The Empire's Ruin, page 74
He shook his head. “One thousand.”
She laughed out loud at the insanity of his offer. “Not a chance, I’m afraid.”
But Akiil could read her face, her posture. She was good at hiding her emotions, but she wasn’t used to sitting across the table from a monk.
He stood, slid the dagger back toward him. “It was a pleasure meeting you.”
She held up her hand. “All right. Five hundred.”
He shook his head again. “Let’s be honest with each other. I could have asked for more than a thousand, and you would have paid. But the Shin trained all the greed out of me.”
Gelta snorted, sat back in her chair, whistled ruefully. “Who are you?”
“Just a simple monk with simple needs.”
“So the thousand is all for robes?”
He smiled at her. “And a healthy diet of vegetables.”
“Did he have anything else squirreled away, this dead abbot of yours?”
“If I remember anything else,” Akiil replied, thinking of that vast room packed with weapons, “you’ll be the first to know.”
* * *
Akiil’s garret in the Wolf’s Head was loud, filthy, dim, and cramped. All day and half the night, noise echoed up from the common room below, and in the few hours when the inn finally fell quiet, Yerrin was usually up, prowling around, muttering to himself as he counted the spiders or watched bats from the tiny window. The air hung hot and still, even on cooler days, the blankets itched, lumps filled the mattress. Still, Akiil felt safer there than anywhere else in the city, safe enough to take the heavy purse from inside his robes and scatter the gold across the blanket.
He hadn’t brought back most of the coin, of course. Hadn’t even seen it, truth be told. Gelta had provided him with a sealed letter, which he presented to a stone-faced man inside the stone-faced citadel that was the Bank of the Twin Lions. The letter allowed him to draw the full sum of a thousand gold suns, but Akiil had taken just fifty, to make sure it worked.
Just fifty.
The sum was astronomical. He might as well have talked about pocketing fifty stars. His childhood self would have choked with awe at the sight of so much gold. At that moment, though, looking down at it, he felt only cold. After a while, he swept it up, deposited it back in the leather purse, dropped heavily onto the bed.
Yerrin sat cross-legged a few paces away, staring down into the floorboards.
“What’s down there?” Akiil asked finally.
“Everything,” the monk replied.
“Sort of a small space for everything.”
Yerrin didn’t glance over. “Time grinds everything to dust. The dust gathers between the boards.”
A sudden irritation flared inside Akiil. It wasn’t that he didn’t want the old man to be content, but the sources of Yerrin’s contentment were so strange and implausible. Was it really possible that anyone could enjoy pressing his eyeball to the floorboards for hour after hour, studying dust? What did he see that Akiil had been missing all his life?
“What do you want, Yerrin?”
“I don’t,” the monk replied mildly.
“Everyone wants things. Even Shin want things.”
“Oh, there is a wanting that goes on inside here.” Yerrin gestured vaguely to himself. “But I have nothing to do with it.”
“Then who’s doing the wanting?”
“No one. Wanting is wanting. It doesn’t need me.”
“A stone doesn’t want,” Akiil pointed out. “Dust doesn’t want. Only people want.”
Yerrin shook his head. “Desire sticks to people, like leeches. But the leech is not the person.”
That made more sense than most things Yerrin said. Which was to say, it didn’t make much sense at all.
Akiil rose laboriously from the bed. Sitting still for too long made him itchy, twitchy. He took a swig of water from the pitcher by the bedside, glanced out the window at the street below. Adare’s thugs were there, as usual. They’d berated him about his disappearance until he pointed out that it wasn’t his fault they’d lost him in the crowd, that it wasn’t his ass that would end up caned if the Emperor found out.
“I’m stepping out for a while,” he said. “To clear my head.”
“Bring back peaches,” Yerrin replied.
Akiil rolled his eyes. He had the coin to afford fruit now, enough coin for wagons upon wagons piled with it, enough coin to buy an entire orchard of peach trees, but Yerrin didn’t know that. As usual, he seemed oblivious to the fact that outside of Ashk’lan people had to pay for things. Including peaches.
