the arse end of Ashanesland?’ asked a pockmarked youth. ‘There’s prettier latrines elsewhere.’

  So, they still counted themselves part of the kingdom here. That would make the story she told them a little different. She smiled and sat, facing the inhabitants of the room like a lecturer addressing her students in the Great Library of Mirror Town. ‘There’s magic in the bones of the earth here. You should know it better than most.’

  The pockmarked youth seemed to have been elected their spokesman. He spat and sneered. ‘No magic we want any part of. And what use has your magic been to us? My uncle bought a rune-marked blade when Smiler’s Fair came past the last time. It shattered and the worm men had him.’

  ‘You question the power of my runes?’

  ‘The only power we know is the sun. Can you make it shine underground?’

  There was laughter this time and she knew she was losing the crowd’s respect. A few had turned back to their drinks.

  ‘You doubt me,’ Olufemi said. ‘It’s your prerogative, of course.’ She walked to the fire as if to warm her hands, but when she was still two feet distant she made a complex gesture, a drawing of runes in the air, and the flames leapt towards her in seeming obedience, flaring a lurid green as they followed the path of her hands. The rune – Yay-Sat, the rune of fury, had these yokels but known it – hung in the air for a moment before fading to nothing. Olufemi’s back was to the room but she heard the shocked gasp behind her.

  When she turned back round, all eyes were on her once again. She smiled with kind condescension at the pockmarked youth. ‘The runes are more subtle than the sun, but no less powerful.’

  He nodded, stuttering too hard to get out the obsequious agreement he no doubt intended.

  You’re an idiot, she wanted to tell him. Can’t you see it’s all just a trick, a mixture of sulphur and black powder cached in a purse beneath my sleeve? I’m nothing but a fraud and the runes are worthless and dead and have stayed that way for seventeen years, despite all my scheming, all my hope.

  ‘I’ve studied the runes my entire life,’ she said grandly. ‘Do you doubt that I’ve mastered them?’

  There were murmurs of ‘no’ around the room. But you should. You should. Yron’s heir is in the world, Adofo proves it, and yet the runes haven’t wakened as I’d hoped. If I’d truly mastered them, I could make them work for me as they worked for the mages of old.

  ‘What service can we give you then, milady?’ the pockmarked youth asked diffidently.

  ‘I’m searching for someone I lost many years ago.’

  ‘Who is he?’ an older man asked, and they were back to the customary script.

  ‘He’s the most important person in the world. So important, King Nayan himself has sent me to hunt him. I have his authorisation and orders in his own hand.’ She drew out the letter from her pocket, its ink so faded with age that it could barely be read. But the imprint of an oak wheel in the sealing wax was still clear.

  She didn’t mention the reward Nayan had added and raised over the years: 10,000 gold wheels, the last she’d heard. She wanted these men’s help; she didn’t want them to keep the knowledge to themselves so that they could pocket the coin and she none the wiser.

  Some of the men in the room rose to crowd round her and peer at the letter. A few reached out to run their fingers over the wax. She let them. She knew none of them could read it and besides, the letter was genuine enough. It was typical, sh
e’d found, for people to doubt absolutely the wrong things.

  ‘Who is this man King Nayan is hunting?’ the old man asked.

  ‘The King’s own son, stolen from his mother’s womb before he was born. The child with the unlucky eyes.’

  And this was the part where the real questions came, and the answers always differed, depending on which would serve her best. Why was the son taken? Because he was marked for death by the King and saved by his mother. Because the moon’s servants stole him, knowing the future that lay ahead of him. Because the King sent him away for his own safety. What’s so special about the boy? A prophecy foretold he’d kill his father and bring evil to the world. A prophecy foretold he’d save the world from the evil of his father. Why do you want him? To save him. To kill him.

  Except that, for the first time in seventeen years, no one asked those questions.

  ‘The boy with moon eyes?’ the pockmarked youth asked. ‘The one with that big reward on him?’

