Laranya was at his elbow, in her nightdress, her touch fearful on his arm. ‘What is it?’ she asked again.
‘I saw him, whore!’ Mos bellowed, flinging her arm away. ‘You can’t pretend any more! I saw him with my own eyes!’
Laranya was backing away into the room. Some emotion midway between enragement and fear had taken her, and did not seem to know which way to resolve itself. There was a new edge to Mos tonight, and she was not at all sure what he might do.
‘Who? Who did you see?’
‘Shouldn’t you know? Was it that effeminate poet? Or is there someone else I should know who enjoys my bed?’
‘Mos, I have told you . . . I cannot prove it to you any more than I already have! There is no one!’
‘I saw him!’ Mos howled, stumbling after her, his face distorted and haggard. ‘He was just here!’
‘There was nobody here!’ Laranya cried. Now she was afraid.
‘Liar!’ Mos accused, advancing, looming in the greentinted shadows.
‘No! Mos, you are drunk, you are tired! You need sleep! You are seeing phantoms!’
‘Liar!’
She reached the dresser, knocking into it and tipping bottles of perfume and make-up brushes over. There was no further she could retreat.
‘A man cannot rule an empire when he cannot rule his wife!’ Mos snarled. ‘I will teach you obedience!’
She saw in his eyes what he meant to do, even before he had raised his fist.
‘Mos! No! Our baby!’ she pleaded, her hand going defensively to her belly.
‘His baby,’ Mos breathed.
Laranya did not have time to ask who he meant before the first blows fell; nor did she find out afterward, when he left her alone on the floor of the bedchamber with her body aching and her face bruised and blood seeping from between her legs as their child died inside her.
Reki was woken by a servant calling his name outside the curtain of his room. Asara was already awake, watching him. She lay next to him in his bed, and as he saw her it seemed that the pallid green moonlight caught her at an odd angle, and her eyes were two saucers of reflected illumination, like a cat’s. Then she looked to the curtain, and the moment passed.
His gaze lingered on her shadowed face for an instant, unable to draw away from the beauty there. She had indeed, as she had promised, given him an experience unlike any he had had before; but though he had repaid her with a flawless rendition of The Pearl Of The Water God, she had not gone away as he had feared, never to see him again. To his delight, she had barely left him since the moment they had met. A sweet recollection of lazy days and passionate nights flitted across his consciousness. And if it seemed too good to be true, then he was loth to shatter his fragile happiness by questioning it.
‘What is it?’ he called, his throat tight from sleep.
‘The Empress!’ the servant replied. ‘The Empress!’
The tone in her voice made him sit up with a jolt of alarm. ‘A moment,’ he said, and slid naked out of bed to put on a robe. Asara did the same. He was too preoccupied to even glance at her sublime form. Though she had shared his bed for several nights now, and he already worshipped her like a goddess, it was all dashed away in that dreadful instant.
‘Enter,’ he called, and the servant hurried in, speaking as she came. It was one of Laranya’s handmaidens, a servant of Blood Tanatsua rather than one of the Keep servants.
‘The Empress is hurt,’ she babbled. ‘I heard her . . . we all heard them fighting. We went in after the Emperor had gone. We—’
‘Where is she?’ Reki demanded.
‘The Imperial chambers,’ the servant said, but she had barely finished before Reki swept past her and out of the room.
He ran barefoot through the corridors of the Keep, the lach floor chill on his soles, heedless of how ridiculous he looked sprinting in a bedrobe.
The Empress is hurt.
Imperial Guards in their blue and white armour stood aside for him; servants hurried out of his way.
‘Laranya,’ he was murmuring breathlessly to himself, his voice like a whimper. ‘Suran, let her be all right. I will do anything.’
But if the desert goddess heard his plea, she did not answer.
His quarters were not far from his sister’s bedchamber. The life of the Keep went on all around as if nothing had happened. Cleaners were polishing the lach and dusting the sculptures, night-time activities carried out unobtrusively when most people were asleep. By the time he reached the door to the Imperial chambers, he knew that all the servants here must have heard what the handmaiden heard; yet they pretended otherwise. Since Saramyr houses rarely ever had interior doors due to the need for breezes in the scorching summers, codes of privacy had arisen in which it was extremely rude to eavesdrop or to pass on anything that was inadvertently learned. That Laranya’s handmaiden had broken that silence was an indication of how serious she felt it was.
