Hunting Gods, page 9
part #2 of Fate and the Wheel Series
He knew this was likely borne of fear as much as anything, although the idea of a clear immediate goal – escaping a dead-end world to one with better possibilities – was appealing. Leaving felt like positive action. But the chances of success …
‘These people of yours,’ he said, feeling hollow. ‘They may not be coming back.’
Shoulders hunched, the queen turned slightly away from him again, looking up at the unlikely braid of water glittering high above their heads.
‘I know,’ she murmured, her voice as distant as the ice on the chamber’s far wall.
CHAPTER 8
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Cuts
THEY WAITED perhaps another day, though there was no way to be certain. Nothing interrupted the cold tedium. No guards or other visitors appeared. No food was brought to Sheehan and Seeli or the other prisoners. During that time Uilleir told them – his cracked, disembodied voice droning like an annoying insect – about his upbringing.
The name of his homeland sounded to Sheehan like ‘Perch-mel’, though she was never sure whether this referred to a nation or his world as a whole. Perchmel seemed a pleasant place, at least in the glow of the old man’s memory – full of meadows and fish-filled streams, with rugged little mountains running down to a small inland sea of brackish water.
He spoke of his family’s delight at his acceptance to the Foundation of Hollingnoss (which sounded eerily like Murrin’s Brotherhood of the First Mind) at the age of seventeen, and his subsequent rise through academia to become the first Mage of the Manifold Worlds: a position created by the Foundation in recognition of the subject to which he had increasingly devoted his life.
It had quickly become apparent that the man had verbal diarrhoea. Sheehan could sympathise: existing in a cell like hers for years with no one to talk to who hadn’t been deafened or rendered mute was something that, even now, she found difficult to imagine. Besides, she was not exactly spoiled for things to do. And so she translated Uilleir’s monologues for Seeli, trying not to let on that she would have sewn his lips together if she could, just to shut him up.
He spoke of the arrival of the voseínte’s armies.
‘We had no warning,’ he said, sadly. ‘Although we learned afterwards that scouts had been sent across the Bridge in advance, appealing to the baser instincts of weaker members of our society in order to gather strategic information.’ He sighed bitterly. ‘But who am I to speak of treachery?
‘One day the army just appeared. It was as though a forest of men had sprung up overnight around the town. We walked out to greet them. What else could we do? We had no weapons to speak of. And in response they fired their crossbows and dagger-pults into the crowds, mowing us down like grass. They never felt the need to explain.
‘They were careful to preserve the Foundation, of course. Ensuring that the correct “leverage” was applied to every useful member. Those who were not – useful, I mean – they killed in the most repulsively imaginative ways, and forced the rest of us to witness, or even take part, as a warning of what would happen to us if we grew rebellious. Our women … I cannot say if those who went into the harems of the ruling class were the lucky ones or not. Those who died did so protractedly. But at least their suffering is over.
‘My homeland has been “restructured,”’ he spat the word, ‘to provide the most efficient flow of food, timber and metal ores into the empire. All young men have been conscripted to the armies. Some went willingly, curse their eyes, lured by the promise of steady pay and the spoils of war. Most of the surviving women are rearing bastard children to stock the armies …’
None of this did anything to lessen the sisters’ dread. Sheehan glossed over the most horrific parts of the tale, hoping Seeli’s vocabulary was poor enough to mask what she was doing. While she yearned to tell this intelligent, broken man of her mission, and the fate that her own world’s scholars had said was approaching, she suspected this was at least partly borne of an unconscious desire to share the burden, and something held her back.
‘What can anyone do?’ she asked.
‘That is the golden question,’ Uilleir replied. ‘I harbour a hope that killing the head of the empire would kill the body. The official voseínte is not the one in power, of course. That’s obvious to anyone with half a brain. He’s a puppet: a fat, stupid puppet, and I’m even fairly certain he’s a different man every few years.
‘No,’ he went on, ‘the force behind the empire is someone much more dangerous. No one knows what he looks like, though I don’t doubt that his face will be amongst the courtiers, nobles, generals and other assorted hangers-on who are to be found orbiting the voseínte like a cloud of carrion-flies. He will have arranged things so that everything falls back to him. A mentality which keeps him securely in power, but which makes the empire highly fragile if he were to be removed.
‘Unfortunately, until anyone knows who he is, no one can get close to him. Meaning that no one will be able to kill him, except by accident. If it were possible, I suspect that it would have been done by now. The gods know he has enough enemies!’
‘Someone must know who he is?’
‘I believe that Droolias – the Chief Royal Bodyguard – is one of the few who do. For a supposedly dedicated bodyguard, he seems to spend a lot of his time in secret. He is like a machine created for one purpose: the clinical excision of threats to the voseínte – and, we must assume, whoever his master is. The man terrifies me. I think he scares even the voseínte. He has been known to come down here and slowly remove body parts and organs from living prisoners he knows he can get away with doing this to, simply for entertainment. He seems cunning, well educated, and able to apply his knowledge and natural aptitude to the worst ends. Pray you never meet him.’
The voice coughed again.
