M
alden wrapped a loaf of bread in a silken cloth—the loaf a more precious commodity now than the silk—and headed down to the Isle of Horses, intending to thank Coruth. She had saved the city, or at least given it one more day of freedom, and he meant to honor what she’d done.
When he arrived at Eastpool, however, it was to find the water frozen over and all the boats hung upside down and covered in sailcloth for the winter. The only person he could find at the stairs was an old woman who sat by a hole cut through the ice, a fishing pole in her hand.
“No way to get across now, Lord Mayor,” she said, cackling. “Unless you choose to walk.”
Malden stared out across the expanse of ice separating him from Coruth’s island home. It thrummed and sang in the sunlight, while dark water bubbled up from underneath. It looked like it might crack open at any moment.
He steeled himself. “I’m quite light on my feet,” he said.
When he took his first step onto the slick ice, though, he wondered if even he was nimble enough to get across. With each step the frozen pool shifted underneath him and icy water surged up around his leather shoes. He took it slowly, spreading his legs as much as possible to distribute his weight, but before long he heard the ice start to crack. Ahead of him a dark spot appeared as water flooded up from beneath to splash against the thinnest layer of rime, and then that thin ice collapsed into greasy shards.
“Blast,” he said, and turned around to head back. He would have to wait for a colder day. He took a step back toward shore.
And under his foot the ice cracked open, a jagged fissure opening that spread across the surface with a noise like paper being torn.
Malden danced sideways, onto what appeared to be firmer ice—and felt it tilt beneath him, the near end submerging into cold water, the far end lifting up to glint in the sun. He started to slide down into the freezing pool and just managed to jump away before he fell, landing on a more solid floe.
It was a temporary reprieve at best. The islet of ice he’d found refuge on was surrounded by black water on every side. The sun burned down from a pitilessly clear sky and made new jagged cracks appear all around him.
The floe he stood on was not broad enough to hold his weight. A fraction of an inch at a time, it started to sink.
Malden knew how to swim, had in fact learned how in this very water. But he was certain that if he fell in now he would freeze long before he could swim to shore. The water would soak through his heavy cloak and the thick tunic underneath and bog him down. The cold would eat into his bones, make his muscles lock up—
Had he survived so many perils, lived through a barbarian invasion and a deadly siege, only to perish from sheer folly like this? He started cursing his fate.
He stopped, however, when he saw Cythera come out of Coruth’s shack and walk through the snow down to the rocky shore of the Isle of Horses. She waved at him—no, she was simply raising her hands in the air. Her head tilted back and her eyes fluttered closed.
All around him the ice crackled and popped. Malden felt the floe he stood on tilt wildly as new ice pushed up all around it. The surface of Eastpool brightened as long crystals of ice snaked over its ripples, then joined together to form a path of solid ice from where Malden stood directly to the island. He did not waste time wondering at the miracle. Instead he dashed along the path, feet sliding crazily, until he could leap up onto the rocks near where Cythera stood.
She opened her eyes. Instantly the ice behind Malden fell to pieces. She gasped, and looked like she might swoon. Malden got an arm around her waist to hold her up, and Cythera sagged against his chest. She was burning up as if with fever, though he knew it was only the etheric energies she’d conjured, still flowing through her blood and bone. He helped her stagger back toward the shack.
Inside, he handed her the wrapped loaf he’d brought. She stared at it numbly, as if she couldn’t imagine ever eating again. “This is too much,” she said. “People are starving all over Ness, and you bring us a full loaf?” She turned her stare on him. “This must be worth its weight in gold right now. When was the last time you ate anything?”
“I had a handful of oats this morning,” Malden said. “I’m fine. Anyway, your mother deserves a far greater reward than this.”
“Mother . . .” Cythera pressed a hand against her cheek as if she felt faint. “Malden—you should come see her. Tell her that yourself.”
“Gladly,” he said, though there was something in her tone that worried him. She led him into a room at the back of the shack, a room thick with heady smoke from braziers full of burning herbs. The medicinal smells covered up something more sickly, something foul that Malden didn’t want to identify.
A massive canopy bed filled most of the room. Lying on its mattress was Coruth. Or what was left of her.
She looked tiny in the middle of all those blankets. It was strange. Malden had always thought of Coruth as enormous, a towering, looming figure who was always bigger than anyone she spoke to. Thinking back, though, he realized he had always been considerably taller than the witch and much broader through the shoulders. When he tried to understand why he’d always thought her so big, he could only think of his own mother. She’d been a slender woman, and not overly tall, but when he was an infant she seemed a giant. Coruth must have had a similar effect on him.
