The surgeon blinked. ‘Rubbish,’ she pronounced without moving.
The girl frowned. ‘What?’
‘That’s arterial blood and it’s smeared, not spurting. Did the cook slaughter another pig? You’re a sick little wretch, you know that?’
Spite stared at her, and then slowly straightened. ‘Just fooling,’ she said.
‘Get out of my sight.’
The girl scowled. ‘Father won’t like it when I tell him how you talk to me.’
‘Your father doesn’t like you, so why would he give a fuck how I talk to you?’
‘We’re going to kill you,’ said Spite. Envy stepped out from behind her and Atran saw the bloody knife in her hand.
‘What have you fools done? Who did you hurt? Where’s Malice?’
Envy rushed her, knife upraised.
Atran’s hand was a flash, catching the girl’s wrist and snapping it clean. She then picked up the child by the throat and threw her across the room. Envy struck the cutting table, her back arching, folding around the table’s edge – a table that was bolted to the floor.
Shrieking, Spite flung herself forward.
A slap sent her sprawling. Atran turned to see Envy picking herself up from the floor, and that was impossible – the girl’s back should have broken, snapped like a twig. Instead, something dark and vile was bleeding out from the girl, from her limbs, her hands, from her dark eyes. The tendrils of this dread sorcery reached out, curling like talons. The broken wrist was visibly mending, flesh writhing under the red skin.
Spite scrabbled to her feet, and in her Atran saw similar power. ‘You’re nothing!’ the girl hissed. ‘A useless drunk bitch!’
Sorcery lashed out from both of them, the tendrils whipping, scything into Atran. At their touch flesh burst, blood sprayed hot as melted wax. Atran held up her hands, shielding her eyes, and then lunged at Envy. The neth powder was roaring in her body, fuelling a rage that swept away the agony. Her groping hands found Envy’s face, took hold like a raptor’s claws and lifted the girl from her feet. When she threw Envy this time, it was with all her strength. The girl hammered into a wall, the back of her head crunching wetly. The sorcery enveloping her winked out.
Spite’s attack continued, lancing into her back, rending flesh down to the bone. Gasping, Atran wheeled, staggered forward.
The girl suddenly bolted for the doorway, but Atran’s boot caught her in the midriff. Spite skidded and struck the door frame. Her face bulged as she fought for air. Atran advanced, caught a flailing arm, and spun the girl around, into the wall behind her. Bones shattered at the impact, and Spite fell to the floor in a disordered heap.
The pain of her wounds tore at Atran’s mind. Moaning, trembling uncontrollably, she reached up and fumbled along a shelf bearing battle medicines. She found a vial of rellit oil, pushed the stopper from the bottle and quickly drank down its contents. The pain vanished like a candle’s flame under a bucket of water. Her clothes were shredded and soaked in burnt blood – but that heat had cauterized the wounds even as they had been delivered. She had no idea what was left of her back, but she knew that it was bad. Still, that would have to wait.
From both girls, there was motion. Bones were knitting before Atran’s eyes.
She had little time. On a peg affixed to one end of the cutting table were her surgeon’s tools. Stumbling over to the leather satchel, she plucked it free and unfolded it on the table. Taking a tendon knife in one hand, she went over to Envy. Picked her up by one limp arm and dragged her over to the table. She lifted the girl’s body and flopped it down on to the tabletop then pinned the girl’s left hand against the wood and drove the knife into the palm with all her strength.
Envy’s body jolted and the eyes fluttered. Atran selected another knife and nailed Envy’s other hand to the table. Then she collected up Spite and flung her down at the table’s opposite end. Two more knives pinned her hands to the table like her sister’s.
A part of Atran, lodged cowering in one corner of her mind, watched and knew that she had snapped inside. Madness had spilled out to fill the room and still it boiled. Those wide eyes staring out from that dark corner looked on in horror and disbelief, even as she stalked over to collect a cloak, pulling it over lacerated shoulders.
The girls wouldn’t stay put for long. Whatever sorcery filled them was too powerful, too eager for freedom. She needed to save as many people as possible. Get them out of the house – and then burn the house down to the ground.
