by Evie Manieri
“Tide will be coming in soon, General,” he warned her.
“Take us in at the edge of the Outer Ring, over by the Boards.”
“Slumming it, eh, General? Whatever you say.”
Jachad sat up. He looked a little better for having rested, but she could tell he was in pain, and he had no more medicine. She felt only a little easier when she remembered what Mairi had said to her before they left: as long as he was in pain, he had time. When the pain stopped, he wouldn’t have much longer.
Dredge moored the boat near a rickety staircase leading up to what passed for streets in this section of Prol Irat. Crude coracles, rafts and less easily named craft wallowed in the mud in advance of the next floodtide. Dim lights flickered up above through the unglazed windows of the wattle-and-daub shacks of the dock-workers, rag-pickers, petty thugs and the lowest of the tradespeople who made their home in this district, a maze of ramshackle houses on stilt legs that didn’t look like they could withstand a strong breeze, much less the pounding of the winter tides. It was a different world from the Inner Ring circling the bay, with its glittering houses, theaters, temples, workshops, moneylenders and brothels.
Dredge helped them struggle out onto the muddy sludge that passed for a bank.
“Well, good luck,” he said, bowing in a mock salute. As he pushed the boat back out into the water, she heard him add, “And I hope by Pengar’s short hairs I never lay eyes on you again.”
“How far is it?” Jachad asked as she put her arm around him to help him up the stairs. Isa had already climbed halfway up and waited for them with her fingers tapping the railing.
“Not far.”
Lahlil let Isa take the lead, calling out directions as they made their way through the crazy intersections of platforms and bridges jutting out in whatever direction people had nailed them together, trying to avoid the blind alleys ending in fifteen-foot drop-offs down into the swamp, or the single-plank shortcuts wherever anyone felt like setting them down. The hour of their arrival proved to be the only disguise they needed: they blended in perfectly with the drunks staggering home after closing-time.
“Disgraceful,” muttered a sharp-faced old woman, who took a moment from sweeping her doorstep to frown at them limping past.
They passed single-file through a narrow alley where the porch of one building jutted up against its neighbor, and then found themselves facing a cramped staircase of about a dozen steps. Jachad struggled so much with each step that he needed to rest by the time they reached the top. Lahlil looked down the stretch of badly matched planks to the nondescript, two-story house at the end. A light glimmered in one of the upstairs windows, and smoke streamed out from a vent in the back wall in lieu of a proper chimney.
“I’m sorry,” Jachad told her, clutching her arm as he fought to breathe. His face shone with perspiration, even in the cool dawn air. “I know I said I’d go on, but I can’t do it any more. Please, let’s stop. I know people here. We can find a bed—”
Isa stopped up ahead on the sloping planks and turned back, her silver-gray eyes shining too brightly.
“We’re already here,” said Lahlil, helping him lean back against a splintery railing to rest, and snagging her cloak on a loose nail in the process. “That’s the house there. Just wait here.”
Lahlil walked down the sloping deck toward the house. The house had no windows on the first floor, but she could hear people moving around inside through the thin walls even before she banged on the door.
“Fellix!” several childish voices sang out. “Someone’s at the door!”
The sounds of movement increased, and the door swung open. She had a glimpse of children of various sizes crowded into a firelit room before Fellix darted out and slammed the door behind him.
He was emaciated: a collection of bones rattling inside the thick, bark-like skin of the Abroans. She could actually see his heart beating through his shirt in his sunken chest, and he stretched open his faded yellow eyes enough to expose the veins twitching in the corners. His turban had slipped down onto his shoulder, revealing a bumpy scalp covered with fine gray hair and throbbing like a newborn rodent.
“Knew someone would come for me,” he said in a trembling voice, speaking broken Iratian. “Heard she had disappeared. Ehya. Like a snake in the house, but where? Prayed to the gods you were dead. Prayed every day.” He held up his shaking hands, palms out, so she could see the faint scars, none of them recent. “Don’t do that any more. Make baskets, me and the children. Came back to kill me anyway. Knew they would. Been waiting.”
The swamp smell rolled over them with another shift in the wind and she had a momentary vision of Fellix rotting away before her eyes and sinking through the cracks into the mud below. She had expected hatred and rage from him—like Dredge, only more so—but this morbid acceptance was somehow much worse.
“I’m not here to kill you,” she told him. “I need you to take me some place. I need you to stride.”
“No!” he wailed, hunching down in the doorframe. “Can’t! She’ll come back if I do. Kill us all. Told me, after last time: stride again, she’ll kill us.”
“Who told you?” Lahlil demanded.
