by Tad Williams
“So it’s true, then. Is there time to stop it? Where is King Olin now?”
Ludis looked up, actually surprised. “By Hiliometes’ beard, why should we stop it? What can a milk-skinned northerner like that mean to you?”
“He is a king! Not to mention that he is an honorable man. Pity I cannot say the same of Hierosol’s ruler.”
Ludis stared at him malevolently. Count Perivos was suddenly aware of the fact that he was surrounded by troops who owed him no personal loyalty, but who received their pay in the lord protector’s name each month. “You climb far out on a thin branch,” Ludis said at last.
“But what do you gain by this? Why give an innocent man over to the cruelties of that...that monster, Sulepis?”
Ludis laughed harshly but turned away, as though still not entirely comfortable meeting the count’s eyes. “Who wears the crown here, Akuanis? Your reputation as a siege engineer gives you no right to question me. I protect what I must protect...”
He broke off at the sound of shouting. A soldier wearing the crest of the Esterian Home Guard shoved his way through Drakava’s Golden Enomote and threw himself down on the mosaic in front of the throne. “Lord Protector,” he cried, “the Xixies have come over the wall below Fountain Gate! We’re holding them in the temple yard at the foot of Citadel Hill, but we have only a small troop and won’t be able to hold them long. Lord Kelofas begs you to send help.”
Akuanis strode forward, all thoughts of Olin Eddon blasted from his mind. The temple yard was only a couple of miles from the townhouse where his wife and children waited in what they thought was safety—they and thousands more innocents would be overrun in a matter of hours if the Fountain Gate defenses collapsed. “Give me some of these men,” he demanded. “Let me go and hit Sulepis in the teeth now—this moment! You have a thousand around this building, but they will be like straws in a gale if we don’t keep the autarch out.”
For a moment Drakava hesitated, but then an odd look stole across his face. “Yes, take them,” he said. “Leave me two pentecounts to defend the treasury and the throne.”
After all the harsh words, Count Perivos was astonished that the lord protector would give up his troops so easily, but he had no time to wonder. He dropped to his knee and touched his head to the floor—bowing not to Ludis, he told himself, but to all the Hierosoline kings and queens, emperors and empresses, who had sat on the great green throne before him—then rose and hurried off to the taksiarch of the men encamped around the treasury. He could only pray that the engineers and workers he had left behind in the Empress Gardens had almost finished the wall, or holding the wall at Fountain Gate would mean nothing.
“Make us proud, Count Perivos,” shouted Ludis as Akuanis and the taksiarch got the men into fast-march formation. The lord protector almost sounded as though he were enjoying some theatrical spectacle. “All of Hierosol will be watching you!”
Eril was so furious with his young mistress that at first he wouldn’t even speak to her, but only followed with his sword nearly dragging in the dust as they set out from the Sivedan temple toward the Citadel Hill. As they climbed upward on the spiraling road, breasting a great tide of folk hurrying the opposite way, he finally found his tongue.
“You have no right to do this, Kuraion! We will be killed. Just because I am a servant doesn’t mean I should die for nothing.”
She was surprised by his vehemence and his selfishness. “I couldn’t do it unless someone came with me.” That seemed obvious to her and it should have to him as well, now that he’d been given time to digest it. What did he want, an apology? “The poor king needs our help—he’s a king, Eril.” The servant gave her a look that in different circumstances she would have reported to her mother. Pelaya was shocked—old Eril, silly old Eril, acting as though he hated her!
“Anyway,” she said, a little flustered. “It won’t take long. We’ll be back before supper. And you’ll be able to tell the gods you did a good deed when you say your prayers tonight.”
Judging by the noise he made in reply, Eril did not seem to find much consolation in the thought.
Although there were still many people on the grounds of the palace and in the stronghold, mostly servants and soldiers, it quickly became clear to Pelaya that Olin Eddon wasn’t one of them. His cell was empty, the door standing open.
