Blade of Dream, page 23
No book was marked. There was nothing on the spines to identify one from the next. In all, there were thousands, and bare space on the shelves enough for a thousand more. It was like looking at the history of a bookbinder’s trade, from the oldest, earliest form to the newest. A dozen lay on the broad table in piles, drawn from all the different ages.
She opened one. The pages within were covered in a beautiful, flowing script, the written lines even and regular. Disciplined. Flipping through the pages, she found sketches and diagrams. The architectural plans of a tower. A complex design in red and green ink and marked with religious symbols. The sketched study of a woman’s torso and hips without head, arms, or legs. She chose a page at random to read.
The river itself is a power. That original channel—that splitting of its flow—was a happy accident indeed. Would all that came after have done if we hadn’t needed fresh water? I think about how delicate it was at the start, and it’s like looking down a fucking cliff. Never let that happen again. Points to follow: More canals on the Inlisc bank of the river—ritual pollution of the flow—more bridges?—controlled dredging to shape erosion? Consult with Cabbian.
She didn’t know what any of it meant, but the diagram beside it was the Khahon. The subject of the author’s concern, Kithamar. She closed the book and opened another. The same beautiful, disciplined script.
Neither peace nor war but a mixture of both. Enough violence, hunger, misery, degradation to make people long for safety, but not so much that they seek it for themselves. Suffering is the medicine of order, and too little is as bad as too much.
I have been too lenient.
She frowned, closed this new volume. The spine was cloth-covered board with threads that had started to decompose. She couldn’t guess how old it was, but much older than the first that she’d opened. She cast around the table. One of the oldest-looking, its pages folded and cut, its binding twine threaded through awl-punched holes, sat just beyond her reach. She walked around the table, her shadow gliding over the dark walls like it was leading the way and she was only following. The parchment creaked when she opened it. The edges of the page were yellowed until it was almost hard to make out the last letters on each line.
Something about it made her flesh crawl, and it took her a moment to know why. She put the ancient book beside the more recent ones, comparing the pages.
The handwriting was the same. They had to have been done centuries apart, but the same hand had made the marks. Beautiful letters. Regular lines. The same hand that had written the other pages, the other books. She pulled back like she’d touched a snake she hadn’t known was there. Dread drew fingers up her neck.
When she turned back toward the iron door, she saw lines and curves worked into the stone and filled with gold. They formed Old Hansch runes. She hadn’t studied the language since she was young, but some of the old knowledge was in her. Along one wall, they spelled out something like The End of All Ending. Or, maybe The Death of Death. Along the opposite side, God Above Gods. And in the stone above the door, The Thread of Kithamar Will Not Sever. She didn’t know why the old words in a dead language felt like a whispered threat, but they did.
A living voice came from behind her, distant but familiar. Halev Karsen, talking with a low intensity that bordered on anger. What are the options? She didn’t know Samal Kint’s voice as well, but she was almost certain he was the man who answered. South of the Stonemarket canal, anything, but Green Hill’s its own beast. There’s no law there until you’re ready to spill some very noble blood. The pause seemed to last forever. Not yet, Karsen said. His voice was closer. They were coming.
Elaine blew out the lamp, and the room plunged into blackness more profound than it had been before her eyes had adapted to the light. She went toward where she hoped the iron door was, rolling her feet from heel to toe so gently that they made no sound. The edge of the great door was barely more than a line of charcoal in the black, but it was enough to navigate by. She reached out her hands, feeling into the darkness. Her fingertips touched iron, and she rushed out into the corridor.
She tried to pull the door closed behind her, but there was no handle to use, and she was afraid that it might make some creak, some scraping that would call attention to her. The sense of trespass, of having been where she wasn’t meant to be and seeing things she wasn’t meant to see, was instinctual and overwhelming. She turned and walked away, fast and quiet. The almost organic maze of hallways and chambers, courtyards and storerooms that had enchanted her before now felt like a threat. She had the sense of being within an immense, malicious living creature. The palace was aware of her, and she wanted nothing more than to be in her rooms with the door barred and every candle she could find pushing away the gloom.
