The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (71 page)

“Most gracious,” said the guard stiffly, pride obviously pricked.  She tried not to smile; this was part of the role, and the way she imagined all mages to be.  Arrogant, condescending, rich.  Gesturing for the small door in the main gate to be opened, he said, “Enter freely, Madam Magus and company.”

“Thank you,” she said, and swept through the gap.  The others followed, Arik jingling from all the glittery bits he'd had added to his harness, and the guards shut the door behind them.

“Guess there's not much merchant traffic,” said Fiora in an undertone as they strode down the street beyond.  It was inordinately wide for the size of the gate, the buildings on each side blank-walled and overhung like battlements.  None stood higher than two stories, allowing a glimpse of the taller buildings that rose to the south like trees protruding from grassland—Trivestean architecture, Lark guessed, which made these squat compounds Riddish.  No lanterns lit the street, the shadows thick where the sun could not reach.

“Clan houses, territories,” rumbled Arik through a mouthful of fangs.  “Fhrovavly a different gate for traders.”

Lark nodded; that seemed reasonable, especially with the desert at their backs.  She had been through her share of sandstorms in her birth-city of Fellen, and as they progressed deeper in, she recognized some similarities between here and there.  No desert-facing openings, nor any where the wind would stick its dusty fingers; lightly-peaked roofs of glazed tile; curve-topped entries with covered walkways between some buildings.  Sand sat in runnels and curlicues along the road and made low dunes in the alleys, but more life began to show down cross-streets as they went.

She picked one at random and turned north, preferring to risk Riddish territoriality over Trivestean scrutiny.  Seen from this angle, the buildings showed their proper faces, with recessed windows and balconies and first-floor rooftops hosting residents who drank and cat-called down at passersby.  These westward façades were painted with what seemed a mix of family crests and opposition graffiti, and while some pedestrians stuck close to them, others kept themselves far across the street, leaving a clear lane in the middle.

A jingle of leash, then Arik was at Lark's hip, pushing her toward the center of the road.  She scritched him behind the ears and adjusted her course; she'd been thinking to shout up at one of the balconies for directions but now saw the way the residents on the roofs watched.  Likewise, those few who slunk by on the far side of the road kept a sharp eye on them.

Wolf-bloods
, she reminded herself. 
Private, uptight, scornful of weakness.  Probably shouldn't approach anyone until we're on the traveler side of town.

So they kept walking, with Arik subtly steering her from street to street, until her legs ached and dusk had settled thick over the city.  Uphill, along curving roads past clan compounds that increased in size and street-width until pitched battles could be held in their forecourts, then around the spur, down to the other side where the compounds shrank then split into apartments, then blossomed with shops and taverns and all the requirements of the more neighborly world.

The streets narrowed and became better-lit, the desert-facing façades still windowless but no longer blank—festooned instead with painted advertisements, way-markers and arrows to all the services found around their corners.  Looking back, Lark saw at the height of the spur a huge structure half-built, half-carved into the rock, presumably the Giant's Head Inn.  Its domed roof indeed looked like a titanic pate, but she was not about to take them there.  She'd asked after expensive inns just to throw enemies off.

Instead they drifted toward the lights and bustle of the plaza at the north gate, where neither the dark nor the settling chill seemed to dissuade the locals.  Lanterns glowed atop stone poles, throwing down radiance from their mirrored lids; street vendors whistled and shouted discounts on the last of the day's wares.  Some carts were packing up, others just wheeling in, and the eastern edge of the plaza was a forest of open doors: taverns, bawdy houses and brothels taking advantage of their access to the street.  In the plaza center, a brace of entertainers' wagons had been pulled in around the public well, their draft-hogs snoozing in their traces while actors in masks and big fur costumes performed some sort of drama for an enraptured crowd.

Lark halted them at the last alley before it and took a moment to look back, but the street was full of bland traffic, the rooftops empty of observers—no clear sign of pursuit.

“Swap gear,” she murmured anyway, and stood guard at the mouth of the alley while Fiora quickly unrolled and donned her wolf-wool robe, then strapped the sword underneath it.  Her headscarf became Cob's, and he pulled on the cut-down remnants of his own robe as a jacket.  They shucked their jewelry into the pouch Lark provided, then Cob let Arik off the leash.

