Elegy (The Magpie Ballads Book 1)

by Vale Aida

  Mordel swallowed hard. “How did the Empath know we were coming?” asked Daine. “Word couldn’t have gotten to Daliss and back so quickly.”

  “Not Daliss,” said Mordel. “Astorre. He’s Queen Marguerit’s man, methinks, but he’s based there. Or at least that’s where his couriers come from.” His face glistened with sweat. “I’m just a nomad tryna earn my keep, milord. I don’t belong to no lord and no lord tells me nothing. I swear that’s all I know.”

  “Really?” said Savonn. At the mention of Astorre, something had sharpened in his expression. “What a pity. We’d best not keep you any longer.”

  Mordel brightened. Frowning, Daine said, “The Council needs to see this fellow. And the gold, too—”

  One never saw where the knives came from. One saw only a quick movement of the hand, a flash like a comet; and then one cried out and slumped dead, as Mordel now did. Daine’s coins scattered, chiming across the floor. Emaris jolted bolt upright. “What was that for? Isn’t this the proof the Council wanted?”

  Hiraen scowled. “Did this one touch your face too?”

  “He’s too much trouble,” said Savonn shortly, without looking at either of them. “The Council can have these dispatches instead, and a Saraian coin or two as a keepsake. I will require half the gold for supplies. The remainder we shall distribute to the men, to spend on food, drink, and attractive persons of extortionate tastes in Astorre. For,” he said, “it seems we now have no choice but to go there.” His eyes were like the points of his knives. “Why the dour faces? Where is the rejoicing?”

  Nikas opened his mouth, received a loaded stare from Daine, and swallowed whatever he had been about to say. In a flat voice, Hiraen said, “Hurrah. I’m going down to the feast.”

  The door closed in his wake. They looked at one another. Then Daine shrugged, and shuffled out after him. Nikas watched him go, his brows raised in a comic parody of fascination. “Well?” said Savonn. Alarmingly, his gaze had come to rest on Emaris. “Aren’t you joining them?”

  Emaris was in no mood for feasting. Something potent had shivered through the room, something threatening, which he could not quite name. He could no longer remember why he had wanted to go to Astorre. But Savonn in such a mood was not to be gainsaid. Resigned, he got up and moved towards the door.

  “Not you,” said Savonn, as Nikas made to follow. “I want a word.”

  Emaris slammed the door between them, angry all over again. He was tired of being shut out. It was childish, he knew. But Savonn was being unjust, which was worse. So what if Nikas smiled a lot, and drew nice portraits, and did not mind killing people? Emaris had been with Savonn from the beginning, had left everything behind to follow him here. One could at least do him the favour of telling him what was happening. No doubt his father would have done so.

  He had begun to walk away, thinking that Vion and his friends might be better company, when Savonn’s lackadaisical voice drifted through the door. “An efficient success. If this clown was telling the truth, we will soon have to fight your countrymen. I hope you are not prone to attacks of compunction?”

  Glasses clinked. One of them must have been pouring drinks. “I thought I told you,” said Nikas. “I was raised in Daliss, but my parents were Terinean slaves. Or my mother was, at least, Aebria rest her thrice-damned soul. The Saraians are not my countrymen. I look forward to fighting them.”

  “I wonder why.”

  Curiosity having long since triumphed over anger, Emaris stopped in his tracks. Silence from within. Then—“I see,” said Nikas. “I thought you wanted to ask about the Empath in private. Instead you are asking about me. I would have thought tonight’s fight had proven me honest.”

  “It has,” said Savonn peaceably. “Which alarms me. I distrust the honest.”

  “A common symptom among liars,” said Nikas. The last word was gilt with mirth. “Why don’t you like having your portrait drawn?”

  “An excess of conceit. Why did you want me to go to Astorre?”

  “I enjoy seeing a jewel in its natural setting. Why did you take me on if you don’t trust me?”

  “Because,” said Savonn, in the honeyed timbres Emaris disliked, “I relish a good game. Because I am bored, and you are reasonably nice to look at. Because I wish to teach my squire a thing or two. By the way, I never suffer from the illusion of privacy. He is at the door now. Don’t say anything scandalous.”

