The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

The one named Nalhent turned and ran. Another Queensman called after him. All the Queensmen hesitated, looked at the corridor and down at the dead on the floor and, wildly, at each other. Then they too ran. The lizard-men turned as well, just long enough for the Queensguards to lunge and stab. “Go!” the chef cried to one of his companions who had reached the edge of the fighting. He fled, weaving so that none of the attackers would be able to throw a knife with any accuracy, and the lizard-man who tried to follow was cut down by an arrow.

  After they had killed the two remaining guards, the lizard-men pounded down the hallway in the direction the escaped one had taken—but though their strides were long and desperate, they did not find him.

  The Queenswood was on fire. The child had smelled and heard it even before he crawled over the body of the dead Queensguard at the palace’s western entrance. The fire had reached the top branches of a few of the smaller trees; the larger ones stood above the shower of sparks, as yet untouched. The child coughed and tried not to breathe too deeply, though this was very difficult, since he was running. He dodged among the trunks, weaving, turning, not thinking about where he was going. When he stumbled into a clear space among the tallest trees, he sat down heavily and sobbed. He tasted smoke at the back of his throat and wondered whether his tears would be black. He lay down as he cried. The earth was soft with the moss and springy spreading plants that had grown after the rains.

  He must have slept. When he sat up, the web of leaves above him was ablaze. He swore and scrambled to his feet. How could he have slept when he had to do something? When he had to tell someone about the men? He stood very still. A picture was forming, slow but clear, and he knew what it was, where he had to go. He ran again, very fast, through spiralling, flaming leaves.

  He was a very good climber, even now that he was twelve and his legs and arms were longer and clumsier. He found the base of the tower that jutted into the Queenswood and pulled himself up against its stones. This was one of the older towers; the stones were rougher, the surface less sheer than those of the newer towers. He scampered up, slipped, continued more slowly. He thought briefly that he could have tried entering the tower from within the palace—but he kept climbing. He had seen the silent spread of men among the houses; they would be inside the palace too, maybe posted at its tower doors in place of the Queensguards they had killed. Better to make this attempt from the outside.

  Below him, wood shrieked and cracked. The fire was spreading; he heard its roar increasing, like the sound of a great beast goaded into rage. He rested with his cheek against stone that was still cool, and closed his eyes. He knew that he could not look down, especially now, when the flames might blind or frighten him. Up, up, up, rest; repeat. At some point his knife fell from between his numb lips—but that was fine; he was nearly at the first window, and in any case, what had he really expected to do with a knife?

  He had often examined this tower in daylight, thinking he might climb it one day when he had nothing else to do. The lowest window was barred; the one above it was not. When he reached it, he saw shorn metal that must once have been bars. The strangest thoughts flitted through his head: Did someone escape from here once? Why hasn’t anyone ever noticed and replaced the bars? Did someone know I would need to climb up here someday?“The boy will save us all—make sure to leave him a way in. . . .”

  He dropped to the landing beneath the window and lay there, shuddering and sweat-sodden. He did not allow himself much rest; he dragged himself up through the darkness, stair by stair, like a wounded dog. His dog-boy whimpering sounded odd, probably because he could not feel himself making this noise. He wanted to sleep again. The darkness tugged at his eyelids and his head—but he shook it off and began to count the steps. He was at eighty-four when he reached for the next step and found only empty space. He had to stand up now. And after he did that, he would need even more strength. He lay and imagined that he was the Summer Archer, that each of the points of his body was actually a star. He was massive and powerful, spread above the eastern horizon, each of his movements a rumble.

  He reached for the rope and felt it, though he did not open his eyes to look at it: rope as thick as both his legs together—but with his new star-arms he would have no trouble holding on. He pulled it in against him, wrapped himself around it. He would fly, in this darkness that was his open sky.

