by Vale Aida
“Can’t tell,” said Lomas. He had blown his nose eight times in the last hour, and it was turning an interesting carmine. “All I see is frost. It’s devilry, it is, to see frost in summer. It better be warm in Astorre.”
“It is,” Vion piped up. “They channel hot geyser water under their streets and through the walls of their houses, so it’s warm all year round. And everybody is rich, and the theatres are roofed with gold, and all the playwrights are drunk on absinthe.”
A chorus of disbelieving challenges arose. Usually the boys believed whatever Vion said, because he had been to school, and his parents were much-travelled cartographers. That he had been raised a girl called Evione was also well-known, but no one’s business. “In the choir,” said another boy, Klemene, who had been one of Savonn’s singing Ceriyes, “they say the Captain had a lover in Astorre. A foreigner. But either he died, or Savonn left him.”
Rougen tugged at Emaris’s sleeve. He never spoke, though they said he could hear an acorn fall on the other side of a wood. No one took notice. “That’s just hearsay,” said Lomas dismissively. “He’s made of ice, the Captain. He probably eats men alive.”
Rougen prodded Emaris in the side. “It’s true,” Klemene insisted. “Isn’t it, Emaris?”
“No,” said Emaris tartly. In fact he had no idea and did not care. “What is it, Rougen?”
But there was no need for an answer. In a moment, as they fell silent, they all heard it themselves: the unmistakeable sound of laughter, floating up to them from the ravine.
No one spoke. They knew better than that by now. Emaris took a quick look around, and motioned them to follow him.
He picked his way across a crag of glistening basalt rocks, avoiding the grass, which might rustle and give their presence away. Below, several voices bantered in playful argument, and something—a harp? a lute? Savonn would know—tinkled a lively song. Whoever it was, they were making no effort to be quiet. Emaris stopped several paces from the overhang, dropped onto his stomach, and wriggled towards the edge.
Here the cliff was less steep, and a goat path wound across the rocks down to the ravine, where a troop of about twenty—both men and women—had stopped for a meal by a stony brook. He had hoped they were merchants. But they were plainly soldiers, and no meanly paid ones at that. Each of them had a tall cornelwood spear, and their cuirasses were polished and well-fitting. One of the men was perched on a boulder in the middle of the group, playing a lute. Several knobbly ponies grazed around them, their saddlebags heavily laden.
The words that drifted up to them were Saraian. Even in the cold air, beads of perspiration broke out on Emaris’s forehead.
The others had joined him on the ground. Silently, Lomas nudged him and motioned to the lute player, his eyes wide. Emaris saw why. Next to the man leaned a longsword in a scabbard richly worked with gold and amber, encrusted with enough rubies to ransom a prince. He must have been the leader. His hair, long and auburn, was bundled back from his tanned brown face in a careless knot, and from his shoulders fell a cloak that was sable on the outside, scarlet on the inside. Emaris did not know the song he was playing, but he recognised skill when he heard it.
Twenty soldiers. The bandits at Onaressi had seemed to think an army was coming. Where was the rest of it? Lurking in the barren wilds above the Pass, probably. Or lying in wait to bar the route to Astorre. His heart stuttered at the thought. Savonn had to be told. Even now, they could be blundering into a trap.
The music stopped. The leader got up and laid the lute aside, moving to the edge of the group. The others were still eating, laughing and swearing at one another over heels of bread and skins of wine. The lute player paused to rub the nose of one of the donkeys, then cupped his eyes with a hand and gazed up and down the ravine, his burnished hair shining red-gold in the afternoon light.
Emaris flattened himself to the ground. The others imitated him. The angle of the rocky overhang would hide them from below, as would the glare of the westering sun. The lute player said something; a command, by the sounds of it. For no reason that Emaris could discern, the laughter ceased.
Cautiously, he peered into the ravine again. The redhead had resumed his seat. Five of the soldiers, grumbling, put their food aside and fetched their spears. Then, to his horror, they started up the goat track towards the overhang.
On his right Vion, ash-pale, mouthed, What now?
Emaris scrambled to his feet. “Run!”
