‘He was a monster,’ Krish said. ‘He enslaved his son. He … he mistreated him.’
‘Ah.’ Marvan leaned back on his elbows, smiling in satisfaction.
‘What?’ Krish snapped, and instantly regretted it. The other man took pleasure in baiting him.
‘I was thinking,’ Marvan said cordially, ‘that you must have seen your own father’s reflection in him. Of course I mean the goatherd who brought you up, not our King.’
Krish knew his face betrayed him as he said, ‘What do you know about that?’
‘Quite a lot. But perhaps you don’t remember telling me. You weren’t very well at the time.’
Krish realised what he meant. When Marvan and his woman had been slowly draining the blood out of his body, he’d tried everything to make them stop. He’d told them everything. His memory of that day was hazy now, but it was possible he’d told Marvan about his da.
‘A violent man, this goatherd,’ Marvan said. ‘Beat you and your mother. Do you know what my father did?’
‘Let me guess: he beat you too. You and me are alike really, and we should be friends.’
‘My father did nothing. When I was six years old and my brother began to rape me, he did nothing. And when I told him, he said nothing. And so it carried on, for years, until I got strong enough. I killed my brother, but looking back on it, I should have killed my father. I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.’
The mocking tone was still in his voice. It could all have been a lie. It probably was a lie, but Krish thought about Dinesh and realised he believed it.
‘Perhaps you wonder why I am what I am,’ Marvan continued. ‘Maybe you don’t care, but I suspect you’d like to know. Perhaps that’s your answer.’
‘Is it?’ Krish was suddenly angry. He didn’t want Marvan to use this excuse because he didn’t want it for himself. ‘I cared for goats, but you know that. You know everything apparently. I studied how they passed down what they were from sire and dam to kids. It always got passed down, one way or another. No kid just came out the way it chose for itself. So your da was a terrible man, from what you say. And your brother too. Then maybe it’s just in your blood – bad blood. Maybe if your brother had never touched you, you’d still be this way, exactly as evil as them.’
Marvan’s face twisted briefly with rage. Krish’s hand went to his belt knife and Marvan saw the movement and bared his teeth in what was almost a smile. ‘And what blood have you got?’ he asked.
‘I’ve never beaten a woman or a child!’
‘No? But then the goatherd wasn’t truly your sire, was he? King Nayan didn’t try to beat you as a child. He tried to kill you before you could grow to be one. He imprisoned his own wife for seven months. He didn’t want any of this spoken about, of course. He wanted the details kept quiet, but servants and soldiers gossip and the shipborn like to listen. He didn’t want any doubt that you were dead, that’s the rumour the servants spread. He’d given his soldiers instructions, the moment you were born, to dash your head against the wall. After that they were to burn the body. Just to be quite sure.’
Marvan smiled at Krish’s expression. ‘That’s the blood that’s in you. And that’s the man who’s after you. I’m glad you feel so safe here. If I were your father’s son, I’d have found a far more distant corner of the world to cower in.’
When the sun was sinking, the air rapidly cooling in a way he wasn’t yet used to, he finally found Olufemi. She was in a building the mages called the Graveyard. Not for the dead, he’d been told, but for dead ideas.
There were mirror masters inside. They were inside every house, ceaselessly turning the glass in a pattern they’d long ago memorised. Echoes of sunlight from far above flashed into his eyes and then over the contents of the long, long hall. It shone on a thousand objects in cases, some hanging suspended from the ceiling, some dusty and discarded in corners. And, at the end of the hall, it flashed on Olufemi as she turned her back on him and walked into the next room.
He followed her into it, but she was already gone. There was only one thing there: a huge device hanging seemingly unsupported in space, a collection of cogs and wheels and marks he recognised as runes. The device looked as if it was meant to move but he could see rust on the cogs. Tiny heads poked out and chirped from a nest at its centre.
