The Court of Broken Knives
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‘It’s happening soon,’ said Darath over the hubbub. ‘Very soon, I’d guess. Weeks? Yes, look at your face, weeks. And you’ll choose Tearday, because you always choose Tearday to do things … Two weeks this Tearday, then. In the evening, obviously, gives you the whole night to consolidate, you hope, while everyone else is running around trying to work out what’s going on. How … that seems obvious enough. The big question is why. Immish, I’m guessing. Though why that should drive you to this extreme suddenly … You really think you can change the world like this, Orhan? Through blood?’
‘There’s another way, is there?’ Was he really that predictable? Hadn’t realized, still, after everything, how much Darath knew him. How much Darath had listened, when Orhan himself had assumed it was all just a game for him. ‘The city’s dying, Darath. The Empire’s a joke. An empty desert and a few villages. A wasteland. The Yellow Empire, we’re known as! The Yellow Empire! Cowards! Weak! The richest empire the world has ever known, and look at us! Petty cowards! Fools! Starving children crawling in filth in our streets! We should have been swept away long ago. The Immish will come with twenty thousand men and a mage, and we’ll fall in days. Or if not the Immish, someone else. Chathe, Eralad, Allene … They see what we are, even if we don’t.’
‘Or barbarians from Ae-Beyond-the-Waters, with well-hung stallions gripped between over-muscular thighs, set on rape and pillage and fun for all?’
‘God’s knives, Darath!’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll be serious … The Empire has survived like this for centuries, Orhan. Unconquered. Unconquerable. The Godkings, the World Conqueror, the Salavene Wars … none of them have ever touched us. The Seven Years War ended in stalemate and no one even looked at us the whole time. So why in Great Tanis’s name now? Twenty years, the Long Peace has lasted.’
That’s exactly why, Darath, Orhan thought wearily. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? There’s been peace for too long. We’re so smug and certain. So convinced nothing will ever change. They won’t even need twenty thousand. Certainly not a mage. All this is illusion. One touch and we’ll crumble to dust. Orhan sighed and chewed on roast meat. A nasty gristle feeling between his teeth. But Tam’s right, too, he thought. The Immish are just a pretence. An easy way to say what I can’t explain. I’m afraid, Darath. I don’t know why, or of what, but I’m afraid. Shadows. Sorrow. Death. Something’s coming. I don’t know … But I’m afraid. We’re too weak, the way we are, sitting on our piles of gold pretending nothing exists beyond our walls. We need to be ready. And yes, that does mean blood. We’re too far gone for anything else.
‘It was them who killed the dragon, of course,’ said Darath.
Orhan started, lost in his own thoughts, visions of flames. ‘What? Who? Oh. Yes. Yes, I imagine so. Unless there are two lots of armed men out wandering around the eastern desert. Of all the wretched luck …’
‘They probably thought so at the time, too.’ Darath prodded at him with a meat skewer. ‘Three thalers. I told you I’d find out when and how. Enough blades to kill a dragon, Orhan? A bit much for one man, even an immortal one, I’d have said.’ His face changed. ‘Lord of Living and Dying, you really are going to do it, aren’t you? You really are trying to change the world …’
‘Not the world. Sorlost.’
‘Sorlost is the world. And what in Great Tanis’s name does Tam Rhyl think this is about? He’s not looking to change the world, surely?’
Tam? Change the world? ‘He just wants power. And March Verneth humiliated. But I couldn’t do it alone.’
‘You could have come to me,’ Darath said.
‘Could I?’
‘Ha. No. Probably not. ‘
They turned into Felling Street, still strolling slowly, gazing idly in the shop windows at expensive sheets of silk paper, old books, pretty silverware with a patina of refined age.
‘But now that I know … If we’re doing it, we’re doing it properly. If I’m in, I’m in. So … how many men? And where did you find them? Even I’ve not bought that kind of service before. Wouldn’t know where you even begin, or what a likely price would be. I’d imagine it’s rather more complicated than buying a new coat, somehow.’
