The Rose of the World (12 page)

After an unknowable amount of time, she found that her bleary vision was fixed on something glinting obscurely in the dirt. She bent down, glad to have something to distract her from her misery, even if it was only a pebble washed clean by her tears.

But it wasn’t just a pebble. With growing certainty, Alisha reached out to the object. She brushed the remaining mud away from its surface, then jerked her fingers back as if bitten.

The object gleamed at her, pearly and malevolent, full of light.

It was the deathstone.

She had known it from the first moment she had glimpsed it; had known it in her bones, rather than in her head. Her fingers still buzzed and burned from the split-second’s contact. Unconsciously, she brought her hand up to her mouth, pressed the pads of her fingers against lips which moved in sudden, silent prayer to a goddess she had been ready moments earlier to renounce. Then, knowing that she was making an irrevocable decision, she reached down and grabbed up the pendant. It swung from its dirt-crusted leather thong, its opalescence absorbing every iota of light there was to be had from the dull day and giving it back to the world threefold. Alisha gazed at it, mesmerised as much by its deadly beauty as by the slow pendulum of its arcing movement from the nadir of the string. This was the stone which had been touched by Falla herself, inanimate crystal charged with Elda’s own power: an object which could suck the life out of any breathing creature with the merest touch.

She frowned. Then why had she herself not expired when she had wiped it clean?

Not caring whether she lived or died, but possessed by a reckless curiosity, she let the stone swing lightly against the skin of her other palm.

Nothing. Or rather, nothing but a gentle warmth like a ray of sunlight. She shut her eyes and focused on the sensation, letting it grow and take shape, letting it infuse her skin, then the muscles and bones of that hand, then radiate up into her arm and shoulder, her neck; the cavern of her skull. Mindlessly, the fingers of her free hand closed tightly over the moodstone. She felt it throb against her palm like a second heart. It was oddly soothing, as if she were surrendering her life to the stone, giving over all responsibility and decision to it. Volitionlessly, she began to move.

From somewhere distant to her actions, she was aware of kneeling by the sorcerer’s corpse, of laying hands on that disturbingly chalky flesh; then there was darkness and confusion. Chaos consumed her. Voices sounded in her head.

Out of me . . . get out of me
. . .

Let me go . . .

I did not ask for this . . .

The Goddess, the Goddess . . .

What is happening?

Who is calling me? Who are you?

No
—

I cannot help it. It is not me.

Who then?

She
—
Aaaaahhh—!

Convulsively, Alisha Skylark flung the deathstone away from her and sat in the mud, breathing hard. She was too afraid to open her eyes. Then a hand touched her face, and someone spoke her name . . .

Saro Vingo had plumbed the depths of human despair on a number of occasions, but none more so than as he bumped his way through the scrubby wasteland bordering the Eternal City of Jetra, bound hand and foot and slung face-down over a soldier’s pack animal. Considering the apocalyptic nature of what he had previously experienced, the smell of a sweating horse and the hot-and-cold waves of nausea caused by its incessant swaying should have registered as mere nuisance; but Saro had never felt so dreadful in all his life. Trying to take his mind off his current predicament, as scalding bile rose in his throat yet again, he recalled the self-disgust he had felt when he knew himself responsible for the deaths of innocent men at the Allfair; when being forced to take care of his loathsome brother after Tanto had been returned so unexpectedly and undeservedly to consciousness; when the full extent of the gift of empathy old Hiron the moodstone-seller had bestowed upon him had been revealed in all its aweful glory; when he had been visited by the appalling vision of Tycho Issian’s ambitions; and when, on a smaller but far more personal and poignant level, such death and destruction had been brought home to him by the sight of Falo, Alisha’s son, lying lifeless and mutilated, his hacked-off arm still clutching his grandmother’s stick. And all because of him, and Virelai; and the greed of a band of militiamen. But now those very soldiers and his sole surviving friends were lying dead and he himself had been captured yet again by soldiers who had ambushed his initial captors. All for money. All for power.

At least they won’t get the deathstone
, he thought savagely.

And they won’t have Virelai.

