The Empire's Ruin, page 84
The noise of the crowd fell like a rain, like a storm, like a monsoon that threatened to drown them. For a moment he was twenty years and as many miles away, out in some clearing in the reeds, heart pounding, skin slicked with sweat, body impossibly light. It had been a long time since he’d killed anything other than a snake. Too long …
From somewhere, the crier appeared. He stood over the fallen bodies and announced their victory to the Arena, as though anyone with eyes could have missed the slaughter.
By the time Ruc rose from Sang’s body, Goatface was striding toward them across the sand, his ugly face split by a wide grin.
“Alive!” he declared, standing on his toes and straining to throw one arm around Talal’s shoulders, the other around Bien’s. That arm seemed to be the only thing holding her up.
“I won’t deny that I felt a few moments of … apprehension, even dismay. There is room to improve, but the most important thing is that you are alive. The dead, after all, face grave impediments in the bettering of their skills. Come, let’s get you back to the box.”
The box.
In the final spasm of violence, Ruc had all but forgotten that they’d gone out on the sand not just to fight, not just to survive, but to buy time for Monster. He squinted toward the perimeter of the pit. Mouse was still there, and Stupid. The parasol was still leaning against the wooden wall. Of Monster, there was no sign.
As Goatface started herding the others, Ruc dropped to a knee, pressed a hand against the side of his leg, forced out a curse.
The trainer turned, furrowed his brow.
“Are you wounded?”
“I…” Ruc scrambled for something plausible. “No, but I twisted something in my leg. It won’t hold my weight.”
Talal shrugged free of Goatface’s genial embrace.
“I’ll help him.”
The soldier took his time getting an arm around Ruc, then hoisting him to his feet. Ruc put on a grimace, made a show of testing the leg, winced, ignored the gibes of the crowd. Their derision was far better than what awaited if Monster were discovered on the wrong side of the wall.
“Slowly,” Ruc muttered, leaning on Talal as they began to move toward the box.
“Slowly,” the soldier agreed.
Goatface and Bien waited until they drew even, then the four of them made their laborious way back toward the wooden box and their waiting fate. The red parasol was large, preposterously so. It was possible, more than possible, that Goatface wouldn’t notice anything amiss. He’d think Monster was pissing out her nerves, or puking them up, behind the privacy of the waxed canvas. On the other hand, if he tried to talk to her, if she didn’t talk back, he would know something was amiss; one thing about Monster—she always talked back.
If it came to it, if the trainer peeked behind the screen and found a hole in the wall and one of his Worthy gone, there would be only moments to silence him.
Ruc glanced at Talal.
There was no way to talk, not without Goatface noticing, but the soldier nodded almost imperceptibly.
They were going to have to kill him.
Not subdue him, as they’d planned. Not under cover of night, as they’d planned. Not with the distraction of another fight unfolding on the sand, as they’d planned. They were going to have to kill him right now, in the bright light of the sun, fresh from their own fight with all eyes on them. It was madness, but there was no alternative. They were going to have to murder the man, then flee through the gap, pray that Monster had forced open a way from inside the warehouse, pray that they could get to the water before the guards caught up.
Goddess … Ruc began silently, then let go of the rest.
Murder and flight were no work for Eira. The Three were more likely patrons for the ugly business to come, but he had abandoned them long ago, and anyway, despite the furious faith of Dombâng, Kem Anh and her consort had never been answerers of prayers.
By the time they reached the box, the concern was evident on Mouse’s face. Stupid managed to look more relaxed, but he was tapping nervously on the wooden rail.
“I return to you,” Goatface announced as he helped Bien over the barrier, “your most intrepid companions.”
Stupid made a show of clapping them all on the back as they entered. “Well,” he said, “you certainly made it exciting.”
“Exciting,” Mouse agreed. He licked his lips, then shot a glance at the parasol.
Goatface followed his look. “And yet our dear friend Monster missed all the excitement.”
He paused, obviously waiting for the rejoinder, frowned when no response was forthcoming, turned to Stupid.
“She’s not taken seriously ill, is she? Two years ago, the yellow sickness struck the yard.” He shook his head. “A most … macabre development. Monster,” he said, crossing to the parasol, “have you been afflicted with any blood in your vomiting?”
Talal shifted behind the trainer. He had no weapon, but he’d killed the fisher out in the pit with nothing more than his fist. Most likely, he’d take the man by the back of the head, smash him once into the wall, and that would be that. When it happened, it would happen fast. Heart hammering inside him, Ruc readied himself. Bien seemed shattered after the fight, distracted by her own violence. He needed to make sure she got through the gap before the others.…
“Monster,” Goatface said again.
Just to his side, Bien cried out, then doubled over, retching.
The trainer turned as puke splattered up against his boots. For a moment he looked genuinely alarmed, then squatted beside her, trailed a finger through the slime.
“No trace of the sickness,” he said, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t be the first to … abandon your breakfast after a fight. It is your companion that has me worried.”
He straightened, turned back to the parasol.
Talal moved forward, face grim. He raised a hand, fingers curling into a fist …
… then subsided as Monster staggered clear.
