Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  She took a step back and reached out her hand, pushing against Thilak’s broad chest to hold him back. ‘I’m … I’m unwell tonight, my lord. I fear I cannot fulfil my duty.’

  He frowned, not pushing forward but not pulling back either. His weight rested against her hand, a reminder of his strength and power. ‘You look well enough. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘My chest is tight. I think I may have a fever coming on.’

  He put a hand against her forehead. ‘You feel cool to me.’

  ‘My lord, I’m afraid I might infect you with an ague. Surely you can wait? There will be other nights.’

  ‘Few enough when you’re fertile. I don’t want this process to go on for ever. I’m sure you don’t either.’

  She stepped back again, but the wall stopped her and there was nowhere further to retreat to. They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

  ‘Can’t you allow me one night to myself?’ she said. ‘Will you really force yourself on me?’

  Even in the low light she could see his expression darken. ‘A man does not need to force himself on his wife. A wife is always willing to fulfil her duty, and I thought you understood yours.’

  He stepped forward, reaching for her. She couldn’t endure the thought of him touching her, not with Jinn listening – not at all – and she lashed out without thinking. She was shorter and far weaker than he, but he wasn’t expecting it and when she hit his chest to push him back he tangled himself in his own feet and fell backwards against her wardrobe.

  The thud as his head hit the wood sounded wrong: too wet. She expected him to yell in anger and leap to his feet to beat her, but he only whimpered and collapsed to the floor. She stood frozen a moment, shocked. Then she sank to her knees beside him.

  His eyes were open but he seemed unable to focus on her. He was shivering, and when she brushed the dark shadow pooling around him she realised it was blood. She didn’t want to touch him, but she made herself lift his head. The back of his skull was too soft beneath her fingers. She could feel the indentation where he’d struck a corner of the wardrobe. He groaned and she dropped him, too quickly.

  When his head hit the floor his eyes flickered with life, then focused on her, full of rage. ‘You whore!’ he said and pressed his hands against the stone to push himself up.

  She thought, very clearly: I’ve hurt him and made a fool of him and he’ll never forgive me. He’ll probably kill me.

  He was still weak. Even the light weight of her body, kneeling on his chest, was enough to hold him down. His hands scrabbled at her, trying to push her off, but he was clumsy and couldn’t seem to get any purchase. Then he bucked beneath her and she knew that his strength was returning.

  She pressed her forearm against his throat, gently at first and then with more and more force as he fought against her. His mouth worked but he could only croak as blood dribbled from his lips. The body trapped under hers spasmed. His face was reddening and a tiny vessel burst in his left eye.

  She hadn’t realised it would be so easy to kill someone. Her father must have killed a hundred men in his life. Had it been the same for him? She felt connected to him now, as if this act could bridge all the years between them and the gulf of death. He’d be proud of her, she was sure. He’d given her a sword; he wanted her to fight.

  And she was winning. Thilak knew that too, and he was terrified. There was no pretence about him now, no charm masking the calculation beneath. In this moment he was entirely honest. As his body twisted beneath her she experienced a surge of warmth towards him. He seemed so vulnerable now. He was just a man, not much different from her, and her hatred gave way to a profound sympathy. She’d feared his strength, but look how weak he was. Weaker than she’d ever been. His mouth moved again, only a little now. Most of his strength was gone. She watched his lips and thought that he was saying ‘please’.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  His eyes were wild, flickering here and there. He was probably looking for help, but none would come. Why would his men interrupt him at his pleasure? The skin of his throat was warm beneath her arm. It felt oddly intimate – far more intimate than their coupling.

  She watched as his eyes drifted shut and his body shuddered and then stilled. The heart beneath her knee pounded once, very hard, and then no more. She sat back and looked down at him, experiencing a strange kind of peace. Was this how her father had felt in his moments of victory?

