The False Martyr (42 page)

“
Smoke,” Teth said from
her position at the front of the boat. She did not point or place
any emotion in the word. It had been that way for two days now, and
Dasen no longer expected anything more.

At least she was moving.
The previous day, she had climbed out of the bed and come up onto
the deck. She had spent the day sitting on the bow with her feet
hanging over the edge just looking at the river, staying as far
from him as she could. Dasen had made several attempts to talk to
her, but she had just stared. That is until he tied off the rudder
and tried to sit with her, tried to touch her. Then she had jumped
away and stared at him not with anger but pleading, begging him
with her eyes to keep away. He had seen no choice but to
listen.

Today, she had slept far
past the dawn, had wandered aimlessly around the boat, and pushed
food around on her plate, but she had moved, had eaten, had even
spoken a few inconsequential words. It was something. After that
first day, Dasen had thought long on her and decided that he didn’t
need to know what was wrong. After all they’d been through, it hurt
him more than he’d ever admit that she could not confide in him,
but he also knew that he could not force her. He needed to take
care of her now just has she had cared for him in the forest. He
remembered that time, remembered how they had eventually come to
trust and understand one another. He could only hope that this was
the same, that time would heal whatever this was, that she would
find her way back to him, that they could somehow reclaim what
they’d had before.

Dasen joined Teth,
standing above where she sat at the bow with the expanse of Wildern
on Orm spread across the plains before them. The sun was sliding
toward the horizon. The mosquitos, flies, and gnats were
celebrating the reprieve from its oppressive heat in frenetic
swarms. The river shimmered beneath them. The wheat fields on the
opposite bank rippled golden in the breeze. And past it, as Teth
had suggested, smoke rose from the sun-drenched city. In fact,
smoke rose from almost every building, small white streamers cast
from cooking fires and channeled to chimneys, but two columns stood
out from those tiny wisps. Slate-grey and black, they rose from an
area past the first buildings, darker, thicker, and far more
ominous than wispy cooking fires. Somehow, Dasen knew that these
were the fires of war, were the fires of buildings burning, of
homes destroyed, of death. He could not tell from that distance
what districts had burnt, but the docks, warehouses, and shanty
structures that were visible along the northern outskirts appeared
to be untouched.

His eyes rose, searching
for familiar landmarks.
Should I be able
to see the Chancellor’s Palace from here? The spires of the
Parliament?
The great dome of the
temple?
He was not sure, but he knew that
the city looked different. Then he realized what was missing and
everything else fell into place.
The
Monument to Unification
. The single great
tower – the tallest in the Kingdoms – surrounded by sixteen shorter
towers was missing. Dasen had approached the city by river a number
of times and remembered seeing the central tower and the peaks of
its scions. He traced from that gap to where he should see the
shining bronze spires of the parliament building, where the white
block towers of the Chancellor’s Palace should hide the city
behind, where the great golden dome of the temple should be
reflecting the sun like a beacon, where the old wall should peek
out above the building that surrounded it.

“
They’re gone,” he
whispered.

Teth looked up at him, her
expression clouding, and Dasen feared that she would fall back into
tears. He held his breath dreading the sound of her sobs, but she
just took a great, deep breath and pointed out across the river
away from the city to the west. “They’re already here,” she said in
defeat. She stood, looked at Dasen for a long moment, eyes studying
him, then ran a hand down his arm until it found his hand. She
squeezed it once and walked silently back to the cabin, climbed
down the stairs, and disappeared into the hold.

Dasen followed her with
his eyes, wondering what it had meant. It was the first time he had
touched her without her screaming, but it was, if anything, more
heartbreaking than all the previous refusals combined.

Eventually, his eyes
turned back to the city and rose to where Teth had pointed. He had
to look almost directly into the sun to see, but Teth was right.
Another cloud of smoke stood above the horizon, rising in hundreds
of tiny columns from an array of tents, laid out across the fields
in the thousands.
The
invaders
, he realized. Legs turning to
water, Dasen took Teth’s place on the bow, leaning against the
railing, staring at the water, wondering when they would ever
escape.

#

The sun was just beginning
to light the few puffy clouds along the eastern horizon when Dasen
untied the boat and set it floating slowly toward the city in the
distance. He had wanted to go even earlier but did not have the
confidence to steer the boat in the darkness and did not want to
end up crashing into a dock, pylon, or barge. He realized that he
had not seen a single other boat in all their time on the river,
and though he had spent an entire evening watching, there did not
appear to be any activity in the city – no ferries passed, the
docks were abandoned, the bridges did not carry a single horse,
cart, or man. Other than the smoke rising from the chimneys, it
looked as if the city were lifeless, leaving Dasen to wonder if the
invaders had massacred the people here the same way they had in
Thoren.

“
We’ll just float on by,”
he said absently as the first buildings, tumbledown inns with boat
slips, appeared beside them. He watched the empty docks, the closed
up warehouses, the shuttered inns without seeing any signs of life.
It was still early on the river, but the Wildern docks were famous
for their bustle, for the continuous stream of boats going in and
out, for the flow of goods, and jingle of coins. Seeing them
abandoned was like watching a ghost, and Dasen shivered. “We’ll
just keep floating until with get to Gorin. From there, we can
cross into Liandria. It will take a week, but we have enough food,
especially if I can catch some fish.”

A sigh was Teth’s only
response. She sat on the bow, legs hanging over the front of the
boat, nearly hugging the spindle she straddled. Dasen was at the
back, holding the rudder to keep them in the center of the river,
as far as possible from each bank, but the city was so quiet that
even whispers seemed to carry the weight of shouts.