Her strides jerky, wobbly, she made for the doorway.
Malice stepped into it, holding above her head a block of masonry. She threw it as if it were a brick. The massive stone slammed into Atran’s chest, shattering ribs. She fell, hit the floor on her back as if thrown down, her head snapping and crunching hard. Light blinded her. She could not breathe and she felt heat filling her lungs and she knew that she was already dead, her lungs drowning in blood. The light faded suddenly and she looked up to see Malice, her throat swollen black and blue and green, dried blood at the corners of her mouth. She had collected the huge stone and was lifting it again.
The eyes that met Atran’s in the moment before the stone descended on her face were empty of life – a look the surgeon had seen a thousand times before. Impossib—
* * *
Atran’s skull squashed flat, with gore spurting out to the sides. Malice stared down at what she had done. On the cutting table, her sisters were thrashing, trying to pull their hands from the knives pinning them to the surface.
Malice turned to them. ‘I’m mad at you,’ she said. ‘You took the lantern with you. You took away the light and left me all alone!’
‘Never again,’ hissed Envy. ‘We promise, never again!’
‘Now be a good girl and help us!’ Spite begged.
* * *
Venth stumped into the dining room. Only Setyl had arrived before him and the armourer sat glumly at the table, which had not yet been set. The master of horses frowned. ‘The bell’s sounded, by the Abyss. I do not even smell cooking – where are the staff? Where is everyone?’
Setyl blinked up at him, and then shrugged.
‘Did you not think to look?’ Without waiting for a reply – which wouldn’t ever come in Setyl’s case, anyway – Venth made his way to the service door that led to the kitchen. Something wasn’t right. He’d been looking forward to this meal, once he’d learned that Ivis would not be attending. He was furious with the captain. The horses were being pushed too hard – the wretched animals weren’t smart enough to resist a tyrant, and Ivis was surely that.
You’d think a damned war was coming—
He pushed open the door. There were bodies lying on the tiled floor, and pools of blood. He stared for a moment longer, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, and then he spun round and rushed back to the dining room.
‘Setyl!’
The scarred man looked up.
‘Get the Houseblades. Get Corporal Yalad. Someone’s murdered the staff. And look – look at us – where’s everyone else? Abyss take me – where is the hostage? Go! The Houseblades! And make sure they’re armed.’
As Setyl rushed out, Venth crossed the chamber and plunged into a side passage, the one leading to the hostage’s quarters. His shock was giving way to dread. Nothing was more sacrosanct than the safety of a hostage of the House. If he found her dead, the Lord would never survive the consequences. Even Mother Dark would be unable to protect him. Things go slack when Ivis isn’t around. The damned fool, wandering off into the wood all night! And now …
He told himself that he knew nothing, since the alternative made him recoil inside. Someone, an assassin, must have found a way into the house. This was an attack upon Dracons – the Lord was away and horror was being visited upon his home. Cowards.
Passing the maids’ cells he paused, and then knocked upon the door of the nearest one. There was no reply. Somewhere else or dead. Venth continued on. He found that he had drawn his knife.
/> Shouts sounded from the front entrance. The Houseblades were inside. As he drew closer to the hostage’s door, he wondered if it wasn’t already too late. They’ve killed her.
Still five paces from the door, he saw the latch suddenly turn and the door was thrown open. The hostage stood in the threshold. ‘Venth? What has happened? I saw running, in the courtyard—’
‘Mistress, please go back inside your room,’ Venth said.
She noted the knife in his hand and stepped back and he saw fear in her eyes.
Venth shook his head. ‘Assassins, mistress. There has been slaughter in this house. Go back. I will guard this passage until a Houseblade arrives.’
‘Slaughter? Who? My maids?’
