by Carol Berg
“Sick, starving, or dead, pureblood, you will locate these prisoners. Our master has an interest in them.”
“You should have scraped up the blood and brought it with us, then,” I snapped, refusing to meet his glare. I could almost forget his eyes’ unnerving lifelessness if I just didn’t look at them. “I could sniff it for you like a hound on the scent.”
He would not tell me anything—neither the two captives’ names nor why Prince Osriel cared about them nor who had dragged them from this house with deadly force. Unfortunately, he understood that names or reasons would not help me locate them. Only a physical link could do that; blood served best.
We hurried round a corner into choking smoke and worsening chaos. A troop of Moriangi men-at-arms entered the square at the same time, and Voushanti retreated a few steps to let them pass. We wore poor men’s cloaks that hid my good clothes and his mail shirt.
As we waited for the soldiers to have their fill of shoving and bullying, inspecting bundles by ripping them open and scattering pots, statues, aprons, and blankets in the filthy snow, men’s voices rose in plainsong from the courtyard we had just visited. My sluggard mind snagged on the oddity—plainsong here in the city. The melody was familiar, a setting used only at the Hour of Sext—noontide. And then my thoughts drifted back to the blood-splashed yard. The design wrought into the ruined iron gate had been a solicale. A Karish household, then.
The soldiers soon moved on. But as the mardane and I crossed the square and followed the turnings my instincts laid out, an urgency that had naught to do with Voushanti propelled my steps. Our search for these unnamed prisoners had begun at a Karish house where men sang the Hours. And noontide was the hour of execution.
The crumbling square called Riie Doloure had likely inherited its mournful title from the squat, ugly edifice that overshadowed it. Plain round towers pocked with arrow loops marked the four corners of Fortress Torvo and the walls of its blocklike keep. In the style of ancient Ardra, no creneled battlements, but rather steep conical roofs of lead topped the four great towers and two lesser ones that flanked the gatehouse.
On this day doloure took on added meaning. Half the squalid houses and shops that lined the cobbled square were smoldering ruins, the other half still burning. Dark smoke billowed in evil clouds, abrading my throat. The snow melted into black slush that soaked my feet and numbed my toes. A jubilant rabble crammed the space before the gray stone walls and gate towers, cheering and shouting over the roar of the flames as ash and embers showered on them like unholy rain.
“The fortress? Inside?” The voice boomed in my ear.
“Yes…yes…maybe.” Clutching the scratchy layers of my cloak over mouth and nose, I closed my eyes and scrabbled through the denser fogs and smokes inside my skull to find the traces. No good.
“Be sure, pureblood. This is no feast-day frolic to venture. Hurry.”
I found a patch of unpaved ground, dropped to my knees, and pressed palms into the ash-rimed muck, seeking a stronger link. My fingers squelched in the filth, and I fumbled with the pattern in my head. Awkward. Slow. By the time I grasped the life thread strung from the clotted blood at the Karish house, my skull felt switched wrong way out, raw and throbbing.
“Beyond the wall,” I whispered, wiping my hands on my cloak. Beyond the impossible crowd.
My eyes itched and watered. Voushanti hauled me up, and we skirted the surging mob, dodging shattered stonework, trampled grain sacks, and fallen beams that pulsed with dying embers. Snowflakes transformed to raindrops in the heat, then vanished in a hiss when they struck hot ash or stone.
The throng shifted and surged like a living beast, and though only a few orange scarves peppered the crowd, guttural cries for purification pulsed like its heartbeat. “Give us blood to cleanse the filth! Fire and blood! Slay the blasphemers!” Faces shone with mad fervor. Surely naught of Palinur would be left for Bayard to claim. As for the people captive in this wretched place…prisoners…
“Who are we hunting?” My voice, harsh and strained, could have been a stranger’s. “Why won’t you tell me?”
Voushanti squeezed forward along the narrow boundary between a ruined shopfront and the mob. “Because the answer should make no difference.”
