The Empire's Ruin, page 42
Goatface corrected him. “There is a series of choices. The contest begins…” He stopped himself. “No. This will not do. Come with me.”
A dozen guards stood outside the armory. Four more with loaded flatbows watched from atop the roof. Goatface waved to them as though they were old friends, produced a key from the thong around his neck, turned it in the lock, folded his parasol, then led the six of them inside. The afternoon sun poured through the open doorway behind them, glinting off the racks of weapons standing against the wall. Goatface crossed to them.
“Spear,” he said, lifting free a slender fishing spear, then tossing it onto a huge wooden table at the center of the room. “Net,” he went on, moving down the wall. “Grapple and line. Dagger and shield, ring dogs, sickles.”
One by one, the weapons clattered into a gleaming pile. When the trainer had made a circuit of the room, he returned to the table and sorted them out.
“This is what you will be faced with, a table much like this one at the very center of the pit. You will be … invited to choose from these weapons.”
“Well,” Monster said, “given that I’m awful at handling half that shit, I choose the spear.”
“Regrettably, that choice may not be yours to make.”
“Tell me what I’m not fucking understanding about the words choose from these weapons.”
Goatface frowned. “I was under the impression that you had in the past attended the contests of the high holy days.”
“Attended them, yes. Sucked down two bottles of quey by noontime—also yes. Forgive me if my memory’s hazy.”
“There’s only one of each weapon,” Stupid said. “You pick, they pick, you pick, they pick.…”
“Indeed,” Goatface said. “The threes alternate in their choice of weapons. If the other three chooses first, and if they choose the spear, the spear is no longer an option.”
“But we haven’t trained with most of this,” Bien protested. “What even is that thing?”
“This,” Goatface said, hoisting a three-pronged bronze hook about the size of his hand, “is a grapple.” There was a slender rope, maybe eight feet long, knotted through an eye at its base. “This is the line. Surely you have seen others training with them in the yard? It is an ancient weapon, from the days when Dombângan pirates raided oceangoing vessels near the delta’s mouth.”
“What do you do with it?”
“That depends,” the trainer replied, “on your level of skill.”
“Why don’t we assume zero,” Bien said, “since I’m not an ancient pirate.”
Ruc shook his head, crossed to the table, hefted one of the short, curved blades, hooked like the moon. “Sickles?”
“Another … venerable weapon of Dombâng,” Goatface said. “Adapted from the tool so favored by the sweet-reed harvesters.”
“When were you going to train us in all this?” Ruc demanded. “You’ve had us handling the spear, the sword, the shield.…”
“When was I going to train you?” Goatface blinked, obviously confused. “Never.”
A hot, humid silence swelled to fill the room.
“I told you he was a shit trainer,” Monster said finally.
“Monster, Mouse, and Stupid,” Goatface replied mildly, “were here for half a year before you arrived. They have received instruction in all of these weapons.”
“What about us?” Bien demanded.
“There isn’t time,” the trainer replied. “You arrived with no martial training whatsoever. I will consider it a triumph if you are able to acquit yourself well with the simplest of these weapons … the spear or the sword.”
“I might not get a spear or a sword,” Bien growled.
“Of course you will.” He gestured to the table. “If they choose the spear first, you choose the sword. If they choose the sword, you choose the spear.”
“That’s fine for me,” Bien said. “What about Ruc? What about Talal?”
Goatface turned to study the soldier. “I have a suspicion that our resident Kettral is … more than capable with any weapon on this table. Am I correct?”
Talal shrugged. “I’ll make do.”
Monster cackled. “I’ve seen a lot of cocky bastards in my life,” she said, “but you’re really resetting the fucking bar.”
The ghost of a smile crossed the soldier’s lips.
“What?” Monster demanded.
“Nothing. I had a friend, a Kettral flier—cockiest bastard I’ve ever met. He’d be proud.”
“What happened to him?”
The smile disappeared. “He died holding a bridge.”
“Against who?”
“Half the Urghul nation.”