  Emaris flinched. His boot squeaked on the flagstones, more than loud enough to prove his presence. To his outrage, Nikas began to laugh. “Fair enough. You are a hard man to follow, milord… but of course you ought to know where I came from. I have told you a little of why I defected.”

  “Tell me more,” said Savonn.

  There was no point retreating now. Decency gave way to spite, and Emaris put his ear back to the door. “I have spent my whole life in the Sanctuary,” Nikas was saying. “An odd name for an assassin cult, I realise. The god of death has a sense of irony. You do know him? The consort of Mother Alakyne, a deity so terrible no one has dared to give him a name. Oh, I forgot. You are not religious.”

  “No,” Savonn agreed. “And you have abandoned your god. Peas in a pod, aren’t we?”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” said Nikas. “By the time we are four or five, we know more ways to kill a man than numbers to count them with. When we are six, we are given a kitten to care for. When we are eight, we are made to slaughter it with our bare hands. Those who balk have the job done for them by the priests, over a number of days…”

  A deadly quiet. Bile rose to the back of Emaris’s throat. He was no longer hungry. “When we are ten, we duel a playmate to the death with all the skills we have learnt. Those who survive these trials receive their initiation into the cult, and are made full priests and priestesses of the Nameless Father. I,” said Nikas, with audible loathing, “have received my initiation.”

  “I see,” said Savonn. Even when one could see his face, it was difficult to tell what he was thinking. Now, with no cues except his modulated stage voice, it was impossible. “You ran away in search of a better life. I wonder if you have found it.”

  “Shall we put a finer point on it?” asked Nikas. “I ran away in search of my mother. I have not found her.”

  “Mothers,” said Savonn crisply, “are a luxury, and fathers an affliction. It is best not to be sentimental about them. Tell me about the Empath.”

  Emaris had pressed himself nearly flat to the door. After what felt like a long time, Nikas said, “I thought you weren’t interested in fairytales.”

  “I am not.”

  “Good,” said Nikas. He had recovered his usual airiness. “Because this is not one. All Daliss has heard of him. The diviner who knows, unfailingly, what you are going to do before you do it. Who has saved the Queen’s life over and over, sniffing out assassins by their fear and hatred long before they ever got close to her. They give him many names. The Empath. The Red Death. The King of Slaves. But all agree he is a man of surpassing wit, as beautiful as he is cunning, as brilliant as he is cruel. Very much,” he added, “like yourself.”

  The pause this time was very long. Sounding unimpressed, Savonn said, “You know him?”

  Nikas laughed. “You find it hard to believe that such a man exists, don’t you? I heard about your choir of Ceriyes. You worship nothing and hold nothing sacred, not even the gods…”

  Again, louder. “You know him?”

  Emaris sucked in a breath and held it. “Yes,” said Nikas. “Very well. He, too, is a servant of the Father. We trained together in the Sanctuary.”

  Glass chinked on wood, a loud, dissonant noise. Nikas was not laughing now. “He is real, my lord Captain. Though most people who meet him find themselves wishing he wasn’t. Perhaps you will prove an exception.”

  A chair scraped back with brusque finality. The discussion was over. Savonn said, “We shall see.”

  10

  The death of a son was far from the only disaster that had befallen
the Efrens in the last fortnight. Other strange things had happened, or so Linn said when she came round to the house with a pot of hot broth and a leg of ham for Shandei. A servant had been knifed in the marketplace. A shed had collapsed, near killing a groom. A basket full of writhing grass snakes had been upended on a maid’s head as she passed under the window of an untenanted house. “And could you guess what else was in the basket?” Linn asked, spooning the broth into a bowl.

  “What?”

  “Roses,” said Linn. She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “There were roses on the scene of every accident. Accidents, I say, but we all know they aren’t. The culprit left his signature, plain as day. The Rose Killer, people are calling him. Or the Thorn.”

  The broth curdled in Shandei’s mouth. They said Vesmer’s body had been scattered with roses dislodged by his fall, scarlet petals strewn beneath the bridge like a morbid benediction. “Do they think that—all these things—they were done by the same person?”

