The Dead Man's Empire, page 14
“Why did we come here, Anzola?” Ernesto said, raising a gauntleted hand towards the Mountain, and for a fraction of a moment Anzola imagined that the God’s shifting surface acknowledged the movement.
I didn’t want to come here, Anzola thought to herself. She had wanted an alliance with the Tzanate so they could fight the Elves together. That alliance was wrecked by fanatics like Ikkosh within the Tzanate, and Ernesto had rushed into war while Anzola was still struggling back from her aborted peace mission through Elf-held lands.
“The Tzanate was inadequate to the task of defending their Mountain. And now it seems the Custodians are gone as well. Better that it is held by us, by the League, in the name of reason and liberty, than let anyone else have it.”
“Yes!” Ernesto said. He turned his hand into a fist. “And we have it! A living god! All that power! It is ours, with no Tzanate and no Custodians to stand in our way! Not even Augardine achieved that!”
In a sudden movement that made Anzola step backwards, Ernesto spun around and brought two fists down on the desk, making pens and knives and inkpots jump. Then he hunched over, his body quaking with emotion. She opened her mouth to speak – perhaps to offer a word of comfort – but Ernesto straightened and spoke first.
“I have surpassed Augardine! I stand on the threshold of godhood! So, really, my question is: why am I powerless?”
Anzola’s jaw hung slack for a moment until she heard her long-dead mother making an unflattering comparison to a fish, and she closed her mouth. Grandiosity was not unnatural from the commander, but vulnerability? In the past couple of years he had acquired the first lines in his face and had been cultivating one or two new chins; in the past couple of days those lines had deepened, and the skin hung loosely at his neck. The cold wind off the peaks picked at the fur trim on his cloak, spreading out stars of downy black. For a ghastly moment she thought he might cry.
“You are not powerless,” she said at last. “An army awaits your command. Let us assemble them, give them courage, and then drive the Elves back into Tarch. Let us re-establish our supply lines and send word to Pallestra and fight the war we came here to fight.”
“Yes,” Ernesto murmured. “But … shouldn’t we fight with all our strength? Zo, look at this.”
He beckoned her to the window and directed her to look towards the ground. The height made Anzola’s head spin – it was twenty or thirty yards down to the Terrace of Gift, a platform of red granite where the Tzanate used to perform its human sacrifices. And the floor of the valley between the Brink and the Mountain was deeper still. It was an ugly expanse of sharp stone, wreathed in steam that rose in sickly curls from pits and sinkholes. Where it rose, towards the base of the Craithe and the Shoulder of God, it did so in sharp folds. The rock seemed shaped according to a perverse and inscrutable design, suggesting cyclopean stairs, angular apertures, the buttresses of nightmares. Anzola was a surveyor. She could read land. This read like hate mail.
Ernesto was reading like a conqueror. “We should put together an expedition,” he said. “Find a path to the Craithe, or to the Custodian monastery on the Shoulder …”
He caught her eye and winced at her expression. “Not to make myself a god! But consider what we might find there, what secrets they may have hidden … there must be a way to traverse this vale – your Mishigo boon can help …”
At this, Inar cleared his throat. The Mishigo had mostly stayed quiet and lingered near the door. When Anzola went to join Ernesto by the window, he had drifted deeper into the room and was inspecting the wood panelling along the wall beside the desk.
“Your grace,” Inar said, with an urgent tone. “Your graces. Did you know that there’s a concealed door here, with a passage behind?”
Ernesto blanched. “What?”
“There are hidden doors and passages everywhere,” Anzola said. “You said so.”
“Yes,” Inar said, stepping back from the wall, “but there’s someone hiding behind this one.”
The room fell into shocked silence, and into that hush came a distinct sound of scrambling from the wall, followed by muffled footsteps.
“He’s running,” Inar said. And he took another step back, as if anticipating what was about to happen.