‘I don’t know about them, mistress, but I fear the worst. Only Setyl and me arrived in the dining hall – no one else. Not Atran, or Hidast or Hilith.’ He turned at the sound of someone running up the corridor. Heart suddenly pounding hard, he readied himself. He would give his life here, defending her. And he’d hurt the bastard—
But it was Corporal Yalad. The young officer was pale and he had drawn his sword. He pulled up when he saw Venth, and then Sandalath. ‘Good,’ he said with a shaky nod. ‘Both of you, with me—’
‘Corporal,’ said Venth, ‘would it not be better if the hostage remained in her—’
‘No, I want every survivor with me, in the dining room. I know – I could post guards, but to be honest, until we know the nature of our attacker, I’ll not split up my squads.’
‘Corporal, you have six hundred Houseblades at your disposal—’
‘The squads I know and trust, horse master. The rest are locking down the grounds.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Sandalath.
‘Mistress,’ replied Yalad, ‘if we’re in time, then the assassins are still with us. But no matter what, to get into the house … it is quite possible that there are co-conspirators. Indeed, given the number of new recruits we’ve been taking on, the assassins could well come from among the Houseblades. I am even now determining if anyone cannot be accounted for. For now, however, I want all the survivors in one place, where I can keep them safe. So please, both of you follow me.’
Venth gestured Sandalath between himself and Yalad, and in this formation they quickly made their way towards the dining hall.
‘Why is this happening?’ Sandalath asked.
When Yalad did not reply, Venth cleared his throat and said, ‘The Lord has enemies in the court, mistress.’
‘But he’s not even here!’
‘No, mistress, he isn’t.’
‘If he had been,’ growled Yalad ahead of them, ‘we’d be looking down at the corpses of however many assassins got in here tonight. And dead or not, Draconus would get answers from them.’
Venth grunted. ‘He’s no warlock, corporal. I don’t know where those rumours came from, but I ain’t never seen anything to suggest he is – and I wager neither have you.’
‘He is the Consort,’ Yalad countered. ‘Or would you deny Mother Dark’s ascension, horse master?’
‘I would not,’ Venth replied.
‘I may not have seen anything,’ Yalad said, ‘but Captain Ivis has.’
‘I wish the captain was here,’ said Sandalath.
‘You’re not alone in that,’ Yalad said in a growl, and Venth could not tell if the young man had taken offence. There were times when this hostage displayed all the tact of a child.
The corporal looked in each of the maid cells, but his glance was brief and he was quick to close the doors behind him before moving on. ‘I don’t get this,’ Venth heard him mutter. And then he halted.
Venth almost collided with the young man. ‘What is it, corporal?’
‘His daughters – have you seen them? Anywhere?’
‘No, but then, I rarely do,’ Venth replied. And I’m grateful for that.
‘Stay here,’ Yalad said, and then he edged past them, returning to the last of the cell doors. He went inside, and when he reappeared there was blood on his hands. He moved to pass them but Venth blocked him, and the thing he did not want to contemplate was now burning like a wildfire in his mind.
He met Yalad’s eyes. ‘Well?’
‘Not now, Venth.’ The corporal roughly pushed past. ‘Let’s go.’
‘But what about those little girls?’ Sandalath demanded. ‘If they’re out there with an assassin on the loose, we need to find them!’
‘Yes, mistress,’ Yalad said without turning. ‘We need to find them.’
* * *
It was just past dawn when Ivis stepped on to the track wending its way up to the grounds. He was exhausted, and in his mind, haunting him, was the face of the goddess who had been impaled on the stakes in the clearing. He remembered her smile and the absence of pain in her eyes – as if wounds meant nothing. Yet each time he saw that face, taking form in his mind’s eye as if reassembled from pieces, he thought about cruelty, and all the other faces he had seen in his life then crowded his skull as if clamouring for attention.
He feared the attention of gods. They had the faces of children, but these were not kind children, and all that was revealed in them, why, he could see it mirrored among the many men and women he had known. The same venality. The same unashamed indifference.
Cruelty was the bridge between mortals and the gods, and both sides had a hand in building it, stone upon stone, face upon face.
We are – each and every one of us – artists. And this is our creation.