Now sickness had wasted her body until she was a bare scrap of a thing. Her iron-colored hair was strewn across a pillow and her haughty face was slack with sleep. As he watched, horrified, he saw her turn over on her side and bring one hand up from beneath the sheets. The fingers of that hand had turned to twigs—actual wooden twigs, one of which sprouted a tiny shriveled leaf. Her arm looked more like the branch of a tree than like human flesh.
“Is she . . . ?” Malden asked, unwilling to say the word “dying” in her presence.
“Perhaps,” Cythera told him. “It’s also possible she’ll just transform for a while. When my father imprisoned her, she turned herself into a rowan tree, do you remember?”
Malden nodded. It was how Coruth appeared when he first met her.
“There is something about that form that allows her to heal.” Cythera shook her head. “I’m starting to grasp the concept, but the details are still lost to me. The process of transformation is a simple matter of altering the weave of one’s constituent atomies,” she said, “but how that allows the body to accelerate its natural processes, well . . .”
Malden bit his lip. Cythera was a witch now, just like her mother. Such mysteries were open to her, if she went looking for the answers. To him they would always be obscure.
“This,” he said, gesturing at the woman in the bed, “this is because she overextended herself, am I right?”
Cythera nodded.
“She made an illusion, made it appear we had far more archers than we actually did,” he said, thinking back to what he’d seen the previous night, up on the wall. “That wouldn’t have consumed her so. But then she made the illusory arrows real. Real enough to kill.”
Cythera looked away from him quickly. Malden frowned, wondering why she wouldn’t meet his gaze. He had only been stating a matter of fact. “Did you . . . aid her in casting that spell?” he asked.
“It was a powerful operation,” Cythera confirmed. “A conjuration even a sorcerer would find daunting. It would have destroyed me to even assist her. No—she had to do it herself. She nearly perished.”
“She saved us all,” Malden said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on Coruth’s forehead. Her skin felt waxy and stiff. “The city thanks you. I thank you.”
He nearly jumped off the bed when one of Coruth’s eyes fluttered open. It stared right into him and he felt transfixed, as if her very gaze could pierce him like steel. She tried to whisper something, but he couldn’t make out the words. Leaning close, his ear almost touching her mouth, he heard only a little.
“. . . never too late. Through the heart. Her father . . .”
There were no more words. Coruth’s eye closed again. When Malden sat up, he was shocked to see a tiny brown leaf attached to one greasy lock of iron-colored hair. The effort of speaking must have cost the old witch dearly. Clearly she had been desperate to get some message across.
Sadly, he could make no sense of it at all. Yet another mystery, one he had no time to decipher. He got up to leave. No point in disturbing her rest now. “Can you help me get back to shore?” he asked of Cythera.
The new witch nodded and led him back to the door of the shack. “Malden,” she said when they arrived at the ice. “She knew this would happen. She knew it would take more than she had to aid you. She understood the necessity. I hope you do as well.”
Malden bowed his head. She was explaining why she couldn’t be with him any longer. “I understand that fate plays dice with us all, and rarely do any of us get a natural throw.” He shook his head. “I understand what your mother did, and what it cost her. Her sacrifice moves me in ways I cannot find words to express,” he told her.
“That was her way,” Cythera said. “The witch’s way. We go places other people do not dare, and take risks others cannot countenance, for the good of all. It’s a noble calling, and one I’m proud to have accepted. She saw this would happen, and she made sure I was initiated before she exhausted herself—so that you would still have a witch on your side afterward. I see that now.”
Malden reached for her hand, but she thrust it under her shapeless cloak.
“You need to understand, though,” she went on. “My witchcraft is still slight. I can effect some minor workings. I can harness a few natural energies better than others, but—I couldn’t even begin to do what she did last night. I couldn’t even have created the illusion. Don’t count on me, Malden. Don’t make plans that require powerful magics for success. I’ll help you when and where I can, but it may not be enough.”
“I’d rather have your love than all the sorcery in the books of Redweir. Maybe it’s not too late,” he said. “Maybe . . . maybe you can still give it up. Give up your witchcraft and come be just a woman with me.”
“Oh, if it were so simple,” she said, very quietly. “But could you just be a man, with me?”