Everyone in the room converged on the wood panel, while Ernesto shouted for his bodyguard. Mesto had his weapon drawn in a blink, roused from indolence by the possibility of combat. Danilo snatched up a dirk, and Anzola drew her own. But these fine warriors were defeated, almost at once, by fine carpentry – two League merites and two knights crowded around one panel, in too small a space, scrabbling at it, unable to get it open. They pushed at it, pulled, scratched around its edges, toed at its lower part, but it did not yield.
Kol Mesto’s patience was quickly exhausted. “Stand back!” he yelled, more peevish than commanding, and he did not wait long enough for the others to withdraw before swinging his longsword, almost striking Danilo, who fell back onto the carpet. The end of Mesto’s sword met the panel with a splintering crunch, and it skidded across the wood, leaving a long pale scar in the dark polish.
“You bloody idiot!” Danilo shouted, returning to his feet.
“Get an axe!” Ernesto said.
“Get back, both of you!” Anzola shouted. “Inar, which side is the latch mounted? You should be able to tell in the stone, if you can see an indentation, or the position of the hinges …”
Inar indicated the right side.
“Thank you.”
Anzola felt along the inside edge of the moulding on the right side of the panel, and found a gap carved into it. She slipped a fingertip into this and pulled – a strip of moulding folded outward with a click, and the secret door popped open.
“There,” she said. “Beautiful.”
Mesto surged through the door, followed by a more circumspect Danilo. The panel had revealed a narrow passage with a rounded top, leading to steps headed down. She could hear the thump of the knights’ boots echoing in the confined space.
“You might have shown us sooner,” Ernesto said to Inar. “Or did you want her to get away?”
Inar reddened. “It wasn’t her. Taller. And older. But able to outrun your clowns well enough.”
“Steady, boy,” Ernesto said, pointing a gauntleted finger at Inar. “Anzola, discipline your servants.”
“Inar has done us a service here,” Anzola said, taking an oil lamp from a niche just inside the hidden door and lighting it with a flint. Natural light showed deeper down the steps. “If he wanted the spy to get away, he need not have said anything. Shall we see what he has uncovered?”
She started down the steep stone steps, followed by Inar and Ernesto. They descended into an octagonal chamber lit by a skylight; four of the eight walls were filled with shelves of books shut behind iron grilles, and the other four were filled with frescoes depicting scenes of carnage. In the middle of the room was a library table, which held equipment similar to that seen in the butcher’s shop.
Inar gravitated towards the bookshelves. Anzola tutted at his distraction, but she felt the draw of those caged volumes as well. To be locked up like that suggested great value. For years she had sought books about scourges and scourge powers, and had been told innumerable times that the Tzanate jealously hoarded such secrets. This might be the hoard. The art was certainly suggestive. One panel depicted Zealots in black armour in a wasteland of disease and famine. Two monstrous figures were burning at the stake: one drooling ichor and covered in pustules, the other little more than a skeleton, ribs stark, eyes sunken black pits. The last plague-scourge and the last blight-scourge, their deaths supervised by Tzans and Custodians.
Of course, if they really looked like that, then they might really have been the last. But Anzola knew very well that scourges looked perfectly ordinary. Blight and plague were mysteries to her, although there had been rumours of a blight-scourge in Yicorum thirty years ago. But from what she knew of other varieties, she doubted they looked like that. What a witch-finder she might have made! Ikkosh’s remark made her smile despite herself.
“A secret library,” Ernesto said. “Perhaps we do not need to go to the Mountain itself after all.”
“We’re not seeing half of it,” Inar said. “There’s more behind. We must tell Kielo.”
“I fear we might never see him again,” Anzola said. “But you’re right. It’s his province.”
They were interrupted by a shout from a lower level: Danilo, calling for Ernesto.
“Go and see what he wants, would you?” Ernesto asked Anzola as he studied the apparatus on the table, the spy forgotten.
