The
Golden Road was thick with travelers. A fisherman from Leonholt
City, Lord Lyonel Vandemair's seat in the southeast, told them the
rebel queen meant to sack Rassian and fire its churches. An old
woman traveling with her daughter's family said the true queen
was coming back to oust the traitorous s. An unwashed vagrant
claimed that sorcerers from hell commanded both sides of the war and
meant to drown Artaxas in blood.
They went down the rugged coast to Vastanbul where an army of
Easterners was encamped in the shadow of the city's salt-eaten walls
and the seabird-infested cliffs that fell away into the sluggish sea
with its slow waves and sucking sounds. Vandemair's lions,
Evraheim's stooping eagle, the thorny coronet of Rosecrown, the proud
ram of Ramm and a score of others snapped and fluttered beneath the
Imperial and the swords-and-wings. The Grieving Reach itself, the
passage between north and south, lay like an old corpse at the mercy
of the ocean. It was a broad expanse of marshland, reed-covered
tidal flats shot through with tangled watercourses like an old man's
sprung veins. Ira removed his felt cap and ran a hand through his
sweaty hair. This is where it happened.
The Rhyddish legions had died screaming on that drab, blotchy
stretch of floodplain. How many skeletons lay under the sand and
clay? How many still went about in mourning blue for the sons, the
fathers, the daughters and sisters whose minds Sepirahkt had scraped
clean or shattered. Ira could feel it when he opened his First Eye:
the enduring stain of that bloody day. Terror and madness soaked the
very soil like salt sewn by conquering legions. It's a bad place
now, whatever it was before.
Ira led his nag along the cliffside path. Edrea rode her carthorse,
Brutus, ahead of him. There was a checkpoint cordon at the base of
the cliff road. Sandbags and coils of barbed wire stretched like a
snake from the cliffs beneath the city walls to the rough tumble of
broken stone that led down to the sea. Logistics officers manned a
dozen crossing points from chemical-board desks and it was to the
back of the shortest line of travelers that Edrea took them. Beyond
the soldiers and their barricade the road dwindled to a profusion of
muddy, rutted tracks half-filled with brackish water. The tide
wouldn't be in for hours. Ragged trains of men, women, horses, even
a few automobiles were making their way across the flats toward the
flat green country on the other side. Three hundred miles of the
clean Eastern air before the Waste.
They
had papers. A vulturous woman in a little harbor town called Wrath
had made them up for a disgusting sum. They were Lyella Pin and her
hired man, Audley, which seemed good enough for the unshaven officer
who waved them through the checkpoint without apparent interest. Ira
kept his head down and his cap pulled low, but if there were
photographs circulating they'd know him by the wormlike scar that
hooked from the corner of his mouth up past his eye in a ghoulish
grin. Marius made sure I'd never travel incognito again.
At least his uncle had botched
the job, though sitting a saddle still made Ira's wounded stomach
itch and ache. He preferred to walk.
Salt mud sucked at Ira's boots. His horse tossed her head and
whinnied as she picked her way over the flats. It was naked country,
raped and oozing. Ira looked back at the thousands of tents pitched
like barnacles in the shadow of Vastanbul. The remains of the clash
between John Blackwall and the Eastern Houses still littered the
mudflats. Gulls roosted by the hundreds on the blasted hulks of
tanks and trucks. Heaps of greasy ash were all that remained of the
dead, burned to safeguard against plague. The Vastani Bridge, the
railroad span that crossed the marshy plain on three huge pylons, had
been blasted at its center and chunks of concrete and twisted steel
lay strewn about the mud like a giant's forgotten bones. Ira walked
through its tangled shadow.
His
First Eye found the birds among the circling clouds who had tasted
flesh either in the battle's wake or on some other day, and for a
while he hung above the Reach on dirty wings and watched the haggard
skeins of refugees stumble like drunks across the pitted, muddy
earth, through stands of thick marsh grass and pools of standing
water. He watched them through the eyes of clever water rats, and
yellow marsh snakes the length of a man's arm. There was nothing to
see, though, and nothing to feel but fear and despair, so he closed
his Eye and left the spying to the rats.
Horses
flicked their tails at biting flies. Men and women burdened beneath
the weight of their uprooted lives toiled through the muck and
standing water. This is hell, thought
Ira. He crushed a fly against his cheek and flicked the bloody
corpse into the mud. An old woman staggered past him with a child of
three or four held in her trembling arms. Beyond her a balding man
in laborer's clothes stood staring in despair at an automobile with
smoking pouring from its bonnet. Ragged children clustered around
the man like motes of dust. The sinners just walk around,
wondering what's happened. They don't know they're already dead.