He heard Laranya sobbing before he shoved the curtain aside, and though the sound made him feel as if his heart would break, he was desperately relieved that she was still capable of making it.
She was on the bed, on her hands and knees, in amid a tangle of golden sheets stained with thin smears of blood that looked black in the moonlight. She was weeping as she pawed through the sheets as if searching for something.
She looked up at him, framed between the curving ivory horns that were the bedposts, and her eyes were blackened and swollen.
‘I cannot find him,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot find him.’
Reki’s eyes welled. He rushed over to hold her, but she shrieked at him to stay back. He shuddered to a halt in uncomprehending misery.
‘I cannot find him!’ she howled again. Her battered face was made ugly by bruises and tears. He had never seen her this way before. Whenever she had cried in the past, it had been only a cloud across the sun; but suddenly she seemed like a shade of herself, all the vigour and spirit gone from her. She looked like someone he did not know.
‘Who are you searching for?’
She grubbed around in the bloodied sheets again. ‘I felt him come out, I felt him leave me!’ she cried. ‘But I cannot see him!’ She picked up something tiny that looked like a dense clot of blood, holding it up to the light. Threads of sticky liquid ran through the gaps in her fingers. ‘Is that him? Is that him?’
With a sickening wrench, Reki realised where all the blood had come from, and what she was looking for. He felt suddenly dislocated from reality, one beat out of time with the world. He could barely breathe for the horror of seeing his sister this way.
‘That is not him,’ Reki said. The words seemed to come from elsewhere. ‘He is gone. Omecha has him now.’
‘No, no, no,’ Laranya began to whine, rocking back and forth on her knees. She had discarded the clot. ‘It is not him.’ She looked up at Reki, her eyes imploring. ‘If I find him, I can put him back.’
Reki began to cry, and the sight brought Laranya to new grief. She reached out for him with bloodied hands, and he slumped onto the bed and embraced her. She flinched as they hugged and he let her go reflexively, knowing that he had hurt her.
‘What did he do to you?’ Reki said, and Laranya wailed, clutching herself to him. He dared not hold her, but he let his hands rest lightly on her back, and tears of fury and grief angled down his thin cheeks.
After a time during which they did not speak, Reki said: ‘He needs a name.’
Laranya nodded. Even the unborn needed names for Noctu to record them. It did not matter that they had no idea of the sex of the child. Laranya had wanted it to be a son, for Mos.
‘Pehiku,’ she muttered.
‘Pehiku,’ Reki repeated, and silently commended the nephew he would never see to the Fields of Omecha.
That was how Asara found them when she arrived. She had taken a little time to dress, though she wore no make-up and her black hair hung loose over one shoulder. She slipped inside the curtain without asking permission to enter, and stoo
d in the green moonlight silently until Reki noticed her.
‘I will kill him,’ Reki promised, through gritted teeth. His eyes were red and his nose streaming, forcing him to sniff loudly every so often. Ordinarily he would have been mortified to be seen like this by a woman he found so attractive, but his grief was too clean, too justifiable.
‘No, Reki,’ Laranya said, and by the steadiness in her voice he knew that sense had returned to her. ‘No, you will not.’ She raised her head, and Reki saw a little of the old fire in her gaze. ‘Father will.’
Reki did not understand for a moment, but Laranya did not wait for him to catch up. She looked to Asara.
‘Look in that chest,’ she said, motioning to a small, ornate box laced in gold, that lay against one wall. ‘Bring me the knife.’
Asara obeyed. She found amid the folded silks a jewelled dagger, and brought it to the Empress.
Reki was faintly alarmed, unsure what his sister intended to do with the blade.
‘You have a task, brother,’ she said, her swollen lips making repulsive smacking noises as she spoke. ‘It will be hard, and the road will be long; but for the honour of your family, you must not shirk it. No matter what may come. Do you hear?’