Frowning, Anzola returned to the stairway and descended. At the bottom, the stair terminated in another concealed door, which was much easier to open from the inside than out. It led into a windowless semi-circular room dominated by tall ebony double doors in the un-curved wall. Anzola had been here before: it was the Sickle Chamber, used by blade priests to prepare for the Giving of the Gift, the Mountain faith’s most awful rite. The double doors led out to the Terrace of the Gift, where hearts were cut out of still-living victims and offered to the Custodian demigods. Years had passed since human sacrifice had last been performed, but – until the arrival of the League – the chamber had been kept in unsettling good order, as if the ceremony might be resumed at any moment. The floor was swept and the braziers were stocked with dried peat. White robes were neatly folded and stacked. Large silver bowls, for washing hands and knives, were clean and polished. Nine niches held the ceremonial sickles used in the deed, against walls deeply inscribed with overlapping Custodian runes. Only six sickles were in place. One was in Danilo’s hands.
“It’s extraordinary,” he said, when he saw Anzola had returned. “This blade is stone, I think – it’s not metal, I can tell you that – but it’s unlike any stone I’ve ever seen. You see this edge –”
With the sickle’s handle in his left hand, he used his right to indicate the cutting line of the curved blade, and quite involuntarily Anzola lurched forward to stop him from touching it.
“I’m not going to touch it,” he said, with a laugh. “It’s … fatally sharp, any fool can see that. Where is Ernesto?”
“Exploring the library,” Anzola said with a conspiratorial glance. “He has, I think, postponed his plan to become a god.”
“That’s a relief,” Danilo said. He replaced the sickle in its niche with exaggerated care. “The gods here have such bloody appetites.”
14.
An awful dream. It was the hunt for Duna, which had been going on for days, with soldiers combing the Brink. But Anzola was no longer the hunter, she was the hunted. She fled down endless passages and through echoing vaults, pursuers from an exterminating force always just paces behind. Unarmed, friendless, in a vast and alien monastery-palace; a child again, betrayed and alone.
The same dream as last night, and the night before. This time, however, it ended differently. Again she was pursued by the same tireless soldiers. And then the soldiers were hunted as well. Not that she was safe – no one was safe. Shapeless death stalked the dead halls. And shouts, in panic, as footsteps clattered: “Elves! Elves!”
She wasn’t dreaming.
Waking with a breath that tore her lungs, Anzola saw the helmeted knights who had shaken her. She saw kol Euzhene’s eyes through the slit in his helm, the panic in them.
“Mistress, we are under attack,” he said.
She threw herself from her bed – a luxurious bed, once occupied by a senior altzan. “Armour,” she demanded of a terrified servant. There was no need to dress, no one undressed at night here. “What is happening? What time is it?”
“Midnight,” Euzhene said. “Patrols raised the alarm a few minutes ago. Only a few of them, a scouting party or a raid, but there may be a larger force on its way. We’re reinforcing the wall right now.”
The wall! That was a joke. Duna had wrecked the wall. She could hear the shouts from elsewhere, and now there was a rhythmic banging of metal on metal as the garrison was roused. The servant had lifted Anzola’s leather battle-armour over her head and was buckling it at the sides. “We have men ready for them?”
“The overnight force, your grace, three hundred men, and we are raising another thousand. But no one will sleep through this.”
More lost sleep, more jangled nerves. Anzola squinted at the window, which showed only darkness. Inar entered, carrying his sword, named for the slain knight Timo, but he did not look ready to use it.
“Bring me my helmet and we’ll leave it at that,” Anzola said to the servant, who had started fiddling with greaves and cuisses. “Inar, you need a helmet as well, I may have need of your talents. Euzhene – go and tell the men guarding the Zealots to be ready to free them and arm them.”
“Mistress –” Euzhene began to protest.
“Just to be ready, kol Euzhene, for a last stand. They’ll kill the Elves before they kill us.”
