Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  In Su pointed left and she nodded and let him draw her to her feet. The sun had passed from overhead, leaving the ravine in gloom. She stumbled on a hidden rock but kept moving, left and then right and then right again. The maze wasn’t easy to navigate and twice they took the wrong turn until the sound was almost lost. Then suddenly it was much louder and the smell of water joined it.

  Nethmi ran round the last curve and found herself in a far wider gulf, at least fifty paces across. In its centre sat a bowl of rock and a brackish pool within it, where the birds they’d heard pecked and drank. She fell to her knees, frightening them into flight, and gulped the water from her palms. The taste was stagnant and another time it might have nauseated her. Now she filled her belly until it could take no more. Beside her, In Su did the same.

  She turned to him as she lowered her waterskin into the pool to fill it. ‘It would appear you were right. Yron’s heir doesn’t mean for us to die quite yet.’

  It was strange to feel a little disappointment as well as relief. But their coming death had broken down what walls remained between them and she’d felt that she finally knew the young man who’d been her companion for weeks. She remembered her father had once said the same: that the sharing of mortal peril bonded men in ways nothing else could.

  She studied In Su’s face, but it was as hard to read as it had ever been. She sighed and watched his hand dip his waterskin into the pool. She watched the spreading ripples in the water’s surface – and realised just a moment too late what they meant as the snake surfaced and sank its fangs into In Su’s palm.

  In Su screamed and flung the creature away from him. It smashed against a rock, writhed a moment and was still, but the damage had been done. Within seconds his palm was puffy and weeping a clear fluid and only moments later ominous red threads began to spread from the wound. In Su keened as he held his wrist in his other hand and rocked. His eyes were dazed with pain and shock.

  Nethmi felt paralysed too. She couldn’t believe how quickly everything had changed. She’d thought she was ready for death, but now she saw that she’d been fooling herself. Secretly she’d always believed that both of them would come through this unharmed, that they’d have time to understand what lay between them. But she’d seen a snakebite such as this before. It was how her father had died.

  Her shock lasted a moment longer and then she tore a strip of fabric from the bottom of her skirt and bound it round In Su’s arm, pulling tight. The venom mustn’t be allowed to spread to the heart.

  In Su screamed as she tightened the tourniquet and clawed weakly at her hands, but she was unrelenting. The next stage, she knew, would be to cut off his hand and cauterise the stump. Fewer than one in three survived that treatment. His eyes pleaded with her and she made herself smile.

  ‘This will help,’ she said. ‘But I need to cut the wound and see if I can get the poison out.’

  He flinched but nodded and she drew the knife from his belt and held it above his hand. ‘Ready?’ she asked, and in the moment when he was listening and not attending she slashed his palm.

  This time he only whimpered and she jumped back as a spurt of vile discharge came out of the wound. It smelled like decay and she could already see a tinge of green to the surrounding flesh. She feared there’d be no saving his hand, but she’d done all she could. Walking would be dangerous for him, she knew that. It would pump more blood round his body and hasten the spread of the poison. But they couldn’t stay here, where there might be more serpents.

  ‘We need to move,’ she told In Su and he only hesitated a moment before nodding his understanding.

  She sheathed his knife and led the way. The harsh rasp of his breathing told her he kept pace at first, but he soon dropped behind. When she turned to watch him, she saw that his face was fiercely flushed. She strode back and wrapped an arm round his waist to urge him on. His flesh was hot beneath hers and close to she could hear the gurgle of liquid in his lungs. She brushed his sweat-soaked hair from his eyes as tears filled hers.

  Before long he couldn’t walk even with her aid, and he was too heavy for her to carry. The gloom in the ravine had grown and she guessed the sun must be near setting. The sky above was a deep and beautiful violet. She gently lowered In Su to the ground and sank down beside him.

  His face was drawn with pain and she reached out to cup his cheek but he flinched away from her. His eyes were hazy and she wasn’t sure how much he could see. Still, she carefully arranged his head so that he was looking not at the imprisoning walls of the gulley but at the freedom of the sky and the stars appearing one by one in it. His body was too hot to hold, so she rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, trying to shut out the sound of his desperate, wheezing breath.

