The Trials of Empire, page 20
But the Sun Gate was closed and locked.
“Shit,” Vonvalt muttered. We rode around the Poor King’s Bridge for a while. Vonvalt examined the passing commonfolk, but he would not tell me what he was doing or thinking, nor did I ask. After perhaps half of an hour, he evidently found what he was looking for; a rangy merchant of late middle age, who was agitating around several large cartfuls of grain at the side of the high-way.
“Good morrow,” Vonvalt said pleasantly.
The man eyed Vonvalt’s palfrey jealously. “Not particularly,” he replied.
“I have been out of the city awhile; what news?” Vonvalt asked, slipping back into his Jägeland accent. “I had not expected the Sun Gate to be closed.”
“And the Creus Gate. Only two ways in and out. There has been some upheaval and no mistake,” the merchant said bitterly. He nodded to the enormous southern wall of Sova. “Lords and ladies playing their games again. Difficult to know who has the better of it these days.”
Vonvalt pretended to look shocked. “By Nema. My business demands that I enter, but I do not want to walk into a war zone.”
The merchant snorted. “Then you would do best to abandon your business, good sir.”
“And what of you?” Vonvalt asked the man. “What is your business?”
“My own,” the man replied. “It profits no one to speak openly within earshot of the walls,” he added pointedly.
Vonvalt scratched his beard roughly. I had to admit, the effect was a convincing one. One would have to know Vonvalt intimately to recognise him. “Would that there was some way of entering with subtlety,” Vonvalt said.
The merchant regarded us for a long time. “What is the nature of your business, I wonder?” he asked.
Vonvalt did not answer. Instead, he nodded at the man’s carts. “You are a grain merchant.”
“I am supposed to be,” the man replied. For all his caginess, his exasperation had been looking for an outlet for some time. “Tried to get through the Creus Gate, which I told you was locked. Was told to come south, but the Victory Gate was jammed up with Guardsmen checking papers. I thought I’d try my luck with the Sun Gate – which is fucking closed.” He took a deep breath, then affected a bright smile. “And then some soldiers confiscated my mules and all the animals they could lay their hands on. And so now I am stuck here waiting for – Prince of Hell, old age to take me at this rate.”
“Our meeting is a fortuitous one,” Vonvalt said quietly. “I need entry into Sova. You need animals to pull your carts.”
The merchant squinted at us. “You propose to lend me your horses?”
“I propose to give you these horses; if I can rely on your discretion.” Vonvalt’s Jägeland accent had slipped, and now he spoke again in a cut glass High Saxan which betrayed his status as some high lord travelling incognito.
The merchant nodded, taken aback. “Oh, I-I can certainly guarantee you that,” he gabbled, his urgency and desire for payment quickly overriding his sense of self-preservation. Then he lowered his voice. “What I cannot guarantee you is that they will not check the goods.”
“That is a risk we will shoulder,” Vonvalt said to my great unhappiness. “Concealing us amongst those sacks will not be difficult. Where do you plan to take the grain?”
“There are silos which feed the stores in the southern closure.”
“Are they guarded?”
“Not normally, but who knows these days?”
Vonvalt mulled this over. “All right. We shall make the attempt just before dusk. Fetch whatever harnesses and make whatever preparations you need to in the meantime.”
We spent a long, anxious, and ultimately tedious day watching the merchant’s grain carts as he hurried off to gather together all of the accoutrements he required. Sova was strangely quiet, and Vonvalt considered it likely, given the silence and feel of the city, that there was a curfew in place. Personally, I felt as though Vonvalt was overestimating the risks to us in simply attempting the gate posing as commonfolk. Clad in unassuming clothes, his hair longer than it had been for years, and his beard ragged and unkempt, he could have passed for just about anybody in Sova.
Nonetheless, the wheels had been put in motion, figuratively and literally, for soon we were concealed under sacks – which had been half stuffed so as not to crush us – and bumping along the road. It felt to me as though Vonvalt had put his trust in this random merchant man a little too readily, but he did not seem troubled by it. “Self-interest is the greatest motivator there is,” he said simply, and that was that.
