The City (72 page)

The old man made a wet, gargling sound and Fell realized it was trying to say his name.
Fell
.

‘What do you want from me?’ he asked, and he heard the terror sharpening his voice.

As the creature moved it made a sucking sound, as if something under the water was giving way. Fell stepped back, revolted.

Then, ‘Help me,’ it said, quite distinctly.

Fell stood, hopelessly conflicted. He believed he should kill this thing and it was lying vulnerable before him. But he was overwhelmed with pity. Whatever it was it was in pain, or crippled in some way. He should step forward and pierce it through, release it from its misery, but he could not even do that. He recalled his dream, the weight on his chest, and he wondered if the creature had been crawling on him as he lay unconscious and he shuddered, forcing down black bile.

He raised his sword.

‘Fell.’ A new voice spoke clearly behind him, and it was like a cool breeze on a sweltering day. ‘Araeon cannot harm you and you cannot harm him. Come.’

He swung round. Marcellus Vincerus stood at his side, as if he had always been there. Fell saw he was unarmed. He was gazing at the creature with what might have been compassion. Then he said again, ‘Come this way.’ He showed the warrior his back and stepped through an archway in the darkness. And Fell sheathed his sword and followed him.

Fell trailed after Marcellus up a flight of winding stairs. Were these the same steps he came down? No, these were torchlit, wider and higher. They climbed, it seemed, for hours. Marcellus had no trouble
climbing and he moved before Fell with all the strength of a much younger man. Fell was tired and he found it hard to keep up and he wondered when the staircase would end. He realized he was hungry and tried to remember when he had last eaten.

Nevertheless he felt calm and at peace, a peace he had never felt in his life before. He knew now that Mason was right: Marcellus would be a good emperor, he would restore the City to its past grandeur. And the creature below, he was just a sad, demented old man who could no longer rule. He would die soon, or be killed. It would be a mercy. Fell considered going back down again and killing him, but he was drawn upwards by the charisma of Marcellus. Daylight started to filter in from somewhere above, and he could hear the distant sounds of battle. He thought fondly of Indaro and Broglanh and Garret and Doon and all the others who were fighting so valiantly. It would soon be over and then there would be peace.

As he stepped up and up towards the light, he thought he had never been so happy.

When at last they reached the top Fell saw it was morning. The sun was rising in grandeur into a sky of summer blue. He was on a high tower, square-sided and floored with old timber. The walls were crenellated with pale brick. In the centre of the wooden floor was a strange glass building. Fell walked over to it. He could see it had once been a pyramid, but much of the glass was broken, and that which remained was mossy and dark.

Fell peered inside and saw Marcellus already standing there, one hand on a metal device bolted to the floor. It was a tall shaft, tall as a man, with a metal tube attached to the top on a hinge. Fell had no idea what it was for. He stepped inside, his boot crunching on broken glass, and Marcellus glanced up.

‘This is an observatory,’ he explained. ‘We would watch the stars from here.’

‘Why?’

‘Did you never lie at night and watch the stars revolving above you and wonder about them?’

‘I never wondered about them for they never change and my wondering would achieve nothing.’

Marcellus smiled. ‘How very pragmatic of you, Fell.’ He looked up. ‘Did you know that the moon is receding, getting smaller and more distant?’

Fell shrugged. He neither knew nor cared.

‘When I first came here the moon dominated the sky. Now it is fleeing, heading for the dark and the cold.’

He stepped out into daylight again and walked to the south side of the tower. Fell followed him and together they gazed down. Beyond the many towers and minarets of the palace they could see the City spread out before them. In the south much of it was destroyed, walls crumbled and buildings fallen. Fell could see no bodies from this height, but a thick glaze of mud lay over everything. He frowned, baffled but not perturbed. Something about this was not right, but he could not say what.

Marcellus was watching him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you did not know of this. I am glad.’

‘What happened here, lord?’

‘Your friends destroyed the high dams and flooded the City. Thousands died yesterday, drowned, and thousands more will die today of their injuries. The palace itself is collapsing from the lowest levels up.’ He pointed. ‘Out there in the south is an army of twenty thousand Blues. They have breached the wall yet they are holding position, waiting for something. What are they waiting for, Fell?’