He followed Olufemi through room after room. The mirror masters in each turned to watch him pass and the light of the setting sun shone red on him through high windows or reflected from the glass. Every room was full, often overfull, wooden carvings piled on metalwork piled on devices that seemed to be made of bone. Half of the things he saw were broken, or he thought they were. It was hard to tell when he hadn’t any idea of their purpose.
He found the mage – or maybe cornered her – in one of the deepest rooms. The light had been reflected by half a dozen mirrors to reach it and shone wan on her broad face. She was at the far end, and between them was a chasm in the floor, deep and dark.
‘Yron’s servants made that,’ she said. ‘It must have taken them months, years even to claw their way through the stone.’
‘But how can they come here? Wherever sunlight has touched is poisoned against them, isn’t it? At least for a few weeks. The mirrors—’
‘The mirrors require masters, and two failed in their duty here. For months Tosin and Toyin Yejida sat and gamed and drank when they should have been turning. There are many duties you can shirk, but guardianship of the mirrors isn’t one. Each of my people must give three years in the twilight of their lives to that service. Tosin and Toyin couldn’t be punished, of course. They were the first to be eaten. But the Yejida name died with them. That was more than three hundred years ago, and now no one in all of Mirror Town will claim it. Their mansion lies rotting at the edge of the city; perhaps you’ve seen it.’
It took him a moment to realise she required an answer. ‘I think I walked past it. It’s half-eaten by the desert.’
‘Eaten. Yes. What do you want, Krishanjit?’
‘I came to talk to you about – about the runes. Every time I’ve asked you about them you’ve brushed me away. But Marvan thinks—’
‘You’ve been speaking to that killer?’
‘At least he will speak to me. I’ve been talking to him, and he says my father will come after me, even here. I want to know if your people’s magic is strong enough to protect us against his army.’
‘Protect us? Protect you, you mean.’
He didn’t understand her hostility, though he knew it had been growing through the long slow weeks they’d been here. ‘What is this place?’ he asked. Not the question he wanted answered, but he thought it might lower the temperature of the conversation.
‘The place where we put all the things whose purpose we’ve forgotten. We’re great experimenters, my people. We like to discover new things, but we don’t always choose to share them. And sometimes we like to explore old things. I did. I chose the runes, which few took even the slightest interest in.’
‘Because they didn’t work without the moon – without me – in the world?’
‘Yes, very good. You do listen.’
‘Then why did you study them?’
‘The runes were neglected, but not abandoned, not entirely. Contemplating them has long been an exercise among my people, a way to still the mind when it’s … troubled. When I was younger than you, I learned to contemplate them in that way.’
‘Because your mind was troubled?’ He studied her stern, seamed face, unable to imagine her young and unsure.
She pulled back the sleeves of her robe to bare her wrists to him. Long, pale scars crossed them, very like those he bore on his own thighs: the marks left by a blade. ‘Yes, I was troubled. The runes helped me to find peace but when the feelings of – when the feelings had passed I was left with nothing. Only the runes, and the runes were meaningless. And if they meant nothing, what did I mean – what had all my suffering been for?
‘I couldn’t give my life me
aning unless I gave the runes meaning – gave it back to them. We were Mizhara’s people once, her priests. But when her battle with Yron swallowed this land, our magic was used to slaughter his people. A terrible slaughter, the worst the world has ever seen. The rest of our people blamed us, though the guilt was everyone’s. They drove us from our homes to this distant and lifeless place. We made the desert bloom with our magic and thought that this would suffice, but then Mizhara’s guilt drove her to depart the world and our magic went with her. In its absence we made an empty exercise of the runes for ourselves and a pantomime for outsiders, a show we put on to convince them of our power. And so we lived for centur-ies with a shame we didn’t admit in an exile we didn’t choose.’
‘But you found a way to bring the magic back,’ Krish said. ‘You brought me back.’
