Now she looked at Juliet walking away, and she thought, I will change it.
I will reshape the world. I will rewrite inkaad itself if I must. I will make this killing not necessary.
I swear it.
11
THE MORNING AFTER THE RAID, Meros went to see the Master Necromancer. When he returned, he said that as payment for their service the Master Necromancer would lay four of their dead to rest.
Romeo hated that he was grateful.
He hated how the rest of the Catresou were grateful, how there was an almost festival atmosphere among them as they prepared for the funerals. But he hated himself the most.
If Juliet knew that all her people served the Master Necromancer now, it would break her heart. If she knew that Romeo served him too, she would hate him even more.
If Makari knew—
But Makari had to know, surely, that Romeo willingly served the man who had enslaved him. Was that why he had never come to see Romeo again? Because he despised what Romeo had done?
But because of their service—Romeo’s service—the Master Necromancer visited them in secret and laid four of their dead to rest. One of them was Emera. She was going to have a Catresou burial, as she had wanted. As Romeo had promised.
If he had broken that promise, surely Juliet would have hated him for that too.
Romeo had nothing left, except his faithfulness to her people. That was how he had ended up here, in the embalming room.
The stench was awful.
Romeo knew that the Catresou embalming process involved draining the blood from the body, then removing the heart, stomach, and brain. So he’d expected the place to smell at least faintly like blood and death.
What he hadn’t expected was the smell of the embalming fluid itself—or at least, he supposed it must be the embalming fluid: an overpowering sweetness, so strong it made the air feel sticky, with a sour undertone that he could taste in the back of his throat as he breathed.
It must be so much worse in the old embalming rooms that the Catresou had used for generations. This was just a cellar in one of the Catresou safe houses, recently converted for use on the dead.
He didn’t want to be here in this dim, crowded room—there were tables everywhere, and shelves filled with jars and metal equipment—but Ilurio had told him that he was needed. They wanted him to help carry out Emera’s body.
“Who’s there?” called out someone from behind a line of shelves. It sounded like an old man.
Romeo took a breath—his stomach pitched at the scent—and said, “I was told you need me to—”
Then he stepped around the shelves and stopped.
The old man was one of the Catresou magi. Romeo could tell, because he wore the golden full-face mask that the magi wore at all Catresou ceremonies. He’d never seen one before, of course, but he’d heard stories passed along by City Guards who had to stand watch at Catresou funerals.
The old man was also an embalmer. Romeo could tell, because there was a man’s corpse laid out on the table in front of him, sliced open from neck to navel, ribs pried apart. The old man had his hands plunged into the middle of the corpse’s abdomen.
Romeo stared. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t look away. He’d seen blood and death before, but not like this. The Mahyanai burned their dead cleanly; they didn’t peel them open and cut out choice portions like slaughtered animals.
“What are you doing?” the man demanded. His hands must have moved slightly, because Romeo heard a very quiet, very distinct wet noise.
Romeo bolted. He managed to make it out of the room before he threw up.
“Oh, my,” said Ilurio from behind him. “Did the brave warrior find something that he couldn’t stand?”
Romeo was miserable enough that it took him a few moments to work out that if Ilurio was lurking in the hallway behind him, if he had followed him down here, then—
“If you were any younger, I would thrash you,” Gavarin announced.
“I’m sorry,” Romeo said quickly, straightening, and gulped as his stomach pitched again. He hadn’t thought this moment could get more humiliating. “I—I just—”
“Not you.” Gavarin had been holding Ilurio by the shoulder, as if he’d dragged him there, but he released him with a sigh and handed Romeo a handkerchief. “The young master here.”
“I’m doing us all a favor,” said Ilurio. “If he deserved to wear a mask and call himself Catresou, he’d be able to stomach a sacred rite.”
“If you were a Catresou in any way except that your mother pushed you squalling out of her body, then you wouldn’t have used the sacred embalming to play a prank,” said Gavarin. “I’m going to apologize to the embalmer; you can start cleaning that mess up.”