‘But then … I do not know if you have met many of the other inhabitants of this realm? Perhaps I entertain a fantasy, speaking of decapitating the empire. I have met no one like these people. They are … like twisted rocks, which have endured so much weather that they notice only themselves. Their minds are closed. Most seem genuinely to believe in their pre-ordained right to take from others. It is as though their development has removed from their brains the part which can put their feet in the boots of others.’ He laughed, weakly. ‘No. I do not expect such an assassination is something I shall live to see.’
‘Discord exists here,’ Sheehan told him. ‘Perhaps more than you know.’ She described the small – and nearly fatal – act of rebellion she had witnessed on their journey through the streets of the town she now knew was called Fiskleín, when bystanders had spat and flung a bucket of what looked like ordure at the most ornate carriage in the procession which had brought them here. He sighed.
‘Why, a veritable uprising!’
‘It was one of the first things we saw here.’
‘Well. Much good may it do us.’
THEY SLEPT. Some hours later they were wakened, stiff and sore, by the clanking of the lock in the cell’s iron door. Sheehan opened her eyes to find a figure standing over them in the gloom.
He was an extraordinary-looking man. Though not as tall as some of her captors, danger oozed from him like a musk, as though he was a trained beast twitching against an instinct to kill. With her dark-adapted vision, she could see his irises as silvery rings around his expanded pupils. Even against the spectral skin of his face, they seemed to shine with a slightly more than reflected light. His lanky frame was clad loosely in black, with an ornately stitched leather waistcoat bristling with what she realised with a jolt were throwing weapons – from crooked metal blades the size of a finger to coldly beautiful daggers as long as a forearm. His sepia-dark hair was plaited across his scalp into a curious, back-tied little tail. At his side hung the decorative scabbard of a straight, long and very narrow sword. As he watched the sisters, he fingered its handle with something approaching tenderness.
Sheehan heard Seeli’s intake of breath as she shuffled carefully upright against the cold back wall of the cell. Her heart was thumping. Though the man seemed to be alone, somehow she knew that, whatever he intended, she would be unable to prevent it. Clutching her shoulder, Seeli let go an involuntary whimper.
The man’s lips parted. His smile made her bowels crawl. It was not just his teeth, which were triangular and intermeshed, like a shark’s. His gaze was worse. It felt like she was being flensed. Never had she seen an expression of such malicious intent.
She sensed scuttling at her feet. Before she could really register what was happening, the man made a casual movement, over almost before it had started. There was a staccato squeak, and a glimpse of something flying away from her. Something warm, heavy and wet landed on her lap.
She picked it up. Held it up before her by its tail. Her fingers were trembling. She forced herself not to scream.
She was looking at the front half of a small rat.
Ignoring every instinct which told her not to, she made herself look up at him again. He was holding two small knives, each connected to the opposite wrist by a slender cord. She watched the cords slither up his sleeves, clearly on some hidden spooling mechanism. With careless ease, he crossed his wrists, slotting the knives back into their sheaths on his forearms.
Sheehan stared, right into his eyes. The man stared back. It was like being eaten alive. After a few moments of this, something happened, but by the time she had worked out that the knives had left his hands again, their cords were already zipping back up his sleeves.
What had he just done?
She hadn’t felt anything, but there had been movement and faint sounds near her head. Something made her put her hands to her ears. They felt warm. Slippery. As she looked in confusion at her fingers, Seeli gasped.
Her fingers were dark and glistening.
She feverishly felt her ears again. She was relieved to find them still attached, but her questing fingers discovered deep slits halfway up the rim of each. Eyes blazing, the man leaned towards her, a finger held towards her face. The fingernail was manicured, like an island lady’s. For a moment she thought he was going to stab it through her eye.
Then, never taking his eyes off hers, he stole backwards to the corridor and disappeared towards the stairs. Sheehan could barely hear the footfalls of his leather-soled boots.
SILENCE.
Then the chamber erupted in a cacophony of gasps, moans, screams of fear or pain, and demented cackling. Someone several cells away was repeating something over and over, in a shriek like coral being dragged over slate. ‘Sheehan? What did you do? He could have killed you.’
Sheehan collapsed against her sister. She was shaking uncontrollably. She found herself weeping. You can’t let them get to you like this. Not even him. She felt her sister’s strong arms around her shoulders, rocking her from side to side.
‘What is wrong with you people?’ she screamed at the darkness, struggling against Seeli’s grip. ‘I mean, what exactly is your issue? Has everyone in this … rectum of a kingdom suffered decompression trauma to the brain?’
Uilleir was saying something urgent-sounding from the next cell.
‘You too, you mad old wanker. Why can’t you all just speak Shi’iin? Everyone would get along so much better.’
‘Young lady,’ Uilleir hissed. Sheehan had pointedly avoided supplying their names. ‘Do you not know who that was? That was him! The one I told you about!’ He sounded as shaken as she felt. ‘You just met the most feared man in Teleísian empire. Desné Droolias, the voseínte’s personal bodyguard.
‘I don’t know what happened in there just now, but you have clearly made some kind of impression on all the wrong people.’
THE CUTS IN SHEEHAN’S EARS could have been worse.
