The Empire's Ruin, page 54
The kettral didn’t understand that, but it knew in the ancient way of all beasts that it was wounded. It understood that somehow the pitiful, unfeathered thing clinging to its chest was dangerous, even deadly, that its very survival depended on getting that thing off, and so, instead of climbing, instead of trying to pry her free with its beak, it stooped.
The world turned abruptly on its end. Gwenna fell back, lost her grip on the blood-soaked feathers, slipped out into the void, tumbled upside down, hanging from the half-tied loop around her thigh as they plunged. Her stomach lurched. The onrush of wind ripped the breath from her throat. Something in her hip twisted almost to the point of breaking. The ground rushed up at her—cliffs, ice, shattered rock. Somehow, in the spinning madness, she caught a glimpse of soldiers, of Cho Lu and Raban down from the cliffside, standing just outside the cave, staring up at her, mouths agape.
Then the wind caught her, stripping them from her sight.
Just paces above the ground, the bird spread wide its wings, tried to pull up the way it might have if it had just taken an ibex or mountain goat. The rope cinched viciously tight around Gwenna’s thigh, tighter then tighter still as the bird strained skyward, until she felt her hip had to give way. Then, with a snap like an overladen pine branch breaking in the dead of winter, the bird’s wing ripped backward at a sickening, unnatural angle. Blood spattered from the gash in the creature’s breast, and, still roped together, they fell the final two or three paces to the stones.
Gwenna managed to get an arm behind her head, but the blow stunned her. For half a dozen heartbeats she couldn’t breathe. Her vision pinched into a tight, vertiginous tunnel, one she felt herself sliding down toward unconsciousness. Then the bird thrashed, yanking the rope around her leg, and the pain brought her back. Desperately she hacked at the line—how she’d managed to hold on to her knife she had no idea—hacked at it blindly until she felt the strands part, her thigh slip free of the awful noose.
She forced herself to her knees.
Barely a pace away, the bird struggled to rise. The broken wing, unstrung from the muscle meant to move it, flopped uselessly. It fixed her with one eye as she staggered to her feet, lashed out with its beak, lost its balance, struck wide. Gwenna stumbled forward into the opening, slipped on the blood-soaked rocks, smashed a knee, rolled to her side, just avoided another blow of the beak, and then she was right up against the blood-drenched feathers of the creature’s breast. It took a moment to find the wound, and then she went to work again, hacking, stabbing, slicing the striated muscle with her blade, driving deeper and deeper as the animal screamed and lurched, until her arm was plunged well past the elbow.
For a woman of twenty-four years, she’d done her share of killing—various beasts back on the farm, people later, lots of people—Urghul, Annurian, Manjari, Dombângan. Some of them had it coming, some of them probably not. Killing was something you had to do sometimes to finish the mission, and so she’d learned to do it. This, though—there was no mission. Never in her life had she attacked a living thing with the blind, maniac frenzy she unleashed upon the kettral. Past reason, past thought, driven only by the ache to have it be over she hacked and hacked and hacked, fat and ribbons of flesh spattering her face, pain lancing up her arm and through her chest at each savage blow until she didn’t know whether the screaming she heard came from the bird’s beak or her own throat, whether, when the knife’s point finally found the throbbing core and everything went hot and dark, it was the bird’s great heart exploding, or her own.
34
As a kid, Akiil had sometimes listened to the legionary recruiters who came through the Quarter. They tended to promise the same things: food and clothing, a small purse of coin each month, the chance to go somewhere beyond the shit-reeking alleys and canals of the Quarter. It was an appealing proposition on the merits, but there was always someone in the crowd who pointed out that the price of that nice uniform and shiny shield was often a bloody and violent death. The recruiters were prepared for this objection. All men die, they pointed out. Usually miserably, usually in pain. A death in the legions, however, is a glorious death, a proud death in defense of one’s land and family. A death of honor.
