by Morgan Rice
He stepped into the room where the Five Stones made their decisions. The others were there already, as he’d hoped they would be. Kas was stroking his trident beard in worry. Vexa was reading through a report. Borion had the bravado of a man who knew that there was trouble.
“What is this?” he asked.
Ulren didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “I have decided to challenge Irrien for his seat.”
He watched the others’ reactions. Kas continued to stroke his beard. Vexa raised an eyebrow. Borion was the one who reacted most, but then, Ulren had expected that. How many challengers had Irrien warned the fop about? How many times had he helped with the other man’s gambling debts?
“Irrien is not here to challenge,” Borion pointed out.
As if there was no precedent for that. Did he think that Ulren hadn’t seen every permutation of the council in his time as one of its Stones?
“Then that should make it easier, shouldn’t it?” Ulren said. He moved forward to take Irrien’s seat.
To his surprise, Borion stepped in front of him, drawing a slender blade.
“And you think you’ll make yourself First Stone?” he said. “An old man who took his position so long ago no one can even remember? Who keeps the Second Stone’s spot mostly because Irrien doesn’t want disruption?”
Ulren moved out into an open section of the floor, stripping off his formal robe and wrapping it loosely over one arm.
“Is that why you think I hold onto it?” he said. “Do you really want to try me, boy?”
“I’ve wanted it for years, but Irrien kept telling me no,” Borion said. He lifted his blade into a duelist’s posture. Ulren smiled at that.
“This is your last chance to live,” Ulren said, although in truth that had passed the moment the other man lifted a blade against him. “Note that Kas and Vexa have more sense than to try this. Put your weapon aside, and take your seat. You should even be able to move up a place.”
“Why move up one when I can kill an old man and move up three?” Borion countered.
He lunged forward, and Ulren had to admit that the boy was fast. Ulren had probably been faster in his youth, but that was a long time ago now. He’d had plenty of time to learn the skills of war, though, and a man who judged the distance right didn’t have to be fast. He swept around his balled up cloak to swirl and tangle with Borion’s sword.
“Is that all you have, old man?” the Fifth Stone demanded. “Tricks?”
Ulren laughed at that, then attacked in the middle of it. Borion was quick enough to jump back, but not without Ulren’s blade scraping across his chest.
“Don’t underestimate tricks, boy,” Ulren said. “A man survives any way he can.”
He stepped back, waiting.
Borion rushed in. Of course he rushed in. The young reacted, they moved in line with their emotions. They didn’t think. Or they didn’t think enough. Borion tried for a measure of cunning, with feints that Ulren had seen a hundred times before. That was the peril of being young: you thought you had invented things that had gotten many men killed before you.
Ulren stepped aside and threw his cloak over the younger man as he passed with his real stroke. Borion flailed at the fabric, trying to clear it, and in that moment, Ulren struck. He moved in close, gripping Borion’s arm so that he couldn’t bring his sword to bear, then started to stab.
He did it methodically, consistently, with the patience that he’d built up in years of fighting. Ulren could see the blood seeping through his cloak as it wrapped around Borion, but he didn’t stop until the other man fell. He’d seen men come back from the worst of injuries. He wasn’t going to risk anything.
He stood there, breathing hard. It had been bad enough climbing all the stairs. Killing a man felt as though his lungs might burst with the effort, but Ulren disguised it. He moved over to Irrien’s seat, positioning himself behind it first.
“Do either of you wish to object?” he asked Kas and Vexa.
“Only to the mess,” Kas said. “But there are slaves for such things, I suppose.”
“Hail the First Stone,” Vexa said, without any particular enthusiasm.
It was a moment of triumph. More than that, it was the moment that Ulren had worked toward for years. Now that it was here, it felt strange to actually sit in the First Stone’s seat, lowering himself down onto the granite of it.
“I have already taken Irrien’s interests,” Ulren said. He waved his hand in Borion’s direction. “But feel free to help yourselves to the boy’s.”
They would. Ulren had no doubt that they would. That was what this city was, after all.
“And, of course, we will need new Fourth and Fifth Stones,” Ulren said.
That should have been their cue to move up a space. Neither did, though. They kept the seats that they’d fought for, leaving the Second Stone’s seat empty. Ulren wasn’t sure he liked that, even if he could understand the fear behind it. They weren’t coming for his new seat, but it was a sign that they didn’t consider this settled, and that they weren’t going to fall into line with the new order.
They were hanging back the way he’d hung back when Irrien had first come to power.
More than that, they were acting as if this wasn’t over.
CHAPTER SIX
Stephania woke to a world filled with agony. The whole universe seemed to have screwed itself up into a ball of pain wrapped up in her stomach. She felt as though she’d been torn to pieces… but then, she had been sliced open.
That thought was enough to make her scream again, and this time there weren’t any priests or warriors there to hear her agony, only the open sky above her, visible through the blur of her tears. They’d dragged her outside somewhere and left her to die.