“Sweet ’Shael on a fucking stick,” she spat, glaring first at Goatface, then at everyone else.
Ruc shot a glance past her. The broken board was back in place, the fracture almost invisible, the wooden bucket set directly in front of it, a slop of piss and vomit in the bottom.
Monster wiped her chin.
“Can’t a bitch get a moment of fucking privacy in here without some old bastard wanting to paddle through her puke?” She sounded genuinely incensed.
“The yellow sickness…” Goatface began.
“My parents died of the yellow fucking sickness,” she spat. “I know what it looks like, and I don’t have it.”
Talal eased back a step, let go of his fist.
Bien, still kneeling inside the box, closed her eyes.
“So,” Monster said, glancing out into the pit. Slaves were dragging away the bodies. “Looks like you fuckers got lucky.”
55
Like swimming, and swords, and sneaking around in the dark, pain was central to the life of the Kettral. Gwenna had spent the better part of two decades getting to know its many faces: the hard cramp of a gut sick on its own hunger; the blinding wash of a blow to the head; the burn of blisters; the crazy-making scrape of half-dried cloth after a long swim in salt water; the red-ragged agony of torn-open flesh; the slow explosion after a hard blow to the ribs. Like any soldier worth her blacks, she knew how to face each one, ride it out, keep going until—after a moment, a day, a week—it finally faded.
A pain that never went away, though—that was something new.
As she followed the historian up the spiral stairs, higher and higher into the mountain, she studied the feeling unfolding inside her. It felt like the ache and itch of frozen muscles coming back to life, only her muscles weren’t frozen. Despite the strain of the climb, she moved as fluidly as ever, found none of the fumbling numbness she would have expected to accompany the sensation. And yet the pain persisted—hot-cold, throbbing, stitched through every vein, hammered into every bone.
It threatened to overwhelm her. Not the sensation itself—which was tolerable—but the thought that she would never be free of it. If she let herself, she could see a whole life stretched out before her, hundreds of days, thousands, the long, silent nights, the meals, the conversations, the fucking hours shitting in the outhouse—all scribbled with that pain.
One day at a time, she told herself grimly. One step at a time.
She forced her attention back to those steps. They’d been climbing since leaving the laboratory. She’d been counting until the pain distracted her.
“A lot of work not to get anywhere,” she muttered.
“That is the point,” Kiel replied.
She shook her head. “You want to build a defensive staircase, there ought to be some way to defend it. Doors to close. Murder holes. Landings for soldiers to fight from.”
“Fighting the Nevariim was a losing proposition. They were faster than the Csestriim, stronger, more durable.”
“So the idea was what? Make them climb so many stairs they got bored and went home?”
“The idea was to flood this entire column.” He pointed up. “There are vast cisterns above to collect glacial melt. In the event of a breach at the laboratory level or of the lower door, the staircase would be flushed.”
Gwenna pulled up short, imagined the sound of water crashing down from above, the weight of it hammering into her, driving her back, smashing her into stone walls, crushing her.
“Not very sporting, were you?”
“The Csestriim?” Kiel shook his head. “No. We were not.”
All over again it hit her, the brute fact that this man, this quiet historian with whom she’d shared meals and conversation for month after month was, in fact, immortal, a member of a race that had once tried to wipe out her own.
“Why did you hate the Nevariim so much?”
“We did not hate them. The Csestriim lacked the capacity for hate. Or for love. For any human emotion. Those are the province of the young gods.”
“A lot of work,” Gwenna said, “wiping out an entire race. Hard to imagine bothering if you didn’t hate them at least a little bit.”
“It did not begin in that way. In the first centuries those who worked here were interested only in study, in learning.” He gazed past her. “Think of a human breeder of horses or dogs.”
“But they weren’t horses.”
“No. As we learned about them, they learned, too. Learned enough to fight back, to make war.”
As though it were all so simple—a little study, a little learning, a little war.
“And so you decided to annihilate them?”
“The war with the Nevariim was a war for survival.”
“Everyone says that about every war.”
“In some cases it is true.”
She started to reply, then found she had no words. She herself had killed plenty of people, and for what? In the heart of the Csestriim fortress, the glory of Annur felt dim and distant. She turned away from the historian and began climbing once more.
Gwenna had been in old buildings before—dilapidated castles, crumbling fortresses, some in good repair, others little more than rubble. This place reminded her of none of them. Though it was carved from stone—like every other defensive structure worth the name—something alien pervaded the space. It wasn’t until they reached the next landing that she was able to put her finger on the strangeness: all the angles were too perfect, the lines too sharp. The stone looked carved by a razor, not some mason’s hammer and chisel. Even the hallways of the Dawn Palace had imperfections, spots of discolored tile, tiny places where the wood had warped or the stone chipped away. There were no imperfections here. There was hardly even any dust.
“Who were the last people to hold this?” she asked.
Kiel shook his head. “The records end with the Csestriim.”
“Meaning you’re not sure.”
“No,” he agreed. “I am not.”
“Was it ever taken? By the Nevariim?”