Lark eyed them over.  It wasn't a vast change, and there was nothing she could do about herself, but it might still trip up a spy.

“I'm going to distance myself from you,” she said, trading the coin-pouch for the jewelry.  “I'll cross the plaza, see if I can find an inn.  You go through from a different direction.  Don't follow me, just watch.  When I leave the plaza, trail me at a distance, and get your own room at whatever place I enter.”

Their faces showed earnest intent but a dismal lack of subterfuge. 
Will they be all right on their own?
she wondered.  Cob was a hermit, Fiora a sheltered acolyte, Arik a forest-dweller.  She wasn't even sure they understood the value of their coins.

It's time to stop caring, Lark.  Concentrate on yourself.

With a nod, she headed off into the whirl of the plaza.  As the distance between herself and Cob grew, the hunger and thirst and weakness that the Guardian's presence had suppressed began to crawl back, and she tapped the canteen at her hip.  She'd go fill up from the well, make a sedate tour of the vendors, then cram herself into the nearest cheap inn.

She had just begun angling past the carts, trying to spot a path to the well that wouldn't put her in danger of the draft-hogs, when a splotch of darkness on the wall caught her eye.  She stopped short, and would have cursed herself for being so obvious if not for the joy that leapt in her heart at the sight.

There, in black, squeezed between an angry slur and a weaver's sign, was a spiky hand pointing to the corner.  A Shadow mark.

Thank Morgwi, we've got a presence here!

She turned away casually, mind churning.  The artist was likely a lay-follower, but that would be enough; they would know how to get her out of here.  And then she would be free of all this lunacy.

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow and I'm gone.

*****

Time meant nothing in the Grey.  For Dasira, it could have been only a day that she spent stumbling onward, ignoring Serindas' guidance—but perhaps it was a week, a year, a century.  She felt numb, distanced even from her own body.  A lost soul drifting through the mist.

It was clear that she'd made the wrong choice.  She should have obeyed the blade's pull and gone for Erestoia, not tried to out-think it and navigate this trackless realm.  The idea of going backward had just been too abhorrent, and now she would suffer for it.

If the Grey even allowed suffering.

A part of her wanted to lay down and quit.  Let the anger go, and the fervor, the grudges—all those things that had driven her forward until she'd gone right off the cliff.  Give up; pull the curtain; admit defeat.

But she'd never been capable of that, no matter how much she damaged herself in the process.  The urge to get back at those who'd beaten her was always there, like a needle in the brain.  She could not rest without treading their faces into the dirt.

It was barely for Cob anymore.  No; perhaps it had never been.  She'd cared for him, but possessively, and when she'd decided to cut his throat, it had been for spite.  To stymie Annia and Enkhaelen as much as to free him; to declare her eternal opposition to those who would be her masters.

And yet she'd failed so often in that.  Every time, really.  Was it some conditioning, some facet of her bracer?  She'd once thought herself cunning, but she barely remembered being the child with the poison bottle, tainting the spoons.

Was she the same at all?

In her hand, the blade twitched.  She ignored it; it had done so many times on this trek, always trying to pull her back toward Erestoia.  Even though she knew she could get out that way, she refused—and she laughed at herself a little for that obstinance.  Would she really rather be lost than ever go back?

The blade tugged again.  Sideways.

Frowning, she deigned to glance at it.  Since entering this place, it had burned with the fleshy orange-pink hue of that spire, its light decreasing as she forged a path away from it.  But now there was a different tone to the glow—cooler and faintly purple, as if bruised.

“What?” she mumbled.

The blade quivered in her hand as if aware it had finally caught her attention.  A thread of bluish energy ran through its runes, and her eyes narrowed.

Cautiously, she followed its pull.  The blue deepened, the blade's tremor heightening until it fairly hummed—then suddenly a blue light breached the mist ahead.  She halted but it came no closer, and when she advanced again, she found its source within a few strides.

An Imperial beacon, its fist-sized glass sphere flaring wildly.

Baffled, she looked from blade to beacon.  She'd always thought these were for detecting enemies at the Empire's borders; they ran alongside the Forest of Mists, the Garnet fringe and the northern frontier.  But it occurred to her suddenly that many of those enemies were wraiths.  Perhaps these were to catch or confuse the ones trying to find their way home.

