The City

by Stella Gemmell

  Petalina poured herself a glass of water and drank it greedily. Cleansing drops spilled down her naked breasts and belly. Still holding the glass, she stepped towards the vestibule, to the narrow wall bed where her maid slept. Then she thought, Why disturb the girl? She went back to bed and pulled the coverlet up to her nose, luxuriating in the lingering warmth.

  Amita stared at the stubs of missing pages in the book. She had been taught the ancient script of the City, but this was in an unfamiliar, cramped hand and it took her a long while to work out what she was looking at. The thick damp yellowing pages, with their tiny precise writing, contained army lists, column after column of names of soldiers listed for each year in order of regiment and company, and including father’s name and date and place of birth. Leafing backwards, she found the last regiment listed was the Second Adamantine Infantry. But so many pages had been torn out that it was impossible to see if the boy had been interested in that regiment, or a following one. Either he was very careless with these forgotten books or cautious to cover his tracks, Amita thought.

  Realising she was wasting her time, she slid back into the icy water and brought her mind back to her quest. Clearly any hope of access to the Halls ended here in the knee-deep water. Nevertheless, anxious to complete her mission in full, she lifted the torch and started searching for the portal. In the rear of the library, deep in the mouldy stacks, she found a narrow panelled doorway, hinged on the inside. Amita stared at it reluctantly for a while, fearful that if she pulled it open she would unleash a wall of black water. Finally she realised the door was badly cracked and would never have held against a flood. She pulled it open a little and instantly smelled the foetid odour of the sewers. The water on the other side was also knee-deep. She dragged the door open with difficulty for it had rotted and warped. She thrust her torch through the gap, then her body. She stood in an empty round chamber, similar to one she had passed on her way down. Somewhere under the oily water lay steps leading down to the Hall of Watchers.

  Her first task accomplished, she returned to the main library. She was worrying about the passage of time, and trying to guess if dawn had yet arrived. She resolved to investigate a small part of the chamber, then return another night. Bracketing the torch, she started methodically working her way along the shelves, using the frail wooden ladder when needed. Many of the books were covered with blooms of fungus, all were damp and decayed, and she dislodged armies of small beetles as she dragged each volume from its perch. She could hear the skittering of rats in the darkness of the stacks, and was conscious of the vulnerability of her bare ankles. From time to time she kicked out, thinking she felt movement against her skin, but the rats feared the torchlight and left her alone.

  She avoided the many shelves of smaller books, deciding plans of the palace would either be in wide, flat volumes like the army lists, or in rolled documents. The big books were heavy and she had to clutch them to her to carry them to the central table to open and look at. She felt filthy, covered with dirt from the rotting books themselves and the fungus and mould clinging to them. Time weighed on her, but she kept picking out one more book, then one more, in the hope it would hold the information she sought.

  Finally tiredness got the better of her and, climbing down the ladder manhandling a heavy book, she slipped and fell. She went down in the disgusting water, then jumped up quickly as a rat skittered close by.

  Time to go, she resolved, abandoning the book to the water. As she reached up to take the torch from the bracket, she saw a pile of thin rolls of paper on the highest shelf above the doorway. Swamped by indecision, she stood for a long moment, then she dragged the ladder over and ran up the rungs, took the whole pile of papers down and took them to the central table.

  They were plans! A quick look showed pale faded lines marking the outline of buildings or roads or perhaps sewers. She could not tell in the dim light in her tired state. She had no more time to waste, so she roughly folded the thin rolls in half and wrapped them in her shawl, then tied the shawl to her back and hurried away.

  When she emerged at the Pomegranate Stair she saw dawn was already well broken. Conscious that in her filthy state she could not afford to be seen, she made her way cautiously back, hugging the dawn shadows. Several times she saw servants or soldiers coming her way, but they all had sleep in their eyes, and they did not see her standing statue-still in patches of gloom.