Past the muddy graveyard of Lord John's defeat the land formed a
sandy ramp in a cut that ran up into the witchgrass of the
vertiginous coast. A few scrawny maples grew gnarled and windblown
from the arid soil and besides the crying seabirds there were great
black clouds of sparrows whipping back and forth across the sky like
schools of fish. The Golden Road, a shaped stone highway as old as
Vulgar Dosht and running alongside the elevated highway called the
Road of Thorns, returned a few hours after they'd left the
fish-stinking Reach at their back. Ira took off his coat, lit a
cigarette and tried to ignore the blister forming on his left heel.
When he did mount his swaybacked mare the Reach was a whiff of salt
on the wind.
The
flat land nodded and the sun sweated them. It was senescent country.
Empty. Flat. Knee-high grass as far as the eye could see in every
direction. The other travelers thinned. They fell behind, forged
ahead, took other roads out into the vast green sea. Ira watched
them go and felt nothing. I spent my whole life a mad
fisherwoman's son trying to get north. Now I'm a prince, headed
south. I wonder if the bitch's cottage is still there? The
sun gasped its way toward the shimmering horizon.
Ira drowsed in the saddle, slipping in and out of dreams about an
endless plain covered in a foot of brackish water, translucent trees
growing up from the silt. Edrea's gloved hand like a vise on his
shoulder dragged him rudely back into the waking world. It was dark,
or nearly dark, and a canvas-topped troop truck blazoned with the
Rosecrown coronet and the Kvalus bull approached them on a parallel
track. Dust swirled in the truck's wake and danced in its
headlights. There were men on the running boards with guns. Ira
started to open his First Eye, but Edrea's grip on his arm tightened.
“No sorcery,” the old woman said through gritted teeth. “They
aren't here for us.”
The truck passed them by. Its reddish taillights receded into the
flat, dark distance.
They
pitched their camp in the gloom beneath the branches of a dead
baobab. The tree's swollen trunk was hollow and stank of guano. Ira
pissed against the knotted bole while heat lightning spidered
glasscrack-wise across the inky sky. Since Marius had opened him it
burned when he pissed, a sensation like forcing ice chips through his
cock. Wind whistled through the nodding grass and made the tree
creak with old voices. It's too flat here, Ira
thought as he buttoned his trousers, hands stiff with the gathering
chill. One sniper in a blind and we're meat.
Edrea
was brushing her horse by their impromptu picket line, a pair of
metal stakes driven into the ground to keep the animals wandering.
The horses watched Ira approach. Their soft dark eyes were empty in
the firelight. Ira lit a cigarette. “How much longer until we're
past the Imperial patrols?”
“The Throne's patrols.” Edrea bent and lifted Brutus's hoof.
The huge horse snorted agreeably. “There hasn't been an Empire
since your grandmother's murder.”
“How much longer?”
“A day. Two days. Lord Sumner Hammerton is waiting for us at the
edge of the Waste.”
“And then what?”
“Valsir. Then Golden Harbor. War.”
War. He was sick to death of guns and tanks and sorcerers. He'd
been bled, stuck, shot, and played for a sap since that day at Second
Genault when his uncle had left him for dead on the shore. There
are people who have to answer for this. He put a hand to his
half-healed stomach. Eating anything but the blandest food still
gave him unbearable cramps, and he'd taken shits he'd thought would
be the end of him. I'm still alive, though, and I can still make
them answer.
Lorne had to go. That much he knew, or felt in his ruined gut. His
uncle, too, or else he'd never be truly safe. The rest of the
Kvaluses, the Rosecrowns, and the rest of their angel-worshiping ilk,
and it remained to be seen whether or not the Umzadi could be bought.
Ira rubbed his nag's neck, but the old horse just looked glassily at
him. “I've been wondering,” he said. “The Third Eye. Kazimir
mentioned it to me, and I've read enough of the Conqueror's Gospel to
know it has something to do with the soul. Why can't I open mine?”
And oh, but I've tried. Hours and hours of pointless meditation
wasted in Lorne's little mansion.
Edrea prized a stone loose from Brutus's dinner plate-sized
hoof and let the big horse go. She lit a long, black cigarillo. “The
Leviathans could do strange things with their Eye,” she said after
a while. “Your uncle was imprisoned by his own soul, warped into
shackles and warden both, and most priests agree that's how the House
kept Eleazora in thrall for so long. No sorcerer outside the
Imperial House has ever touched that kind of magic, and there's
nothing I can do to help you use it.”
They sat in silence by their campfire well into the night. Ira ate
tinned corn and pickled beets while Edrea read through a slim
leather-bound folio. The stars were clear and bright. Bats swarmed
in the warm night air, looping madly around one another in a rush to
gorge themselves on as many insects as they could eat before sunup.