Orhan snorted. ‘Even you …! So daring and wicked and corrupt your very name is a byword for idleness. It is strangely like buying a new coat, to be quite honest, if that doesn’t disappoint you. Get a recommended name, describe what you want and by when, negotiate over details and price, sit back and wait and hope the man cuts your cloth straight and knows where to stick his pins. Forty men. The Free Company of the Sword, they’re called. Absurd name. They were recommended by one of my acquaintances in Immish, ironically enough. The High Council has used them a couple of times. They were key to the Immish recovery of Telea during the Winter War. Specialize in … interesting work like this.’
‘And you trust them?’
‘Of course I don’t trust them. I don’t expect to trust them. That’s what they do. Betray people for money. They’re inherently untrustworthy, in fact. Except that I’m paying them, and they don’t get paid if they betray me. That’s how they operate.’
‘Like buying a whore, then. They’ll get a bad reputation if they don’t go through with it, or pick your pocket or whatnot.’
‘If you really must put it that way, probably, yes, I imagine it is.’
Darath grinned at him again. ‘Now I’ve put you out, haven’t I? So sweetly fastidious as always. Even plotting murder you have to be purer than I am … They’re arriving soon, then, I take it?’
‘I had word yesterday. They’re coming in in small groups. Two or three days, it will take.’
‘Hmmm … This doubling of the guard. Dangerous. Very bad timing. Why in the God’s name did Tam suggest it? And why in the God’s name did you agree?’
‘Because I don’t particularly want to die of deeping fever, probably.’ Orhan took a last bite of meat and spoke as he chewed. ‘And it’s actually extremely fortuitous, as far as I can see. Excellent timing. The guards will be so preoccupied looking out for Chathean accents, they won’t look too closely at anything else.’
‘I suppose so … You’ve got a lump of gristle on your chin, by the way.’
Orhan rubbed at his face in irritation. The spices were beginning to sting his lips. ‘We could have just had this conversation in my study. Without the need for all this flim-flamming about.’
‘Your study … Now that’s somewhere I haven’t been for a while. What would people say? Quite an eventful day you’d be having. And I don’t trust even your men not to be peeping at the keyhole. Especially your men, if they really do only charge six dhol.’
They paused in the street, standing with the charred skewers in their hands, sticky with grease. Before them the small green square flanking the House of the East. A magnolia tree bloomed in its centre, its petals were beginning to fall and lay like skin on the marble ground. The air was very still, as though the city had stopped breathing. A bell tolled over in the west. Dusk. A ferfew called loudly; he heard a woman laugh. A dog barked and the bird flew up with a frantic beating of wings. Orhan thought: a little way over to the west, a child is dying. Always a perilous time, the border between day and night. He looked at his ex-lover, who was more worn now, more haggard, more alive.
‘Why don’t you come in, Darath?’ he said.
Darath looked back at him. The tension that was between them flickered like the tongue of a snake. ‘Damned erotic thing, plotting the overthrow of one’s Emperor. Or did the pretty serving boy earlier stir you up? I saw you eyeing him. Lovely lips, he had.’
They turned together in through the gates of the House of the East, which opened smoothly at Orhan’s approach. Amlis and Sterne and Darath’s escort followed behind them, knives drawn.
Chapter Seven
They line up in long rows, stretching away into the horizon. Rank upon rank of them. Gleaming silver armour, silver-gilt bronze over fine white cloth. The blood shows through the white and marks them as His soldiers, who will fight until they’ve lost every drop of blood in their bodies and beyond.
They carry the long spear, the sarriss, its jagged point a thing to rip flesh going in and coming out. A short wide-bladed sword that will stab and hack and cleave and tear. A broad cruel knife. No shields. His armies do not need shields. Shields are to stop a man dying. It does not matter how many of them die. Only that they kill as they do so. A shield is a coward thing.
Their helmets cover the eyes but leave the mouth bare, to bite and spit and scream. Ten times a thousand pairs of eyes stare through white-tempered bronze. They wear red horse-hair plumes that nod in the wind. He likes His soldiers plumed like birds in His colours. Seen from above, standing on the walls of a city looking down at them, they must look like a great field of flowers. Like the rose forests of Chathe must have looked, before they burned them.
They stand in perfect silence, still as standing stones, still as teeth in a dead mouth. Perfect order. Perfect discipline. He likes that. Demands that. His officers know the need for it, have passed the lesson on to their men. And they do not often need speech, anyway, when they march. They sing the paean and they sing the death song and they shout their allegiance to the skies. Anything else is unnecessary. What is there in the world to think of but Him?
