The Company of Glass

by Tricia Sullivan

  ‘Mother, if you don’t believe Pharice is attacking us, why don’t you convince Lerien he’s foolish to leave Jai Khalar?’

  Mhani looked at her sharply. ‘Men seldom do things for the reasons they give,’ she said. ‘You might have learned that much by now.’

  ‘Better to be like Chyko,’ Istar murmured, ‘and never give any reasons at all.’

  ‘Stay out of trouble, Istar,’ her mother advised. ‘Keep your head down and wait – perhaps we will find the White Road after all, and Lerien can ride to Jai Pendu.’

  ‘But we know a way through the Floating Lands! The White Road is not needed, Mother, and you exhaust yourself looking for it.’

  Mhani bristled. ‘I am not exhausted! Calm yourself, daughter. Self-restraint is called for here. Now, go get Pallo and bring him here for safeguarding, before Lerien decides to throw him in prison.’

  Istar wished she could slam the door behind her, but today there was no door out of the Eye Chamber. She passed through an arch into an overgrown, weedy garden where the noon sun beat down even though she knew it was almost night. The only way out was a broken gate that led to a flight of steps climbing hundreds of feet.

  ‘Kassien, you’re right,’ she said to the air. ‘Give me a ditch.’

  She climbed until she could climb no further. At the top of the stairs she found herself on the battlements two levels above the main dining hall. She turned left and walked to the end of the wall, where she could look out across Everien. She wanted to be alone with the birds and the wind and, with the passing relief of night coming on, the stars.

  There was a whirlpool turning in the pit of her stomach, and at the centre of it was Tarquin the Free. She had heard so many stories about Quintar the Captain of the Guard, but of Tarquin the Free no one ever seemed to speak a whisper. He had been right to change his name, she reflected. The man she had seen this afternoon was not the hero of the stories. This man had killed Quintar and replaced him with something bitter, rough, and crude.

  For years she had fantasized about meeting him. She would be travelling somewhere far away, at a strange inn on a desolate road, and she would be thrashing the entire clientele at darts, and a tall stranger with keen eyes would challenge her. They would engage in a hotly contested match that would end with Istar throwing the winning dart from behind her back. And then he would reveal his identity and she hers, and they would drink together and Tarquin would tell her that he had been watching her from afar for years. He would talk of Chyko and how Chyko’s death had destroyed him. And she would befriend him and he would teach her all his best tricks and together they would ride out and make an end to the Sekk … or something like that. In any case she had expected him to be better-looking. And she had expected him to make some overture of kinship to her, for he had after all left her unsupported in the Seahawk Clan, all but forcing her to become an Honorary in order to stand for her sisters.

  She certainly had not expected him to arrive out of the blue and swipe aside her years of careful planning with a few words – ruin her hard-won audience with the king, disrupt all her goals – and then merely say, ‘We should talk.’

  She was fuming. The sky ambered in the south over the sea, and the mountains seemed to grow larger in the falling light. A soft wind blew sheep calls from the valley far below. Istar felt murderous.

  Footsteps sounded behind her. She turned. ‘I thought you were asleep,’ Istar said coldly. ‘I thought you were exhausted from your journey.’

  Tarquin came to a halt just out of sword range. ‘I am tired. But I find it difficult to sleep many hours in Jai Khalar. And every hour spent sleeping here is another hour for the Pharician army to advance.’

  Istar said nothing. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how agitated she felt.

  ‘I regret my interruption of your petition,’ he said after a minute. ‘It was unfair. Poor timing on my part.’

  She put her elbows on the parapet. She couldn’t see his face clearly. Behind him the moon was coming up in a bright wedge over the mountains.

  ‘Then support me with the king,’ she urged. ‘Ajiko’s strategy is doomed to fail. Surely you can see how he has turned into a poor imitation of a Pharician. He denies the Clan ways and makes everyone march to a pattern. We could do so much better.’

  ‘Ajiko was never what you could call a great thinker,’ Tarquin agreed. ‘It disturbs me now to see him with so much power.’

