Kylar ignored him. He was looking past the Ceuran to the man’s bed mat. There, for all the world looking like Ceur’caelestos, was a sword in its scabbard. A sword that Lantano Garuwashi hadn’t tucked into his sash. A sword that Kylar had thrown into Ezra’s Wood.
“Nice sword,” Kylar said.
Lantano Garuwashi flushed. Though he smiled to cover it immediately, with his fair skin it couldn’t be hidden.
“Whatever will your men say when they find out it’s a fake? You have a vested interest in not spilling blood? How about a vested interest in not drawing your sword?”
Given the circumstances, Kylar thought Lantano Garuwashi mastered his rage rather well. His eyes went dead and his muscles relaxed. It wasn’t the relaxation of a sluggard, but a swordsman’s relaxation. Kylar had heard that Garuwashi once ripped out an opponent’s throat before the man could draw his sword. He hadn’t believed that an un-Talented man could do such a thing. Now he reconsidered.
Lantano Garuwashi didn’t attack, though. Instead, he merely picked up his false Ceur’caelestos and tucked it into his belt. He forced a marginally pleasant expression to his face. “I have a secret of yours, Night Angel. You have an entire identity built as Kylar Stern. You wouldn’t wish to lose that, would you? All your friends, all your access to the kinds of things the Night Angel couldn’t find out on his own.”
“Remind me to thank Feir for that.” Kylar paused. Did this Ceuran never run out of tricks? “It would hurt me in any number of ways to lose Kylar Stern. But Kylar Stern isn’t all I have or all I am. I can change my name.”
“Changing a name is no great thing,” Garuwashi admitted. “In Ceura we know this. We sometimes do it to commemorate great events in our lives, but a face—” he cut off as Kylar rubbed a hand over his face and put on Durzo’s visage. “—ah, that is something else entirely, isn’t it?”
“Losing my identity will cost me years of effort,” Kylar said. “On the other hand, if you can’t draw your sword, you can’t lead your men at all, no matter how overwhelming your strength is. I know Ceura well enough to know that a king can’t rule with an iron sword, and there’s no such thing as an aceuran sa’ceurai.”
Lantano Garuwashi raised an eyebrow. He glanced at the sheathed sword on his hip. “If you wish to reprise our duel in the wood, I will oblige. Feir Cousat went into the Wood that day after my sword. As none ever has before, he returned, on my word as a sa’ceurai. I still bear Ceur’caelestos. If you force me to draw it, I will sate its spirit with your blood.”
It was a serious oath, but the words of his vow didn’t mean what he wanted Kylar to infer. “You bear nothing but a scabbard and a hilt. Say that I lie, Garuwashi, and I’ll stand before your tent and challenge you before your army. Your sa’ceurai will tear you apart with their bare hands when they find you’ve lost Ceur’caelestos.”
The muscles on Garuwashi’s jaw stood out. He said nothing for a long time. “Curse you,” he said finally. The iron in him seemed to melt. “Curse you for taking my sword, and curse Feir for making me live. He did come out of the Wood. He said he’d been chosen to make another Ceur’caelestos for me. He knew the sa’ceurai would never understand, so he gave me this hilt and swore to return by spring. I believed him.” Garuwashi breathed deeply. “And now you come again to destroy me. I don’t know whether to hate you or admire you, Night Angel. I almost had you. I saw it in your face. Do you never run out of tricks?”
Kylar didn’t let his guard down. “You don’t even want Cenaria, do you? You just thought it would be another quick victory that would make your legend grow.”
“What is a warleader without war, Night Angel? I was invincible before I took Ceur’caelestos, and now you wish me to lose—against Cenaria? You don’t know what it is to lead men.”
“I know what it is to kill them. I know what it is to ask others to pay for my mistakes.”
“Do you know what it is to refuse to be satisfied with the meager portion life hands you? I think you do. Can you imagine me squatting in a field next to my one servant with my trousers rolled up, picking rice? These hands were not made for a hoe. You took this name Kylar Stern. Why? Because you were born with an iron sword, too.
