THE LIGHT OF Tal’s lantern gleamed on the ancient pillars and tiles of the underground boulevard. By some minor miracle, the Thousand Eyes had never discovered Tal’s old escape tunnel, and it was now the only way in or out of the Citadel without having to pass through their security.
He’d bought Tsereg a pastry from a roadside trader, hoping it would distract them from the enclosed space and the darkness. It seemed to be working. They ate it silently, eyes narrowed with puzzled concentration, and picked every crumb of almond paste out of the paper bag when they were finished.
“What was that for?” they said.
“What, was it not nice?” he said. “Thought you might like it.”
“Yeah, but why?” they said.
He’d already begun to have the idea that the pastry had been a mistake, though he couldn’t identify why. He’d expected some kind of gratifying reaction, maybe. Another smile, as when he’d killed Jatharisse. Now he thought about it, this made him queasy. He’d been careful to keep a certain distance from Tsereg. Partly because they would probably bite, mostly because—well, he wasn’t used to thinking of himself as a man of power, but Tsereg was a teenage escaped convict, and these things were always relative. He didn’t want to startle them, and he certainly didn’t want them trying to ingratiate themselves with him.
He had been mad for ingratiating at that age. He had moved back to his mother’s house after his expulsion from the Tlaanthothei Academy for Boys, and he remembered too well trying to make himself interesting and agreeable to her friends. The ability to make himself agreeable had served him well later in life, notably with actual men of power, but it had always required a calculated effort to suppress his real personality, and his real personality had never been happy with him afterward. At least Sethennai had known him for the nasty, spiteful creature that he was.
Still, Tsereg wasn’t a performing animal, and presumably knew that people only did nice things if they wanted something from you, or if they were trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Which was exactly what Tal was doing, because he had not told them about his plan to dump them with Niranthos.
“Kept you quiet for a bit, didn’t it?” he said. Maybe he should tell them. Maybe not everything, but enough that he didn’t have to feel like he was really lying to them. “So when we get in, we’re going to head to my brother’s house—”
“Who’s your brother?” Tsereg asked, later.
“He’s some kind of city official,” said Tal. Tsereg screwed up their face in preemptive wrath, and he shook his head. “No, he’s really corrupt, it’s all right.”
“You mean, he’s on our side?” said Tsereg.
Tal didn’t know what to say to that. If he hadn’t known for a fact that Niranthos was a turncoat, Tal would have said his brother was as disgustingly happy in the God-Empress’ employment as he’d always been as a class prefect at the Tlaanthothei Academy for Boys.
“There’s no our side,” he said. “Niranthos is on his own side. He’s a prick. But he’s not on the Empress’ side either, and I’ve got something to trade with him.”
“Hmm. What’ll you do afterward?” said Tsereg.
“What?” said Tal. He was still figuring that out. He’d only got as far as the idea that things would be easier for a while if he could get some money.
Tsereg’s thoughts were clearly running on different lines. “When the Empress is dead. What’ll you do?”
“I don’t know, take myself on a bloody beach holiday,” said Tal. “What will you do?”
Tsereg shrugged. “I’m going to die,” they said. “So I don’t need to worry about it.”
“What?” said Tal. “What the fuck, Tsereg? You can’t go in planning to die.”
“I told you,” they said. “It’s my sacred duty.”
“What sacred duty?” he said.
“As the Chosen Bride of the Unspoken,” they said.
Tal had spent the best part of his early twenties wishing Csorwe had just fucking snuffed it in her cave, so he couldn’t help knowing what this meant. The Chosen Bride of the Unspoken went up the hill to the Shrine, where she probably got bored to death reciting verses or something. But all the same—
“How are you the Chosen Bride of the Unspoken? I thought it had to be a girl.”
Tsereg rolled their eyes at him with deep scorn.
Tal bared his teeth to show off a general lack of tusks. “Don’t know how you people do things, do I?” The only Oshaaru he’d ever known well was Csorwe, and he didn’t think he could rely on her as an example.