She set a hand on the beacon and felt the faint resonance of the spire-shard within.

The Grey snapped away, leaving her in starlit darkness.  Dead bracken crunched under her feet; when she shifted, a lance of pain went through one leg and she looked down to see a small branch protruding from it, neat as if spliced there.  A few inches behind her stood a thorn-tree, and she shuddered at the thought of having come through at the wrong place.

The beacon still throbbed.  It would draw a Watchtower's scry—perhaps even a portal.  She considered laying in wait, but she had no idea where she was.  The color indicated Sapphire territory, no more.

So she cut herself free, opting to leave the twig embedded in her calf rather than try to dig it out, and faded back into the underbrush.  Where there was one beacon, there would be more—and from them a path, a road back into the Empire.

Her work was not yet done.

Chapter 19 – Misericorde

“In the name of the Risen Phoenix Emperor, you have been found guilty of the crimes of treason and murder, and are hereby sentenced to death.  Do you have any final words before your sentence is carried out?”

Kneeling at the headsman's block, Commander Tonner glared in silence.  The block was already wet with the blood of three of his lieutenants—their bodies removed and their heads mounted on pikes to be displayed in front of the garrison—and his neck and tunic were stained red from the contact, his eyes dark-circled but defiant.

Captain Sarovy exhaled, then raised the executioner's sword.  It was not as heavy as he had expected, though after three uses it seemed to have grown weightier in his hands.  Lieutenant Benson stepped back from his side; he held the whetstone and cleaning cloths and stiff straw for testing the blade's edge but was not willing to be in range of potential spatter.

All around the training field, the onlookers hushed.  There was a proper execution square at the other side of the Civic Plaza but Sarovy did not dare move Tonner from the garrison, not after running down half the militia and burning the governor's manor.  So a makeshift block had been set up here, and he had claimed the sword, though there had been offers from others.

He was the leader.  This was his decision, his obligation.  Let the blood be on his hands.

“Then I consign your soul to the Light,” he said, and brought the sword down.

Even after all this time, it surprised him how easily flesh separated and bone split.  The sword bit into the wooden block, the chained body spasmed, the head dropped, and it was done.  Another life gone.

He wrenched the blade free, and Lieutenant Benson handed him a clean cloth.

There would be a few moments' pause before the pieces were removed.  Sarovy did not know whether the soul fled its corpse immediately or took time to extract itself, but a superstitious part of him refused to interfere.  And, too, there were the onlookers to consider.  The high bluff of Old Crown overlooked the training yard, and Scryer Mako had told him there were people up there, watching.  As the yard was warded and the executions no secret, he found that acceptable.  He had invited the families for propriety's sake, but they had made themselves scarce.

On the other side of the block, angry Beltras and gloomy Rynher stood under guard, waiting their turn.

As he cleaned the blade mechanically, he considered the future.  He was not endearing himself to anyone by this action.  The city's feelings were obvious in the shuttering of several services—including the Velvet Sheath—and in the near-riots that had broken out around the last few militia arrests.  The Shadow Cult did not have to show their anger; it was already evident.

But beyond that, Sarovy's superiors would be furious.  Execution was a valid sentence for treason, but it was normally carried out at the Palace, and Tonner's beheading should have waited until the man was scanned by an Inquisitor.  Sarovy planned to argue expediency; the Potter's Row incident had shown them how dangerous both the cult and the city were, which made Tonner's presence a threat to the men.

His superiors would not accept that, which was fine, since it was a lie.

This was pure spite.

Not toward the militiamen; they were fools but dedicated to their city, and he respected that.  No, his spite was aimed at his commanders, current and former: Field Marshal Rackmar and Prince Kelturin Aradysson.  Kelturin for inciting this whole mess, and Rackmar—bloody-handed bastard—for denying his request to trade prisoners with the cult.

No using the glass eiyetakri in his pocket.  No retrieving Sergeant Presh or any of the men who had vanished during the attack and since.  He would not have traded Tonner, but Beltras or Rynher or all three lieutenants...  Five game-pieces in his hands, now made worthless.

