Sad and confused, Briony had more than her usual small share of the sweet wine that Idite and the others liked so much. As a result, when she woke in the dark her head was heavy and it took long moments to make sense of where she was, much less what was going on.
One of the younger girls, wrapped head to toe in a blanket so that she looked like a desert nomad, was standing in the doorway.
“Mistress Idite, there are men at the gate, demanding to be let in!” she cried. “Your husband the Dan-Mozan, he is arguing with them, but they say they will break it down if he does not let them in!”
“By the Great Mother, who are they? Robbers?” Idite, although obviously frightened, was keeping her voice almost as level as she did during their evenings of storytelling.
The girl in the doorway swayed. “They say they are Baron Iomer’s men. They say we are harboring a dangerous fugitive!”
Briony, who had just clambered out of bed, went wobbly in the knees and almost tumbled to the floor. A fugitive—who else could that be but herself? And Shaso, too, she remembered. He would still be called a murderer.
“Dress, girls—all of you.” Idite raised her voice in an attempt to quiet the frightened murmuring. “We must be prepared for trouble, and at the very least we must be decently dressed if strangers burst in.”
Briony was not so much concerned with being decent as being able to defend herself. She hesitated for only a moment before pulling on the loose tunic and breeches borrowed from Effir’s nephew, then grabbed the one pair of practical shoes Idite had given her, leather slippers that would at least allow her to run or fight if she had to. She tucked her Yisti knives into the cloth belt of the tunic and then pulled her robe around herself to hide the male clothing and the knives, giving herself at least a chance to blend in with the other women.
As the sound of raised, angry voices came echoing through the house, Briony saw that Idite intended to keep the women hidden in the hopes that everything would be happily resolved without them ever having to come into contact with the baron’s men. Briony was not willing to passively await her doom. The women’s chambers had few exits, and if things turned bad she would be trapped like a rat in a barrel.
She pushed past young Fanu, who grabbed ineffectually at her arm as Briony stepped out into the corridor.
“Come back!” Idite shouted. “Br . . . Lady!”
As she ran toward the front of the hadar, Briony silently thanked Idite for having the good sense not to call out her name. The hallways were full of clamorous voices and flickering light, and for a dizzying moment it was as though she had stumbled into some eddy of time, as if she had circled back to the terrible night in the residence when Kendrick had been murdered.
She staggered a little as she reached the main chamber, stopping to steady herself on the doorframe. The smoke was thick here and the voices louder, men’s harsh voices arguing. She peered into the weirdly crowded chamber and saw at least a dozen men in armor were shoving and shouting at perhaps half that number of Effir dan-Mozan’s robed servants, bellowing at them as though they could force the men to understand an unfamiliar language by sheer force. Several robed bodies already lay on the floor at the soldiers’ feet.
As Briony stared in horror, trying to see if one of them was Shaso, an armor-clad man kicked over a brazier, scattering burning coals everywhere. The barefooted servants shrieked and capered to avoid them even as they cringed from the soldiers’ weapons.
“If you won’t talk,” shouted one bearded soldier, “we’ll burn out this entire nest of traitors!” He stooped and lifted a torch that had been smoldering on an expensive carpet and held it to one of the wall-hangings. The servants moaned and wailed as the flames shimmered up the ancient hanging and began licking at the wooden rafters.
Briony was digging beneath her robe for her knife, although she had no idea what she could do, when someone grabbed the belt of her robe and yanked her away from the door, back into the corridor.
Her heart plunged—trapped! Caught without even a weapon ready to fight back! But it was not another of the baron’s soldiers.
“What are you doing?” hissed Effir’s nephew Talibo. “I have looked everywhere for you! Why did you leave the women’s quarters?” He grabbed at her arm before she could answer and began to drag her away down the hallway toward the back of the house.
“Let go of me! Didn’t you see—they’re killing the servants!”
“That is what servants are for, stupid woman!” The hall was rapidly filling with smoke; after only a few steps he doubled up coughing, but before she could pull away he recovered his breath and began tugging at her again.
“No!” She managed to wrench her arm free. “I have to find Shaso!”
“You fool, who do you think sent me?” Tal’s face was so suffused with both rage and fear that it looked as though he might burst into tears or sim-ply rip into pieces.”The house is full of soldiers. He wants me to hide you,”
“Where is he?” She hesitated, but the shrieks of unarmed men being slaughtered like barnyard animals behind her were terrifying.
“He will come to you, I am sure—hurry! The soldiers must not find you!”
She allowed herself to be drawn away up the corridor. Almost as terrifying as the servants’ screams was the low, hungry roar of the spreading lire.
She pulled away from him again as they reached the part of the residence across the garden from the main chamber. “What of your aunt and the other women?”
“The servants will lead them out! Curse you, girl, do you never do what you are told? Shaso is waiting for you!” He stepped behind her and grabbed both her elbows, shoving her forward at an awkward stumble, another dozen steps down the corridor and then out a door into the open yard at the back of the house, site of the donkey stables, the vegetable garden, and the kitchen midden. He pushed her toward the stable and had almost forced her through the doorway when she threw out her arms and caught herself. She stepped to the side so the front wall and not the open door was behind her, and put her hand into her robe.
