The Hollow King, page 5
He smelled more life the higher he went. Smoke and the aroma of baking bread coiled from bakers’ ovens. Pots of piss and excrement sloshed from doorways and ran down the gullies at the edge of the road. He passed a street where the flat stones of a broken temple had become the stalls of a fish market. Long, white eels lay in coils beside violet-shelled crabs, and heaps of small fish with black scales. He had seen no rivers, but that did not mean they were not there. Water flowed deep in the Realm of Death, draining out of the land to the great oceans and seas. In places there were great, black lakes beneath the earth where magic and water gathered. No life swam those waters, but things with fins of bone stirred the surface. If a mortal could dive to the bottom, they could surface and draw breath in other realms. So the stories said.
There were soldiers too. Most were alone or moved in pairs. They wore boiled leather and mail. Here and there he spotted one with a dull metal cuirass. Threads of bird skulls and feathers hung on cords around their necks or from the shafts of their spears. They were a battered lot, with scarred flesh and wary eyes. He did his best to avoid them, and though some watched him, none of them stopped him. People passed by pulling handcarts, heads down as he made the climb. A few looked at him as he passed, but most at least pretended to keep their eyes to themselves. Mercenaries were a presence in every city and settlement across the realms. The curious might notice them, but it seemed that here a sellsword with the dirt of the road on his boots was not worth much remark.
He paused as he climbed. Solia had said that once, the city had extended to all the rock spires that surrounded it, each one linked by bridges, each one crowded by buildings like bird nests atop dead trees. He had presumed that the acolyte in the caravan had been making for the main part of the city, but what if that was not the case? Aventhis was holding half the mortals it was built for, and that was in its main spire alone, but it looked as though a few bridges still linked it to smaller spires nearby. There might be other clusters of inhabited buildings on those spires. What if the tower with the painted door was amongst them?
Another truth had become clear as he searched the streets, too: Aventhis was a half-living city. Newer buildings intertwined with the old. People lived in some of the original structures, but not others. He would walk along one street and see stone and wood climbing the stump of a temple to make a grain house. The buildings to either side would be made of repurposed stone, with the comet-and-hammer symbol carved into them. Then he would turn a corner and find a row of buildings looking down at him with empty windows, their roofs gone and their faces crumbling. Birds roosted in the ruins, great colonies of them. They watched Cado as he passed, and the echo of their calls shivered in his ear whenever the sound of the city faded to quiet. He could feel the curiosity, malevolence and caution. He remembered what Solia had said about this underworld.
~The spirits of the dead become birds…~
Behind those black-and-amber eyes, the kernels of souls sensed what he was. They did not think; this form of afterlife did not let most keep that ability. But they felt the current of magic as it flowed through the air. He was not a threat to them, but he was also not of the living. There were far more of them here than there had been out in the forests he had come through. Were they attracted to the living, or was there something else that pulled them to this spear of rock?
A caw shivered through the air as he turned up another road. This one was lightless and lifeless too. The fronts of the buildings had spilled down onto the street, half blocking it. Water ran down a shallow gully it had cut between the loose cobblestones. He shook his head. There was no tower here, no painted door. He was beginning to feel that it would take days to find the place, and that he might not have that time. He was not sure why, but the feeling had not shifted from where it itched at the back of his skull. It was the kind of feeling he had learned to listen to.
He was just turning to go back down the street he had just climbed when the caw came a second time, louder, and he glanced around at the sound. A huge, pale grey bird sat on the arch of a door in a broken wall. It looked at him, eyes black pinpricks in amber. It cawed again. Cado shook his head and began to turn away, but the bird called once more, and when he looked around, it sat on the top of a fallen block of stone, just an arm’s reach away.
He went still. This bird was not just calling to him because he was near its nest or young. It was a sign, and in the underworlds, you ignored signs from the spirits at your peril.
‘You wish something?’ he said.
The bird cocked its head, then turned and hopped and flapped back towards the arch it had perched on before. It rotated its head to look back. After a second, Cado followed. The bird glided from the arch when Cado reached it, pale wings beating the air inside. Cado paused just inside the threshold. The walls and half-fallen roof soaked the inside in shadow, but his eyes could see clearly. More birds sat within, lining the tops of walls, and the gaps between shifted blocks. Bird droppings lay in a thick, white layer under the bare beams. The great grey bird was on the floor by a doorway at the far end of the space. Cado looked back out at the street behind him, but could see nothing except the rain and the smoke rising from chimneys further down the spire side. He picked his way across the floor. The bird flapped out of sight as he reached the door.
Cado paused under the arch. He blinked at the dark beyond. It did not recede from his sight straight away, but clumped and drifted back, like a slow retreating tide. He took a small bite of air. There it was: a tang of magic, fading but strong. He was no deep adept of the arcane. The curse in his blood and long years of study meant that he could do many things, but it was a narrow ability rather than mastery. He could feel the winds and current of magic, though. Just as a mortal could smell salt in the wind coming from the sea, or a lion could taste the rot in meat, magic entwined with his senses. Now, in the dripping dark of this collapsed building, he could feel magic. It itched across his skin. There were the textures of death that pervaded all magic in this realm: heavy, like a lead weight dragging the senses down. There was something else though, too, a jaggedness like the edges of a shattered cup.
