The Empire's Ruin, page 75
She was still standing there, grappling silently with her rage, when she heard Kiel approaching.
“A setback,” he said quietly.
Gwenna stared at the empty barrel, the strips of burlap. For a moment she felt like a creature that had never learned the value of words.
“More food remains,” the historian continued. “And water.”
“We can’t survive on water,” Gwenna hissed. “If we don’t climb out of the sickness soon, we’ll have to start hunting.”
“That would be a mistake.”
“What about starving? Is that a mistake?”
“Starving is natural. What the pollution will do to you is not.”
“You said it didn’t extend into the mountains, but we’re in the mountains and I can still fucking feel it.”
“We are not yet high enough.” He gestured. “The soil, the trees, the vegetal matter—it is all diseased. We must climb above them.”
Gwenna shook her head. They’d been climbing into the high hills for days, but the true mountains, the height of the range, still lay beyond, elusive.
“How much farther?”
“Four or five days,” the historian replied. “Maybe a week. Once clear, we will be able to hunt once more, and drink from the runoff.”
“A week,” Gwenna breathed.
Talal had had an expression: You can do anything for a day.
There’d been a time when she’d agreed with him. Swimming. Fighting. Running. She could do anything for a day. But Kiel hadn’t said a day. He’d said a week. She tried to imagine surviving for a full week, found that she couldn’t. She tried to remember why she would want to.
The camp began to stir. Soon everyone would be up. Soon they’d all know what had happened to the stores.
“I saw Talal,” she said. “First in a dream. Then in a … hallucination while I was walking.”
Kiel nodded slowly, but didn’t respond.
“First he was walking over sand, shackled to a metal ball.” She had no idea why she was telling him this, but she found herself unable to stop. “Then he was fighting in an arena somewhere, fighting beside someone I’ve never seen. It felt real. He felt real, like he wasn’t even dead.”
“Perhaps he is not.”
Gwenna wanted to sob, wanted to slash the man across the throat. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it may be true.”
“He died. They killed him. They opened him up on the steps of the Shipwreck.”
“Did you see him die?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “Frome’s spies saw it.”
“And what is your opinion of the quality of Frome’s spies?”
Her hands were clenched into fists so tight the knuckles felt ready to snap. There was a scream building inside her like a storm.
“Dreams aren’t real. Everything in this place is a lie.”
“Not everything.”
She closed her eyes, watched Talal fight for a moment, then shifted her gaze to the structure behind him. She recognized those rickety wooden stairs. They were part of the Arena in Old Harbor, where the high priests held their blood sport rituals. If Talal had survived, if they hadn’t killed him, it was just possible that he’d ended up there, forced to fight as some sick glorification of their gods. Of course he’d be shackled—they knew he was dangerous. Of course she wouldn’t recognize the people fighting at his back. Hope burned like a sickness, like a fever accompanying a plague.
“He could be alive.”
She opened her eyes to find Kiel nodding.
“Or it could all be a fucking trick, a new twist of the sickness.”
He nodded again, as though the answer didn’t make any difference.
She gritted her teeth.
“Well, I’ll be shipped to ’Shael if I die out here before I find out which it is.”
* * *
The next day they lost Bult; one moment they were hacking their way through the jungle, the next, a vicious snapping echoed through the trees. By the time Gwenna turned, he’d been ripped in half. The torso was gone. The legs remained, still twitching as they gouted blood out into the dirt. There was nothing to fight, nothing to chase, nothing to flee from or defy—just half a body, a few scraps of meat that had once been a man.
No one made any move to sleep that night, even after the sun had long set. Ostensibly they were all watching the forest, on guard against another attack, but the grim truth of the matter was that they spent just as much time eyeing one another, as though the gravest threat was already inside the makeshift camp. Some of the crew whispered that they’d seen eyes glittering in the dark. Others insisted it wasn’t one monster but a pack of them. Toward midnight they almost came to blows again, screaming about the nature of a beast that no one still living had seen until Gwenna intervened, yanking them apart. Cho Lu and Pattick sat back to back, staring into the darkness, while Chent, Vessik, and Lurie prowled around like a pack of feral dogs.
