No, it was a trick. An illusion of some kind. She shook her head and it was just rock again, but behind her, Elethe started to scream. Stephania turned to see her crouched, hands raised to ward off something she couldn’t see.
“What’s wrong with you?” Stephania demanded. “What’s happening?”
Elethe continued to scream and whimper. If Stephania hadn’t been tied to the stupid girl, she would have abandoned her there. As it was, she set her hands around the rope. The handmaiden was hers.
“Shut up and get up,” she snapped, hauling Elethe to her feet through brute determination. “It’s not real. It’s not real, do you understand?”
She wouldn’t allow her handmaiden this weakness. She wouldn’t allow it in anyone.
“Y-yes, my lady,” Elethe said in a fractured voice.
They made their way up to the cave mouth, and Stephania saw that it wasn’t the grand opening she had anticipated. Instead, a flat face of rock stood there, barring the way. No, not flat. A faint line sat there in an arch, easier to feel than to see. There were marks set around the door too.
“There’s a door here,” Stephania said.
“How do we open it?” Elethe asked. “What do these marks mean?”
Stephania waved her into silence. She recognized these marks from somewhere. She’d seen them before, but where?
She remembered with a start. They were old symbols for healing herbs. At least, most were. Three stood out. Three she knew better than the rest, because she’d made use of them more often. These three represented poisons, and the very fact that they were hidden in amongst the rest said to Stephania that they were significant.
She reached out and touched the one representing Heartbane, looking for some kind of catch or button. Instead, to her surprise, she found it glowing under her fingers in a deep red that spoke to her of blood. Quickly, she touched the other two marks.
Stephania expected to hear the grind of stone and see the door sliding back. Instead, it shimmered, becoming something that seemed more like water than stone. Stephania guessed that she should have stood there staring at such a thing, but right then, she simply wanted to know what the sorcerer had to tell her. She’d come so far that taking the next step, into that shimmering stone, was easy.
There was a space that felt like the gap between two breaths, and then she was somewhere… else. Somewhere that did make her gasp with its scale and the power it must have taken to build it.
It didn’t look like the inside of a mountain. The walls were things of veined marble, not dark stone. There was light everywhere, coming in through windows high above. The floor looked as though it was crafted from pure silver, reflecting everything above it in a collection of the fabulous that seemed to go on forever. Stephania saw rows of scrolls and tablets that would have made old Cosmas jealous, devices that seemed to make no sense in their operation, orbs that glowed of their own volition…
She turned to make sure that Elethe was seeing this, and realized that her handmaiden wasn’t there with her. Behind her, the door still stood open, but the rope that had held them together hung loose around Stephania’s waist, sheared in half by some unseen force.
“You were the one who passed the tests, Lady Stephania,” a voice said from among the books. “And your companion is not the one with something to ask of me.”
It was probably intended to worry her. Stephania was made of stonier stuff than that.
“You’re the sorcerer?” Stephania asked. “Show yourself.”
“First, answer me a question,” the hidden voice countered. “There are many places that power can lie: in the sword, in the knife in the dark, in knowledge, in armed men. What is strongest in all the world?”
Stephania thought. What answer would this man want? Men so often wanted to hear the things that accorded with their views. Yet here, Stephania suspected that the sorcerer would know if she spoke anything but the truth.
“In my will,” Stephania answered.
That got a laugh that grew, until the sound seemed to shift into something more. Between one eye blink and the next a figure was standing there in the middle of the silver floor, wrapped in pale robes, the hood thrown back to reveal a pleasant face of middling years that—
“No,” Stephania said. “That isn’t your real face.”
She had no time for games, even if she played so many herself.
“What would you prefer?” the sorcerer asked. His face flickered, and Stephania found herself looking at an ancient crone, a boy, herself. Finally, it settled into the features of a young-looking man with almost bone white skin, pale hair shorn, with eyes of the deepest amber looking out. “I find appearance is such a shifting thing, but this is the one I worked to keep.”
Stephania was good at staying calm, staying polite, always thinking. She’d learned in a world where she hadn’t been the most powerful, and so she hadn’t been able to afford to show too much.
“You know my name, but I don’t know yours,” Stephania said.
“That is true,” the sorcerer replied. He spread his hands. “There were those who called me Daskalos once. Call me that.”
Stephania knew enough to know the name meant teacher in one of the old languages. “And what is it you have to teach me, Daskalos?”
She had the sense then that the sorcerer was amused. So long as he gave her what she wanted, Stephania didn’t care.
“There was a time when I might have taught you many things,” he said. “I used to take apprentices, and show them what I had learned of the Ancient Ones’ secrets. Mostly, they betrayed me and I broke them. If I had found you earlier, you might have made a good student.”
Her patience wasn’t without limits, however.
“I’m not here to be your student,” Stephania said. “I’m here to find the power to kill someone with Ancient One blood.”
