Bending as low as he could without groaning, he studied the forlorn weapon lying on the ground. The wooden haft had once been polished to the point of smoothness, but this was no parade weapon straight from a cobwebbed arsenal. The polish had been worn down by long use until the wood was dull. He ran his eyes along the length of the weapon to the massive blade, a wicked-looking axe head with a recurved tip. Quatrefoil holes had been drilled through the blade to lighten it. It was not a barbarian weapon-it was too well made, perhaps even dwarven in manufacture. The thing that worried him the most was that the blade shone with luster. There was not a spot of rust on it. Someone had maintained the weapon with care. And recently. This was no long-lost souvenir of some ancient battle.
Croy closed his eyes and tried not to panic. Then he stood up, opened his eyes again, and hurried as much as he could to catch up with Bethane. She had walked twenty feet in the time it took him to inspect the poleaxe.
Together they walked another half mile before the sun set. They made camp in the shelter of some trees, with a rock wall behind them to lean against. He balanced caution against the threat of freezing to death and made them a small fire, and they sat back-to-back quite close to it, greedy for its warmth.
Bethane picked at the rags on her feet, perhaps for lack of anything better to do. Croy sharpened Ghostcutter, rhythmically drawing his whetstone along the iron half of the blade, letting it slide free at the point, bringing it back down toward the hilt.
Between the sound of his whetstone and the crackling of the fire, he expected to hear nothing else. Yet when a twig snapped somewhere out in the darkness, every muscle in his body jumped.
Bethane noticed his alarm, but she had learned over many days of travel not to react or ask questions. He held his left hand low, palm toward the ground, to tell her to hide herself and be still. She did as she was ordered, whether or not she was his queen.
Rising stiffly, Croy stepped away from the fire until his eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond. He could see little of the rocks around him-there was no moon and clouds hid the stars. A little light, just a dim glow, outlined the tops of the hills, so he looked up there-and saw it.
A man sitting a horse. Very far away. Too far away to be the source of the noise he’d heard. So there were more than one of them out there.
He hurried back to the camp and kicked out the fire. Bethane had taken shelter under an overhanging rock. The rock hung so close to the ground she’d had to cram herself inside. Croy shoved himself in after her, his greater bulk making it difficult. He ignored the way the rock scraped at his back and shoulders and squeezed himself inside.
In the last embers of the fire he saw Bethane’s eyes, and the fear there. It seemed she was still capable of feeling something, then, if only terror. He placed a finger to his lips, and she nodded in response.
He heard no more sounds that night. Whoever had come looking for them in the dark didn’t find them-or didn’t think the game worth dragging them out of the rock. Croy spent every moment of the night watching anyway, watching and listening, his ears straining to pick up the slightest noise.
Eventually gray light streamed along the world outside their hiding place and dawn lightened the sky.
Though they had slept not at all and Croy’s body had become as solid as the stone around him, he managed to haul himself out of the crevice and then pull Bethane out after him. They had nothing with which to break their fast, so they just started walking again.
Less than an hour later Croy saw the rider once more. This time he made no attempt to conceal himself-standing at the top of a hill, he was hard to miss. The other pursuers, however, were harder to find, though he could hear them moving through the trees.
They could be hillmen, the notorious savages of these untamed rocks. They could be bandits or deserters or highwaymen from Skrae. They could be barbarians. Croy had no way to tell.
Bethane looked at him with eyes she kept barely under control.
He nodded, and pointed at the trail ahead of them. She kept walking.
He drew Ghostcutter from its sheath and held it close to his leg. His one comfort just then was that he knew exactly what to do. If the rider’s men attacked, he would try to fight them off. If there were too many of them, though…
For one of royal blood like Bethane, there were fates worse than death. He could not let her be captured. If it came to that, if honor left him no other choice He thought he could do it.
Cythera, he prayed, for he could think of no words the Lady would like to hear. Cythera, forgive all my sins. Remember me fondly. I did my best.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
The whispers became murmurs. The murmurs became disgusted looks in the midst of the camp. Morget said nothing, but made certain every man of the horde knew he was willing to listen.
And still, no word came from inside the walls of Ness.
A warrior came to him from one of the lesser clans, a weakling of a man who should have been weeded out long ago. His name was Horfnung, and he was known far and wide for being a thrall to his wife. Still, he had the courage to speak to Morget, man-to-man. Morget led him inside his tent and together they sat on stools and shared the warmth of his charcoal stove. “The snow lies on the ground today, and does not melt,” Horfnung said.
“I saw it,” Morget told him. He wanted to smack the man with the backside of his hand for wasting his time, but instead he nodded sagely, as if this were some grand observation.
“This morning I went to make water, and by the time I was done, my piss had frozen on the ground,” Horfnung went on.
If the man did not get to his point soon, he would gut him.
“Every day we throw rocks over this wall, like bad neighbors throwing garbage over a fence,” the little man said. “Inside the city, they sleep in warm beds, and enjoy their women. I want a bed.” Horfnung smiled, as men do who are about to make a joke they think hilarious. “I want to enjoy their women.”