When he came within sight of the keep wall, he saw Houseblades swarming the grounds, and a moment later a half-dozen of them were rushing towards him. Looking like children, when something has gone wrong. The sun’s light was hard and strangely harsh, as if every colour was paint, and every hue and every shade held in it, somewhere, a hint of iron. Ivis paused, and then made his way across the moat bridge to meet his Houseblades.
FOURTEEN
WHEN HE WAS young and still living with his family on the Durav estate, Cryl remembered one summer when a tree-fall blocked a stream in the wood of the grounds. Water backed up to form a pool, and then a pond. He recalled seeing the mound of an ant nest in the path of that rising water. Day after day he returned to it, watching one side of the nest slowly crumbling to the seep of water. Atop the mound the ants continued their usual frenetic activity, as if blind to what was coming. On the last day of his visit, he discovered only a sodden heap of mud and twigs where the nest had been, and in the black muck he saw eggs and drowned ants.
He thought of that nest now, inexplicably, as he stood staring at the smear of smoke above the forest to the east, watching it spread across the sky. The procession had drawn to a halt while Lord Jaen rode out with a dozen Houseblades to investigate, a venture from which they were yet to return. Cryl remained with the carriage, ostensibly in command of the remaining eight Houseblades, although there were no orders to give.
Upon this journey, to the place of the wedding, Enesdia was required to remain cloistered, hidden from sight by the closed shutters on the carriage windows, and communicating only via a tube with her maid, Ephalla, who sat beside the driver on the bench. Somewhere, on the north road out from Kharkanas, Lord Andarist would be similarly bound to solitude, assuming they had departed the city yet. There were symbolic meanings to this ancient tradition, but Cryl wasn’t much interested in them. As the poet Gallan once said, traditions hid the obvious and habits steadied the world.
When next he rested eyes upon Enesdia, she would be facing her future husband, on the threshold of the edifice Andarist had built to proclaim his love for her. And Cryl would smile, from where he stood at her father’s side – a hostage made brother and a brother filled with brotherly love.
But I am not her brother.
There was virtually no traffic upon the road, and the line of trees off to their left, gap-holed by the beginnings of trails, seemed empty of life: wood like bone, leaves like flakes of ash. The river on the right showed them a mud-cl
otted bank where plants had torn away in unseasonal currents and high water. As they had travelled down from Enes House, they had almost kept pace with Dorssan Ryl’s southward flow, but now the familiar water seemed to have rushed past and in its place was something darker, stranger. He knew that such notions were nonsense. The currents were unending, and whatever sources of the river existed high in the mountains of the north, they too never ceased.
After one more long searching study of the trail mouth in which the troop had vanished some time earlier, Cryl turned and strode down from the road to draw closer to the river. The black water held hidden every promise, and even to reach down into it was to find nothing to grasp. He thought of its chill touch, and the numbness waiting in its depths. River god. Your water does not run clear, and so you remain blind to the shore and the lands beyond. But I wonder … do you hunger? For all that you cannot have? All that you cannot defeat? The traditions of current, the habits of flooding, and the mysteries you guard: these are the things the Deniers would worship. And I see no crime in that.
This wedding would be his last responsibility to the Enes family. His days of being a hostage were coming to an end. He felt like a crow lost in a flock of songbirds, beleaguered by gentle songs and shamed by his own croaking call. The Duravs had given themselves to the sword, had made their lives traditions of violence and habits of killing, and though Cryl had yet to end someone else’s life, he knew that should the necessity arise he would not hesitate.
He thought back to Captain Scara Bandaris and his troop, and the miserable, snarling pack of Jheleck children they had been escorting. He had felt comfortable in their presence. Understanding the mind of a soldier was a simple task; even meeting the feral eyes of those savage pups had proved an exercise in recognition, despite the shiver that ran up the back of his neck.
The Enes family now felt alien to him, and his ties to it were stretching, pulling apart, fraying like rotted tendons. He was ready to draw a blade and slash through the last of them. I am done with flighty young women and sad old men. I am done with foul-tempered artists who see too much. Done with giggling maids who flash bared flesh my way at every opportunity, as if I am but a slave to temptation. I leave Osserc to such legendary prowess – if Scara’s tales are of any worth on that account.