Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  Chapter Forty-eight

  The Exhumation of Conthas

  Tam waited with Freecloud while Rose said good-bye to Wren. Mother and daughter walked hand in hand into the forest beyond the henge. The sylf was chatting happily about the things Orbison had shown her—flowers made of silver glass, birds that could fly backward—while Rose listened and laughed as if this wasn’t in all likelihood the very last time they would ever see or speak with one another.

  It was, all things considered, the most heroic thing Tam had ever seen Rose do.

  The golem stood at the circle’s edge and watched Freecloud with crosshatched eyes. Contha resumed work on his six-legged spider-turtle, muttering quietly to himself as his fingers sliced and soldered its innards. Tam watched the construct’s legs thrash and told herself it couldn’t feel, it wasn’t real, it was just a mindless thing.

  “You must think I’m an asshole,” Freecloud said under his breath.

  She glanced up at him. “I don’t think you’re an asshole.”

  He sighed, staring in the direction Rose and Wren had gone. “I feel like an asshole.” They stood in silence a while longer, until the druin spoke again. “You have a choice ahead of you, Tam.”

  “I’m going with Rose,” she told him.

  “Of course you are,” he said. “I mean up there. Tomorrow, or whenever it starts.”

  “It?” she asked, surprised she had the wit to be wry under the circumstances. “You mean the battle to decide the fate of every living thing in the world? That it?”

  “Yes, that. But what part will you play, I wonder?”

  She glanced over, dragging a strand of silver hair behind her ear. “I’m just the—”

  “No,” he cut her off. “You’re not just the bard, Tam. Unless that’s all you want to be.”

  Freecloud crossed his arms and leaned against one of the standing stones. Tam pondered the druin’s words, absently rubbing a thumb against the weather-worn grip of her longbow. They waited side by side until a warbling toot from Orbison’s spout heralded the return of Rose and Wren. The sylf had been crying, her cheeks still raw from having rubbed away tears.

  Freecloud pushed himself upright. “I’ll take you up,” he said. “There’s another way out, a Threshold that opens outside Lamneth’s walls.”

  “The golem can do it,” Rose said. Her voice was cold, her face impassive. She passed her daughter off and looked to Tam, who nodded in reply to the question in her eyes.

  The bard half-expected Contha to gloat, but the Exarch didn’t even bother glancing up from his work as Rose turned to leave.

  Before she could, Freecloud took her hand. Rose started to pull away, but didn’t, and as the moment stretched, Tam could see her trembling, as if the druin’s touch were a scalding flame—and yet she couldn’t force herself to let go, no matter how badly it hurt to hold on.

  Finally, she did, and Tam imagined Rose’s heart tearing into halves as the two of them followed Orbison up the winding path and away. They crossed the bridge and climbed the spiral stair, but instead of returning to the foundry the golem took them by a different route. They came to another bridge, and were halfway across when Orbison paused and peered over the edge.

  “What is it?” Rose asked, sounding annoyed.

  The construct whistled and pointed down. Tam and Rose joined him at the brink, squinting into the gloom. As they did, Orbison’s ghostly green heartlight brightened so they could see a portion, at least, of what lay beneath them.

  “Gods,” Tam whispered, and heard Rose swear quietly beside her. “There must be hundreds of them.”

  “Thousands,” said Rose.

  “Do you think Freecloud knows about this?”

  “He’d better fucking not,” Rose grated, and then spat over the side of the bridge. “Let’s go.”

  They stepped out of the Threshold onto the darkened hilltop. Glancing over her shoulder, Tam saw Orbison wave good-bye before the air beneath the stone arch shimmered and left her looking through it at a flurry of falling snow. The city sloped away below them, dotted here and there with guttering torchlight, gleaming windows, and several rampant fires.

  Conthas, she recalled Bran telling her once, was a city of mercenaries: Even the fire brigade won’t lift a finger unless you pay them up front!

  On the hill south of Lamneth was a lofty chapel surrounded by a high wall. Light glowed behind coloured glass windows, and mirrored lamps threw broadening beams across the arc of a great golden dome.