“My men need food, but they need victory more. With me or without me, they are here for the winter,” Lantano Garuwashi said. “The tunnels we widened to get through the mountains are rivers and ice now. If you expose me, the sa’ceurai will kill me, but then what? They will vent their fury on your people. For everyone’s sake, Night Angel, let that go. Go instead and tell this queen to surrender. I give you my word that if she does this, not a single Cenarian will die. We will take nothing more than food and a place to winter. She will be granted her throne once more when we leave in the spring.”
And you won’t ask for anything else once you have Cenaria and Ceur’caelestos both, right?
Kylar shook his head. “You’ll surrender.”
“I can’t,” Garuwashi said through gritted teeth. “In surrender, even Cenarians lay down their swords at the victor’s feet.”
Kylar hadn’t thought of that. It wasn’t the thought of surrender that was impossible for Lantano Garuwashi, it was the physical act.
“Maybe,” Kylar said, “maybe there’s a third way.”
27
When Dorian’s half-brother Paerik had brought his army to Khaliras to seize the throne, he had abandoned a vital post. The general who had served under him, General Talwin Naga, stood in front of the throne, explaining how the wild men would invade in the spring.
“Sixty thousand of them?” Dorian asked. “How could they raise so many?”
“Raise may be exactly the word, Your Holiness,” the tiny Lodricari man who had accompanied General Naga said.
“Who are you?” Dorian asked.
“This is Ashaiah Vul,” the general said. “He was your father’s Raptus Morgi, Keeper of the Dead. I think you need to hear what he can tell you.”
“I’ve never heard of such an office,” Dorian said. And “raptus” didn’t primarily mean keeper, either. It meant taker, stealer. Dorian’s stomach turned.
“By your father’s order and his father’s before him, it was a quiet office, Your Holiness,” Ashaiah Vul said. He was utterly bald, with a knobby skull and a pinched face with nearsighted eyes, though he looked barely forty years old. “I was known only as the Keeper. Your father’s Hands discouraged questions.”
The Hands. There was another problem. Whoever led the informers, torturers, spies, and guards who served as the Godking’s thousand hands had yet to show himself. Regardless, Dorian doubted Ashaiah Vul would dare lie about them.
“Go on,” Dorian said.
“I think you may want to come with me, Your Holiness. I suggest you leave your guard here.”
Is this the first attempt on my life? If so, it was rather clumsy. That made it all the more impossible to refuse. When the attempts on Dorian’s life began, he had to defeat them ruthlessly. Then they would end. “Very well.” Dorian signaled the guards to stay and dismissed the general.
In the hall, they immediately ran into Jenine. “My lord, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, giving him a version of a Khalidoran bow mixed with a Cenarian curtsey, chin up, eyes closing demurely only for a moment, right hand sweeping into the Khalidoran courtiers’ flourish while the left hand flared her skirt as she curtsied. She made the mixed curtsey look graceful, too. Obviously she’d practiced it. It occurred to him then that there was no Khalidoran form of a woman’s salute to an equal male. Khalidoran women who were equals would nod to each other, but were always inferior to men in the same social rank, and invisible to men of lower rank. And all women prostrated themselves before a Godking. This was Jenine’s offering of a middle ground. He smiled, pleased with her solution.
Dorian nodded more deeply than any Godking before him would have. “My lady, the pleasure is mine. How may I serve you?”
“I was hoping to spend the day with you. I don’t want to be in your
way. I just want to learn.”
Dorian glanced at Ashaiah Vul. The man, of course, had his eyes averted. He wouldn’t dare to disapprove of a Godking’s decisions, or to even look at a Godking’s woman. “I’m afraid I’m going to go see something remarkably unpleasant. You don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see it. You should probably wait in the throne room. I’ll be back shortly.” Dorian turned.
“I do want to see it,” Jenine interjected. Ashaiah Vul gasped at her audacity, then studied the floor once more as both of them looked at him, his face going red.