Within their ranks are men and women and children and old men and cripples and the maimed and the half-dead. He does not care who they are. Whether they are strong or weak. Only that they will fight. If they have no other use, they will deflect an arrow or a sword. If they have no other use, they will die.
They are the army of Amrath, the World Conqueror, the King of Dust, the King of Shadows, the Dragon Kin, the Dragonlord, the Demon Born. For all eternity, they will fight for Him.
A command sounds, a great horn of silver. Music of paradise! The officers call out commands in clear voices. The ranks move forward, cavalry and infantry marching together, baggage wagons drawn by white oxen, camp followers with their meagre lives packed on their backs. Dark red pennants flutter above them, bright in the wind. The war drums pound out a beat like that of the human heart. The terrible, awful sound of living, that one first learns to love and tremble at when floating in the womb. The sound they march to, slow and steady. They are in no hurry. They walk slowly to the pounding of a human heart.
In the first day they travel perhaps twenty miles. They stop and make camp with the efficiency of those who have done this a hundred times. Tents are raised. Fires built up. Food prepared. The camp is filled with the usual bustle of armies. Women tend children or tout for business. Gamblers and loan sharks and pawnbrokers ply their trades. Soldiers dice or drink or sit quietly talking. A few even read. But no matter how long they have fought for Him, how far they have marched with Him, they turn, now and again, every one of them, to the great red tent in the centre of their encampment, where He sits. They say a baby can tell its mother by smell and texture, before its eyes are fully working, before it can see more than dark and light. So they know Him. So they feel Him. They whisper His name, sometimes, a prayer before any action taken. No other god they have but Him. They are hushed and reverent, knowing He is there.
They march again the next morning. Days and days they march. It is neither too hot nor too cold for marching. Though they would march through drought and snow and raging storm for Him. A light wind blows from the west, smelling of cut grass. They hold their heads high and march into it, the sun warm on the backs of their heads. He rides at the very front, with His guard in red and silver, mounted on His great white horse. His armour is too bright to look at. His cloak flutters around Him red as blood. The column stretches behind Him for hours, ten times a thousand faces set. A second column, a second army of camp followers, behind them. A city, marching.
On the sixth day, they come to the borders of His Empire. Excitement burns through them. The enemy is awaiting them, gathered already, horses and footmen and archers and even a few great weapons of war. Impossible to keep the enemy ignorant that they are coming. The trample of their feet on the dry ground alone must signal their approach like the roar of water signals the coming of a flood. They make camp that night in sweet meadows where the grass is tall and golden, scattered with pink flowers that smell drowsily sweet. The stars shine down on them brilliant as daylight. The Maiden. The Tree. The single red star of the Dragon’s Mouth. They sharpen their weapons and polish their armour and sing the paean. When the dawn comes they are roused and arranged in their lines. Birdsong all around them. Dew on the grass. His tent glows red in the morning. A second sun. The drums start up, beating out the rhythm of their blood pumping. The horses nicker and stamp. Leather creaking and shifting. The snap of their banners in the wind. All these sounds are graven on their hearts. They line up in battle order. Men. Women. Children. The old. The sick. The maimed. The half-dead. Red plumes bobbing on their helmets. Spears at their shoulder. Swords at their hip.
They are the army of Amrath, the World Conqueror, the King of Dust, the King of Shadows, the Dragon Kin, the Dragonlord, the Demon Born. For all eternity, they will fight for Him.
They wait.
Three days, they wait. The enemy is a coward who does not dare to engage them. A west wind blows, smelling of cut grass. A rich country, this, warm earth and tall trees and a fair sky. Good growing land. He wants it. Wants the orchards and the vineyards and the white-gold ripples of the wheat. Some to feed His armies, His cities, the march of His will across the world. The rest to burn and trample and sow with salt.
On the fourth day, they burn three villages, strip every leaf from the fruit trees and hang the inhabitants’ bodies from the bare branches. On the fifth day, they dump the fly-blown bodies into the sacred River Alph, whose waters run clear as the evening sky. The water churns and boils and distant voices beneath the surface cry out in pain. Poison flows downriver, towards the rich towns and cities of the plains. Samarnath, city of towers. Tereen, city of the wise. The wheat fields of Tarn Brathal. Bloated bodies bringing disease.