  She woke to the sound of groaning and the smell of rot. In Su had moved away from her in the night, but she could feel the heat of his body even without touching him. He was burning with fever and she could see red veins where the poison had spread up his arm despite her efforts. Foul-smelling gangrene had followed it, gnarling his fingers and turning them black and their nails a sickly green. When he rolled towards her the arm hung limp and useless from his shoulder. She thought briefly of trying to cut it from him, until she saw the red lines rising up his neck towards his flushed cheeks. Then she knew he was doomed.

  She’d already drunk a quarter of the water she’d taken from the stagnant pool, but she used most of what remained to soak her skirt. She tore another strip and used it to mop his forehead. His eyes stuttered for a moment and then fixed on her.

  ‘I feel bad, Nethmi.’

  She stroked his cheek to remove a bead of moisture. ‘I know. The poison’s spread, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I am dying?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I hurt.’

  ‘I know.’

  It was her fault. Everyone close to her died. In Su would have lived out his whole life in Winter’s Hammer if she hadn’t come along and tempted him away. And her father … She remembered the way he’d looked as the poison ate him up. He’d begged for purple sorghum tea to end the pain. He’d asked her to be the one to give it to him.

  ‘I can make the pain stop, if you want,’ she told In Su. Her words came out thickly through a throat clogged with tears.

  His eyes when they met hers were feverish but not uncomprehending. Her right hand was clutched tight round the hilt of his knife, but the left was shaking. She could feel her own heartbeat in her ears, and she found that a perverse part of her longed for him to say yes. She felt so close to In Su in this moment. Coupling with Thilak had been a cold thing. It had bridged not an inch of the gap between them. Only in his death had she known him. There was no act more intimate than the taking of another’s life.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Please, make it stop.’

  ‘Look at me, then,’ she whispered. ‘Just look at me. There’s no need to be afraid. There’s peace at the end of this. I’ll end your pain quickly.’

  He nodded weakly and his eyes scanned her face but didn’t slide lower to where she pressed her knife against the pulsing vein in his throat. There were threads of virulent red around it and she knew if she didn’t end him soon, the poison would.

  ‘Goodbye, In Su’ she said, and slashed the knife across his flesh.

  His blood sprayed all over her, warm and sticky. His body convulsed and, despite her promise, she saw a moment of pure agony in his eyes. His hand clutched hers and she held his back just as tightly.

  She studied every inch of his face, memorising it: the tilt of his eyebrows, the little mole above his lip, the thin white scar on one cheek. She felt she knew him then completely, and as his dying eyes looked into hers, she felt he knew her. She smiled at him and he smiled back, but it turned into a rictus as his back arched and his life left him.

  She couldn’t bear to see that harsh expression on his gentle face and she reached out to smooth it away. But the touch of his dead flesh sickened her and she quickly dropped her hand. In
Su was gone and what remained was only a shell.

  She stayed by his body as long as she could, but the stench of decay was strong and she knew it would draw predators she was ill-equipped to fight. There was no lake to sink him in or cairn to raise in the manner of the landborn, but she heaped sand over his body and said the same prayers to the Five she’d recited over her father. She wished she could have prayed to In Su’s own gods, but she’d never asked him their names and now she never could.

  When she left his grave, she found a gulley wider than the others and followed her own shadow down it, heading north, where the exit from the Waste must surely lie. She didn’t care if she found it, but In Su had wanted her to live. He’d believed she would and suddenly it felt very important to prove him right.

  She drank her waterskin dry as she walked, until the walls of the ravine began to lower and its floor widen. Stalks of grass poked through the sand and at sunset she realised that, almost without noticing, she’d returned to the plains. The smell of vegetation was rich all around her.

  She turned for a last look at the desolation that held In Su’s corpse, but some trick of perspective hid it from her so that the plains seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions.