Gwenna tried to get Rat to sleep, but the girl refused to go inside the tent.
“Stay,” she said. “Stay with Gwenna Sharpe.”
And so Gwenna forced herself to sit, Rat settled in beside her.
“Watch,” she hissed, staring at Chent. “Watch the bastards.”
Gwenna nodded. “I will, Rat. I will.”
The girl’s furious vigilance quickly faded. Her eyes slid closed and she slumped over, exhausted, half in, half out of Gwenna’s lap. Gwenna started to shift her aside—the position looked horrifically uncomfortable—then stopped. Somehow, unlike everything else in the ’Shael-spawned sick, the weight of the girl felt real. As everything else unraveled, Rat’s shallow, steady breaths were a tether. Gwenna drew a short sword and set it on the ground beside them. It wasn’t a good position to fight from, sitting pinned beneath a kid’s weight, but then, fighting hadn’t done anyone any good so far.
She put a tentative hand on Rat’s shoulder. The girl was thin, even thinner than she had been back on the boat—the toll of the jungle, the endless walking, and the rations. If she’d looked like a wild thing when they first found her, back in the abandoned city, now she looked even worse. Gwenna picked a twig from the tangled mat of her hair, then a burr, then a crushed bug that she must have mashed against her scalp. It was a hopeless task—the head was a snarl of sweat and mud—but Gwenna kept at it. It was, she realized, something she’d never done before. She’d seen people do it, back when she was a child, on feast days maybe, parents smoothing or braiding their children’s hair, but her own father was bald, and while her older brothers had shown her a million things—how to put an edge on a knife, shoe a horse, slaughter a hog—none of them had ever touched her hair. Hour by hour, strand by strand, Gwenna worked at the tangles and twigs until the moon was staring down through a gap in the branches overhead. She paused, bathed in the cool light, stared down at Rat’s face. For the first time in days, she felt almost human.
Then she heard the footsteps approaching.
She tensed, shifted her hand from the girl’s hair to the handle of her sword. It took barely a moment for the sickness to bury its talons in her gut all over again. She was about to shove Rat aside and rise to her feet when Jonon spoke.
“I’m not going to murder you.”
Judging from his voice, from the smell of him, he was a few paces behind her.
The word murder bred inside Gwenna a strange kind of excitement. She wanted him to try it, wanted him to come after her, to give her even the slenderest excuse.…
Rat muttered something in her sleep, shifted, cinched an arm around Gwenna’s knee, and the feeling faded.
“Then maybe don’t stand directly behind me.”
Jonon grunted, moved forward to where she could see him. He was holding a waterskin, but his other hand kept straying to his cutlass, as though itching to draw it.
“What do you want?” she asked.
He blinked, looked down at her, stared for a moment, as though he hadn’t expected to find her there, then shook his head, wiped the sweat from his brow, took a long swig from the skin.
“It’s killing us,” he said. “The gabhya.”
She nodded.
When she didn’t speak, he shook his head again and went on.
“More than a dozen men, my men, ripped to pieces.” He stared at his hands, as though he were the one who’d done the ripping.
“Kiel says it will be better,” Gwenna replied finally, “when we get to the mountains.”
Jonon took another drink from the skin. “When we get to the mountains.”
“Another two days. Maybe three.”
“We’ll all be dead in another three days. We’ll all be bloody fucking ribbons decorating the trees.”
It was, she realized, the first time she’d ever heard him curse. As quickly as his voice had risen, however, it dropped to a skeletal whisper.
“I can’t let that happen.”
“Sometimes shit happens,” Gwenna said quietly, “and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
The admiral stared at her. “Is that what you tell yourself? About why you lost your bird? About why you got your soldiers killed? That shit happens? That there was nothing you could do to stop it?”