Daskalos stood there for a moment, his expression as impenetrable as a mask. “There are ways to do such a thing, but they are not trinkets to give out easily. There will be a price.”
“There are prices for most things, I find,” Stephania said.
She’d learned that better than most people. If you wanted a thing in life, then there was no point in complaining once you’d got it that the cost of it wasn’t what you wanted. You learned what it was beforehand, or you arranged to deal with it afterwards.
“Oh, you would have made a good student,” the sorcerer said. “Perhaps I should keep you anyway.”
“Is that what you want?” Stephania asked, moving closer to him. She knew how to seduce someone better than most. “Power has always been attractive. Help me, and—”
She saw the sorcerer take a step back.
“I have bedded queens and slaves, the strangest of the Most Ancient and the simplest of peasants. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Now, his amusement felt more like an insult. Stephania had been insulted before too. None of it made any difference to her.
“Why don’t you tell me?” Stephania said. “What is it you want? There’s something, or you would just say no.”
She watched as Daskalos moved to a shelf, taking down a vial.
“This is the most rare and difficult of concoctions,” he said. “The Ancient Ones invented it, then tried to lose all knowledge of it. Administer it to one, and their powers become as nothing. Killing them becomes as simple as killing you or me. Well, possibly not me.”
It was what she wanted, in other words. Everything she could possibly need to kill Ceres.
“Your price?” Stephania insisted. “You know I want this, so how much?”
What would it be? Not money, not power, not her body, so—
“Your child,” Daskalos replied.
“My…” Stephania shook her head. “No.”
That was the one thing she couldn’t give. The one thing she wouldn’t give. The child growing inside her was hers, and Stephania had already decided the way its life would turn out. The sorcerer dared to ask this?
“That is the price,” Daskalos said, placing the poison on a small table and turning back to her. “You will give birth to your child, and then I will take it.”
“To do what?” Stephania demanded.
She cursed herself for even asking.
“Whatever I choose,” Daskalos said. “It would not be your concern.”
Which meant that it might be something truly awful. Stephania had read books that spoke of the things sorcerers needed for power.
“No,” Stephania said. “Just… no. Never.”
“Then leave,” Daskalos said, gesturing to the shimmering door.
He said it as if it were nothing. As if it didn’t matter to him. Possibly, this was another of his foolish tests. Stephania didn’t care.
“There must be something else,” Stephania said.
She put everything into that plea. She would have given him anything else. Drag Elethe in here, and Stephania would have cut her throat if the sorcerer required it. Ask for all the knowledge she’d gained about others, and Stephania would have recited it.
He turned his back on her. “There is nothing else I want.”
“A pity,” Stephania said. “You might have lived.”
She stepped in close, drawing a knife and thrusting in one movement. She felt it thrust up through the cloth of his robes, then his flesh. She struck the heart in one blow, but struck again to be sure. With a sorcerer, there was no point in taking chances.
As he collapsed, she moved to the table, snatching up the poison. She might have stayed there to loot the rest, but the truth was that there was nothing else she wanted. Turning, Stephania ran for the shimmering door.
She found that there was nothing there but stone.
“Do you think I would be so careless as not to hide my life somewhere safe?”
Stephania spun to find the sorcerer standing, wiping blood from his hand with a look of distaste.
Stephania felt a rush of fear as she held the knife out in front of her. More importantly, she held the potion back from him.
“Consider my offer again,” the sorcerer said. “Only this time, if you say no, you stay here forever—with your child.”
Stephania stood there, and for a moment, she simply didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t give up her child to this… this monster. But the alternative was worse. Far worse. And then there was the potion. She’d given so much already to get to this point. She’d suffered so much, and now she finally, finally had a way to kill Ceres.
Put like that, there was no choice. Love mattered, but Stephania had learned plenty of times in her life that other things mattered more. Hatred was one of them.
She could feel the tears in her eyes at the choice, but she blinked them away.
“All right, all the gods damn you! Take my child.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sartes hadn’t expected so many of his fellow conscripts to travel with him to deliver Ceres’s news about the changes in the Empire. He’d been expecting a small group of them wanting to go home. Instead, he felt as though he was marching with an army of them.
No, not an army. Sartes was done with armies. He’d seen more than enough killing for one lifetime. He’d even helped to plan some of it. This was something different. It had to be, if they were going to help to rebuild the Empire in the wake of all that had happened.
What though, if not an army? They had the wagons and the horses of a merchant’s convoy, but they weren’t there to make money from the villages they passed through. They had the lack of discipline that Sartes might have seen in bandits, but for all their pasts, the young men who traveled with him didn’t cause trouble as they passed through.
“A circus,” he decided. “We’re a kind of circus.”
Not in the traditional sense, perhaps, because they didn’t juggle or play music, entertain or show fabulous beasts. In every hamlet they passed through, however, they tried to bring joy, giving back young men who’d been conscripted into the army, passing along the news of Ceres’s decrees. They camped outside villages where they could, but they came into the main squares for the announcements, and to give away the contents of the Empire’s warehouses. They might not have jesters or dancers, but they brought joy and… well, a few of the boys sang as they marched. It was close enough, in Sartes’s opinion.