Reki was taken aback by the gravity in her voice. It seemed appallingly incongruous with the disfigured woman who knelt on the bed with him. He nodded, his eyes wide.
‘Then do this for me,’ she said, and with that she twisted her long hair into a bunch at the back of her head and put the knife to it.
‘Don’t!’ Reki cried, but he was too slow; in three short jerks it was complete, and Laranya’s hair fell forward again, cut roughly to the length of her jaw. The rest had come free in her hand.
He moaned as she held the severed hair up in front of him. She tied it into a knot and offered it.
‘Take this to Father. Tell him what has happened.’
Reki dared not touch it. To take the hair would be to accept his sister’s charge, to be bound by an oath to deliver it which was as sacred as the oath she had made by cutting it off. To the folk of Tchom Rin, the shearing of a woman’s hair meant vengeance. It was done only when they were wronged in some terrible way, and it would take blood to redress the balance.
If he gave this to his father, Blood Tanatsua would be at war with the Emperor.
For the briefest of instants, he was dizzyingly aware of how many lives would be sacrificed because of this one act, how much agony and death would come of it. But an instant was all it was, for there were higher concerns here than men’s lives. This was about honour. His sister had been brutally beaten, his nephew murdered in the womb. There was no question what had to happen next. And in some cowardly part of his soul, he was glad that the burden ultimately would not fall to him, that he was only a courier.
He took his sister’s hair from her, and the oath was made.
‘Now go,’ she said.
‘Now?’
‘Now!’ Laranya cried. ‘Take two horses and ride. Switch between them; you’ll go faster that way. If Mos finds out, if Kakre hears of this, they will try and stop you. They will try and cover this up with lies, they will play for every moment and use it to arm themselves against our family. Go!’
‘Laranya . . .’ he began.
‘Go!’ she howled, because she could not bear the parting. He scrambled off the bed, cast one last tearful look at her, then stuffed the hair into the pocket of his bedrobe and fled.
‘Not you,’ Laranya said quietly, even though Asara had shown no sign of leaving. ‘I need your help. There is something that must be done.’ Her tone was dull and flinty.
‘I am at your command, Empress,’ Asara replied.
‘Then let me lean on you,’ she said. ‘And we will walk.’
So they did. Bruised and battered, her nightrobe bloodstained around her thighs, the Empress of Saramyr limped out of her bedchamber on Asara’s arm, out through the Imperial chambers, and into the corridors of the Keep. The servants were too amazed to avert their eyes quickly enough. Even the Imperial Guards who stood station at the doorways stared in horror. Their Empress, well loved by all, reduced to a trembling wreck. It was not the done thing for a woman so abused to show herself in public, but Laranya did not shrink from it. Her pride was greater than her vanity; she would not play the game of the servants’ silence, would not cower in secret and pretend that nothing had happened. She wore Mos’s crimes on her body for all to see.
The Keep was asleep, and there were few people in the corridors and none that dared to detain her; but even so, the route to the Tower of the East Wind was a long and arduous ordeal. Laranya could barely support herself, and though Asara was uncommonly strong, it was a struggle. Her world was a mass of pain, yet still she was conscious of the eyes that regarded her with fear and disbelief as she staggered through their midst. Asara bore her stoically and in silence, and let Laranya direct her.
The Tower of the East Wind, like all the other towers, was connected to the Keep by long, slender bridges positioned at the vertices. It was a tall needle, reaching high above the Keep’s flat roof, with a bulbous tip that tapered to a point. Small window-arches pocked its otherwise smooth surface. Far above, a balcony ringed the tower just below where it swelled outward.
The climb was hard on Laranya. The spiral stairs seemed endless, and she would not pause at any of the observation points where chairs were set by the window-arches to view the city. Only when they reached the balcony and stepped out into the warm night air did Laranya allow herself to rest.
Asara stood with her, looking out over the parapet. Close by, the city of Axekami fell away down the hill on which the Keep stood, a multitude of lights speckling the dark. Then the black band of the city walls, and beyond that the plains and the River Kerryn, flowing from the Tchamil Mountains which were too distant to see. The night was clear and the stars bright, and Neryn hung before them, the small green moon low in the eastern sky, an unflawed ball floating in the abyss.
