With that jolly thought, she went back to the others. Nedlam had not destroyed the Skull Cup in her absence, and in fact she and Amkulyah were in quiet conversation when she arrived, the Aethani sitting beside her, almost small enough to go into the Yorughan’s pocket.
But if not Nedlam, then…
“Where’s Heno?” she asked, stomach sinking. Nedlam got into trouble because she didn’t think. Heno got into trouble because he did. Or got everyone else into trouble, more often than not.
Nedlam shrugged and stretched, showing her brutal teeth in a great yawn. “Don’t know. We on the way out of here any time soon? All too quiet and nice-like for me.”
Celestaine’s stomach sank further, because if Bladno’s brawling nest of veterans and camp followers was too quiet, then Cinquetann was going to be a problem. But I knew how it would go when I agreed to bring them with me.
“Well, then…” she started, before spotting Heno elbowing his way through the crowd, grinning through his tusks as they eddied back from him. Lots of disapproving looks came Celestaine’s way, for making it impossible to drink to forget, but somehow nobody had got nostalgic enough for the war to throw a bottle at either of them. The thought gave her a little spark of hope.
Heno arrived and laid Celestaine’s sword on the table with a magician’s precise care. His hands were remarkably deft despite their size and claws. Beside the blade he laid a roll of hide. Celestaine stared at it, seeing the delicate scales there, a little dulled with time but still strong. They were small enough that they must have come from Vermarod’s throat, or the fine skin of its joints. Even there, they would be strong enough to ward off blade or bow or siege artillery. She could make a scabbard from them to last the next few moons at least.
Heno grinned, cocking one silver eyebrow. “You need?”
“I need,” she agreed. “Thank you.” A display of affection out here in the open was a bit much for her Forinthi propriety, but she put a hand on his coat-sleeve’s cuff, feeling him twitch at her touch like a dog.
“That’s good. Do you have what you came for? We should be leaving now.” He cast a bright gaze across the taproom, looking for threats.
“Why…?”
“Because there’s some very rich man who probably runs this camp who has a big square hole in his curtains, and he will have questions.” Heno had worked on that grin, such a non-Yorughan expression.
Celestaine was aware of Amkulyah’s judging gaze on her.
“Well it’s about time we hit the road anyway,” she decided grandly. “Middle of the night. Best time for travelling. Who wants all the heat and the dust, eh?”
“What have you found?” the Aethani asked quietly.
“A lead. The name of a man who might have something, or know of something, that can help you. How much do you travel with?” For a moment she thought that all the Your Highness would come back and he’d have four wagons and a retinue, but the Aethani’s reliance on material wealth had been lost along with the wealth itself.
“Nothing I can’t carry.” He stood, still not coming to the seated Nedlam’s shoulder. “One moment to settle my account.”
They watched him go. Celestaine waited for some snide remark from Heno, but the magus was silent, his face a mask.
Nedlam chuckled. “I like him,” she said.
THEY ONLY HAD the one horse and Amkulyah had never learned to ride. Why would he? Before the Kinslayer came he could have flown from Bladno to Cinquetann in less than a day. Now he walked, and probably he would have been a drag on their progress every step if he hadn’t been kept as a mine-slave for years. The work hadn’t bulked out his slender Aethani frame much, but it had given him a plodding endurance Celestaine could only envy. His possessions amounted only to a sling bag, a quiver and a holstered bow.
Nedlam grunted in approval. “Remember that bow I had once?” she asked Heno. “Shoot to the horizon, I could.”
“Whether you needed to or not,” the magus noted. “That’s why they took it off you.”
Celestaine had seen a few Aethani fight—mostly those few who’d got out with their wings. They had the eyes of a creature that needs to spot small details from way up high, but probably their prince hadn’t needed to spend his time practising at the butts much. She hoped they wouldn’t need to find out. After all, the war’s over. Nobody needs to fight any more.