  Olufemi felt a bolt of something down her spine, as shocking as a lightning strike. ‘There is a reward,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘And you claim you work for the King,’ the old man said. There was new suspicion in his voice and in the faces of many around him.

  ‘I travel the world for him,’ Olufemi said. ‘We don’t speak every day.’

  ‘You’ve been out of the country?’

  ‘For a very long time.’

  The old man grinned, showing the broken nubs of his teeth. ‘Well then, you won’t have heard. Your boy’s been found. East of here a ways, in a mountain village. He ran, but King Nayan’s soldiers are after him, and so are half the men of this town, eyes shining with all that gold.’

  ‘He was – he was found?’ Olufemi had pictured this moment for so long, and yet it was nothing like she’d imagined. The search had been her whole life and what should have been a long-awaited beginning felt oddly like an ending.

  ‘Like I said, not far from here. You’ll join the hunt too? Your runes might come in handy, I reckon, though they don’t seem to have done you too much good these last years. I hear it was pure chance the boy was found. A justice went to this piss-poor village for some other crime and there he was. Didn’t even know he was a wanted man, they say.’

  And now he was on the run and likely to be caught at any moment – caught and killed. Her prize had appeared, only to be snatched away from her. No. No, she couldn’t let it happen. ‘I’ll hunt for him,’ she said.

  And what if you find him, she thought, and he isn’t what you hope? What if he’s just a boy?

  Krish stopped in the lee of the rocks to study the graveyard. He could see no one living, only the bare bones on their wooden platforms. What kind of people left their dead out for the birds to pick apart? He guessed the village itself lay somewhere beyond and he yearned to go there. He wanted to be among people like those he’d grown up with, to eat a hot cooked meal, sleep in a tent, talk. He thought that perhaps he could finally risk it.

  The sky had been black with carrion mounts in the first days of his flight. He’d been forced to travel at night, risking his life on mountain paths he didn’t know. He thought he’d broken a rib in one fall and his legs were dark with bruises. His chest was tight, too. He hadn’t dared build himself a fire, and the cold had bred illness in his lungs so that his breath crackled like the flames he couldn’t chance. But one night, when the soldiers had almost caught him and he’d crept past their camp, he’d heard them talking. They hoped they’d find him soon, they’d said. They were reaching the height beyond which the birds couldn’t fly.

  After that, he’d headed upward. The cold grew bitter, seeping through his mittens and goatskin jacket, and the strain of the climb hurt and then strengthened the muscles in his calves and thighs. His chest grew tighter and tighter and his breath shorter and shorter, but he kept going. At least now he could travel during the day.

  He took a last look around the graveyard and a white glint caught his eye. He thought it was a fallen bone at first, but when he looked closer he saw that it was rock, twisted into a shape almost like a naked woman with wide hips and generous breasts. He stroked it with his finger and found that it was pleasingly smooth.

  His da was dead, and his ma was … she was safe with her sister. She must be. But he was seventeen and head of his household. He was a man and a man needed his own god. He touched the rock to his forehead and then to his lips. He’d sleep with her in his hands until his dreams brought him her name, and she would watch over him. He’d whisper his quest to her, the instructions his mother had given him, perhaps the last she ever would. He’d tell her of his plan to raise an army and fight his true father, and she’d help him achieve it. That’s what gods were for.

  He slipped the prow god into his pack and then stood. Finding her here must surely be a sign that events were leaning in his favour at last. He would go to the village.

  The path that led from the graveyard was clear, as if it was followed often. Krish felt himself smiling as he walked it. The landscape around him was almost like his home: grey and brown fractured hills, mountains in the distance and ragged vegetation clinging to the rocks. On the crest of a nearby rise, he could see two goats cropping at the grass.

  The path curved round one hill and then climbed to the top of another. The footing was treacherous, loose stones and earth, and when he reached the other side he saw why. A wide tunnel had been bored into the rockface opposite. Its interior was dark and, if the mound Krish had just climbed was its innards, it must go very deep. He knew that metal lived beneath the ground but he’d never truly realised the cost of its retrieval. No wonder only Isuru had been able to afford an iron knife.

