Last Argument of Kings (64 page)

“Urgggh,” breathed the twin on the left. Jezal realised that blood was spurting out from under her armour. She lifted one hand towards him and it dropped off the end of her arm and thudded to the tiles, blood squirting from the smoothly severed stump. She toppled to the left. Or her body did, at least. Her legs fell the other way. The bigger part of her crashed to the ground, and her head came off and rolled across the tiles in a widening pool. Her hair, trimmed off cleanly at the neck, fluttered down into the bloody mess in a golden cloud.

Armour, flesh, bone, all divided into neat sections as perfectly as cheese by a cheese wire. The twin on the right frowned, took a wobbling step towards Marovia. Her knees gave out and she fell in half at the waist. The legs slumped down and lay still, dust sliding out in a brown heap. The top half dragged itself forward by the nails, lifted its head, hissing.

The air around the High Justice shimmered and the Eater’s severed body burst into flames. It thrashed, for a while, making a long squealing sound. Then it was still, a mass of smoking black ash.

Marovia lifted up the strange weapon, whistling softly as he smiled at the hook on the end, a last few traces of vapour still drifting from it. “Kanedias. He certainly knew how to make a weapon. The Master Maker indeed, eh, your Majesty?”

“What?” muttered Jezal, utterly dumbfounded.

Marovia’s face melted slowly away as he crossed the floor towards them. Another began to show itself beneath. Only his eyes remained the same. Different-coloured eyes, happy lines around the corners, grinning at Jezal like an old friend.

Yoru Sulfur bowed. “Never any peace, eh, your Majesty? Never the slightest peace.”

There was a crash as one of the doors burst open. Jezal raised his sword, heart in his mouth. Sulfur whipped round, the Maker’s weapon held down by his side. A man stumbled into the room. A big man, his grimacing face covered in scars, his chest heaving, a heavy sword hanging from one hand, the other clutched to his ribs.

Jezal blinked, hardly able to believe it. “Logen Ninefingers. How the hell did you get here?”

The Northman stared for a moment. Then he leaned back against a mirror by the door, let his sword drop to the tiles. He slid down, slowly, until he hit the floor, and sat there with his head leaning back against the glass. “Long story,” he said.

“Listen to us…”

The wind was full of shapes, now. Hundreds of them. They crowded in around the outermost circle, the bright iron turned misty, gleaming with cold wet.

“…we have things to tell you, Ferro…”

“Secrets…”

“What can we give you?”

“We know… everything.”

“You need only let us in…”

So many voices. She heard Aruf among them, her old teacher. She heard Susman the slaver. She heard her mother and her father. She heard Yulwei, and Prince Uthman. A hundred voices. A thousand. Voices she knew and had forgotten. Voices of the dead and of the living. Shouts, mutters, screams. Whispers, in her ear. Closer still. Closer than her own thoughts.

“You want vengeance?”

“We can give you vengeance.”

“Like nothing you have dreamed of.”

“All you want. All you need.”

“Only let us in…”

“That empty space in you?”

“We are what is missing!”

The metal rings had turned white with frost. Ferro kneeled at one end of a dizzying tunnel, its walls made from rushing, roaring, furious matter, full of shadows, its end far beyond the dark sky. The laughter of the First of the Magi echoed faintly in her ears. The air hummed with power, twisted, shimmered, blurred.

“You need do nothing.”

“Bayaz.”

“He will do it.”

“Fool!”

“Liar!”

“Let us in…”

“He cannot understand.”

“He uses you!”

“He laughs.”

“But not for long.”

“The gates strain.”

“Let us in…”

If Bayaz heard the voices he gave no sign. Cracks ran through the quivering paving, branching out from his feet, splinters floating up around him in whirling spirals. The iron rings began to shift, to buckle. With a grinding of tortured metal they twisted out from the crumbling stones, bright edges shining.

“The seals break.”

“Eleven wards.”

“And eleven wards reversed.”

“The doors open.”

“Yes,” came the voices, speaking together.

The shadows crowded in closer. Ferro’s breath came short and fast, her teeth rattled, her limbs trembled, the cold was on her very heart. She knelt at a precipice, bottomless, limitless, full of shadows, full of voices.

“Soon we will be with you.”

“Very soon.”

“The time is upon us.”

“Both sides of the divide, joined.”

“As they were meant to be.”

“Before Euz spoke his First Law.”

“Let us in…”

She needed only to cling to the Seed a moment longer. Then the voices would give her vengeance. Bayaz was a liar, she had known it from the start. She owed him nothing. Her eyelids flickered, closed, her mouth hung open. The noise of the wind grew fainter yet, until she could hear only the voices.