  “I wonder who lives there,” Tam mused, gazing across at the fortified compound.

  “My mother used to,” Rose answered. “But she moved to Fivecourt last year and sold the place to Uncle Moog. He calls it the Sanctuary.” She started at the sound of someone approaching, but relaxed as a shaggy, scarf-wearing wolf materialized from the shadows.

  Brune was carrying his clothes in his mouth, and once he’d shammed he began hurriedly dressing himself. “Jain sent me to find you,” he panted. “She—”

  “Did you speak to the pit bosses?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Will they help?”

  “Reluctantly, yes.”

  “What about the Agrians?”

  “Leaving in the morning, apparently.” The shaman was struggling to keep his socks dry as he pulled on his boots. “Their commander is a real asshole, by the way.”

  “Frigid Hells,” Rose swore. “What about the Carteans?”

  Brune rolled his shoulders. “Dunno. Slowhand’s called a meeting at the Starwood. The local barons are there, and some of the senior mercs, along with a few weirdos Moog and Cura scrounged up in Sinkwell.” Rose started downhill, but the shaman blocked her path. “Jain needs to see you first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … she wants to speak with you.”

  “Then tell her to meet me at the Starwood.”

  “Not Jain,” Brune clarified, before Rose could push past him again. “Astra.”

  Conthas was going crazy around them. It reminded Tam of Fighter’s Camp on a city-wide scale. Everywhere she looked were drunk people, dancing people, naked people; bards were singing, mercs were fighting, priests were shouting, “It’s the end of the world!” to a chorus of raucous cheers.

  Tam spotted argosies belonging to the Screaming Eagles, Flashbang, the Time Wizards, and countless bands she’d never heard of. There were a trio of skyships moored above a tavern called World’s Away. All three boats were packed to the rails with revellers.

  Brune led them through the veil of raining mist, skirting a stone fountain into which a line of industrious mercs were emptying kegs of frothing beer.

  “What’s wrong with these people?” Tam hollered to be heard above the noise. “They know what’s coming, right? Why are they still celebrating?”

  “Why not?” Rose countered. “If you thought you’d die tomorrow, would you waste the night weeping about it?”

  Tam didn’t bother responding—in part because she didn’t feel like shouting, but also because yes, she probably would. She quickened her pace to keep up with Brune, who brought them up to speed as they walked.

  As per Rose’s request, Branigan and Lady Jain had organized the exhumation of Conthas. Every crypt and tomb was being ransacked, their contents smashed to dust. The moat was dredged, revealing several hundred corpses in various states of decay, a hoard’s worth of mouldy courtmark coins, and a cantankerous merman who identified himself as Oscar and berated his captors until they set him free.

  The graveyards were likewise pillaged: Skeletons were stomped apart, while the corpses were taken by cart to the square beyond the West Gutter Gate. When Rose remarked on how efficient Jain had been at coercing the citizens of Conthas to help out, the shaman snorted.

  “That’s because she promised they could keep whatever fortune they find, so long as they disposed of the bodies. These people aren’t really helping,” Brune informed them. “They’re looting.”

  As they neared their destination t
here were more people standing than walking. Someone they passed called out to Rose, but when Tam turned to see who’d spoken she saw nothing but a shabby man draped in fine jewellery pushing a corpse in a wheelbarrow behind them.

  Jain was waiting at the gate. The woman looked as shaken as Tam had ever seen her, which the bard took for a very bad sign.

  “This had better be good,” Rose told her.

  “It ain’t good,” said Jain, and led them on.

  Rose. Tam heard it again, from up ahead this time.

  Rose. And again, except it sounded as though a dozen people were saying her name at once.

  As they entered the square, a cannibal’s kitchen of horrible smells assaulted Tam’s nose: the rot-flower reek of spoiled guts, the sour-apple stench of putrefied flesh, and the underlying scent of an outhouse overflowing with curdled eggs.