  There was a clattering from the far side of the room as Jinn crawled from beneath the bed. He stared at her and the corpse beneath her for a moment and she realised that she’d murdered a man in front of a young boy. She’d wanted to spare him the knowledge of their congress and had shown him something far worse instead.

  Jinn’s normally expressive face was blank. Then he nodded once, sharply, in confirmation of something she didn’t know. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re gonna have to help us now.’

  16

  They were closing in on him. Yesterday Krish had seen them, crawling up the mountain behind him. Today he’d found a region of undulating hills covered in vegetation that looked like grass from a distance but up close revealed itself to be a sort of soggy moss. His pursuers were hidden behind the green hillocks, but he knew they were still there and there was nowhere to run in this empty landscape.

  The moss wasn’t edible. He’d already tried and vomited it back up a few minutes later. He wasn’t sure when he’d last eaten real food. Had he caught that rabbit two days ago, or three? Occasionally, the smooth surface of the moss was broken by a scrawny plant with narrow yellow leaves and seed pods as hard as metal. He’d found, when he pulled one from the ground, that its root was bulbous and white. He thought that boiling might make them edible, but he couldn’t light a fire, not here in the open where it would reveal his position for miles in every direction. Only water wasn’t a problem. It fell from the sky almost constantly, sometimes as a chilling drizzle and more often as snow. His lungs were filling with liquid too. He’d begun to avoid sleep, afraid he wouldn’t wake. The image of the man he’d killed hovered on the borders of his dreams, the orange hair and the red bloody mess of his face beneath it.

  Krish’s thoughts were the only thing that warmed him. He’d had a lot of time to consider what it meant to be the King’s son. His ma was right: it meant he was the King’s heir, whether his da wanted him or not. He’d thought that in time he might inherit a tent and a herd of goats, but he was due far more than that: the whole of Ashanesland. And King Nayan had enemies, his mother had said. Once Krish was away from his pursuers, he’d find his father’s enemies and they’d help him take the Oak Wheel so he could be a friend to them. He wouldn’t be caught; he wouldn’t die now. He had a plan for his future.

  At first, the buildings looked like nothing more than a tumble of boulders, humped beneath the moss. It was only as he drew closer that he saw angles where nature would have made only curves and the glint of what might have been metal. Where the moss had been scraped from the ground there was a layer of black ash, as if the whole area had once been consumed by fire. And there were footprints in the ash. People had been here within the last day. He wondered where they were now – if hidden eyes watched him from behind the black and green hills.

  His own villagers would have told him to avoid the place. Ill-omened, they would have said. Never trust a place that never moves.

  The shape of the ruins became clearer as he drew closer. He’d thought it just one tumbled-down building, but now he could see the remains of at least a dozen. Most were little more than huts. The blocks of rock had fallen apart into ragged piles and ash had blown into the gaps. There’d be no shelter there. But further away was a much larger structure: a dome at least twenty paces high and fifty across, which seemed almost entirely intact. It looked like a miniature model of the hills that surrounded it.

  He found himself reluctant to draw closer. The stillness and silence felt suddenly threatening. There
seemed to be a presence in the ruins, something waiting with the patience of a hunter for him to approach. He’d been told that monsters lurked where there were shadows, but he’d been told many things that weren’t true. Still he hesitated, until hail began to fall around him. The sky had been white moments before but now it was a metallic grey. The hail would be followed by snow and probably a storm. He shifted his pack on his aching shoulders and headed for the dome, head bowed to keep the hailstones from his face.

  He’d been right. The dome was perfectly preserved, not a single break visible across it – and no entrance either. The ground was treacherous, with rocks and roots hidden beneath the moss. He twisted his ankle twice and fell painfully on already bruised knees as he circled the structure, searching for a way in.

  He found it at the back, in the lee of the hill behind. Here the structure had been sheltered from the elements and he saw that what he had taken for rock was really metal. In the diffuse light it looked almost like water, a dull and unreflective grey. He guessed that it stretched across the entire dome and he wondered why no looters had come to rip it free. But maybe they’d been wiser than him. Maybe they’d listened to their feelings of unease about this place and left.