They would have died anyway, their minds stripped down to nothing, their heads bent before the Throne itself.  He knew he should have sent them there.  But he wouldn't.  He was tired of being yanked around by his commanders, and if this little rebellion—this slice of mercy—was all he had, he would take it.

If a Shadow Cultist happened to fall into his hands, though...

The company had eulogized lost Lieutenant Gellart and his men the night before.  No one had said much, just as no one raised a fuss now—no shouts, no jeers.  Only grim faces, all still shaken or else waiting for the real enemy.

Looking up, he met the eyes of Medic Shuralla.  She stood beside the two militiamen, wringing a handkerchief between her fingers, but her gaze was steady.  None of the condemned had accepted Imperial rites, and so Enlightened Messenger Cortine had been dismissed over his objections, with Shuralla brought out in his place.  She had not addressed the crowd, but whispered now and then with the condemned men, their guards politely pretending not to listen.  Now she touched Rynher's arm, and he grimaced and bowed his head, saying some kind of prayer under his breath.

Sarovy tested the edge with a straw, which split neatly.  Sharp.

“Next,” he said.

*****

Sergeant Linciard hesitated at the door.  He could hear voices through it, too faint to recognize. 
Courage
, he told himself, and knocked.

Silence fell, then came the sound of footsteps.  He edged back as the door cracked open, hands fisting, but the face in the gap was Cortine's.  “Lancer-Sergeant?” said the priest, blank eyes seeking his unerringly.

“Ah...  I don't suppose Rallant—Lieutenant Rallant is up for visitors?”

The priest smiled.  “I believe so.  Shall I leave you two?”

Linciard opened his mouth but couldn't figure out how to answer.  Rallant must have said yes, though, because the priest swung the door wide and beckoned him in, stepping by.  “I should minister to the rest of the injured,” he said, and strolled off down the hall.

Linciard watched him go, then pushed the door shut.  “Is it just me, or can he actually see with those eyes?  It's creepy.  Everything about him is.  He went after the medic—“

“Why are you here?”

Warily, Linciard turned to face Rallant.  It was not the senvraka's bandages that made him uncomfortable, or the bruises on his few patches of bare skin, but rather the heat he felt when their eyes met.  The nervous prickle that ran down his back and made his thoughts fizz.  At least Rallant was upright, in the chair that his predecessor Gellart had so recently vacated.  “Are—  How do you feel?” he said, drifting closer.

Rallant's gaze was hooded, face carved keen with distrust.  “Fine.”

“You've...been sleeping well?  Got your own room now...”

“Yes.”

“I haven't seen you in a while.”

Silence.  Just that honey-colored stare, flat and distant.  Linciard's heart rose in his throat.  Somewhere close by, men were being put to death; all around them, their fellow soldiers mended and worried and smoked, feeling threatened by the future; the captain was getting scary; and here he was, pursuing a man who had used him then lost all interest.

“Look, I—nevermind,” he said, turning to go.  “I'll get Cortine back for you, yeah?”

“Erolan.”

His name froze him in place, warm memories dancing behind his eyes.  Hard to think that attacking Weshker had been just a week ago.  Harder still to think Rallant had been in his life only three weeks more.

“Why aren't you angry?” said Rallant.

The question surprised him, made him turn around when he'd almost sworn he wouldn't.  “What?” he said, moving in, and saw Rallant flinch as if he'd shouted.  But he hadn't.  He was sure he hadn't.  “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I did.”

“You mean controlling me?  Yes.”  He stopped just out of arm's reach, aware of how tense Rallant was in that chair—shoulders stiff, bare feet tamped on the floor, ready to spring toward or away.  Holding up his wrapped hands, he said, “I knew you were a controller from the start.  That's why the army employs you, right?”

Rallant's brows twitched, expression unreadable.  “Yes.”

“The captain said you were good at Potter's Row.  Kept the men going.  But look, I'm not here about that.  I knew the moment you bit me that you were influencing me, and so you used me against the Corvishman, which I can understand—not forgive, but—“

“I didn't think you'd get hurt.”

“How in pike's name would I not get hurt?  He had knives.  They all have knives!”

“You're twice his size and he's an idiot.”

