The Icefire Trilogy

by Patty Jansen

  “I think we have our killer,” Orsan said, pushing the man in front of him. He was barely panting. “Who are you?”

  The man said nothing, and continued to stare out of those blue eyes. Southern. His felt trousers were definitely southern.

  Orsan checked the man, rifling through pockets and patting the front and back of his pants. The prisoner didn’t object to any of Orsan’s searching. Orsan found nothing.

  “Come on, who are you?”

  The prisoner responded with silence.

  Orsan snorted and picked up the knife and swung it in front of the man’s face. “It this what you used to kill all those people?”

  Nothing.

  “Come on, come on.” Orsan pushed him in the chest with a flat hand, and Orsan’s hands were enormous. “Answer me when I ask a question.”

  The man stumbled back, but made no sound. His face showed not fear, but the distant, haughty arrogance of a madman. Not someone who regretted his deeds.

  Orsan pushed him further back. “Who the fuck are you, and what were you doing sneaking around like this?”

  Nothing.

  Orsan hit him in the face. “Talk to me when I ask you a question. Why were you sneaking around with a knife, looking like you just killed someone?” He grabbed him by the collar of his filthy shirt—

  “Wait,” Sady said.

  Orsan turned to him, and relaxed his grip on the prisoner’s collar. His face glistened with sweat, his eyes were wild with anger. It was not a good time to be reminded of the fact that Orsan was half Sady’s age, two heads taller and twice the width. Nor of the fact that prisoners often died “accidentally” in interrogations. Nor of the fact that Orsan, and other members of the guard, would certainly have had their fair share of involvement in those “accidental” deaths. And that these deaths were, if not entirely condoned, certainly not questioned by the doga.

  Sady breathed out tension. “This man is southern. It’s likely that he doesn’t understand Chevakian. We should take him to the courthouse and let the guards interrogate him in the presence of an interpreter.”

  “What is there to interrogate? He has a knife and is covered in blood.”

  “I’d like to know: how did he get out of the camp, and why did he target my house in which southerners happen to be staying?”

  Orsan gave an impatient snort, and shrugged.

  “We don’t know, and he can’t tell us what he knows when he’s dead. I want him in the courthouse prison, and I want him interrogated.”

  Orsan sighed. Some of the wild anger went out of his face. He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, and nodded. “Yes. Let’s take him there.” And a bit later, “I cared a lot for Serran, that’s all.”

  Sady nodded, and the sadness of his loss again settled over him.

  “Come,” Sady said to Farius, whose young face showed a wide-eyed expression. He was probably afraid that he had been about to witness his first killing. “Let’s take him to the jail.”

  He met the prisoner’s eyes and noticed that he didn’t look so arrogant anymore. He was sure: despite his southern appearance and attire, this man understood every word he said.

  * * *

  Sady, Orsan and Farius went home after having made sure that the prisoner was securely locked up in a solitary cell.

  The jail, that place of death, made Sady’s skin crawl. One single corridor of cells for an entire city of criminals. Average stay, five days—he had seen the figures. Next stop, the court, and then the gallows room. High numbers of death sentences made sense in times of food shortages, but railways and farm machines had made life better for over thirty years. Nobody had thought to adjust the law.

  All lights blazed at the house and two city guards stood at the porch before the closed door.

  When Orsan pushed the gate open, both turned around. “Oh, there he is.”

  The guards turned to Sady with polite nods. “Proctor.”

  “You just arrived?” He was sure the guard had been called before he left the house. Had they taken this long to show up?

  “Yes, sorry, Proctor, but we’ve been very busy tonight.”

  Sady remembered windblown and empty streets and was tempted to ask if that busy-ness involved games of dice, but he bit his tongue. He’d spent enough time feeling annoyed at the misguided “independence” of guards. “How long have you been waiting here?”

  “Not too long.”

  The other guard nodded, but Sady had the impression it was longer than both wanted to admit. Where was Merni?