  22

  After a week of travel, Eric had grown used to the motion of Rii’s muscles beneath his legs and the unpredictable swoops and dives as she navigated the currents of air. He’d taken to dozing on her back, though the cold made his sleep restless and he often dreamed, but never of the moon. He was dreaming of Lahiru when Rii’s voice woke him.

  ‘Wilt thou look ahead, morsel?’ she said. ‘Our destination approaches.’

  The endless water and endless sky had become so monotonous to him that he’d ceased to really see them. Now the sun was rising to the east, casting a pinkish glow over the restless waves, but the brightest glow was ahead of him. For a disorientated moment he thought it was a second sun. Then he realised that he was looking at snow, a vast great stretch of it. The entire land was frozen.

  ‘People live there?’ he said as they drew closer and still all he could see was white.

  ‘The Servants do. This is their home and soon it will be thine.’

  They were flying over the snow now, low enough that Eric began to see features in it, dips and drifts and bright lakes of ice. Even wrapped in his furs he felt the lancing cold and he realised that spring was over for him before it had really begun. Rii had flown him back to a permanent winter.

  They flew another half an hour into growing darkness before he saw the city. There was a strange jolt, the sun seemed to jump back upwards as if in an eye-blink he’d lost hours of time and then there it was, its spires breaking the smooth line of the horizon ahead. When they were closer he realised that it was made entirely of ice, pure and clear. No bloody secrets there, he thought. Everyone knows just what everyone else is getting up to.

  Insect-tiny figures crawled through the city’s chambers and there was another group closer at hand, waiting on the ground and looking up at Rii and Eric as they approached. They stood among an ordered copse of golden-leaved trees, which were the only splash of colour in the white land.

  Rii landed inelegantly, ploughing a furrow through the ice so that Eric was surrounded by a temporary snowstorm as the figures approached. He blinked the flakes from his eyelashes and sat where he was, all the fear he’d managed to hide from himself over the long journey rapidly reappearing.

  ‘Dismount, morsel,’ Rii said. ‘My task is done and I would away.’

  Her shoulders shrugged impatiently and he did as she asked, untying his baggage and throwing it down before him.

  The instant his feet touched the ground he was knocked off them and to his knees by the powerful beat of her wings. She was airborne and receding before he could say goodbye, though he doubted she cared. He watched her retreating form for a long time. She hadn’t been friendly or at all reassuring, but she’d become familiar. And she’d promised him that he’d return home one day. If she’d left him already, what was her promise worth?

  He shifted his gaze to the people approaching. They were swaddled in white furs so that when tears of cold blurred his eyes they became just another part of the landscape. Their faces were hidden, only a narrow slit of skin visible around their eyes. He made himself smile and nod and clasped his hands together so their shaking wouldn’t be visible.

  ‘Eric!’ one of the swaddled figures said.

  Eric frowned. He was sure he recognised that voice. Then the figure threw back its hood and he blinked, then blinked again, but it was still a face he knew very well. Bolli had been at Madam Aeronwen’s when Eric had first arrived, the only other man there with his unusual pale colouring and the one who’d taught Eric all a sellcock’s tricks. He’d been mates with Eric for two years until one day he’d just disappeared.

  ‘Well, ain’t this a surprise?’ Eric said, moving to embrace the other man. ‘You’re looking as pretty as ever, Bolli.’

  Bolli returned the hug, then held him by his shoulders as he examined his face. ‘You’re looking well too, Eric. The years have been kind.’

  Eric didn’t remember the other man’s voice ever being so posh. His face looked more refined as well. All the boyish roundness had gone and there was a new knowingness in his eyes that was more than just a whore’s cynicism. ‘What are you doing here, Bolli? We’re off the edge of the bloody world!’

  Bolli flicked his blond fringe from his forehead. ‘I’m doing the same thing you are.’

  ‘And what am I doing here?’

  The other man glanced at his companions, still swaddled in their furs, and smiled. ‘You’re getting hitched, of course.’

