Empress of the Fall

by David Hair

  He met Sacrista’s eyes: greenish-brown eyes, the prettiest thing about her, and weighed her up. Women who could fight were rare, even among magi, but those who could were every bit as dangerous as a man. And they often held a grudge against every man who’d tried to prove them weak. She would have her own catalogue of those who’d tried to beat her in the arena, or assaulted her more privately. Sometimes her defences might not have been enough. There was a brittleness to her that spoke of violence and abuse endured and never forgiven.

  Perhaps we have that in common. He nodded, and opened his mental shields.

  Her face swelled to fill his consciousness; her eyes like giant moons bored into him intently. As always when gnosis-touched, he felt an intense sense of her, a sensation like being brushed with her sweat and musk in a salty, tangy rush; then she said,

  With a searing jab of pain, his vision flashed pure white, then the darkness rushed in.

  Hegikaro, Mollachia, Yuros

  Martrois 935

  Valdyr woke to a rattling sound, and the whole world lurched. Horses snorted, a gridline of square boxes of light flashed overhead and silver light stabbed his eyes painfully. He groaned and rolled over to escape the glare, and found Kyrik lying beside him on a wooden floor that was rocking backwards and forwards. His elder brother’s face was vacant, his mouth open and eyes closed, but his chest rose and fell. Valdyr’s own body was a mass of bruises and welts and deep throbbing pain. His nose was swollen – it felt broken – and a gash on his forehead had barely started scabbing over. He remembered trying to fight when light burst from Sacrista’s hand, felling Kyrik, but Rudman had downed him with contemptuous ease.

  He’d heard the battle-mage scoffing, ‘He couldn’t even engage his gnosis!’ as the guardsmen had closed in and pummelled him halfway into the next life.

  Then Sacrista was standing over him, reaching down and touching his cut forehead. she’d whispered, and slapped his mind into oblivion.

  Now where are we? He peered through scrunched-up eyes and realised the boxes of light were actually the gaps in the bars of a cage, and then he saw a mast and furled sails. Horses whinnied as the floor below him lurched – they were being unloaded from a windship. The air was bitingly cold, and there were wolves howling in the distance, a sound he’d not heard since childhood. He pulled himself to his knees and looked around. The cage had been lowered onto a wagon hitched to two big, shaggy horses with feathered hooves: wain-horses. He hadn’t seen a wain-horse in seventeen years. Legionaries in the Delestre livery were everywhere, but when he looked beyond them, the moonlight revealed a landscape that had haunted his dreams for two decades: Hegikaro Castle, perched on the shores of a glowing dish of reflected moonlight – Lake Droszt. The town huddling about the skirts of the castle was dotted by occasional dimly lit windows.

  Mollachia . . . He blinked back tears. We’ve come home.

  Her orange hair gleaming in the moonlight, Sacrista Delestre appeared above him, leaning from her saddle to peer into the cage. She made a gesture, and Kyrik jolted awake.

  Valdyr’s temper flashed. ‘What are you doing? These are our lands! When Father sees—’

  ‘Your father’s dead,’ Sacrista replied in a stony voice.

  ‘What? No, he can’t be . . .’ Kyrik murmured. When he looked up at Sacrista, there was a childlike look of betrayal on his face. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He died earlier this year,’ Sacrista replied. ‘He owed debts to the banks in Augenheim, which my father purchased, along with the tax-farming rights to Mollachia. In all practical senses, your lands belong to us, at least for the term of our tax-farming contract.’

  ‘How can that be?’ Kyrik demanded. ‘Free us, and we’ll repay you in full!’

  ‘With what?’ Sacrista sniffed. ‘I’m sorry, but business is business.’

  ‘But I have money . . .’ Kyrik hammered on the bars. ‘Where are our travel bags?’

  Sacrista smiled coldly. ‘Bags? I remember no bags.’

  ‘You’re nothing but a stinking thief!’ Valdyr snarled at Sacrista.

  She snorted in amusement. ‘Under the new Tax and Debt Law, you’ll be locked up until your debts are repaid.’

  Valdyr met Kyrik’s gaze. None of this sounded right or just, or even legal.

  Kyrik confirmed his suspicions, panting as he recovered his breath, ‘You can’t do this. I’m the rightful lord of Mollachia and can’t be imprisoned over a tax debt. I have the right to oversee the payment of the debts—’

  ‘That’s for my brother and Governor Inoxion to decide. I’m just a soldier.’ Sacrista’s face had a touch of distaste as she mentioned the Governor.