“The Mongrel,” Fellix sobbed, crossing his arms over his face. “Killed them all. Said I could live if I didn’t stride.” He clapped his hands over his mouth with a little cry of terror. “No, don’t even say it. Hear you if you say it.”
Lahlil didn’t realize she’d been backing up until she felt Isa’s chill behind her.
Jachad needed to hold on to the railing for support, but he had his other hand pressed over his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the state to which Fellix had been reduced. Jachad’s shame—shame on her behalf—burned like a hot iron.
“Ehya!” a voice called out to them from the end of the boardwalk. Lahlil looked over and saw a barefoot Abroan boy standing with bundles of rushes in both arms. “Ehya,” he said again, slowly this time, leaving a trail of muddy footprints on the boards as he trotted toward them, “what are you doing to Fellix?”
Old habits. Time was running out for Jachad too quickly for her to make new ones.
Lahlil grabbed the back of the boy’s shirt and yanked him down to his knees. His stiff turban fell off and rolled away across the boards on its side—his hair was the same mouse-gray as Fellix’s, only thicker—and the rushes tumbled out of his hands. He tried to pull away, but a moment later she had the edge of her sword to his chest.
“Fellix,” she said, “Fellix, look at me.”
Whimpering, the man’s eyes rose up over his arm and saw her captive. “Savion?”
“What do you want?” cried the boy. He was small and wiry, but older than she’d thought at first; sixteen or seventeen; Isa’s age. She didn’t remember him—she didn’t remember anything about the faces from that day. She hadn’t noticed unimportant details, like people, back then.
“Fellix, listen to me,” she said. “There’s somewhere I need to go, and you’re going to take me. That’s all I want from you. You’ll never see me again after that. I’ll never come back.” She coughed back the acid burning in her throat. “But if you don’t pull yourself together and do what I need, I’ll kill this boy.”
Fellix shrieked and curled into a ball. “Never. Said never. Tell them, Savion. Made you understand. Never, never.”
A raindrop landed on the boardwalk in front of her, then another, and a gust of wind whipped through her cloak.
Isa was right: it was over.
Lahlil let go of the boy’s shirt and stepped back, sheathing her sword. He scrambled away over the boa
rds in what she thought was a frantic attempt to get away from her, but then she saw him pounce on his turban before the wind could sweep it from the boardwalk. Fellix just hugged himself a little tighter, still whimpering. He hadn’t noticed the approaching storm. He didn’t even try to go back in the house.
“He’s all right most of the time. Sometimes he’s like this,” said Savion. He stood by the railing, watching her with yellow eyes, like Fellix’s, but much brighter. “Be like this, days maybe, follow? He won’t help you. He won’t let us talk about it.”
Lahlil squinted at him through the half-light. “What do you know about it?”
“This,” he said, holding up his hands. Swollen, barely healed cuts bisected both of his palms. Then he turned around and pulled up his shirt. “And this.”
The red welts of an emphatic caning crisscrossed his back just above his waist. Some of the cuts were still flaked with scabs. He turned back around, and now she saw the eagerness gnawing at his smile. She was beginning to understand why he hadn’t run when she’d released him.
“I can take you,” he said, “wherever you want. You do want to stride, ehya?”
“Don’t, Lahlil,” said Jachad. His hand slipped from the railing and she caught him as he fell. “Leave them alone,” he said, pushing her hands away. The anemic light brushed his pale cheeks and half-shut eyes. “You’ve used these people enough already. I won’t let you.”
“I won’t let you give up now,” she told him.
“You were right, about your life.” The collar of her cloak pulled down on her shoulders and neck as he seized the front of it, trying to haul himself up. His blue eyes were glassy and bloodshot, but all too lucid. “I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”
Then his eyes fluttered and he fainted into her arms as a peal of thunder shook the boards.
She looked up at Savion. “We have to go now.”
“How much?” asked the youth.
“What?”
“How much? I say you pay me one hundred eagles,” said Savion, folding his arms across his thin chest.
Lahlil actually gasped. “I’ve killed princes for less.”
“Each,” Savion added and then grinned, showing a line of small white teeth.
“All right,” Lahlil told him, arms straining to hold Jachad up, “you’ll get it—but when we get back, not now. There’s no time.”
Savion narrowed his yellow eyes. “How do I know you pay?”
“How do I know you won’t dump us in the ocean?” said Lahlil. “Are we going, or not?”
“Ehya,” Savion said. “The blood, follow? Need the blood of the person to meet.”
Lahlil pulled the oiled-cloth envelope from her pocket and brought out the page from Trey’s Book. A fat raindrop landed on the paper and the old stain bled blue around the edges. “Is this enough? Will it work?”