  When she arrived, racked with nerves, back at Petalina’s apartments, she peered into the bedroom, but her employer was still fast asleep. Breathing a deep sigh, Amita unwrapped the plans and stowed them in the base of her wall bed. She bit her lip anxiously. Though they were hidden, they stank, even to her, and she knew she would quickly have to move them away. There was no time now. She washed and re-dressed, then wrote a quick, carefully worded note. Checking on Petalina again, she left the apartments and went out in to the enclosed garden. There she slid the note into a crack in the garden wall in the shade of a fig tree.

  A cavalry officer without a horse is a sad man indeed, thought Captain Riis.

  The Nighthawks, the First Adamantine Cavalry, had become the victims of their own success and of the City’s critical shortage of mounts.

  The horsemen had still been in their Paradise Gate barracks when the Maritime Army had been hit first by the devastating flood then by the opportunistic Blueskin attack. They had mounted up and sallied out to aid their comrades, but the battlefield was far to the east and by the time the Nighthawks reached it, the infantry was routed, tens of thousands lying dead and dying on the plain. The riders, two thousand of them, engaged the enemy far to the south of the field, overwhelming and slaughtering, to a man, a Blues infantry company. Flushed with success, they eventually returned to the City, after a dozen skirmishes, forty men lighter but with more than one hundred and fifty extra horses found wandering riderless and half starved in the weeks after the rout.

  The cavalry had been hard-hit over recent years by lack of new foals. The plains to the east of the City had been horse pastures for time out of mind. The light cavalry needed mounts that were of medium build, fast and agile yet with an enduring spirit, and many generations of such horses had flourished on the sweet grass of the plains. But the attrition rate among mounts was high, for broken legs accounted for huge losses in pitched battle. And as their pastures were threatened by the enemy the young horses were brought in closer to the City. Eventually there was nowhere left for them to graze and they could only be fed by importing grain from the City’s allies far across the western seas. Still, the rate of horse deaths far outstripped the supply of feed, and the Nighthawks were celebrated for bringing in so many new mounts, a small bright spot in the gloomy aftermath of the battle.

  That was in the winter. When spring came, and with it the threat of renewed campaigns by the enemy, the generals decided, in their wisdom, to form two new cavalry companies, made up of new young troopers on the rounded-up horses, and others borrowed from the Second Celestine and from the First Adamantine. Despite the outraged protests of the Nighthawks’ commander, the company, deprived temporarily of its mounts, was put into the troop rotation of the palace guards, to the disgust of every rider.

  So it was that Riis, now second in command of the horseless cavalry, came to be walking the wall of the south wing with two of his men.

  “I’m hungry,” complained Berlinger, a morose man, burly for a rider. “My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”

  “That’s your trouble, Berl,” Riis replied, “you let your stomach do your thinking for you. If you get any fatter you’ll never get on a horse again. Then you’ll have something to complain about.” The riders all moaned constantly about being out of the war, but Riis guessed many of them were glad of the respite from battle.

  He gazed down into the pretty garden below. He could see the fig tree and a buttress.

  “What’s so interesting down there?” Berlinger asked.

  “Women’s quarters,” said the third man, Chevia Ha
lf-hand, a veteran rider of Fkeni descent. “Whatever you’re thinking, Riis, you could be put in irons for.”

  Ignoring him, Riis strode towards the steps leading down into the garden.

  Berlinger said, “We’re not allowed in the south wing. You know that.”

  “I’m not going in. I just need to piss,” Riis answered, jogging down the steps.

  “When did you get so pigging coy?” Berlinger called after him.

  Riis had watched this garden over the last few days and he knew only two windows overlooked it, both high in a tower and both belonging to an ancient relative of the Vincerii. He ducked under the fig tree, out of sight of the two riders, and freed the loose brick in the buttress. He tucked the piece of paper he found into a pocket, relieved himself against the tree trunk, and jogged back up the steps.

  Chapter 30

  A few months previously Riis had been fighting on the north-eastern front against an allied army of Odrysians and Fkeni tribesmen at Cloud Ridge. The Nighthawks had then been in the field for more than three years and he saw no end to their ordeal, for the Blues had mountainous terrain to fall back to, a warren of narrow passes and box canyons and caves and tunnels, whereas the City forces had only the meagre protection of the shallow river Simios. One by one Riis had seen his comrades, including his brother Parr, die and there was still no sign that the First Adamantine and the infantry they supported would be relieved.

