‘Indeed,’ Sang Ki said.
‘You’re wanted,’ the hawk said, adding a snapped, ‘Now!’ when Sang Ki didn’t move.
‘Perhaps you’d care to explain what I’m wanted for, and by whom?’
‘By Cwen. There’s a visitor you both need to talk to. Come on!’
Sang Ki sighed, bowed ironically to the burnt woman and left the tent.
The man led him through the Ashane enclosure to the centre of the hawks’ own section – where Sang Ki paused to study the three huge, splay-legged lizards cropping the grass outside Cwen’s dun-coloured tent. Their visitors were Rah.
There were four of them inside the tent, all men of middle years with proud but strained faces. One of them rose as Sang Ki entered. ‘You are the Ashaneman?’ he asked a little doubtfully.
‘I am Sang Ki, the son and heir of Thilak of Winter’s Hammer, may he find good rest.’
‘Just tell him,’ Cwen said, with her usual abruptness. ‘You need to hear this, Sang Ki.’
‘And you are, sir?’
‘Rah Uin. I have information for you – about Krishanjit.’ His voice, which had been smooth and strong, now hissed venomously on the name.
‘You know him?’ Sang Ki asked.
‘He was a guest in my home, before he betrayed me and all my people.’
‘He’s in Rah lands now?’
‘He was in Rah lands. Fled like the coward he is, after setting a blaze among the coinless scum who were ready to listen.’
Sang Ki sank into the one free chair, disappointed. It creaked beneath his weight and he felt all the Rah men’s eyes on him, marvelling at his bulk. There might come a day when such a gaze left him wholly untroubled.
‘You look like a moose that shat a thistle,’ Cwen said to him. ‘Don’t despair just yet: there’s more. Finish your tale, Uin – the end’s better than the beginning.’
‘Krishanjit left by sea, that much I know. And I passed on the news of his presence before he fled.’
‘Passed it on?’
‘King Nayan has an agreement with the Four Together.’
‘I’d heard that was the case.’
‘He won’t push the boundaries of his land beyond Winter’s Hammer and they allow him to keep a few carrion riders on the plains to carry any news back he needs to hear.’
‘You’ve told him that his errant son is – or rather was – here?’
Uin nodded sharply. ‘I told him, and your King Nayan sent news back. He was mustering anyway, once he knew Krishanjit lived. Now he’s bringing his army through the Blade Pass. It must be halfway across the plains by now.’
Alfreda’s wagon was on the edge of the encampment. Cwen seemed to understand why she preferred it there, though she’d ordered some of her hawks to stand guard. Alfreda hadn’t learned their names and seldom looked at their faces. They changed most days and none of them tried to speak to her. She thought Cwen might have had orders for them about that too.
The hawk leader came to spend time with her when she could, though not since the battle with the Brotherband that hadn’t been a battle and then the visit from the strangers that had set the whole camp frothing like a river in spate. But despite the upheaval, Alfreda’s meal had arrived at noon as usual, the same good supplies the armies’ leaders ate.
Cwen took care of her. Cwen needed her weapon, so of course she wanted Alfreda well, but it still felt so strange. No one had cared for her since her parents died of the carrion fever. Taking care was her job. It was up to her to protect Algar, and feed him and keep him happy. But Algar was dead. The thought struck her, each of the hundred times a day she thought it, with the same piercing pain.
But there was Cwen to worry about now. Alfreda had come to feel she owed the other woman some words. She owed her thanks if nothing more. Yet each time she tried to speak them, they stuck in her throat like a fishbone. What if it offended Cwen to be thanked for what she saw as a duty? What if Alfreda’s silence was what the hawk valued in her?
And then there was Jinn. The boy was walking towards her now, through the crowded camp. Usually he had a smile for those he passed and the hawks often stopped to ruffle his hair, but today he dodged their reaching hands with a stony expression on his face.
It was soon clear he was making for her and she stepped away from her forge to meet him. The notched swords could wait.
She tilted her head when he reached her, which he’d learned to take as a question.