Ausai wasn’t what I thought he was. That was what her father had said. I think he may have been mad.
I hope he was.
The words had been odd at the time. Ominous. She walked fast, her head down like she was trying not to meet the palace’s gaze. Like she could will herself not to be noticed by it. She wanted to run.
Perhaps it was some sort of strange pastime of her great-uncle’s. The books looked old. Maybe they were old, but that didn’t mean the script was the same age as the books. Maybe Ausai had found them all blank and spent his years filling them in. Journals and notebooks that seemed to reach back through the ages, but were all written in the course of one man’s few decades of life. Was that possible? Could those thousands of volumes be the work of a single lifetime? And if they were, how had he found time to do anything else?
Or might there be a tradition? Some kind of princely script where every generation practiced the same letters and spacing until it was perfect. Identical with all the men and women who had come before. But if that was true, no one had told her. Or her father.
If there was a reasonable explanation, her father would have it by now. And if there wasn’t, the only things left were eerie and unsettling.
She reached her private rooms with the relief of a fish slipping off the hook and back into the pool. A little fire was already burning in the grate, and the room smelled of smoke and burning sap. Her Inlisc bed servant came in from the side room with an expression that was polite and subservient and practiced. “Can I help, miss?”
“No,” Elaine said. Then, “Yes. I’ll eat dinner in here. You could fetch that for me.”
“Of course. What should I tell the kitchens you’d like?”
“Their best judgment will be fine,” she said.
“Yes, miss,” the Inlisc girl said, then held out a scrap of paper. “This came. One of the guardsmen said it was meant for you.”
“What is it?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t have letters, miss. It’s for you.”
Elaine took it between two pinching fingers. She waited until the girl left to unfold the note. I miss you. I barely know you, and you showed me so much about myself.
Elaine sat on a little silk-upholstered stool beside the fire and read the message in full, then read it again. I will come to you this time, if I can find my way.
She tried to feel joy or elation or even pleasure, but all she found were deepening layers of dread that feathered into one another seemingly without end.
“I’m happy for the distraction. And I was sincere before when I promised to be here if you needed me. Is something troubling you, cousin?”
Elaine hesitated. Andomaka had been Prince Ausai’s priest in the Daris Brotherhood. She’d known him better than Elaine or even her father had. Would she know about the notebooks? Would she know what the phrases worked in stone meant? Everyone who wrote in those books is dead. That was what Halev Karsen had said. She wished it carried more weight than his Not yet. He was planning something. Or frightened of something.
“You’ve been crying?” Andomaka asked gently.
“Things have been hard since we came to the palace. Father’s been busy and… he’s distracted. I think it’s all wearing on him.”
Andomaka settled more deeply into her chair. Her smile was an invitation.
“I have to break something off,” she said, and as she heard it, she knew it was true. “There’s a man who I… I had a connection with. And I can’t anymore.”
“A connection.”
“He was…” He was the only man who ever saw me and not her, not the daughter of the prince. Not the version of me that gets everything and leaves nothing past that. “He was exceptional. For me, he was exceptional.”
“Does he have a name?”
“I’m the daughter of the prince. He’s a city guard,” Elaine said, and scoffed, though what she felt wasn’t contempt. “He’s a bluecloak. How could knowing me end well for him? Or for me? We could never be together, and pretending anything else is a cruelty, isn’t it? For him or me or both of us? I should never have let him know. I shouldn’t have stopped. I wasn’t thinking.”
The words spilled out of her, the fears and grief she hadn’t known she had in her. If she’d been able to sleep, if Theddan had been there to talk with. Or Garreth. Or her father. She was overfull and only half aware of all she was saying, flooded by the raw feeling in her gut and her throat and her vacant heart. And by pouring out one secret, she wasn’t pouring out the other. Andomaka listened, and made soft, encouraging noises now and then, but Elaine was elsewhere.