  So it was with a dull sense of release that he heard he was among a hundred Nighthawks deployed to buttress a company of the Thousand guarding the emperor on a journey from the Fourth Eastern Gate on some unknown mission. He had mounted his horse and headed out, avoiding the looks of the men they were leaving in the midst of carnage.

  He was under few illusions that the man they were to guard was really the emperor. He had watched the Immortal closely over the years, as closely as it is possible for a soldier in the field to watch an emperor who rarely leaves his palace. He had come to the conclusion that the man had several stand-ins. Riis’ childhood ambition to kill the emperor had never been abandoned, but it receded further in his hopes and dreams the older he became. Still, he was glad to get away from the battle for a day or two, for he believed this diversion was just that, a harmless diversion.

  He was riding some way behind the imperial carriage, behind a red-headed woman rider, a Wildcat, watching the way her buttocks spread pleasingly as they met her saddle, idly wishing he were that saddle and she astride him, warm and wet, when the imperial carriage suddenly rose like a rearing horse, and a sound like thunder battered his ears. He was wrestling with his panicking mount when a second bigger explosion hurled riders and horses around like dice.

  Riis was thrown from the horse and for a moment he thought he was badly injured. He could feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing in the flying dust. Then his vision cleared and he saw the redhead again. Somehow she was still mounted and as he watched, frozen in eerie silence, she leaned down and casually chopped the sword-arm off a warrior who lunged at her horse’s belly.

  Enemy soldiers were erupting from the ground. They were sluggish and hampered by the bodies of dead and dying horses and men, and the woman slashed and cut her way easily through heads and necks. The Blues were unequal to her, and Riis felt unequal as he watched.

  He stumbled to his feet. He could hear nothing and he kept turning round, fearing he was being attacked from behind. He cast about for an uninjured mount, but there were none in sight. He saw a Blueskin warrior lying near the rubble of the black carriage, blood gouting from a half-severed leg. He walked over and cut the man’s throat, and felt instantly better. A horse came trotting towards him through the swirling dust. He whistled, then realised it probably couldn’t hear either, and signalled to it with the hand gestures all Nighthawk horses knew. To his surprise it obediently walked over. Riis leaped on its back and raced off in the direction he had seen the woman going.

  When at last he spotted her she was crouched beside an injured man, a soldier with a badly broken arm. She had taken off her helm, and her thick coppery hair flowed freely. As he watched she pulled it back in her fist and tied it in a ragged knot at her neck. He stared at her stern profile and thought she looked like a goddess, albeit a dirty one, for her face was smudged with dust and smeared with sweat. As he watched she touched the injured man on his good shoulder in a friendly gesture. The man wore Wildcat armour too, and Riis wondered if they were lovers. The woman stood and looked around. Her gaze passed over him as if he were a tree stump, and she walked off. Riis looked back to where the injured man was leaning his head back, his eyes closed in pain. With a start Riis realised he knew him. He walked over.

  “Evan?” he asked, crouching down.

  The soldier’s eyes opened wearily, but there was no recognition. His face was grey and sweating and he cradled his broken arm with his good hand. It was a bad break, the white bone sticking out through red meat.

  “Evan, it’s Riis.”

  They had run into each other several times over the years since the night of the branding. For a while they had served together.

  Evan blinked dust from his eyes, then nodded. “Son of a bitch,” he said, with some of his usual spirit. “Still alive, then, Riis? Joined the horse-shaggers now, I hear?”

  Riis grinned at him. It was good to see Evan again.

  “Where’s Parr?” the injured man asked.

  Riis was tired of the question. He and his brother had served together for more than twenty years. Since Parr was killed it was always the first thing he was asked.

  “Dead,” he said shortly.

  Evan leaned his head back, closing his eyes. “Got any lorassium?” he asked.