She clung to that thought the next day because the Cheriveni already had people at the border crossing, where the silver course of the Bladen formed one of the few historically stable boundaries between their nation and Forinth. There were only two soldiers and a bureaucrat huddling from the rain under a lean-to, and at least nobody mentioned trade tariffs on dyes, which for complex geopolitical reasons had caused more fights than any number of spies or assassins over the years. Still, they looked at Nedlam and Heno very narrowly, and then at Celestaine herself, getting her to spell her name three times and casting sidelong looks at her clan colours. Of course, she hadn’t helped matters by getting out her embroidered tunic with its fiddlehead fern device and looking every inch the Forinthi warrior, but that was what you did when you visited the neighbours: you damn well reminded them who you were.
They obviously wanted to make some sort of petty trouble for her, to remind her who they were, but Amkulyah defused the situation in the end. It wasn’t anything he said, it was just their realising what he was. At first probably they’d seen just a skinny little man with big eyes and some sort of pack on under his cloak. As they’d kicked their heels and the Cheriveni had shuffled their papers, though, he had become more agitated at the delay. Celestaine had watched his cloak twitch and shudder as his stunted wing-limbs tensed and clutched. The bureaucrat had seen it too, and the realisation had hit him almost visibly. Empathy sat awkwardly on the man’s lean face, but to his credit he waved them through immediately, Forinthi clan pride and Yorughan barbarity notwithstanding. Then they were in Cherivell, passing fields being reclaimed from the ashes, villages still half-standing, the scaffolds of fresh building work, and around all of that, the tents and shacks and scattered pieces of all those people the war had unshelled from their homes.
Chapter Four
CINQUETANN HAD SURVIVED the war with most of its buildings intact; a lot of the Cheriveni townships had. By the time he had regrouped his forces after the Battle of Bladno, the Kinslayer was feeling the bite of supply lines and logistics. He occupied Cherivell one community at a time, held a round of public executions as a show of force, and put the rest to work greasing the wheels of his increasingly unwieldy and scattered host. The Forinthi jeered and called them collaborators, but in truth the Cheriveni had run all sorts of resistance operations under the Kinslayer’s boot, aiding the spies of other powers, freeing slaves and evacuating those under sentence of death. They had fought on the battlefield too, at Bladno and with expatriate units on every field after that. The Forinthi wouldn’t call it fighting—in Forinth a fight was swift and wild, lighting attacks and feints by a people who prided themselves on their… well, they’d have said their warrior spirit, but Celestaine thought what they prided themselves on was pride itself, most of the time. When the Cheriveni took the field it was not as warriors but as tradesmen and farmers in the best steel armour they could get, fighting in tight blocks of pike and crossbow with parade-ground discipline.
But the best armour in the world didn’t help against someone like Nedlam with a hundred and twenty pounds of metal-studded flintwood, because even when the steel held, the flesh beneath was pulverised by the shock. It didn’t help against the cold fire of the Heart Takers or the ever-hungry mandibles of the Vathesk, or a score of other monsters the enemy could put on the field. The Forinthi, striking fast and loose-knit, had been far more suited to the Kinslayer’s war than the pedestrian Cheriveni, and Celestaine hated it. She despised the kneejerk nationalism of the clans, even as she played to it by getting herself up in full Fiddlehead livery to cross the border. The Cheriveni’s training and forethought ought
to have ruled the field, instead of which they had been butchered, losing far more than their warlike neighbours.
A district on Cinquetann’s outskirts had been razed, probably in retaliation for some act of defiance against the occupation. There was plenty of scaffolding up, and the bustling Cheriveni were working with counterweighted cranes to stack it higher. They stopped when Celestaine and her companions came into view, though. Every set of eyes watched Nedlam and Heno: she could almost smell the fear. There would be Grennish all through Cherivell—she’d heard that half the administrators the Kinslayer had set over them had turned coat the moment the war ended, if not before—but there wouldn’t be Yorughan. The elite warriors had been called back to the Kinslayer’s inner fortresses for the last stand, in those parts still referred to as the Unredeemed Lands. They would remain a symbol of terror and loss. Nedlam and Heno hadn’t even been all that welcome in Bladno, after all; and this was Cherivell, this was civilization.