“A thousand pardons, my lord, I spoke hastily. Forgive my rudeness,” Jenine said. She chewed her lip. “I—My father never looked at things he didn’t want to see, and it got him and my whole family killed, our country laid waste. Dealing with things we don’t like is part of ruling. My father refused to do it because he was weak and venal. How else am I to learn if not from you?”
“What I’m going to see is beyond anything your father had to deal with, real or imagined,” Dorian said.
“Even so.” Jenine was unmoved, and Dorian couldn’t help but smile. He loved her strength, even as it surprised him.
“Very well,” he said. “Ashaiah, show us what you were going to show me alone. All of it.”
Ashaiah Vul said nothing, pretended to have no opinion—and maybe, in fact, had no opinion. A God-king’s unwelcome order was like a day of unwelcome weather. You might not like it, but you didn’t have any illusions that you could change it, either. So Ashaiah took them deep into the bowels of the Citadel, and then into the tunnels of the mountain itself. Dorian could smell vir on the man, though not much. He was at best a meister of the third shu’ra.
Finally, Ashaiah Vul stopped in front of a door that looked like any of the hundreds of others this deep in the Citadel. The dust in this hall was so thick it was more like soil, and it was plain that this room hadn’t been visited any more recently than any of the others. He unlocked the door and opened it.
Dorian held his vir as he followed the Lodricari into the darkness. His first sensation was that this room was huge, cavernous. The air was musty, thick, fetid.
Ashaiah mumbled an incantation and Dorian snapped three shields into place around both himself and Jenine. A moment later, light coursed up the arch where Ashaiah held his hand against the wall. It spread from arch to arch, across a painted ceiling over a hundred feet above. In a few seconds, light bathed the chamber.
This had been a library once, a place of beauty and light. The walls and pillars were the color of ivory and lace. The mural was like something out of a forgotten legend, light coming out of darkness, creation. It gave a sense of divinity and purpose. Long cherry shelves had once held both scrolls and books and tables had been arranged with space for scholars to study.
Now, it held clean, white bones. The chamber was hundreds of paces long, and half as wide, and everywhere, the books and scrolls had been removed. In their place, on every shelf, on every table, were bones. Old, old bones. Some shelves held entire skeletons, labeled with tags tied to their wrists. Some held skeletons of human bones but arranged in inhuman shapes. But mostly, the shelves held matching bones, with boxes for the small ones. An entire shelf of femurs. Boxes of finger bones. Pelvises stacked. Spines whole and in boxes for each vertebra. And skulls in a large central area: mountains of skulls.
Dorian dropped the shields. This was no attack. At least not on his body. “What is this?”
Ashaiah glanced at Jenine, then, obviously deciding he must speak the truth, said, “Should the wild men invade, this is your salvation, Your Holiness. It is your corpusarium. When General Naga speaks of the clans raising an army, this is what he means. Two years ago, a barbarian chieftain found an ancient mass grave and discovered a secret we had long thought was ours alone.”
“Raising the dead?”
“Sort of, Your Holiness.”
“Sort of?”
“The souls of men are inviolate,” Ashaiah Vul said.
“I always liked purple.”
Ashaiah blinked, not daring to chuckle. Jenine was too busy staring around in wonder. He didn’t think she even heard him. “We don’t have the power to bind men’s souls to their bodies. Your predecessors tried to make themselves immortal doing that, but it never worked well. This is different. We call it raising because we use the bones of the dead and unite them with a kind of spirit we call the Strangers. The result is the krul. They were originally called the Fallen because whenever they fall in battle, they can be raised again if a Vürdmeister is present.”
“Take me one step at a time,” Dorian ordered, his queasiness increasing.
“It starts in the pits. It always has. The Godkings have always said that the ore beneath Khaliras was powerful, and that that’s why the slaves and criminals and captured enemies are forced to work there. It’s a lie. We don’t need their service; we don’t need the ore. We need the prisoners’ bones and their agony. Their bones give us a frame. Their agony draws the Strangers.”