The cart clattered and squealed and jolted along the road as we approached the Victory Gate. My heart thumped so loudly I was sure that the gate guards would hear it. We waited in a queue of people for the better part of an hour before it was our turn. In that time the greatest risk was dying of heatstroke; in the Sovan summer, trapped under a huge pile of grain sacks, my little hollow became intolerably hot – so much so that I began to panic slightly as the air thickened into sweat soup around me and I felt lightheaded.
“What’s this then?” I heard a man asking in a Sovan accent.
“Grain. Which I was supposed to deliver yesterday, no thanks to you lot,” the merchant snapped.
“What have you got these knackers doing pulling carts?” Same accent, a different voice.
“You took my mules!” the merchant said angrily.
“Nema, keep your wig on,” the first voice said. I wasn’t sure whether the merchant’s anger was genuine, born of nerves, or a piece of skilled acting, but it was having the quite brilliant effect of deflecting all suspicion that may have fallen on him. People who had something to hide – and who were unskilled at doing so – were nervous and evasive, not confrontational and attention-seeking.
“How much does each of these weigh?”
“Sixty pounds,” the merchant said.
I felt a disturbance at the head of the cart, and then something jolted it sharply. “Nema, you aren’t joking,” the second guard said with a strained voice as the sack was thrown back down.
“All right, get on with it,” the first voice said, and we were on the move again.
I whispered a prayer of thanks to Nema, when I heard the second guard shout, “Hold on!” and the cart clattered to a stop. My heart leapt into my mouth.
“What’s the matter now?” the merchant demanded. I clasped my hands over my mouth, stifling a screech as I heard the unmistakable ring of steel as a sword was drawn. Then the cart tilted to the left as someone climbed on top of it, and I felt one of the sacks dislodge from where they had been piled around me and press into my legs. I tried to keep my breath level, but my panic was once again rising. I was going to be discovered, or suffocate on grain; the outcome was the same.
I heard a sound like a spade digging into sand.
“What you doing?! You’re going to spill it!” the merchant shouted.
“It’ll get tipped into the silo anyway,” the guard said, and I realised that he was stabbing his sword into the sacks above me.
Every muscle in my body clenched as I waited for a sword to bite into my flesh. I heard the rattle of grain as it tumbled out of severed sacks.
“First you take my mules and now this shit,” the merchant grumbled.
The cart tilted again as the guard leapt off. Now I heard the unmistakable sound of someone being slapped. “Shut the fuck up,” the guard snapped. Then one of the palfreys whickered as it was slapped on its rear. “Get the fuck out of here, you insolent old bastard.”
And with that, we were in Sova.
We and the rest of the grain were emptied out into a silo somewhere in the south-western closure of the city. The merchant was pleased to see that we were alive, even though it had earned him a black eye and potentially his death.
“Thank you for the horses,” he said. He spoke quietly, though there was no need; the silos were empty and unguarded. Indeed, much of this part of the city seemed unsettlingly quiet, and that in spite of the night-time.
“Thank you for your discretion,” Vonvalt said. “I bid you good fortune.”
“And I you,” the merchant said, and they clasped forearms. Then he left us, and once the sound of his cart clattering away into the distance receded, a silence hitherto unknown to Sova reasserted itself.
We found a quiet corner, concealed ourselves, and lay down. In spite of the season, at night-time the silo was bitterly cold, and we ended up having to hold one another for warmth. There was nothing intimate about the close contact. In other circumstances I would have lain awake all night thinking about it and what it might represent; now I was much too cold, tired and anxious of discovery to think of such things.
I did not expect to be able to fall asleep, but I must have done so at some point, for I was roused early in the morning. A gap in the tiles above offered me a glimpse of a milk-pale sky, pink washed with blue and still rife with stars. My body was cold and stiff as I pressed myself up off the hard floor. We had nothing to eat or drink, but I was much too nervous to think about either.