  ‘We were only asking for ten swords, Tarquin – the men won’t even be missed. Tell me ten swords could do anything against an army such as you tell of! We have a good strategy, and—’

  ‘It has nothing to do with the Pharician army,’ Tarquin cut in. ‘You’re out of your mind to wish to go to Jai Pendu. For one thing, you’ll never get through the Floating Lands. The bridges no longer connect them to each other, or to Jai Pendu. You’d be stranded.’

  ‘Xiriel knows a way.’

  ‘He’s wrong. There is no way, I tell you,’ he said vehemently.

  ‘I don’t see how you could know, Tarquin. You took the White Road. How can you be so sure?’ She watched him carefully. It was as if he didn’t want there to be a way.

  ‘I am sure. It is a fact. No one can cross the Floating Lands.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘It’s true! Don’t argue with me.’

  She slid back half a pace, wondering why he was so emotional. He looked older all of a sudden, and bleak.

  ‘You’d be throwing your lives away and you don’t even know it.’

  ‘No, I don’t know it,’ Istar said bitterly. ‘You’re the only one who knows, because you’re the only one to come back alive. Even Queen Ysse is dead. She would have agreed with me – I know she would have. She went to Jai Pendu herself.’

  Tarquin’s rough profile smiled. ‘Queen Ysse would not have stood here and argued with the likes of me,’ he said. ‘She would have taken her men and gone by now, and cut to pieces anyone who stood in the way. But those were different times.’

  Thinking of Ysse made Istar hot with ambition. Ysse had been the only Honorary to actually lead men at a high level. By assembling her small group of dissidents, Istar hoped to do the same. Certainly she hoped to escape Ajiko’s system of discipline, which irritated her beyond speech.

  ‘Chyko was a brilliant fighter, and my best friend,’ Tarquin said, disturbing her nascent thoughts of putting Ajiko’s smug, order-loving officers in their places. ‘I miss him still.’

  Istar supposed that was the closest she was going to get to an apology. She could think of nothing to say in return. What could she say to this strange man, who knew nothing of her or her goals?

  There was only one real question. ‘What happened to my father at Jai Pendu?’

  His gaze swerved away from her scrutiny. ‘I can’t say.’

  She frowned. ‘What do you mean, you can’t say? Is it true what I heard, that Ysse forbade you to speak?’

  He was silent. She forced herself to wait for his answer, but what she wanted to do was hurl her fists against him. His lined face, his shadowed eyes, his unruly hair – she wished to see it all smeared with his blood when she smashed his teeth. How could a man so many times renowned be so resigned, so full of doom – and so deficient in the hauteur required of a Clan warrior?

  ‘I met a terrible foe,’ he said at last. ‘One beyond my scope, and I failed, and their deaths are on me, and it drove me out of my mind. You would not understand the details.’

  ‘Try me.’

  He shook his head. ‘Leave it, Istar.’

  ‘I won’t leave it! Why did you come back, then? How dare you face me and refuse me what you owe?’ She was spitting with emotion.

  Kassien was calling her from somewhere below.

  ‘Istar! Istar, come quickly!’

  She did not react. She was staring at Tarquin, trying to read his face – demanding an answer with her eyes and body.

  ‘Your friend calls you,’ he said woodenly.r />
  She spun on her heel and ran towards the sound of Kassien’s voice.

  ‘Move your legs, Istar! They want to put a guard on Pallo. Istar!’

  She came around a corner in the parapet and nearly bumped into him; he grabbed her arm and started to drag her into a doorway. She resisted him, craning her head around the corner to see back the way she had just come. Tarquin was no longer there.

  ‘Quick, Istar. It took forever to find you, and Xiriel says the way might change at any moment. This damned castle is doing my head in, I swear.’

  He was tugging her into the passage.

  ‘Where’s Pallo now?’

  ‘With Xiriel. Hanji’s on the trail, though, so it won’t be long before we’re discovered. We’ve got to make a decision.’

  They were running through galleries and down stairs.

  ‘There’s no decision to be made from my point of view. What about you, Kassien? You’d be directly disobeying the king, abandoning your duty and ruining your good name forever.’