  The source of the stink was obvious: There was a pit here like the one across town in the Monster Market, but instead of yammering goblins it was filled nearly to the top with dead bodies. A dozen of Jain’s Silk Arrows stood around it with buckets of lamp oil and guttering torches, the light of which picked out the tangled limbs and bloodless faces of those heaped below.

  The source of the whispers, however, was less apparent—at least until Tam forced herself to look directly into the pit.

  “Rose”—from gaping jaws, from mouths that should have been too broken to form the words.

  “Rose”—from blistered lips, from tongues that writhed like maggots out of open throats.

  “Rose”—from a thousand piled corpses, every one of them gazing up with white-fire eyes.

  “Rose. Rose. Rose,” said the Winter Queen in a chorus of disparate voices, and when the mercenary finally stepped to the pit’s edge, the dead spoke as one.

  “Rose.”

  “What the fuck do you want?” she asked.

  A hundred slit-throat grins greeted her words. “Tell me how he died,” they asked.

  “How who died?” Rose’s voice was flat, but pain and anger flashed behind her eyes.

  Papery laughter floated up from the pit. “Gabriel,” they said, and a frightened murmur erupted around the square. If anyone in Conthas was unaware that Grandual had lost its greatest champion, they would know before long.

  A priest with crow-pecked eyes lurched upright in a nearby wheelbarrow. “Was he in pain? Did he weep?”

  “Did he scream?” asked a woman below, fish-bitten and bloated. “Did he curse my name with his dying breath?”

  “TELL ME,” the dead commanded.

  Tam had never been so scared in her entire life—not even when they’d faced the Simurg. Her fear then had been a fiery thing, burning through her limbs, fuel for a courage she hadn’t known she’d possessed. But this was a cold, creeping, fathomless dread. It fuelled nothing, only drained.

  It was all she could do not to flee from the pit, the square, the whole fucking city. She could tell Rose was unsettled, too, despite her brave face. Of everyone, Jain was the least bothered by the horror below. The mercenary stood with her hands on her hips and was glowering into the hole like a farmer finding out a fox had spent the night in her henhouse. She had wads of something—mint leaves, it looked like—stuffed up her nose.

  “It doesn’t matter how he died,” Rose said. “My father is gone. Beyond your reach,” she added, drawing an enraged hiss from below. “He’s not your concern anymore. I am.”

  The corpse of a young girl in a soiled blue dress rolled her head to an impossible angle. “I should have killed you by the lake,” she said sweetly, “but I wanted you to suffer. You will suffer, Rose. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “And when you are dead,” said a man elsewhere in the pile, who must’ve been rich since someone had gone out of their way to steal his clothes, “you are mine. I will wear your soul like a glove.”

  “You will be my tool,” the eyeless priest informed her. “My puppet-general. With you to lead them, my armies will scour every corner of the world.”

  A woman with half her head caved in wheezed up at her, “Your meddling cost my son his life. And now you, Rose, will be the instrument of my revenge.”

  “Your son?” Jain’s brow knit in confusion.

  “Lastleaf,” said Tam and Rose at once.

  “Ah.” The southerner chewed on that for a moment before deciding she didn’t much care for how it tasted. She hawked and spat a mouthful of phlegm down onto the pile. “That’s for your son,” she said.

  The pit writhed in fury. Tam heard another bout of muttering from those gathered to watch, and a few tittering laughs as well.

  The bard recalled Astra’s grief on the battlefield south of Grey Vale. She tried to conjure sympathy for the woman whose so-called life had been bought and paid for with the blood of her children—the daughter first, and now the son. But then Tam’s eyes returned to the dead girl in the blue dress with her head on backward, and sympathy threw open the window, waved from the ledge, and leapt to its death.

  Fuck her, Tam thought. Everyone suffers. We’ve all lost people we love, and it’s not always—or ever—fair. But only a monster paints everyone with the same bloody brush. And only a madwoman wants the world to suffer with her.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” Rose said. “You should have gone to Ardburg first. Or Fivecourt. Anywhere but here.”

  The squirming pile groaned. “Why?” they asked.

  “Because this is Conthas,” Rose answered, as if needing to explain that water was wet. “The Free City. They don’t take kindly to queens here, or conquering armies.”