“But where is he?” she asked. She had come so far and taken so many risks for nothing!
“Gone, Mistress,” said one of the soldiers who had gathered to watch this unusual performance. “The lord protector had him moved somewhere.”
“Where? Tell me, please!” She brandished her forged letter. “My father is Count Perivos!”
“We know, Mistress,” said the soldier. “But we still can’t tell you because we don’t know. The lord protector’s Rams took him somewhere. You’ll have to find out from him.”
“You talk too much,” another soldier told him. “She shouldn’t be here—it’s dangerous. Can you imagine anything happens? It’ll be our heads on the block, won’t it?”
She led Eril out of the stronghold and across Echoing Mall toward Kossope House, ignoring his complaints. If the servants were still in their dormitories, especially the darkhaired laundry girl, perhaps they’d know where Olin was. Servants, Pelaya had discovered, usually knew everything important that happened in a great house.
As the echoes of distant cannon echoed along the colonnade, Pelaya saw that whether the laundry women were here or not, many other servants had remained, although they did not look very happy. In fact, many of them seemed to glare at her as though it were somehow her fault they’d been left behind. She was glad Eril had his sword. Pelaya could almost imagine these abandoned servants, if left here long enough, turning entirely wild, like the dogs that roamed the city midden heaps and cemeteries after dark.
“The one I want to talk to is in here,” Pelaya said, pointing toward the large building on the far side of the palace complex. “Poor thing, she has such a long way to walk each day.”
Eril muttered something but Pelaya could not make it out.
When they reached the dormitory they found that the residents were guarding it themselves: three strong-looking young women with laundry-poles stood before the door, and they gave Eril a very stern look before letting him accompany Pelaya inside.
To her delight and relief they found the laundry girl almost immediately, sitting morosely on her bed as though waiting for a cannonball to crash through the roof and kill her. To Pelaya’s shock, the dark-haired girl not only wasn’t pleased to have a highborn visitor, she seemed frightened of Eril. “Follows me!” she said, pointing. “He follows!”
Eril scowled. “She never saw me, Kuraion. I’m sure she didn’t. Someone told her.”
“He followed you because I needed to know where you lived,” Pelaya said gently. “He’s my servant. I had to find you quietly, when King Olin wanted to speak to you. Now, where is Olin? Do you know? He’s been taken out of the stronghold.”
The girl looked at her in blank misery, as if Olin’s whereabouts were of no particular interest compared to her own problems, whatever those might be. Pelaya scowled. How could she converse usefully with a laundry maid who could barely speak her language? “I need to find him. Find him. I’m looking for him.”
The girl’s face changed—something like hope flowered. “Help find?”
“Yes!” Finally, sense had been made. “Yes, help find.”
The girl jumped up and took Pelaya’s hand, shocking the count’s daughter more than a little, but before she could protest she was being dragged across the dormitory. It was not Olin that the brown-haired girl led Pelaya to, but another laundrywoman, a friendly, round-featured girl named Yazi who seemed meant to translate. The new girl’s command of Hierosoline was not much better, but after many stops and starts it finally became clear that the brown-haired girl hadn’t agreed to help find Olin, she herself wanted help finding her mute brother, who had been missing since the middle o
f the night.
“He not go,” she said over and over, but clearly he had.
“No, we have to find Olin, King Olin,” Pelaya told her. “I’ll ask my father to send someone to help you find your brother.”
The Xandian girl looked shocked, as though she could not have imagined anyone would say no to her request.
“Haven’t we had enough of this, Kuraion?” said Eril. “You have dragged me across the city for nothing, risking both our lives. Are we now going to have to search for a runaway child as well?”
“No, of course not, but...” Before Pelaya could finish, someone else joined the small crowd of women that had gathered around the brown-haired girl and her round friend. This new arrival was considerably older than the others, her face disfigured by what looked like a bad burn.