The voice of heat lightning murmured in the distance when Edrea slid
her folio back into her satchel and looked up at Ira.
“Your mother was a gentle woman.” She unscrewed her thermos and
took a drink, then wiped her chin. “When you were born she was
taken by a black depression. For weeks she kept to her bed. She
would weep at the very sight of you. It happens to women sometimes
after childbirth, and Lyannis was morbid at the best of times. Twice
she tried to end her own life. Only Kazimir's surgeons kept her from
succeeding.
“It took her the best part of a year to recover her strength, to
leave her bed and take you in her arms. Still, there were days she
sat by the window and stared out at nothing for hours. She wouldn't
speak, she wouldn't eat. We feared she might die.”
“Before Lorne could get another whelp on her.” I'll never
forget, teacher; you lied to me. “What's the point of this
story?”
Edrea looked older than usual in the firelight. Too old to be out
riding on the eastern plains in the dead of night. “Not everyone is
made for war.” She puffed on her cigarillo. “We're riding
toward blood, my prince, and I know what blood does to young men.
You've seen your share of killing. If you chose to take ship to
Barkult or Al-Dosht or Jek then, well, that would be that.” She
took the cigarillo from her mouth. “Do you understand me?”
It was a door she held open for him, a way out of the web woven by
people like Sofia, like Luke, like Kazimir, and Lord John. Ira
looked down at his twisted hands, at the iron ring on his little
finger that was all he had left of his dead, broken mother. When had
anyone ever offered him a way out? Never. Not even Sofia would
have done this for me. I could go...not back to the coast, but
somewhere good. Somewhere new. I could ride off into obscurity,
sign on with some half-penny crew out of Lion's Bay or Stone
Harbor... And then what? Would he live his life as a deckhand,
a corsair, a clam diver? My home a shack by the docks of some
foreign city, my wife a crabber's daughter, my children dirty ragamuffins, my grave a pit dusted with lime. He chewed the
inside of his scarred cheek, his forced half-grin. “No.”
“No,” Edrea repeated, disappointed. “Of course. As
you wish.” She rose and went to unroll her pallet among the roots
of the baobab tree.
When Ira slept he dreamt of little girls with scabby knees laughing
as they raced through the shallows beneath the rotten piers of some
dead city. Their hair was dark as the sea, their eyes grey as gull
feathers. The elder carried the younger on her back up a crumbling
stone stair to the bones of a ruined lighthouse overlooking a great
black bay mobbed with circling seabirds. “There it is,” said the
older girl, her sister's moon-wide eyes peering over her shoulder.
“That's where it happened.”
Ira woke with a splitting headache and an aching bladder. He had a
long, stinging piss behind the tree while Edrea, who had already
risen, saddled Brutus. They rode away from the baobab before first
light touched the grasses. The half-light of dawn lurked by the
horizon when they returned to the road. Six miles into their day's
ride they passed the first slave farm they'd seen since coming south
of the Reach. Ira, his head still pounding, watched the slaves toil
in their sweating hundreds. Dark-skinned Islanders, ashen Xuli,
hairy men from the archipelagos north of the Shatterstones, and the
lanky coffee-hued men of Barkult sweated with sickles, scythes, and
handcarts among the ripe head-high grain in the endless summer heat
of the south. Every slave, men and women both, was branded with a
livid eagle. Evraheim's chattel.
The whole empire rests on their shoulders, and when they're old
and bent they'll go sailing off to Heaven to feed the Throne's brood.
Where was the justice in that? Where was the justice in any of
it? Nobles are leeches, but what does that make me?
Some slaves watched them from behind the chain-link fence
that ran for miles and miles along the fields, and then that was gone
and they went on into the morning and the grasslands. A few cars
passed them, and a handful of ox carts and carriages, but foot
traffic was non-existent. Even when they rode past a little trading
town no one came out to recommend hotels or beg custom. The east
still went in fear of John's defeated armies, or else the soldiers of
their own rulers. There were signs to justify their fears, as well.
Twice they passed Blackwall men and townsfolk strung up from
makeshift gallows by the roadside, and once a burning car left to
smolder in a ditch. The next town they saw was a blackened skeleton,
the one after that a still-smoking grave. A crashed airship lay like
a whale's shark-stripped carcass in a field and dead men, carbonized
husks, spilled from its ruptured gondola.
“It will be worse in the open grassland where John fled,” Edrea
said when they stopped to water the horses at a cattle trough. The
cattle, great beasts with cut horns and wet noses, watched them
placidly from their pastureland. “He was always a hard man, and
defeat makes the best soldiers into ravening dogs.”
Ira spat through his teeth and pushed a hand through his
sweat-dampened hair. “As long as he stops sniffing himself long
enough to crack Laurent and the East.”