Tsereg shrugged. “House of Silence was mostly girls, sure. Not like the Unspoken One is a man or a woman, though, is it? Gods aren’t. So I’m extra Chosen, I feel like.”
“Sure, fine, okay,” said Tal, who always felt out of his depth with god stuff. “I thought you said you were in prison. Wouldn’t have thought the Unspoken would want a baby shoplifter or whatever you are.”
“We’re all in prison. The Thousand Eyes burnt the House of Silence when I was three months old, and now we all hang out in the Iron Hill and have a great time sewing bags and stuff.”
“And they still want you to die?”
“It’s not like that! They don’t want me to die, I’m just—I’m Chosen, so it’s gonna happen one way or another, so I’m the one who’s got to kill the Empress.”
“And what, you don’t have a choice?” said Tal.
“Yeah, that’s sort of what being the Chosen one means,” said Tsereg.
“The Unspoken One just … picks you out, and that’s that? They just send you to die?”
“I’m not afraid of dying,” said Tsereg. “I’m not a coward.”
“You don’t know what death is,” he said. “You’re literally a child! You don’t know what you’re throwing away.”
“My mother died,” said Tsereg, eyebrows drawn down so low that he only caught a flash of golden-brown iris, beaming hatred directly into his face. He felt guilty until he realised Tsereg clearly saw this as a winning gambit.
“When?” he said.
“When I was a baby,” said Tsereg.
“Yeah, well then!” said Tal.
“What, does that not count or something?” they said, lip curled.
“God, you and the Unspoken One can both kiss my arse,” said Tal. “It’s like you want to throw your life away.”
“Yeah, well. The world didn’t used to be like this, did it?” said Tsereg, with a sudden solemnity that made Tal want to flick a piece of gum at them.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard about the good old days, but I’m here to tell you it’s always been a whole mess of bastards,” he said.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like this,” they said. “I heard about it. Tlaanthothe. Forests and seas and shit. No snakes. No Empress.”
Sometimes he remembered Tlaanthothe with such painful clarity it was as if he was home again: the chatter of students flooding from the School of Transcendence after their exams, the blue aloes, the fountains, the exact smell of the bar where he had used to drink alone, aniseed liquor and candle wax and sawdust, spots of rain on dry stone. All carefully preserved behind one of those doors in his mind which he had done his best to keep closed.
“Yeah,” he said. “You should’ve seen it. But it’s gone.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this forever,” said Tsereg. Their expression was one of utter and compelling faith in themselves.
Tal wondered if some people had a kind of switch inside them, some irreversible ratchet that saw things were bad and flipped over into and I’m going to fix it. He didn’t have it. When things went wrong, the Talasseres way was to run.
A long time ago he’d thought he had something to prove, that he’d eventually be able to make people believe that he was brave and tenacious enough to be worth something. Or rather, let’s be honest here, the person he was thinking of was Belthandros Sethennai—who the fuck else—and then that had fallen through, and then everything else had fallen through, and there wasn’t much point being brave or tenacious anymore. He had seen what bravery and tenacity got you.
“And if you fix it,” he said, “if you fix it and die fixing it. What’s the point, then?”
“You are very damaged,” they said. “Things change, Tal. And I’m the one who changes them.”
“Sounds like you think this is going to be easy,” he said.
“Been easy so far,” they said. They were practically skipping down the passage in their eagerness to get going. “Maybe you’re just lazy.”
“Ha ha. Maybe you’re just a kid.”
“Maybe you’re just a coward.”
“Maybe you’re just a dumb baby—” said Tal, and this was when something hit him hard in the back of the head.
It was a big stick. Holding the big stick was a skinny girl not much taller than Tsereg. Tal rolled over onto his back and tried to get to his feet, but something was holding him flat. His lantern bounced away across the ground and shattered, and before the light went out, he saw that the girl’s teeth were bared as if she was about to rip out his throat.
