He had ridden all day and most of the night, but sleep could not have been further from his mind. He did not care if he never slept again. He did not believe that this overwhelming sorrow and bitterness and pain would ever go away. How cruel the world could be, that just when he had found a searing happiness in Asara, it was all torn away and he was flung into the night, forced to abandon his sister and charged with a terrible responsibility. He could not bring himself to recall the pitiful state Laranya had been in when he had found her. It was a blasphemy against the person she had been, had always been until Mos had beaten her like that. The agony seemed too great to allow him to draw breath; the physical ache in his chest and stomach doubled him over.
Then, he had no idea that his sister was already dead.
They would be looking for him, she had said. They would try and stop him. Mos had crossed a line, and there was no telling what he might do now. Reki did not really understand: he had not known what his sister intended to do, how she had exposed her humiliation to the servants of the Keep so that rumour would be unquenchable, how she had meant to take her own life to ensure that vengeance would come from the desert. He did not think Mos would dare capture him and keep him against his will. As abhorrent as his actions were, kidnap was another order of magnitude.
None of that mattered though. He had his sister’s black hair twisted around his fist. She had charged him with delivering it to their father. Honour bound him, as it would bind Blood Tanatsua. And Blood Tanatsua, one of the most powerful of the Tchom Rin families, would call on the other families in the name of Suran to aid them. Reki had no doubt his father could and would raise a great army to his banner.
The desert folk were traditionally insular, dealing with affairs within their own territories and not involving themselves in the politics of the west. The Emperors and Empresses were happy to let them do so. Even with Weavers at their command, the desert was a difficult place to administer, and those who lived in the fertile lands on this side of the Tchamil Mountains had little knowledge of the complex ways of the Suran-worshippers. Though they were all part of the Empire, in a land as vast as Saramyr it was possible for neighbouring cultures to be as foreigners to each other.
Reki held war in his hand. It was a responsibility he did not want. And yet to shirk it would be to betray his sister, who had suffered terribly at the hands of the man she loved. His own grief was nothing compared to hers, but that was no comfort to him. It seemed the crying would never stop, a racking spasm like vomiting, bringing up a bottomless void of shame and guilt and hate and woe.
He was so consumed by his own misery that he did not hear the door to the shack open and close, nor the newcomer walk over to him. It was only when he felt a touch on his shoulder that he suddenly scrambled away, pressing himself up against the corner of the shack, cringing from the shadow who stood over him.
‘Oh, Reki,’ said Asara.
He whimpered at the sound of her voice and threw his arms around her legs, his weeping beginning afresh. She knelt down next to him, allowing him to hold her and she him. There in the darkness he clung to her as if she were the mother he had never known, and she soothed him. For a long time, they stayed like that. The horses murmured to themselves, and the autumn wind rattled the shack door against its latch.
‘Why are you here?’ he managed at last, touching her face with beatific wonder as if she were some deity of mercy come to rescue him.
‘Do you suppose you can do this alone?’ she asked. ‘I followed your trail as easily as if you had left me a map. If I did, so can others. Without me, you will be caught by next moonrise.’
‘You came after me,’ he sobbed, and embraced her again.
She pushed him away gently. ‘Calm yourself,’ she said. ‘You are not a child any longer.’
That stung him, and his tear-blotched face showed how wounded he was.
‘We must go now,’ she told him, her voice firm. She was a sleek outline in the shadows, but her eyes glittered strangely. ‘This place is too dangerous. I will take you by roads quicker and less travelled. I will see you discharge your sister’s oath.’
Reki clambered to his feet, and Asara rose with him. His eyes burned and his nose ran. He wiped the back of his hand across his face, ashamed.
‘You could be executed if you are caught,’ he whispered.
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I will ensure we are not caught.’
He sniffed loudly. ‘You should not be here.’
‘But I am.’
‘Why?’ he asked again, because she had never really answered him the first time.
She kissed him swiftly on the lips. ‘That, you will have to work out for yourself.’
They led the tired horses out to where Asara’s own horses were, and headed away into the night. Later, she would tell him of his sister’s suicide. But for now, it was enough to get him to safety, and to guard him on his long trek south-east to his father’s lands. She would ensure he delivered Laranya’s hair into the hands of Barak Green. She would make certain that he started the civil war that had to come.
As they travelled across fields and fens, Asara’s eyes were flat. She was thinking on the murder of the Empress.
She had not originally intended to assassinate Laranya. In truth, she had been sent by Cailin only to keep an eye on developments within the Imperial family, for word of Mos’s growing insanity was leaking out and Cailin believed that something would happen soon. She wanted Asara there to deal with it when it did. Asara had infiltrated the Imperial Keep only days before Mos’s little disagreement with his wife.
As a spy she was peerless, and getting into the Keep – and into a shy young man’s bed – was easy for a creature such as her. She was old, despite her appearance, and she had seen much and studied much. It was simple to charm her way into the company of the poets and playwrights and musicians that Laranya surrounded herself with. She had a greater wealth of knowledge than most of them, which was remarkable in a woman of such apparent youth. From there, gossip about Eszel and Laranya had led to Reki, and so she had formed her introduction. It had not been difficult. He was still a boy, still inexperienced in the way of women. It was simple to seduce him.