The whole notion had always struck Akiil as nonsense. He’d never come within a hundred miles of a battlefield, true, but he’d seen what a rusty knife could do to a person’s guts and he wasn’t buying the idea that it felt any better to have your life hacked out of you just because you were wearing a uniform. No. The idea of a good death seemed rotten at the root. On the other hand, he believed wholeheartedly that there was a whole range of bad deaths, from the disappointing to the truly revolting.
Being fed alive to a dozen five-hundred-pound blood hogs had to be one of the worst.
“Andraz will go first,” the Captain said. He gave the man a benign smile.
Andraz gaped in drunken terror. He’d already pissed himself—the whole front of his pants was a dark, spreading stain. Maybe shit himself, too, although it was impossible to tell over the stench of the pig yard. The place reeked of feces, mud, and half-rotten slops. Greenheads buzzed over pools of stagnant water. Old eggshells and rinds were shoved up against the wooden walls in festering embankments. Something grayish white poked up from the mire—it might have been a broken stick or a fragment of bone.
“Why me?” Andraz managed finally. He stabbed a finger at Akiil. “It was his idea. He wanted to do it. He … he made me cheat.…”
In the stories and songs, grave danger had the ability to sober a man. Akiil had been drunk enough times to know that wasn’t true. The approach of the city watch might take the edge off of two or three drinks, bring things back into focus that were starting to blur, but once you’d reached the bottom of the bottle nothing was going to haul you back. Not the city watch. Not a few tons of slavering hog. Over the course of the card game Akiil had tossed back enough black rum that he felt slightly numb, a little adrift, but he’d drunk nothing close to what Andraz had. The other man was lost in the liquor, tangled like a fly in the web of his own drunken mind.
Maybe that was a mercy. He was obviously terrified, but not as terrified as he would have been if he’d been able to see clearly the full tableau of his own approaching death.
The Captain put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I understand that it wasn’t your idea. You are not smart enough to have ideas like this.”
Andraz nodded furiously.
“I’m not. I’m not.”
“That’s why you are going first. This is a favor to you. A courtesy.”
The drunken man gaped, speechless.
“It is not a pretty sight,” the Captain explained, almost apologetically, “seeing a man consumed by pigs. You might think that you can imagine the horror, but I promise you, however vivid your imagination, the sight of the thing is worse. By throwing you into the pen first, I am sparing you this sight. At the same time”—he turned to smile at Akiil—“I am giving your friend the opportunity to dwell fully on the consequences of his actions.”
Akiil took a deep breath. Even drunk, even faced with the hogs—which had begun to grind themselves hungrily against the wooden walls of the pen—the old monastic habits remained. When his heart began to pound, his body went to work slowing it down.
There is a way out, he thought. There is always a way out.
He started to turn, to look over his shoulder, then stopped himself. No need to tip his hand before it was time to make the play. He closed his eyes and, with an effort, summoned up the saama’an of the Captain’s compound. The pig yard comprised half of an open courtyard closed in on all sides by the wooden walls of the buildings surrounding it. They’d come in through the only door—a heavy, triple-hinged wooden monster more appropriate to a fortress. Two guards stood at that door, one with a flatbow, one with a spear. Akiil could feel their eyes boring through his robe into his back. Getting past them would be almost impossible, and they weren’t the only problem.
Directly behind him, thick hand heavy as an anvil on his shoulder, stood Fari. As he’d promised his brother earlier, he didn’t seem to have any compunction about feeding a monk to the pigs. Fori had Andraz by the arm, the sharp point of a knife pressed to the man’s back just behind his liver. The Captain himself twirled the club that had been Vicious Ryk’s femur casually in his hand. Of Skinny Quinn there was no sign.