“Fortunately,” Goatface said, “you will not be required to face a nation, whole or fractional, Urghul or otherwise.” He gestured to Ruc with the bronze grapple. “As for our second priest, I would be greatly surprised if he never learned to use a knife or a net during his time with the Vuo Ton.”
“I’ve been away from the Vuo Ton more than fifteen years. If you want me to fight with the net, why haven’t I been training with the net?”
Goatface blinked. “Have I not explained this adequately?”
“Evidently not.”
“One of the Worthy from the other three may choose the net before you. Rather than belabor your … preexisting skills, I chose to instruct you in weapons less familiar to you. Now you have choices.”
Ruc nodded grudgingly. “Still. If I do end up fighting with the net, it would be nice to have one or two days to brush the dust off.”
“I had intended,” the trainer replied, looking mildly affronted, “to give you several weeks of … review. There is ample time yet before the fights of the high holy days.”
“I don’t know if you remember,” Bien cut in, “but we’re not warriors, not soldiers. We’re priests of Eira.”
Goatface frowned, raised a finger. “No. You were priests of Eira, once upon a time. Now you are killers. The only remaining question is whether you are capable in your new calling.”
* * *
“Have you…” Ruc hesitated, unsure how to frame the question. “Have you tried again?”
Bien closed her eyes, nodded wearily. After spending most of the day in the blazing sun striking and blocking at Goatface’s command Ruc’s arms felt ready to fall off. Bien looked half a step from collapse.
“Every night,” she said. “After training. When everyone’s asleep.” She shook her head. “The only thing worse than being a leach is being a useless leach.”
Ruc grimaced, glanced over his shoulder. The shaded corner behind the storage shed was the safest, most private space he’d found in the yard. Which didn’t mean it was either safe or private. If anyone heard her talking about leaches, about the fact that she was a leach, she was dead.
He would have preferred to talk in the barracks, but there was always someone else in the barracks. Goatface set a relentless training schedule. Every single day he had Bien, Ruc, and his other four Worthy running, wrestling, or sparring from before dawn until after dark. By the time they stumbled through the mess hall and returned to the barracks no one was much inclined to go for a stroll. Talal shared a tiny room with Ruc and Bien—each three was expected to live together just as they would fight and probably die together—which left the gap between the storage shed and the mess hall.
“If you think back to the temple,” he said, “to the night it burned—”
“We’ve been over this—” She cut herself off, scrubbed her face with a grimy hand. “I’m sorry, Ruc. It’s just, it doesn’t help. You asking me to remember it again and again. I can see them dying. I can feel them dying. But it doesn’t get me any closer to knowing what I did.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it before he could make things worse. The sad truth was that he had absolutely no idea how to help her. If she’d asked him for advice on her knife work or spear technique, he would have stayed up all night every night teaching her what he knew. But she didn’t need advice on knives or spears. She had Goatface for that. What she needed was the power bred into her flesh. More than any weapons work, it was that that would save her, maybe save them both, and he could do nothing but look on uselessly, day after day, as she struggled.
“I need to tell him,” Bien said.
The heat radiating from her face deepened from yellow into orange.
“Tell what to who?” Ruc asked, though he could already see the shape of the answer.
“The Kettral. Talal. He’s a leach.”
“He says he’s not.”
“That’s what we all say. It’s the only way to stay alive. But they bring him the adamanth every day. They make him drink it.”
Ruc shook his head. “They’re spooked. Look at that iron ball they’ve got shackled to his leg. They’ve never captured a Kettral before.”
“But if he is a leach,” Bien said, “then he can teach me.”
“And if you’re wrong, he’ll tell Goatface. Goatface will tell the guards. Your throat will be cut, your heart carved out, and you’ll be tossed into the delta for the crocs.”
Bien didn’t flinch. “Not necessarily. Talal is rational enough to see that my power is…” She searched for the word. “… an asset. Even if he’s not a leach.”