  “Well,” he said, trying not to let his worry show through. “We’ve had four people killed by what appears to have been southern madman. We’ve done the work for you, because we found him. He’s already in the courthouse prison.”

  He almost enjoyed the shocked look on their faces. Served them right, playing games while on duty.

  “Now all we need to do is find a newborn baby. I’m sure you can manage that.”

  “Sure.” The guard completely missed Sady’s sarcasm. “Could we see the scene of the disappearance of this baby?”

  Sady led the men through the house to the guest quarters, where someone had lit a couple of lamps, although there was no one in the room. The harshness of full lighting made the horrors worse. There were smears of blood on the carpets, furniture and walls. The glistening blob of unidentified tissue on the floor looked like bloodied entrails. One of the guards told him that it was, in fact, an afterbirth. It seemed that the child had been born normally and that the madman had come afterwards.

  Then a chilling thought: what if the madman had been part of the family? The large window had shattered outward because most of the glass was in the yard. Sady had asked for Loriane and the members of her family to be taken to the house. He’d thought it was the right thing to do, rather than splitting them up. He thought there had been the woman, the man, and the girl and the infant. But he could not be entirely sure. He’d been too busy to take note.

  The thought made him sick and made him realise that he did not understand these people and their strange habits.

  And because he’d thought to be charitable, four good Chevakians were dead.

  He sat on the couch, clenching his hands in his pockets, staring at the form covered in a sheet that was Lana’s body, while the guards combed the room.

  Mercy, if they were dead through his fault.

  He stared at the carpet, his eyes sore with fatigue or tears or both. Somewhere in the distance, a man and a woman argued.

  The guards studied everything, and wrote down notes. They asked Sady what he had seen, which wasn’t much. They approved for the bodies of the surgeons to be taken away.

  Farius came in not much later. “The people from the hospital are here.”

  Sady rose, feeling dizzy. Farius had held up remarkably well, seeing his young age and inexperience, but now his face looked pale and haggard.

  “Go to bed as soon as you can,” he said.

  “Do you think I could sleep?”

  Sady let the question hang between them and sighed.

  “Try for the sake of the household,” Sady said. “We’ll need you more than ever.”

  “Yeah,” Farius said and his eyes glittered briefly. “Merni’s not so good.”

  Pieces clicked into place. “That was her shouting a little while back?”

  Farius nodded. “She refused to make the southern family tea. It was their fault that Lana was dead, she said. I tried to calm her, but she’s hysterical about it.”

  Sady closed his eyes. “That’s not . . . particularly helpful.”

  “No. I said that, too. Didn’t make her listen, though.”

  “Where
is she?”

  “She went into her room and slammed the door. Hasn’t come out, not even to open the front door when the guards came.”

  Great. One more thing to deal with. “I’ll deal with the hospital people first.”

  Farius left and two men and a woman came into the room, the woman and one of the men in hospital uniforms. The other man carried a rolled-up stretcher.

  The woman bowed and greeted him. Her face was anxious, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “I’m sorry for the loss of your colleagues,” Sady said. He felt helpless. Tomorrow, he’d have to face Lana and Serran’s families with the same news.

  She nodded, pressing her lips together. Her chin trembled.

  Sady put a hand on her shoulder, not feeling so steady himself. “If there is anything I can do . . .”

  “Is it true you caught the killer?”

  “We think so.”

  “Why would anyone do something like this?”

  Sady shook his head, thinking of the mad youth and his unfathomable black eyes.

  “It’s just . . . incredible. We don’t have many people like them,” she said. “We can’t miss their experience, especially with all those refugees in the camps. Why would someone kill people who are doing so much good work?”

  Sady spread his hands. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand either. Yet the look in the woman’s eyes was accusing, as if it was his fault that her colleagues were dead. And to an extent, it was. He had brought the southerners here; he had insisted that the surgeons treat the woman. To add insult to injury, his intervention appeared to have been unnecessary because the child had been born normally.