The happiness that they brought seemed to be the same. He’d seen mothers running to their sons, men who’d thought they wouldn’t be able to feed their families crying with happiness as he handed out grain.
It was the kind of task Sartes was glad his sister had picked him for, even if it meant being away from the city. The Empire had wanted to turn him into just another soldier crushing ordinary people. Here, he got to help them.
Sartes saw a hamlet ahead. Just a few houses, and they looked almost empty as his collection of former conscripts drove their wagons into the small space between them. Sartes had grown used to this in the time he’d been on the road.
“It’s all right!” he called out. “We aren’t here to rob you. Ceres and the rebellion sent us!”
His sister’s name always seemed to be enough to pull people from their hiding places. However far they went from the city, it seemed that they had still heard of her and her fight against the Empire. They came now, stepping out of the shadows of buildings and the bushes that backed onto a small stand of trees. Even now, they seemed ready to run, but Sartes was used to that.
“It’s all right,” he said. He looked around. “Is anyone from close to here?”
It turned out that one of the boys was, and Sartes watched him run to a couple who looked thin and bent with both hunger and worry. It was easier when they went to somewhere the conscripts had come from. In some other villages, it was hard to coax anyone out at all.
“Here,” Sartes said. “We’ve brought food, and coin as well. Ceres has declared that the money and land the Empire took from people should be returned.”
That got stunned looks from the people there, as if they couldn’t believe that it was real. Sartes could understand that though. After all, the Empire had taken so much that it was hard to believe its evil was gone. It was only when Sartes nodded for the conscripts to start handing out grain and silver that the people there seemed to believe it. He heard them cheer when a sack of barley hit the ground.
One villager came to him, putting a hand on Sartes’s arm. “Thank you so much. A couple of the nobles near here used to bring grain, but when the Empire’s army came through, they took everything.”
Sartes smiled. He was just glad that he could help.
“You must stay,” a woman said. “You’ve brought us so much, and we should share it with you.”
Sartes shook his head. It was still daylight, and there would be more villages to visit today before they were done. Besides, with how happy most people were to see them, if they stopped everywhere that asked them, they would never move on.
“Save your food,” Sartes replied. “You’ll need it for winter, and for planting in the spring.”
The villager looked as though he wanted to argue, but Sartes could also see him recognizing the truth of it. There was another truth: such a large convoy of men could eat through the remaining resources of a village like this far too quickly.
“Hardly seems worth it,” the man said. “If we’ll have to flee ahead of more violence.”
“The violence is done,” Sartes promised him. “Ceres will see to that. We all will.”
The villager looked as though he didn’t believe him, but Sartes meant it. The time for war was done. Maybe they could build a lasting peace.
“They say that there will be an invasion soon enough,” the man said. “There have been people clearing out ahead of it, going to the hills.”
“It will be all right,” Sartes said. “Ceres won’t let it happen.”
Again, he got the feeling that the villager wasn’t quite convinced.
For now though, they needed to keep on going down the road, so Sartes
took the reins of his wagon in his hand and flicked them gently. He was surprised to see the conscript who’d run to his parents running back to a wagon.
“You don’t need to,” Sartes called. “The whole point is that you get to go home.”
“When all this is done,” the boy called back. “For now… I want to be part of this.”
Sartes didn’t argue. He could understand that need to do some good, and he wasn’t about to stop those who wanted to travel with him. There were still bandits out on some of the roads, and still places where they all needed to push together to get the wagons through. The more of them there were, the better, in those spots.
They didn’t have to push as they rolled the wagons down these country tracks, but after an hour, Sartes definitely saw signs of violence.
The first body hung from a tree by its feet, strung up there less like something human than in the way a poacher might leave hares. Getting closer, Sartes could see that the man’s throat had been cut, while almost all his possessions seemed to have been ripped away from him, even down to some of his clothes. Those that remained hinted at wealth, in flashes of silk and velvet.
There was a symbol on his tunic: a golden leaf, the strands spreading into streams beyond. It was the symbol Sartes had seen before, and he recognized the family. Not the worst of nobles, by a long way. Maybe not perfect, because they still had their drinkers and their snobs, their gamblers and those who thought they owned all the farms that lay in their villages, but there were other stories too, of families given time to find rent, of children helped.
Just the sight of it was enough to make Sartes feel ill. He’d seen death, but there was a casual cruelty to this that he hated.
More bodies followed as they continued down the road. All strung up on the trees that lined the road. All murdered. There were men and women, all in expensive-looking clothes, and as the convoy rumbled on, Sartes started to get the horrible feeling that he knew what was happening.
He didn’t know these nobles. He didn’t know if they were good, or evil, or somewhere in between. That wasn’t the point, and he suspected it hadn’t been the point to whoever had killed them either.