“We’re not on the raid anymore,” Ilurio said sulkily. “You don’t have command over me.”
“No,” Gavarin agreed. “But I’m still first guard to the Lord Catresou, so it’s up to me if you ever get to join in a raid again.”
“How dare you,” said Ilurio. “Don’t you know I’m—”
“The son of illustrious dead parents, heir to a fortune that doesn’t exist anymore. The world you knew is over, boy. Wake up and start earning your place in the new one.”
“I’ll clean it up,” Romeo interrupted. He wanted to just escape quietly while Ilurio and Gavarin were arguing, but he knew that wasn’t right. “I should be able to bear your people’s customs.”
There was a moment of fragile silence, as Romeo felt the yawning gulf between himself and anyone who had been born Catresou. Then Gavarin said, “Get to work,” and vanished inside the embalming room.
Ilurio was still glaring at him. “Do you think you deserve to be our hero?”
“I never said I was.”
“No, you just put on one of our masks and asked us all to worship you.”
Romeo felt the heat along his cheekbones. The more time he spent around the Catresou, the more he was aware of how arrogant he’d been, putting on the symbol that they all had been forced to take off.
“I didn’t do this for your worship,” he said. “I only wanted to serve the Juliet.”
Ilurio’s laugh was harsh and ugly. “You think we’ll respect you because you love that whore?”
The words seemed to slide straight down Romeo’s spine. The next moment, he had shoved Ilurio against the wall, and his voice felt like it was coming from someone else as he said, “I killed the last man who called her that.”
Ilurio’s eyes were wide in actual shock.
Then the door opened. Romeo heard Gavarin’s footsteps as he came out. He didn’t say a word about I thought you were cleaning up. He didn’t need to; Romeo could feel his gaze on the back of his neck, and it said everything.
Romeo let go of Ilurio and stepped back. “Where’s—we need a cleaning cloth,” he said.
“There’s a storeroom down to the left,” said Gavarin, in such a flat voice that it was impossible to tell if he was furious or trying not to laugh.
“Thank you,” Romeo said, and marched down the hallway. Surprisingly, Ilurio followed him without a word. Maybe he was embarrassed too.
“I still don’t believe you’re a warrior sent by the gods,” Ilurio grumbled, when they had gotten to the storeroom. Then he shot Romeo a sideways glance. “Did you really kill someone?”
Romeo remembered Tybalt’s blood on the cobblestones. The shouts and the smell and the dizzying hot sun. If not for that one afternoon of loss and fury, Juliet would belong to her people still, and the Catresou would be safe, and Emera would be alive. So many people would be alive.
“Yes,” he said.
Romeo had heard all his life about the exotic, sinister pageantry of Catresou funerals. He supposed that the actual ceremonies in the sepulcher would be more elaborate, but even so, it was far simpler than he would have imagined.
The Catresou had obtained a house built over the ruins of another, which meant there were several underground rooms. They didn’t
bother with individual coffins or graves; they had just carved a pit out of the floor and lined it with bricks and then a white cloth. The four bodies lay in it nestled side by side, each wrapped in a shroud. If Romeo could ignore the nagging awareness that the bodies were going to be left there forever, he could almost pretend that they were simply performing a normal Mahyanai vigil.
He couldn’t really pretend, though, because there was a magus in the traditional gold mask. And a row of jars, three for each body.
Meros was there, dressed and masked in somber black—all the Catresou were masked for the occasion. The magus went to each of the bodies, touching their eyes, mouths, hands, and feet with a golden seal as he muttered prayers in an undertone. The soft whisper of his voice, like fluttering moth wings, made the back of Romeo’s neck prickle with uneasiness.
Emera had wanted this. She had thought it holy. Just as Paris had, as Juliet had.
