Wicked Throne, page 18
Deercat grinds his jaw. His eyes rake me over.
“I stayed behind to cover for his absence,” I say. “Nyrene knows about it.”
Deercat scowls. He doesn’t like the idea of Nyrene and me doing anything together.
I add, “We were on the brink of war.”
His acid-green eyes mark my skull a target. I shove my knee into his ribs and squirm for freedom. Deercat’s elbow plows into my sternum and knocks me back. I wheeze. His right fist jerks high. I hold up a hand for peace.
“True,” I gasp, “Razanhi let me go. I was supposed to leave Almathea and never come back. I—Hm. I wanted to see my funeral. Call it a guilty pleasure. Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to see an entire city sob over your corpse? Nobody sobbed for me, as it turned out. I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked.”
“No,” he says.
That hurts.
“No, I’ve never wanted to see someone sob over my corpse,” he clarifies.
I squint. “Where did you come from, anyway? Don’t tell me the merfolk had Vorsmad’s secret coordinates all this time?”
“It was the goblins. They sent out a distress call to Gadran Vei. Small aircraft arrived to fly us to their kingdom.”
“The goblins? I’m surprised.”
“Why?” He shakes his head. “They’re your people.”
“She should have joined with the elves.”
Deercat glowers. “Not everyone’s as honorless as you. Once we arrived, they flew us through their seagate—”
“Honorless,” I repeat. It doesn’t taste better in my mouth. “How did you figure it out, anyway?”
“—to Tes Ap Hanhga.” Deercat looks me in the face. “Elegant.”
“Not really.”
“I heard you. Who else would praise his enemies for betraying him?”
Oh. “I don’t remember blurting that into the audio pickup.”
“You did. You’re lucky no one else noticed.”
More than he knows. Razanhi certainly wouldn’t say “elegant” while being double-crossed. I smirk. “Ygraine was right beside me, too. She must have been busy with her parsnips.”
Deercat looks at me funny. He looks away. “So, Nyrene knows?”
So long as I’m on the floor, I stuff a hand under my head for a pillow. “Do you think I could fool her? I can’t. She figured it out right after the funeral.”
“She allowed you to rule as the Imperial prince? I don’t believe that.”
I smile. “I’m councilor regent. So get up, Lord Deercat.”
“Regent.” His eyes grow glassy. He’s thinking about Momaggos. “Who —?” Killed him.
“I don’t know. The same person who brought a weirghast hive to Vorsmad and stole access to Razanhi’s private seagate. He evacuated the city right before the elves attacked.”
Deercat’s eyes snap up.
“So many went missing, it’s hard to guess who he might have been.”
“He was in the city?”
“Yeah. How about that, we had a real traitor and it wasn’t me.”
Heaviness settles upon his brow. “You never told me. About any of this.”
He’s hurt. Seriously? “You did just attack me. You could have told someone and had me killed. Or thrown back in a dungeon. Or exiled.”
“If I ever believe . . . for a moment—”
“If I had reasons to make you believe for a moment, I could have fled through any operable gate from the city before the elves attacked. I wouldn’t have nearly been killed trying to save our people, and your whore —”
“Zavia has done nothing to you. You will leave her out of this.”
“—waited around for you or Razanhi to come back. I’ve been avoiding the privy council for a week. They want to attack Pelay with no army, and the commoners want to retake Almathea. I think a good execution would be less mind-bogglingly stupid.”
Deercat stares. After a moment, he reaches out to help me up.
I roll to my feet and shove him. He shoves me back. “Friends,” I say, “are we?”
“Your call. Come quietly.”
“To the Fringe? I take it back. You’re not stupid.”
“I—” He was going to say to the dungeon or to Beurnock, who’s worse, but the need not to be stupid fights with his sense of justice. “Shut up,” Deercat says.
“He’s got the Ash Womb. And an army. You know that, right? We don’t stand a chance. We don’t need numbers or a strong leader. We need someone who’s good at sneaking into places, and we need someone to infiltrate his location. You want to come with me? Perhaps I’ll let you kill him.”