He tried to push the image of that macabre, caved-in skull away into some recess of his mind, but it kept coming back to him in ever-increasing detail. He now recalled how the skin had been puckered all around the point of impact, how the interior of the wound, a great crater of a thing, had looked so pale and lifeless, as if every drop of his blood had to be absorbed by the thankless earth. How the white of bone had showed through the dead grey flesh.

He was still thinking about the odd chalky nature of the flesh revealed by his friend’s wound as they reached the shores of the great lake and began to traverse the narrow causeway which led to its towering rose-red walls of carved sandstone; he was gripped by images of death as they passed beneath the chilly shadow of the city’s arched southern gate, where the stone had been leached away by the elements like flesh eaten into by a leprous plague; he was wrapped around by thoughts of mortality when they rode through dank passages fringed with black weed and noxious scale gleaming at the lapping waterline, through tunnels in which the horses’ hooves echoed as loudly as the clang of weapons. As they turned a tight corner, one of the soldiers began to swear at another for bringing them in via the Misery – or this was what it sounded like to Saro’s distressed ears, though the man’s voice reverberated off the low ceiling and narrow walls like a blaring horn.

‘That’s what he said to do,’ the first man protested.

‘Who? The Lord of Cantara paid us to bring him to Jetra, to his state room; not down here. No one told me anything about this.’ He sounded thoroughly aggrieved.

‘Not him, the master’s new friend,’ the first soldier returned belligerently. ‘Caught me as we were leaving . . .’

Saro’s heart stopped. His ears strained to hear the rest; and he could tell from the sudden quiet of the rest of the troop that others were listening, too.

‘Stop talking in riddles, Tosco!’

The other man sighed melodramatically. Then he reached into his pouch and brought out a small roll of parchment, opened it with a maladroit fumble and read slowly. ‘“The old cells” something, something – I can’t quite read it, but look, see here: “the Miseria”. Says so quite clearly.’

‘No one in his right mind comes down here: it’s full of ghasts and demons . . .’

‘Who said anything about him being in his right mind?’

Saro didn’t catch the next bit of the exchange because at that moment the nag he had been bundled on like so much baggage rammed itself into the wall so hard that he had to put a hand out to prevent his skull from being mashed. At once he was assailed by a terrible stench – if he had thought the smell of a sweating horse was bad, then this was infinitely worse – a sickly aroma of blood and vomit and shit all combined with a sharp and lasting after-scent of terror and pain. As the impact of the smell passed off, there came a new assault on his senses. Dark shapes all around, flickering torchlight, shouts and screams, disembodied at first, then closer and closer until they seemed to be inside his own head. They
were
inside his own head, he realised suddenly – and he was being dragged, toes scuffing against the slippery and uneven cobbles, by two huge men, their heads swathed by masks, their boots sloshing through unnameable substances streaming along the gutters on either side of the passageway. Everything hurt. The socket of his left arm raged with fire: and then he remembered how they had hung him by one wrist from a chain suspended from the ceiling and beaten him with sticks and chains, with their hands and their boots till he swung and spun wildly across the gore-streaked chamber. And he remembered how they had laughed when several of his teeth had sprayed out of his mouth and skittered across the stone floor; how they had reviled him and beaten him harder when he had pissed himself and one of them had caught some of that weak and bloody stream on his tunic.

And then the devil had come, that softly spoken man with the sharp features, the expressive brown eyes; how he had commanded the men in a rebuking tone to take him down and stop their torture; the blessed relief as his weight came off his ruined arm, the welcome cold stillness of the stone floor. He remembered being taken into a room with a carpet, a chair, an ornately carved desk; how the brown-eyed man had offered him wine which had burned his ravaged gums; and how he had begun to talk and talk and talk as if he could never stop – ridiculous, inconsequential nonsense about his childhood and Ravenna’s hair – and the man had listened patiently with his fingers steepled and his head nodding, nodding his encouragement, and only later, much later, had he spoken about his wife’s brother’s secret temple; how the slaughter-goats had danced and shrieked; how they had prayed and drunk a saltwater toast to the old god. And then the softly spoken man had pressed him for more detail, and more detail he had given him: more and more and more, like a well head unstoppered.