“Being an idiot has nothing to do with being able to fight.  And—stop sidetracking me.  You didn't have to do it.  You could've just asked me and I'd've beaten him up for you.  I like you.  I wouldn't've tackled him down the front steps, but I'd've hit him a bit, sure—“

“You
like
me?”

Linciard looked down at Rallant's baffled, battered face and felt suddenly like he was speaking the wrong language.  “I wouldn't be here if I didn't.  Don't get me wrong, I'm pissed that you controlled me, but you had a reason.  You're from the border too, you've lost people to the Corvish, right?”

“Yes.”

“I lost my father.  Bunch of my cousins.  So I know how you feel.  But—“

The memory hit him then, as if playing catch-up to his words, and in Rallant's place he saw the man in the pit: bloody-mouthed, frostbitten, his eyes like black holes, his rust-red hair frozen to his scalp.  Linciard and the other children had found him there—the first Corvishman he had ever seen, dying impaled among spikes with a brace of wildfowl at his feet.

The others had laughed and thrown snowballs, rocks.  Then they had run home to tell the rest of the lodge what the fox-trap had caught.

He had stayed behind, and when they were out of sight, he had climbed down carefully into the pit.  Twelve, he had been old enough to carry a hatchet, not just a child's knife.  And the Corvishman had smiled.  They both knew a hunter should not let the prey suffer.

Softer, he said, “We've done bad things to the Corvish too, and I'm tired of it.  If it was a personal grudge, I'd mangle him for you, but Savaad...  You forced me.  You made me get excessive in the fight.  That was you, right?  That wasn't me?”

Rallant's expression revealed nothing.

Linciard almost reached for him—to grab, to shake, to extract an absolving answer.  But he couldn't let himself be that man.  “Forget it,” he said.  “This is obviously a bad idea.  You used me as a bludgeon then you ran away.  Fine.  I won't bother you again.”

“It wasn't my choice.”

Linciard snorted and turned, but Rallant caught his wrist.  Even that light pressure made his fingers tingle, but he stopped short, not wanting to pull away.  Not wanting to look, either, or think about what he was doing.

“They—  He—“ said Rallant, then, more quietly, “Erolan, I have orders.”

That was a cold finger down the spine.  “What?”

“Not Blaze Company orders.  White Flame.”

Mouth dry, Linciard turned toward him slowly.  His head was bowed, shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow, his hand on Linciard's wrist like a vise.  “White Flame,” said Linciard, “the Emperor's guard?”

“They have agents throughout all the Imperial armies—watching, listening, waiting.  They don't like this...mixing between humans and specialists.  Especially the inoculations.  They wanted me to test whether I could override my own.”

He remembered the tingle in his bitten lip, and the way it spread like cold fire through him.  That revelatory night.  “And you could?”

“Somewhat.  I'd been...dosing you with the venom that makes thralls, but it kept wearing off instead of accumulating like it should.  And it was difficult to evaluate your behavior, since you—“  He smiled faintly, gaze still averted.  “Since you never argued with my orders.”

Linciard flushed.

“So...Weshker.  But then you were hurt, you went under that witch's care, and you stayed away.  I failed.  I'm in trouble.”

“With who?”

Rallant fell silent.

For a long moment, they stayed like that: Rallant holding on but looking away, Linciard staring down at him.  Trying to figure out what this meant—what to feel.  He wanted to be angry, but like Rallant said, he had never objected.

And he couldn't help the way his heart hurt, seeing Rallant like this.  He didn't know the man well, but the injuries on his psyche were as plain as those on his skin.  He hadn't expected the tawny, fanged beauty who had swaggered up to him that first day to be
this
on the inside, but he couldn't say he was surprised.  Pretty men were often broken.

He wanted to help, but he was historically shit at it.

Nevertheless, he tried.  “Your thralling wouldn't stick?”

“You were never thralled.  Just influenced.”

“Then I'm here because I want to be.”

Shaking his head, Rallant said, “You're a fool.  You shouldn't get involved with me—with any of us.  Nor with Blaze Company.  It's not just the Shadow Cult whetting their knives.  Get a transfer from the captain.  Go back to the Gold Army.  Escape, Erolan—while you still can.”