Fell shook his head. ‘I know nothing of this.’

‘What
do
you know?’

‘My part was to kill the emperor,’ Fell told him, happy to be of help.

‘Two assassins,’ said Marcellus, raising his brows. ‘Two invasions. Double redundancy.’ He thought for a while, then said, ‘A two-pronged attack is a basic of battlefield strategy. You know that. More subtle, and far more difficult to execute, is the three-fold attack. But I have never seen this four-fold strategy except on the urquat board. I guess the mastermind behind the plan is an urquat player.’ He seemed to be speaking to himself, but Fell nodded politely. ‘Not Hayden Weaver. He is a fine general. Only he has the authority to bring an army within reach of their hated enemy and to hold them there without attacking. Yet he is not a man of subtlety. Who is the source of this plan?’

Fell was grateful to have a question he could answer. ‘Mason,’ he said.

Marcellus shook his head. ‘I have already spoken to Mason Weaver. He is filled with bile and would have slaughtered every man in the
City if he had half a chance. He knows more about this grand scheme than you do, yet he does not know whose idea it was to betray the diversionary army. That was the part of the scheme – such a ruthless part – which nearly caused the emperor’s death.’

He said, more sharply, ‘You have been played for a fool, soldier. All of you – Mason, Gil Rayado, your friend Indaro.’

Fell didn’t care. His role here was ended, and he could tell the lord nothing of any use. He felt calm and at peace.

As they watched together a thin minaret, an elaborately carved spike of green and red marble, leaned drunkenly to one side before falling through a roof below in a crash of stone and tile.

‘The foundations of the palace have been compromised,’ Marcellus explained as the noise drifted away. ‘The structures which kept the river water and the sewers flowing have been left to rot. My fault. Our fault. Lack of focus. Centuries of decadence. And now the water from the dams is delivering the final blow. The palace will not be habitable for much longer.’

He turned to look at the corner of the tower. Fell followed his gaze and saw the shape of a man huddled in the corner. It was Mason. He had last seen him at Old Mountain only days before. Fell was interested but not surprised. Nothing was surprising on this day of days.

They walked over. Mason was gravely wounded but he still lived. His eyes had been put out and blood was leaking from his lids and from his ears and nose. Fell could see the lifeblood pumping weakly from his side, where a slender knife was embedded. One blood-covered hand groped blindly for the blade.

Marcellus knelt, taking the searching hand and guiding it away. ‘Don’t,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t pull it out.’ As he gazed at his enemy, Fell saw only compassion in his eyes.

Mason, his face contorted in agony, muttered, ‘My death is inevitable, Marcellus. I would rather die without a piece of metal lodged under my ribs. Do you really need to prolong this?’

‘Mason,’ said Fell.

The injured man groaned at the sound of his voice. ‘Fell?’ he whispered. ‘He has you too? Then I am dead already, Marcellus. You have won, as always.’

‘First,’ said Fell, crouching down, ‘tell me the truth.’ The thrall that held him was waning. His mind started to clear. ‘You have lied
to us from the first, Mason. You owe me the truth, now you are dying and I am soon to die.’

Marcellus watched them silently.

‘You wanted the emperor dead, as did I,’ Fell said to the dying man. ‘You wanted the City destroyed, washed away. That I understand. Your people are dying because of the war. And the City was dying too, although I know that gave you pleasure. But why fool us with the elaborate plan? Did Gil Rayado know? And Saroyan? Did you send them both to their deaths as a diversion?’

‘You’ve seen the powers of these creatures, these Serafim,’ Mason whispered. ‘If all the armies of the City and its enemies turned against them, we still could not be sure of killing them. This was our last throw, Fell. If this failed we had nothing left. We had to use everything in our arsenal.’ He muttered, ‘Have some perspective.’

Marcellus sat back on his haunches. ‘You have failed,’ he told Mason. ‘The City will survive. The greater part of it is untouched. The palaces on the Shield will ride out the storm. The last Families will be watching with interest. Araeon had many enemies among them, but none would move against him. He was their brother. Now they will rally and sally out and descend on your armies. There will be more death and more suffering but the City will survive. It always has.’

‘You were ready to destroy the whole City in the hope of killing one man?’ Fell asked Mason. ‘You would tear down a house to kill a single rat?’