“We should make for the Imperial Palace,” Vonvalt said. “They will not have changed the guard yet, and those on duty will be tired and lazy.” It was the same logic he had applied getting us through the Victory Gate, and it spoke volumes of his opinion of the city’s guardian class.
We made our way out of the silo. This was an aspect of Sova I was unfamiliar with, for much of our time here had been spent in the north-eastern closure. From the south looking north, the view was dominated by the southern aspect of the Law Library, whilst to the left, the Grand Lodge was conspicuously broken and burned.
Most worryingly, we were only half a mile from the Imperial Guard barracks, a large white box of pillared marble rife with pennants and flags that stood proud of much of the intervening city. Squinting, I could see signs of damage there, too; more blackening from fire, broken arrows littering the roof slates, and the remains of makeshift barricades.
“What happened here?” Vonvalt murmured to me as he, too, drank in the view.
We faced the same problem at this time of morning as we would have done in the middle of the night: the streets were empty. Sticking to what shadows there were, we made our way quickly up the road and to its junction with another running perpendicular, when we stopped dead. There was a checkpoint there, attended by men and women in the armour of the Imperial Guard – fine black steel with golden trim and gambesons of rich purple with intricate embroidered patterning. But they also, I noted with a profound sense of dismay, had the white star of the Savaran Templars daubed crudely over their chests. Worse: just beyond was a row of crude gibbets, each home to a body. Atop each wooden armature, crows cawed and clawed incessantly, plucking at rags and flesh and eyes, something which none of the soldiers did anything to dissuade. In the road, too, were bodies, most roughly kicked into the shit ditches at the side. Some were badly burned, blackened like lumps of charcoal.
“Shit,” Vonvalt hissed, pushing me roughly into an alley. I stumbled into the shadow and kept moving, though I felt Vonvalt grasp the back of my kirtle and slow me to a walk. “Keep walking quickly and stay to the left,” he said in a quiet voice behind me.
I felt sick with fear. The temptation was to hide again, to find somewhere to conceal ourselves for another day and wait for the safety of darkness. But Vonvalt kept pushing me on, and we made our way hurriedly but carefully through a succession of dank alleyways. There was no sign of anyone else. It was as though the whole population of Sova had evaporated like water from a hot pan.
We were now moving parallel to the Petran High-Way in an easterly direction. Vonvalt’s plan, insofar as he had told me, had been to cross the easternmost branch of the River Sauber, but that was scuppered when we saw another checkpoint at the end of the Miran Bridge. There were more Imperial Guard there, too, displaying the white star of Savare, and it was becoming impossible to escape the conclusion that they had turned traitor.
Vonvalt’s composure was beginning to fracture. He pulled me down another alleyway and we crouched behind a stack of old wine barrels at the rear of a public house. We took a moment to catch our breath.
“There is no one,” he said, unable to keep the bafflement from his voice. “I had hoped we might…” he gestured to the city at large “… blend in. But there is no one.”
“Perhaps we should wait for nightfall,” I said hopefully. If we were caught, the best we could hope for was to be briskly murdered. At worst, torture and immolation awaited. Vonvalt’s strategy – if it could so be called – of simply improvising our way into the Imperial Palace had failed. It was folly to continue risking our lives so recklessly for the sake of half a day of anxious tedium.
Vonvalt, to my dismay, shook his head. “No. We must press on.”
“We are going to get killed,” I said through clenched teeth. “It is getting lighter by the second.”
Vonvalt worried at his lower lip. “If we can reach the banks of the Sauber we will be concealed from view.”
“Hardly!”
“Helena, listen to me—”
“Nema’s blood, you listen to me,” I snapped. I had had enough of this lunacy. “This is reckless. This is foolish. It is clear some… rebellion has taken place here. Charging through the city like this is going to get us both killed. And then what happens? What a stupid, ridiculous, ignominious end: to have come this far, only to be murdered out of hand by idiot soldiers.”
Vonvalt stared at me. I wasn’t sure if I had ever spoken to him in this way.