Whispering, soothing, righteous.

“We will take the world and make it right.”

“Together.”

“Let us in…”

“You will help us.”

“You will free us.”

“You can trust us.”

“Trust us…”

Trust?

A word that only liars used. Ferro remembered the wreckage of Aulcus. The hollow ruins, the blasted mud. The creatures of the Other Side are made of lies. Better to have an empty space in her, than to fill it with this. She wedged her tongue between her teeth and bit down hard, felt her mouth fill up with salty blood. She sucked in breath, forced her eyes open.

“Trust us…”

“Let us in!”

She saw the Maker’s box, a shifting, swimming outline. She bent down over it, digging at it with her numb fingertips while the air lashed at her. She would be no one’s slave. Not for Bayaz, not for the Tellers of Secrets. She would find her own path. A dark one, perhaps, but her own.

The lid swung open.

“No.” The voices hissed together in her ear.

“No!”

Ferro ground her bloody teeth, growled with fury as she forced her fingers to unclench. The world was a melting, screaming, formless mass of darkness. Gradually, gradually, her dead hand came open. Here was her revenge. Against the liars, the users, the thieves. The earth shook, crumbled, tore, as thin and fragile as a sheet of glass, and with an empty void beneath it. She turned her trembling hand and the Seed dropped from her palm.

All as one, the voices screamed their harsh command. “
No!”

She blindly seized hold of the lid. “Fuck yourselves!” she hissed.

And with her last grain of strength she forced the box closed.

After the Rains

Logen leaned on the parapet, high up on a tower at one side of the palace, and frowned into the wind. He’d done the same, it felt an age ago now, from the top of the Tower of Chains. He’d stared out dumbstruck at the endless city, wondering if he could ever have dreamed of a man-made thing so proud, and beautiful, and indestructible as the Agriont.

By the dead, how times change.

The green space of the park was scattered with fallen rubbish, trees broken, grass gouged, half the lake leaked away and sunken to a muddy bog. At its western edge a sweep of fine white buildings still stood, even if the windows gaped empty. Further west, and they had no roofs, bare rafters hanging. Further still their walls were torn and scoured, empty shells, choked with rubble.

Beyond that, there was nothing. The great hall with the golden dome, gone. The square where Logen had watched the sword-game, gone. The Tower of Chains, the mighty wall under it, and all the grand buildings over which Logen had fled with Ferro. All gone.

A colossal circle of destruction was carved from the western end of the Agriont, and only acres of formless wreckage remained. The city beyond was torn with black scars, smoke still rising from a few last fires, from smouldering hulks still drifting in the bay. The House of the Maker loomed over the scene, a sharp black mass under the brooding clouds, uncaring and untouched.

Logen stood there, scratching at the scarred side of his face, over and over. His wounds ached. So many of them. Every part of him was battered and bruised, slashed and torn. From the fight with the Eater, from the battle beyond the moat, from the duel with the Feared, from seven days of slaughter in the High Places. From a hundred fights, and skirmishes, and old campaigns. Too many to remember. So tired, and sore, and sick.

He frowned down at his hands on the parapet in front of him. The bare stone looked back where his middle finger used to be. He was Ninefingers still. The Bloody-Nine. A man made of death, just as Bethod had said. He’d nearly killed the Dogman yesterday, he knew it. His oldest friend. His only friend. He’d raised the sword, and if it wasn’t for a trick of fate, he would have done it.

He remembered standing high up, on the side of the Great Northern library, looking out over the empty valley, the still lake like a great mirror beneath it. He remembered feeling the wind on his fresh-shaved jaw, and wondering whether a man could change.

Now he knew the answer.

“Master Ninefingers!”

Logen turned quickly, hissed through his teeth as the stitches down his side burned. The First of the Magi stepped through the doorway and out into the open air. He was changed, somehow. He looked young. Younger even than when Logen first met him. There was a sharpness to his movements, a gleam in his eye. It even seemed that there were a few dark hairs in the grey beard round his friendly grin. The first smile Logen had seen in a good while.

“You are hurt?” he asked.

Logen sucked sourly at his teeth. “Hardly the first time.”

“And yet it gets no easier.” Bayaz placed his meaty fists on the stone next to Logen’s and stared out happily at the view. Just as if it was a field of flowers instead of a sweep of epic ruin. “I hardly expected to see you again so soon. And to see you so very far advanced. I understand that your feud is over. You defeated Bethod. Threw him from his own walls, the way I heard it. A nice touch. Always thinking of the song they will sing, eh? And then you took his place. The Bloody-Nine, King of the Northmen! Imagine that.”

