Procession
7 Teala 941
'You will allow, sir, that the Annuncet is more than noise: it is music, after a fashion. No two Mzithrini elders sing it quite the same, although I'm told the words are simple: This house is open to men and gods; none need fear it save devils and the devilish; come, and find the good you seek. All very pleasant. Still our sfvantskor guests were loath to part with their blades.'
King Oshiram II, Lord of Simja, chuckled at his own remark. Walking at the royal elbow, at the centre of a vast, ecstatic throng, Eberzam Isiq returned a smile: the most false in his long public life. His heart was pounding, as from battle. He was hot in his wedding regalia – antique woollens, leather epaulettes, otterskin cap with the admiralty star – and the king's chatter grated in his ears. Still the old admiral walked with lowered eyes, measured step. He was an ambassador, now, and an ambassador must show the greatest deference to a king, even the petty king of an upstart island.
'Enlightened policy, Sire,' he heard himself say. 'Simja has nothing to gain by allowing armed and violent men to walk her streets.'
'Nothing,' laughed Oshiram. 'But by that token who can we afford to exclude, hmmm?'
The sun was high over Simja: it was approaching noon. The mob of well-wishers assaulted the king's retinue with their cheers, their spark-flinging firecrackers, their piercing fishbone whistles. Onlookers filled every window, the young men dangling perilous from the balconies. Flightless messenger birds nine feet tall skirted the crowds, grimy boys clinging to their necks. Monks of the Rinfaith droned in harmony with their bells.
They passed under an arch between the port district and the Street of the Coppersmiths. The king pointed out the workshop from which he'd ordered lamps for the ambassadorial residence. Isiq nodded, in agony. The blary fool. Does he think I wish to speak of lamps?
Before the two men walked a vision. His daughter, Thasha, had been at war with lavish clothing since she was old enough to ruin it. She was not a good Arquali girl but a bruising fighter, with a conscript's temper and a grip to make a wrestler wince. And yet here she was: grey-gowned, satin-shoed, cheeks dabbed with powdered amethyst, golden hair twisted up in a braid they called a Babqri love-knot. Exquisite, beautiful, an angel in the flesh: the mob breathed the words after her in a sigh no effort could contain.
Thasha looked straight ahead, back rigid, face quiet and resolved. Isiq's pride in her stabbed him at every glance. You did this. You brought her here. You dared not fight for your child.
A small entourage surrounded Thasha: the personal friends custom allowed her to name. The swordsman, Hercol Stanapeth, her friend and tutor of many years, tall and careworn and matchless in a fight. Mr Fiffengurt, the Chathrand's good-hearted quartermaster, whose stiff walk and one-eyed way of looking at the world ('the other just points where it pleases') reminded the admiral of a fighting cock. And of course the tarboys, Pazel and Neeps.
The two youths, despite vests and silk trousers hastily provided by the king, looked terrible. Ragged, red-eyed, bruised about the face. Pazel Pathkendle, child of vanquished Ormael, gazed out through his straight nut-brown locks with an expression more like a soldier's than that of a boy of sixteen. A searching look, and a sceptical eye. He had turned that sort of look on Isiq at their first meeting, when the admiral found him with Thasha in her cabin, and Pathkendle declared, in so many words, that her father was a war criminal.
At the time the charge had felt outrageous. By tonight it could well be an understatement.
The other tarboy, Neeps Undrabust, fidgeted as he walked. A head shorter than Pathkendle, he glared at the crowds on both sides of the street, as if searching for a hidden enemy. They fear the worst, thought Isiq, but have they lived long enough to withstand it when it comes? For that matter, have I?
They had argued the night away – the tarboys, the admiral, Hercol and Thasha – and yet they'd failed to find a way to save her. Not from a loveless marriage; she would suffer that but briefly. Days, weeks, a fortnight or two. The Mzithrin Kings would need no longer to discover how they had been deceived, and to murder the girl at the deception's heart.