Sila Diaglou stood atop the fortress walls. Not dressed in a warrior’s garb today. Her filmy orange robes flared in the wind like more flames, gifting the willowy, pale-haired woman with a majesty and magic that infused the scene with purpose, as if she were the carved prow of a great ship. She raised her spread arms to embrace the scene of smoke and chaos. “Sanguiera, orongia, vazte, kevrana,” she cried. “Bleed, suffer, die, purify. Die to the world. Abandon those who cling to your old self, and live henceforth in repentance for as long as the streams of time carry you forward. Harrow the earth, that the Gehoum shall be appeased.”
A savage roar rose from the crowd. “Sila! Sila!”
To either side of the priestess, stolid and proud, stood three I’d seen at Graver’s Meadow—the doe-eyed girl, the man with the dog’s face and dagged purple cloak, and the man with the oiled black curls. Perhaps the needle-chinned man had died of my blow. Other ragged men and women cavorted along the parapet, waving orange rags, garlands, weapons, and other things round and heavy that they tossed into the crowd. Another cheer shook the ground. Glee and greed and an insatiable hunger surged through the pressing bodies like an incoming tide. A certain darkness, the foulest bile, ate at my throat. Heads…the round heavy things tossed from the walls were human heads, now passed from hand to hand atop the mob, evoking new waves of cheers.
Great Kemen Sky Lord…holy Iero…whatever your name…guard us from madness. No prayers for Sila’s Gehoum, though. I invoked no powers that took pleasure in headless corpses. Evil rioted in that courtyard. If we could save some poor wretch from such a fate, I would league with Magrog himself. Perhaps I had.
“Inner bailey, outer bailey, or belowground?” The Evanori’s voice grated in my ear, interrupting my sudden hesitation. “Speak.”
“Not belowground. But inner or outer? I don’t know.” If I could just think…
“By Magrog’s deeps, man, what use are you?”
He scanned the mob. As suddenly as a judge’s hammer falls, he grabbed a scrawny man in a ragged coat from the edge of the crowd, bundling him into his massive embrace. “Gert, old friend! Our day has come at last! The earth shall be cleansed. Harrowed!”
He thumped the bewildered fellow on his chest and then shoved him back into the river of people bereft of his orange scarf.
“Tie it on,” he said, cramming the damp rag into my hand.
I tied the scarf about my neck, while he absconded with one for himself. We shoved our way through the heart of the press, Voushanti digging his fingers into my flesh, while waving his free hand and chanting the same words as the rest.
The gates stood open, guarded by Moriangi warriors, spears leveled and ready. But the mob was restrained by their own discipline, not the threat of the warriors. Ten men and women, dressed no differently from their shabby fellows, stood in the front rank, hands stretched to the side as if withholding the pressure of the hundreds. Each one of them wore an orange scarf.
When we came up behind these ten, Voushanti grabbed my chin and pulled my ear close to his mouth. “When I give the word, you will follow me. Stay close. Do not slow down. On your life and the boy’s, speak no word until I tell you. Do you understand?”
A bellow of agony rose from the fortress and rippled along my spine. Only its beginning timbre identified the victim as a man. I nodded.
Raising the engraved gold band that he had slipped from his left wrist, he clasped his hands in front of his face. “Ready?” he cried. “Now!”
A glare of red brilliance shattered the gray noonday. The whole world paused for that moment; shocked faces turned upward toward the light, shouts and laughter sheared off in midvoicing. I thought I had gone deaf. What in the name of all gods had he done?
The big
Evanori sped toward the gate, his gray cloak flapping. I raced after him, agape. Voushanti and I existed between breaths, between swings of the great pendulum that ticked off our lives. No human eye perceived us. No human hand could halt our passage…across the short bridge…through the tight gatehouse…and into the courtyard of hell.
A grim, narrow, smoke-filled slot of a yard squeezed between inner and outer walls of undressed granite. Ruffians armed with pikes and swords stood behind three seated men wearing the red robes and wide-brimmed hats of judges. Flame soared and dark smoke billowed beyond the walls behind them, as would befit Magrog’s own tribunes.
Though Voushanti and I existed in profound silence, events inevitably moved forward. A cage of iron poles against one wall bulged with battered men and women, and under the whips of two filthy guards, a stake-cart vomited more human refuse into the cage. Guards dragged a bloodied prisoner from the cage and threw him on his knees in the dirt before the tribunal. Words were exchanged.
We heard none of it. And no one marked us as we dashed across the yard.