It took all of her strength to lift her head even enough to look around.
When she did, she quickly wished she hadn’t. Trash surrounded her, as far as the eye could see. There was broken pottery, animal bones, glass and more. All the detritus of city life spread out in a seemingly endless landscape of despair.
The stink hit her in the same moment, fetid and overwhelming, seeming to fill the space around her. The stench of death was mixed in with it too, and Stephania saw the bodies then, simply abandoned as if they were nothing. In the distance, she thought she saw funeral fires, but she doubted they were the elegant pyres of funerals. They would simply be pits, waiting for more and more bodies to consume.
Stephania knew where she was now, in the garbage area beyond the city, where a thousand middens found themselves emptied, and the poorest of the poor scavenged for what they could find. Normally, the only bodies that ended up there were those of the people who couldn’t afford a grave, or who were there to be lost in death, victims of criminals.
Stephania collapsed back for what seemed like an interminable time, the sky swimming above her in waves. Only strength of will kept her from giving in and succumbing to the blackness that threatened to consume her. She forced herself to raise her head again, ignoring the pain.
There were figures moving over the garbage heaps. They wore ragged clothes and their faces were smeared with dirt. Many of them were little more than children, their feet wrapped with rags against the sharp edges.
“Help… help me,” Stephania called out.
It wasn’t that she had much of a belief in the generosity of others. It was simply that she had no better choice. After everything that had happened to her, there was no way she could survive without help. They’d cut her child from her to sacrifice. They’d stolen him!
As if the thought summoned it, agony shot through the wound in her stomach, and Stephania screamed. Her cry for help hadn’t brought the scavengers, but her scream did. They came stalking over the heaps of broken things as if certain that this was all some kind of trap. They didn’t look like Felldust’s people, though. It seemed that the lowest of the low could survive even a war with nothing changing.
Stephania wished that things had been so stabl
e for her. She’d been so certain that she could control things in the city; that she could wait out the siege and come to an arrangement with Irrien. Now she was lying discarded on a garbage heap, and she barely had the strength to keep breathing.
“She’s alive,” someone said.
Stephania looked up, and the presence of the garbage pickers so close to her took her a little by surprise. Had she blacked out for a moment? They stood around her in a pack, seeming to tower over her even though most would have been smaller than her if she’d been standing. Some were children, some were people twisted by illness or war, missing limbs or bearing scars.
“Help me,” Stephania said.
Maybe they wouldn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Most people didn’t do that, in her experience. Even Thanos had abandoned her eventually. But there were other reasons to help someone. Stephania knew that she was beautiful. Maybe they would want to sell her to a slaver for a profit. Maybe she could find one to seduce while she recovered.
The very fact that she was thinking it told Stephania just how desperate she was right then. It was true though. Give her any kind of chance, for any reason, and she would find a way to take control of the situation.
“I get her slippers,” one of the scavengers said.
“You do? Who says you do?”
There were hands on her then, a seeming horde of them. Every touch was agony, so that Stephania screamed and writhed. Worse, every touch seemed to ignore her completely. They tore at the few scraps of possessions she had left, tearing them from her while ignoring her completely.
She tried to fight, although the truth was that she couldn’t have fought off so many even if she’d been well. As it was, they tore every scrap from her, even though she tried to fight back. She grabbed for a sharpened piece of pottery, swinging it at the nearest of them.
They danced back.
“We can’t leave her like that,” one said.
For a brief moment, Stephania dared to feel hope. Maybe her few scraps of silk were the price for saving her.
“Throw her on one of the pyres,” another said. “No one will know.”
“No,” Stephania begged. “No!”
They grabbed her, ignoring the way she tried to fight as they lifted her. They carried her between them, and it was like being held aloft by a rolling wave of people. Stephania barely had the strength now to turn in their hands, but whichever way she turned, there seemed to be people there ready to hold her.
They carried her across the garbage the way servants might have hefted an old piece of furniture waiting to be demolished. There was no care to it, no gentleness, not even a fundamental acknowledgment that Stephania was alive. To them, she seemed to be nothing more than a thing to be disposed of.
She could see the fire pits ahead now, and that only fueled her struggles. They were big enough that each could have swallowed a house, flames coming up in spurts from them, as bodies broke down in their heat. There were corpses piled near them, each stripped of all valuables, while figures in the rags of the scavengers lifted them and threw them to the flames.
Stephania could feel the heat of the pit from here as they carried her toward it. It was like standing in front of a blacksmith’s forge, or having the fire of an alchemist’s burner skimming across every inch of her skin.
She didn’t want to think about how much worse it would be if they threw her in there. When they threw her in there.
It was impossible not to think about it. Stephania had seen people burn before, in the middle of battles, or when she’d had them tortured. She knew the smells of burning hair and skin, and just the memory of those told her what her future would involve.
“Please,” Stephania begged. “You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I can give you!”
“Doesn’t look like you have much from here,” one of them said.