“What are these Strangers?” Dorian asked.
“We don’t know. Some of them have been here for millennia, but despite the length of their experiences, we are a puzzle to them. They don’t have physical bodies—though my master said that once they walked the earth, took lovers, and had children who were the heroes of old, the nephilim. The southrons claim the name was because the Strangers were once children of their One God who were thrown out of heaven.” He smiled weakly, clearly regretting saying anything about a southron religion.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know. But the Strangers long to wear flesh again. So we take the bones of our dead and sanctify them for the Strangers’ use. Incidentally, this is why Godkings have themselves cremated; they wish to avoid our use of their bones.”
“And then?”
“Real bones are necessary but not sufficient to give the fallen a sense of embodiment, and it is for embodiment that they trade their service. We give them flesh. It doesn’t have to look human. Some Godkings believed that any shape is possible, putting human bones into a horse’s or a dog’s shape. It makes binding the fallen more difficult as they wish to be men, not horses, but it makes a fine horse.”
“And the musculature, the skin and so forth, does it need to be crafted as painstakingly as the skeletons?” Dorian asked. He’d trained as a Healer, and he couldn’t imagine the intricate magic necessary to create a whole living body.
“Given the correct skeleton and enough clay and water, the Strangers help the magic form muscles and ligaments and skin. They’re never as sturdy as man. Godking Roygaris was able to craft krul that lived for a decade or more, but he was a brilliant anatomist. He was able to make krul horses, and wolves, and tigers, and mammoths and other creatures we no longer have names for.”
“They function like living beings?”
“They are living beings, Your Holiness. They breathe, they eat, they . . .”—he looked at Jenine again—“defecate. They just don’t feel as men do. Pain that would incapacitate a man will do nothing to them. They won’t complain about hunger. They will mention it if it’s gone long enough that they are about to stop functioning.”
“They speak?”
“Poorly. But they can see better in the dark than a man, though not as far. Eyes are difficult to make correctly. They make poor archers. They have emotions, but the palette is different from men’s. Fear is incredibly rare. They know that as long as the line of Godkings survives, if their body is destroyed, they will most likely be put into another sooner or later.”
“Are they obedient?”
“Perfectly, in most circumstances, but they have an incredible hatred toward the living. They won’t help build anything, not even engines of war. They only destroy. Experiments have been tried where a krul was put in a room with a prisoner and told that if he killed the prisoner, he would be killed in turn. Every time, the krul killed the prisoner. It was tried with women, with old men, with children: it didn??
?t matter, except they killed children more quickly. You couldn’t ask them to take a city and not kill those who surrendered. They also hunger for human flesh. Eating it seems to make them stronger. We don’t know why.”
“My father gathered these bones, but never used them.” That was odd. Dorian turned it over in his mind. Perhaps Garoth Ursuul was too decent.
“Your pardon, Your Holiness. Your esteemed father did use them, once. When Clan Hil rebelled. Afterward, he noted that the Hil fought to the last man when they knew they would be eaten and profaned. Your father said he wished to have men left alive to rule; the krul wished only for ashes. He held them off for a great emergency. The emergency never came, so there’s quite a stockpile.”
“How many do we have?”
“About eighty-five thousand. When we organize them, we have to preserve their hierarchy. Their number system is different than ours.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even our words for numbers are predicated on multiples of ten: ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. Their number system is based on thirteen—my master said that was where our superstitions about thirteen come from. They’re rigidly bound to those numbers. A meister can lead twelve krul himself, but if he wishes to lead thirteen or more, he must master a thirteenth, which is different—a white krul called a daemon. The white krul are faster, over six feet tall, and take more magic to raise. Platoons are thirteen squads—a hundred sixty-nine krul. So after you raise thirteen squads, if you wish to add a single krul, you must raise a bone lord. Bone lords speak well, they’re smarter, tough, and they can use magic.”
“Vir?”