“Give me your knife,” said Savion, holding out his hand as a flash of lightning forked the sky behind him. “Need to be touching, follow?”
“Where we going, anyway?” he asked Lahlil, giving her back the knife. He grinned again as he pinched a fold of her cloak. “Ehya, don’t tell me. I like surprises.”
His yellow eyes rolled back like he was having some kind of fit; then he took a step forward on the cracked boards, and they were gone.
Chapter 22
Kira crowded in among the others of her station on the porch of Eotan Castle to watch the workers smash apart the stone gods carved into the lee of the headland. The porch was too far away from Eowara’s tomb for Gannon, though, who stalked right in among the low-clan workers trying to cart away the debris, terrifying them with his mighty presence. The number of triffons pressed into service had doubled to twenty in the last hour, and they could hear the dry clink of falling stone every time another boulder-filled net swung against the rock. The ancient barrier wouldn’t hold much longer, and then Onfar and Onraka help them all.
Kira found herself wishing it would snow. The clouds were low and heavy, but they were holding their breath so far, along with everyone else.
She kept scanning the crowd for Rho—as if she would ever be able to spot him with five thousand soldiers shivering out on the Front. She regretted advising him to take the boy from the witch’s tower while everyone else was distracted by the tomb-opening. He was bound to flub it and make matters worse: he was Rho, after all.
Every guard and soldier in Norland had been mobilized for Gannon’s war except for the few contingents left behind to guard Ravindal’s clan houses and other strategic points. Vrinna had selected two hundred Eotan guards to lead the strike force into the tomb alongside the more distinguished high clansmen. The soldiers recalled from the provinces would remain on the Front, waiting for their nightmares to swarm them.
Kira tried to work out if she was the only one who believed the tomb held nothing more than Eowara’s old bones and the moldy scent of superstition. Obviously not Lady Jaen Arregador, with her hand apparently fused to the hilt of her dagger; and probably not Lord Gothar Peltran, who stood with his helmet under one arm, patting out a slow rhythm against his leg as he watched the progress of the demolition, and certainly not the eager Vartans, standing together with the fitful light of the torches playing off their polished helmets.
Another impact rattled the hinges on the castle gates behind her.
Until Kira knew for sure, the Mongrel and the cursed could be waiting for them down in that tomb, using Eowara’s sword as bait. Three years was a long time. Trey, Cyrrin, the woman with the blotches on her face—even little Berril—might be down there with them, corrupted by Lord Valrig into something beyond recognition.
Another boom rolled across the Front. Do not go down, it said.
A silent roar started outside at the headland and rolled back to them, swelling until Kira could feel it behind her eyes and in her chest. They had broken through. The privileged warriors representing the Eotans, Arregadors, Vartans, Rilndors and the rest of the twelve clans rushed forward as the castle guards barred the doors behind them against whatever was going to come swarming out.
Kira knew too well what it would be like, waiting behind here while the others went down to the tomb. She had spent the last three years waiting. She could not stand to wait any longer.
She snatched Bekka’s helmet and jammed it over her head as she ran forward with the others, enjoying Bekka’s wail of outrage behind her. She could see nothing except the people just in front of her and soon
found herself caught up in a bottleneck behind the strike force.
Kira said petulantly,
She leaned back until her head brushed his hood, affording her enough privacy to explain.
The fur-clad figures around her surged forward, sweeping her up along with them, and she had no time to reconsider her impulsive act before the ragged hole in the rock loomed up and swallowed her along with the others. An icy chill shot through her blood when she found the bumpy rock walls closing in on both sides and over her head, but the dozens of people in front and behind her made any escape from the narrow tunnel impossible now. The rock walls trembled with the sound of all their stamping boots. If the Mongrel was down there, she would have ample time to prepare for their arrival. A few of the guards carried lanterns and Kira tried to stay focused on the dim light bobbing somewhere up ahead. Surreptitiously, she reached out and clung to the fur coat of the man in front of her, looking for some small bit of comfort. She could just make out two silver triffons winding around the hilt of his sword: she was clinging on to Eofar Eotan.
The tunnel sloped down gradually at first, but then abruptly dropped away down a crude set of steps that twisted around on itself at no regular intervals. Kira had to brace her hands along the walls to keep from tripping as they climbed down into the dark, then down, and down some more. She tried to swallow but her mouth had gone dry, and the painful tingling that she had only just noticed in her fingers had begun to spread up into her arms. At least she wasn’t alone: she could almost see the visceral revulsion of those around her smearing the walls.