‘It’s my mamma,’ he said. ‘I can’t find her.’
She pointed at the sun and he added, ‘All afternoon. I know it ain’t long, but we were meant to go draw water together. There’s soldiers here don’t respect a woman.’
Alfreda knew that was true: the rapists weren’t confined to the Brotherband. Two Ashanemen had even tried to force themselves on her. One she’d driven from the army with a broken arm and shattered nose. The other Cwen had hanged. But Vordanna was far less able to defend herself.
‘I can’t go to the Ashane camp,’ Jinn said. ‘They remember the words I spoke against their king. I’ve tried before and they won’t let me pass.’
She nodded and pointed to her own chest. No one tried to stop her going where she chose.
He smiled for the first time. ‘Thanks, Freda. I’ll see you back here, shall I?’
The Ashanemen and the remnants of Smiler’s Fair were by far the smallest element of their force, but she took her time about the search. People shouted when she thrust her head inside their wagons and tents but most stopped when they saw who she was. Cwen had told everyone whose weapon had brought them victory at Aethelgas and Ivarholme.
She saw people fucking, haggling, sleeping and eating, but she didn’t see Vordanna anywhere. By the end her guts felt knotted. Her footsteps dragged as she walked back to Jinn. She was afraid to let him know what she hadn’t found. She kept imagining his face, his tears.
But when she approached her wagon, the boy wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the small party leaving the camp nearby. It was the Rah, mounted on their ugly lizards. The leader was the one Jinn was watching. Alfreda looked at him too, back at Jinn, and then back at the Rah man again. He was only a few feet away and his face turned to them as he passed. She could see it all, every feature.
Jinn couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from the Rah man, but she didn’t think he understood. She did, though. Jinn had told her his history and his mother’s over all the weeks when he’d chattered on and she’d listened.
The Rah man frowned as he caught Jinn’s stare, before turning his attention back to his mount. He clicked his tongue and the little party moved forward, swiftly drawing away on the bow-legged but fast-moving lizards.
‘I know him,’ Jinn said. ‘But I ain’t ever met him before.’ His face was so innocent, very unlike Algar’s when he’d been a boy. Her brother had always had a mischief in him, but Jinn was often so solemn.
‘What is it?’ he asked, staring at her. His voice was trembling.
She had to clear her throat twice before she could speak and her voice, when it did come out, was little more than a whisper. ‘That man was your father,’ she said.
28
Krish looked like a child when he slept, the lizard monkey curled in his arms like a child’s toy. Dae Hyo sat on the bench opposite his bed and thought. When the thinking got too hard, he took a swig from his flask of fine Ashane brandy, which he’d always found greased the process. It didn’t help much this time, though.
His brother was unhappy, that much he knew. He hadn’t emerged from his room for three days, only sent the slave Dinesh to fetch his meals for him. The first morning, Dae Hyo hadn’t noticed. Mirror Town was no Smiler’s Fair, but the mages seemed to know how to enjoy themselves. There was a place near the centre of the town that served wine and didn’t even charge for it. One of the customers, a man who spoke the tribes’ language, had told Dae Hyo that the woman who ran it was experimenting with different mixes of grape – she and some mage of an
other house were competing to see whose vintage was best. It all tasted the same to Dae Hyo and all the better for being free. He’d spent a day there happily clouding his mind and a night without dreams after it.
The second day he’d continued his exploration of the city. The place made him itchy: strange buildings and stranger people and the sun shining like it meant to beat them all down into the sand. And the walks among the complex, sprawling buildings, the dusty fields and the crumbling monuments had left his throat so dry that afterwards there’d been little choice but to return to the inn that wasn’t and drink more free wine.
Today, though, he’d gone straight to Krish’s room. And here was his brother, sleeping, near midday. A square of light passed over him, the work of a mirror master outside his glassless window, and when it crossed his delicate eyelids he twitched but didn’t wake.