It was this “holy” Catresou magic that had twisted the spells on Juliet, that had tried to rip the world open and end it. Romeo stared at the magus and wondered if he had been part of that plot. If he was working with the necromancers now.
After the magus, Meros went to each corpse and laid one jar at the head and another at the feet: the embalmed stomach and brain. Romeo reminded himself that this was enough to keep them safe. The chained coffins in the Catresou sepulcher were only a precaution; no body could rise as a revenant with so many organs removed.
Then it was time for the final jars to be laid: the embalmed hearts of the dead.
Romeo had been given Emera’s. It was small, a cheap little unglazed jar that had probably once held oil. It was light in his hands, and he tried not to think about the tiny object inside it.
Emera’s face was very pale, but peaceful. Her wounds were covered by the shroud, and so too were the seams from the embalming. Romeo still felt nauseous when he looked at her; his mind kept skipping back to the bloody embalming room, and the way she had clawed at the bars of the cage—and that was wrong, because she was more than a corpse, more than a monster.
She was a person, and Romeo had never really known her, and he didn’t deserve to stand at her funeral.
But there was no one else. So he did.
12
RUNAJO CAME UP WITH THE plan late that night.
But then she couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
She squinted at the paper where she had been trying to do calculations. The numbers seemed to be wiggling. It was nearly dawn; her eyes felt swollen and gritty, while her head ached and felt too light at the same time.
She could hardly think when she was this tired, but she didn’t have time to sleep. The Great Offering was in three days. Two days, now, because it was nearly dawn. And Runajo still couldn’t get the numbers right. She’d always been good at the sacred mathematics, but this calculation was more complex than anything she’d ever tried before.
The plan itself was simple: shrink the city walls. Viyara was huge. The Upper City—the original city, which had stood guarding the Mouth of Death for thousands of years—was built upon a vast spike of rock, with the Cloister at its top. Carved into that spire were the underground chambers where the Sisters grew the food of Viyara. At the base lay the Lower City, built a hundred years ago when refugees from the Ruining arrived. Only the Catresou and Mahyanai had negotiated a place for themselves in the Upper City; the rest built a sprawling, overgrown labyrinth of buildings that went right out to the edges of the island.
The city walls—the invisible sphere of magic that surrounded Viyara, keeping the deadly white fog of the Ruining out—didn’t even touch the land. They rose out of the surrounding water. They were so vast, no wonder they were failing.
Runajo was sure that if the city walls were shrunk to the base of the city spire, it would take much less power—much less blood—to maintain them. It wouldn’t be an easy way to live. They’d have to evacuate the people of the Lower City, and whether they went into the Upper City or the inside the city spire, it would be hard to fit them all. It would be hard to keep the peace.
But it had to be better than a perpetual bloodbath. Surely she could convince Lord Ineo to see it that way.
If she had the numbers worked out, to prove it could be done.
And that was the problem. She had to design a new set of walls for the city, and she had to design a plan for shifting from one set of walls to another, without the walls having a deadly reaction. And she had to do it without really knowing how the walls worked. That knowledge had been lost in the first days of the Ruining, when over half the Sisterhood died protecting Viyara, and the Sunken Library was overrun by revenants. Now they only knew how to keep producing the walls; Runajo had to extrapolate from that how to create new ones.
She groaned and rested her head on the table. Time to face the truth. She wasn’t going to finish in time. She might not be able to do this alone at all.
And Juliet would have to guard the sacrifices.
Cold nausea dragged at her stomach. Juliet wouldn’t do it without orders. So Runajo would have to look her in the eyes and tell her to stand guard as her people were slaughtered one by one.
She didn’t want to hurt Juliet anymore. She didn’t want to get people killed anymore.
She wasn’t going to have a choice.
Runajo let out a slow breath, and admitted another truth to herself: she was not going to make this plan work on her own. She needed help.
And the only way to get it was to wait, and pretend she was obedient, and go to the palace of the Exalted.