“A great many lives depend on your ultimate success. My life right now depends on you not being careless. Prince of Hell, can we just think a moment? Can we turn our minds to the issue, rather than running about like headless hens?”
Vonvalt held out his hands in a placatory gesture. “You are right, and I am sorry. Let us take our bearings.”
“Yes, let us,” I said sarcastically. “Blood of gods.”
We crouched there on the damp and dirty cobbles for a few moments in silence.
“All right. You are right. Something has happened here. The question is, is it every member of the Imperial Guard who has gone rogue, or just some of them?”
“Why does that matter?” I snapped, though it was fairly obvious why.
“If it is all of them, then the Emperor is likely to be dead,” Vonvalt said pointedly. “If that is the case, then we are in real trouble.” He thought for a moment. “If that is the case, then I do not think we can win this fight.”
“But if it is just some faction?” I prompted, not wishing Vonvalt to turn maudlin.
“Then there will be some who remain loyal to the Emperor, and they will be guarding the Imperial Palace. For as long as there are loyal soldiers, then we have a chance to turn back this…” He wrinkled his nose. “Treachery.”
“That means that some parts of the city will still be safe for us,” I said, making a scooping motion with my hand to keep him talking.
“Yes and no. I remain persona non grata. Unless the Emperor has reversed his decision, I still face the risk of being killed out of hand. That is not to say that the Emperor will not reverse his decision – indeed, I consider it perfectly likely that he will, given the brevity of his list of allies. But a zealous soldier might take a different view.”
“So you are saying that our enemies are enemies and our friends may well be enemies, too?”
“Yes. At least, for the moment.”
“I rather wish I had been left behind with Severina and the Kasar,” I said. It was my attempt at gallows humour, but I just sounded bitter and angry.
Vonvalt was about to say something when there was a shout from the far end of the alley. I instinctively looked over to see who it was, but Vonvalt grabbed me by the face and kissed me instead.
I had no idea what to do. I had not kissed anyone since Matas Aker in Galen’s Vale. I had certainly thought about kissing Vonvalt, more than was healthy, but now it was happening it was not as I had expected. His beard, for one, scratched my face, his hands smelt like soil and his breath smelt strongly of pipe smoke. But I could not deny the jolt I felt, the surge in my heart and blood, the way I ached. This was a realisation of many things, and in other circumstances might have been the beginning of something – a thing that both of us had been skirting around for many months. Instead, I found myself thinking of von Osterlen in the City of Sleep, and the great stream of blood she had expectorated over me.
In the first instance I mistook this passionate and rough kiss as Vonvalt indulging his base desires before we were captured and murdered; and in that same spirit I gave myself to it. But as I did so, he pulled away.
“Pretend you are a whore,” he whispered urgently in my ear.
“What?” I demanded angrily.
“Just kiss me and make it look like you are drunk!”
Frustrated, angry, frightened, I nonetheless went back in for another kiss. This time I felt Vonvalt’s hands pawing clumsily at my ribs – he was consciously avoiding my actual breasts, which was a good thing since it would have broken me out of the ruse – and I did my best impression of someone who was only pretending to enjoy this ordeal. That at least was not difficult.
“You two should not be out here,” the Guardsman said as he approached. He must have been a decade my senior, white-skinned and blonde-haired. Like the other traitors he had a white star painted on his breastplate, though it was crudely done and looked pathetic up close. He carried a Sovan short sword loosely in his right hand, and did not wear helmet. Had he been anything except an Imperial Guardsman, Vonvalt could have made him disarm himself with the Voice.
“Fuck off,” Vonvalt said over my left shoulder, affecting a slur, and then pulled my kirtle strap to the side and began to kiss up my neck. His beard was like the bristles of a broom against my skin.
“There is a curfew!” the Guardsman snapped. He was but a few feet from us now, and my back prickled in anticipation of his blade.
“Here, mate, you want a go?” Vonvalt said. He pulled me up with his left hand as he stood. His right, I knew, was gripped around the handle of his own short sword.