Then, the Empress. Reki had told her about the dreams Mos had been having. Asara had put the piece together with the massing armies of Blood Kerestyn, the approaching famine and what she had learned of the Weavers in her guise as Saran Ycthys Marul, and come to only one conclusion. The one she would have suspected anyway. The Weavers were driving Mos mad with jealousy. They meant him to harm his wife.
They wanted to draw the desert families into the conflict. And therefore, so did Asara. When opportunity came her way, she did not hesitate.
If there was one thing that Asara knew for certain, it was this: the Libera Dramach could not beat the Weavers as things stood. Not now, not in ten years’ time, and probably not ever. The instant that Lucia revealed herself and made her claim to the throne, she would be killed, the Libera Dramach annihilated by the full force of the Weavers. Lucia could not win the Empire.
But with a little help from Asara, the Weavers could.
TWENTY-SIX
The assault on Zila came in the dead of night.
The clouds that had been stroking Saramyr’s western coast had consolidated into a dour blanket by sunset, and when the darkness came it was almost total. No stars shone, Aurus was entirely invisible, and Iridima was reduced to a hazy smear of white in the sky, her radiance choked before it could reach the earth. Then the rain began: a few warning patters, insidious wet taps on the stone of the town before the deluge came. Suddenly the night was swarming, droplets battering down from the sky, hissing on torches and smacking off sword blades.
It was a painful, aggressive downpour, forcing its way through the clothes of the men who stood armed and on watch, their eyes narrowed as they watched the distant campfires of the besieging armies. They flickered in a ring around the hill upon which Zila sat, beacons of light in otherw
ise total darkness, illuminating nothing. Eventually, they went out, doused by the rain.
The onslaught kept up for hours. Zila waited, a crown of glowing windows and lanterns hanging suspended in rain-swept blackness.
The man who first noticed that something was amiss was a calligrapher, an educated man who, like many others, had found himself swept up in the events that had overtaken his town and did not really have any clear idea how to swim against the tide. He had been assigned to the watch by some structure of authority he did not understand, and had un-questioningly obeyed. Now he was soaked and miserable, holding a rifle he did not know how to use and expecting at any moment to be struck in the forehead by an arrow from the abyss beyond the walls of the town.
It was, perhaps, this fearful expectation that made him more attentive than the others on the watch that night. They had settled themselves in, after several nights of inactivity, for a long period of negotiation and preparation before any actual combat would occur. The heat of the revolt had cooled in them now, and most had resigned themselves to a long autumn and a long winter trapped inside Zila. What choice did they have? They did not like the idea of throwing themselves on the mercy of the armies, even if they could leave. Some were wondering whether it might not have been better just to let the Governor keep hoarding his food, and take their chances with the famine; but their companions reminded them that they were thinking from the luxury of a full belly, and if they had been starving now, they would not be so complacent. There was food in Zila, more than they would have outside.
Like the calligrapher, many wondered now how they had got into this mess, and what they could possibly do to get out of it with their skins.
It was while chewing over these very thoughts that the calligrapher began to hear noises over the constant tumult of the rain. The wind was switching back and forth in fitful gusts, spraying him with warm droplets, and when it came his way he thought he heard an occasional creaking sound, or the squeak of a wheel. Being a timid man, he was reluctant to embarrass himself by pointing these out to any of the others on the watch, so he chose to do nothing for a long while. And yet time and again he heard the sounds – very faint, blown on the breeze – and gradually a certainty grew in his breast that something was wrong. The sounds were fleeting enough to be imagination, except that he had none. He was level-headed, practical, and had never been prone to phantoms of the mind.
Eventually, he shared his concerns with the next man on the wall. That man listened, and after a time he reported to his officer, and so it came to the commander of the watch. The commander demanded the calligrapher’s account of what he had heard. Other men joined in: they had heard it too. They stared hard into the darkness, but the shrouded night was impenetrable.
‘Send up a rocket,’ the commander said eventually. He did not like to do it: he thought he might unduly alarm the troops and the enemy both. But he liked less the crawling trepidation that was ascending his spine.
A few minutes later, the night was torn by a piercing shriek, and the firework arced into the sky, trailing a thin stream of smoke. Its whistle faded to silence, and then blossomed into a furious ball of light, a burning phosphorescence that lit the whole hillside.
What they saw terrified them.
The base of the hill was aswarm with troops, frozen in the false sun like a bas-relief. They were draped in tarpaulins of black over their leather armour, disguising their colours, and under that camouflage they had advanced from the camp-fires, crossing in secret a potential killing field where the folk of Zila might have been able to shred them with bowshot and fire-cannon. Beneath the tarpaulins, they looked like a slick-backed horde of grotesque and outsize beetles, creeping insidiously up to the walls of the town, dragging with them mortars and ladders and fire-cannons of their own. The very suddenness of the image was horrifying, like pulling back a bandage to find a wound swarming with maggots.
Perhaps three thousand men were climbing the muddy hill towards Zila.