Runajo had never been inside the palace before. Like all the Upper City, it was carved of white stone, alive and glimmering with the power of the Sisterhood. But it felt like a different world.
She was used to smooth white walls, to lamps carved of glowing stone in the shape of flowers, to the occasional stray spark of light running down the floor. Here, every surface was carved with swirling lines, with birds and flowers and tiny dancing figures. There were no lamps; light glimmered and pooled in the crannies of every carving. Veins of light glowed in the floor, ever-shifting. In every room were pools and fountains, their inner surfaces tiled in gold or bright blue.
When Runajo had come to the gates and told the guards that she needed to speak with Mahyanai Sunjai, she hadn’t expected to be allowed in. She had thought that she would be left in one of the outer courtyards and made to wait until Sunjai came to her. She had written a note, in case she wasn’t allowed to see Sunjai at all. She had thought she might have to beg and plead, and she’d brought her best gold earrings in case she had to bribe.
But as soon as she told the guard her name, he nodded, and said, “Come with me.”
He led her through the glimmering rooms and corridors to a little walled garden with three pools where huge carp glittered dimly from under the lily pads. Between the pools was a stone bench, and on the bench sat the younger sister of the Exalted: Inyaan, who had once been a novice beside Runajo and helped weave the walls with her.
Once, Runajo had hated her.
Inyaan had the dark skin and white-gold hair of all the Old Viyaran nobility, but she didn’t look like the child of a dynasty descended from the gods. She was a short, scrawny girl, neither pretty nor impressive. Now that she was no longer a novice, she wore gauzy white silks and glittering gold chains, but they hung on her like weights, not adornments.
Her face was like a mask, fixed in a blank expression that looked both bored and disdainful. That was just the same as in the Cloister. It had taken until the very end of their time together for Runajo realize that the blankness had actually always been fear.
The guard bowed low. Runajo did too.
Inyaan didn’t blink.
Well, Runajo hadn’t expected getting permission to see Sunjai would be easy. She stepped forward, opening her mouth—
She gasped in pain as the guard caught her by the hair. “May she approach, Sister of the Exalted?”
Runajo felt unbearably stupid
. As a novice, Inyaan had been treated almost the same as all the other novices; but here in the palace, she was due the same courtesies as the Exalted.
For a moment Inyaan was silent. From a nearby pond came a plop as one of the carp gave a sudden wriggle.
“Allow her,” said Inyaan, her voice soft and dull.
The guard released Runajo’s hair. She stumbled slightly, and then—feeling the guard’s eyes still on her—dropped to her knees.
“Leave us,” said Inyaan. As the guard retreated to the doorway of the garden, she finally looked Runajo in the eyes. “Why are you here?”
Runajo was painfully aware of the fact that they’d never been friends in the Cloister, and that she’d loathed Inyaan until nearly the end.
“I need to speak with Sunjai,” she said. “I need her help.”
“She serves the family descended from the gods,” said Inyaan. “What has she to do with you?”
“She served the gods themselves in the Cloister,” Runajo snapped, “and wasn’t too grand for me then.”
But that was a stupid thing to say, when Inyaan could have her thrown out with a word—and wrong, because Inyaan had never been as proud as Runajo thought.
“Please,” she said quietly. “I know she’s your friend, but—”
“She is nothing to me,” said Inyaan, instantly.
The words were a lie: they had been friends. Runajo had worked at weaving the walls with the two of them every day, so she knew this for sure.
The words were clearly a lie, but also a reflex. Runajo felt sick as she remembered discovering that Inyaan’s proud stares had always masked fear, as she wondered now what Inyaan was hiding.
“I’m not trying to make trouble for either one of you,” she said. “But I need her help. I need your help. No one else outside the Cloister knows enough about weaving the walls.”
Inyaan drew a breath. Her fingers flexed as if preparing to unclasp, but didn’t.
“Why should I help you?” she asked, and the little bit of resentment that had crept into her voice was comforting. At least she sounded alive now.