“You have no idea how rational he is. We know precisely one thing about him—he’s Kettral. Which means he is a killer.” Ruc thought back to his conversation with the man out in the yard. What was it he’d said? Some people need murdering. “A ruthless killer.”
She met his eyes defiantly. “He’s been nothing but kind to us since we arrived.”
“He has no other choice. Monster, Mouse, and Stupid spend most of every day hoping he’ll die so that they can go back to not being noticed, and everyone else in here wants to be the one to do him in. Talal’s trying to stay alive, just like we are.”
“Right. So don’t you think that he’ll see this”—she gestured vaguely to herself—“as a way to stay alive? You know the stories even better than I do. The Kettral use leaches.”
“Sure. I’ve heard plenty of stories, usually from sailors on their second or third bottle of quey. I spent the better part of one night listening to a man tell me how the Emperor of Annur—not the woman, the other one—was actually the god of pain.”
She shook her head. “You’re smart enough to sort the crazy from the rest.”
“And I’m telling you this sounds crazy. Right now your secret is safe.”
“Safe?” She stared at him, agog, then gestured madly to the walls behind them, to the churned-up mud leading out into the yard. “Nothing about this is safe. Every day we stay here is a day someone might knife us, or choke us, or bash in our skulls, and if we make it, if we somehow survive all the way to the high holy days, the big prize is that we get to fight for our lives over and over until someone kills us.”
“Or we kill them.”
“Ruc.” She placed a hand on his chest, either to steady herself or hold back his words. “You’ve seen me out there every day. We’ve been here for what feels like forever and I can barely swing a sword. Goatface tied both Monster’s hands behind her back and she still managed to choke me out with her legs. If I don’t figure out how to use this … thing inside me then we’re stuck here. And if we’re stuck here, I’m going to die and you’re going to murder people trying to save me.”
He took her hand, held it against him. It seemed like a long time since they’d touched each other. For a while they didn’t move. After the endless running and sparring, it felt good to be still, her hand on his chest, his own holding it close.
Every part of him ached. Goatface had seen to that. Some days what the trainer demanded of them felt impossible, and yet he could feel himself growing stronger as some long-dormant thing inside him asserted itself once more. How, he wondered bleakly, must the whole ordeal feel to Bien? She hadn’t been raised in the delta by gods and Vuo Ton. She had no inexplicable speed or strength running through her veins. She was relying day after day on nothing more than her own bravery, stubbornness, hope, staying on her feet long after Ruc expected her to fall. How long could she keep up the pace without breaking?
He lifted her hand to his lips, kissed it. “All right.”
“All right, what?”
“Tell him.”
She withdrew her hand slowly. Her dark eyes were grave. “I wasn’t asking your permission.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
She hugged her arms to herself, as though she’d caught a chill.
“Bien.” He struggled for words to frame the feelings churning within him. “I don’t know how to do this.”
A small, bitter laugh forced its way through her lips. “How to join a group of murdering religious fanatics?”
He shook his head. “How to be afraid for you.”
“It doesn’t help,” she said quietly.
“I know.” He exhaled unsteadily. “I know it doesn’t, and I’m sorry. It feels like someone lifted my heart out of my chest”—he forced down the memory of Hang Loc doing just that to some hapless warrior of the Vuo Ton—“and hung it, still beating, around my neck. Every time you fall down, every time you get hit, every time you get cut”—he reached out, traced a shallow slice down the side of her cheek—“it’s like a blow right to that naked heart.”
“That’s romantic,” she replied, “and poetic. But do you know what it feels like to me?” She worried her lip with her teeth before continuing. “It feels like I need to protect myself and you at the same time. I can’t just deal with my own exhaustion and pain, I need to worry about your heart, too. I need to worry about whatever my failures are doing to it.”
Ruc started to respond, then stopped himself. Whatever she needed from him in that moment, it wasn’t more words.
Bien watched, waited for an objection, and then, when none was forthcoming, softened. “I worry about you, too, you know. It’s just that, you looking at me every moment like I’m made of porcelain makes me feel even more like I’m about to break.”