‘Petty selfish people,’ Marcellus said, standing and gazing at the sky. ‘You never see beyond your own small needs and passions.’

‘My sister,’ Marcellus said, turning to Fell. ‘Whom you call Archange.’

Fell frowned. He remembered the tall woman who had defended the hostages in the trial so many years ago. Indaro danced across his thoughts again. She knew Archange, had worked with her. What has she got to do with this, he wondered?

‘Mason once loved my sister,’ explained Marcellus. ‘And she loved him, in her way. He was a young soldier then, of the Petrassi nobility. They were not our enemies in those days. She married him, against our entreaties.’

‘They were determined to have me killed,’ said Mason weakly. ‘They call us primitives.’

Marcellus looked at him sadly. ‘If we had wanted you dead, you would have died then. It would have been better if you had. For the City and all its enemies. It was one of many mistakes we made.’ He turned back to Fell. ‘He was exiled from the City, and from Petrus too. He could not sell his sword in any land. He lost his woman, his family, and his name. He has spent forty years plotting his revenge for that slight.’

Mason bared his teeth. ‘The taste is sweet on my tongue,’ he said.

‘He loved a goddess,’ Marcellus said to Fell, as if it explained everything. ‘It is a dreadful fate. He could never recover from that.’

‘She loved me,’ whispered Mason, his voice failing. Fell’s practised eye saw he had only moments to live.

Marcellus sighed. ‘We all loved you,’ he replied. ‘You blame us, but everything we did was out of love.’

Mason seemed to rally a little and blood dripped from his mouth. ‘Our lands are barren and the fields reek with the smell of corpses. A million men and a generation of young women have died under the swords of our enemy. The City is populated only by children and crones, and old maimed men living lives of misery. Is this how the gods show their love?’

Marcellus gazed off into the distance, apparently adrift in his own thoughts, and he did not answer. For a long time the only sound was of Mason’s weak, whistling breath. Then it stopped. Marcellus knelt and felt for the beat at the base of the man’s throat. ‘He is dead,’ he said.

EM HAD BEEN
sitting on the floor holding the dying woman’s hand. The gesture meant more to her, she guessed, than it did to Indaro, who seemed unaware of her presence. The hand was lifeless and cold, although from time to time the girl could detect a low, slow beat of life force deep beneath the skin. Emly felt numb, exhausted beyond movement. All her hope, her ambition, had been to free her sick father from the dungeon. Now he had changed beyond recognition. Dead-eyed, she’d watched him move with a purpose, striding back and forth on the wide landing, surveying the activities of the enemy warriors below, consulting with his troops, giving orders. He was garbed in armour, a breastplate and sword-belt. She did not know him any more. Evan stayed at his side, his eyes on the general, listening, advising. He had not glanced at her. She felt adrift and alone.

But then Bartellus had crouched down to speak to Indaro, glancing at Em with a small smile which warmed her heart a little. And Indaro said the one word which brought Emly’s soul back to life.

‘
Elija
.’

‘Elija was with you?’ Bartellus asked, surprised, and Indaro nodded. ‘Broglanh, did you know this?’ Evan shook his head.

‘Where is he?’ Emly asked her urgently. ‘Is he alive?’

‘Injured,’ Indaro muttered. She gestured at the doors behind them. ‘Back there.’

She seemed to be losing consciousness again. The girl resisted the impulse to shake her. ‘Where? Was he badly hurt?’

‘Broken arm,’ the woman told her, her eyes closed.

‘Where? Where is he?’ Then, ‘Please, Indaro.’

The woman frowned. There was a long, frustrating pause, and she opened her eyes, her eyes like flowers. ‘Back there,’ she repeated, with certainty although her voice was weak. ‘Up the sloping corridor. Up the stone stairs. Keep the green wall on your left … I mean, the right. Take the first … no, the second on the right. The corridor has a white marble floor and a blue ceiling. The room,’ she hesitated, remembering, ‘the room is on the right, carved doors, near a fountain with dolphins. I told him to hide.’

Em jumped up, her lethargy blown away like smoke in a breeze. ‘I’ll find him,’ she told her father. She snatched up a half-empty water skin lying on the floor and looked around for something to defend herself with.