“They tried. Several times. Each attack was thrown back.”
Gwenna frowned. “If the Csestriim needed a fortress built out of a mountain just to survive, how did they ever win the war?”
At first, the historian didn’t reply. He kept climbing, the measured tread of his boots on the stones unbroken, his breathing quick but even. He held his peace so long that she started to wonder if she’d actually spoken the question aloud. There was a new weight to their mutual silence, though, a heaviness that had not been there before, as though the chill air were turning slowly to water. Two more turns of the staircase, and the steps stopped, finally, leveling out into a small room just a few paces across. A gleaming metallic door was set into one wall, but Kiel didn’t turn to the door. Instead he looked at Gwenna.
“If you were losing a war,” he asked, “losing badly, what would you do?”
She blinked. It wasn’t clear whether this was an answer to her question or some new line of conversation altogether.
“Fight harder,” she replied, after a pause.
Kiel shook his head. “All creatures have limits, even the Csestriim. After hundreds of years of war, they had reached those limits.”
“Fight smarter, then. Change strategy. Shift tactics.”
“The best minds had deployed such strategies, only to see them fail.”
“Then I guess you put on a good face, kick back the last of the black rum, and get ready to die.”
The historian gazed blankly at the wall. “They considered this, considered accepting their own extinction. Some even argued in favor of it.”
Gwenna tried to wrap her mind around the idea. She’d fought in wars before, wars for the fate of entire civilizations. The stakes had seemed overwhelming at the time, but those stakes paled beside the survival of an entire people—if you could call the Csestriim people—women and men, young and old, all the living and all that would ever be born.
“Things must have been pretty fucking bleak,” she said, shaking her head, “if they were ready to call it quits.”
“Some insisted that the alternative was yet bleaker.”
“Survival?”
“Obliteration.”
“Of the Nevariim.”
“Of an entire continent. Maybe an entire world, if the necessary weapon could not be controlled.”
Gwenna stared at him, the words echoing in her skull.
The annihilation of an entire continent.
All over again she felt the hungry grass of the southern jungle wrapping around her ankles, heard the awful, human screaming of the bright-plumed birds, smelled the fetid rot of things that should have died under the weight of their own disease but kept moving anyway, scrambling forward on twisted claws, felt the jaws of the gabhya sink into the meat of her calf.…
“They did this,” she whispered. “You did this. The Csestriim destroyed Menkiddoc.”
Kiel nodded. “And the Nevariim with it.”
Back on the Islands, fifth-year cadets took a class on poisons. They learned to mix nightwine into a barrel of red, to smear green-scale toxin on a blade, to foul whole wells with human corpses. Gwenna had hated the class. Blowing someone up was vicious work, but at least the targets she’d been trained to take down were all military—walls, bridges, castles. The poisoning work, on the other hand, seemed focused on villages and civilians. There was something disgusting about polluting an entire river just to break the will of the local population.
The thought of doing the same thing to an entire continent made her sick and furious in equal measures. And tired. Very, very tired.
“Did it work?”
“You saw the results for yourself.”
“Did it work on the Nevariim?”
He nodded. “They were destroyed. The Csestriim enjoyed another three millennia of dominion over this globe until humanity arrived—humanity and the young gods—to finish the work the Nevariim began.”
She shook her head. “If the Nevariim are gone then what was all that horseshit down south, in Rat’s city? Nevariim, you said.”
“You grew up on a farm,” Kiel replied.
“I grew up on the Qirin Islands, but sure, before that I was a little kid on my father’s farm.”
“Did you ever struggle with rats?”
“Every few years, when the winter wasn’t cold enough to knock their numbers down. We’d spend weeks in the spring killing them.”
Kiel raised an eyebrow. “Did you ever kill them all?”
“Of course not…” Gwenna paused, stared at him. “The Nevariim weren’t rats.”
“No. They were far smarter, far stronger, far deadlier than rats.”
“You think some survived.”
“At this point, I am certain of it.”
She shook her head. “How?”
“In any population, there are always a few that are faster than the others, more cunning, more ruthless. These are the ones that live. These are the ones that learn from their mistakes. These are the ones that return eventually—in a month, in a year, in ten thousand years—to plague you.”
* * *
Gwenna climbed a long time in silence and pain, her thoughts a tangle of twisting thorn.
The Csestriim were killers.
No. That wasn’t right. The word was too small. They had destroyed an entire continent—every insect, every animal, every tree and blade of grass—to eradicate their foes. According to the historian, they’d been willing to risk blighting the whole world. The historian, who was himself one of the Csestriim.
She started to ask him what side he’d been on, all those thousands of years earlier, when his people debated deploying a weapon that might have ended everything. Before she could frame the words, however, she felt something high in her sinuses, just behind her eyes—a faint itch, the whiff of something that wasn’t stone or metal. She took a longer breath, deeper.
“Rot,” she murmured grimly.
The historian paused. “My senses are not as keen as yours.”
“Like something died in here.”
“Let us hope that it is dead.”
“I thought you said the gabhya couldn’t get through the doors.”