Dae Hyo went to Krish and shook his shoulder, once softly and twice hard. That didn’t work and so he took the glass of water from the table beside his bed and upended it over his head. When Krish had finished spluttering, he glared from beneath soaking hair. He’d cut it short again while he was in Rah lands and it barely curled on to his brow above his strange silver eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dae Hyo asked.
‘You just woke me up by pouring water over me!’
‘It’s midday, brother, and we need to talk.’
‘About what?’
‘About what’s wrong with you.’
Dae Hyo’s calm seemed to defeat Krish’s anger. He slumped back on to the bed, suddenly looking on the verge of tears.
‘Has something happened?’ Dae Hyo asked.
‘I spoke to Olufemi. She told me … I spoke to Marvan too. He says my father will come for me, even here.’
‘So? That rat-fucker knows nothing.’
‘He knows my father – he’s met him. And Olufemi says the runes don’t work and the mages won’t fight. If my father comes, she thinks I should surrender to him.’
‘He’d kill you, brother!’
Krish shrugged, rolling on the bed until his back was to Dae Hyo. The lizard monkey chittered, clinging to his chest. ‘Maybe that would be best for everyone.’
‘It wouldn’t be best for me,’ Dae Hyo said fiercely.
Krish rolled back to look at him and then sat up, arms hugging his knees. ‘But it’s hopeless. The runes don’t work, Olufemi says, and magic was the only defence this place had.’
‘Then we’ll fight.’
‘Just you and me?’ Krish asked, smiling a little.
‘A cornered animal will fight for its territory. I tell you what, the mages will put down their games and take up arms if there’s battle on their doorstep.’ He frowned, less certain than he pretended. They hadn’t struck him as a martial bunch.
‘They won’t,’ Krish said with certainty. ‘It’s like Olufemi said, I’m nothing to them. They’d kill me themselves and hand me over.’
Dae Hyo didn’t have a quick reply to that. It seemed all too likely Krish was right.
His brother lay back down on the bed. ‘It’s hopeless,’ he said again, and refused to say anything else.
Outside, Mirror Town continued with its business, indifferent to his brother’s worries. Dae Hyo wandered the streets, looking at the mages the way a general might look at his troops. His conclusions weren’t encouraging.
These people had a city ancient and strong. It should have been beautiful but instead it was ugly and ill-arranged, because they couldn’t leave it alone. On every street, mansions were being torn down and built back up again, and only so they could be made to outdo their neighbours. Dae Hyo moved between two houses and into the shadow of the spires on each, both teetering a hundred paces high and growing as slaves crawled up their precarious sides. The mages of each family looked on frowning as this pointless competition between them progressed.
Most streets were lined with tables where pairs of mages sat hunched over circular boards for hours on end, moving the many different pieces of the game they called Night and Day. Even children no taller than his chest chalked the outline of a board on to the pavement and mimicked their elders with rough stones in place of the intricately carved playing pieces.
There were larger boards at nearly every crossroads, paces wide and paces high, shaped like a stepped mountain with a fort on top. Some were so large the mages used slaves in place of counters, snapping their fingers to move them from square to square. Olufemi had told him these were a part of the great tournament between houses, which never ended and never had a victor, only a temporary leader, a position the mages fought over as fiercely as starving wolves over a rabbit.
Life was a game to these people, more serious than any work. And everywhere on every building were the mirrors, shedding light on it all. The mages seemed able to ignore their own multiplied reflections, but Dae Hyo felt stalked by his, staring around him in disapproval.
Krish hadn’t been quite as far wrong as Dae Hyo had hoped. The mages liked to win, that was certain, but only at games where all they risked was their pride. He didn’t like to think how those soft, unworking men would deal with the higher stakes of battle.
After a while, though, it occurred to him that the crowd weren’t all mages. In fact, barely a tenth of them were. They were hugely outnumbered by their slaves.
The slaves worked as they were told, and the bliss made them love it, but they weren’t loyal, not in the way a brother or even an Ashane servant must be. Or they were loyal, but only to whoever gave them the drug. And there were a whole lot of them: an army in waiting.