  He felt fragile, crumbling under pressure and fatigue. I was only trying to help. Why? Because he’d met the woman Loriane’s eyes across a seething, disgusting mass of people on a crowded train platform, and had felt sorry for her.

  The three busied themselves putting the closest body on the stretcher.

  Having nothing more to do, Sady slouched down the corridor to his bedroom. Tears rolled over his cheeks.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  CARRO STARED out the window in a little bay off the wide corridor of the farmhouse that was the Eagle Knight’s base. Large rooms to the left and right were dormitories, each with eight or ten beds. His fellow Knights slept there, in stuffy rooms designed to sleep only two or three people, but he had been tossing and turning on his mat until he grew too annoyed to pretend he was asleep.

  The courtyard outside was dark and quiet. Eagles slept in their shed, a low open-walled building on the other side of the courtyard. Carro couldn’t see them from here under the dark overhang of the roof.

  He’d made this little alcove his work space, with a flat piece of wood that looked like it had started life as a door for a desk and two narrow shelves for the books. It looked homely and tidy, and reminded him of his sleeping shelf at home in the Outer City. Except that little homely space no longer existed, and the books stashed under his bed were gone, those books he and Isandor had risked much to acquire. The books his sister scoffed at, and his father—no, he meant the merchant—had threatened to burn.

  Just what had happened in the City of Glass?

  A candle flapped with the draught that came in through the cracks where the window didn’t close properly.

  He’d been sitting here since midnight, going over the documents that Rider Cornatan had given him in preparation for future negotiations with the Chevakians. The books about Chevakia were interesting, although he could not hope to remember everything about the Chevakian council—doga they called it.

  He had more trouble with the hand-written notes from Rider Cornatan.

  They said things like, The Eagle Knights have been destroyed by this disaster, and there are but a few left.

  “That’s a lie,” he had said to Rider Cornatan while walking in the courtyard that evening.

  Rider Cornatan had stopped and faced him, so that the light from the lamps around the farmhouse’s courtyard lit his eyes. “The Chevakians don’t know that.”

  His father smiled, and his expression held pity. He stood in his typical proud position, with his thumbs tucked in the metal loops at the chest strap of the riding harness. Another disconcerting fact Carro had found out since coming to Chevakia: his father did still ride. He had a magnificent bird that parted the air like the sharpest sword and had never been housed with the other eagles and therefore Carro had never seen it before. He flew it steady as if he’d been born on the back of the bird, with just the stirrups and reins. The saddle weighed the bird down too much, he said.

  And it made Carro feel inadequate and clumsy. He needed the saddle.

  He pushed the books aside, heaving a sigh.

  Was he meant to accept these lies without comment? Was there any truth in anything Rider Cornatan said, even to his own son?

  Go to the Chevakians, pup. Pretend that you’re the most senior Knight left. Tell them lies as if they’re idiots.

  Carro leant his head in his hands.

  Lies, lies.

  He didn’t want to be a leader, not even a fake one. He hated to be told to do things he didn’t understand, or things he didn’t want to do. Or things he understood how to do, but didn’t understand why he had to do them. Or things he could do but disagreed with why he had to do them. Not just disagreed, but thought they were fundamentally wrong.

  There, up on the wall opposite the window bay was the Eagle Knight’s crest with the motto. Obedience, honour, honesty, humility and silence. Those five words haunted him to no end.

  What was the honour in killing people who couldn’t defend themselves, like Isandor and Jevaithi? Where was the honesty in hiding yourself behind a fake leader who had no real power, but whose only function was to give an impression of weakness? And where was the humility in assuming you were worth more than others, like the people from the Outer City, who were in the Chevakian camps? That you were worth so much more, that you could disregard their lives as if they were rats. Silence, there was plenty of that. Codes of silence amongst the Knights were everywhere. You did not tell on your mates. Not even if they did terrible things.