“So now you tell them all, ‘I am Celestaine the Slayer,’” noted Heno, sotto voce. “You tell them how we’re all friends, right?”
She looked at the Cheriveni, standing and watching with hammers and crowbars in their hands. Probably some of them had been soldiers and would remember the Slayers, but she was Forinthi, and even fighting side by side there had been little love lost.
“We just go on,” she told them, the same words she had said to herself every morning since the war started, and hadn’t stopped saying since it stopped.
Soon after, they were in Cinquetann proper, where the buildings—though scarred and smoke-blackened, here and there—had survived the war intact. Celestaine could spot exactly where the Kinslayer’s additions to the town’s décor had been torn down: the Cheriveni, left to their own devices, had little use for gibbets, and preferred builders’ scaffolds to those of the hangman. One metal cage remained, turned into a planter for flowers that were just starting to bloom. She liked that.
There were plenty of locals about, the town still playing host to refugees from communities that had met with the Kinslayer’s displeasure. The Yorughan attracted more and more attention, but Celestaine and Amkulyah got their share of stares. In the past any Cheriveni town would be a melting pot of visitors, who they’d greet with open arms; who else were all those regulations and tithes for? These days even someone in Forinthi dress was getting hard looks from people who didn’t have much left and were worried someone might take even that. The fear never quite changed into anger, but the place was the ghost of the busy, mouthy Cherivell that Celestaine remembered not liking before the war.
“I count a lot of guards,” Nedlam noted. “Not so many legs and arms, though.”
There were indeed plenty there in the powder blue and black of the Cheriveni army, sitting outside buildings or standing on street corners. The number of missing limbs was surprising unless you considered how many of the Kinslayer’s monstrous legions could smash or shear away a leg with appalling ease. Cinquetann had a lot of veterans who’d only mostly come home, and Celestaine appreciated that they were finding a place for every one of them. Extra uniforms on the streets probably helped everyone else’s peace of mind, too.
Before they were halfway to the Street of the Gracious One Hospice, they were finally bearded by someone in authority, with half a dozen more or less complete soldiers at his back. She recognised him as a housegrave, though what that meant in the hundred strata of Cheriveni officialdom Celestaine had never worked out. He wore one of their magisterial gowns in black velvet, high-collared and split down the front from the waist to reveal a white under-robe with entwined gold floral motifs beneath. He had a rod that was too short for a walking stick and so presumably served as a badge of office. Like most Cheriveni he was small, his ears slightly pointed. Like most of them past a certain age, his face was creased and pouchy. Celestaine drew herself up, waiting to see what sort of trouble they were in. Every Forinthi learned at her mother’s knee that the Cheriveni were paper vampires, draining the life of others with their writs and laws.
Her heart almost broke when the self-important-looking little man crept close and whispered, “Please don’t cause any trouble.” She felt like demanding of the whole town just what the Cheriveni spirit had come to, insisting that they imprison her because of a spelling error on some scroll or other.
“It’s just, well, we welcome foreign custom, y’understand,” he muttered, eyes flicking to Nedlam, who had chosen to loom like an oak tree at Celestaine’s back. “I mean, there’s even a Yogg work crew helping rebuild the paper mill. But…”
Heno chose that moment to snicker, a deep sound like liquid murder. The housegrave flinched.
“I mean, y’see, welcome to our town, please, sample our wares, try the food,” spend your money, “but no trouble, please.”
He was terrified. Not of her, not even of Nedlam and Heno in particular, but of the thought of more fighting, more blood spilled. Celestaine suddenly felt that all the scaffolding, all the town’s life and bustle was just straw. A strong breeze would have scattered it.