  As he drew closer he saw that there was a man kneeling at the tunnel entrance. At first Krish thought he was wearing a red hood, but then he realised it was the stranger’s own hair. There was a wild shock of it, brighter than fox fur, and when he turned at the sound of Krish’s steps he revealed a pale face ridged with ugly scars. He was holding a wreath of leaves in his hand and he set it down gently on the ground before rising.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Krish said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’m looking for the village.’

  The stranger scowled. ‘You’re wasting your time. He’s not here.’

  ‘I’m not looking for anyone. I just want food. I have coin.’

  ‘Don’t bother, lad. Do you really think you’re the first? We’ve had a dozen through here in the last week, and we told them all the same thing. If we find him, he’s ours. You can’t go hunting in another man’s woods.’

  The stranger was armed. A sword hung from his belt with a knife beside it, and some of the scars on his face were clearly from battle. Krish knew he should retreat from the man’s unfounded hostility, but he’d been so long without company and his food was all but gone. He took a hesitant step closer and said, ‘Really, it’s only a meal I want. I don’t even need shelter. I’ll move on after I’ve bought it if you’d prefer.’

  The other man stepped nearer too, until only ten paces separated them. He studied Krish and smiled abruptly. Several of his teeth were missing and the smile twisted as his tongue flicked out to lick along his empty gums. ‘Perhaps I was too hasty, lad. I apologise for my rough manners. I’m Edmund Aikensson.’

  He was waiting for Krish to say his own name, to confirm it. Krish felt a jolt of terror as he realised what Edmund’s earlier words had meant. He eased back a pace, trying a smile of his own, which was brittle where the other man’s had merely been false. ‘You’re right. I was coming here to hunt him. But I’ll move on. I won’t take your prize.’

  Edmund eased forward, his longer stride eating up more ground than Krish’s. ‘No, you won’t.’

  Krish backed away another pace, and in the moment when Edmund was preparing to follow, he turned and fled.

  The other man was only a little surprised. There was no more than a heartbeat’s pause before the pounding of footsteps followed Krish. He had no chance on t
he ground, he knew that already. Edmund was bigger, stronger and armed. But he was armed, and armoured, and weighed down by it all, while Krish had lived in the mountains all his life.

  The cliff face was rough enough that when Krish leapt and clasped, his hands found purchase. His legs kicked frantically before his boots hooked into a crack in the rock and he pushed himself up. He was already gasping for breath, but he made himself do it again, and then again. His hands grew slick with sweat and his heart lurched when one slipped from its hold. He tore three nails in their desperate scrabble at the rock and the blood trickled down his hand, making it slicker still as he grasped and pulled again.

  After long moments of labour, feeling sick with fatigue, he allowed himself to look down. Edmund was far closer than he’d hoped, only five paces below and climbing fast, but Krish had reached a ledge. He knocked out what breath remained in him as he flopped on to it and rested his head against the rock. He knew he had no time to waste, though, and he forced himself to his knees and tore his pack from his back.

  His new prow god rested on top of his blanket. She slid smoothly into his palm and he raised her and knelt on the edge of the rock.

  Edmund had reached him. As his hand grasped for the ledge, his eyes locked with Krish’s and there was a moment when it was clear he knew what was going to happen. But he had no time to prevent it and Krish brought the rock down on his fingers.

  The blow was too weak, too half-hearted. Edmund shouted in anger and brought his other hand up to join the first. Krish tightened his fist as he brought the rock down for a second time, and now there was blood when he struck, but Edmund only cursed and began to push his weight into his hands, levering himself up. His head was at the lip of the ledge and Krish raised his god a third time, closed his eyes and brought her down with all his force.

  He heard the crunch as Edmund’s nose broke and opened his eyes to see it flattened and blood pouring out of it. There was more pain than rage in the other man’s eyes now, but he clung on and Krish brought the rock down seven more times, until Edmund’s face had lost its shape and his hands finally loosened their grip.