  Obedience was the one that worried him most. All his life he’d obeyed. He’d obeyed the merchant by changing the books for the sake of the tax collector. He’d obeyed his father in going with the hunters, and helping them set fire to the houses of innocent farmers. In his sleep, he heard their screams. Obeying had given him nothing but trouble. Obeying had made him betray the only person who had ever cared about him, because he hoped that his father would be genuinely happy with him.

  Yet, did he have a choice? That was always the question.

  “Hey, there’s not much privacy in those dorms, huh?”

  Carro gasped and turned around.

  It was Nolan, sneaking up from behind. The bluish light from outside silvered his curls and made his eyes glitter. He pressed himself against Carro’s back and gently folded his arms around Carro’s shoulders. “We see so little of you these days. I miss you whenever we fly out. It gets boring watching Farey and Jeito fool around.”

  “Yeah—uhm—I’ve been really busy. What have you been up to?” He wished he could fob Nolan off with some sort of excuse. He wished he never, ever said yes to his advances.

  “Not much. Keeping an eye on this crowd of Chevakians where the Queen is. Can’t do anything until they’re on the move again. Maybe not even then. She’ll be in the city. Too many people there. But we’ll keep an eye on her. Me, I’ve been patrolling. On foot, by the skylights. Talk about boring.”

  The camps. Someone in the Chevakian army had thought it was a good idea to build a camp for the refugees who had come on the trains from the City of Glass. Trouble was, they’d
built it in the middle of the road that led to one of the southern provinces. And those silly Chevakian vehicles were too heavy to travel on sand or anything that was not a paved road. For days, the Chevakian refugees had built up on the other side of the fence. They all knew that Isandor and Jevaithi were in that crowd, protected by a mass of Chevakian people and out of the Knights’ reach.

  “Come. Enough talking,” Nolan whispered and pulled Carro up.

  Carro cringed; his skin tensed with dread for what would happen next, anticipating the touch of Nolan’s sweaty fingers under his shirt.

  Obedience. He could not say no without consequences worse than what he wanted to avoid, but oh, how did he want to avoid it.

  Nolan led him to the linen cupboard where it was dark and musty and where it smelled of soap and freshly-washed sheets. He lifted Carro’s shirt over his head and let it whisper to the floor. “I really want you.”

  His breathing sounded loud in that silence. He pulled Carro into his embrace. His mouth closed over Carro’s. He tasted like cheap bloodwine and smelled of sweat. There was nothing tender about his kiss. Nolan’s wet lips slobbered over what felt like half his face. Carro fought to repress his desire to shove Nolan away, a feeling that became stronger every time Nolan touched him.

  “You seem so quiet when we meet these days,” Nolan whispered.

  Carro glanced out the door of the laundry cupboard into the corridor. He hoped someone would come. “I guess I’m nervous. We’re not alone in this place. What if someone comes? Are you sure it’s the right thing to do?”

  “Why do you always bring that up? I’ve told you so many times: no one cares. This is how we look after each other. Like wolves.”

  Once, Carro had found that term interesting. Now, the word made him sick. He had enough of being pestered by Nolan every night. Were you allowed to say that you found sex disgusting and smelly, and that it felt too much like rape to be nice or comfortable, that it flat out didn’t interest you?

  “Come on, relax.” Nolan’s hand found its way between Carro’s waistband and his skin. His hands went over his naked buttocks. He pushed Carro’s pants down and pressed himself against Carro’s back. Carro felt the slimy hardness of his cock. A wave of despair washed over him. How could he stop this without appearing soft, without making an enemy of Nolan? He’d asked himself that question so many times, and had not yet found an answer. He liked Nolan, but not like this. He hated how his body betrayed him and feigned emotions he did not feel. Regardless of how much he hated the invasiveness of Nolan’s touch, there was always a point where what he wanted no longer mattered as long as Nolan made him come, and Nolan was good at that. But afterwards, when the high ebbed and Nolan whispered soft words of love and believed that he enjoyed it, the shame set in. He didn’t know how to break that cycle.