  “Some,” Riis told him, digging in a pocket. Evan’s eyes opened. “Good man,” he said. “I’ll need it before the bonesetter gets here.”

  Riis pulled out a lump of the dried leaf. He rolled it into a ball and put it in Evan’s mouth. His friend chewed on it for a long time, then sighed.

  “There are fewer of us now,” he said blurrily. “Ranul’s dead too.”

  “I hadn’t heard.”

  “But I found Arish. The bastard.”

  Riis frowned, wondering if the pain was confusing his old friend. “Arish disappeared thirty years ago,” he said. “Are you sure?”

  “Changed his name. Bastard,” Evan repeated. “Thought I didn’t know him.”

  Rallying, he sat up and spoke in Riis’ ear. “We’ve got to get ’em together,” he said, with the intensity of a drunkard.

  “Who? Get who together?”

  “Arish. Calls himself Fell Aron Lee.”

  Riis stared at him in surprise. Everyone had heard of Fell Aron Lee.

  “And Saroyan.”

  “Who?”

  “Lord lieutenant.”

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “She. Cold bitch. We’ve got to do it soon. Or we’ll all be dead. There’s only three of us left.”

  “Does she…” Riis looked around. “Saroyan. Does she want him dead?”

  Evan nodded. “More than any of us.”

  Riis could make no sense of it. His friend seemed to drift off, and he sat down beside him to await the surgeon. His thoughts wandered on familiar paths, and after a while he nudged the Wildcat gently and asked, “Evan, that woman you were talking to…”

  Evan’s eyes were closed but he smiled and said slurrily, “Same old Riis.” He feebly grabbed Riis’ arm. “Keep an eye on her for me,” he asked urgently.

  “I will,” Riis told him. “If I get the chance. Is she your woman?”

  But Evan had closed his eyes again. “Indaro,” he said, before slumping into unconsciousness.

  Weeks later, after the destruction of the Maritime and the Nighthawks’ demotion to guard duty, a message reached Riis at the Paradise barracks. It said merely “Big-Bellied Pony, noon tomorrow” and was signed Sami. Riis stared at it for a long while. His long-ago vow to kill the emperor seemed naïve and childish at
this distance. He shrugged and made no decision, but a foul-up in the rotas meant he was off-duty that day. He argued to himself that there was no harm going.

  The Big-Bellied Pony tavern, in Burman Far under the Third Imperial Wall, was small and dark and smelled of rot and sweat and sour ale. Riis pushed his way in through the doorway and blinked as his eyes got used to the gloom. It was crowded with workers and whores, but no soldiers, he noticed. He looked around for Evan Broglanh.

  A whore in a shabby red dress and headscarf brushed up against him, grabbing his belt. “Take me out back, darling?” she leered at him. Riis saw with distaste she was old enough to be his mother and that under the spangled scarf her hair was grey. He shook his head.

  But when she nuzzled his ear her voice was metal. She said, “Follow me, you fool.”

  He trailed after her through a narrow corridor and out into a foetid passage.

  “Evan told me about you,” the woman said, turning. “He didn’t tell me you’re a simpleton.” She was tall for a woman, middle-aged, mattock-faced and thin as a sword. Her eyes were pale and protuberant. He disliked her instantly.

  “I didn’t know who I was meeting,” he answered feebly.

  “You know now,” she replied. “You do know, don’t you?” She stared at him impatiently, like some disagreeable tutor, until he answered, “Yes, I know.”

  “You took an oath, as a young soldier, one you have not fulfilled,” she said.

  He was silent. He had never spoken of this to anyone except his brother.

  “Yes, I know all about it,” she said impatiently. “Five boys swore to kill the emperor thirty years ago. Now there are just three left and the task is within their reach. Arish and Evan have chosen their part. But we need someone already in the palace.” And she outlined to him the plan of invasion and assassination.

  “You want me as a doorman,” he said, frowning, after she’d finished, “to let enemy troops in, and to stand by and applaud as Arish kills him. I’ll do it myself.”