A soundless hammer fell, witnesses waved their hands gleefully, and the silently screaming man was hauled toward the blood-slathered gallows that stood in the center of the yard. A bare-legged man and a silk-gowned woman already dangled from the crossarm—the woman crook-necked and very dead, the man in his death throes, his hands scrabbling weakly at the rope choking the life from him. Lashed to a frame at the end of the platform, a second man slumped dead in his bonds, his steaming entrails newly spilled out across the bloody hands of his executioner.
I halted, aghast, not so much at the brutality of this tableau, for such vileness too often passed for justice in this world, but at seeing the faces of the damned. The woman, mercifully, I did not know. But the man in the last agonies of strangulation was Brother Victor, the small scholarly chancellor of Gillarine, and the one whose life lay splattered so casually on this altar of savagery was Abbot Luviar.
O mighty gods! My heart stopped. My gorge rose. My clenched fists slammed my temples as if the blow might jar my sight to look upon a different truth. Luviar, the passionate heart of Gillarine, the one man I had ever met who could make a jaded soul feel worthy of a god’s notice, butchered like a beast. Helpless grief and impotent rage stole breath and voice and filled my soul and limbs with lead. And guilt…oh, gods of night, if we’d arrived but moments sooner…if I’d had a clearer head…
Voushanti raced up the steps, motioning me to follow. Surely it was the force of his will that stirred my feet, for I had no will, no strength, no courage to face such ruin. He waved and stomped his foot. He grappled the dangling body and supported Brother Victor’s splayed legs, lessening the strain on the slender neck. The little monk spasmed and heaved a violent breath, breaking my paralysis. He lived.
I flew up the gore-slick stair and snatched the blunt, curved blade from the hand of a bull-necked man beside a headsman’s block. He gaped, bewildered, at his bare hands. At the limit of my height, I stretched and slashed the rope above Brother Victor’s head. The monk slumped into Voushanti’s grasp.
Spinning in place, I scoured the yard and the cage, searching for another familiar shaven head and dark brows, sure that he, too, must be a victim of this outrage. “Gildas!” I bellowed.
Noise and confusion fell on my head like a collapsing mountainside. The executioner’s bewildered gaze met my own, then blazed with understanding. “Treachery!”
“Useless ass!” Voushanti screamed in fury. “Run! Now, or the boy dies!”
Voushanti hefted Brother Victor over his shoulder and raced down the steps, his threat piercing the thunder of astonished outrage that surrounded me.
Spurred more by rage than fear, I leaped from the platform and sped after him, slashing randomly at any hand or blade within my armspan. If Voushanti’s own neck fell foul of my blade, I would not weep.
We were most of the way across the yard when the Harrowers on the walls finally grasped what we were about. Sila Diaglou stretched her orange-draped arm over the milling horror and pointed straight at us. “Those three! Seize the blasphemers who dare defy the Gehoum!” she cried, her rich contralto as cold and deep and relentless as the tidal currents in Caurean Sea caves.
Sharp commands rang from the Moriangi troop at inner gate, and a half dozen warriors pushed through the crowd around the gallows. We dashed into the gatehouse tunnel.
“Halt and drop the blade,” snapped Voushanti, once we had passed into the dark. “Now.”
My hands and feet obeyed the command, whether by his will or magic or my own choice, I could not have said. I saw no possibility of escape without his connivance.
A warm limp weight was thrust into my arms. “Stay close. If you have a hope of life, do as I say.”
“Can you work the spell again?” Gildas could easily be the next to have his bowels ripped out.
Red light flared dully from his hand and then faded. “No.”
“But the others back there…”
From beside me came the unmistakable sound of a sword sliding from its sheath. No doubt the ax he wore strapped to his belt had found its way into his alter hand. “They have no hope of life.”
The warriors were on us then, great looming shadows in the dark—distant daylight outlining their bulk. The tight passage restricted Voushanti’s opponents to two at once, preventing a quick slaughter. I kept to the deepest shadows behind Voushanti, positioning Brother Victor’s slight body across my shoulders while the Evanori efficiently dispatched two, then four, then five pursuers in a blurring flail of sword and ax.
“Now,” he gasped as the sixth man fell, “run!”