His cravat was too tight. He had dressed without a mirror, repelled by the thought of the face awaiting him there: the face of an imbecile patriot, a blind blunt tool in the kit of Magad V, Emperor of Arqual, and his spymaster Sandor Ott. By the fiends below, I hate myself more than Ott.
The king touched his elbow. 'Are you quite well, Ambassador?'
Isiq drew himself up straight. 'Perfectly, Sire. Forgive me, I confess I was lost in thought.'
'As a father must be at such a time. And I know the matter of your musings.'
'Do you?'
'Of course,' said the king. 'You're pondering what last words of wisdom to bestow upon the child of your flesh. Before another man takes your place, as it were. Do not fear: Simjan custom shall be observed today as well as Mzithrini. On this island fathers and daughters enjoy a private leave-taking. I trust you've understood? It is of course why we make for the Cactus Gardens.'
'I'm aware of your tradition, Majesty, and glad of it.'
'Splendid, splendid. You'll have eleven minutes alone with her. But do wave to my people, won't you, Isiq? They've had no small bother about all this, and see! They've laid down flowers for the Treaty Bride.'
A whole street of flowers, in fact: the last approach to the gardens was buried in blossoms, a thousand yards of yellow scallop-shell blossoms with a honeyed scent, poured two inches deep and bordered with rosewood. Children from the mob had been allowed past the guards and stood with eager handfuls, presumably to toss at the Bride. It seemed a crime to walk on the flowers, but that was clearly the idea.
'Isporelli blossoms, Excellency,' said the king's chamberlain from behind them.
'Are they? Pitfire!'
His little outburst turned heads. Isiq had not seen isporelli in fifteen years, nor wanted to. They were his late wife's favourite.
'You may thank Pacu Lapadolma for this intelligence,' said the king, as they trampled beauty flat. 'She has exchanged letters with our Mistress of Ceremonies for the better part of a year, now, and helped out in many particulars.'
The girl in question walked just behind Thasha's entourage, on the arm of Dr Ignus Chadfallow. Isiq could hardly bear to look at Chadfallow, a favourite of the Emperor and, until yesterday, Isiq's best friend. Better to look at Pacu, lovely Pacu, daughter of a general and niece of the Chathrand 's owner. She was sixteen, like Thasha and the tarboys, and already a widow. She was also Thasha's Maid-in-Waiting. Thasha had once remarked that the girl could as easily have done her 'waiting' back in Etherhorde and spared them months of misery: she and Pacu did not get along.
'She has generosity of spirit,' Isiq had retorted. 'She loves Arqual as passionately as any man in uniform. And she believes in the Great Peace. I heard her say as much to her aunt.'
The Great Peace. He had believed in it too. Desperately, although in secret, for a soldier of Arqual was not expected to waste his energies imagining peace with the enemy he had been trained to destroy. Isiq had been born into a world of chaos and fear. He could not remember a time when the spectre of war, and annihilation should the war go badly, had not hung over his family. Defending Arqual against the Mzithrin, and the numberless small foes and revolutionaries that boiled up from the marshy edges of the Empire, was the noblest life he could have chosen. The only life, by damn. The only choice you could have lived with, once you knew you had it in you. He was a soldier of Arqual, and even if he sat out the rest of his days in the court of this foppish King Oshiram he would never truly be anything else.
Half a century in the service. Half a century of struggle and bloodshed, maimed friends, fatherless children: he saw now that they had all built to this moment. Treaty Day. The Great Peace. Millions were waiting for it to begin.
And it was all a monstrous sham. Peace was the furthest thing from the mind of his Emperor, as Thasha and her friends had grasped before anyone. For chained in the bowels of the Chathrand was a deposed king of the Mzithrin, the Shaggat Ness, a madman who thought himself a god. His twisted version of the Old Faith had seduced a quarter of the Mzithrini people, and inspired a doomed but hideously bloody uprising. When the Mzithrin Kings at last crushed the rebellion, the Shaggat had fled in a ship called the Lythra – right into the jaws of Arqual's own navy.