“Shit,” Vonvalt muttered. We rode around the Poor King’s Bridge for a while. Vonvalt examined the passing commonfolk, but he would not tell me what he was doing or thinking, nor did I ask. After perhaps half of an hour, he evidently found what he was looking for; a rangy merchant of late middle age, who was agitating around several large cartfuls of grain at the side of the high-way.
“Good morrow,” Vonvalt said pleasantly.
The man eyed Vonvalt’s palfrey jealously. “Not particularly,” he replied.
“I have been out of the city awhile; what news?” Vonvalt asked, slipping back into his Jägeland accent. “I had not expected the Sun Gate to be closed.”
“And the Creus Gate. Only two ways in and out. There has been some upheaval and no mistake,” the merchant said bitterly. He nodded to the enormous southern wall of Sova. “Lords and ladies playing their games again. Difficult to know who has the better of it these days.”
Vonvalt pretended to look shocked. “By Nema. My business demands that I enter, but I do not want to walk into a war zone.”
The merchant snorted. “Then you would do best to abandon your business, good sir.”
“And what of you?” Vonvalt asked the man. “What is your business?”
“My own,” the man replied. “It profits no one to speak openly within earshot of the walls,” he added pointedly.
Vonvalt scratched his beard roughly. I had to admit, the effect was a convincing one. One would have to know Vonvalt intimately to recognise him. “Would that there was some way of entering with subtlety,” Vonvalt said.
The merchant regarded us for a long time. “What is the nature of your business, I wonder?” he asked.
Vonvalt did not answer. Instead, he nodded at the man’s carts. “You are a grain merchant.”
“I am supposed to be,” the man replied. For all his caginess, his exasperation had been looking for an outlet for some time. “Tried to get through the Creus Gate, which I told you was locked. Was told to come south, but the Victory Gate was jammed up with Guardsmen checking papers. I thought I’d try my luck with the Sun Gate – which is fucking closed.” He took a deep breath, then affected a bright smile. “And then some soldiers confiscated my mules and all the animals they could lay their hands on. And so now I am stuck here waiting for – Prince of Hell, old age to take me at this rate.”
“Our meeting is a fortuitous one,” Vonvalt said quietly. “I need entry into Sova. You need animals to pull your carts.”
The merchant squinted at us. “You propose to lend me your horses?”
“I propose to give you these horses; if I can rely on your discretion.” Vonvalt’s Jägeland accent had slipped, and now he spoke again in a cut glass High Saxan which betrayed his status as some high lord travelling incognito.
The merchant nodded, taken aback. “Oh, I-I can certainly guarantee you that,” he gabbled, his urgency and desire for payment quickly overriding his sense of self-preservation. Then he lowered his voice. “What I cannot guarantee you is that they will not check the goods.”
“That is a risk we will shoulder,” Vonvalt said to my great unhappiness. “Concealing us amongst those sacks will not be difficult. Where do you plan to take the grain?”
“There are silos which feed the stores in the southern closure.”
“Are they guarded?”
“Not normally, but who knows these days?”
Vonvalt mulled this over. “All right. We shall make the attempt just before dusk. Fetch whatever harnesses and make whatever preparations you need to in the meantime.”
We spent a long, anxious, and ultimately tedious day watching the merchant’s grain carts as he hurried off to gather together all of the accoutrements he required. Sova was strangely quiet, and Vonvalt considered it likely, given the silence and feel of the city, that there was a curfew in place. Personally, I felt as though Vonvalt was overestimating the risks to us in simply attempting the gate posing as commonfolk. Clad in unassuming clothes, his hair longer than it had been for years, and his beard ragged and unkempt, he could have passed for just about anybody in Sova.
Nonetheless, the wheels had been put in motion, figuratively and literally, for soon we were concealed under sacks – which had been half stuffed so as not to crush us – and bumping along the road. It felt to me as though Vonvalt had put his trust in this random merchant man a little too readily, but he did not seem troubled by it. “Self-interest is the greatest motivator there is,” he said simply, and that was that.