In an ideal world she would have used strips of tackweed to glue the edges together, but they would heal, she told herself. The scars would be part of who she was. Perhaps someday she could flaunt them, the way her mother Aeeo and the other matriarchs liked to show off evidence of their tussles with sharks and other predators. More damaging had been Droolias’s implied threat. Any thoughts she’d had of escape or open rebellion were, for now, thoroughly quashed.
Despite her protests Uilleir began regaling the two of them with tales of the bodyguard’s unlikely feats. Desné Droolias had supposedly slain an entire team of assassins who had managed to infiltrate the castle. A general in one of the subsumed armies had a brother who had suffered some particularly hideous form of recreational torture on behalf of the voseínte. The general, according to Uilleir, had colluded in the destruction of his own remaining family and served in his conqueror’s army for a full ten years, rising steadily back through “the ranks” (whatever those were) – all to gain a position from which he could provide twenty elite assassins access to the voseínte.
Hearing how the royal bodyguard had killed them all – armed, if the legend was true, with only the dagger he slept with, as he had been with his harem at the time – unnerved Sheehan still further. She gave up translating and drifted between listening to Uilleir’s monologue and her own increasingly desperate thoughts.
Some time later, two downtrodden-looking menials appeared, wearing a kind of coarse-woven brown uniform and escorted by three big guards.
Servants? she wondered. Slaves, even?
One of the guards produced a key and unlocked the cell door. Their armour was mirror-smooth and looked expertly crafted without being in any way beautiful. Embossed on the breastplates was the motif she had seen earlier on some of the castle flags: a circle between two lines, the top straight, the bottom like a human child’s drawing of the sea.
The menials stepped into the cell. The bigger of the two was carrying a hefty wooden pail of steaming water, its top obscured by froth. With compassion in his soft brown eyes – the first trace of it that Sheehan had seen since their capture – he set the container in the filth before them, placing a stiff-bristled brush and a fat sea-sponge at Sheehan’s feet. His companion shuffled up and laid the check-patterned blanket he carried over his arm on the floor behind the pail.
Sheehan studied the two men. Both were oddly fleshy, and disconcertingly genderless in their features and movements. The guards were built similarly. She watched the smaller man kneel and unfold the blanket.
Laid carefully upon two smaller blankets inside were immaculate embroidered dresses, one aquamarine, the other golden. Also inside was a hide bag, from which the man produced two pairs of absurdly slim silver and gold shoes with long straps clearly meant to be tied in some decorous arrangement.
Head submissively lowered, the man held a pair of shoes towards each of the sisters. When neither reacted, he gestured at the dresses and then at the pail. He said something Sheehan did not understand.
Sheehan and Seeli looked at each other.
Sheehan looked back at the man.
‘Oh, you absolutely have to be joking.’
CHAPTER 9
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Sacrifice
THEY WERE LED along dank passageways and up stairways so endless that Sheehan quickly lost count of the steps. From doors and side corridors, talking, moaning, occasional screams and other muffled sounds of activity could often be heard over the clatter of the guards’ armour and the scuff of their shoes.
The stone beneath her feet was as cold as the cell’s had been. She suspected that the steps had been re-carved several times: their worn faces were well below the joints of the blocks from which they had been cut, and some had been repaired with stone which stood out against the original shark-grey. Windows were absent. She had sensed that their prison had been underground. She began to wonder how far.
The guards had watched like statues as the servants, or whatever they were, nodded in increasing agitation between the sisters and the pail, willing them to make the connection. Eventually Sheehan had just rolled her eyes and shooed them out of the cell, jabbing a finger to show that the guards should also take themselves out of sight.
After some hesitation they had complied, and the sisters began scrubbing each other down with the brush and sponge, relishing the hot water after so much cold misery. It wasn’t that Sheehan had acquired the drybags’ embarrassment at being naked. She just wanted a moment alone with her sister sharing something that wasn’t discomfort or terror. They had rubbed themselves dry with the smaller blankets.
The aquamarine dress was too short for Seeli, so she wore the gold one. Both proved near-perfect fits, making Sheehan wonder how closely they had been studied. It was not a pleasant thought.
Without discussion, they had tossed the shoes in the empty pail.
The menials protested, but they had folded their arms and made it plain that they would not be swayed. Their last memory of the dungeon had been Uilleir’s grief-stricken voice croaking ‘Don’t leave me here! I have enjoyed our conversations. Who will I talk to now?’ As they climbed the stairs and the voice faded behind them it had hardened, spitting: ‘The man must be stopped! Curse his eyes, he must pay for what he’s done. You must find a way!’
AFTER YET MORE PASSAGEWAYS and stairs, the guards opened a secretive door and they emerged into a brighter and much broader corridor.
Air here circulated. It was warmer, too. A burnt mineral smell made Sheehan’s nostrils twitch. Beside her, Seeli plodded doggedly down the corridor after the brown-clothed men. With her slim height, she made the golden dress seem elegant, although the healing graze on her forehead and her bruise-ringed eyes spoiled the effect. Besides – had the idiots no dress sense? I barely wear clothes, and even I can see that gold is not a good colour for a blue person.