‘Yes.’ She sat down abruptly on a complex wooden device that had probably been designed for something else. ‘Yes. I thought perhaps I could use Mizhara’s magic alone, the sun’s power that flows through the world as long as she lives, however distant she might be. But the runes remained powerless and I knew that their strength must be in their duality. Without the moon they’re nothing, so I chose to call on Yron. Do you know how I did it? I caught a worm man. It wasn’t easy; I nearly died in my attempts, but the third time I succeeded. I carved runes into his flesh that I’d taken years to devise and then I burned him and I took the ashes and I mixed them into your mother’s food.’
‘She didn’t know?’ Krish asked, horrified.
Olufemi laughed harshly. ‘It wasn’t a request I could see being well received. But I needed Yron to be born into power. The role he occupied, the position, it was a part of who he was. So I ingratiated myself into King Nayan’s court, fed her and waited. And then, of course – well, you know what happened next. Those cursed truthtellers. For years they’d told anything but, and yet they sensed something about you, even when you were no more than a tiny pulse in your mother’s womb.
‘I thought I’d lost you and so I went to Smiler’s Fair and I found another woman with a child in her, an escaped slave. I had a little of the worm man’s ash left with me, and I thought, why not? So I fed her that same meal. I told her it was medicine to save her son from the bliss pills. There’s no such medicine, but why would she doubt me? My own lover! My own lover’s son!’
Krish wished he could leave. He didn’t want to hear this, and yet found himself asking, ‘And did it work? Did he come out like me?’
‘Oh no. He was something else, a strange thing, but not you. I trained him to be your priest instead, in the hope that it was your continuing presence in the world that prevented his own assumption of Yron’s godhood. Do you know the first word he spoke? It was “Yron”. His mother was so pleased. She was very beautiful and so easily persuaded. The bliss never really leaves a slave, you know. That’s why, among we mages, it’s forbidden to lie with them – it’s as demeaning as lying with a mindless beast. But I broke that law as I’d broken so many others, and Vordanna believed everything I told her. I did all this and for what? For nothing.’
‘It wasn’t for nothing. It worked.’
She put her face into her hands. For a long time, the only sound was their breathing and the distant calls of the mirror masters. She looked very old and very weak. If he’d been told that she was dying, it wouldn’t have surprised him.
‘It didn’t work,’ she said finally, looking up at him hollow-eyed. ‘I thought it had, but that one moment in Smiler’s Fair was … I don’t know. Luck perhaps. I’ve tried and tried since, with every rune I know, every combination of glyphs. I’ve searched here for old devices that might help, but none of it has worked. The runes are as dead as they’ve ever been. And you’re – I don’t know what you are. Just another failed experiment.’
He sank down opposite her on to a stool carved from ivory and inlaid with silver. It was worth more than any man in his village could have earned in a lifetime, and yet he suddenly wished that he was back there. ‘What will we do when they attack?’ he asked.
‘Mirror Town’s defences were all magical. Without magic, there are none. The choice will be yours in the end, Krishanjit. I burned Smiler’s Fair for you, and the Rah tore themselves apart in your name. You could bring the same death here, I’m sure. But if you have any kindness in you, then you’ll give yourself up when they come. I’ve ruined so much else in my making of you. I’d prefer—’ She wasn’t laughing, he realised. She was sobbing. ‘Please don’t destroy my home too.’
26
Drut was gone, flown off to the coast to collect a cargo for her sisters. Eric had pleaded to be allowed to join her, but she’d told him it wasn’t proper. When he’d tried to use his tearful face on her, she’d looked so upset that he’d relented and just kissed her goodbye, then watched her ride off on a sled drawn by wolves, of all things.
It would have been useful to get another look at the docks from which he hoped to sail away, but having her gone was useful too; it gave him the chance to explore the city below, where she was reluctant to tread. Rii told him the place extended for miles and had many exits. Perhaps one might aid in his escape.
He hadn’t quite lost his fear of the worm men, but he’d grown used to their soft footsteps padding after him as he explored the buried city. Sometimes he thought they might even be herding him, pushing him towards certain buildings or paths, but he couldn’t guess why they wanted him to see those places, or what they hoped he’d find there.