  The boy swung himself off the wooden platform. At first he simply hung, swaying slightly. He shouted once—the Archer’s bellow, like thunder—and bent his body violently back and forth, until he and the rope were climbing up and plunging down together. Somewhere far above him, the Queensbell began to toll.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I must still be sleeping, Ladhra thought. I’m sleeping and dreaming of him. But as she looked at Leish, she felt her eyes blinking and dry as they always were whenever she woke too soon. And his face, above the lantern he held, was not as she would have dreamed it. His rounded lips were drawn back, but not in a smile; one of his eyes was closed. At first she thought he was winking at her—but she stirred on her bed, focused her own gaze more clearly, and saw that his eyelid was swollen shut and that there was a long, glistening line of blood on his cheek. She rolled onto her side and said his name in a hoarse, just-woken voice. He lowered his head and she spoke his name again more loudly—and Baldhron stepped out from behind him.

  “My lady,” Baldhron said as she scrambled to bury herself in bedclothes. Her mother’s guards had taken away her dagger when they locked her in here. Locked her in—she glanced at the open door. “Ladhra.” She turned back to him, attempting to scowl as if this were only another encounter in the Queenswood or in the sunlit space of a corridor.

  “How did you get in?” she asked, gripping the sheet in both hands so that he would not see their trembling.

  He lifted one shoulder in a shrug that would have seemed lazy if his eyes had not been so steady and bright. “I killed the guards,” he said, “and took the key.”

  She laughed—but then she looked again at Leish, who was bleeding and whose one open eye was white-wide, and her laughter withered.

  “I thought,” Baldhron went on, “that you might wish to see your lover.” There was a vein pulsing on the left side of his forehead; she watched it and did not speak. Perhaps if she waited, kept him here long enough, a guard would pass by and see the untended door and creep up the stairs, dagger at the ready. . . .

  “Go,” Baldhron said in the yllosh language, shoving Leish forward. “Go to her.” Leish came to a stumbling halt about five paces from the bed. Baldhron walked to him, wrenched the swinging lantern from his hand, forced this hand up so that it seemed to be reaching for Ladhra. “Go. Touch her.”

  Leish smiled at her. I know his smile now, she thought, and her eyes stung with half-risen tears. He smiled at her and did not move.

  “Very well,” Baldhron said. He continued in the Queenstongue, “Stand back, in that case.” He pushed Leish over to the wall across from the bed, pressed first one then the other of his arms against the hanging tapestry there. He looks like a tree, Ladhra thought, and I’ll run for the door—but Baldhron had turned to her again, and the distance to the door was so great, so open, and the stairs would be dark. . . .

  Baldhron set the lantern on the floor. “My men have taken the palace. We’ve cut our way in this far and have only the final ring to breach. I thought I might bring you with me to witness this. I thought your mother might want to see you before she dies.” He paused, nudged the lantern forward with his foot. “I watched my mother die, you know,” he went on. “Your mother killed her. I was eight, and I saw my mother die.”

  Ladhra had to scoff; it was what she would have done if he had cornered her beneath the trees. “I always knew you were addle-brained,” she said. Normal; everything normal, the same—night that was really day, guards down the hall, approaching. “But you’re obviously entirely mad. I pity you more now than I did.”

  Baldhron t
ook several long strides toward her. She held herself as tall as she could, watched him check and smile very slowly. “Mad?” he said. “No.” She saw a dagger in his hand where there had not been one before, and his arm drawn back, his body twisting round to throw. She screamed as the dagger flew. She screamed, and screamed again, until she knew that there would be no footsteps on the stairs.

  Leish felt no pain, at first. He heard Ladhra scream and saw her eyes go to his right hand, so he too looked at his right hand (a strange, awkward look, since his right eye was sealed shut). He was surprised to see a knife lodged in the web between his first and second fingers. He had not seen Baldhron throw; he had decided he would not look away from Ladhra. He could hear an ending in the song of the palace and the city, and he would not let his eyes leave her face. Except that she screamed and he followed her terrified gaze and saw the knife—and in the heartbeat it took to do so, pain seared up along his inner arm and into his chest. He tugged his right hand down and felt a tearing, but the knife was sunk firmly into his flesh and the thick wool of the tapestry behind him.