The great processional way was so chaotic that Anzola feared the Elves had already broken through and the battle was inside the Brink. Instead, it was the League fighting itself as companies of men-at-arms and footsoldiers tried to form up, their efforts overlapping and interfering. The knights pushed their way through. Kol Blasowo had, fortunately, brought a League command standard and raised it above them, and with bellowing and the beating of dirks against shields a path cleared.
A wide flight of marble steps led down into the bailey between the fortress and its outer wall. It was here that the fighting between the League and the Zealots had been bloodiest during the storming of the Brink days before, and Anzola did not enjoy the memory of that victory now that the tables had been turned. Kol Danilo stood on the small terrace that protruded over the wide splay of steps, out of the flow of men. There, the whole bailey could be taken in at a glance, by the light of a growing number of torches. Directly ahead was the partly ruined gatehouse – its colossal gates still intact, thankfully. To the right of this was the long, ragged gap that Duna had torn in the Brink’s gigantic, ancient wall. The rubble had been heaped to provide a slightly better defensive rampart, but it didn’t seem like nearly enough. Just visible were two lines of knights standing slightly behind the highest point of this rampart, with two lines of pikemen behind them. Was that really three hundred men? It barely looked like fifty. But they were in reasonable order, given the rubble under their feet, and more men were assembling behind them.
“Where is Ernesto?” Anzola demanded.
“Coming, I’m told,” Danilo replied, his eyes fixed on the wall and the breach.
“Number of enemy?”
Danilo scoffed. “Depends which patrol you believe. First report said a mounted scouting party. They challenged it and it withdrew. After that point we think it was mostly patrols seeing each other. We’ve withdrawn everyone to the Brink.”
“Mounted?” Anzola said with a frown. “The Elves aren’t riders, normally.”
“Who knows what they’re up to,” Danilo said glumly. He looked, all of a sudden, very young. He saw war as swordplay and gallantry, not … whatever this was. Chaos in the dark, on the edge of collapse.
She bashed him on the shoulder with a gloved fist – not an act that came naturally, but the moment called for it. “Welcome to command, kol Danilo. That feeling, like you want anyone, literally anyone, to take over from you? That’s what it feels like, the first time. And most of the later times. Keep it up. I’m going to the gatehouse to get a better look.”
He nodded and gave her a little smile.
Captains and quartermasters were bringing some order to the League army as it filled up the bailey behind the breach in the wall. From a lower angle, the improvised rampart made up of rubble was a little more impressive – it was a colossal wall and it made for a colossal amount of rubble. Imagine the forces needed to tear all that stone apart, the forces that Duna had wielded. But Anzola did not need to imagine. She had been there. She had heard it, and felt the concussion rolling through the ground. She glanced back at the fortress, now swarming with lights. No one was sleeping tonight. So where are you, Duna?
Duna had also brought down part of the top of the Brink’s gatehouse, but most of the massive square structure was still standing, and a company of archers was stationed on its remaining battlement. Every few seconds a fire arrow streaked down from their position into the dark, trying to find the enemy force. As she reached the arch that led into the gatehouse, she had a horrid memory of another gatehouse in another fortress, and she saw Inar hesitate and grimace.
“This isn’t Mal Nulalus, Inar,” she said. “We’re ready for them. One League knight is worth five Elves. This is where those vermin get what they deserve.”
Inar shook his head. “That’s not … I was thinking about when we stormed the Brink. With Duna.”
This stopped Anzola, suddenly enough that the grit under her boots scraped. “I was just thinking about her as well.”
“What if it’s her, out there?”
Anzola swallowed. “That’s good. I want her back. I want to make things right.”
“Do you? I just want you to be ready.”
“Ready?” Anzola replied, feeling her face twist with confusion. “Ready for what?”
“If you go up there, be ready to see her. With them.” The dim and flickering light threw threatening shadows over the young man’s features.
“She wouldn’t …”
“It wouldn’t be up to her. She was never given any choice. You gave her Elfcap. I saw the madness in her eyes when we stood here together. She’s gone.”