Dae Hyo stood in the centre of the street, people streaming by on either side, and smiled.
The next day he got up, poured himself a brandy to get him going and went to the big dining hall where Olufemi’s family started their day.
Breakfast was some strange concoction he couldn’t imagine he’d ever grow to love: a fruit with the texture of bread mixed with a meat so sweet it must have been cooked in honey. Four generations of the family sat round the table digging into it and barely spared Dae Hyo a glance. He took his own portion of food and watched as the household slaves trooped in.
They marched in a line past the windows, dark then light then dark again as the broad streaks of sun crossed over them. There were near a hundred, crowding out one end of the room. Usually their faces were so blankly happy it was hard to notice them, but at this time of day, and again in the evening, there was an intentness about them. The mages sensed it too, he could tell. Mostly they ignored the slaves unless it was to give an order, but quite a few turned to watch as the oldest woman at the table hobbled towards the silent crowd.
They knew, though Dae Hyo doubted they ever admitted it to themselves – they knew these people weren’t truly theirs. And so they half-watched, little flicks of their eyes, as the old woman handed out the red pills one by one. The slaves knelt down, mouths open to receive the substance that enslaved them.
‘Where do you keep it?’ he asked, when the old woman was halfway down the line.
A number of glances snapped his way and he cursed his own mouth. Perhaps that half bottle of brandy should have waited until after he’d had this conversation.
‘Where do we keep what?’ Olufemi asked.
‘The bliss,’ Dae Hyo said, unable to think of a convenient lie.
She eyed him assessingly, then said, ‘Stick with the drink, tribesman. It will kill you sooner but harm you less.’
He let himself look guilty. ‘I’m not that much of a fool,’ he protested half-heartedly.
Her look suggested she thought he was precisely that much of a fool. ‘It isn’t kept in the mansion. So there’s no need to tear the place apart looking for it.’
‘We leave bliss to the Chukwus,’ said a young man at the far end of the table. Olufemi glared at him and his throat bobbed as he swallowed.
‘The Chukwus?’ Dae Hyo asked.
‘They discovered it,’ the young man said.
‘So they
claim,’ another relative drawled. ‘You know the Chukwus. They’d claim they invented breathing if they thought they’d be believed.’
‘But they’ve often excelled at botany,’ a chubby cousin said. ‘And they’re too idle to lift their own hands if they can find someone else to do it for them. I believe they might have invented bliss.’
And so the conversation went on. He’d noticed how much the mages enjoyed arguing, though they liked to pretend they didn’t truly care. Dae Hyo really didn’t care. He’d heard what he needed. He waited long enough for Olufemi’s suspicious gaze to slip away from him and then rose from the table and left.
The Chukwu mansion was near the centre of Mirror Town. He’d passed it a hundred times and never spared much time to look at it, but now he settled down on a low stone bench opposite and observed.
It was bigger than the Etzes’ place, and growing. The breakfast conversation had also revealed that a member of the Chukwu family had invented glass-stone. A whole wing of the house was made out of the translucent green material, like frozen seawater.
Around that wing of the mansion lay heaps of crumbled orange debris. Dae Hyo realised they must have been slave huts, demolished to make room for the expanding house. More were being knocked down as he watched, with the slaves themselves carrying out the work. Of course they were; slaves did all the work in Mirror Town. He wondered if it was the huts’ inhabitants who were being used to demolish them. It seemed like the kind of cruelty that wouldn’t bother the mages.
The sun sank and reddened and his head had almost nodded into sleep when the group of slaves emerged, a good fifty of them with only a couple of mages to look after them. There was something about the way they moved, the easy routine of it, the bored expressions on the mages’ faces. And there was something about the way so many of the slaves on the street turned and watched.
He soon realised that five of the slaves had been set as guards. Their eyes scanned the crowds, as alert as they could be when they were hazed with bliss. Their gaze stopped on any slave who seemed to be taking too much interest – and on Dae Hyo when they caught him watching.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 30