“Oh, thank the Great Mother!” this old woman said when she saw them all, then leaned against the wall, gasping hoarsely for breath. “I...I...was frightened I wouldn’t...find you.” She looked at Pelaya, surprised. “Your Ladyship. Forgive me.”
Pelaya just barely nodded a greeting, irritated by yet another interruption. Eril was right—they needed to get back to Landsman’s Market.
“What is it, Losa?” asked the round-faced girl, Yazi.
“The boy who can’t talk, the little brother! He is up in the counting house tower and very...” She waved her hands, trying to find the words. “Angry, sad, I don’t know. He won’t come down.”
“Pigeon?” Qinnitan sat forward. “He not...hurt?”
“I don’t think hurt, no,” said Losa. “He is just hiding in that tower, the old broken one near the seawall. I think the... cannons? I think the cannons scare him. He wants his sister.”
“We’ll come, too,” said Yazi. “He likes me.”
“No!” said Losa. “He is very scared, the boy. He almost falls when I come. Up very high. If he sees people he doesn’t know so well...” She shook her head, unable or unwilling to come up with the words for such a dire prospect. “Just his sister.”
The dark-haired laundry girl did not appear to grasp everything said, but she smiled—it did little to hide the anxiousness in her face—and said something in her own tongue to the girl Yazi. For a moment Pelaya wondered if she should go with them to help—Olin had taken an interest in this girl, after all—but she could think of too many reasons why she should not let herself get further involved.
After the old, scarred woman had led the brown-haired girl out, Pelaya began to move toward the front of Kossope House. “It’s good she’s found her brother,” she said, smiling at the other laundry women. “Family is so important. Now I must go back to mine. May the gods protect you all.”
The faces of the servants turned toward her as she reached the door. They watched her, silent as cats.
“I’m sure everything will be well,” Pelaya called to them, then had to hurry to catch up with Eril, who was already striding off in a determined way in the general direction of Landsman’s Market.
Old Losa led Qinnitan across the courtyard into a section of the palace deserted days earlier by the clerks who had worked there. It was strange to move freely through rooms she had only tiptoed through before, terrified she might break someone’s concentration and earn a whipping.
“Why would he run away like this?” Qinnitan asked, falling back into Xixian now that the young noblewoman and her servant had been left behind. “And how did you happen to find him?”
The old woman spread her palms. “I think the cannons frightened him, poor little lad. I heard him calling and found him where he was hiding, but he wouldn’t come with me.”
“Calling?” Qinnitan said, suddenly fearful again. “But he can’t speak. Are you sure it was him? My Pigeon?”
Losa shook her head in disgust. “There you go. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, all this has me in such a muddle. I heard him crying—moaning, that’s the word I meant. Here, go down this passage.”
“But you said he was in the old countinghouse tower—isn’t it that way?”
“You see? I can’t think straight at all.” Losa pointed a dirty finger at the low bulk of the almshouse where it hugged the inside of the seawall, the arched doorway of its single squat tower showing dark among the vines like a missing tooth in a bearded mouth. “Not the countinghouse tower but the almshouse tower, the old almshouse. There. He’s there, I promise you.”
Losa guided her into the shadowed antechamber of the building, which had been abandoned and all its poor relocated a few years before the siege. The mosaics on the floor were chipped and scratched so that other than the hammer-shaped object in one’s hands, it was impossible to tell which of the Trigon brothers was which. Qinnitan suddenly had the awful feeling that the old woman had tricked her for some reason, but then she saw Pigeon staring back at her from the shadows of the stairwell with his eyes wide. Her heart seemed to swell and grow light again. She rushed toward him but he did not move, although she saw his jaw pumping as though he would have much to say if given his tongue back.
“Pigeon?” Something was wrong, or at least odd: she couldn’t see his arms. As she moved closer she saw that they were behind him, as though he had something hidden for her there. A few more steps and she could see that they were tied at the wrists, and the cord looped through the latch of the heavy stairwell door. She reached him, felt him trembling with terror beneath her hands, and turned toward Losa. “What...?”