His mouth opens and closes. He swallows. “I can’t let you walk free.”
“Ah?” I rock forward. “So this is interesting. Which is more important: your reputation or the lives of your people? Wow, is it Eorha all over again?”
“Stop.”
“Lock me up. Take command. Nyrene made me regent—”
“I am not Nyrene.”
“I hadn’t noticed. You become regent. Sort of. Except, since it turns out that Emperor Razanhi is Ivar de Ryeleth, there’s a riot on your hands. Oops. And our enemies still have the Ash Womb. Perhaps Beurnock convinces you to force me to confess under interrogation, as he still thinks I’m behind the theft, or perhaps you refuse because you know it’s a waste of time you don’t have. Right? But now everyone thinks you still have a soft spot for me and they stop trusting their regent. So you have a riot and you’ve fatally sabotaged your reign. Sheer political carnage. Sound like a plan? Great. Let’s start.” I put my wrists together and amble back toward the main hall.
Deercat blocks my path.
“Well?” I say.
“Please don’t do this. Can’t this be simple?”
I raise an eyebrow. “When have things ever been simple?” He glares.
“In any case, what were you saying about going places?”
Deercat drops his eyes, studying his feet. “I’m not letting you talk me into another treason. I should take you to the dungeon.”
“You know I have connections in the Fringe. I know people who can whisper secrets in my ear—for the right price.” I brighten. “You can come with me, of course. Ensure I don’t slip away from justice a second time. Except—you can’t go as yourself. I can just imagine how the underworld would take to our noble Lord Deercat. If only you knew a wizard who’d be happy to disguise you.”
“You don’t have to be ugly, Ivar.”
“Don’t I?”
Deercat gives me a brooding look. His shoulders sag. At length, he says, “I will tell the War Council of our plan. Beurnock will take command while I enlist a volunteer war band—”
“Good idea. Beurnock will kill me and arrest you for helping me. Our enemy will be terrified. I expect he’ll turn himself in.”
He glowers.
“You know I’m right.”
“Then Mother Sigeld. She’ll grant me a band from the Black Tower Guard, and I’ll order her not to tell—”
“I expect the moment you tell anyone who survived the bombing that they’ve been taking orders from the dragon’s right hand, your plan not to tell Beurnock will tumble into ash.”
Deercat glances up and down the hall. Is the gravity of the situation finally starting to dawn on him? He should have let me do this in private, where no one might happen upon the emperor’s half brother plotting with his traitor adviser.
Deercat sighs. “Go ahead. You’ve obviously spent some time thinking about how to trap me in a corner. Why shouldn’t I tell the merfolk king?”
“I have not spent a great deal of time. Look, now you’re just being irritating. Why do you think you shouldn’t tell Razanhi’s relatives he’s been missing for a month?”
He glares.
I offer a magnanimous smile. “Don’t despair. There is an art to defeat. And from art, beauty. I should know.”
“How? Ivar de Ryeleth has never been defeated.”
“Please. The emperor—”
“He exiled you. He didn’t defeat you. Clearly, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
That’s too fine a point to bother arguing. I say, “What about Nyrene? Leave her in command. She already knows I’m alive.”
“Fine. Nyrene will do a good job leading. She is strong willed but diplomatic.”
“In a sense, the best of both of us.”
He says, “Don’t be familiar.”
“I’m not familiar. This is my irritating smile.” I rebuild my Razanhi glamour and point myself toward Tes Ap Hanhga’s seagate.
Deercat roars, “Take that off! You’re not to—”
“Just until we get through the seagate. Think about it.”
He thinks about it. He thinks about it all the way to the dock, where a muscle quivers in his jaw while I use his brother’s voice to command our immediate transport and pass Razanhi’s throne to Nyrene halfway through the emperor’s vigil. The goblin small-crafts fleet hovers in the distance. They’re somebody else’s problem. Everything is somebody else’s problem, except for the seagate and the frosty wasteland beyond, and answers.