“We’ll be gone before you know it,” she said. She wanted to sit the petty bureaucrat down and buy him a drink and tell him it was all going to be all right, that the war was done and life would be better hereafter. She wondered how he had weathered the occupation, and decided he had probably fought paper-and-ink battles to cripple the Kinslayer’s resupply efforts, and possibly seen a relative hung or beheaded for more direct action. Everyone’s got a story. “No trouble, I promise you.” And she cast a warning eye at the two Yorughan.
Heno gave everyone his best sweet human-style smile.
She agonised over the decision for a while, but decided that the Housegrave’s polite warning would probably be reiterated with considerably more punch in the nicer parts of town where Catt had his corner. Trouble enough being Forinthi and armed; she didn’t fancy her chances getting some wealthy Cheriveni collector to give her the time of day with a pair of Yorughan at her back. With that in mind she found an inn that still had most of its windows and overpaid for an upstairs room and a general lack of questions. The woman behind the bar was plainly glad to see the coin.
“This is a bad idea,” was Heno’s take. “Give them two hours to build their courage and they’ll come and kill us.”
Celestaine shook her head. “I don’t think so. Tax you, possibly.” But fear made people do strange things. Better find this Doctor Catt quickly.
THE AREA AROUND the Gracious One Hospice was still the better part of town. Celestaine saw fewer of the dispossessed, more people in livery, the houses larger and the war damage already patched. In contrast, the Hospice itself was a wreck no amount of spot repairs would fix. The Kinslayer had had a personal grudge against the gods that had set him and the other Guardians as servants to the mortal races. After silencing the gods’ voices—however he’d done that—he’d razed temples wherever he could, and most especially those devoted to healing and peace. Celestaine had always been puzzled that war temples actively resisting the enemy had not attracted quite the same unrelenting oblivion, but Lathenry had the answer: cults and temples that preached war and reprisal were the Kinslayer’s mirror, espousing his own philosophy even as they opposed him. What he could not abide were those who said there was a way of life where nobody had to fight.
Certainly the Hospice was just a jagged shell, the surviving stonework coated with a silvery patina that showed the fury of the magical fire that had gutted the place. Nobody had started rebuilding or replacing it yet, and she’d heard that the entire order of healer-priests had been put to the sword.
The street she walked was lined with shops, most of which were shuttered up. A few still did business: a diviner had her daily tables out front to entice those about to make momentous decisions. The next door building was shared by a bookmaker, an armourer and a weather magician, which must make for some interesting conversations at lock-up time. After a handful of vacant shopfronts, she came to a neat little building w
hose sign read, Catt & Fisher, apothecaries, physicians, notaries of law, lawyers of note, dealers in the unusual.
She pushed at the door a little to give the bell inside the chance to ring, and then stepped in.
The air inside the shop smelled of cloves and preservative and faintly of decaying taxidermy. To Celestaine’s left was a forest of herbs, hanging in ragged bunches from the beams. To her right was a little desk set with inkwell and coarse paper. Shelves on the back wall held a variety of what was best described as arcane tat: leaded flasks, brass brooches, clay Tzarkand death masks, antique scrolls that looked as though the ink was still wet. Standing between her and the tat was a glass counter showcasing slightly better tat and a tall, long-faced old man, his jowls and chin blue with stubble. He wore a woollen gown that had seen better days, as he himself surely had.
“Catt!” he snapped. There was a pause in which he stared at Celestaine without quite acknowledging her existence. Then: “Catt! Catty! Customer.”
“You see them, I’m busy,” came a sharper voice from the back.
“I’m on lunch.” The long-faced man held Celestaine’s gaze as though daring her to point out the utter lack of anything edible to be seen.
A few expostulations came from the back, but at last another man bustled up, of an age with the first but looking as though he’d got all of the sunshine in their collective lives. His head seemed to be mostly forehead and beaming smile, with a pair of genial eyes balanced between them. A band about his brow held a set of lenses—at least seven of various magnifications, and perhaps enchantments—and he was just struggling into an over-robe of deep blue and silver, gesturing for his fellow to help him.
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