The old woman was pulling off her face.
As Qinnitan stared in terror, Losa scraped the skin off her cheeks, peeling it away in long, knubbled strips. She had straightened up, and now seemed a head taller and a great deal more solid. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t even a woman.
Qinnitan was so shocked that she lost control of her bladder; a trickle of urine ran down her legs. “Who... what...?”
“Who doesn’t matter,” the man said in perfect Xixian. Underneath the waxy remnants of false flesh his skin was nearly as pale as King Olin’s had been, but unlike Olin, this man had not a flicker of kindness in his eyes, nor a flicker of anything else: for all the expression he wore, his face might have been carved on a statue. “The autarch sent me.” He straightened up, shredding the shapeless dress he had worn to reveal man’s clothing beneath. “Don’t scream or I’ll slit the child’s throat. By the way, if you decide to sacrifice the boy and make a run for it, you should know that I can hit a rabbit with this,”—he lifted his hand and a long, sharp dagger appeared in it like a conjuror’s trick—“from a hundred paces away. I can put it in the back of your knee and you’ll never walk without a crutch, or I can put it between two of your chines and you’ll never walk again at all. But I would prefer not to carry you all the way to the Golden One, so if you do as I ask, you’ll keep your health.” He kicked away the remnants of the dress, then used the knife blade to cut away a sack he had tied to his waist with rags to give him an old woman’s sagging belly.
Qinnitan wrapped her arms around Pigeon, tried to stop him shivering. “But...” Faced with this empty, emotionless man, she could think of nothing to say. Somehow she had known this day would come—she had only hoped it would take longer than this brief couple of months. “You won’t hurt the boy?”
“I won’t hurt him if he does nothing stupid. But he is the autarch’s property, so he goes back, too.”
“He’s not property, he’s a child! He did nothing wrong.”
The merest hint of a smile stole across the stranger’s cold face, as if he had finally heard something worth his getting out of bed that morning. “Sit down and put your legs out.”
She started to argue, but he had closed the distance between them in an astonishingly swift step or two, and now stood over her, the knife only inches from her eye. She sat back on the stairs and extended her feet. He put the end of the knife gently against her throat and held it there with his thumb on the other side of her windpipe, then looped a piece of cord around one ankle. When he had tied the other end, a length of the cord about t
he distance from her wrist to elbow stretched between her two legs, leaving her neatly hobbled. He took a long dress out of the sack—it was something she had seen some of the chambermaids wearing—and dropped it over her head, then yanked her to her feet. When she stood, the hem of the dress almost touched the dusty tiles, hiding the cord completely. “Does the boy understand speech?”
Qinnitan nodded, dully, hopelessly. Even if the others went looking for her, she had just realized, it would be to the countinghouse tower on the other side of the palace grounds.
The pale man turned to the boy. “If you try to run away, I will cut off her nose, do you understand? The autarch won’t care.”
Pigeon looked at the man with narrowed eyes. If he was a dog, he would have growled, or more likely, simply bit without making a noise. At last he nodded.
“Well, come along then.” The man landed a single kick that made the boy whimper wordlessly and scramble awkwardly onto his feet so his bonds could be cut. Pigeon rubbed his wrists, unable to look at Qinnitan for the shame of having been part of her capture. “No tricks,” the man said. “It would waste time if I have to kill or cripple either of you, but it wouldn’t change anything important. Move along now.” He pointed to the doorway. “We don’t want to keep your master waiting. He’s much less patient than I am, and much less kind.”
Qinnitan stepped out into the light of the deserted courtyard, the cord chafing her ankles at each constrained step. She was too shocked and empty even to cry. The space of a few heartbeats had changed everything. Only a few dozen yards away in Kossope House she had friends, a life, all the things she had wanted so badly, but they were all lost now. Instead, she belonged to that madman again— the terrifying, utterly heartless Living God on Earth.