The Lythra had been blown to matchsticks. But the Shaggat, and his two boys, and his sorcerer: they had been plucked from the waves alive, and whisked off to a secret prison in the heart of Arqual.
He was the most dangerous lunatic in history, east or west. For forty years now the world had thought him safely drowned. And for forty years Arqual's guild of assassins, the Secret Fist, had been infiltrating the Shaggat's worshippers. On Gurishal, the fanatics' war-blighted island of exile, the Secret Fist had stoked their faith, encouraged their martyrdom, assassinated the moderates among them. And above all, it had spread a false prophecy of the Shaggat's return. Those gods-forsaken wretches! They might have abandoned their cult and rejoined the Mzithrin by now, if only we'd let them be!
Instead, the spymaster Sandor Ott had prepared them for a second uprising, even as Arqual and the Mzithrin prepared, with the greatest sincerity, for peace.
If you want a lie to fool your enemy, test it on a friend. The proverb was surely Ott's cardinal rule. Even the highest circles of the Arquali military (of which Isiq was indisputably a part) had been kept ignorant. And the blood-drinking Mzithrinis: they had taken the bait in both hands, as King Oshiram's prattle made clear.
'They've loaded three ships full of presents, Isiq. Sculpture, tapestries, fiddles and flutes, a whole spire from a ruined shrine. A petrified egg. A miraculous talking crow. All for Arqual – the ships as well, mind you. And they're sending artists to paint your Emperor Magad. I gather they're dying to know what he looks like.'
'The world changes swiftly, your Highness,' mumbled Isiq.
'It does not seem very swift to me – one day I will show you the City of Widows – yet I understand you, Isiq, I declare I do. Peace is our destiny, and we who have lived to see these days must rejoice. The future! How welcome it is!'
A few decades without a bloodbath, and he thinks it's for ever. But how could anyone have guessed the sheer, foul audacity of the plan? For the prophecy Ott had spread among the Shaggat's faithful came down to this: that their God-King would return when a Mzithrin prince took the hand of an enemy soldier's daughter. Isiq was that soldier, and Thasha the incendiary bride.
Horror and betrayal: and that was before the sorcerer entered the game.
Isiq waved to the mob, despair gnawing his heart like some ghastly parasite. Who among them would believe, even if he screamed it, that as soon as his daughter took Prince Falmurqat's hand the Great Ship would set sail – not for Etherhorde, as they'd pretend, but for the depths of the Nelluroq, the Ruling Sea, where no other ship left afloat could follow her? That by crossing that chartless monstrosity of ocean, resupplying in the all-but-forgotten lands of the southern hemisphere, and returning far to the west of Gurishal, they would do the impossible – sail around the White Fleet, that impenetrable naval wall, sweep down on Gurishal from the Mzithrinis' blind side, and return the Shaggat to his horde? Preposterous! Unthinkable!
So unthinkable that it could just come to pass.
No, King. Do not welcome the future, do not hasten it. A cracked mirror, that is all it will prove: a desert where we maroon our children, a broken image of the past.
The Cactus Gardens were the pride of Simja. Tended by a guild of botanical fanatics, they stretched over four dry acres in the heart of the city, a patch of earth that had never been built upon. There were cacti tall as trees and small as acorns, cacti that climbed and cacti that wriggled along the ground, cacti disguised as stones, or heavy with armoured fruit, or bristling with six-inch spikes.
At the heart of the garden rose the Old Sentinels: two rows of ugly, blistered, thousand-year-old plants that groped like tortured fingers at the sky. Between them walked Isiq and his daughter, hand in hand, alone. The procession had swept on without them, into the Royal Rose Gardens next door. Their eleven minutes had begun.
'Failed,' said Isiq.
'Stop saying that,' said Thasha, pulling a wayward spike from her gown. 'And pick your feet up when you walk! You never used to shuffle along like a clown.'