  Kassien stopped suddenly, flattened himself against the wall, and put a finger to his lips. They were nearing the barracks that housed such soldiers as yet remained in Jai Khalar. Pierse the Captain of the Guard could be heard droning at one of the cadet squads.

  ‘I don’t care if you’re sleeping! I’ll give inspections any time I like. This is a war, you little midgebites. Your boots are a disgrace, Liese. Let me see your kit. What a mess. What’s this for?’

  ‘It’s a hunting knife, Captain.’

  ‘Did you ask permission to carry a hunting knife?’

  ‘I’ve always carried it, ever since—’

  ‘Not any more. Thank you, Liese. Close your mouth.’

  Every muscle in Kassien’s body had gone taut. Now it was Istar’s turn to do the tugging.

  ‘Kass, don’t! Come on. Don’t listen to him.’

  Istar cursed under her breath. Just the sound of Pierse’s voice was enough to blind Kassien with rage; for years he had been avoiding Jai Khalar, not only because of the Knowledge, but to avoid running into Pierse and having to refrain from killing him.

  ‘Star.’ His teeth were clenched. His hand was on his sword. She didn’t know whether he wanted her to stop him, or to just hold down Pierse while Kassien disembowelled the Captain.

  ‘No, Kassien. Come on.’

  She knew he had to be thinking about Bennen. Kassien’s younger brother had been her only friend in her early years training for Ajiko’s army, and he had fallen foul of Captain Pierse, whom Istar privately believed was a sadist. Istar, an Honorary, had been almost as ill-suited to the group as Bennen, and the two had clung together as outcasts will. At first they had been ignored by Pierse as the ineffectual usually are; then Bennen invented a bird out of wax and paper and wood, and they had flown it from the Eye Tower on a string until it was caught on a sudden gust and shot in a window, where it frightened some women spinning. Word had got back to Captain Pierse, who confiscated the toy and interrogated both cadets.

  ‘How did you do this? Explain how it works!’

  Bennen shrugged dumbly. He affected an idiotic expression whenever he didn’t want to answer something; this occurred frequently under Pierse’s authority, with the result that Pierse thought Bennen a simpleton.

  ‘Are you ill, boy?’ he snapped.

  ‘My friend is an Impressionist,’ Istar said, and Pierse reacted as though she’d said, ‘My friend eats babies.’

  Pierse put them both on punishment for no good reason, but Bennen was undeterred. Bennen was always making things. They used to build fire-propelled boats and race them on the lake outside the training grounds. Pierse got wind of this, too, and took the boats away. He was unpleasant to everyone but downright vicious to Bennen, who admittedly was not much of a soldier. Bennen had a tendency towards sleepwalking, and sometimes he would say things in a language no one could understand. Pierse thought he was playing games and criticized him for being the weak link in the chain.

  He’d sneer at Bennen. ‘Everyone else is looking over here. Why are you looking over there?’ Bennen would give a secretive little smile and comply with directions, but later he confessed to Istar that he’d been watching some people no one else could see.

  Pierse was obviously embarrassed to have such a weird boy under his command, but Bennen might have made a decent fighter had he been left to his own Clan for informal instruction. He was big and an apt wrestler, even if he was less interested in swordplay and not interested at all in military discipline. Where Kassien had thrived on the strict environment of Jai Khalar’s military school with its romance of strength and status, Bennen’s very nature made it impossible for him to fit in to the ranks. Istar remembered how Kassien always stuck up for his little brother, until eventually it was understood that if you harassed the freak with fainting spells you would receive a severe whacking from Kassien. It was something Istar had always liked about Kassien, especially because she knew Kassien himself was afraid of Bennen’s Impressions. Almost everyone was: there was a deep suspicion among the Clans when it came to the Everien Knowledge speaking through the mouths of their own children. Even now, mere mention of the Knowledge made Kassien uncomfortable.

  Things had begun to go badly for Bennen after Kassien was placed under Taro and went to Wolf Country to fight the H’ah’vah in the tunnels under the north-west cliffs of Everien. While he was away, Bennen was assigned to the less dangerous Deer territory, where the typical Sekk, instead of calling monsters to serve it, tended to pass itself off as human and attempt to Enslave a villager who would then turn on others in unseeing rage. If the Sekk got a warrior, a whole village might be wiped out when that man went berserk.