“Weren’t you just telling me you don’t want anything?”
The monk shrugged. “I don’t. But the wanting is the wanting.”
49
Jonon was thinner than he had been when Gwenna first met him on the deck of the Daybreak. Thinner, sharper, keener, like a knife honed too many times. His eyes were bright, almost feverish, glistening by the light of the fire. He refused to sit, stalking back and forth across the low rise where Gwenna’s group had camped, fingering the handle of his cutlass over and over, whipping his head around at every snapped twig and bird call to stare intently into the trees.
His men—those that were left, anyway—seemed almost as taut. Chent had survived, and Vessik, and Lurie, along with a legionary named Hevel, and two sailors, brothers, Bult and Rummel. Hevel was obviously broken. The moment he stepped into camp, he collapsed, weeping silently into his beard even as the others went about adding stakes to the meager palisade. Gwenna’s small crew watched them warily, but Jonon’s men seemed to have no appetite for fighting. They were looking back the way they had come, and they reeked of terror.
“We still have the eggs,” the admiral said. He gestured toward the packs they’d been carrying. The canvas bulged with the weight of the unhatched birds. “We can still complete the mission.”
Gwenna shook her head. “Forget the mission for half a heartbeat. What happened to the rest of your men?”
Jonon bared his teeth, stared at her, seemed to speak against his will. “Eigen disappeared the first night.” His eyes flitted from Gwenna to Kiel to Dhar, then skittered away. “He was on guard, but never made a sound. I thought he’d deserted, but once we started marching we found his helmet. Good Raaltan steel, crushed like an eggshell.”
“What about tracks?” Gwenna asked.
Jonon gritted his teeth. “Eigen was our tracker.”
“Anything large enough to haul off an entire human leaves tracks.”
“I have spent my life in the service of the western fleet. Not grubbing about in the mud of foreign jungles examining paw prints.”
Gwenna shook her head. “Probably not paws. Probably something a lot fucking nastier than paws.”
She found, to her surprise, that Jonon’s arrival made things easier. Being stalked by a deadly gabhya was obviously less than ideal, but it distracted her from the beasts wandering her own mind, from the anger, and the hunger, and the lust for blood. This—murdered soldiers, uncertain terrain, limited supplies—was the kind of problem she’d been trained to face.
Jonon had frozen, his eyes locked on her. Suddenly he reeked of suspicion.
“You know what did this.”
“How in Hull’s name would I know?”
“You’re not surprised.”
Gwenna shook her head. “I’ve been hearing for almost half a year that Menkiddoc is a miserable shitpool of madness and monsters from which no one emerges alive. Why the fuck would I be surprised?”
She felt her hand creeping up toward the handle of her sword, forced it back down.
Kiel shifted slightly at her side.
“Have you seen it?” he asked quietly.
Jonon held Gwenna’s glare. For a moment, she thought he was going to bare that cutlass of his, but then he shivered, turned to the historian.
“Only glimpses. It doesn’t always come at night. It ripped Berin straight out of the column in the middle of the day. Two sailors saw it. Sorn described something like a spider; Ji said it was a squid.”
“Are they here?” Gwenna asked, casting her eye over the diminished group.
Jonon ground his teeth. “They almost came to blows over the question. That night Sorn murdered Ji in his sleep. Strangled him, then tore out his eyes. When we found him he was laughing, yammering on about how Ji didn’t need the eyes because he couldn’t see anyway.”
“What happened to Sorn?” Gwenna asked.
“I executed him.”
“Diseased,” Kiel said.
Jonon clenched his fist. “What is this place doing to my men?”
“The same thing,” the historian replied, “that it is doing to you, to all of us. It is … expanding them.”
Jonon shook his head, glanced over his shoulder to where the pitiful remnant of his crew hunched by the fire, blades drawn, staring out into the dark. “It is breaking them.”
Kiel nodded. “Fill a waterskin too much, and it will burst.”
“How did you find us?” Gwenna demanded.