“Morg, my father-ah, and chieftain of us all,” Morget said, very slowly, “has decreed the city must not be harmed. So we can enjoy it more when it is ours.”
“Every day he tells us this. And nothing changes. Meanwhile, an army camps not thirty miles away. An army we could walk over with bare feet. Morg, your father, leaves them in peace.”
“Such is his decision. Some, in the past,” Morget said, “have called him Morg the Wise.”
“Some now call him Morg the Merciful,” Horfnung said, spitting out the insult.
Morget nodded sagely again. “Who do you speak for?” he asked.
“Only myself,” Horfnung admitted.
“Ah. Very good. I am glad to offer you the hospitality of my tent,” he said, and stood up. Horfnung was smart enough, at least, to rise as well, and take his leave.
At the flap of the tent, however, Horfnung stopped a moment. “There are many others who would say the same things.”
“Let them come to me and speak, for there is no harm in it. Now-get out of my tent. You’re letting in the cold,” Morget said, and took a step toward the flap.
Horfnung all but ran away.
“Spittle of a man,” Morget cursed when he was gone.
Balint raised her head from where she lay on a pile of furs in the corner. “That almost sounded like a real insult,” she said. “You must be learning from me.”
Morget snarled. “I would wipe my arse with his kind if-”
“If you didn’t need their support,” the dwarf said. “Aye, barbarian, you can’t do this thing alone. If you’re still committed to doing it at all. You need to make up your mind, you know. A man sitting on a fence too long gets a post up his backside.”
But Morget had already decided. Horfnung had spoken true when he’d said many others thought the same as he. Morget had heard similar veiled threats from a hundred men already, and knew there would be no question when he made his move. Morg’s plan for taking the city wasn’t working fast enough. The barbarians were not famous for their patien
ce. “I’ll go and make the challenge now, if you like, little one.” He reached for his axe.
“Don’t you dare. If you get cut down, they’ll make me one of their thralls. I’ll have to carry rocks and sharpen weapons for the rest of my life,” Balint said. “I could probably fuck my way out of thralldom in a month, of course, but it would be a very smelly, very sore month. No-you need to do this the classical way. In the middle of the night when no one’s looking.”
Morget scowled. He would have preferred to kill his father in broad daylight. But he supposed she had a point. Morg cheated-he was famous for it. Perhaps it was time to see how he felt when someone broke the rules on him.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
The rocks kept coming, though not as frequently as when the bombardment began. Most of the missiles struck Castle Hill-sticking up above the level of the wall, it made an excellent target-and did little harm. The constant fear of attack might actually have helped Malden a little, since it kept people off the streets.
On top of everything else-starvation, greedy thieves, a horde of barbarians-now he had to worry that the city would be overrun from within, by a mob of zealots.
The cry for blood sacrifice had been taken up all over the city. His thieves and whores seemed mostly immune, but the honest folk of Ness had given themselves over to religious mania. Every day more people claimed that if the proper sacrifices were made at the Godstone, the barbarians would have no choice but to pack up and leave. Conversely, a rumor started making the rounds that failure to appease the Bloodgod would cause the city wall to collapse.
That was not based entirely on conjecture. Malden had heard a rumor when he as a child-grisly stories being a favorite topic of conversation for street urchins-that when Juring Tarness built the wall eight hundred years ago, he had sacrificed his three chief architects to Sadu and mixed their blood with the mortar that held the bricks together. He had thereby made the wall impenetrable to mortal weapons. In eight centuries that theory had never been tested. Now it seemed an article of faith that the shield of blood must be replenished in time of need.
On his daily patrol of the city, Malden started finding the carcasses of animals lying before the Godstone. He knew better than to forbid it-even though the city desperately needed the meat. The common people of Ness, it seemed, would rather starve than risk the eternal punishment of their god. The looming altar had been ritually desecrated back when the Burgraves decided to outlaw the priesthood of Sadu, but it seemed the stone had been rededicated to the Bloodgod. For the first time in centuries it was being used for its original purpose.
The old religion had never died. It had slept for a while, but now was waking up again, and bringing with it all the old madness. Sadu called out for blood, and the people were afraid enough to answer that demand.
He went to Cutbill to ask for advice. “This morning,” Malden said, when he was seated comfortably by the ex-guildmaster’s fire, “a deputation came to me. Five men who said they wished to be ordained as priests of the Bloodgod.”
“Interesting. They think you have the power to bless them now?”
Malden raised his hands in bafflement. “They treated me like a prophet, with much deference. And it’s not as if anyone else has that right. There hasn’t been a true priest of Sadu in how long? A century?”
“Longer than that,” Cutbill told him. “Royal decree outlawed that priesthood three hundred years ago, and the Burgrave of Ness reinforced the ban a few dozen years later. And for good reason.”
Malden nodded. The priests of Sadu had once performed human sacrifices to appease their god. Some of them had not been above kidnapping and murder to make sure of a steady flow of blood-since volunteers had always been hard to come by. It had not been unheard of for one of Sadu’s priests to work as an assassin, taking money from clients and blood from victims. That was the priesthood Prestwicke tried to revive. The men who had come to Malden wanted a slightly more orthodox office to be set up, but still, they wanted the right to sacrifice animals and even humans at the Godstone. “I made them swear they wouldn’t kill anyone. But that wasn’t what they were really after. They said they would need some kind of official position in order to convince the people they truly were agents of the Bloodgod.”