Tsereg squawked and thrashed somewhere nearby, and Tal struggled against whatever was holding him, convinced the skinny girl must have an accomplice.
Then a bluish flickering light flared in the girl’s hands—magelight, Tal thought, dazed—and he saw there was nobody there in the passage but the three of them. Tsereg was spinning in the air, held by whatever invisible force had Tal pinned to the ground.
“Let me go!” shrieked Tsereg, clawing at the air in rage.
The girl shook her head. Tal saw now that her clothes were ragged, her legs bare under a torn shift, and her feet bloody from walking on jagged stone. She was in her early twenties, but her cheeks were hollow and there were deep shadows under her eyes.
“Sorry,” she said, in a thick Qarsazhi accent. “Sorry, sorry—”
Tal’s Qarsazhi was rusty, but he still knew the essentials. “What the fuck is this?” he said.
She blinked at him. “I—I thought you were snakes,” she said. She was shivering. “Look, I’m really sorry, but I still have to do this.” She eyed the two of them up, and then spotted Tal’s knife on the floor.
She fumbled for it, holding it as if she was about to cut into a steak. Her fingers didn’t bend properly.
“Do you have any money?” she said.
“Tal, what is she saying?” Tsereg hissed. “Who is she?”
“She’s robbing us at knifepoint, I think,” said Tal. He struggled against the band of force holding him down. As soon as he got free, he could have the knife off her. He could incapacitate her without it, for that matter. She was no fighter, and she was shaking like a blade of grass.
“Yeah, I have some money,” he said to the girl. “It’s in my pockets. You’ll have to let me go.”
“All right. Maybe,” she said to Tal. “When I do that, you need to take off your coat and put it on the floor.”
“Why should I do that?” said Tal. “You know, this isn’t the first time someone’s tried to rob me, but I’ve never had to talk them through it before.”
“Or I’ll…” She looked down at the knife. “I’ll cut the child. I will.” She moved toward Tsereg, still holding the knife as if it might leap out of her hand.
Tsereg screamed at her. They really could use their voice as a blunt instrument.
“Shh,” said the girl, wincing. “Please. The snakes might hear. They’re looking for me. I’m serious, you don’t know what I’m capable of. Tell your friend to shut up, or I’ll use this. I mean it.”
“Tsereg, shut the fuck up,” said Tal obediently.
“Tell her I’ll rip her eyes out!” hissed Tsereg.
Tal turned back to the girl. “Yeah, they’re terrified,” he said. “All right. I think you were mugging me?”
He didn’t want to hurt her, which was a problem. He was surprised to realise that if she had a go at Tsereg, he would hurt her. She was certainly desperate enough to chase them if they tried to escape, and she was probably desperate enough to try and use that knife, and he knew from Shuthmili what a mage was capable of doing in a tight corner.
Not to mention that he hadn’t forgotten what he’d told Tsereg about a common enemy. All in all, he didn’t seem to have a choice. The girl let him go, he took off his coat, turned out the pockets, and held up his hands. The girl pounced on the coat hungrily and pulled it on at once.
“And your boots,” she said, pointing the knife at him. It would be the easiest thing in the world to grab her wrist and snatch it off her. Instead he unlaced his boots, stepped out of them and kicked them toward her.
“Don’t think I’m your size,” he said.
She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Thank you. I’m sorry to do this. I thought I was going to die.”
“Hey, any time,” said Tal. “Look at me, these days I’m a fucking charitable institution. Can I have my knife back?”
“N-no,” said the girl. “I need it.”
Tal stepped neatly over to her, plucked the knife out of her hands, and sheathed it again at his belt.
“Don’t do yourself a mischief,” he said. “Are we done?”
The girl flinched, flattening herself against the wall of the passage. She was a mage, which meant she could pull Tal’s guts out of his nostrils, so this made no sense.
“We’re done,” he said, to clarify. “Get out of here.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “I … I see. Thank you.”