  The doorway was very clear, a yawning black emptiness in the grey. Daylight penetrated only a few feet into the darkness within and Krish realised he’d need to build a fire to see his way. There was a little dry, scrubby vegetation against the metal and he wearily stooped to pile it inside the doorway. His flint was buried at the bottom of his pack, unused since he’d started his flight. His numb fingers fumbled for several moments before he was able to strike a spark and coax his kindling to ignite.

  He knew the fire wouldn’t last long, but he couldn’t resist the lure of the heat. He crouched beside the flames, warming his fingers back to life and filling his lungs with air that didn’t feel as if it would freeze them solid. It was tempting to stay where he was, to curl up and sleep beside the flames, but after a while he made himself stand and fashion a crude torch from rags wrapped round the thickest branch he could find. He held it aloft as he headed deeper into the building.

  The floor was perfectly smooth beneath his feet. It was rock rather than metal, patterned with unknown symbols. They seemed to be part of the rock itself, swirls of sparkling crystal or ebony against the pale marble. Their meaning nagged at the edge of his consciousness. His mind strained to understand them but no sense emerged.

  He’d expected the building to be empty, yet it was clear that someone had been living here very recently. There was a long wooden table to his left. The flowers in the vase at the table’s centre were wilting but not yet dead. They couldn’t be much more than a week old. He could smell the sweet decay of them even from this distance, and his stomach clenched with fear as he took a step back towards the doorway. But if he ran from here there was nowhere else to shelter. And the people had gone – they seemed to have fled in a hurry. Perhaps they were as afraid of his pursuers as he was.

  He squared his shoulders and walked on, only to jerk to a halt as something else loomed out of the shadows. It was a vast statue of a man, its head lost in the darkness. When Krish brought the torch down to study its feet he saw toes that were long, their nails clawed. Scales had been carved in its marble legs but it was impossible to tell if they were meant to represent armour or something else.

  It was as he studied the statue that he heard the sound. He took it for wind, until he realised that it was coming from deeper inside, where no gust of air could stir. Something was breathing, but it wasn’t a healthy sound. It occurred to him that whatever was making it might have heard him and thought the same of his own wheezing inhalations. He held his breath and stilled but the sound continued. He should run back to the entrance, enjoy the last of his fire and then leave. But after a moment he took another rattling breath and walked on.

  He saw the blood splashed against the marble floor before he found its source. A step further and he nearly tripped over a foot, viciously clawed as the great statue had been. Whatever lay there was no man. Krish knew he should run, but this close he could hear the pitiful whimpers of the creature and when he raised the torch and saw its face, he had to stay.

  Its grey cheeks were sunken and its skin stretched tight over the misshapen skull beneath. He’d seen such a face once, an illustration in the only book Ishan owned. This was the monster in the dark, a worm man. But its eyes were bright and alive – and exactly like his own. The swollen pupils narrowed to crescents as the light drew nearer and then Krish knew that it was looking at him, and the same shock he felt at seeing his mirror image seemed to be echoed in the creature.

  It made a sound that might have been speech: a high, musical murmur.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Krish said.

  It spoke again, faster and more desperate, and one of its clawed hands reached towards him. The palm was smeared with red and when he studied it more closely he saw that its chest was too. A ragged tear ran across its ribs and down to its stomach. The creature stared at him unblinking and he thought he understood what it was asking.

  ‘I don’t know if I can help,’ he said. ‘You’re … you’re hurt bad.’

  When he knelt beside it, it looked up at him with what seemed like trust in its eyes. Up close, he realised that the darkness to its left wasn’t a shadow, but a crack in the floor more than three paces across. The trail of blood led from the rift, as if the creature had emerged from that absolute darkness.