“What are you doing?” Talibo was almost screaming, his handsome, slightly childish face as exaggerated as a festival mask. Briony could see flames now on top of the house, greedily at work in the roof. On the far side of Effir dan-Mozan’s walls, torches and lanterns were being lit in the surrounding houses as the neighborhood woke up to the terror in their midst.
“You said Shaso was waiting for me. But first you said he would come to meet me. Where is he? I think you are lying.”
He looked at her with a strange, wounded fury, as though she had gone out of her way to spoil some pleasant surprise he had planned for her. “Ah? Do you think so?”
“Yes, I do. I think . . .” But she did not finish because Talibo put both hands on her breasts and shoved her, bouncing her off the wall and into the doorway, then pushed her again, sending her stumbling backward to fall down in the mire of the stable.
“Close your mouth, whore!” he shouted. “Do what you are told! I will be back!”
But even as he scrambled for the door, Briony was sliding across the damp ground toward him. She grabbed at his leg and pulled herself up—
right, and when he turned, she shoved herself against him, forcing him back against the rough wattle of the stable wall, and pressed the curved blade of the Yisti knife against his throat. Close enough to kiss, Shaso had taught her, close enough to kill.
“You will never touch me again, do you hear?” she breathed into his face. “And you will tell me everything Shaso said to you, everything that has happened and that you saw. If you lie I will slash your throat and leave you to bleed to death right here in the shit and the mud.”
Tal’s long-lashed eyes widened. He had gone pale, she could see that even in the dim light of the single candle that someone had lit here in the stable—in preparation for her arrival?—and when he sagged Briony let her own muscles go a little slack. Where was Shaso? Was Effir’s nephew really lying? How could they escape
with soldiers everywhere—and how had the soldiers found out . . . ?
Talibo’s hand was open, but his sudden blow to her face was still so hard and so unexpected that Briony flew backward, her knife spinning away into the darkness. For a moment she could do nothing but gasp in helpless anger and gurgle as blood filled her mouth. She spat, and spat again, but every drop in her body seemed to be streaming from her nose and lips. She scrabbled for the lost knife as the merchant’s nephew approached but it was beyond her reach, beyond her sight—lost, just as she was . . .
“Bitch,” he snarled. “She-demon. Put a knife to my throat. I should . . . I will ...” He spat at her feet. “You will spend a month begging me to forgive you for that—a year!”
She tried to say something, but it felt as though her jaw had been broken and she could only murmur and spit blood again. She slid her hand down her leg and reached into her boot, but the sheath was empty—the other dagger had fallen out somewhere during the scuffle. Her gut went cold. She had no weapon.
“Shaso, your mighty Shaso, he is dead,” said Talibo. “I saw the soldiers kill him—surrounded him like a wild pig, spearing, spearing. I told them where to find him, of course.”
She coughed, rubbed at her broken mouth with the back of her hand. “Y-You .. . ?”
“And my uncle, too. Him I did myself. He will never again call me names—spoiled, lazy. Ha! He will rot in the shadows of the land of the dead and I will be the master here. My ships, my merchants, my house . . . !”
You betrayed ... ?” It hurt to speak, but the thought of Shaso murdered blazed in her like a tire, like one of the coals that had bounced across Effir dan-Mozan’s chamber floor only moments ago, lifetimes ago, lt couldn’t be true—the gods could not be so cruel! “Betrayed us . . . all?”
“Not you, bitch, although now I wish I had. But I will keep you for my own and you will learn to treat me with respect.” Panting, he took a few steps toward her and leaned over, keeping well out of reach, even though she had lost the curved blade. Briony took a certain grim pleasure in that, anyway: he craved respect, but it was he, Talibo the traitor, who had learned to respect her. His face was ridiculously young for the emotions that played across it in the candlelight, greed and lust and exultation in his own cruelty. “And if you had been a proper woman you would have been safe here until it was all over. Now, I will have to break you like a horse. I will teach you to behave ... !”
Briony hooked his ankle with her foot, sending him crashing to the ground. Instead of running away, she threw herself onto him even as he thrashed on the slippery ground, struggling to get his feet under him. She knocked him back but he curled his hands around her throat. Something hard was pressing painfully into her back, but she scarcely noticed it. The merchant’s nephew was slender but strong—stronger than she was—and within instants, as his fingers tightened, the light of the single candle began to waver, then to burst into flowers of radiance like the fireworks that had scorched the sky over Southmarch to celebrate her father’s marriage to Anissa. Her hand found the thing that was digging into her back.
Talibo’s grip was so powerful that it did not slacken immediately even after she had pulled the second, smaller Yisti dagger out from underneath her and rammed it up under his jaw with all her might. Talibo straightened, shuddering and wriggling like an eel in the bottom of a fisherman’s boat, so that for a moment it seemed his death throes might break her in half, then at last his hands fell away.