“You don’t need me to tell you you’re not going to break.”
“No,” she agreed with a sad little smile. “I need to look in your eyes and see that you believe it.”
Ruc hesitated, then opened his arms.
Bien hesitated, then stepped into them.
An embrace, like thousands they’d shared over the years. Like those, and not like them at all.
27
The First Admiral was a puckered asshole, but he knew how to lead soldiers. A lot of commanders would have retreated to the ship for the night rather than setting up camp within the walls of a foreign city, a city almost certainly hostile, even if it appeared empty, a city bristling with statues of monsters and stacked with the skulls of the dead. A ship at anchor in the harbor was far easier to defend than a barricade erected in a city square. It was hard to sneak up on someone in a ship. Hard to surround and slaughter them. Gwenna herself would have been tempted to fall back to the Daybreak for the night. Jonon, however, was thinking beyond the night.
The mission, after all, wasn’t to find some ziggurat piled with skulls, poke around awhile, then go home. It was to journey inland, to the mountains on the horizon, to find the kettral and their nests—provided that both still existed after so many thousands of years—plunder the eggs, and bring them back. Which meant Jonon and all the rest of them were going to spend days if not weeks in the strange land. By establishing camp on the shore that first night, he was making a statement—Whatever challenges await us here, we are equal to them. Just as important, the work of building the barricades—dragging beds and tables and chairs from the homes, stacking them athwart the streets, setting torches alight around the perimeter, establishing guards and snipers—gave the soldiers something to do, something to take their minds off the rumors that threatened to spread like plague through the crew.
Monsters. Skulls. Sickness. Sacrifice.
Nevariim.
In a strange way, that last revelation was the least threatening. Kiel had spoken about the Nevariim as though they were real, real as the stone of the city streets or the sky above, as though they might at any moment stride naked and gorgeous from the surrounding forests, gleaming swords in their hands. To Gwenna, however, the word still sounded like something out of a fireside story. She remembered her father sitting by the cozy blaze in the cabin where she grew up, unspooling soldiers’ tales of the legendary warriors. In the way of stories, they were all different but all the same: two or three Nevariim holding a pass or a gate or a bridge against hundreds and hundreds of Csestriim. Despite being wounded over and over—punched full of arrows, slashed with swords, burned with flaming oil—they kept fighting and fighting toward one of only two possible ends: triumph, or a heroic death surrounded by mountains of the enemy slain.
It was all a batch of horseshit. She’d learned that later. That just wasn’t how war worked, Nevariim or not.
A few soldiers—properly trained and heavily armed—might hold a perfect defensive position against a superior foe for some length of time. Half a day. Maybe, with great luck and bravery, if the opposing numbers weren’t too great, a day. No one could stand in the middle of a bridge against an army and survive. Gwenna’d had a friend who’d tried just that; he’d ended up skewered on a forest of Urghul spears. Or Quick Jak. The flier’s attempt to carve his way the length of the Purple Baths would have been an exploit worthy of the Nevariim, except Jak hadn’t made it the length of the Baths. He’d managed maybe twenty paces before the Dombângans hacked him apart. Not surprising. That was what happened when you fought a battle against long odds—not glory, but blood, suffering, failure, death. For all her wide-eyed childhood fascination, the stories of the Nevariim were just that—stories.
On the other hand, someone had built the city. Actually, more like tens of thousands of someones, judging by the size of the place. Whether or not Kiel was correct about a cadre of immortals dwelling at the top of the ziggurat, real, actual people had lived in all those houses, and not long ago, either. That thought—not the myths of the Nevariim—had Gwenna glancing over her shoulder and listening to the wind for the rest of the day. The place seemed empty. Certainly, the bulk of the population had vanished, but she’d never heard of a city emptying out entirely. There were always the old, the sick, and the young, those too green or feeble to leave their houses, even their beds, let alone to abandon everything. Even if everyone else had quit the city, what had happened to them?