“When I’m with you,” Malden said, “that’s all I ever am. Your man.”
She made no reply.
He opened his mouth to speak again, but she had already lifted her hands and tilted her head back. The ice began to firm up just off shore. Malden knew she couldn’t hold it very long. Hardening his heart, he raced for the far side, for the Ditchside Stair and solid ground.
T
he Lemon Garden could no longer hold all the supplicants who wanted a piece of Malden’s precious time—and some of the more devout citizens had begun to object to entering a whorehouse just to make their points heard. Malden took offense at that, but he knew better than to alienate his people by venting his personal feelings on them. So he took over the moothall, a massive stone building in the Spires just off Market Square. Once, the masters of every guild in the city had come there to discuss public policy. Now that the guildmasters were all gone, fled long before the barbarians arrived, it stood empty and its hearths cold.
Velmont built a fire in the enormous fireplace of the main meeting hall, while Malden walked around and around the long oak table, studying the coats of arms hung up by the rafters. The guilds those heraldic symbols belonged to had built Ness, and made it free, even more than Juring Tarness—it had been the money they accumulated that gave Ness its power. Many, many times in its history the kings of Skrae had tried to tax the city, or to enslave its population despite its charter. Always they’d been bought off with tributes and fat bribes. Ness had bought its safety and its freedom with money earned by hard work and shrewd dealings.
That was the official story anyway. It ignored the fact that since the beginning of the guild system the actual workers—the laborers, the unskilled and the eternally apprenticed—had been exploited and ruthlessly kept down, all so the merchants who sat in this hall could squeeze out another farthing from their misery.
“I was downstairs in the cellar, earlier,” Velmont said when his fire was blazing cheerfully away and the room began to warm up. “They got some flash regalia down there. Guild symbols all in gold, and enow ermine and sable to make a menagerie.”
Malden nodded. “They had a grand procession every year. They would trot out the symbols of their mysteries—ornamental tools, ceremonial robes and hats and the like. Basically a way to celebrate their own importance.”
“I was just wonderin’,” Velmont said, a sly look in his eye.
Malden sighed. He knew what Velmont was asking for. For the first time a stab of conscience struck him. The regalia down there was steeped in mystery and tradition—it was part of Ness’s folk heritage, and now Velmont wanted to plunder it? How dare he?
Malden, once called Malden the Thief, could only laugh at himself. How far he had come. There had been a time when he would have tricked Velmont just so he could get first dibs at the stuff.
Now he could only think of how to use the regalia to firm his grasp on his people. “Get a team of thieves down here. Pick the ones who are the best archers, and the most loyal. Cart it all away, but be quiet about it.” The thieves had begun to grumble again, now that there was very little left in the city worth stealing. They were happy to serve Malden as Lord Mayor, they said, but if he was also going to be the guildmaster of thieves, he needed to line their pockets. He knew he could not afford to lose their favor, not when they still represented the best pool of able-bodied men under his command.
The whores, conversely, had never complained once. It seemed that they got what they truly wanted—recognition as full citizens, a little respect—just by being associated with him. He could count on Elody and Herwig and the other madams, at least.
Of the honest folk, who made up ninety percent of his constituents, he could be neither sure nor comfortable he knew how to appease them, and that worried him. If Cutbill was right and the siege was about to come to a head—and he had no reason to doubt it—then now was the time he had to solidify his power. Now was when he had to make common cause with his people, so when he asked them to fight—and die—for him, they would not hesitate.
For nearly a week he had refused to meet with any civic group, because he’d had more important things to worry about than their petty concerns. If they were starving, or terrified by the bombardment, or just desperate for recognition, he’d had no time for their feelings. Now, his neglect was starting to feel like a mistake. Perhaps they would not have turned so maniacally toward the Bloodgod and supernatural aid if they thought they had their Lord Mayor’s ear.
That day, he was in a mood to give them anything they wanted. As long as it didn’t mean losing the city in the process.
Velmont ran out just as the first supplicants started filing in. Malden recognized them at once, though they’d changed their clothes. They were dressed in scarlet and crimson now, with even their leather dyed burgundy.
The self-ordained priests of the Bloodgod. Perhaps the worst of his enemies, he thought. At least he knew where he stood with the barbarians.
There were three of them. Thin, wild-eyed men with shaggy hair and beards. He could barely tell them apart. Only one of them spoke, which meant he didn’t need to remember three names.