“Good job,” said Tal. “Great robbery, let’s do this again sometime.”
“May the vigilance of the Mother of Cities protect you waking and sleeping,” said the girl with a little bob of her head, and Tsereg squeaked as they hit the ground.
“Don’t push it, you stole my bloody boots,” he said. The girl grinned at him and limped off into the darkness.
As usual, Tal regretted this about five minutes later.
“What the hell,” said Tsereg. “Why did you let her go?”
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” said Tal. Anyone less like a hardened criminal was hard to imagine. She’d had the same prissy cut-glass accent as Shuthmili. “Didn’t you see? She’d been tortured.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Tsereg.
“I guess I just didn’t really want to be a dick about it.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m the one who’s a dumb baby,” said Tsereg. “Now you don’t have shoes! And she was waving a knife at me!”
“Yeah, and I’m sure she would have done you a lot of damage if you’d run deliberately into it a few times,” said Tal. “She could hardly hold the thing. Her fingers…”
It was just starting to sink in, now that the standoff was over and he could think. He knew what kind of things happened in the Citadel. Of course he knew. He’d seen the terror on people’s faces as they were arrested.
It ought to have made him want to turn back. He ought to give up on this plan and scuttle out of town and find some other quiet hole to hide in. If he had any sense of self-preservation, he ought to tell Tsereg this little jaunt was over and that they were on their own.
“Do you really think you can do it?” he said. “Get rid of the God-Empress, I mean? You’ve got some kind of weird Unspoken scheme up your sleeve? You really think there’s a way?”
“Yeah, I’ve told you,” they said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a book. In the library, in the Citadel. Gotta get the book, and then I’ll know.”
“What book?”
“Just a book,” said Tsereg, sounding cagey. “It’s from the House of Silence library. The Thousand Eyes nicked it along with everything else, and now it’s stashed away in some dungeon.”
He didn’t feel so good about the idea of leaving them with Niranthos anymore, and to be honest, he didn’t think they would stay where they were left anyway. Maybe if they really did have a plan—as ridiculous as this book idea sounded—maybe if there was some way to bring down the Empress, maybe he should help them.
Except that they’d admitted the assassination would end in their death. Chosen Bride of the Unspoken, dying like Csorwe was supposed to have done. If they thought that was worth it, to fix the world, maybe it wasn’t Tal’s business to stop them—but then again, if they didn’t have a plan, if they were running on pure faith in themselves and the Unspoken, then they’d probably be captured by Thousand Eyes first thing and drowned in the fountain like everyone else who had tried.
Tal did not enjoy complicated problems. He’d arranged his whole life to avoid them. If you saw a complicated problem, the only sane thing to do was to turn your back and walk away. All the same, he found himself dwelling on this all the way down the tunnel and up the hidden stairway.
Originally, the tunnel had emerged in a public park, among a stand of trees. This was now a huge dry stone garden, all gravel paths and bronze sculptures.
The bronzes had a half-finished, molten look, as though the sculptor had only vaguely imagined them and called them into being without thinking further.
Tal peered out from the stairway until he was sure the garden was empty, then called Tsereg up from below.
Looming at the far end of the garden, its apex brushing up against the panes of the dome, was the defunct Great Gate of Tlaanthothe, long since brought to earth from its original position hovering above the Gate-fortress. Before the accession of the God-Empress, the Gate had burnt as green as copper, but its light was long extinguished, leaving nothing more than a great circular stone frame, dull and sightless as the sculptures.
Beneath the dead Gate was a grand fountain, with steps leading up to a deep pool of salt water, and a large open space for spectators. Tal recognised it as the original on which the public fountain in Ringtown must have been modelled. It also reminded him, in a sickly way, of his mother’s Midsummer’s Eve party fifteen years ago—the ruined offerings, the withered body of the hippocamp lying in the dry fountain. These must be the Execution Gardens, where traitors were drowned.