I bolted. I could have carried two of Brother Victor without slowing, yet we had no route but through the mob. Those outside the walls could not know we were the objects of Sila Diaglou’s wrath, and so it was not deliberate opposition that forced us to a standstill, but merely the crush of overexcited bodies.
“Stand aside,” shouted Voushanti, over and over, forcing a path through the press, angling toward the side where the crowd was thinner. “Our brother…wounded by raiders…by Karish infidels…Let us through!”
Voushanti’s ferocity and our orange scarves gave us passage. But the mardane’s cloak had been torn halfway off. We had reached no more than halfway across the square, when a woman noticed the Evanori blazon on his surcoat. “Damn all, he’s the Bastard’s man!”
Haggard, starving faces, alight with manic fever, closed in, pressing us toward one fiery border of the square, crowding between us and our escape. “Who are you?” yelled a hollow-cheeked man. “What are you about? Who’ve you got there?”
“The Bastard defies the Gehoum…thinks to rival them…” The murmurs grew hostile. “Don’t trust him.”
Voushanti waved them off, spinning a half circle with his fouled ax and the bloody tip of his blade. Yet inevitably they pressed us backward, ever closer to a row of blazing houses. Even through the layers of wool, my back blistered. Brother Victor moaned and shifted in my arms. In moments the mob would devour or shove us into the fire, unless the Moriangi soldiers who had begun slashing a ruthless path through the mob got to us first.
I closed my eyes and imagined my hands penetrating the muck beneath the cobbles, summoning the ruined landscape I had touched with mind and magic: the fortress like an angry wound on the world…the dingy remnants of lives lived solely in its vile shadow…the present devastation—half walls, scorched rubble, fallen beams, blazing tenements leaning sideways at precarious angles now that their supporting neighbors had collapsed…and the past—ancient stones, broken and buried beneath centuries of filth…beneath shifting land and blighted building. Necessity…desperation…escape… Certainty flooded into my bones.
“This way,” I shouted into Voushanti’s back. I whipped my heavy cloak over Brother Victor and my own head, leaving only enough of a gap to see my way. Then I turned my back on Voushanti and the mob and dashed straight through the wall of fire.
“Wait, fool!”
Veils of red and orange and blue snapped and roared, engulfing the tall house. To my dismay, we found no sanctuary beyond the dissolving timbers. Flaming debris and flared ash rained down as I clutched the limp body and leaped over a blazing beam. I had no hands free to knock away the embers that singed the back of my hands or set the damp wool of my cloak smoldering. My boots stank of scorched hide, and my feet screamed in agony as I waded through coals and ash. I could not hear for the belching thunder as another wall or bench or barrel exploded into flame, could not think for the suffocating smoke and fear.
Where was the safe, secure stone? I felt it here. Its pattern lived in my mind. Instinct told me we needed to go down. Smoke and garish flames made the patches of darkness too deep to penetrate with watering eyes, yet I dared not slow enough to hunt. To the right the hillside angled sharply upward. To my left a half-timbered wall groaned and sagged as moisture boiled away. Behind me, Voushanti yelped and cursed as an exploding barrel shot burning staves into the air like the brands of Syan fire jugglers. I had to let my feet guide as they would…and, in moments, my boot skidded on the brink of emptiness. Littered with charred debris and rills of flame, an ancient stone stair plunged into the earth. Unhesitating, I sped downward.
The stair led into a stone-lined trench. A sewer, I thought at first, so narrow I almost cracked Brother Victor’s head on the wall. But as the way angled across the hillside and behind the rows of burning houses, worn steps broke the walls here and there, leading off into jumbles of stone and earth that might once have been far older houses. So perhaps this was an ancient street, its worn base and shoulder-high walls laid with native stone, only this bit of it exposed.
Though fire raged beyond the walls on either side, air flowed gently through the trench, just enough to shift and cool the falling ash without fanning it to flame. The lane widened slightly into a small high-walled courtyard. In its center a stone ring encircled a gnarled apple tree, astonishingly untouched by fire. I hurried past the tree. By the time I thrashed through a snag of dead brush and half-frozen offal and stumbled into an abandoned tanner’s yard, all traces of the ancient stone had crumbled into the hillside rubble, and we had left Riie Doloure well behind.