She half expected the rage to rise up inside her. Instead, there was only a vast emptiness.
“It doesn’t matter what I tell myself. They’re dead.”
“I do not accept that.” His teeth were bared, the half snarl of a trapped animal. “I do not accept it.” He glared out into the darkness surrounding them. “If you could go back,” he murmured, “sacrifice yourself in order to save your men, would you do it?”
“We can’t go back.”
“Would you do it?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, took a long pull on the waterskin, then another, then another, and then, like a blow to the gut, the horror hit her.
“You’re drinking the water.”
Jonon nodded, not taking his eyes from the jungle.
“It will kill you. It will drive you mad.”
“I am already going mad. We all are. This, though…” He hoisted the skin, stared at it, then laughed. “It’s making me stronger. Faster. I can feel it already.”
“It will make you into a monster.”
The admiral whirled to face her. “Good! Good!” Tears streamed down his face. “Because the man I am?” He plucked at the chest of his filthy uniform, held up a trembling hand, shook his head. “The man I am can’t defeat that thing. My men are dying and I can’t save them.”
Gwenna shook her head, gathered Rat in close. “Sometimes you can’t save people.”
Jonon stared at her, then drew himself up, scrubbed away the tears, twisted his face into a sneer. “Spoken like a coward.” He spat onto the ground. “I should have known.”
* * *
They burst from the trees without warning. One moment, the forest crowded in around them, close and oppressive; the next, the branches gave way to a wide, cold, blue sky and the diamond-bright peaks. At first, relief flooded Gwenna’s veins. After the confinement of the trees and vines she could finally see where she was going, take stock of the terrain and the dangers that might lurk there. That relief soured instantly, however, when she realized that the sickness was still with her, crawling beneath her skin, burrowing into her brain.
“So,” Jonon murmured. “These are the mountains.”
It had been half a week since he first drank the polluted water, and the admiral had grown positively gaunt, the muscles of his arms, shoulders, and chest withered to desiccated strips beneath his skin. His head looked like a skull. His hands twisted into claws. For all that, there was an awful vigor in his voice when he spoke, a knife-bright keenness to his eyes as he studied the terrain, as though he were a predator come face-to-face finally with his prey.
“We need to get up there,” Gwenna said. “Free of the disease.”
“Such a hurry!” Jonon laughed, a dry, delighted sound. “What happened to the fearless Kettral?”
Gwenna shook her head. “I was never fearless, even when I was Kettral.”
“How disappointing.”
“It was,” Gwenna replied. “It certainly was.”
Jonon arched an eyebrow. “Not anymore?”
“I’ve gotten used to it.”
“The fear, or the disappointment?”
“Both.”
The admiral lifted the waterskin from his belt. “You could drink. I can’t explain to you the … the strength. Fear, disappointment…” He waved them away with a dismissive hand. “You never need to deal with them again.”
Gwenna studied the skin, studied her own eagerness to reach for it, the thirst that was more than human thirst.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, I do.” She turned away. “We keep moving until we’re up in the mountains.”
A few days earlier, Jonon would have bristled at her command. With the land’s sickness breeding in his veins, he just laughed. The sound was too loud. “There are so many mountains! Which one to choose?”
“There.” Kiel raised a finger, pointing toward a notch in the peaks miles distant and thousands of feet above. “That valley will take us through. There should be no sickness near the summit or on the northern slope of the range.”
“Through,” Rat murmured, gazing up. The word came out half a curse, half a prayer.
The historian fixed Gwenna with those gray eyes. “There may be artifacts inside the fortress, one in particular that could help the admiral.”
“Artifacts.” She shook her head. “You mean there might be a cure up there?”
“I would not call it a cure.”
“You could have mentioned this earlier. You could have mentioned it when we left the ’Kent-kissing ship.”
“Mentioning it would have weakened your resolve.” He shook his head. “Besides. It cannot help the entire group—only one or two.”