Logen frowned. “That wasn’t how it happened.”

“Details. The result is the same, is it not? Peace in the North, at last? Either way, I congratulate you.”

“Bethod had a few things to say.”

“Did he?” asked Bayaz, carelessly. “I always found his conversation rather drab. All about himself, his plans, his achievements. It is so very tiresome when men think never of others. Poor manners.”

“He said you’re the reason why he didn’t kill me. That you bargained for my life.”

“True, I must confess. He owed me, and you were the price I demanded. I like to keep one eye on the future. Even then, I knew I might have need of a man who could speak to the spirits. It was an unexpected bonus that you turned out to be such a winning travelling companion.”

Logen found he was talking through gritted teeth. “Would have been nice to know is all.”

“You never asked, Master Ninefingers. You did not want to know my plans, as I recall, and I did not want to make you feel indebted. ‘I saved your life once’ would have been a poor start to our friendship.”

All reasonable enough, like everything Bayaz ever said, but it left a sour taste still, to have been traded like a hog. “Where’s Quai? I’d like to—”

“Dead.” Bayaz pronounced the word smartly, sharp as a knife thrust. “We feel his loss most keenly.”

“Back to the mud, eh?” Logen remembered the effort he’d made to save that man’s life. The miles he’d slogged through the rain, trying to do the right thing. All wasted. Perhaps he should’ve felt more. But it was hard with so much death spread out in front of him. Logen was numb, now. Either that, or he really didn’t care a shit. It was hard to say which.

“Back to the mud,” he muttered again. “You carry on, though, don’t you.”

“Of course.”

“That’s the task that comes with surviving. You remember them, you say some words, then you carry on, and hope for better.”

“Indeed.”

“You have to be realistic about these things.”

“True.”

Logen worked at his sore side with one hand, trying to make himself feel something. But a scrap of extra pain helped no one. “I lost a friend yesterday.”

“It was a bloody day. But a victorious one.”

“Oh aye? For who?” He could see people moving among the ruins, insects picking at the rubble, searching for survivors and finding the dead. He doubted many of them were feeling the flush of victory right now. He knew he wasn’t. “I should be with my own kind,” he muttered, but without moving. “Helping with the burying. Helping with the wounded.”

“And yet you are here, looking down.” Bayaz’ green eyes were hard as stones. That hardness that Logen had noticed from the very start, and had somehow forgotten. Somehow grown to overlook. “I entirely understand your feelings. Healing is for the young. As one gets older, one finds one has less and less patience with the wounded.” He raised his eyebrows as he turned back towards the horrible view. “I am very old.”

He lifted his fist to knock, then paused, fingers rubbing nervously against his palm.

He remembered the sour-sweet smell of her, the strength of her hands, the shape of her frown in the firelight. He remembered the warmth of her, pressed up close to him in the night. He knew there had been something good between them, even if all the words they had said had been hard. Some people don’t have soft words in them, however much they try. He didn’t hold much hope, of course. A man like him was better off without it. But you get nothing out if you put nothing in.

So Logen gritted his teeth and knocked. No reply. He chewed at his lip, and knocked again. Nothing. He frowned, twitchy and suddenly out of patience, wrenched the knob round and shoved the door open.

Ferro spun about. Her clothes were rumpled and dirty, even more than usual. Her eyes were wide, wild even, her fists clenched. But her face quickly fell when she saw it was him, and his heart sank with it.

“It’s me, Logen.”

“Uh,” she grunted. She jerked her head sideways, frowning at the window. She took a couple of steps towards it, eyes narrowed. Then she snapped round suddenly the other way. “There!”

“What?” muttered Logen, baffled.

“Do you not hear them?”

“Hear what?”

“Them, idiot!” She crept over to one wall and pressed herself up against it.

Logen hadn’t been sure how it would go. You could never be sure of anything with her, he knew that. But he hadn’t been expecting this. Just plough ahead, he reckoned. What else could he do?

“I’m a king, now.” He snorted. “King of the Northmen, would you believe it?” He was thinking she’d laugh in his face, but she just stood, listening to the wall. “Me and Luthar, both. A pair of kings. Can you think of two more worthless bastards to put crowns on, eh?” No answer.