  “Damn right,” Jain said through a grin.

  Rose dragged a hand through her hair. “Listen, Astra, what happened to your son … It wasn’t right. My father told me how the Republic treated him.”

  “Like a beast,” said the stripped nobleman.

  “Like an animal,” said the fish-bitten woman.

  “Like a monster,” said the girl in the blue dress.

  “Yes,” Rose admitted. “Like a monster. But Lastleaf wasn’t evil. Not really. He wanted to change things, not destroy them entirely. He was fighting to make the world a better place for those like him. But—”

  “YOU DO NOT KNOW,” the pit howled up at her. “THE AGONY. THE ANGUISH. THE VOID A CHILD LEAVES BEHIND WHEN IT IS GONE.”

  “But you will,” said the priest in the wheelbarrow.

  “You will very soon,” said the little girl.

  Rose cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think I can’t see her?” the Winter Queen asked with the ashen lips of the potbellied nobleman. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re hiding?”

  Tam’s heart stopped beating. Her next breath was an involuntary gasp. She glanced toward Rose and found her parchment-pale, still as stone.

  The woman with half a head grinned toothlessly. “Contha thinks himself clever. He thinks himself safe. But I have eyes in the dark, and I can see him now. I can see his son. And I can see …”

  “Oh, please, no,” Tam whispered.

  “… your daughter,” said the girl in the dress, her words jarring like violence on a sunny day. “I will kill her, Rose.”

  “Burn them,” Rose said to Jain. “Burn them, now.”

  “And I will use your hands to do it.”

  “Burn them!” Rose screamed.

  At a frantic gesture from Jain, the Silk Arrows she’d stationed around the pit tossed buckets of oil over the heaped corpses. Others lobbed torches onto the pile, and the fire caught quickly—chewing up flesh, blackening bone, turning wisps of tattered hair into blazing filaments.

  And all the while the corpses laughed, a sound like a thousand dying breaths drifting up on oily smoke. They laughed in the wagons still rumbling toward the square, in the carts delayed by the traffic entering the city. The priest in his barrow cackled, one bony finger pointed at Rose, who was standing over the pit as though she meant to dive in and kill every one of Astra’s thralls before the fire c
onsumed them.

  “I will end you!” Rose howled. “Do you hear me, you cold-lipped cunt? If you come here—if come anywhere near my daughter—I will find you on the battlefield and I will cut you the fuck down!”

  She turned and stalked back toward the gate, pushing aside those too slow to clear a path. Brune and Jain went after her, but as Tam made to follow, the priest’s wheeze tickled her ear like a pestering fly.

  The bard whirled and walked over to the wheelbarrow. The thing’s flickering gaze settled on her. Its grin fell away, and Tam could sense something—Astra—looking out through its eyes. The feeling was eerily sinister, like seeing the shape of someone watching you from a darkened window.

  “You,” it said.

  “Me,” she replied, and drove her knife down into its skull.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Here and Now

  In a tavern called the Starwood they found Slowhand and Moog sharing a long oak table with a handful of city delegates, while an audience of mercenaries, soldiers, rogues, and restless thugs looked on. Cura and Roderick were just inside, and had cornered someone the bard couldn’t see until Rod saw Rose coming and pushed their quarry toward her.

  “Look who I found!” he announced.

  “You didn’t find me,” said Daon Doshi. “I returned of my own volition. I couldn’t in good conscience—” He stopped there, evidently finding it hard to speak with Rose’s knuckles buried in his gut. “I deserved that,” he groaned, and when Rose’s other fist caught him hard across the jaw he stumbled, touching fingers to his bloodied lip. “I deserved that, too. Wait!” The pilot raised a hand before Rose could throw another punch. “Listen, please! I panicked, okay? You saw what was happening on that battlefield! Heathen help me, the dead were coming back to life! What did you expect me to do?”

  “I expected to drag your corpse off that ship and fly away,” Rose grated. “My father—” She stopped herself short, closed her eyes, and waited until her fury drained away. “Why did you really come back?”