The Gardens were very silent. The crunch of their footsteps on the gravel made Tal wince almost as much as the feeling of sharp stones on his bare feet. He hoped Niranthos would give him another pair of boots.
“Well,” he said. “We’re in.”
It was not far from the Gardens to Niranthos’ house, down narrow streets and covered alleyways. The shape of the streets was half familiar, like the mangled version of the old Charossa mansion that Tal sometimes saw in his dreams. The Citadel had grown on Tlaanthothe like a great crystalline fungus, a gigantic parasite that engulfed what had once been Tal’s hometown. Here and there, a fragment of the old Tlaanthothei facade was visible behind the casing of fossil-stone. Niranthos’ townhouse was a tall narrow sliver at the end of a long terrace.
Tal knocked at the door, and Niranthos himself answered. Tal should have known immediately that that meant something was wrong.
Niranthos gave him a forbidding look.
“Talasseres,” he said. “It’s six o’clock in the morning. What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Long story,” said Tal. “Uh, this is Tsereg.”
He wasn’t sure how to press on. He knew how Niranthos felt about anything he considered to be too risky, too outlandish, or simply beneath his dignity. Take this foundling off my hands was going to be a difficult proposition, whatever the child’s provenance.
“Uh, they’re from that shipwreck. You know, the one you sent me to investigate—”
Tsereg didn’t say anything, apparently stricken by shyness.
“You always did know how to pick your moments, Talasseres,” said Niranthos. A muscle was working in his jaw, and his long ears were flat against his skull.
“Can we come in?” said Tal.
Niranthos glanced back into the dark passage behind him. Tal really should have known then, really should have grabbed Tsereg’s arm and turned and run, and later he would curse himself for not doing so.
“I suppose you’d better,” said Niranthos. There was an odd intentful light in his eyes, as though he was trying to beam something directly into Tal’s brain. They’d never been close enough for that kind of understanding. Tal didn’t know what he meant. All he was thinking about was a cup of tea and a new pair of boots and maybe sitting in a comfortable chair for a while.
Niranthos led them to a small, dim sitting room. Where you might expect a window to be there was a huge tapestry depicting the God-Empress enthroned.
“Wait here a minute,” said Niranthos. “I’ll send for something to eat.”
Tsereg watched him go and gave Tal the kind of look you might exchange with a friend when someone embarrassing left a party. It was all eyes with a little bit of face between them, goggling like two jar lids.
“I told you he was like this,” said Tal.
After a few minutes Niranthos returned with a new look on his face, one that Tal did recognise. It was a very Niranthos expression. It meant so be it, there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s not my fault if my fool brother gets himself into trouble.
“What’s going on?” said Tal, beginning for the first time to be alarmed.
At this Niranthos was overcome by a coughing fit. He held a green handkerchief delicately to his mouth, and when he pulled it away, it was stained dark. A handsome jade basin with a straw lid stood on a side table. It looked about half full of bloody handkerchiefs.
“Are you sick?” he said, casting at random for something to say. Niranthos seemed to be waiting for something.
Niranthos looked genuinely puzzled until he followed Tal’s gaze to the basin of handkerchiefs. “I’ve been living in the Citadel for nearly twelve years,” he said. “This happens to everyone eventually. I’ve … tried. Tal. I really tried. I thought I could do something. But I—”
Tsereg yelped at Tal’s side, their pointed ears pricking up. “Tal, someone’s coming,” they said.
“What is going on?” said Tal.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” said Niranthos, and blew his nose bloodily into another handkerchief.
The door to the parlour opened, and three Thousand Eyes in full armour stepped into the room.
“Is this him?” said one of them. Her voice boomed behind her visor.
Niranthos nodded.
Shock and inevitability collided, leaving Tal momentarily dazed. Then the world slid back into alignment and he realised … Yeah, of course, this seems like Niranthos.
“So you’re with them now,” he said.
One of the Thousand Eyes was barking some sort of command at him. He ignored her.