On the eighth day, the enemy is forced to confront them. And so they march out in silence, heads held high, filled with pride. The drums beat slow and steady. Loud. The tips of their spears glitter in the sun. A light breeze blows the plumes of their helms, sets the horse hair nodding.
A blare of trumpets, bright and sparkling. He rides up and down the battle front, inspecting them, checking their lines, raising love and fearlessness in their hearts. They shift and tighten their grip on their weapons, hunger rising. They look over into the south and see the enemy waiting. They sing the paean. The enemy beat their sword blades on the bosses of their shields.
It is beginning to get hot. Sweat drips down their faces, runs inside their tunics and their bronze armour. Sticky on their foreheads beneath their helms. The two lines shift and stare at one another. They sing the paean again. The drums beat louder. A heartbeat. The first and last sound of a human life.
A trumpet sounds. They lower their sarriss and begin to move forward. A slow careful walk. The gap between the armies closes. Arrows shower down on them, clattering on their armour with a sound like rain. The enemy begins to march, coming towards them, a wall of spears. They put their weight behind their sarriss and grit their teeth.
The gap closes. The two lines meet.
The dust rises. The enemy line is broken. The enemy is surrounded and shattered and killed and destroyed. They are the army of Amrath. They will conquer the world. They were born for this. As indeed all men are.
Death! Death! Death!
Chapter Eight
The candle was still burning at the Low Altar that night, though it had melted down to a pool of golden wax. The Great Chamber still blazed and shone with light. A few worshippers still knelt in prayer, whispering praise and desperation, clinging on to the promise of hope or of a kind death.
In her bedroom high above, the High Priestess of Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying leaned out of her window, looking down at the gardens, her girl’s face tired and drawn. Another priestess, also young, also tired-faced, sat cross-legged on her floor. They were drinking smoky-scented tea and eating small cakes flavoured with cimma fruit: the High Priestess always craved sweet things after her long days of fasting. The room smelled of fresh mint and lavender oil.
‘I really should go to bed,’ the other priestess said. She munched on a cake and gave no sign of moving.
‘Yes …’ The High Priestess gave no sign of moving either. ‘It went well, this evening, I think. The child cried a bit, at the end, but I think it went well enough.’
‘It went well. It always goes well. You should go to bed, Thalia. You must be exhausted.’
The High Priestess, Thalia, came away from the window and sat down beside her friend. She was indeed exhausted, so tired her legs ached. Three days’ fasting, a night and a day kneeling on the stone floor before the High Altar in the blazing light of the Great Chamber, and then the Small Chamber and the child and the knife. Her left arm was heavily bandaged: she had cut herself deeply, this evening, her hand had shaken a little on the handle of the blade as she raised it to her own skin. But she could never sleep, after. She felt wide awake, filled with a dizzy feeling that was part joy, part horror, part excitement, part shame. It took a long time to recover from it, to be able to think about sleeping and being alone.
‘Yes.’ She frowned at the other girl. ‘You really think it went well? The child was … was so little.’
‘Of course it did. You worry too much. You looked so beautiful, kneeling before the altar. Like you always do.’ The other priestess, Helase, looked at her companion in envious admiration. ‘It’s no wonder there are so many poems about you.’
‘They’re not really about me,’ said Thalia. ‘I keep telling you that. I don’t suppose some of the poets who say all those things have ever even seen me.’
Helase picked up a book from a pile on the table and flipped through it.
‘Beautiful as the dawn,
A willow tree beside clear water,
A flower in desert flood.
Her face blinds me,
Light too bright to bear.
I will dedicate myself tomorrow,
That I might see her close,
Hear her breathing, feel her skin,
My blood mingling with her bleeding,
Dying under her hand.
No one’s ever likely to write anything like that about me.’
Thalia laughed. ‘It’s hardly The Song of the Red Year, is it? And I haven’t actually seen the poets queuing up to offer themselves. Even the Red Year: do you think Maran Gyste was really so madly in love with Manora he’d have cut off his manhood if she’d asked him to?’