  Welcome home, the dark part of Valdyr’s soul jeered. See what you’ve been missing?

  ‘Listen, it’s likely only for a time,’ Sacrista told Kyrik, a touch of sympathy in her voice. ‘Come summer, our tax-farming contract expires. You’ll get your kingdom back then, and your freedom.’ Then she sighed as if she were tired of their complaints, and signalled to the driver. The wagon lurched into motion, and carried the caged brothers home.

  *

  Kyrik fell asleep on the journey to Hegikaro, and awoke an unknowable time later, chained in a eighteen-foot-square stone cell. One wall was a steel grille onto a corridor. There was no bed, and just a bucket for bodily waste. The air was frozen and his breath steamed, but at least the chill dulled the stink of the piss-bucket. The only light came from a tiny hole high in one wall, closed off by a cross of steel imbedded in the bricks. Valdyr was chained to the opposite wall, unmoving. He didn’t respond to Kyrik’s calls.

  Kyrik recognised the cell. They were in his father’s dungeons.

  He was still fighting the despair that tore at his belly, when a key rasped in the rusty lock and the door swung open. Sacrista Delestre led in a ginger-haired young man, presumably her brother Robear. With them was a purple-robed Imperial magistrate with a self-satisfied manner; his chain of rank identified him as the Rondian Governor.

  Seeing the high-ranking official lit a flare of hope in his breast. ‘Milord!’ he gasped, ‘you—’

  ‘Be quiet, scum,’ Robear Delestre said in an irritated whine; he gestured, and a kinesis-blow smashed across Kyrik’s face, leaving him stunned. The Imperial Governor showed no reaction.

  ‘So, are they who they claim, Lady Sacrista?’ the man said, not even glancing at Kyrik. His leering eyes didn’t leave Sacrista’s chest.

  Her lips thinned as she answered, ‘Yes, they are, Governor Inoxion.’

  ‘Well, that’s a problem for you, isn’t it?’ the governor drawled.

  ‘It needn’t be,’ Robear said. Unlike his sister, he had thick, surly lips, a big nose and was somewhat portly. ‘Two blasts of mage-fire would solve the problem with ease.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ Inoxion pointed out. ‘They’ve been formally registered as passing through Collistein Gate and taken into your custody. That makes them legally alive and your responsibility. I’m not having them murdered on my watch.’

  Kyrik looked up hopefully. Could this arrogant bureaucrat actually be on their side after all?

  But Inoxion immediately dispelled that notion. ‘If they die violently, I would be compelled to investigate. However, a non-violent passing – and a small consideration – might allow me to look the other way.’ He patted Robear’s back amiably. ‘I’m sure it’s not difficult to come up with something my healers can attest as beyond your control?’

  You piece of shit . . .

  Robear smiled, while Sacrista scowled; he was surprised to see unease on her face. ‘I’m not comfortable with this,’ she began. ‘These are titled lords and—’

  ‘Oh, Crista, don’t be such a Squeam!’ Robear chided. The grille opened untouched, he sauntered into the cell and stopped in front of Valdyr. ‘Kore’s Balls, look at the pelt on this one – hairy as a dog! It might keep him alive an extra night in this cold, don’t you think, Sister?’

&n
bsp; ‘What do you mean?’

  Robear laughed. ‘It’ll get cold down here with no food or drink. I give them a month.’

  Sacrista gaped. ‘But that’s no better than killing them – Governor Inoxion, you can’t—’

  ‘Are your sensibilities offended, Lady?’ Inoxion smirked. ‘I thought you as hard as a man?’

  ‘Aye, but starving someone is also murder—’

  ‘But the bodies will bear no marks of violence,’ Robear told her in an ‘explaining the joke’ voice. ‘It’s perfect.’ He ruffled her hair. ‘We’re not going to waste food on them, darling sister.’

  Sacrista bunched her fists. ‘We don’t need to kill them at all – this isn’t necessary – we can release them when we leave at the end of summer – in all honour, Robear—’

  ‘What’s honour?’ Robear rolled his eyes. ‘Crista, listen: these two fools returning home destroys the value of this investment. Father paid a fortune for the right to pillage this wretched hole. Estate-tax farming is only worthwhile in foreclosure, which means we can come in and take everything. That’s what Father demands, and that’s what we’re here to do.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Legally, we can’t hold them, which leaves them free to find finance, and our return goes from “anything we can get” to “what the law requires”, and that’s not good enough. Right now, no one but us knows they’re here, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.’