  Linn shrugged, bustling off to cluck at the contents of the pantry. “Could be more. The Efrens have plenty of enemies. All rich people do. But if you ask me, with the luck he’s having, Willon would be lucky to pluck off just one Thorn.”

  Willon did not need luck, Shandei thought. Not even brains. What one needed to catch a killer was money and power and a certain degree of bone-headedness, all of which the Efrens had in abundance. They had put the city under curfew for three days after Vesmer’s death, arrested several people, interrogated them, and—at Lord Lucien’s insistence—released them again. And she had noticed a great many unfamiliar people crossing and recrossing her street, staring for just a little too long at her house. The killer is at large, their faces seemed to say. The killer is here.

  “Well, no one’s surprised,” Linn was saying. “The old man still means to be Governor, and not everyone’s happy about that. I for one am not. You wouldn’t happen to have the stink of roses about you, my dear?”’

  Shandei spat out her broth and looked up sharply. Linn was smiling. It was just a joke. But surely her blood feud with the Efrens was common knowledge; surely everyone knew the Ceriyes must be with her. If she had prayed Vesmer dead—if she was responsible for his death—did it mean she was responsible for all the rest?

  Willon might think so. And sooner or later, he would be upon her.

  * * *

  It was in this state of mind that she went to the Temple of the Sisters to be purified for Midsummer.

  The Temple was a tall, narrow building behind a once-white fence swarming with creeping vines. One could judge the piety of the present rulers from the décor. Raedon Sydell, a devout man, had furnished the High Priestess with a sizeable income, only for Kedris to divert it all to his gardens as soon as he came to office. This left the Temple appointed in a style fashionable two generations ago, with arched bay windows that always seemed dark no matter how many candelabra were lit, and ornate stone balconies so ponderous they looked like battlements. The walls were painted a garish gold, the windows and doors offset in crimson. The courtyard was tiled with slate, spotted with small patches of yellowing grass. It was as if nature itself feared the goddesses, and dared grow nothing here.

  Today the grounds were thronged with people. Devotees queued all the way out through the temple doors, across the courtyard and beyond the gate, waiting to be purified lest they carry their guilts and misfortunes with them into the new year. Shandei had to wait over an hour before she reached the front of the line, where an acolyte in pure white robes ushered her through the doors. She was led up a sweeping marble stair and down a gallery overlooking a gloomy terrace, and thence into the hall where the goddesses dispensed their blessing on—or withheld it from—their supplicants.

  Coming in, the altar always struck one into an awed stillness. The Sisters were never depicted separately, for the daughters of Mother Alakyne always manifested hand in hand. Their stone likenesses towered at the end of the hall, twelve feet tall and terrible in majesty: Aebria the younger, Goddess of Sorrow, in a mourning robe and veil; the elder, Casteia, Goddess of Strife, armed in mail and carrying a spear. Their carnelian eyes shone red in the light from the altar candles. In silence, Shandei crossed the hall, stopped the proper number of paces from the altar, and knelt on the cool flagstones.

  She was alone. That was odd. On festive days like this, the priestesses were known to bless five or six supplicants at once. The hall smelled of incense, of the myrrh and sandalwood and other precious things that smouldered on the altar. There were no windows. It was quiet here, far from the crowd that thronged the lawn, and the heavy air cloyed in the passages of Shandei’s nose and throat.

  Then a creak fractured the strange, perfumed hush, and Shandei lifted her bowed head by half an inch to peek.

  A door had opened behind the altar. For a moment it looked onto an abysmal darkness. Then a gargoyle head protruded from the crack, wizened and prune-like, topped with stringy tufts of white cottony hair. It jerked this way and that as if worked by ill-maintained machinery, filmy black eyes staring out of the withered face. Then the waxen, stalk-like neck retracted, taking the head with it. As Shandei stared, decorum quite forgotten, the door came open all the way and a small stooped figure tottered out.