He slid one of his daggers out of its sheath and stepped further in. The bird cawed. His sight pushed into the gloom. There was something resting against the furthest wall. He took another step. No, not resting. Pinned. He saw fingers, clutched together, then an arm; then the face emerged as though surfacing from deep water. Cado stopped. The eye sockets of the dead face were empty, the jaw lolling on strands of dried sinew. Matted hair hung from the crown of the skull. An iron pin had been hammered through the mouth and back of the skull into the wall behind, presumably while the mortal was still alive. Two more pins went through the shoulders under the collarbone. He could see now where the hands had raked at the wall, fingertips gouging through the lichen on the stone. The remains of robes hung from the body, now reduced to tatters of velvet. Strands of silver thread ran through them like a discarded cobweb. He moved his head closer and pushed the spill of hair to one side with the tip of his dagger so that he could look at the pin in the corpse’s mouth more closely. Struck into the top of the iron was a crude symbol of a twin-tailed comet.
He let the dagger drop and touched the ring on his forefinger. Solia’s presence shimmered into being behind his shoulder. The grey bird cawed from its perch in the dark above.
He could tell that she did not like being here. Ice prickled over his back, and when she spoke her voice was sharp.
~My prince.~
‘Look,’ he said as reply. Solia hissed.
~There is magic here, death and the taint of Chaos. Can you feel it?~ He could. It was the aberration in the feel of the magic filling the space. ~The spirit of this one did not go free after death. It was held here, and then ripped away.~
‘What could have done that?’
~The cult of the God-King. Witch hunters punishing the disciples of the Dark Gods.~
‘Or something else.’
~You must be careful, my boy.~
He looked around, pulled a flask of oil from his pouch, and upended it over the corpse.
~It would be wiser to leave.~
He did not reply but struck a flint until the spark jumped onto the oil soaking the hair and cloth. The flame shrank, then flared up. Cado stepped back and turned. Smoke poured up through the broken building as the flames grew.
The coil of night was drawing tight as Cado walked from the deserted street back into the city. The smoke from the fire he had set climbed slowly, and then thinned in the mist of rain. The blaze did not grow. There was little in the ruins for it to feed on once it had burnt the body. No one cried out or came running to find the source. There was nothing to distinguish it from the smoke of chimneys or cooking fires.
He reflected on what Solia had said. This city was more dangerous than he had hoped and thought. The threat of discovery was high, but there was also an opening. There were disciples of the Dark Gods here, but there were also people who knew they were there and were hunting them. That meant that if Cado could not find the disciples themselves, he could find those already on their trail. It was a risk, but he could walk the streets of this city for days and not find a door painted in blue and red. The more time he was here, the more suspicion would turn eyes towards him; that was how it always went. He thought about it as he walked another street of ruins, then came to a decision.
It was not an inn, not truly. There was no sign to mark it and the building looked as though it had been a counting house. The door at the front was tall and narrow. A slouched guard keeping out of the rain just inside had looked at Cado’s weapons but made no move to stop him. Further inside, narrow stone niches lined the walls. A chest-high stone counter was set in each niche for a ledger or scroll to sit on. There were splashes of ink on the sides of some niches, faded but the colour soaked in deep. Dozens of people would have stood here, heads bent over their work as they counted and marked whatever had come in and gone out of the city gates. Counting, bead by bead, quill mark by quill mark: that was what civilisations did, numbering their gains and losses as though it mattered more than a spark in the eyes of the cosmos.
It was called the Candlelight now, and the scratch of quills was long gone. Cado guessed that it had been chosen because it was close to the main gate, still standing and had no other use. The upper floors had slumped into each other. Thorn roses climbed the stones in a thick mat like the hair of a dried corpse still clinging to the scalp. The ground floor had been reclaimed as a place where the souls of Aventhis could huddle over cups of liquor and do what mortals with only fears and hopes did: talk and drink.
Wooden tables and stools sat in the middle of the two largest rooms just inside the main door. Barrels sat in the niches of the largest room. Candles had been placed in all the others, great clumps of candles. Thick layers of wax covered the stone. Wooden figures holding hammers stood beside the candles. Comets formed haloes behind their heads. They were crude. Cracked paint covered them and wax spattered their faces. The air reeked of alcohol and tallow smoke.
The tables were full in both rooms. He saw men and women in chain and plate just like the gate guards. They glanced at him as he entered. There was no friendliness in the looks, just a cold, low-grade hostility. He took in the other patrons as he walked up to a man sitting on a stool beside the row of barrels. The man blinked at Cado, the gesture as much of a question as he was willing to offer.
‘A drink,’ said Cado.