  There were no gates to the city, just a vast open arch in the ice, its rim carved with circles and spirals that drew the eye into infinite loops. It was no warmer on the inside and Eric wondered how he’d cope with living here, but the others seemed glad to be indoors and pulled back their hoods. They were all men, he saw, some almost as young as him, none looking much older than thirty, a round dozen of them. And they were all of them fair and pale like him, though the cast of their faces said they came from different lands and peoples.

  ‘Welcome to Salvation,’ said a green-eyed man with a sharp nose. ‘It may not look the warmest hearth you’ve ever huddled by, but we call it home.’

  Eric gave him the smile he saved for strangers he hoped to charm. He always set out to make friends, though he seemed to have lost his touch at it recently. ‘It ain’t exactly enticing, but Salvation’s a hopeful name. And any home’s better than none.’

  Another of the men nodded. He was the oldest looking, with a few strands of silver in his golden hair. ‘Indeed. We’ve found it so.’

  ‘But you don’t come from here, do you? You ain’t those Servants what Rii was talking about. I know your accent; you’re an awful long way from home, if home’s the savannah, and I reckon it is. And Green Eyes here is Jorlith same as me. That I’m sure about.’

  ‘You’re right on both counts,’ Green Eyes said.

  ‘We’re not the Servants of Mizhara,’ Bolli said. ‘We’re wed to them. It’s all right, lads, you’ve done your duty now. I’ll take Eric from here.’

  The men all smiled and nodded to him and went their separate ways at a crossroads in the icy corridor. The material had looked see-through from the air, but inside it foxed the eyes so that you only got a tantalising glimpse of what lay within it. As Bolli led Eric down corridors that turned at sharp angles and through halls with curved walls he spotted glimpses of what might have been the Servants, but it was impossible to make out anything about them. Would they be hideous like Rii? Eric had slept with many an ugly man that made him feel handsome, but a boy had his limits.

  ‘So they brought me here to marry me?’ he asked Bolli.

  The other man nodded. ‘It’s the same for all of us.’

  ‘But who’d want to marry a whore?’

  ‘Shh!’ Bolli took Eric’s arm and shook him. ‘
I thought you’d have been told. The Servants don’t know what you were, and they don’t need to. Radek takes their gold to bring them the finest men the world has to offer, so that’s what we have to be.’ He saw Eric’s expression and loosened his grip, smiling reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t ask any questions. They’re not an inquisitive bunch. All they do is talk and talk about Mizhara, trying to learn us her ways. They don’t care about the world outside Salvation, but don’t go volunteering anything that’ll get you into trouble. Just make up some simple story – you’re the son of a rich thegn, whatever you like – and stick to it. We’re on to a good thing here and you’re not to spoil it for the rest of us, you hear?’

  He started walking again and Eric was forced to trot to keep up with him. The ice crunched beneath his heels. ‘But why? I mean, don’t they have no decent men of their own?’

  ‘They don’t have any men at all. They all died, or they’re all gone anyway. There’s no need for me to explain – they’ll tell you about it themselves. By the Smiler, they’ll tell you more than you want to know, not that you should name the Smiler here, or any of the prow gods, nor the Hunter neither. Especially not her. The only goddess here is Mizhara and she don’t abide any others. But no, they’ve got no men, or none but us.’

  ‘So I’m to have a wife.’ Eric’s mouth twisted. Babi’s revenge was more subtle than he’d imagined. ‘Might as well have stayed in the Moon Forest. I just hope I can do my manly duty when the time comes.’

  ‘You’d better. And you’re not marrying one of the Servants – you’re marrying all of them. No, don’t panic, you won’t be wearing your cock thin servicing them.’ Bolli’s accent was slipping, Eric noticed. It must be the bad company he was keeping. ‘We’re all married to all of them, see. The thirteen husbands, they call us, and we’re each to serve for thirteen years. The first husband finished his duties twelve days ago and you’re to replace him. The wedding’s tomorrow, because that’s your day on duty.