“Official position? So they wanted more than just your blessing. They wanted to be part of your government.”
“They wanted me to put them in charge of distributing foodstuffs.”
“Ah. So they wanted to be the ones to eat first.”
“Everyone’s hungry. I told them as much-that I couldn’t afford preferential treatment for any of my citizens. They seemed offended. I told them I thought the whole point of Sadu-the only reason the poor still worship Him-was that every man was equal in His sight. That we all had to die and be judged, and that no social station made a man less blameworthy than his neighbor. That made them leave in a huff. But they warned me as they went. With or without my sanction, the priesthood will be renewed. And the sacrifices will start again.”
“You can hardly complain about their faith now,” Cutbill told him without sympathy. “Since it was that belief that raised you to the heights of fame in the first place.”
The former guildmaster had a point, of course. Yet it was enough to make Malden wish he’d forced the priest of the Lady to stay in Ness. The Book of the Lady forbade blood sacrifice in no uncertain terms. The laws of Skrae were founded on that book and the practice had been eliminated everywhere in the kingdom. Yet now those laws were ignored-statutes decreed by a dead king, issued from a fortress far away, impossible now to enforce. Malden knew that in the absence of such laws it was just a matter of time before he found one of his citizens at the base of the Godstone, throat slit in just the right manner. The priest of the Lady might at least have preached to the people about why human sacrifice was wrong. Now it felt as if no one remained who held that particular view-no one except himself.
If he was going to fight religion, he decided, he would need help from the occult. As soon as his duties allowed it, he headed down to the Isle of Horses. Coruth had promised him all kinds of assistance, but since the siege began, the witch hadn’t so much as showed herself in the city. He borrowed a boat at the Ditchside Stair in Eastpool (the Lord Mayor didn’t have to pay a security deposit) and rowed himself over to the forbidding island just as the sun hit the top of the wall.
Climbing up onto the withered grass on the isle’s shore, he braced himself for another attack by phantom horses. It didn’t come. There was a light burning in Coruth’s shack but no one approached him or welcomed him. He started walking slowly toward the door, expecting some nasty surprise, when he heard a shriek from within.
It sounded like Cythera. He broke into a run.
Coruth met him at the door. She shoved it open with one skeletal hand and beckoned him to follow her. “You’re late,” she said, as if they’d had an appointment.
Malden had no time to wonder what she meant. He was too busy being horrified. Cythera lay on a pallet in the front room, naked save for a sheet that covered only one leg. It looked like she’d thrown it off her in the convulsions of some terrifying dream. Her skin was pale and clammy and slick with some foul-smelling unguent. Her eyes were wide-open, but when she blinked he saw that arcane symbols had been painted on her eyelids.
“The Guardian of the Gate!” she screamed. “He sees right through me! He judges me!”
Malden was about to demand what was going on, then stopped himself. He knew. This was Cythera’s initiation. The ceremony that would transform her into a witch. He knew there were rules about such things-ironclad laws that no man dared break. If he spoke at the wrong time, the consequences could be dire.
Coruth stared at him with one bloodshot eye. The old witch looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Normally she stood tall and erect, but now she was as stooped and grotesque as-well, as a witch in an old woodblock illustration. Had she sprouted a wart on her nose and clutched a broom, she might have been a c
aricature of her profession.
“Here,” she said, and shoved a dagger at him. He took it, for the same reason he’d kept silent so far. The weapon was a thin-bladed knife wholly without ornament, and seemed unfit for ceremonial purposes. Its point looked very sharp.
“What do I do with it?” Malden asked.
“Put the point here,” Coruth said, tapping a point just left of Cythera’s sternum. “If I give you the signal, drive it straight into her heart.”
“I can’t do that,” Malden said. “Not-Not to her.”
“Worried about losing your swiving partner?” Coruth said, and her mouth curled into a wicked smile. “All good things should come to an end, boy. Only true evil is eternal. It’s got no bottom.”
Malden didn’t know what to make of that. “My love for her is true.”
“Every boy in the history of fucking has said as much. And they were all honest, at least at the moment they said it. You think I don’t understand love? You think I never had a leman? I had to give all that up to become a witch, and I did it, because Skrae needed me. Cythera will make the same sacrifice, because the times require it.”
“Surely there’s another way-she could renounce magic and-”
“Stop your blathering, boy. Time is tight. Put the point where I showed you.”
“I can’t kill her!”
“Unless she’s a bigger fool than I think, you won’t have to,” Coruth told him. “Now do as you’re told! Much more than you know depends on it.”
Malden bit his lips for a moment, but in the end he did as he was asked. He made sure to touch the point so lightly to Cythera’s skin that she would barely feel it.
Not that she was likely to feel much. Her eyes were unfocused and her pupils changed size rapidly as he watched. Cythera was looking at things invisible, perhaps things very, very far away.
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