The man nodded. Clearly there was not a wide enough selection of drinks to require a clarification. He moved off the stool and went to a barrel set in one of the niches. Cado noticed that the man moved with a rolling motion. There were pale marks down his right arm and on his neck under the collar of his jerkin. They looked like splashes of grey dust. Shade scars, Cado realised, the marks left by the touch of an unkind spirit. The man filled a leather cup from the barrel’s tap, turned to Cado and waited. Cado held up a charm-sliver. It was stamped with the hound-head crest of Lethis’ charm-makers and had held as good currency in most of the realms he had crossed. The man looked at the crescent of yellow bone and shook his head, then began to turn.
‘If you want to pay with totems, it needs to be a bird quill,’ said a voice from behind him. Cado turned to see a single amber eye looking up at him from a face that was half scar tissue. The woman smiled with broken teeth. ‘They will take lightning iron if you have that, but they are funny about what they accept from people here. And if you can’t pay for a drink, they won’t let you sit.’
The barrel-man was already turning away, shaking his head and making to pour the cup of drink into a bucket.
‘Here,’ said the woman, holding out a hand, a small purple-black feather held between finger and thumb. ‘I’ll take what you were going to give him, and you can give him this.’ Cado looked at the bearded man. An eyebrow crooked above the lone eye in the woman’s face. The skin puckered under the other, empty socket. She was wearing a rough doublet but had the look of someone who spent their time moving around under the weight of ring mail and boiled leather. Someone who noticed a stranger paying with the wrong coin and who stuck her nose in. Someone who saw things.
Cado nodded, and handed the woman the charm-sliver, took the feather and gave it to the barrel-man, who thrust the cup into Cado’s hand. The liquid inside had an oily sheen and smelled of wet earth and herbs.
‘Pretty vile,’ said the woman. Cado nodded at the stool opposite her. ‘Feel free,’ she said. ‘No one else is going to take it.’ He took a gulp from the cup, for appearances, and decided it would be the last. Some of the Soulblighted could not eat or drink mortal food. He could, but it did nothing. He could taste, could distinguish scents and flavours more finely than when he had been alive. But the hunger and thirst it sated in the living was a void in him, the smell and texture of the finest food a mere selection of facts set before his senses. He put the cup down.
‘They struggle with what they don’t know,’ said the woman. ‘Stay a week and they will barely look at you. Right now, though, they are all looking at you and wondering if you are trouble.’ She smiled. ‘I am going with yes.’
Cado shook his head. ‘I am just passing through.’
‘No one just passes through here,’ said the woman. ‘People come here, less now than they did, but no one leaves. There’s nowhere else to go and no way of getting there.’ She took a drink of her own cup. ‘So, you might want to change that part of your story.’
Cado nodded, looking at her. He let his senses reach out. The beat of the hearts in the room grew in his ears. The smell of sweat and flesh, the reek of living breath. He let the wave pass and focused on the woman opposite. She had been drinking less than she appeared to have been. Deceptive. Younger, too, than the scars on her face made her seem. Damaged but strong. Blood beating to a broad rhythm in her veins. He let his caution relax a little.
He was alert for his prey coming for him. The acolyte he had taken from the caravan had known who Cado was and that he was hunting them. They were here too, in this city; the corpse he had burnt had confirmed that. Had they spotted him since he arrived? Was this the beginning of an ambush? He did not think so, but decided to voice the question left hanging.
‘You are less cautious about whom you speak to,’ said Cado. The woman shrugged.
‘Foolish,’ she said. ‘Or bored. Likely both.’ She took another drink, the swallow shallower than it looked. ‘You are a mercenary, aren’t you?’
Cado gave a small shrug but said nothing.
‘There are not many of us left, here,’ she continued. ‘Can’t be a sellsword if no one is buying. No trade, no small settlements or expeditions that need watching. So if you were hoping for that, prepare to be disappointed. Amaury, by the way.’
‘Cado,’ he said. ‘If you are a sellsword and there is no one buying, why are you here?’
‘I said there was nowhere else to go. Nowhere it’s wise to go at least. If you came in on one of the roads, you know. The darkness is not ebbing, it’s flowing, and this is one of the last islands in the seas. For now, at least.’
‘So what is paying for your drink?’
‘Militia,’ said Amaury. ‘Only real payers for a blade. Hungry for people too.’
‘And they pay well?’
Amaury snorted. ‘They pay like people who are desperate and scared and have almost nothing.’
‘Scared?’ he asked. ‘What are they scared of?’
She tilted her head, looking at him for a long moment.
‘A caravan was taken in the woods on the north road,’ she said at last. ‘Handful of survivors. They said at the gate that there were wolves, but there was something else out there too.’ Cado said nothing. Amaury gave her own shrug. ‘That’s just today. This land does not want us here.’
‘And the Old Enemy?’ he said. The Old Enemy – one of the ways that people talked about the threat of the Dark Gods without having to name them. The look she gave him was sharp, and with more than a hint of triumph, as though he had done exactly what she had guessed he would.