Akiil found himself obscurely glad of that last fact. She’d shown no compunction about betraying him, maybe because he’d betrayed her first, maybe because he’d been betraying her every day since the Captain took her. He wanted to ask her if she was all right, but the question would have been both stupid and self-serving. Despite the clean clothes and freshly washed hair, she wasn’t all right. He didn’t know the exact facts of what had happened to her, but the outlines were obvious enough. Ugly things had been done to her and in front of her. At least when he died she wouldn’t be there to witness one more.
“Because I am in a charitable mood,” the Captain continued, turning back to Andraz, “I will show you another mercy.”
He pivoted with a dancer’s grace, swung his arm in a wide arc, smashing the club into the side of Andraz’s knee. With a sound like the limb of a snow-bound tree snapping, the leg buckled. Andraz screamed. Fori caught him beneath the armpits, hauled him back up, slammed him against the wooden wall of the pen.
“Strong men,” the Captain explained, “will struggle against the hogs. Sick Pyt actually survived half a morning in there. He’d ripped a board from the top of the pen, used it to defend himself until Bess got inside his guard and opened his gut with a tusk.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the outcome’s always the same, and I don’t want to prolong your suffering. The broken leg will make things go faster.”
Andraz puked, choked on it, leaned over the wall, hacked out a desperate sound somewhere between a moan and a sob, whatever human language he’d had obliterated by his terror. Death could do that to people, transform them into something other than themselves, strip away the last bits of dignity. For just a moment the memory of the slaughter at Ashk’lan washed over Akiil. At the time, he’d despised the monks for not fighting, for sitting cross-legged on the rocky ledge while the soldiers ran them through. Now, though, watching Andraz piss himself, shit himself, drool out the last of his horror, he found himself admiring the Shin. They hadn’t fought, but they hadn’t lost themselves either.
Andraz struggled, but Fori was twice his size and held the man pinned to the wall as though he were a child.
“You will want to watch this,” the Captain said, turning back to Akiil.
Which meant, of course, You will not be able to watch this.
Akiil felt himself sink deeper into some kind of calm. He took it, at first, for an effect of the rum, but it was deeper than drunkenness, colder. Finally, for once in his life, he hadn’t escaped. Like everyone else, like Skinny Quinn and Horan and Butt Boy and Runt and Scial Nin, he’d been caught.
He met the Captain’s gaze.
“You killed one of my friends here,” he said.
His own voice sounded far away.
The Captain raised his brows. “Certainly possible. The hogs are always hungry.”
“He was just a kid. We called him Butt Boy.”
“Usually I would have other uses for a butt boy. A boy without obvious blemishes—not lame, no rotten teeth—can fetch good coin on the street.”
“We called him Butt Boy because he was always saying ‘But … But…’ He refused to accept how things were. If you told him we were going to starve, he’d say, ‘But…’ and come up with a way to steal just a little more food.”
The Captain pursed his lips. “Resourceful.”
“When you took my other friends for your corners, I chalked them up as lost. Butt Boy, though, he said, ‘But we can get them back. But we can save them.…’”
“Ah. Resourceful, but unwise.”
“Your men caught him, beat him. I watched them drag him through the door just outside—I was hiding behind a barrel—but I didn’t try to get to him. I only heard what happened later.”
“And that,” the Captain said, clapping him on the shoulder, “is why you remained alive.”
“I’m good at that,” Akiil said. “Remaining alive.”
He found himself laughing.
He hadn’t come back to the Quarter to die, certainly he hadn’t planned on being caught, but now that the Captain had him, now that he was finally facing his own end, really facing it—nowhere to run, no more lies to tell—there was a shocking lightness to the moment, a rightness that he realized he’d been striving for his entire life.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” the Captain said.
“Actually,” Akiil replied, “I never really left.”
The man watched him awhile, his brow furrowed, then shrugged, turned back to Fori. “In he goes.”
Andraz went over the fence like a straw doll, landed on his head and shoulder, slumped to the side, and the hogs were on him.