“After the … thing took Handaf we left the river. This would have been four nights ago. I was searching for high ground, a hill, something defensible. Instead we saw the remnants of your fire.”
It made sense. The blazing grass would have bathed the sky pink and orange for miles, left a burned scar obvious to anyone who stumbled across it.
“So you saw the fire,” she said. “Why did you follow us?”
Jonon blinked, stiffened, looked around him as though he were only just waking to the moment. His voice was ice when he replied. “I am not bound to answer a traitor’s questions. Count yourself fortunate that I have not already carved you open.”
His fingers tightened around the handle of his cutlass.
“Go on.” Gwenna realized she was smiling—a terrible, joyless smile. “Draw it. Let’s see how fast you are.”
A vision flashed across her mind of Jonon’s head lopped off and rolling in the mud, of his neck fountaining blood as the dead body stumbled to its knees before her.
“This,” Kiel said, interposing his own body between the two of them, “is the land’s sickness speaking.”
“You want to die too, historian?” Jonon asked, his eyes wide, gleaming. “That can be arranged.”
The rest of the group had been drifting gradually closer, drawn by the raised voices, until Chent stood at Jonon’s shoulder, Vessik and Lurie just behind him, all their blades naked. Back on the beach the admiral had had the numbers. Not anymore. Cho Lu and Pattick loomed behind Gwenna, reeking of violence. Bhuma Dhar smelled more cautious, but he, too, had risen to his feet and stripped his steel. Even Rat was ready, small knife clutched in her right hand.
Gwenna’s smile widened until she thought her face might split.
She could feel muscle and bone shuddering beneath her sword blows, hot blood spraying across her face. She could taste that blood, feel the still-warm flesh in her mouth, the stringy heart, the liver’s bitter meat.…
Someone screamed.
She found herself staring down at her own empty hands. Where were her swords? Had she already hacked Jonon apart? She looked up. No. He was standing there, barely a pace away, his face a mad mask of rage. The others were standing as well. No one had killed anyone, not yet. So who …
“Hevel,” Kiel said, pointing toward the fire.
Somewhere off in the trees, already too far away to reach, the scream came again—long, desperate, lost.
“What…” Cho Lu asked, staring about like a man waking from a dream.
“The gabhya,” the historian replied. “It came from the trees and took him.”
They found the sailor a hundred paces from the camp. Found what was left of him, at least—boots, belt, sword, a rib cage gnawed open, the organs gone, an eyeless, brainless skull ripped off, slurped dry, tossed aside.
Kiel knelt by the body, held up a rib to the torchlight, studied the grooves carved across it, turned to the skull, excavated one of the gaping eye sockets, then let it drop.
“Ah,” he said quietly.
Gwenna shook her head. “Ah?”
“This explains why we have not been attacked already.”
“Not attacked?” Cho Lu said. He gestured toward the ribbons of flesh. “Tell it to that poor bastard.”
Kiel shook his head. “As Commander Sharpe observed earlier, the gabhya should have been crawling all over us for days. There would have been more and worse the deeper we pressed into the continent’s interior. Those we have faced, however, have been relatively benign.”
Gwenna could hear Jonon’s teeth grinding. “You would call this benign?”
“No,” Kiel agreed, straightening. “Whatever did this is large, fast, deadly. It is also the reason there are no other gabhya around. It is scaring them off.”
“You present this as a blessing,” Dhar said warily.
“It all depends,” the historian replied, “on how you measure your blessings.”
* * *
For three days they fought their way higher into the mountains. Gwenna couldn’t quite bring herself to believe in Kiel’s promised fortress, but even a high pile of rubble, even a wind-scoured mountain peak would offer better lines of sight and opportunity for defense than the tangle of dripping trees. All of them pressed hard, working their bodies to exhaustion and beyond, and for three days, the thing did not attack. In other circumstances, that might have seemed like a reprieve. Not in Menkiddoc. With nothing to fight, nothing to hunt or defend against, Gwenna was forced to contend once more with the violence of her own mind. The farther they fought into the hills, the harder the struggle became.