  ‘But surely you must at least give them water? Dehydration is agony – that’s torture—’

  ‘Then it’ll hasten the process,’ Robear sniffed. ‘I’ll not argue about this. I spoke by relay-stave to Father, and he was adamant. We do it my way.’

  Sacrista glared at him, then she whirled and stormed out.

  ‘Is that your imperial justice?’ Kyrik demanded – or tried to; the words came out in a sob.

  Robear laughed. ‘Imperial justice is the same as it’s always been, Sarkany: fully paid up and transferable. Your father should have made better use of your mother’s cunni, so he had more sons to defend him.’

  ‘Don’t you malign my mother—’

  ‘I’ll say what I like about a prusi who sold her cunni to a dirty old prick like your father. Much good having magi sons has done him, eh? Paid all that money, only for you to vanish when he needed you most.’ Robear came and stood over Kyrik. ‘How were the breeding-houses, Sarkany? Must’ve been tough, rukking Noories while real men fought. Must’ve been Hel.’

  ‘You know nothing—’

  ‘Don’t I?’ Robear’s boot prodded Kyrik’s groin. ‘Poor little soldier.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Wait!’ Kyrik called. ‘Please, my father . . . What happened?’

  ‘He drank himself into a stupor one night and never woke, or so I heard. The magistrate contacted my father in Augenheim and the rest, as the scribes would say, is written.’

  Kyrik looked away. Oh, Father. You never drank when you were young. The Kore priests spoke against it and you took their word to heart. But then your wife died and your sons left. He hung his head, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he and Valdyr were alone.

  No one brought food or water at midday, or that evening, nor all the following days. The brothers gradually came to realise that the next time someone opened those doors, it would be to carry out their bodies for burial.

  *

  The first days were almost unbearable, as bad as anything Valdyr had endured in the slave-camps. The hunger and thirst was like being eaten from the inside, as if worms were consuming his throat and guts. Then came the cramping as tissues warred for fluid, the separate parts of the whole trying to preserve themselves.

  He and Kyrik sang hymns to distract themselves. They tried talking, but their minds wandered; if anything of import was said, any great secrets spilled, they were erased within minutes. The ability to finish thoughts and sentences was lost and they lapsed into silence thinking they were still talking, imagining conversations with people drawn from the drying dregs of memory. Father came to them, roaring and raging at them to get up and fight. Mother danced through the tiny pool of moonlight, singing like a child. That was all bearable.

  Visions of Asiv weren’t.

  *

  ‘Kyrik. Wake.’ Paruq’s warm, husky voice drew Kyrik up from the dark depths and he opened his eyes and looked up at that well-loved face smiling down at him, telling him that no prayers go unheard, and that a Place Above awaited him. He could have wept in joy, but his tear-ducts were dry. His throat caught and he coughed weakly, blinking . . .

  . . . and Paruq was gone. No, he’d never been here.

  The silent darkness mocked the very thought of a Place Above.

  *

  In daylight, the few lucid moments brought only distant sounds of Rondian voices and boots on stone, and the harsh cawing of the crows. The moonlight waned as the month died. At night, the distant lonely music of the wolves rolled down from the peaks, and some nights Valdyr howled back at them, and in his delirium he ran with them, flowing across the snow, the scent of prey in his nostrils and the taste of blood in his mouth. He woke to find his tongue bitten and bloody.

  *

  Kyrik could feel his body growing light, as if he were about to rip his soul free from his body and go coursing out into the night. Spiritualism, he thought. I’ll leave my body here and go for help! But he was under a Chain-rune, earthbound – Hel-bound. Outside the foetid cell, Mollachia called to him: home, the earth and the soil, the sea of trees and the endless mountains beyond. He grew calmer as the end came, saw fewer visions and delusions. He felt lucid again, and saw it in his brother as well. They exchanged long stares, searching each other out, truly seeing each other for the first time since they’d been reunited. They remembered that above all else, they were kin.

  Words were impossible, because their bodies were atrophying from the inside out and they could no longer make intelligible sounds. All I want to say is that I love you, Brother.

  Valdyr’s eyes said that he knew.