One time they pushed him towards a small building composed of a series of nested round rooms, very cosy. The innermost chamber was covered in paintings of a woman – a Servant who looked a great deal like the Hunter. Who was she and why was she painted there? There was no clue in the room and Eric could hardly ask the worm men.
In another place he found what seemed to be stables, but the stalls were too long and thin for horses and on the floor he saw what seemed to be big, black feathers. He picked one up and found that it was made out of metal. When he ran his fingers down its tines, it played a tune so eerie he dropped it and hurried away.
On the second day of Drut’s absence, he discovered the grandest building he’d yet seen. Its door was so high that ten Erics could have stood on each other’s shoulders and walked straight through, and when he entered he saw that the floor was paved with intricately moulded silver.
The silver rang beneath his feet as he began to cross the broad expanse of the floor, but he stopped before he was halfway there. At the far end he could see a grand chair and above it a perfect model of the moon. He suddenly felt sure that this was Yron’s palace, and as soon as he thought it he began to feel the moon god’s power hanging over the place the way the moon hung over his throne. He didn’t think Yron had any cause to hurt him, but a dead god couldn’t be too pleased with the world. Eric nodded politely to the throne, then turned on his heel and left.
And now, on the third day without Drut, he’d found a long, long passage with plain walls and the drip of water somewhere above, though the stone itself was dry. After he’d walked a little way and found no rooms or doorways off it he would have gone back, but when he turned he saw a cluster of the worm men behind him, and they didn’t seem inclined to move. He took a swig of his water and strode on instead.
His legs were aching before he finally saw a glint of light in the distance: the distinctive white glimmer of sun on snow. Suddenly desperate to be out, he sprinted up the rough steps at the corridor’s end and into the sweet, cold air of the outside world. When he looked about him he found Salvation nowhere in sight, only the wild peaks and troughs of the snow from horizon to horizon.
It bothered him that he was starting to find this land beautiful. Sometimes, when he tried to imagine Smiler’s Fair, he pictured it with snow drifted in its jumbled streets. His childhood memories of the Moon Forest had all the trees rimed with frost.
But that was the point of this, wasn’t it? He meant to get out before all he could remember was snow. The b
oat Rii had arranged was still waiting on the coast. He could hitch a ride on that, if only he could reach it, and this was a pretty good first step. It would get him well away from Salvation without the Servants any the wiser about where he’d gone. He was feeling pretty good about everything, as a matter of fact, with the sun shining, the sky blue and, when he spun round, a big building right behind him that would do very nicely for shelter when he made his escape.
It was a shame the building had no walls, just a peaked roof and pillars at every corner, carved into spirals that foxed the eye if you tried to follow them. Or – no, not carved. When he went right up to the place and got a good look at the dull grey gleam of it he realised it was made out of lead. The metal was icy cold; it snatched a bit of the skin from the tips of his fingers when he made the mistake of touching it.
Apart from the twisty pillars, from the outside the building had seemed pretty plain. Inside, it was a different story. He glanced up casually at the high roof and then stopped for a long time and gawped.
It was painted all over, as fresh and clear as if it had just been done yesterday. It showed a hundred different creatures of a hundred different species all twining round each other. After Eric had spent a while looking, he realised that some of them were shagging and some of them were tearing into each other, in portions of the painting that were red and not so pretty to look at. He saw wolves snarling and cats curled into balls, rats eating and rabbits being eaten and all kinds of other things he couldn’t put a name to.
And there was a man’s face in the centre of it all. It was a face he’d seen before, carved on the walls of the city below: the moon god Yron. His face was long and thin, hollow-cheeked and very dark. Eric couldn’t decide if it was handsome or ugly.
The temple in Smiler’s Fair had been painted too, and some of the rooms at Madam Aeronwenn’s. And there’d been stalls that sold little drawings to visitors who wanted more to remember the fair by than a case of the clap. It occurred to Eric that the moon would have fit right into his old home: he and the folk of Smiler’s Fair seemed to have a similar way of looking at the world. Even Rii might find a welcome there, if she could just shrink herself down a bit.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 27