  Istar had been with Bennen when he engaged with just such a Sekk in Deer Country, but it had escaped before it could be killed. Recalled to Jai Khalar for placement in one of Ajiko’s new armies, the group had been subjected to immediate inspection by Ajiko. She would never forget it. Bennen fell into a trance in the training ground and began inscribing symbols and diagrams in the sand. Ajiko claimed he must be Enslaved, and Pierse took Bennen’s sword away and cut him down with it on the spot. Afterwards they said that the Sekk Bennen had encountered in Deer Country must have put a Slaving spell on him. There was no arguing with such a claim, for paranoia about the Sekk had reached new heights in the past five years or so. Anyway, what was done was done: Bennen was dead.

  Kassien never spoke about his brother. As far as Istar knew, he had always been the perfect soldier. He never stepped out of line, and on the field he displayed daring and excellence, fighting with a cold intensity held barely in check. But Istar suspected he was only biding his time, waiting for an opportunity to bring down Ajiko and Pierse. Recently, when Istar made the rounds of the young officers, seeking support for an expedition crossing the Floating Lands, most of them had shrugged her off. But Kassien had listened to her ideas and to her surprise agreed to sign on. He had not interfered with her leadership in organizing the group or gathering information, and he had even let her speak before Lerien. And until now he had shown a level disposition, for all that he seemed to hate and love the army in equal measures. She was not prepared for the way he reacted to the mere sound of Pierse’s voice: he was shaking with rage.

  ‘This is not the time or the place, Kassien,’ Istar said in his ear, and dragged him away from the doorway. ‘Where’s Xiriel? Let’s get out of the Citadel before you do something you regret.’

  He shook himself a little and let her draw him away. Then he seemed to pull himself together, and he led her to a round room containing a sculpture of a running horse.

  ‘Xiriel’s waiting for us, but we have to get through that statue,’ he said. He shuddered. ‘Nothing here is ever simple, is it? Why can’t it just be a fucking door?’

  ‘Shh. Let’s go.’

  Kassien hesitated.

  ‘Wait, Star. Think what we’re doing. Is it really worth it to have Pallo with us? He’s probably safer here in prison, even
if he has done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I told him he could come, and I intend to keep my word. No one has ever given Pallo a chance.’

  ‘Istar.’ His serious tone made her look at him, and she felt herself weakening under his gaze. She knew he was thinking that she was letting her sympathy for Pallo colour her judgement. That Pallo could easily be killed.

  She argued automatically. ‘Any of us could die on this mission. It’s his choice. If he wants to come, we can’t afford to turn him away. We’re dissidents; we’re not going to get ten swords from Lerien, and we have no future with Ajiko. Do we?’

  Now it was Kassien’s turn to look away. ‘No,’ he answered grimly. ‘There’s no question in my mind about that. I don’t want to stay here. But Pallo could be a handicap for us. At least Xiriel knows how to use the axes. At least he has a head on his shoulders.’

  ‘I’ll be responsible for Pallo,’ Istar said. ‘Come on, let’s argue about this somewhere else. I thought you said there wasn’t much time.’

  ‘There isn’t.’ Kassien went up to the statue and studied its eerie shape in the moonlight. ‘Xiriel got me through here, but I don’t know how to get back. Jai Khalar is starting to make me sick, I swear it.’

  ‘I remember this statue,’ Istar said. ‘It goes to a staircase. You have to mount the horse to get inside it.’

  Kassien put out a cautious hand as if afraid to touch the statue. Then he let out a sigh and remarked over his shoulder. ‘All right, we’ll take Pallo. It would be cruel to leave him in a place like this.’

  He took a deep breath, scrambled up the side of the stone horse, and was gone.

  Wings

  In defiance of anybody’s idea of what a castle was or how it should behave, Jai Khalar was rearranging itself around itself. The hourglasses quickened in some rooms and slowed in others, to the chagrin of the clerks. Corridors became shafts and windows became rooms; children learned mathematical tricks in their sleep. Things went missing.