The next thing he knew, he was in his cell, unable to get comfortable: not because of the ever-flaming hurt to his shoulder and arm, but from some irritation beneath his right haunch. Further investigation had for long minutes seemed too exhausting, but the annoyance plagued him beyond endurance and at last he had been forced to address it. Reaching down, he had eased his hip away from the plank of his cell’s hard bed and found – not a stone or a knot in the wood, but one of his own molars embedded in his flesh, where he had dropped down onto it from the chain. And then he had begun to cry and cry, ashamed for his weakness, for his broken body, for betraying his entire family to the Goddess’s wicked priests and thus condemning them to the fires. He was weeping still as they dragged him down the long, stinking passageway to the death he knew awaited him – out in the city’s arena at the pyres where he would surely find his wife, her brother, his children, his friends and neighbours all bound to their stakes before being consigned to Falla’s flames.

This time, the nausea was unstoppable. Vomit burst out of Saro’s mouth and down the flank of the horse, spattered onto the decaying stonework, where his stomach’s acids would surely react with the excoriating air and bring yet more rot to this damned and evil place, replete with its tortured ghosts and traumatised memories, with the violence and fanaticism which had made Jetra the great rotten heart of the Southern Empire, its foul reality belied by the grace and serenity of its towering minarets, its crenellated walls, its age-old carvings.

They turned another dark corner, then rough hands grabbed Saro and, swearing at the mess he had made, threw him down onto the floor. He hit the polished stone hard and threw out a hand to save his head.

Death and stink. A man being gutted while another sat watching, taking notes.

Saro groaned in agony and rolled away, fetching up beside a wall rank with dripping water. The wall told him other stories: a woman raped by guards when she brought bread and ham for her imprisoned husband; a Footloose man bleeding slowly to death from a stab-wound to the groin; terrified nomad children listening to the screams of their loved ones in the cells beyond; a thousand untimely, undeserved deaths.

Silently, Saro Vingo began to cry. He was crying still when a familiar voice hailed him.

‘The wanderer returns!’

Saro’s head came up with a snap. Even though he knew what to expect, the reality was still a shock. His brother, Tanto Vingo, loomed over him, as repulsively bloated and moonlike as he remembered; but dressed now in the most tasteless opulence that Jetra’s ostentatious tailors could provide. His tunic – a confection of rose and purple watered silk, worn over contrasting hose in luminescent green – was wrapped around with great swags of leather and worked metal, though you could hardly call it ‘belted’, since there was nothing to distinguish the region above from that below the cinctures. A boned collar in lurid, striated purple stood straight up from his shoulders like the angry threat-display of some vast frilled lizard. Massive rings of silver studded with jewels weighed down every finger and a great amethyst caged in silver drew down the lobe of Tanto’s left ear so that the jewel swung pendulously just above his shoulder. His bald head shone with sweat although he had obviously expended no effort in getting here, a fact attested to by the presence of two richly dressed servants with dark circles staining their otherwise immaculate silk livery who must have carried his wheeled chair to this dank and steamy place.

The soldiers who had risked their lives bringing him here waited in the shadows, watching silently.

When Tanto smiled at him in a horrible parody of welcome, Saro noted with a certain satisfaction that his brother had lost yet another tooth from those rotting gums since the last time he had seen him. He stared down at the slimy floor again, since doing so was infinitely preferable to looking at that mocking, predatory grin.

Annoyed that his captive was not being suitably appreciative of his new finery and status, or rising to the bait, Tanto shot out a hand and grabbed Saro by the chin, wrenching his head upright. At the sight of his tear-streaked face, Tanto leered delightedly. ‘Weeping for your lost freedom, eh, brother? Or for fear of what may now befall you?’

Saro held his gaze determinedly, jaws clamped rigid, and said nothing, although fleeting glimpses of Tanto’s recent vile excesses flickered in rapid succession through his head.

Tanto quirked an eyebrow.‘Not speaking to me? How rude. To leave without even a farewell, too: not very brotherly, brother. Our poor father was so beside himself at the thought of his youngest son disgracing our family – such cowardice and ingratitude, to desert from the glorious position in the army that Lord Tycho bestowed upon you and flee from the castle in the middle of the night, like the sneak-thief you are –’ he wagged a finger chidingly in Saro’s face – ‘having stolen his finest horse, the one he had promised to the Lord of Forent, who is, by the way, also much displeased – that he renounced all his standing, and has pledged himself to the cause, joining the army as a rankless man.’