She lay where she was for a long time, fighting for breath, coughing and sputtering. When at last her throat seemed to be open again she stood up. Swaying, legs trembling, she bent over the merchant’s nephew cautiously, in case he might be shamming, but he was dead: he did not even twitch when she pulled the blade out of his throat, freeing a gush of dark blood. She spat on his handsome, youthful face—a gob that was red with her own blood—and then turned and went to look for her other knife.
When she emerged from the stable Effir dan-Mozan’s entire house was in flames. Briony stared for long empty moments, as if she had turned to stone, then she limped across the open yard into the shadows by the wall. She found a place she could mount and climbed with quivering, exhausted muscles over the top, then she let herself drop into the cool, stinking darkness of a refuse heap.
When morning came, Briony found a bucket of icy water and did her best to wash the blood from her throbbing, aching face, then pulled her robe tight around her boy’s clothes—the clothes of the boy whom she had killed, she reflected with little emotion. She dragged her hood down low and joined the crowd that had gathered outside the smoldering remains of Effir dan Mozan’s house. Some of the baron’s soldiers were still standing guard over the ruins, so she did not dare go too close, and many of the crowd spoke Xandian languages, since this was the poorest part of Landers Port, but she heard enough to learn that the women of the house, at least, had managed to escape, and were sheltering with one of the other well-known Tuani families. She thought briefly of going to Idite, but knew it was a foolish idea: they had lost everything because of her already—why put them in danger again? Nobody seemed to know for certain exactly what had happened, but many had heard that some important criminal had been captured or killed, that Dan-Mozan had been harboring him and had died trying to defend his secret.
Only one male member of the household had lived to escape. For a moment, hearing that, Briony felt a rush of hope, but then someone pointed out the survivor—a small, bowed old servant that she recognized but whose name she did not remember. He stood apart from the others, staring at the smoking, blackened timbers of what had been his home. Alone in the crowd, he looked the way Briony imagined she did beneath her hood, shocked, confused, empty.
There was nothing here for her anymore except danger and quite possibly death. The baron’s men did not seem to have tried very hard to take Shaso alive, and he had been nowhere near as dangerous to the Tollys as she was. Briony felt certain that Hendon Tolly’s hand was somewhere in all this—why else would Iomer, a man who cared little for politics, have struck in such a swift and deadly way?
She screwed up her courage and joined the crowd of people walking out the city gates for the day and stared at the ground as she walked, meeting no one’s eye. It seemed to work: she was not challenged, and within an hour sne was alone on the cliff road below Landers Port, Briony walked until she reached a place where the woods were thick beside the road, then slaggered off into the trees. She found a hidden spot surrounded by undergrowth and curled herself up in the wet leaves at the base of a mostly naked oak, well out of sight of the road, and then wept until she fell asleep.
17. Bastard Gods
Zmeos, brother of Khors, knew that Zona’s father and her uncles would come against their clan, so he raised an army and lay in wait for them.
But Zosim the Clever flew to Perin in the form of a starling and told the great god that Zmeos and Khors and Zuriyal had laid a trap, so
Perin and his brothers called out the loyal gods of heaven. Together they descended upon the Moonlord’s castle in a mighty host.
—from The Beginnings of Things The Book of the Trigon
FERRAS VANSEN AND HIS COMPANIONS were not the beak-faced Longskulls’ only prisoners, as they discovered when they reached the creatures’ camp after an exhausting trudge through the dark woods. The Longskulls seemed almost uninterested in them, despite the dozen or so of their number Vansen and the others had killed, most of them victims of the Storm Lantern’s blade. If a prisoner strayed out of the line one of the snouted warders honked at him or even jabbed at exposed skin with a sharpened stick, but otherwise left them alone.
Despite being our ally, Gyir has shown more hatred toward me and the other mortals than these things do toward us, Vansen thought. Why did they take us if they care so little about us?
He quietly asked Barrick about it. The prince asked Gyir and passed on his words: “The Longskulls are more like animals than people, as we would see it. They are doing what they
are trained to do, no more. If we hurt one it may well Hurt us in return, but otherwise they are taught only to bring us back to their master.” Their master was Jikuyin, the one the raven had called Jack Chain—a disturbing name then, even more ominous now.
“What does this Chain want with us?”
Barrick paused, listening again, then shrugged. Gyir’s eyes were red slits, “He says we will not know until they bring us to him,” Barrick said. “But we will not like it.”
The Longskulls’ hunting camp looked like something out of an ancient Hierosoline temple-carving—the antechamber of the underworld, perhaps, or the midden heap of the gods. Certainly there seemed to be at least one of every misshapen creature Ferras Vansen could have imagined in his wildest night-terrors—squint-eyed, sharp-toothed goblins; apish Followers; and even tiny, misshapen men called Drows that looked like ill-made Fun-derlings. There was also an entire menagerie of animal-headed creatures with disturbingly manlike bodies, things that crawled and things that stood upright, even some that crouched in the shadows singing sad songs and weeping what looked to be tears of blood. Vansen could not help shivering, as much to see the misery of his fellow prisoners as their strangeness. Many had their arms or legs shackled, some their wings cruelly tied, a few with no more restraint than a leather sack over their heads, as though nothing else was needed to keep them from escaping.