18
IN THE BEGINNING WAS fire, and in the beginning was ice. The fire came from Chaos, the great storm boiling forever around Sangearth, and the ice from our world’s ancient surface. Where fires touched the ice, it melted, ran into fissures underground, and cooled—in time, this gave rise to pocket oceans bearing life. From almost the earliest days, when our behorned, flightless ancestors passed stories around the bone fire along with too much whale fat, a great prophetess foretold that whomsoever climbed from the ice world’s depth and reached the top of all creation, and looked up from Sangearth’s white permafrost into the Chaos storm’s raw fire, would become as God immortal.
When settlers first climbed up the prehistoric ice deposits that led to Lotherak, they thought they’d reached the world’s top. Lotherak is not another pocket inside the ice. Looking up from the wasteland, they didn’t see an ice dome for a sky but, instead, something wondrous. Stars. If poor Terra, home to poisonous iron and giant avians, was at Sangearth’s extreme bottom, could Lotherak be the prophesied top?
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Lotherak’s on the side somewhere, poking out from the ice world like a blister on a giant’s knee. From the tallest mountain, you can see Chaos light licking above the horizon, but no one who’s ever followed the light hoping to find the top has returned to tell about it. Nothing lives in Lotherak’s wastes but the mad and the monstrous. Morning comes as a heatless milky glow from a nearby spiral galaxy; a hundred billion suns look down upon Lotherak’s bald terrain over a frosty wilderness buried in mist and razor-edged ice crystals.
Deercat and I trudge up a ridge buffeted by screaming wind so fierce it whips powder from the dunes. I conjure a shield; sleet smashes across my barrier and froths around us in a dull gray cone. Our thermal charms melt any snow that drifts too close to our skin, leaving a mushy ice trail in our wake. Superheated Chaos winds drive the storm, and every few minutes, the tropical air lashes too close to the surface, carving icy furrows we slip and slide across.
Greasy red light splits the fog. The Fringe rises like a poor but loving mother through the storm, sheltered from wind and snow by massive warded plate-iron walls. The search beam orbits a tower above the patch metal gate where three dozen plasma turrets glower like feral children. Mother’s oily interlocking skirts crackle with permafrost and residual defensive magic. A small personnel hatch stands open on its peeling hinges, showing us into a dubious embrace. Four bristling, masked steel golems seize us and search us before accepting a fistful of rubies and sapphires each to let us through.
“Is that Azan’s treasure?” Deercat says.
“Don’t be absurd. That’s their treasure.” I grab his shoulders and pull him under a rusted scaffold. “Now that we’re in, put on your mask so I can make our disguises.”
Deercat hauls the burnished monstrosity over his face. Universal translators aren’t common inside the empire, but out here away from civilized linguistic spells, they pass almost as normal. Better, the panivox hides his famous good looks under folded brass and ten knobby white straps. Deercat hates magic.
“You look like a Midwinter roast,” I say. “Speaking of, what are you going to call yourself? Roast-lech? Beur-gravy?”
“Stop.”
“Fine. You’ll call me Quinath.” I flip through glamour masks. Faces appear and disappear in sherbet and lemon smoke. Tanif could work, being, at least, the same outward sex and skin color as my current shape.
Deercat spreads his arms.
I maneuver Tanif’s face over mine. The glamour seals in place with a gout of cherry-red sparks.
“So?” Deercat says.
“So, what?”
“Earth’s blood, Ivar, do I look like a mercenary?”
Except for the offensive goblin silks he had on a few minutes ago, Deercat has a fashionista’s taste in armor. Between that, his general stature, the warded Imperial sword hanging at his hip, and his steady charisma—
“You’re the universe’s most expensive private guard,” I allow. “And don’t call me Ivar. Quinath.”
He lowers his roast. “I won’t remember that.”
“Just try.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? Am I running this operation, or aren’t—”
“Ivar is a common name for a goblin. My father was married to an Ivar.”
“Potatolot is a common name for a roast.”
“I’m Magni,” the Roast says, quietly. “In his honor.”