  His mother had packed some healing supplies for him. He dug out bandages and an ointment she’d always sworn prevented infection and began to smear it across the creature’s wound. It flinched and whimpered and for a moment Krish thought it meant to rake him with its claws. Then it seemed to relax, turning its head aside as if it couldn’t bear to watch. It was such a human reaction that Krish felt a swell of empathy and murmured reassurance as he bound the bandage around the creature’s chest.

  When he was finished he patted its shoulder awkwardly. ‘My fire’s at the entrance. You can join me there, if you like. I’ve no food, but it would do you good to be warm.’ He turned back towards the doorway – and froze.

  Two men were silhouetted against the flames. He couldn’t see their faces, but the shape of their armour was clear, as were the outlines of their drawn swords. It could only be the King’s soldiers. They were walking towards him and he knew that his torch had given him away. He doused the flame against the marble floor, then stumbled back into the darkness. There was a desperate scrabbling beside him and he guessed the creature was doing the same, dragging its injured body away as best it could.

  There was no other way out. He’d circled the building; he knew that. And more soldiers were entering, at least a dozen of them, their lanterns spreading into a line as they advanced towards him. He retreated a step, then another, then found his back pressed against what he guessed must be another statue. How could he have cornered himself in a room with only one door? Maybe he deserved to die. Being a king’s son was no use if you were also a fool.

  The soldiers were near enough now that he could see their faces. Many seemed so tight with terror it almost made him smile. What was it they expected him to do? But as they drew closer he saw the way their eyes darted around the room and guessed it was something other than him they feared.

  They advanced still further, until the light from their lanterns was licking against his feet and they’d reached the place where the creature had lain. He saw three of them gather to inspect the bloodstain on the floor and another lower his lantern to peer into the rift in the marble. ‘Injured,’ one of them muttered.

  The attack was so sudden, two soldiers had been pulled into the rift before the others realised their danger. The second screamed as he fell and the King’s men spun, swords drawn, to see a swarm of ash-skinned creatures emerging from the darkness. It was hard to judge their number. A dozen? A hundred? They bore no weapons, but their claws dripped blood as they slashed and Krish saw o
ne sink its teeth into a soldier’s neck and rip free a gobbet of flesh and all his life with it.

  He wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run to. There was nothing to do but press his back against the statue and hope that neither the soldiers nor the creatures saw him. And for a few seconds, none of them did.

  It couldn’t last. As a soldier sliced his sword through one creature, severing its head from its spindly neck, he spun to face Krish. His startled look quickly transmuted into avarice when he saw Krish’s eyes. Krish remembered the gold that had been offered for his capture. There must be a very great deal of it for the man to think of it now, surrounded by all this death.

  ‘Come with me, boy.’ His sword point poked Krish’s chest. ‘You’ll be safer outside.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Krish kept his eyes on the soldier as the shadowy form crept up behind him. Then its hands were on his throat and the sword clattered to the marble as it clawed through his throat and blood splattered across Krish and round the soldier’s thrashing body in a wide arc.

  Krish stooped to pick up the sword from the floor. It was far heavier than he’d expected and he had no idea how to use it, but it made him feel a little safer. He looked to his side and saw the creature crouched on top of the man it had killed, its mouth chewing at his flank. Krish felt his gorge rising and swallowed it back. That thing had saved his life. And predators must eat their kill; it was the point of the hunt.

  The soldier had been right, though. Krish would be far safer outside. The battle had slowed a little. At least half of the men were dead and little groups of the creatures had clustered to feast on their corpses. The remaining soldiers had gathered into three groups, one large and two of only a pair of men, back to back and frantically fighting off the monsters that swarmed around them. They wouldn’t last long, but they’d hold the creatures’ attention for now. Krish hefted the blade in his hand, then regretfully dropped it. It was better if he didn’t seem like a threat. He took a last look at the battle, turned his back on it and ran towards the distant door.