‘Such a beautiful night,’ Laranya murmured. She sounded strangely peaceful. ‘How can the gods be so careless? How can the world go on as normal? Does my loss mean so little to them?’
‘Do not look to the gods for aid,’ said Asara. ‘If they cared in the least for human suffering, they would never have allowed me to be born.’
Laranya did not understand this, did not know what manner of creature she was talking to: an Aberrant whose form shifted like water, whose lack of identity made her a walking shell, loathsome to herself.
Asara turned to the Empress, her beautiful eyes cold. ‘Do you mean to do it?’
Laranya leaned over the parapet and looked down to the courtyard far, far below, visibly only by pinpricks of lantern light. ‘I have no choice,’ she whispered. ‘I will not live so . . . diminished. And you know Mos will not let me leave.’
‘Reki would have stopped you,’ Asara said quietly.
‘He would have tried,’ the Empress agreed. ‘But he does not know what I feel. Mos has taken from me everything I am. But my spirit will strike at him from beyond this world.’ She took Asara’s arm. ‘Help me up.’
The Empress of Saramyr clambered onto the parapet at the top of the Tower of the East Wind, and looked down on all of Axekami. With an effort, she stood straight. Her soiled night-robe flapped about as the breeze caressed her. She breathed, slowly. So easy . . . it would be so easy to stop the pain.
Then, a gust, rippling the silk against her skin, blowing her newly shorn hair back from her face. It smelt of home, a dry desert wind from the east. She felt a terrible ache, a longing for the vast simplicity of Tchom Rin, when she had not been an Empress and where love had never touched her nor wounded her so cruelly. Where she had never felt her child die inside her.
And with that scent came a new resolve, a strengthening of her ruined core. It felt like the breath of the goddess Suran, revivifying her, imbuing new life. Why throw herself away like this? Why let Mos win? Perhaps she could endure the pain. Maybe she
could survive the dishonour. She could revenge herself upon him in a thousand different ways, she could make him rue the tragedy he had brought upon himself. The worst he could do was kill her.
If her father declared war, he would be casting himself into a nearly hopeless battle for her sake. Dignity would demand it. All those lives. Yet, if she turned back now, she could send Asara to catch Reki, to stop him. She could seek retribution in ways far more subtle and effective.
‘The wind has changed,’ said Laranya, after standing there for some minutes, an inch from that terrible drop.
‘Doubts?’ Asara asked.
Laranya nodded, her eyes faraway.
‘I think not,’ said Asara, and pushed her.
There was an instant when the Empress of Saramyr teetered, a moment of raw and overwhelming disbelief in which the thousands of routes fate held for her collapsed down to one single dead-end thread; then she tipped out into the dark night and her scream lasted all the way until she hit the courtyard below.
TWENTY-THREE
One hundred and seventy five miles away from where the Empress was falling from the Tower of the East Wind, Kaiku and Tsata hunted by the green light of Neryn.
The Tkiurathi slunk along the shadowed lee of a row of rocks, his gutting-hooks held lightly in his hands. Kaiku was some way behind him; she could not move at the speed he could and still remain quiet.
The cocktail of fear and excitement that Kaiku felt when on the hunt had become almost intoxicating now. For days they had been living on their wits and reactions, staying one step ahead of the beasts that wandered inside the Weavers’ invisible barrier. The paralysing terror that she had experienced almost constantly at first had subsided as they had evaded or killed the Aberrant predators time and again. She had learned to be confident in Tsata’s ability to keep them alive, and she trusted herself enough to know she was no burden to him.
The shrilling was somewhere to their right. She could hear it, warbling softly to itself, a cooing sound like a wood pigeon that was soft and reassuring and decidedly at odds with the powerhouse of muscle and teeth and sinew that made it. She and Tsata had begun to name the different breeds of Aberrant by now for the sake of mutual identification. They had five so far, and that still left an uncertain number of species that they had only glimpsed. Aside from the gristle-crows and the shrillings, there were the brutal furies, the insidious skrendel, and most dangerous of all, the giant ghauregs. Tsata had named the latter two in Okhamban. The sharp and guttural syllables seemed to suit them well.