'I won't waste these last moments bickering,' he said. 'Nor will I ask you to forgive me. Only to remember, to think of me now and again, should you somehow-'
Thasha put a hand to his lips. 'What a silly ass you are. Why won't you trust me? You know I have a tactical mind.'
Isiq's brow furrowed. Despite his best efforts he had dozed off briefly in the night. One moment he had been seated on a bench in his cabin, his great blue mastiffs snoring at his feet. The next she was kissing him awake, saying that the Templar monks had drawn their boat alongside the Chathrand, waiting for her. A new steadiness had shown in her face, a resolve. It had frightened him.
Now between the monstrous cacti he pressed her hand to his chest.
'If you have devised some plan, you and Hercol and those mad-dog tarboys, it is for you to trust me. Reveal it now. We'll have no other chance to speak.'
Thasha hesitated, then shook her head. 'We tried, last night. You started shouting, remember? You forbade us to speak.'
'Only of madness. Only of running, or fighting our enemies head-on, or other forms of suicide.'
'What if suicide's the answer?' she said, looking at him fiercely. 'No marriage, no prophecy come true. It's better than anything you've come up with.'
'Do not rave at me, Thasha Isiq. You know His Supremacy left me no choice.'
'I'm tired of that excuse,' said Thasha sharply. 'Even today you're saying "no choice," when the most dangerous thing would be to take no risks at all.'
'That is juvenile idiocy. I know what risk is, girl. I have been a soldier three times as long as you've been alive. You have courage, that's something no one denies. But courage is just one of the virtues.'
Thasha heaved a sigh. 'Daddy, this is the last thing-'
'Another is wisdom, rarer and more costly to earn than skill with a blade. And dearer than either of these is honour, which is a sacred trust, and once lost not easily-'
Something changed in Thasha's face. She snatched her hand away and boxed him in the ribs. The blow made a dull clink.
'Ouch! Damn! What's that blary thing in your coat?'
Isiq looked embarrassed. 'Westfirth brandy,' he said.
'Give me some.'
'Out of the question. Listen, girl, we have just-'
'GIVE ME SOME!'
He surrendered the little bronze flask. And the Treaty Bride, head to toe the image of a virgin priestess of old, tilted back her head and drank. After the fourth swallow, quite deliberately, she spat brandy in his face.
'Don't even say the word trust. You sent me away to a school run by hags. Offered me to your Emperor when he snapped his fingers. You brought me halfway round the world to marry a coffin-worshipping blood-drinking Black Rag-'
'For Rin's sake lower your voice!'
'You denied what I told you about Syrarys.'
Isiq closed his eyes. Syrarys, the beautiful consort who had shared his bed for a decade, had been exposed two days ago as Ott's lover and spy. She had made a deathsmoke addict of him. She would have killed him as soon as Thasha wed.
'You laughed when I said the Shaggat Ness was aboard,' said Thasha, 'and that Arunis planned to use him against us. You've watched everything I warned you about come true – and you still think I'm a child.'
With slow dignity, Isiq dried his face with a sleeve.
'I also watched your mother fall through a rotten balustrade. Four stories, onto marble. She'd been waving to me. She reached out as she fell. She was twenty-six, with child again, although we'd told no one. That child would be twelve, now, Thasha. Your little brother or sister.'
He could tell she was shaken. Thasha knew, of course, how her mother had died, that horrid fall from a theatre balcony. But Isiq had never told her he'd witnessed the accident, or that Clorisuela had been pregnant at the time.
'You're all I have left,' he said. 'I can't watch you die before me as she did.'
Thasha looked up at him, tears glistening in her eyes. 'Don't watch,' she said.
Then she raised her gown and swept away down the path. 'Thasha!' he cried, knowing she would not turn around. He huffed after her, cursing his stiff joints, the throbbing in his head that had only worsened since the removal of Syrarys' poison, the red silk shoes he'd consented to wear.
Silk. It was like going out in one's socks – in women's socks. How was it that no one had laughed?
'Come back here, damn it!'