Helase yawned. ‘Some very great people came to the Temple today. Lord Emmereth and his wife. She was horribly sad, she must have had the scab worse than anyone I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t dare show even the tips of my fingernails, if I looked like that. I think I’d rather be dead. But she didn’t seem to care. Her dress was gorgeous, all yellow silk and embroidery like peacock tails. Her skin was whiter than doves’ feathers. They were celebrating the fact she was pregnant. The candle lit so brightly. It was lovely.’
‘That’s nice,’ Thalia said.
Helase said earnestly: ‘Because of you, Thalia. Because you keep life and death balanced. Those who need death dying, those who need life being born.’
‘You really think that?’ Thalia frowned. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
Helase yawned again. ‘Ah, I am tired. I will go to bed, now.’ She got up. ‘Good night, Thalia. It went well. Be pleased.’
‘Good night, Helase.’
The door swung shut. Thalia went back to the window and gazed out again. A flock of ferfews darted past, wings shimmering in the light of her lamp. They called as they flew, sweet and low. Ghost birds, she’d heard one of the Temple servants call them. Dead souls. Superstitious nonsense, for which the woman should have been whipped. The dead had no souls. Still, the thought made her shiver.
She went over to her bed and sat down on it. Her hair was damp from bathing, twisted into a long thick plait bound with silver thread. Cool sheets, faintly scented with spice.
We all drew our lots, she thought. Helase’s yellow, mine red. What would we rather, that we had drawn the black or the white? Fifteen years dead, both of us. And drowning is a hard way to die, they say. Maran Gyste drowned, she thought then. He grew old and fat and married and never cut off his manhood, and in the end he drowned swimming in a lake.
The day after a sacrifice was always a busy one in the Temple. After the sacrifice of a child, doubly so. People flocked to the Temple, offering small gifts of silver to buy candles, seeking blessing on a child born, a marriage contracted, an agreement made. A child was not sacrificed often, and was especially pleasing to the Lord.
Thalia felt tired and drawn still, her sleep heavy, broken with dreams. The extra day’s fasting, she told herself. Drained her. The wound of her left arm ached. It never fully healed, a delicate pattern of scar tissue, silver, black, red and white. She thought momentarily of Helase’s description of Lady Emmereth, scarred and grotesque. Her own scars a mark of her status. Words written on her skin.
She ate breakfast alone in the small room off the dining hall where the other priestesses sat. They were mostly silent, heads bowed, but smiles and nods and short exchanges passed between them. She ate a bowl of wheat porridge, sweet with milk and honey, studded with slivers of almond. It steadied her a little, gave her a little strength. The act of eating made what had gone before seem less real.
After breakfast, she was bathed and robed for her duties in the Temple. Her gown was grey, the colour of thin high rain clouds. She liked this robe and this ceremony, a day of joy after the shedding of blood. Walked with slow steps to the Great Chamber, Samnel walking before her, old fat Ninia and another couple of priestesses behind. Not Helase, today.
It was still early enough that morning light shone through the high east windows of the Great Chamber. The great room resounding with light, so brilliant it sounded in the heart. Thalia stood before the High Altar and her body shone in the light. Samnel chanted in a dry voice, the other priestesses echoing her. Old words, recited in a long rhythmic drone of old cadences. Like birdsong. Like rainfall. Thalia knelt before the High Altar, gazing up at the single red light. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. We live. We die. For these things, we are grateful.
Afterwards, she went back to her bedroom and sat by the window again, looking out at the gardens now bright with the midday light. The day was cool, a fresh breeze and a few clouds scudding in the golden-blue sky. The strange beautiful golden light of the desert that makes the air clear so that detail is picked out like the brush stroke of a painting, the soft wide shape of things blurred with wind-blown sand. A lovely day. Clean. She felt clean, bright as the sunshine, bright as the gardens. If she listened carefully, she could hear the bustle of the city, forever just out of reach beyond the high walls of the Temple. Laughter. Noise. The shouts of children, the clatter of a beggar’s bowl, the stamp of sandalled feet. The great towers and domes of the palace loomed above her, gold and silver, the only other building she had ever seen. The pethe birds called and whistled, higher pitched than the ferfews, less melancholy. The Small Chamber seemed very far away now. It is necessary, she thought. So that the living remain living, so that the dead may die. A good life and a good dying. And the things beyond either kept back. The world is a good place. Even with pain in it. Even with death.