Tsereg was still and silent in a way he had never seen them before. Their hair fell down over their eyes as they hung their head, and Tal could only see their lopsided mouth, set in a dull line.
“They were going to hurt me,” said Niranthos. “I’m sorry. I—I only have one life, Tal, I wasn’t going to die down there, I had to—”
“So you flipped the first chance you got, and now you’re selling me out?” said Tal.
“Anyone would have done the same thing!” he said. “You don’t know what she’s like, the Hand, you don’t know what she was going to do to me—”
“That’ll do, Charossa,” said one of the Thousand Eyes, putting a hand on Niranthos’ shoulder. He flinched and shut his mouth.
“Do we take the child?” said one Eye. Another one grabbed hold of Tal, and this combination of circumstances activated whichever one of Tal’s base instincts made him fight like a wet cat. He kicked and elbowed and writhed and bit until one of them punched him in the face, which quietened him down a bit.
He blinked, his head swimming. Tsereg was still shrieking and kicking. Good for them.
When he was younger, Tal had been able to forget that every fight might mean death. It had been fun, sort of, a focus which sharpened everything to a single edge, cutting away all the idiot nonsense that bothered him the rest of the time. At some point—and it was probably about the same point that Csorwe had become the God-Empress—he’d lost that ability.
Tal did his best, but he was outnumbered, and tired, and he didn’t have any shoes. One of them got his knife out of his hands almost immediately. They didn’t even have the decency to kill him. They wanted to take him alive.
“What happened to your whole fucking motto?” he said. “What happened to the city looks to us for leadership, Niranthos? You fucker!”
The Thousand Eyes got him on his knees. One of them dealt him a backhand blow that made his head spin. His ears rang as if he’d been shaken in an iron drum, but he heard his brother’s voice with clarity.
“I’m sorry, Talasseres,” said Niranthos, “but things change.”
Tal sat on a bench in a cell. His head ached in a way that made him wish someone would tap his skull on the top and scoop out the innards like a hard-boiled egg.
They had been locked in for a few hours, and he still hadn’t got used to the smell. It rose from the sodden floorboards like marsh gas: blood and rot, warm and organic. At least he wasn’t retching anymore. Tsereg was curled up on the opposite bench, grey jacket doubled around them like armour.
All the time the only thought Tal had been able to form was how stupid he was. Trusting Niranthos had always been a mistake. The Charossai ate their own. He ought to have seen this coming. He had wanted someone else to fix his problem badly enough that he’d got himself arrested by the fucking Thousand Eyes.
The Hand of the Empress wanted them. It was only a matter of time before they were handed into her custody. That much was clear from what the guards had said among themselves.
Tal’s chest tightened.
He had never quite known what to make of Shuthmili. He’d taken her for another haughty wizard type, the kind to look down her long nose at Tal and curl her lip. He’d assumed she and Csorwe would be unbearable together. To his surprise, she’d been almost shy with him and somehow made Csorwe softer to deal with. They’d been so easy together, it had looked almost more like friendship than love to him, at least based on his limited experience of either concept. So when he’d first heard Shuthmili was still alive, he had assumed she must have some kind of clever scheme to fix everything. And even after he started to hear stories about the Hand of the Empress and the things she had done, there was still the hope. While he had been concentrating on staying alive, maybe Shuthmili had been playing a double game, trying to stay close until she could get Csorwe out of there.
But Csorwe was gone, and the years had passed, and nothing had changed, and whatever he might have hoped, Shuthmili was one of them now. The Empress was a monster, and the Hand was perhaps a greater monster still.
You don’t know what she’s like, the Hand, you don’t know what she was going to do to me.
Even back then, he had seen the darkness in her. Worlds die all the time, she had told him, long ago in the deepwood, as if it was nothing to her. She could have killed him then.
He and Tsereg hadn’t talked much. He hoped they were thinking about something nice, not wondering about whatever was coming, whether it would be a knife in the dark or the public fountain in broad daylight.