  She stood about four feet tall, maybe five if one straightened out her back with a bonesetter’s hammer. Her robes were a motley of colours, tassels and frills, as if some deranged tailor had tried to sew a rainbow into a mockery of a wedding dress. They hung from her scarecrow frame like a curtain on a fence-post, fabrics rustling and hissing as they slithered across the floor in her wake. A string of enormous pearls dangled almost to her waist. She paused within arm’s reach of Shandei, and the viperine eyes drank her in with unwholesome thirst.

  “Daughter,” she said. The rasp was like the scrape of a sword on a whetstone, with an odd singsong quality. “Come ye to be purified?”

  Belated recognition came to Shandei, rapidly followed by amazement. This must be the High Priestess herself. Shandei had glimpsed her once, presiding at a Midsummer play from her palanquin many years ago—one that she remembered with pristine clarity, because her mother Serenisa had been there on a rare visit, so her father’s smile shone like the sun. But she had been very small then, and Emaris only a toddler, and since then the High Priestess had grown older than she thought possible. The woman must have been at least a hundred. Perhaps a hundred and ten.

  “Yes,” she managed. “Your Holiness.”

  A desiccated hand, like a winter branch, emerged from one capacious sleeve and stretched its long fingers towards Shandei’s face. She felt the curious urge to jump back and climb on a chair, like the neighbour’s children did when there was a spider in the house and she was called in to remove it. She forced herself to hold still, even as the dry fingertips with their yellowing nails brushed against her cheek. “Oh!” cried the crone, withdrawing her hand as if scalded. “This one! The righteous fire, the unrighteous vessel!”

  Her heart sank. “My name is Shandei,” she said. “Daughter of Rendell.”

  “I know your name,” sang the Priestess. “I have seen you in my visions. My pious, violent daughter. Even now your father’s dagger is in your sleeve.”

  This time she had not given herself away with her eyes. How on earth could the old woman have known that? But of course, she was a servant of the goddesses, and was privy to more than earthly knowledge. Shandei said, “Vengeance is my right.”

  “Vengeance!” The shriek was piercing. “The Ceriyes are thirsty. But they will not drink blood from your idler’s hands.”

  She had given them blood. She had delivered Vesmer Efren into their hands, or they into hers. Or had she? Who had been that spectre on the bridge? A drunken passer-by who would pick a fight with a guardsman and send him plummeting to his death, or a spirit of vengeance she had called down on an innocent youth only to hurt his father? If the latter, what did that make her?

  “From whose hands will they drink, then?” she
asked. Her voice was shaking again. All these disasters, and still her father’s shade wandered unavenged. “My brother’s? Holiness, where shall we find the killer?”

  A choking noise emanated from the mummified throat, like a saw on wood. This time she could not arrest her physical recoil. It was a moment before she realised that the crone was laughing, but not in mirth. “Emaris?” the old woman asked, the syllables of the name made hoarse and grating. “He has absconded with that devil child of a devil father, on whom the gods do not smile. Idler’s hands! Is that why you are here? To seek absolution for him?”

  Shandei drew a long, shaking breath. “No. I have come to be purified for Midsummer. That is all.”

  The old woman distended her lips into a smile, revealing a mouth full of small brown teeth, crooked and overcrowded. “Yes. Why not? A little incantation, a little sprinkling of water. Then blood shall be washed away and your wrongdoings made clean. Or so one supposes.”

  She regarded Shandei with her cold black eyes, and slithered back into the dark room from whence she had come.

  It was another priestess, this one much younger, who came to purify her. After all that, the ceremony was over almost at once: the priestess laid a hand on her head, and murmured the invocation that would cleanse her of Aebria’s grief and Casteia’s rage and enfold her once more to the Mother’s bosom. Water from the altar, warm and sweet-smelling, was sprinkled in her hair. The deities having been propitiated, the priestess kissed her brow and bade her go.

  It was like climbing out of a mine. After the drenching of incense, the fresh air was shocking as a cold bath. The noonday sun was so brilliant that Shandei, walking down the gallery outside the hall towards the distant rumble of human voices, flung up a hand to shield her watering eyes. Down the marble stair, across the landing, through the front hall. A passing acolyte stared at her, then hurried away with her head down. Shandei had just reached the temple doors, the buzz of disparate conversations filtering in through the heavy timber, when they swung open and a group of women came in.