In a heartbeat she would be gone for ever. There were things yet to say. Humility to recover, love somehow to confess.
'Where are you?'
He would confess, too. Before the Mzithrin prince, that irritating king, the whole distinguished mob. Stand before them and declare that the Shaggat lived, that the wedding was a trap, and Arqual ruled by a beast of an Emperor. I am guilty. She is not. Exempt her from this infamy; let it be me whom you punish.
But of course he would do no such thing. For beneath his daughter's gown hung the necklace – his late wife's gorgeous silver necklace. Arunis had put a curse on that silver chain, and had sworn to strangle her there on the marriage dais should anyone interfere with the ceremony. He had demonstrated that power yesterday, though Isiq would never have doubted it. This was, after all, a man who had come back from the dead.
He had been hanged. Everyone agreed on that point: Arunis had been hanged, nine days on the gibbet, and his body chopped into pieces and tossed into the sea. Chadfallow had described the execution in detail; he had been there. Yet through some black magic Arunis had cheated death. For twenty years there had been no hint of him, no rumour. Like Sandor Ott, he had astonishing patience. And only when the spymaster was at last ready to deploy the Shaggat, his master weapon – only then did Arunis suddenly return, and strike.
'Do you hear the horn, Thasha? We have five minutes! Come back!' What fools the sorcerer had made of them all. Under their very noses he had left the Chathrand in Ormael, rendezvoused with Volpek mercenaries, and raided the sunken Lythra. With Pazel's forced assistance, he had retrieved an iron statue known as the Red Wolf. The statue itself was no use to him, but within its enchanted metal was the one thing he needed to make his Shaggat invincible: the Nilstone, scorge of all Alifros, a cursed rock from the world of the dead.
Yesterday, in an unnatural calm, the mage had demonstrated his power to kill Thasha with a word. His advantage proved, he had forced the crew to raise the iron forge to the Chathrand's topdeck, and to stoke a great fire under the Red Wolf. Bit by bit the Wolf had succumbed to the flames. At last, before their eyes, it had melted to bubbling iron.
There had followed an hallucinatory succession of shocks. The Nilstone, revealed. Captain Rose flying like a madman at Arunis; Sergeant Drellarek clubbing him down. The molten iron spilled, men in agony leaping into the sea. The Shaggat bellowing triumph as he grasped the artefact – and death running like a grey flame up his arm: for the Nilstone (as they all learned presently) killed at a touch any with fear in their hearts.
Finally, strangest of all, that instant silence, like the deafness after cannon-fire, and a brief but ghastly dimming of the sun. When Isiq recovered his senses, he saw Pazel with his hand on the Shaggat – on a stone Shaggat, one withered hand still clutching his prize.
It seemed this dusty tarboy was himself steeped in magic: he had a language gift (the little bastard spoke some twenty tongues; Isiq had heard him; he was a walking Carnival of Nations) as well as three powerful spell-words, Master-Words he called them, each of which could be spoken only once. He had used the first yesterday: a word that turned flesh to stone. And in a burst of genius for which Isiq would thank him forever, Pazel had foreseen that if the mad king died, Arunis would slay Thasha the next instant. Before the Nilstone could kill the Shaggat, Pazel had leaped forward and petrified him. Arunis believed he could reverse the spell – and as long as he dreamed of doing so, he had a reason to let Sandor Ott's game of betrayal go forwards.
But the necklace – every scheme for saving Thasha foundered on that necklace. Arunis would kill her if they talked, if he overheard the least rumour of a conspiracy, passing among the guests. And the necklace tightened of its own accord if any hand sought to remove it. I cannot even sacrifice myself for her. I have the courage. And no cause left to live for, witless servant that I have been. I would humble them ere they slew me, if I could but strike'Confound it all!' he thundered. 'Where are you, girl?'
'This way, Daddy.'
He turned a corner and there she was, sipping from his flask again, beside an odd little reflecting pool. No, it was a birdbath. No'Is that… a plant?'
Thasha pointed to a sign at their feet.