“Magni.” I incline a hand toward myself. “Quinath.”
“Not as soon as we get shot at.”
“Oh, give yourself more credit. You’re making the spiced vegetables look bad.”
He replaces the panivox, and we slink down the tunnel between the garbage and exit into a crowded city street. Buildings raised upon buildings cram every nook and alley, even weaving into the air on a knotted scaffolding web that spans the ice canyon twenty kilometers from end to end. I lead him down a street papered over with yellow streamers, then climb greasy black cement stars to a jutting second level zigzagging back and forth over the gulf. A sign overhead bursts into colorful parrots who flap away croaking before the enchantment resets, the parrots evaporate, and the words “Foreign Money Exchange” appear across the clapboard in yellow paint. A ragman blows fireworks at us. Deercat jumps to defend himself, but I grab his shoulder.
“They’re not real. They’re magic.”
“What?”
The ragman does it again. Fiery shapes explode through us out over the canyon floor, erupting into winged snakes and half a glowing, ethereal palace. He yells, “Flower for the lady?” The next bout produces a crackling, sparking rose garden.
“Yeah,” I drawl. “About the Fringe. Nobody has money and off-world goods are expensive. Magic’s cheap. The signs aren’t real, the sex workers aren’t that pretty, the rich folk? They’ve just figured out how to glamour nicer clothes. Always, always disenchant your food before you eat it.”
Deercat pulls a face. He follows me past the ragman shaking a tin-can coin purse at us, which might be enchanted to resemble a black satin box, but the tickle-bone rattle gives it away. I push between two semi-conjoined paper airship shops into the market district: three hundred tiny storefronts squeezed together with spit and tape into a space zoned for fifty. Mass-produced capes, boots, pins printed with funny slogans, snow globes, and giant dream catchers breed in the dark when no one’s looking, spilling from walls and under tables piled high with their children. A skinny black-haired goblin weaves past us on a clockwork bicycle with a glittering silver naiad girl on the back and two children cradled between them. Twenty more pass them on the bend ahead: couples, families, single riders going to or from work or temple.
A different skinny goblin pushes into us from the throng. “Need ship?”
“Where are we going?” Deercat says to me.
“Good price,” the penny captain declares. “Sir, need ship?”
I keep walking. Another man takes his place. “Where you going? Ship?”
“I don’t think so,” Deercat tells him politely.
A dream-catcher seller throws a snowball at the penny captain. He curses the seller and lunges like he’s going to knock over the man’s goods.
“Ivar,” Deercat prompts.
Why even bother? I point to an overhang on the level above ours, where the path juts out between long icicles thrusting down like pillars from the higher levels. “See that house up there? On the end of the street? There’s a ladder up ahead.”
“Let’s take a short cut.” He heads toward a stair mouth crowded with carved crimson gargoyles: snake heads and grinning yellow viper spirits.
“You can. I’m going this way.”
Deercat halts. “Why not? Too dangerous?”
“No, it’s a temple street. Read the sign.”
“Holy ground.”
“Well—yeah. You’re all right. Read the sign.”
He walks up and squints at the glossy pasteboard propped between two mummified rattlesnakes. “TEMPLE STREET,” it says in big block letters in both Seelie and Lothersian. All are welcome. No women allowed. No enchantments.
“So? Switch back,” he says.
“Keep going.”
No goblins.
“Put on a different face,” he says.
“Go on. I’ll meet you.”
“Why are you being like this?”
If I tried to explain that he wouldn’t understand, I’d sound weak or stubborn—both inexcusable. Sometimes the fight isn’t worth starting. I shouldn’t have to fight for my right to exist. It’s not an abstract point up for debate. It’s my flesh and blood. Nobody gets to argue about me and whether I count as a man or a woman.
I’m going to take the ladder.
“Come on,” Deercat says. He lingers at the stair’s entrance until the crowd folds back over me, and I figure I’ll see him up above. The ladder’s annoying to climb anyway. It’s packed and the people are slow. He’s better off taking the stairs.