Logen licked his lips. No choice but to get straight to it, maybe. “Ferro. The way things turned out. The way we… left it.” He took a step towards her, and another. “I wish I hadn’t… I don’t know…” He put one hand on her shoulder. “Ferro, I’m trying to tell you—”

She turned, quickly, plastered her hand over his mouth. “Shhhhh.” She grabbed his shirt and pulled him down, down onto his knees. She pressed her ear against the tiles, eyes moving back and forward as if she was listening for something. “Do you hear that?” She let go of him and pushed herself into the corner. “There! Do you hear them?”

He reached out, slowly, and touched the back of her neck, ran his rough fingertips over her skin. She shook him off with a jerk of her shoulders, and he felt his face twist. Perhaps that good thing between them had been only in his mind, and never in hers. Perhaps he had wanted it so badly that he had let himself imagine it.

He stood up, cleared his dry throat. “Never mind. I’ll come back later, maybe.” She was still on her knees, her head against the floor. She did not even watch him leave.

Logen Ninefingers was no stranger to death. He’d walked among it all his days. He’d watched the bodies burned by the score after the battle at Carleon, long ago. He’d seen them buried by the hundred up in the nameless valley in the High Places. He’d walked on a hill of men’s bones under ruined Aulcus.

But even the Bloody-Nine, even the most feared man in the North, had never looked on anything like this.

Bodies were stacked beside the wide avenue in heaps, chest-high. Sagging mounds of corpses, on and on. Hundreds upon hundreds. Too many for him to guess at the numbers. Someone had made an effort at covering them, but not that great an effort. The dead give no thanks for it, after all. Ragged sheets flapped in the breeze, weighted down with broken wood, limp hands and feet hanging out from underneath.

At this end of the road a few statues still stood. Once-proud kings and their advisers, stone faces and bodies scarred and pitted, stared sadly down at the bloody waste heaped round their feet. Enough of them for Logen to recognise that this truly was the Kingsway, and that he hadn’t somehow stumbled into the land of the dead.

A hundred strides further and there were only empty plinths, one with broken legs still attached. A strange group were clustered around them. Withered-looking. Somewhere between dead and alive. A man sat on a block of stone, staring numbly as he pulled handfuls of hair out of his head. Another was coughing into a bloody rag. A woman and a man lay side by side, gawping at nothing, faces shrivelled to little more than skulls. Her breath came crackling short and fast. His did not come at all.

Another hundred strides and it was as if Logen walked through some ruined hell. There was no sign that statues, buildings, or anything else had ever stood there. In their place were only tangled hills of strange rubbish. Broken stone, splintered wood, twisted metal, paper, glass, all crushed together and bound up with tons of dust and mud. Things stuck from the wreckage, strangely intact—a door, a chair, a carpet, a painted plate, the smiling face of a statue.

Men and women struggled everywhere among this chaos, streaked with dirt, picking at the rubbish, throwing it down to the road, trying to clear paths through it. Rescuers, workmen, thieves, who knew? Logen passed by a crackling bonfire high as a man, felt the kiss of its heat on his cheek. A big soldier in armour stained with black soot stood beside it. “You find anything in white metal?” he was roaring at the searchers, “anything at all? It goes in the fire! Flesh in white metal? Burn it! Orders of the Closed Council!”

A few strides further on, someone was on top of one of the highest mounds, straining at a great length of wood. He turned round to get a better grip. None other than Jezal dan Luthar. His clothes were torn and grubby, his face was smudged with mud. He barely looked any more like a king than Logen did.

A thickset man stood staring up, one arm in a sling. “Your Majesty, this is not safe!” he piped in an oddly girlish voice. “We really should be—”

“No! This is where I’m needed!” Jezal bent back over the beam, straining at it, veins bulging from his neck. There was no way he was going to get it shifted on his own, but still he tried. Logen stood watching him. “How long’s he been like this?”

“All night, and all day,” said the thickset man, “and no sign of stopping. Those few we’ve found alive, nearly all of them have this sickness.” He waved his good arm towards the pitiful group beside the statues. “Their hair falls out. Their nails. Their teeth. They wither. Some have died already. Others are well on the way.” He slowly shook his head. “What crime did we commit to deserve this punishment?”

“Punishment doesn’t always come to the guilty.”

“Ninefingers!” Jezal was looking down, the watery sun behind him. “There’s a strong back! Grab the end of that beam there!”

It was hard to see what good shifting a beam might do, in all of this. But great journeys start with small steps, Logen’s father had always told him. So he clambered up, wood cracking and stones sliding underneath his boots, hauled himself to the top and stood there, staring.