Klemene was off like a sprinter from the starting post, dragging Rougen behind him. Vion and Lomas scuttled after them. Emaris brought up the rear, yanking an arrow from his quiver as he picked his way across the crag. The lute was tinkling again. A jagged column of rock stood out on the overhang like a leaning pillar. He ducked behind it, nocking his bow. As soon as the foremost of their pursuers came into view—a big, grizzled man with a javelin—he drew and released the bowstring.
The javelin hissed past his face and struck the rock an inch from his temple. His arrow hit the man in the thigh, and he went down, roaring. Two others came up behind him. Emaris nocked again, saw in his mind’s eye the perfect arc of Hiraen’s orange-plumed arrow under the ringwall of Onaressi, and loosed. Another soldier went down. But the last two had gained the overhang, and now they were three against one.
“Out of the way!” someone yelled.
Emaris ducked. Vion had appeared with the fallen javelin, which overtopped him by about three feet. Before Emaris could ask what he thought he was doing, he wound back his arm and threw.
His technique left him flailing on one foot with the force of the throw, but his aim was true. The javelin plunged squarely into the neck of the closest pursuer. Then there was a yowling cry, and Lomas burst out from the other side of the rock column and bowled over the remaining two, slamming their heads against the ground. He had not, Emaris noted with vague disbelief, even drawn his sword.
No one else came after them. Impossibly, the lute was still playing.
Shaken, they dispatched the soldiers—three men and two women—with their daggers. Klemene and Rougen were waiting for them at the edge of the basalt outcropping, looking astonished to see them alive. Klemene yelled, “I thought we were done for!”
“I think that redhead let us escape,” said Vion, still panting. He glanced over his shoulder, as if he thought to find the Saraians hot on their tail. “He just wanted to frighten us. Right, Emaris?”
The Red Death, Nikas had said. Emaris could not answer. His stomach was churning. “We were quiet,” said Lomas, rubbing a bruised jaw. “I’d swear we never made a sound. How the hell did they hear us?”
“Maybe,” said Emaris slowly, “they didn’t.”
With a sinking heart, he realised this was not an explanation Savonn would accept.
* * *
“I told you,” he was saying two hours later, when they got back to camp. “We were careful. You taught me how to scout properly. You could at least believe me when I say we didn’t pick a fight on purpose.”
Savonn had been in a queer temper since Onaressi. His voice was the lethal, silky one they all dreaded, and his smile was edged like a diamond. “So careful,” he said, “that you brought five Saraians down on your heads and left behind fifteen others who now know we are here.”
“We took care of it,” snapped Emaris. He was standing before Savonn in the Captain’s tent, while Hiraen and Nikas gave him commiserating looks over the map they were studying. “I shot two myself and my patrol did for the rest. What were we supposed to do, kill the lot of them?”
“To get away unseen would have sufficed,” said Savonn. “Courage, as a rule, does not make up for incompetence. On the contrary, it tends to exacerbate it.”
“All right,” said Emaris, nearly beside himself. “Henceforth I shall be both cowardly and incompetent. Whatever will you do the next time you’re attacked in a deserted street?”
He fancied, for a moment, that Savonn’s eyes widened fractionally. “This man with the lute,”
said Nikas, hastily redirecting the conversation. “He glimpsed you? Or heard a footfall, perhaps?”
“No,” said Emaris hotly. “They made enough noise to cover a riot. The fellow never even looked up. He was still playing his bloody lute when we ran off.” He drew a deep breath. “We think he’s the Empath.”
“Oh,” said Savonn. “I suppose he heard the clarion-call of your righteous rage? Now, of course, we have to break camp and march to Astorre another way, in case your mythical siren has followed you back here. It will be cold and dangerous and if anyone complains I shall point them to you.”
He was already at the tent flap. Seething, Emaris swung round to follow him. Mortification made him bold. “Nikas told you he was real. And now I’ve seen him. Why won’t you believe it?”
“Because,” said Savonn, “superstition is for children. As are angry outbursts. Calm yourself.”
He stalked out. Presently Nikas got up, bright-eyed and thoughtful, and went after him. “It’s not fair,” said Emaris to their receding backs. If he sounded as juvenile as Savonn claimed, it could not be helped.