“Don’t be sad,” they said, catching his eye. “You tried. And at least we’ll die fighting, when they come for us. Why are they leaving us so long, anyway?”
“I think they were probably hoping this place would crush your spirit,” he said, weakly. He couldn’t find anything to say to the rest.
“Ha ha,” said Tsereg. “Good luck. We’ve got two whole benches and a bucket to piss in, nobody can break me.”
They gave him a sunny little smile, appallingly brave, impossibly defiant. Tal felt sick.
Somehow, he remembered the first time he’d killed someone. A couple of dummies had ambushed Sethennai’s retinue in the early days back in Tlaanthothe, and Tal had broken one of their necks without even really thinking about it. Csorwe had dealt with the other one and returned to her post without speaking to him. He’d been nineteen, and he hadn’t slept for a week. He had lain awake staring at the ceiling, swallowing down justifications.
You were brave, Sethennai had told him eventually, and that had somehow made it all right.
It was no good to be brave, he thought. He had to stumble his way toward the thought in darkness. It was no good to break yourself and smile through it. He wouldn’t tell Tsereg they were brave.
Not that it mattered, if they were both about to die. Or maybe it did.
“God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wish I’d kept you out of it.”
Tsereg’s smile shattered like a dropped glass. “Shut up,” they said, as if it had hurt them. “No. Don’t be sorry.”
“What?”
“This is my fault, not yours,” they said. “I made you come here. Now they’re going to kill you, and it’s my fault.”
They shut their mouth and stared at him, huge eyes like lanterns in the dark, and to Tal’s utter horror and self-disgust, he saw those eyes were shining with tears.
Tal blinked. Why should Tsereg care so much for him? They hardly knew each other, and Tsereg mostly seemed to hate him. He’d only helped them get into the Citadel; that wasn’t the stuff of life debts, surely—
But that was how they got you, Tal realised. It could happen more or less by accident. If you were entirely alone and someone paid you any kind of attention at all. All too easy to imagine Sethennai equally startled by the extent of Tal’s adoration.
“Oh, well,” they said, burying their head in their arms, so their voice was even more muffled than usual. “You were right. This was a stupid idea.”
“Tsereg, no—” he said.
He was interrupted by a shriek of metal as the guard drew back the bolts to the cell door, and the Hand of the Empress stepped inside.
Shuthmili was older, although not as much older as she ought to be. The heavy-lidded eyes, the long nose, and thin mouth were all exactly the same. There were deep shadows under her eyes. She looked as tired as Tal felt, the weariness of the endless days and endless years bearing down, individual grains of sand that ground the rock to nothing. Her long hair and the skirts of her robe seemed all of a piece. She looked like a skeleton wrapped up in a single dark cobweb.
“Leave us,” she said to the Eye.
The black lace robe drifted after her like a retreating wave as she came toward them. Her gauntleted hands were folded before her, shiny black spines, more like claws than fingers. The gauntlets were no longer recognisable as Sethennai’s.
Whatever Tsereg had said about their plan to die fighting, they were frozen where they sat, their eyes empty with terror.
Shuthmili ignored them, looking straight at Tal. Her features were impassive, no hint of recognition. Tal was almost glad for that. It was better that she didn’t know him. How much worse to be killed by a friend.
“So. You were working with your brother,” she said. Her voice was as cold and inexpressive as her face.
No, thought Tal, fuck this, I’m not dying sitting down, if she remembers me she’d better fucking remember me. He was only going to get one chance to stick the knife in and he’d better make it good.
He looked up at her, folding his arms.
“You really think this is what she’d want?” he said.
He didn’t know what he expected. He certainly didn’t expect Shuthmili to laugh. It was a dry little laugh, only slightly sinister, as if she couldn’t turn that off altogether.
“I expect I deserve that,” she said. “Listen to me, Tal. You need to do exactly what I tell you if you want to get out of this alive.”