The cart clattered and squealed and jolted along the road as we approached the Victory Gate. My heart thumped so loudly I was sure that the gate guards would hear it. We waited in a queue of people for the better part of an hour before it was our turn. In that time the greatest risk was dying of heatstroke; in the Sovan summer, trapped under a huge pile of grain sacks, my little hollow became intolerably hot – so much so that I began to panic slightly as the air thickened into sweat soup around me and I felt lightheaded.
“What’s this then?” I heard a man asking in a Sovan accent.
“Grain. Which I was supposed to deliver yesterday, no thanks to you lot,” the merchant snapped.
“What have you got these knackers doing pulling carts?” Same accent, a different voice.
“You took my mules!” the merchant said angrily.
“Nema, keep your wig on,” the first voice said. I wasn’t sure whether the merchant’s anger was genuine, born of nerves, or a piece of skilled acting, but it was having the quite brilliant effect of deflecting all suspicion that may have fallen on him. People who had something to hide – and who were unskilled at doing so – were nervous and evasive, not confrontational and attention-seeking.
“How much does each of these weigh?”
“Sixty pounds,” the merchant said.
I felt a disturbance at the head of the cart, and then something jolted it sharply. “Nema, you aren’t joking,” the second guard said with a strained voice as the sack was thrown back down.
“All right, get on with it,” the first voice said, and we were on the move again.
I whispered a prayer of thanks to Nema, when I heard the second guard shout, “Hold on!” and the cart clattered to a stop. My heart leapt into my mouth.
“What’s the matter now?” the merchant demanded. I clasped my hands over my mouth, stifling a screech as I heard the unmistakable ring of steel as a sword was drawn. Then the cart tilted to the left as someone climbed on top of it, and I felt one of the sacks dislodge from where they had been piled around me and press into my legs. I tried to keep my breath level, but my panic was once again rising. I was going to be discovered, or suffocate on grain; the outcome was the same.
I heard a sound like a spade digging into sand.
“What you doing?! You’re going to spill it!” the merchant shouted.
“It’ll get tipped into the silo anyway,” the guard said, and I realised that he was stabbing his sword into the sacks above me.
Every muscle in my body clenched as I waited for a sword to bite into my flesh. I heard the rattle of grain as it tumbled out of severed sacks.
“First you take my mules and now this shit,” the merchant grumbled.
The cart tilted again as the guard leapt off. Now I heard the unmistakable sound of someone being slapped. “Shut the fuck up,” the guard snapped. Then one of the palfreys whickered as it was slapped on its rear. “Get the fuck out of here, you insolent old bastard.”
And with that, we were in Sova.
We and the rest of the grain were emptied out into a silo somewhere in the south-western closure of the city. The merchant was pleased to see that we were alive, even though it had earned him a black eye and potentially his death.
“Thank you for the horses,” he said. He spoke quietly, though there was no need; the silos were empty and unguarded. Indeed, much of this part of the city seemed unsettlingly quiet, and that in spite of the night-time.
“Thank you for your discretion,” Vonvalt said. “I bid you good fortune.”
“And I you,” the merchant said, and they clasped forearms. Then he left us, and once the sound of his cart clattering away into the distance receded, a silence hitherto unknown to Sova reasserted itself.
We found a quiet corner, concealed ourselves, and lay down. In spite of the season, at night-time the silo was bitterly cold, and we ended up having to hold one another for warmth. There was nothing intimate about the close contact. In other circumstances I would have lain awake all night thinking about it and what it might represent; now I was much too cold, tired and anxious of discovery to think of such things.
I did not expect to be able to fall asleep, but I must have done so at some point, for I was roused early in the morning. A gap in the tiles above offered me a glimpse of a milk-pale sky, pink washed with blue and still rife with stars. My body was cold and stiff as I pressed myself up off the hard floor. We had nothing to eat or drink, but I was much too nervous to think about either.