In her mind, she saw Garreth in the cloak of the city guard, standing amazed on the bridge between Newmarket and Oldgate. She saw him the night they’d met, meeting her eyes as she hid behind the low wall. Come to me. I’ll see you safe. She was weeping in earnest now.
“He asked me to come, and I went to him,” Elaine said. And he’d meant it, but he couldn’t. There wasn’t any safety to be had. Not for them. Had anyone ever made a simpler, more tragic promise than that?
There was something wrong in the palace. Something wrong at the heart of Kithamar. It was tangled up with Ausai’s notebooks and the runes and whatever else her father had seen that frightened him. She didn’t know what it was. Garreth couldn’t keep her safe any better than she knew how to protect him. Or what she would protect him from.
“To his barracks?”
“No. His family house in Riverport,” she said. The hollow feeling in her chest deepened. “I don’t know what to do.”
The pale woman was quiet for what seemed like a lifetime. “Follow your heart. It’s a better guide than I am.” Andomaka took her hand, squeezed it gently, and then retreated, leaving Elaine to the room and the fire and the cup of tea that had gone tepid while she wept. She closed her eyes, and they felt gritty.
The Thread of Kithamar Will Not Sever, the wall had said in its golden runes. The city would endure, it seemed to promise, and leave everything that was gentler, kinder, more hopeful, or joyous broken in its wake.
Including Garreth and his quiet birds.
Including her.
There’s a plague in Stonemarket,” Abbit said.
Captain Senit’s gaze swam for a moment as he found the taproom keeper, but when he spoke, his voice was steady. “That so?”
“Kint sent his boys down to shut off the streets. Quarantined. Order from the prince, is what I heard.”
“Well, good on him,” Senit said.
The taproom had closed its wide shutters for the winter. Where once the walls themselves had seemed to open to the street, now it was just old wood with bits of wool stuffed in the cracks to keep the wind outside. Mostly outside. On a night with a good, ripping squall, they’d all still feel it. Today wasn’t bad, though. Not that aspect of it, anyway.
It was seven days since Longest Night, two more before Tenthday. How much that mattered measured how much wealth and time people had to piss away. Seepwater, Longhill, the hospital. They nodded to Longest Night as it passed and got their asses back to work the next morning. Riverport had its great celebration on the night itself, and it would have an echo on Tenth Night. All the guilds and merchant houses making a display of their generosity and wealth by serving the cheapest meat and plainest beer they could pass off as good. Green Hill and the palace were in the yearly orgy of celebrating themselves that would end in a few days with men and women reclining on silk divans, exhausted by the effort of putting together wine enough for their feasts.
Through it all, the guard would do what the guard always did: keep the good people of Kithamar from robbing and raping and murdering each other more than they already did by raining hell on the ones who’d already done it. There were no days off from that.
Abbit trundled through the place with a rag and a broom, keeping the tables and floors as clean as they were ever going to get. The smells of overspiced meat and heated wine made it seem warmer than it was. The fire in the grate turned good honest wood into ash and embers, eating log after log after log. Senit watched the flames play. At the far bench, Linton Coar, Marsen Wellis, and Marsen’s salad-green nephew were all celebrating themselves halfway to drunk. Either the new boy didn’t understand the jokes they were making at his expense or had the good sense not to mind them. Abbit’s dog was asleep by the fire, his wide, greying flanks and muzzle twitching as he ran down some dream rabbit. Senit drank his sixth, maybe seventh, beer of the night. He didn’t feel drunk.
Abbit lumbered back across the room with a tin plate in his hand, sat down on the bench across from Senit, and slid a dinner’s worth of sausage and coarse mustard toward him.
“Didn’t ask for that,” Divol said.
“Didn’t charge you for it,” Abbit said.
“I’m not charity.”
“Didn’t say you were. It makes the beer taste less like piss.”
Senit scowled. “This is your beer that you’re talking shit about.”
“Was once, but you’re the one drinking it.”