“If it matters,” said Hiraen, stirring from his seat near the brazier, “I believe you.”
Emaris looked at him. One could tell things to Hiraen. He would listen, and if he laughed, it would not be in scorn. “We were afraid,” he said. The words tumbled out in a rush. “I was sweating, and imagining all the places his army could be lying in wait, and that’s when he gave the order to go after us. As if he sensed it. Our… our fear.”
Outside, Daine was yelling orders to break camp. Hiraen shrugged. It was a careless gesture, but his eyes were searching, as they so often were when he looked at Emaris these days. “The world is full of oddities. Being one himself, Savonn knows this. You mustn’t take it personally. He’s been in quite the mood these last weeks.” He rose, rolling up the map. “If you will believe it…”
“What?”
“He’s upset,” said Hiraen, “because he doesn’t want to go to Astorre. He made a mistake there once.” He smiled ruefully. “And I keep reminding him about it.”
* * *
They turned away from Forech’s Pass that evening and began their ascent into the steep peaks that lay between them and Astorre. The threadlike track they followed was serpentine and precipitous, passing over sheer drops into shadowed valleys and disappearing here and there under slick patches of hoarfrost. The wind howled like a pack of hungry wolves, and not long after dark, a dusting of soft white fluff began to swirl around them. Snow, in high summer.
They snatched a few hours’ rest under a rocky outcrop on the summit of Lady Fidelity (“The guardian mountain of Astorre,” Nikas explained). No one slept well. Already a feared name when they broke camp, the rumour of the Empath hounded them all the way up the mountain, and by nightfall had taken on fangs and fire-breathing properties. Emaris laughed at the speculation in the hearing of his patrol, but tossed and turned and mouthed prayers when no one was looking, so cold he was afraid to close his eyes in case they froze shut for good.
But the night was uneventful, as was the next day. By the second evening they were shuffling down Fidelity’s bosom towards the city in her lap. They came on Astorre at sundown—the perfect time, Nikas assured them, for viewing the polis as it was seen by painters and poets. It was an abrupt manifestation. One moment they were trudging down a mud-slick path, still looking over their shoulders for the Empath; and the next thing they knew, they had rounded a bend in the path and were looking out on a tableau of green and gold.
Below them was a rocky chasm spanned by a tremendous drawbridge with balusters of gold, wide enough for eight horses to gallop abreast. On the other side lay Astorre in her grassy plateau. The fields sprawled in languid serenity, verdant as emeralds; and behind the triple walls, each higher than the one that surrounded it, a hundred towers and minarets spired audaciously into the sky. The glazed roofs, the stained-glass windows and the gleaming steeples drank the last light of the sun and threw it back, multiplied hundredfold, to dazzle the eye. “It looks like a brooch,” Emaris murmured aloud, awestruck.
“Like a carving on a wine goblet,” said a voice at his side, startling him. “The more you drink, the thirstier you get.”
Emaris had thought it was Vion beside him. He turned, apprehensive. But Savonn’s level stare gave no inkling of what had transpired the day before. “Astorre, as the poets say, is a wild maenad who has supped full of the fortunes of Falwyn and Sarei and the Northlands. Placed as she is, trade is her only way to survive. Merchants and artisans from three nations and more have settled here under truce, and anyone who lifts a hand against an enemy is put to death.”
He smiled, though not quite at Emaris. “But of course, there’s a perennial rivalry between her three theatres—Akiron, Aereas, and Charissos, which are Saraian, Pierosi, and Falwynian respectively. During every festival they compete to outdo one another in acting, singing and dancing, all of which the Astorrians do very well, and to excess. I saw fourteen plays the first week I was there, and thought I could die happy.”
Emaris gazed at him, surprised. He detected, for the first time, a strain of nostalgia in Savonn’s voice, never present when the men settled round their cookfires at night and spoke of home. On impulse, he said, “They say you had someone there once.”
Astonishingly, Savonn did not say anything sarcastic. Perhaps this exceeding civility was his way of making up for his outburst the day before. “Do they?” he asked. “It’s a good place for meeting people. I wonder who we’ll encounter this time.”