Akiil felt Fari’s hand tighten on his shoulder; the man expected him to try to run. Instead, he stepped forward, right up to the edge of the wooden fence. All those years in the cold of the Bone Mountains the monks had trained him to watch, to observe, to see, and so, as a man was unmade in the mud by half-feral pigs, he saw.
They didn’t go for the throat, the way a true predator might have. The goal—to the extent that beasts had goals at all—wasn’t to make a quick, clean kill, but to feast. And so, as Andraz rolled to his side, tried to get his feet beneath him, they went for his belly. Their tusks weren’t particularly sharp, but with all that weight behind them, they sank through the skin like hot iron into ice. Andraz groaned, folded in on himself, threw useless arms around the nearest hog. He looked like a man trying to hold on to something, to keep it near, though his fingers, nerveless, refused to fully close. With a quick snap of the neck, one of the hogs ripped open his stomach. Intestine slipped, slick and glistening, out into the mud. Two animals fell on it with a greedy grunting, rending it with their teeth, slurping it down with their rough pink tongues, while the first continued to gore the man, savaging his gut over and over, burying its snout in the ragged wound. Andraz jerked, twitched, hacked up blood. It was impossible to tell whether the motion was his own, or a result of the pig’s savagery, whether he was still a man, or just a puppet for the beast.
A fourth pig shouldered in, buried its nose in the trough of the opened chest, ripped free something that looked like a liver, dragged it away from the scrum. Andraz opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Another hog—this one smaller than the rest and so shoved away from the tenderest meat—went to work on his face, ripping into the cheek, tearing free the flesh in ragged flaps. Another attacked the leg, worrying it like a dog, bolting down the gobbets of flesh, then shouldering its way back in for more.
And all the while Akiil watched.
This is how Butt Boy died.
The thought was true, but it didn’t go far enough.
He stared, watched the pigs strip away the skin, the viscera, the muscle, until the bloody bone shone in the torchlight.
This is the way everyone dies.
That was more correct. Not at the jaws of feral hogs, obviously, but how much did it matter, really? In battle or in bed, sick or slipping beneath the sea, the results were the same. In the end, every person—every thief, every monk, every emperor, every gambler, every infant who’d barely drawn breath—died the same way. The human thing was unmade. Hogs gobbled the flesh, or ravens, or maggots, or it all just rotted in the hot sun. Whatever thoughts had lived in the body were gone, whatever fears and fury and dreams, gone, until in the end there was only blood and meat and bone and then, after enough time, enough years or centuries or millennia, not even that. Just dust. Just nothing.
Nothing.
The word closed over him like a whole empty ocean.
He floated inside it as the hogs feasted, buoyed up and plummeting at the same time, unmoored, untethered. He was aware, vaguely, of rage and horror somewhere, of a man who’d been an orphan, then a thief, then a monk who’d once felt such things, but that man was a stranger. He might as well have been a ghost.
“Are you ready?”
It took him a moment to find the source of the words—the Captain, studying him warily.
Was it so obvious that Akiil was gone? That he’d stepped free?
“Yes,” he said, turning from the Captain back to the pigs, to those great agents of unmaking. “I’m ready.”
Fari gave a grunt that Akiil took for surprise.
Then he felt the man’s hand slip from his shoulder. A moment later, the huge man stumbled forward, collapsed against the wooden wall.
The Captain’s head snapped around, eyes finding someone past and behind Akiil. He half raised his club, hesitated a moment, then lowered it.
Something is happening, Akiil thought.
He tried to remember why he should care.
“It has been a long time,” the Captain said, “since anyone dared attack my men inside my home.”
“We’re not here for you,” a voice replied. A familiar voice. “We’re here for the monk.”
Hugel, Akiil realized vaguely. The Aedolian guardsman.
The Captain hesitated, then spread his hands. “Take him, then. But deliver a message for me when you go, a message to your employer. Tell them, whoever they are, that I’ll look forward to hosting them here, in this very courtyard, and soon.”