There was a great clamour as the firework died, both from the town and from the troops below. They cast off their tarpaulins in the last light of the rocket, and tugged them away from the sculpted barrels of the fire-cannons, which were shaped like snarling dogs or screaming demons. Then blackness returned, and they were hidden once again; but Zila was speckled in light, and could not hide.
Alarm bells clanged. Voices cried out orders and warnings. Men scattered dice or bowls of stew as they scrambled to the weapons that they had left carelessly leaning against walls.
Then the fire-cannons opened up.
The darkness at the base of the hill was lit anew with flashes of flame gouting from iron mouths, briefly illuminating the troops as they broke into a charge. Shellshot looped lazily up and over the walls, black orbs leaking chemical fire from cracks in their surfaces as they spun. They crashed through the roofs of houses, shattered in the streets, tore chunks out of buildings. Where they impacted hard enough, they burst and sprayed a jelly which ignited on contact with air. Blazing slicks raced along the cobbled roads of Zila, and the rain was powerless to extinguish them; dark dwellings suddenly brightened from within as their interiors turned to bonfires; howling figures, men and women and children, staggered and flailed as their skin crisped.
The first salvo was devastating. The second was not long in following.
Bakkara was out of his bed before the first screech of the rocket had died, and was strapping on his leather armour when the shellshot hit. Mishani had woken at the same time, but she had not understood what the firework might mean. At the sound of the explosions, however, she was in motion herself. While Bakkara was at the window, throwing open the shutters, she was slipping into her robe and winding her hair in a single massive plait which she knotted at the bottom.
Bakkara cursed foully as he looked down onto the rooftops of Zila, saw the flames already rising.
‘I knew they’d do it like this,’ he grated. ‘Gods damn them! I knew it!’
He turned away from the window to find Mishani putting her sandals on. Ordinarily it took her a long while to make herself ready, but when elegance was not an issue she could do it inside of a minute.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded.
‘With you,’ she said.
‘Woman, this is not a time to be a burden, I warn you.’
The room shook suddenly to a deafening impact, a tremor that made Bakkara stumble and catch hold of a dresser to steady himself. The keep had been struck. A fire-cannon’s artillery would not penetrate walls this thick, but there was a flaming rill left on the keep’s flank that dripped down into the courtyard below.
‘I am not staying here; it is the most prominent target in Zila,’ she said. ‘Go. Do not concern yourself with me. I will keep up.’
She could not have said why she felt the need to accompany him, only that to be wakened in this way had frightened her, and she did not want to be left alone to wonder at what fate might befall the town.
‘No, you’re right,’ Bakkara said, sobering for a moment. ‘I have a safer place to put you.’
Mishani was about to ask what he meant by that, but she did not have the chance. Xejen burst into the room, jabbering frantically. He had evidently been awake, for he was not sleep-mussed and his hair was neat; in her time observing the leader of the Ais Maraxa, Mishani had established that he was a chronic insomniac.
‘What are they doing, what are they doing?’ he cried. He registered Mishani’s presence in the room, then looked at Bakkara with obvious surprise on his face. He had evidently not known that they were sleeping together. ‘Bakkara, what are they—’
‘They’re attacking us, you fool, as I told you they would!’ he shouted. He pushed past Xejen and out of the door. Xejen and Mishani followed him as he hurried through the keep, adjusting his scabbard as he went. Outside, the staccato crack of rifles had begun as the men on the walls organised themselves enough to mount a defence.
‘We were negotiating!’ Xe
jen blustered, running to keep up with Bakkara’s strides. ‘Don’t they care about the hostages? Are they intending to burn an Imperial town to the ground?’
‘If that’s what it takes,’ Bakkara replied grimly.
As a soldier, he was used to the frustration of suffering for a leader’s incompetence, and accepted it. In a chain of command, even if one man thought he knew better than the one above him, he still had to accept his superior’s orders. Bakkara had not, in his heart, thought that the Baraks Zahn tu Ikati and Moshito tu Vinaxis would dare a ploy like this, but he had warned Xejen of the possibility.
Xejen had not heeded him. He believed, as he had always believed, that troops of the Empire would try and wait them out. They would waste time with diplomacy, letting the people become bored and complacent and dispirited, hanging on until the rebels’ morale slipped. Then they would make offers to the people themselves, to try and incite a coup from within. At the very worst, they would assault the walls, and Xejen believed that they could be held back easily from the advantage of high ground. The Empire’s hands were tied to some extent: they would not want to cause any more damage to the town itself than they had to, and the Emperor would not want to kill thousands of Saramyr peasant townsfolk, especially when things were so volatile.
If Xejen knew anything, he knew how to play people, how to inspire them or make them doubt. And he had intended to use the time spent in negotiation to spread the doctrine of the Ais Maraxa, to give the people of Zila something to believe in, a purpose that would keep them unshakable. He had banked on the generals being unenthusiastic about the fight, seeking to preserve their strength for the civil war that was brewing.
Xejen thought only in his own terms, and he assumed – fatally – that everyone else of education thought that way too. After all, sense was sense; surely anyone with a mind could tell that? He had thought it would come to a battle of wills. He was wrong.