“And that’s if it’s there at all, if any of this ten-thousand-year-old shit is still standing.”
“Indeed.”
They climbed all day, working their way up through the steepening scree, weaving between blocks of granite the size of houses as the air went from cool to chill, chill to cold. An icy wind grated over them, blowing down from the peaks flanking the pass, forcing the men to walk faster or freeze inside their jerkins and breeches. Even worse than the cold was the thirst. They’d drained the last of the barrels a day earlier. It didn’t seem a long time to go without water, but that day had left them all in agony: parched, cracked-lipped, swollen-tongued.
Cold and thirst, however, were foes that Gwenna understood. She’d trained in mountains; she’d run miles under a desert sun. In a way, the suffering was a friend walking beside her, a companion she recognized even when everything about the world had grown strange. She took hold of that cold, buried herself in it, and carried on. As long as she concentrated on the cold, she wasn’t thinking about the hunger mounting inside her.
And then, almost between one footstep and the next, the hunger vanished.
She felt it first as confusion, a disorientation similar to the kind she’d experienced sometimes deep underwater, when she lost track of up and down. She could still see the sun, still feel the ground beneath her feet, but they seemed wrong, misplaced, dangerous. Next came the feeling of loss, like the pain when Jak died, or the awful laceration of her heart when she’d believed Talal, too, was dead—only this was even stronger, a hundred times stronger, so violent she almost turned and raced back down the slopes. Then came the deep, creeping horror when she saw clearly for the first time what she’d become, when she remembered the things that she’d done and almost done, when she understood how close she’d been to losing the last shreds of herself.
That was what it felt like, leaving the sickness of Menkiddoc.
She stumbled ahead for a hundred paces or so before bending over, retching up her guts. For a while, her whole focus narrowed to the scattering of stone and snow directly before her. Her body trembled, spasmed, burned. Back on the Islands, there was a class on poisons and their antidotes. She remembered drinking nightwort, being forced to sit with it curdling in her gut for half a day, then drinking the bitter antidote, remembered how her body shook with the struggle to be clean again, how she’d half wanted to just die and be done with it. This was like that, but worse.
She had no idea how much time had passed before she finally straightened up.
Sunlight gleamed on the ice, warmed the clean white granite.
She felt wrung out, weak-kneed, feeble as something just born. The others were grappling with the shift in their different ways. Some puked up phlegm and blood. Others lay on their backs, eyes blank as the eyes of the dead, staring into the sky as they shook. Kiel sat cross-legged atop a wide boulder. He appeared no different than usual, but when she looked closer she could see the tremor in his fingers, in one eyelid that kept twitching over and over.
Jonon lem Jonon seemed to have recovered the most quickly. The First Admiral and his trio of thugs—Chent, Vessik, and Lurie—stood a few dozen paces away, staring back down the valley. It bothered her that she’d been insensible while they were already up and about, but there was nothing to be done about it. Kiel had warned her that the disease would affect them all differently.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Pattick breathed. He was sitting beside a small, ice-blue tarn a few paces away, his head cradled between his knees. “What happened to us?”
“We survived,” Gwenna said, forcing herself upright.
A harsh, jarring laugher rattled the cold air. She turned to find Jonon staring at her. “You think so?” he asked. “That thing—that beautiful thing that’s been killing us—it’s coming.”
“How do you know?”
“I can smell it,” Jonon hissed. “I can feel it.”
Gwenna closed her eyes, half expecting to find Talal there, still struggling or sprawled out dead, but found only darkness. She could smell the filth on the men, the sweat-drenched leather, the fungus. And blood—everyone had nicks, cuts, scrapes. Not long ago she’d wanted to taste that blood, to drink it. Now, the thought turned her stomach. She could smell the fear on some of them, the horror of what they’d done mingled with the eagerness of Jonon lem Jonon for more blood. Beneath all of it lay the smell of stone and a coming storm, and then there, for just a second, something else, awful, rotten, wrong.