“We should make for the Imperial Palace,” Vonvalt said. “They will not have changed the guard yet, and those on duty will be tired and lazy.” It was the same logic he had applied getting us through the Victory Gate, and it spoke volumes of his opinion of the city’s guardian class.
We made our way out of the silo. This was an aspect of Sova I was unfamiliar with, for much of our time here had been spent in the north-eastern closure. From the south looking north, the view was dominated by the southern aspect of the Law Library, whilst to the left, the Grand Lodge was conspicuously broken and burned.
Most worryingly, we were only half a mile from the Imperial Guard barracks, a large white box of pillared marble rife with pennants and flags that stood proud of much of the intervening city. Squinting, I could see signs of damage there, too; more blackening from fire, broken arrows littering the roof slates, and the remains of makeshift barricades.
“What happened here?” Vonvalt murmured to me as he, too, drank in the view.
We faced the same problem at this time of morning as we would have done in the middle of the night: the streets were empty. Sticking to what shadows there were, we made our way quickly up the road and to its junction with another running perpendicular, when we stopped dead. There was a checkpoint there, attended by men and women in the armour of the Imperial Guard – fine black steel with golden trim and gambesons of rich purple with intricate embroidered patterning. But they also, I noted with a profound sense of dismay, had the white star of the Savaran Templars daubed crudely over their chests. Worse: just beyond was a row of crude gibbets, each home to a body. Atop each wooden armature, crows cawed and clawed incessantly, plucking at rags and flesh and eyes, something which none of the soldiers did anything to dissuade. In the road, too, were bodies, most roughly kicked into the shit ditches at the side. Some were badly burned, blackened like lumps of charcoal.
“Shit,” Vonvalt hissed, pushing me roughly into an alley. I stumbled into the shadow and kept moving, though I felt Vonvalt grasp the back of my kirtle and slow me to a walk. “Keep walking quickly and stay to the left,” he said in a quiet voice behind me.
I felt sick with fear. The temptation was to hide again, to find somewhere to conceal ourselves for another day and wait for the safety of darkness. But Vonvalt kept pushing me on, and we made our way hurriedly but carefully through a succession of dank alleyways. There was no sign of anyone else. It was as though the whole population of Sova had evaporated like water from a hot pan.
We were now moving parallel to the Petran High-Way in an easterly direction. Vonvalt’s plan, insofar as he had told me, had been to cross the easternmost branch of the River Sauber, but that was scuppered when we saw another checkpoint at the end of the Miran Bridge. There were more Imperial Guard there, too, displaying the white star of Savare, and it was becoming impossible to escape the conclusion that they had turned traitor.
Vonvalt’s composure was beginning to fracture. He pulled me down another alleyway and we crouched behind a stack of old wine barrels at the rear of a public house. We took a moment to catch our breath.
“There is no one,” he said, unable to keep the bafflement from his voice. “I had hoped we might…” he gestured to the city at large “… blend in. But there is no one.”
“Perhaps we should wait for nightfall,” I said hopefully. If we were caught, the best we could hope for was to be briskly murdered. At worst, torture and immolation awaited. Vonvalt’s strategy – if it could so be called – of simply improvising our way into the Imperial Palace had failed. It was folly to continue risking our lives so recklessly for the sake of half a day of anxious tedium.
Vonvalt, to my dismay, shook his head. “No. We must press on.”
“We are going to get killed,” I said through clenched teeth. “It is getting lighter by the second.”
Vonvalt worried at his lower lip. “If we can reach the banks of the Sauber we will be concealed from view.”
“Hardly!”
“Helena, listen to me—”
“Nema’s blood, you listen to me,” I snapped. I had had enough of this lunacy. “This is reckless. This is foolish. It is clear some… rebellion has taken place here. Charging through the city like this is going to get us both killed. And then what happens? What a stupid, ridiculous, ignominious end: to have come this far, only to be murdered out of hand by idiot soldiers.”
Vonvalt stared at me. I wasn’t sure if I had ever spoken to him in this way.