Hoping to pass as a river
man and his son bringing in a cargo to trade. They did nothing to
speed their progress or draw attention. They wanted to seem as
shocked as anyone would be at drawing in on a city under threat of
invasion. It was not a guise they had to work to maintain. Dasen
was clothed in a big, oiled-felt boatman’s hat that he had found in
a trunk of clothes under the bed. Its great brim shielded his
entire face, and his other clothes were sufficiently ragged to give
the appearance of a river man. Teth did not wear a hat, but her
short, mangled hair and ragged clothes were such that no one would
believe her a girl if she told them.

Eventually, the docks and
warehouses gave way to the brick blocks that marked the Financial
District on their right and the River Market on the left. The
stalls of the market were universally closed. Blank boards would
have greeted any shopper who happened to venture out. Staring at
the rising sun, Dasen quickly calculated. It was Rest Day, the
busiest day for the market, and though still early, the merchants
should have been opening their shops, stocking their shelves,
arranging their wares in preparation for the shoppers who would
soon fill the market to near immobility. At the same time, it did
not appear that any of the buildings on either side of the river
had been touched by the invaders. The docks were almost completely
empty of boats, but they still stood. The warehouses were tightly
closed, but no fire had touched them, no looters had ransacked
them. The market was lifeless, but there were no dead among the
stalls, no bodies collecting flies as the stalls would customers.
There was not a brick out of place, no signs of fire, no rubble, or
bodies. The domes of the cities other two temples stood above their
districts as they always had.

Until the river turned
again past the market and the old wall came into view. It was
shattered. The thickest wall Dasen had ever seen was nothing more
than jumbled piles of broken rock. The mighty river towers that had
stood ten paces out in the river on either side had been cast into
the water, leaving only slabs of rock poking from the surface like
ragged merlons. And beyond it was a wasteland of rubble and ash.
Everything was gray or black, charred by the fires or covered by
heaps of ash. It was all gone. Every edifice, administrative
building, palace. The Temple. The university. The gardens. The
monuments. They were ash and jumbled stone.

“
By the Order,” he
whispered. And on the other side, the East Bridges District, the
main commercial district where the wealthy kept their offices and
ran their empires was a mirror of the Capital District. The
invaders had destroyed the political and economic heart of the
nation and left everything else untouched like children forced to
watch their parents’ execution then mourn over their broken,
lifeless bodies.

“
Dasen, watch out!”
stirred him from his reverie just in time for him to see the ferry
that had pulled out into the river in front of them. He had become
so complacent, so used to seeing nothing but empty water, that he
barely knew how to react to the existence of another vessel. He
watched as the river carried them on a collision course with the
wide, low ferry. Then, with some thought, he turned the tiller to
angle them around behind as it crossed their path.

Passing, they watched a
dozen men with long poles push the ferry across the river,
perpendicular to the current. Between them, on the ferry’s flat
surface was an ornate coach surrounded in its entirety by large,
brutish warriors holding mammoth horses – the invaders. The ferry,
designed to carry a dozen wagons and their teams, barely held the
host of decidedly nervous warriors and even less certain horses.
Dasen wished that he could somehow panic those horses, that he
could create some kind of stampede that would result in the lot of
them being thrown into the river to drown. He played with the idea,
but it was nothing more than that, so he kept his head low, face
hidden behind the rim of his hat as their boat passed
behind.

“
What was that?” he asked
when they were out of earshot. “And why didn’t they use the
bridges?” He watched the last of the four great stone spans pass
over their heads without a single support from the river below. He
had once asked one of his father’s engineers how the bridges had
been built. The man had given a long explanation about cantilevers,
truss arches, distributed force, and compression support, which had
all been his long-winded way of saying he had no idea.

“
The bridges are blocked,”
Teth answered with a sigh. “And that was your father.”

Dasen wanted to argue, to
scream at her, but she had made the accusation with so little
emotion, that Dasen could only follow her finger to the side of the
coach where his father’s face was clearly illuminated in the
coach’s side window. Gasping, Dasen felt his stomach churn as his
sense of betrayal fought his desire to stand and wave.

“
He’s one of them,” Teth
said. “Just another man who’s betrayed us.” But those words were
too much even for the indifference she seemed to be attempting. She
choked on them and buried her face in her sleeve as if that would
hide the shaking of her shoulders. Dasen was too shocked, too far
in denial to join her. No matter what he saw, he could not convince
himself that his father was a traitor, that he had sold himself to
the invaders and given up his country in return, so he just turned
back to the river, to the untouched houses, markets, and docks that
were now appearing on the other side of the devastated
districts.

Chapter 26

The
24
^th
Day of Summer

The words of the oath were
still ringing in Ipid’s ears as he strode down the granite steps
away from the temple that served the south-eastern section of
Wildern.
Protect, serve,
follow
, he had barely heard the words as
Valati Wallock recited them, as he repeated them back. Now, they
echoed through his mind, drowning out the murmurs of the crowd, the
bustling of the guards, the whinnying of the nervous
horses.

He looked out at the crowd
with glassy eyes. They looked as stunned as he felt. They were
certainly not cheering as they had when Kavich was sworn into his
most recent term. No flowers were being thrown, no flags were
waving.
At least they’re not throwing
rocks and burning effigies
, he told
himself.
But for how long?
Once the shock wore off, once the Darthur moved
on, once their fear was forgotten and misery mounted, he would be
at their mercy. It was exactly as Eia had said, his fate was
decided. Succeed or fail, history would remember him the same way:
traitor, tyrant, plunderer. The lone epithet he could add was
failure. And his only chance to avoid the latter was to embrace the
former.