“I said I don’t want your fucking food,” Senit said.
“I heard you.”
Senit turned his attention back to the fire, but the keep didn’t go away. He just sat quietly, alone with his thoughts, until Senit couldn’t stand it any longer.
“I’m fine, Abbit. Stop acting like my mother.”
“Do I look like I’m offering you a tit?”
“Are you calling me a baby?”
Abbit shrugged. The rage that sat in Senit’s belly all the time now flared up brighter than the fire in the grate. His scowl deepened until his cheeks ached. He planted his elbows on the table and leaned forward, chin jutting.
“You,” he said, “are a crippled old fuck who got lucky the day they hacked your toes off. You never belonged in the blue to start with, and I know it because I was there. So take your judgment and your bullshit sympathy and your pus-stinking sausage and your piss beer and shove them all up your cock.”
Abbit stretched his neck to the left and then the right like a showfighter readying for the pit. “You are a grown man. Captain of the largest barracks in the city. You’re the lead for the guard, the example that all the others follow. You are the law in Kithamar. You decide who goes to the magistrate and who gets put in the river, who gets a fine or a warning or ignored from the start. And all the bluecloaks on this side of the river look to you so they’ll know what they should be.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you back, you sloppy-mouthed shit,” Abbit said cheerfully. “And eat the goddam sausage. You haven’t shoved anything but beer down your guts since you came in.”
Senit wavered. The evening was about to go one of two ways, and he wasn’t sure quite which he wanted.
“Do you remember Captain Sault?” Abbit asked. “He was the old one that Mad Perrin kept on when she took over the Stonemarket barracks?”
“I remember him. He had pock marks.”
“When I lost my foot, I was down past the south wall in the hospital with the herb man trying to pull the dead blood out before I rotted. Captain Sault came and saw me. I was down at the time, you know. Looking at the end of my career in the guard, and no idea what was coming after, or if anything was. And him, he could barely walk himself, old as he was. I still don’t know if he’d hobbled all the way down from the barracks or had someone carry him, but he showed up. He sat at my bedside, with this look on his face. You know what he said to me?”
“You’re going to tell me.”
“I am. He said Well, shit. That’s it. That’s all he said. Came halfway across the city, stood by while I watched the shape of my life killed out from under me, said Well, shit, and then he went back home. No idea what he meant by it, except…”
Senit shook his head. Then, against his will, he chuckled. Abbit’s smile seemed almost shy. After a moment, Senit picked up the sausage with his fingers and swept it through the mustard. The meat had lost the warmth of the kitchen grill, but the pepper and salt made it seem hotter than it was.
“She broke me, Abbit. It was going to be my legacy. Their children’s children were going to tell stories about how Captain Senit broke Aunt Thorn. About the underground criminal city that I turned into a grave of the worst thugs in Kithamar.”
“You’ve thought about that story a lot.”
“I did. That was my fault. I let myself want something. I’ve lost before. I let myself hope, and then I started living in the hope like it was already here.”
“I hear you.”
“Everyone loses, all the time. It’s why succeeding’s such a big fucking deal. I could stand the loss if I hadn’t dreamed my way so far into where it had already happened. They laugh at me, you know. My people. Pavvis’s. Probably Samal fucking Kint is up there in his clouds pissing down at me. Why shouldn’t they?”
“Wanting is dangerous,” Abbit said. “But what would life be without it, yeah? Who doesn’t want?”
“She made a fool of me.”
“And who’s not a fool? Who gets from the birthing chair to the grave with dignity? What prize do the gods hand out to people who never let themselves care about anything enough to be disappointed by the loss? Look around you, Captain. Everyone who laughs at you or cringes away? They’re all thinking of some time when it was them. Some race they ran and came in last, someone they wooed who didn’t want them, some moment of glory they reached for and wound up with an empty hand for the trouble. We’re all fools. Everyone. That’s why we hate fools so much. They’re the echoes of when we were vulnerable in front of the world ourselves, and that’s hard for us to forgive.”