Sometimes, when she glanced down, she wondered why she was wearing all black. Sometimes she forgot where she’d sheathed her swords, or that she had swords at all. Memory turned eel-slick. She had more and more trouble holding it, more trouble recalling why she would want to.
Worse than the gaps in her memory was what bubbled up to fill them.
Sometimes she felt just a raw hunger; not the desire to eat, exactly—it had nothing to do with chewing or savoring or swallowing—but the need to consume. The morning after Hevel’s death a long-toothed creature the size of a marmot or a large rat skittered across her path. It had four eyes, all of which appeared to be weeping. She lashed out with a blade, slashing it in two, was reaching for the still-twitching carcass when Kiel paused beside her.
“You don’t want that,” he murmured.
She stared, first at him, then at the bloody pulp she was about to devour.
“Why the fuck would I want it?” she snapped, though she could still feel the gnawing inside of her, the need.
She closed her eyes sometimes when the world grew too close, too enticing, trying to blot it all out. That was when the visions happened. Sometimes she saw just a face, a scrap of an image, someone she knew or didn’t know, people screaming or laughing or just staring blankly at a scene outside the field of her vision. She saw Valyn once, her old Wing commander, stared into his scarred, black eyes for three or four heartbeats until he turned away, called out a few words in a strange harsh language she didn’t quite recognize. Once, she thought she saw Talal again, just as she had in her dream, only this time his iron ball was gone and he was fighting back-to-back in an arena with a young man she didn’t recognize.
No, she told herself.
No.
No.
No.
The real people, the ones trekking through the jungle with her, were even worse than the visions.
The last time she’d spoken to Jonon had been a day earlier, when they’d argued briefly about which valley to follow up toward the mountains. For the dozenth time he had called her a traitor and a whore, and for the dozenth time she’d seen herself, felt herself, leaping atop him, seizing his shoulders, burying her teeth into his throat. It felt so real. She could taste his blood, hot and coppery. Or no. Not his blood; her blood. She’d bitten through the side of her cheek. Despite the pain, she wanted to keep biting. Instead, she spat a gob of bloody phlegm onto the rocks. Gray lichen writhed at the touch of the blood, swelled, spread another handsbreadth across the stone. Gwenna stared at it, then turned away.
Jonon’s men never stopped staring. Chent was the most open, leering at her constantly, sometimes winking, sometimes licking his lips. Lurie, however, was worse. Instead of a man wanting to rape a woman, he looked like a starving farmer getting ready to carve into a side of seared, seasoned beef. Somewhere else, anywhere else, those looks wouldn’t have troubled her much. She could take care of herself if they came after her. The problem was that taking care of herself meant something different here than it did in the rest of the world. She could feel her own eagerness lurking. If she started taking care of herself she wouldn’t stop at breaking a wrist or shattering a nose. If one of them started something with her she might not ever stop.
Even the men on her own side were starting to feel dangerous. For days, as they worked their way into the foothills, she’d caught them stealing looks at her, feral, hungry looks, as though they wanted to fuck her or devour her or both.
The air grew colder, the leaves on the trees turned to needles, and then one morning, well before dawn, she woke to find a thin rime of ice on the tent, a few inches of snow on the broken ground. Her own heart, her own mind, still felt dark, and hot, and tangled as the jungle below, a violent trackless madness in which the only choices were to hide or to kill. Of the twelve survivors, Rat was the only one remaining that Gwenna felt no urge to eviscerate, and so she took to walking just behind the girl, focusing on the child’s breath as they labored higher and higher, listening to her heartbeat, quick and small as a bird’s.
For three days nothing killed them, but on the fourth morning after Jonon’s sudden appearance, they woke to find tracks in the snow, thousands of tracks, the kind of print that squirrels might leave, but with sharp, vicious claws. Gwenna realized, with a sick dread, that those tracks centered around the meager pile of supplies. When she threw aside the tarp she found two of the sacks of rations slashed open, one small barrel of dried fish splintered and pillaged.