  This pain made him forget his eye and his cheek, which Baldhron had hammered with his fist when he had first come to Leish’s prison chamber. “Mallesh is waiting for us,” Baldhron had said. “The attack has begun and it’s time for you to join us.” But Leish had seen the tremors in Baldhron’s lips and jaw and hands, and he had shaken his head.

  “I will await my brother here,” he had said, “since I am too weak to fight.”

  So Baldhron—tall enough to do so—had struck him in the face and thrust the point of a knife against the hollow of his throat and hissed, “You come with me. Walk ahead. Turn—now.”

  Baldhron had not lied about the attack, Leish soon saw. Every palace door they passed was flanked by dead Queensguards. Some selkesh as well; Leish looked at them and heard the song of Nasranesh, sudden and piercing as a wail. He remembered his dreams of blood, and Mallesh atop the gathering pool stone, and the boats and weapons piled along the shore. He saw these fallen selkesh and wanted to sing his grief against their skin—but Baldhron nudged him on with his knife, and Leish walked past them all.

  Occasionally they heard cries, from around corners or behind walls. Each time, Baldhron turned Leish and forced him in another direction. “So it’s not just my brother you’re avoiding,” Leish said the third time this happened. Baldhron spat at him, then held Leish’s wrists together behind his back so that he would not be able to wipe his neck dry.

  They had passed through countless doors into countless hallways when Baldhron paused. This particular corridor was empty and lantern-lit, unlike the others, which had been dark and littered with bodies. Baldhron drew in several deep, slow breaths and prodded Leish around a turn.

  One of the two Queensguards standing outside an ornately carved door had called out sharply. Baldhron had smiled and bowed his head to them, and Leish had seen them relax very slightly.

  “Help me,” Leish had said loudly in the yllosh language, but they did not understand. They frowned and looked again at Baldhron, who spoke to them in a tone of restrained urgency. He gestured at Leish several times and mimed some actions: a lunge, a warded blow. Leish imagined him saying, “This man is the Queen’s prisoner, and he has escaped. He tried to attack me, but I fought him off.” Leish felt the trickle of blood beside his swollen eye and wanted to laugh at his own helplessness. Baldhron talked on. Leish heard him say the Queen’s name. They were directly in front of the Queensguards now. One of them began to speak, but stopped when Baldhron held up a hand. He said a few words, and he and the Queensguard stepped away from the door. Before Leish could move, the woman’s throat was cut and the dagger was hissing past him, and the other guard cried out and slumped at his feet.

  And now the same dagger was in him. He forced his gaze away from it, to Ladhra, who was still sitting in bed clutching the bedclothes over her drawn-up knees. The pain in his hand and the tortured singing in his head nearly blinded him—but he held her in his vision and smiled so that she, at least, might find a place of quiet. He would touch her hair with his uninjured hand; he would draw it down to cradle her head, where it curved to meet her neck. He would tell her of the songs he heard, all of them, even the ones that were now being torn thread by thread and remade in patterns that horrified him.

  Baldhron’s head was moving, Leish noticed, back and forth, tracing the line from Ladhra’s eyes to Leish’s. Seeing the quiet? Baldhron howled—an animal sound, or a wind trapped among rocks—and drew back his arm again, and a second dagger sank into Leish. Into his other hand, which was still splayed where Baldhron had set it against the tapestry. The middle web: the largest and most fleshy. This time Leish made no sound, just closed his eyes and sang a high, steady note inside his head. When he could breathe around the new pain, he opened his eyes.

  Baldhron’s face was so close to his that he could smell the sourness of his breath. “Where now?” he murmured, jerking the dagger out of Leish’s right hand. “Hmm? Where next, fish-man? Any gills under that cloth, I wonder? Or perhaps I should ask her that.” He took three steps back—enough for Leish to see past him. Ladhra rising, the bedclothes falling away from her body. Rising and slipping off her bed, smiling at him as if she would simply cross the floor and touch him. Her bare feet were silent on the flagstones. She took two paces, paused; then she ran.