“Hargrove, is it?” Malden asked, falling down into a chair at the head of the table. He threw one leg over the arm of the chair and studied his nails. “I’ll ask you to be plain and not waste much of my time. I have a war to fight, you know.”
Hargrove scowled and made a complicated gesture before his face. Most likely some exhortation to Sadu. “Milord, we have not come here to condemn you, nor to censure you. You are His chosen instrument in this world,” he said. “That much has been made plain to us. Yet questions do remain.”
Malden rolled his eyes. “Of what sort?”
“Lord Mayor, you’ve never shown any sign of true piety. At least not since you resanctified the Godstone. You don’t come to our services. You’ve made no sacrifice since then. The people wish to know you believe as they do.”
“The people would be better occupied helping me break this siege,” Malden said.
“But that is exactly the point! The barbarians cannot be repelled by strength of arms. Not any such strength as we possess. Our only chance of turning them away is through divine assistance.”
“Mmm. My mother was a good woman,” Malden said.
Hargrove’s face crawled all over itself. It was known everywhere, of course, that Malden’s mother had been a whore. “May I inquire what that has to do with—”
“It was she who taught me about religion. About Sadu.”
All three priests lowered their heads at the mention of the Bloodgod’s name. They clasped their hands together and said something quick and formulaic.
“At that time the Bloodgod had no priests, nor any church in the city. Yet people still worshipped Him in their hearts. They kept that flame alive, no matter what the Burgraves did to try to snuff it out. My mother taught me that was all that was necessary. That we thank Him every day for the justice He brings to this world—the only kind of justice the impoverished will ever see.”
“Things have changed,” Hargrove said. “Now we have a better way to approach Him. A more effective method of beseeching His aid.”
Malden nodded. He knew what this was really about. “A more visible, more—pragmatic way. A way to show our faith in public, and to share it with each other.”
Hargrove actually smiled. “Exactly! A living church, for the first time in centuries. But that church cannot exist on private faith alone. If you were to make an appearance at one of our services, or—”
“Or if I were to grant you some kind of official commission?” Malden asked.
“Well, ah, that would be most useful in bringing the fire of belief to those not as—as firm in their faith, here in Ness.”
“Very good. Let’s see. The first time you came to me, you asked to be allowed to distribute the city’s food supply.”
“It was always the province of the church to do so, in olden days. Grain was gathered by the church in autumn, and portioned out over the winter by the priests. It was the only way to make sure the poor received enough to eat. This tradition of charity kept Ness alive through many a hard winter.”
“None so hard as this one,” Malden said. “Well, far be it from me to stand in the way of charity and compassion.” Or graft, he thought, or hoarding, or making sure the priests get to eat first, before all those less righteous people who come demanding a bit of bread to keep their families alive. “I’m of a mind to give you exactly what you want. In exchange, I wish only your blessing—and that you not question my piety anymore.”
“I can assure you,” Hargrove said, bowing low, “such questions have fled altogether from our minds.”
Malden saw the priests out of the moothall. He found Velmont standing by the door, having already rounded up enough thieves to clear out the cellars.
Malden waved the others on, toward the regalia in the cellars, but he grabbed Velmont’s sleeve as the others filed cheerfully in. “How much of my audience did you hear?” he asked the Helstrovian thief. “Did you hear what the priests asked for?”
“I heard you givin’ ’em what they hankered for this whole time, e’en after you turned ’em down before.” Velmont looked confused.
“Ah, but back then there was an actual stock of food to be considered. How much is left now?”
“A mite,” Velmont confessed. “A few days, if everyone sticks to one meal a day, and a paltry one at that. What kind o’ fool gives up his last crust o’ bread to folk that’d spit on his shadow?”
“The kind who doesn’t want to be in charge of foodstuffs tomorrow. Tomorrow, when there is no more. When the bread runs out, the starving people will have to ask the priests for food, not me. I’ll be able to say I gave over responsibility for that to the most trustworthy men in Ness. Furthermore, there may be a few head of livestock still tucked away somewhere. How likely are the priests to waste those animals in sacrifices, if they know they’ll have no other source of meat?”
Velmont laughed, long and loud. “Ye’re gettin’ good at this, boss.”
“I’ve had a good teacher,” Malden told him. “All right, send in the next beggar who wants something I can’t afford to give away. I’m ready.” He went back to perching himself on a carved wooden chair, one leg over its arm in a pose of carefully studied insouciance. The image he presented was half his power. Cutbill had taught him that, too.