  *

  Valdyr woke to find a man in a fox-head hat standing over him: a big, swarthy man with a giant bow of bone and wood, who grinned savagely. Behind him, a woman with a crescent moon tattoo muttered prayers to the sky, then touched his lips. Brother, she whispered, come with us.

  *

  The end was easy, a floating feeling as a multitude of ancestors lifted them up and carried them away, into the trees, upwards towards the snowy peaks, their ice-bladed peaks scarring the clouds as they passed.

  We die.

  We die.

  *

  The afterlife was fire.

  *

  Then came rebirth, by water.

  Liquid touched Kyrik’s cracked lips and burning mouth and forced itself down his throat. Fluid in places that had been parched was a new type of agony, reawakening his body with brutal sensations. If dehydration was like drifting away, rehydration was all cramps and churning guts, over and again, as he climbed back towards life.

  When he could see again, he found himself staring into glinting eyes and a face he remembered: a craggy, lupine visage touched by frost. ‘Dragan?’ he whispered.

  Dragan Zhagy, his father’s best friend, had aged the Mollach way, becoming weather-beaten and bark-skinned, his long hair and moustaches drooping. He looked like something carved from the land, encased in steel and infused with unquenchable fire. His smile revealed long yellowed teeth. ‘Kyrik,’ he growled. ‘Welcome back.’ He put his hand to his heart. ‘Vitae Sarkanum,’ he added: long live the Draken.

  ‘I don’t feel much like a draken right now, my friend,’ Kyrik croaked.

  Dragan bared his teeth again. ‘All in time, my Lord.’

  They were in a cave, icy walls melting from the radiated heat of a fire in a stony hearth. The air was smoky, but the worst was chimneyed into cracks in the roof and funnelled away. Kyrik remembered the place from his youth, a hunter’s place lair at the headwaters of the Osiapa River. He looked around
, and saw Valdyr lying under a blanket, his face aged and drawn, but his chest rising and falling.

  Tears stung his eyes, and he sent prayers of thanks streaming to the One God Above.

  We live.

  11

  In the Presence of Royalty

  Messiahs

  ‘Messiah’ is a Dhassan word for a man sent by Ahm to save humanity from their wickedness. The Amteh believe there will only ever be two Messiahs, the first being the Prophet Aluq-Ahmed, who became spiritual and temporal ruler of all Dhassa and Kesh. The second Messiah will come at the End of All Days, when Ahm will descend and take the faithful to dwell with him eternally in Paradise.

  ORDO COSTRUO, HEBUSALIM, 421

  The false Messiahs who pop up every week, fermenting rebellion, are a plague upon our people. Let any who claim such status be put to death for their heresy!

  GODSPEAKER ELIM, HEBUSALIM 809

  Sagostabad, Kesh, Ahmedhassa

  Thani (Aprafor) 935

  Waqar left his friends below and retreated to the upper balconies to watch the court. He wasn’t sure why Rashid had told him to make himself scarce, but no doubt that would become clear. He wasn’t the only person up here: there were guards, and a couple of other men also watching proceedings, but no one approached him.

  Making his way at the sultan’s court had been harder than he’d expected: he was just one among a great many men scrabbling to be noticed. Some traded on their reputation as fighting men or – still rare, but becoming less so – on their power as a mage. Others had lineage or money, which opened all doors. There were many whose skill was to procure and facilitate – Attam’s lusts were well-known, but Waqar had been a bit shocked to discover noblemen whose main function appeared to be to act as pimps. Xoredh liked opium, and there were plenty whose fortunes were tied to the poppy. Everyone with something to sell scrambled to make the right connections and tie themselves to a rising star.

  Many latched onto Waqar as a potential benefactor because of his family name. From the moment he’d arrived here, he’d been beset with – well, suitors, sounding out his beliefs, opinion and desires. He’d opted for noncommittal caution: A prince must listen to ten words for each one he utters, the Rimoni philosopher Makelli wrote, so he’d done much more listening than talking. Tonight, standing above the crowds, he could clearly see the patterns woven by the red and blue scarves. The red-clad Shihadis clustered about the Maula of Sagostabad, Ali Beyrami, at one end of the hall, while most of those about the throne wore blue. But not everyone was sporting declarations of partisanship; some, like his uncle’s people, were keeping their allegiances private – although Attam and Xoredh primarily mingled with the Shihadis.