“A great many lives depend on your ultimate success. My life right now depends on you not being careless. Prince of Hell, can we just think a moment? Can we turn our minds to the issue, rather than running about like headless hens?”
Vonvalt held out his hands in a placatory gesture. “You are right, and I am sorry. Let us take our bearings.”
“Yes, let us,” I said sarcastically. “Blood of gods.”
We crouched there on the damp and dirty cobbles for a few moments in silence.
“All right. You are right. Something has happened here. The question is, is it every member of the Imperial Guard who has gone rogue, or just some of them?”
“Why does that matter?” I snapped, though it was fairly obvious why.
“If it is all of them, then the Emperor is likely to be dead,” Vonvalt said pointedly. “If that is the case, then we are in real trouble.” He thought for a moment. “If that is the case, then I do not think we can win this fight.”
“But if it is just some faction?” I prompted, not wishing Vonvalt to turn maudlin.
“Then there will be some who remain loyal to the Emperor, and they will be guarding the Imperial Palace. For as long as there are loyal soldiers, then we have a chance to turn back this…” He wrinkled his nose. “Treachery.”
“That means that some parts of the city will still be safe for us,” I said, making a scooping motion with my hand to keep him talking.
“Yes and no. I remain persona non grata. Unless the Emperor has reversed his decision, I still face the risk of being killed out of hand. That is not to say that the Emperor will not reverse his decision – indeed, I consider it perfectly likely that he will, given the brevity of his list of allies. But a zealous soldier might take a different view.”
“So you are saying that our enemies are enemies and our friends may well be enemies, too?”
“Yes. At least, for the moment.”
“I rather wish I had been left behind with Severina and the Kasar,” I said. It was my attempt at gallows humour, but I just sounded bitter and angry.
Vonvalt was about to say something when there was a shout from the far end of the alley. I instinctively looked over to see who it was, but Vonvalt grabbed me by the face and kissed me instead.
I had no idea what to do. I had not kissed anyone since Matas Aker in Galen’s Vale. I had certainly thought about kissing Vonvalt, more than was healthy, but now it was happening it was not as I had expected. His beard, for one, scratched my face, his hands smelt like soil and his breath smelt strongly of pipe smoke. But I could not deny the jolt I felt, the surge in my heart and blood, the way I ached. This was a realisation of many things, and in other circumstances might have been the beginning of something – a thing that both of us had been skirting around for many months. Instead, I found myself thinking of von Osterlen in the City of Sleep, and the great stream of blood she had expectorated over me.
In the first instance I mistook this passionate and rough kiss as Vonvalt indulging his base desires before we were captured and murdered; and in that same spirit I gave myself to it. But as I did so, he pulled away.
“Pretend you are a whore,” he whispered urgently in my ear.
“What?” I demanded angrily.
“Just kiss me and make it look like you are drunk!”
Frustrated, angry, frightened, I nonetheless went back in for another kiss. This time I felt Vonvalt’s hands pawing clumsily at my ribs – he was consciously avoiding my actual breasts, which was a good thing since it would have broken me out of the ruse – and I did my best impression of someone who was only pretending to enjoy this ordeal. That at least was not difficult.
“You two should not be out here,” the Guardsman said as he approached. He must have been a decade my senior, white-skinned and blonde-haired. Like the other traitors he had a white star painted on his breastplate, though it was crudely done and looked pathetic up close. He carried a Sovan short sword loosely in his right hand, and did not wear helmet. Had he been anything except an Imperial Guardsman, Vonvalt could have made him disarm himself with the Voice.
“Fuck off,” Vonvalt said over my left shoulder, affecting a slur, and then pulled my kirtle strap to the side and began to kiss up my neck. His beard was like the bristles of a broom against my skin.
“There is a curfew!” the Guardsman snapped. He was but a few feet from us now, and my back prickled in anticipation of his blade.
“Here, mate, you want a go?” Vonvalt said. He pulled me up with his left hand as he stood. His right, I knew, was gripped around the handle of his own short sword.