  Baldhron stumbled sideways as she launched herself onto his back. She scrabbled at his face; she wound her legs around his waist and forced his head back. Leish only watched for a moment. He reached over to pull the dagger from his left hand—but he suddenly felt feverishly hot and dizzy, and his fingers groped in vain for the knife that seemed to be receding into a distance of heaving waves and bending trees. He heard a dull, heavy sound and looked slowly around. Baldhron was lifting Ladhra off the floor. She flailed and writhed but still he held her. She was falling backward onto the bed, and he was falling onto her, and their limbs were weaving and thrusting too quickly. Leish looked back at his hand and reached again, and this time his fingers closed around metal.

  He tugged once, twice. The knife came free and he slid down the wall, sickness rising in his throat. He saw his blood, remembered the selkesh blood he had seen in this place, and he imagined that he heard it as another song, surging east toward the sea. He swallowed and struggled to his knees. He heard a low, rapid grunting and got one foot flat on the floor. Then he heard another sound.

  It was music. One note only, but still music, swelling, shuddering against all the stones. It boomed again and again, and in the silence that came between, Leish heard shouting, distant but growing closer. He raised his head and shoulders and saw Baldhron crouching on the bed with his own head up. Two more booms. Baldhron cried out and sprang to the floor. Leish watched him run. His footsteps faded as Leish dragged himself over to the bed.

  Ladhra’s face was turned to the wall. He saw the tangle of her hair, followed its darkness down to the twist of her spine and hips. In the lantern-glow her spreading blood seemed to twist as well, as if it lived. He sat down and lifted his hand, saw his own blood coursing down the inside of his arm. He touched her with the fingers of his right hand, which was no longer bleeding much. He touched her hair, and the small, still place between her lips. He lowered himself down beside her and hummed a bit against her skin.

  “They were too young for the wild country,” Galha said. She was pacing in front of her open window, in and out of the moonlight that lay upon the air, and along the floor. “I should have known they would lose their nerve. When did our people in Blenniquant City confirm this uprising?”

  Malhan looked briefly down at the parchment on his lap. “The letter is dated two weeks ago. There will have been rumours circulating before that.” He gestured at the large cushion beside his. “It’s late—at least sit for a moment. Let your body think it’s resting.”

  “There’s flyfever in that region, isn’t there?” Galha’s blue- and green
-stitched sleeping robe tangled between her calves as she turned. She shook the cloth free with a flick of her wrist. “Caltran will find someone in Blenniquant City who has the disease. I’ll have this person taken to the camp. You’ll have to research the symptoms, make sure the account of their illness is exact and vivid. Queensfolk are not overly familiar with the details of such fatal diseases.”

  Malhan said, “Dearest, do you not think we should bring the leader, at least, back to Luhr? We might discover why this thing happened.”

  “It happened,” the Queen said, coming to a halt in front of Malhan so that he had to crane to see her face, “because they were not fit to do my work, or to be remembered for it. Because they were too young. By the First, too young, untried, all of them—how could I have sent them there?” She bent her chin to her chest. Her eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks. Malhan held up a hand and she took it, let him pull her gently down to the cushion.

  “It’s late,” he said again. “There’s nothing to be written tonight.”

  “Except,” she said, lifting her head, “the letter to Caltran, about the fever. . . .”

  “Tomorrow.” He tightened his grip on her hand and felt an answering pressure from her fingers. She smiled and sighed, and her shoulders relaxed, very slightly.

  “You worry about me too much,” she said, and he said, “Of course I do,” and leaned over toward the single candle that was standing beside them on its golden filigree stand.

  As he pursed his lips to blow, running footsteps and raised voices filled the staircase beyond the tower door. Galha rose more quickly than he did; he had barely taken his place behind her when the door crashed open.

  “What has possessed you,” the Queen began, “to enter here without—”

  “My Queen,” one of the four guards said, his voice cracking, “please forgive us—but the palace is under attack. Shandhren here has seen them, outside the kitchen and then too as he was running to find you. . . .”