It turned out that, as was to be expected from a city under a strict and fragile truce, Astorre did not take kindly to strange armies showing up on its doorstep. The men were made to wait on the far side of the drawbridge, while Savonn went across with Hiraen and—after suffering a protracted, beseeching gaze—Emaris to speak with the chief guardsman. The gates were ebony and jet reinforced with steel, ornamented with intricate carvings of the sun and moon, and the pink-faced young man who met them there introduced himself as Gelmir. He addressed them in Bayarric at first, until he learned they were from Cassarah, upon which he switched to serviceable Falwynian. Here, it seemed, everyone was a polyglot. “You come with hundreds of armed men, Captain,” he said, looking with distaste at the waiting column behind them. “Have you not heard that there is also a sizeable troop of Saraians lodged with us at present? Some of them, in fact, have just preceded you here.”
Emaris glanced at Savonn, failed to meet his eye, and caught Hiraen’s instead. “We thought so,” said Savonn. “They evaded us, and we evaded them. A complicated situation, I grant.”
“Everything you lowlanders do is complicated,” said Gelmir. “What do you want here? You are not traders.”
“No,” said Savonn. Emaris could tell by the crispness of his enunciation that he was growing impatient. “We are three hundred very cold, very hungry people who came headlong across the Farfallens in a hurry to spend all our money here, and leave again before snow closes the passes. Is that so much to ask?”
“We’re not here to fight,” added Hiraen. “We’ve had more than enough of that.”
Gelmir snorted. “Like hell you’re not. Every meeting of Falwynians and Saraians has ended in violence ever since your Governor died.”
“If you recall,” said Savonn unexpectedly, “I do have a certain propensity for averting bloodshed.”
Emaris had to blink several times to be sure of what he was seeing. It was as if Savonn had put on a mask, or perhaps taken one off. His shoulders relaxed, his stance loosening to let Gelmir make the most of the two-inch advantage he had in height. His smile was sly, his heavy-lidded gaze alight with obscure mirth. The disconcerting thought struck Emaris that this was Savonn as he must have been at seventeen or eighteen, far away from home for the first time, running Merrott’s errands and getting into trouble on the side.
Hiraen seemed, if unsurprised, at least mildly entertained. But Gelmir’s mouth had fallen open
, revealing a couple of gold-plated incisors. Then, improbably, he closed it and began to grin. “Savonn! You little rascal, is it really you?”
Looking severe, Savonn said, “I feared I had aged badly.”
Gelmir guffawed. “Can you blame me? Up you come tramping with yon lot of muddy men, with a full face of stubble and not a bit of kohl round your eyes, talking to me all stern like one of them lowlander princelings! Who the hell’d recognise you?”
“For sure, I don’t even recognise myself,” said Savonn. “Well? Are you going to leave an old friend out in the cold?”
“Why, you know you’re always welcome here,” said Gelmir. “But your men—”
“I go where they go.”
Gelmir hesitated, glancing over the drawbridge again. “Perhaps,” he said, “you would like to speak with the Lady? Last I heard she was giving an audience to the Saraians, but they must be nearly finished by now. Yon fellows could wait in the guardhouse in the meantime.”
“Excellent,” said Savonn. “Must we disarm? I can give you one of my six knives.”
They disarmed, though not without reluctance. Savonn, having with great generosity surrendered four knives and his vial of poison, was for a moment swallowed up by a crowd of acquaintances on the steps of the guardhouse. Listening to the ensuing flurry of how long it’s beens and do you remember whens, Emaris learned that Savonn had once been responsible for, among other escapades, an infestation of moulting ducks in the barracks and the sudden manifestation of a screeching cuckoo-clock in the common room chimney-shaft. Gelmir was still chortling when at last he dispatched a boy to take them to the Dome of Stars, where Lady Celisse lived, and Savonn swept away again with Hiraen and Emaris in tow.
“How’d you acquire this one?” Hiraen asked, once they were out of earshot.
“Tavern brawl,” said Savonn cryptically.
Unable to stop himself, Emaris asked, “Did you fight him?”