They lifted her higher above their heads, ready to fling her down into the pit. Stephania screamed even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. From there, she could see into the deep, white-hot heat of the pit’s heart, where corpses were slowly turning to gray ash and charcoal.
They pulled Stephania back to throw her, and she knew then that she was going to die.
She found herself thinking of Thanos, despite herself. Part of it was hatred, because if it hadn’t been for him, then she wouldn’t have ended up here. That hatred had her thinking of Ceres too, and everything the pair of them had done to her.
Part of it was more than that. She missed him even now, even after everything he’d done, choosing Ceres. She wanted him to come running to the rescue. She wanted him to be there so that she could throw her arms around him.
The strangest part was that she even felt a flash of guilt. So many people had died because of her.
“You there, what are you doing?” a voice called.
For a moment, just a moment, Stephania thought that Thanos had come for her, which just went to show how much blood she’d lost when she saw who was really approaching over the mounds of broken and discarded things.
A woman who had to be in her sixties was approaching, wearing robes that had probably been a healer’s white once. She held a stick, waving it the way a knight might have wielded a sword.
“Leave her be, all of you!” the woman snapped.
Stephania expected the crowd around her to descend on the old woman the way they had on her, to lift her alongside Stephania and throw her into the flames.
Instead, they started to back away. They even set Stephania down in among the corpses by the edge of the pit. She tried to swallow her horror at that, because at least she wasn’t being thrown into the flames.
“But we found her,” one of the children said.
“And that means you get to kill her?” the old woman demanded. “Go on, get away, all of you.”
To Stephania’s surprise, they did. A few around the edges scrambled away first, then a few more, and quickly, Stephania found herself alone with the old woman, who watched while they left with a faint look of disapproval.
“You have to forgive them,” she said, standing over Stephania. “Living out here, they seem to think that taking all they can is the only way to live. I suppose, for most of them, it is.”
“Thank you,” Stephania managed.
The other woman seemed to ignore her words, squatting beside her and eyeing her critically.
“Let’s see… a huge wound to the stomach, signs of pregnancy, massive blood loss… oh dear, you have had a bad time of things, haven’t you?”
If Stephania had still had any strength, she might have hit the other woman then, rescue or no rescue.
“And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better, dear,” the woman said. She started to pull things out of her robes: cloth, water, thread.
“How did you… get rid of them?” Stephania asked.
“Oh, they come to me when they need help. They wouldn’t want to ruin that. Don’t worry about them right now. You have better things to worry about. I’m sorry, this will hurt.”
The other woman did something, and Stephania screamed in fresh agony.
“It’s astonishing that you survived what happened. What was it? A husband who found out the child wasn’t his? A rival?”
“Felldust,” Stephania managed, in between panting screams.
Something darkened in the other woman’s expression. “Yes, I’ve seen what they can do. Don’t worry. I will help you.”
She did something else that made Stephania cry out.
“Now,” the healer said, “I think it’s probably best if you sleep a while. Here, drink this.”
Stephania tried to shake her head, because sleeping meant losing control, but the other woman pushed a water skin into her mouth, forcing bitter-tasting liquid down her throat. Stephania could taste the sedative in it, a cheap thing, but a powerful one. It wasn’t long before the sky above her started to swim again.
The last thing she felt was surprisingly
strong hands clamping around her wrists as the healer started to drag her across the waste ground.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ceres stood at the bow of the boat, looking ahead along their route to Haylon with trepidation. They were approaching the Passage of Monsters, where a slender island cut off a strait from the rest of the sea. Right then, it seemed peaceful, with a broad stretch of water past the rocks at the entrance, but Ceres had heard some of the stories about it.
It seemed that Thanos had too. He stood beside her, his hand on his sword, and Ceres could see how white his knuckles were with the tension of it.
“They say the Ancient Ones imprisoned creatures here rather than wipe them out,” Thanos said. “That the things too dangerous to let loose in the rest of the ocean were penned up in one spot.”
Ceres thought about how dangerous some of the other things in the ocean were. What did that say about the things that might be there?
“We’re doing the right thing, right?” she said, quietly, so that the others on the boat wouldn’t hear. She knew from experience how important it was for people to believe in the ones leading them.
“If we don’t go this way, we won’t get to Haylon,” Thanos said. “And then Akila will die.”
Which meant that they had to do it, despite the risks.
“At least we get to avoid Felldust’s fleet this way,” Ceres said. The monsters in the passage might come for them, but they would be mindless things, not hunters determined to follow them with the full force of an enemy fleet. “And people make it through the passage. I’ve heard the stories.”
Of course, most of the stories involved people who went in and didn’t come back, but Ceres wasn’t going to let that stop them. They could do this. They had to do this.
Besides, for the moment at least, the Passage of Monsters looked peaceful. The water within it was glassy and still, cut off from the rolling waves of the sea, sheltered from the wind by the strip of an island on the far side.