Lord Sumner Hammerton met them a week later at the desert's edge
where the waving grasses of the eastern plains gave way to bare gorse
and dead acacias standing black and thorny in the sunlight. The
herds of antelope, wild cattle, and bison that roamed the east were
nowhere to be found. Vultures perched in the branches of every tree,
and once Ira saw a strange long-snouted beast scratching at a termite
hill, but life was sparse and dusty on the burning plain. Lord
Sumner's legion rode dark, men, camels, and horses dressed in duns
and tans, greys and browns in place of their commander's own blue and
white. Even the trucks and their lone tank had been repainted to
blend into the barren landscape.
Sumner himself was a stocky, white-bearded man with leathery skin
and windswept hair. He found them in the shadow of a lonely red
pillar of time-eaten rock, him and his ragtag band of survivors sent
to escort the prince and his tutor south to dusty Valsir. He climbed
down from his horse and knelt. His men did the same. “Highness,”
the old man said. “House Hammerton is at your service.” The
irritation at bowing to a younger man was plain in Sumner's terse
voice.
“Thank you, Dominus.” Ira didn't bother dismounting. “It's
been a hard ride. How many days until we reach Valsir?” His horse
dropped a load of dung, spattering its own fetlocks.
The bearded nobleman stood. “Three days, highness, and I have
good news for a change.” He cracked a smile. “Lady Yvaine fled
back to Golden Harbor last week, defeated.”
Small favors. “Good news indeed,” said Edrea. “Has
Lord John pursued?”
“Not yet.” Lord Sumner, aided by a slave, climbed back into the
saddle. “He's pacifying Valsir before he rides out. The
angel-lovers are throwing a tantrum over some priestess dying in the
siege.” The bearded noble's men were on their feet again and
preparing their own mounts and vehicles to move out from the shadow
of the standing stone. Ira heeled his nag forward to ride beside
Lord Sumner. A peek through his First Eye showed the seers in the
old man's honor guard; three of them dressed as rank-and-file
soldiers with Hammerton's warhammer on their collars. Like most
seers they'd shaved their heads and their pale scalps were peeling in
the sunlight.
He doesn't trust me, Ira thought. The old man's unease and
anger were there to read, jumping like the lines on a pulse tracker.
His men were similarly on edge. They've been dodging the Church
out here for months and now they're babysitting a man they've never
met and some old sorcerer crone; I can't blame them for being sour
about it.
They made good time that first day, though Ira's nose and
cheeks were peeling and he'd sweated through his shirt by the time
they made camp beside a muddy oasis. Sumner ate with his men,
clapped their backs when they joked, shared out his liquor like a lax
uncle, and joined them in their crudest marching songs. Ira had a
place by the nobleman's fire, but neither the man nor his knights or
soldiers so much as looked his way. He considered easing their
disease and resentment with his Eye, but with Sumner's seers so close
it seemed more likely to start a fight than to win him any friends.
“This is ridiculous.” Ira wolfed down his stew of tinned
spinach, onions, and leathery beef. The broth warmed him against the
cold night air. “What have I ever done to the old man?”
“He's been fighting wars since before you were born.” Edrea had
crumbled stale crackers into her own stew and was fishing
unenthusiastically for the pieces with her spoon. “Leave him be.
Even princes can't be loved by every lord who swears his House to
theirs.”
Ira lit a cigarette. Out beyond the circles of the camp's fires the
eyes of jackals glowed like coals, and for an instant the cigarette's
end matched them. He smoked it, watching Lord Sumner trade war
stories with one of his client knights, a bull-necked man with a
brown roadrunner on his ceramic breastplate. I could blast them
all to slop. He blew smoke. One second and this whole camp
is a charnel house. Ani had told him stories when he was a boy
of Rassianus kings and queens who had brought whole cities to their
knees with the strength of their sorcery. Aurax the Mad had once, in
a fit of wrath, reduced Rassian to cinders from the Palace to
Leviathan Bay.
Edrea rose, stretched, and departed for the tent the men had set
aside for her. Ira sat by the fire and smoked until one by one the
soldiers drifted away to their posts or their pallets. Lord Sumner
gave him a stiff bow before taking his own leave, and then it was
only Ira, the dark, and the fading fire. That night he dreamed of a
tree that was a woman, her eyes dark knots in the rotten bark, her
fingers twisted branches, her mouth a black pit working, working,
always moving, never speaking.
Beautiful boy, came the woman's voice, not from the tree but
from far, far away and deep, deep beneath the earth. All our sins
are crashing down.
Ira woke shaking and sweaty in his slant-topped tent. It was still
dark. He went out to the water barrels, drank deeply, splashed tepid
water on his face, and watched the gelid sun rise fat and shimmery
from the belly of the night.
