SOME TIME LATER, Tal woke up in barely controlled panic, in an unfamiliar tangle of quilts and bedsheets. From the dark he imagined it was the middle of the night, but then a servant drew back the canopy and he saw that a warm and rosy light was streaming in through the windows. Either it was late afternoon or something was on fire.
The servant wanted to make sure that everything was all right. Tal had been shouting, apparently. That sounded about right. He lay back on the bed.
Right, of course. He had slept in a real bedroom, in a real bed, in the guest wing of the Lignite Citadel, and he wasn’t dead. They had put Tsereg in the next room, with a real medic to keep an eye on them, and they weren’t dead either. There was a Thousand Eye guarding the corridor, and this was supposed to make them feel safe.
He was in a clean nightshirt, which was concerning because he didn’t remember undressing, and he couldn’t see where they’d put his clothes. He peered round the connecting door into Tsereg’s room. They had a canopy bed of their own, on which they lay utterly still, deep pink in the light of the sinking sun. Someone had managed to dab away most of the ash. Their hands were folded neatly on the white sheet.
“How are they?” he said. The medic gave him a weary look, as though it wasn’t the first time he had asked. He couldn’t remember. She was the same doctor who had examined Tal himself, on Sethennai’s instructions.
“No change, sir,” she said. “I said I’d tell you if anything happens.”
The servant was still hovering in the room behind him, and seemed very keen to get Tal washed and dressed. They had drawn up a nice hot bath for him, if he would wish it?
The bathroom itself was a cold windowless cavern of vaulted fossil-stone, but the bath was scented with orange-blossom and someone had put out a plate of apricots for him to eat while he was in it, taking the trouble to halve and stone them. Tal ate them all without thinking. As he was towelling off, another servant appeared with a pile of clean clothes and tried to shave him. Tal, who had what he thought of as a normal distrust of blades near his face, insisted on shaving and dressing himself. His face looked strange in the mirror without the fuzz of stubble and ill-trimmed beard, but he hadn’t aged as badly as he’d feared. The lines of his jaw and cheek were sharper than he remembered. The rest of him looked as narrow and lean as ever, weather-beaten into a kind of compactness, like a fork of driftwood with its grain polished to the surface by the waves.
There was a shirt and leggings, both clean and soft in the way he had forgotten clothes could be. They ran through Tal’s hands like water. After them was a smart buttoned tunic and sash. Tal had never been all that bothered about clothes but could not help noting that the tunic was a dark moss green, enough like the Citadel livery that he would not stand out, but not enough to feel like anyone was staking a claim.
“Do you know where the other Charossai are being kept?” he asked the servant.
“The Charossa apartments are on another floor of the guest wing,” said the servant. “Your lady mother Niranthe is very eager to see you, sir, whenever you are well enough, but the Chancellor has ordered that you are not to be bothered until you seek company yourself.”
Tal turned this over in his head. On the one hand, this was how they got you. You were tricked into being grateful and then they turned around and said, Well, I fed you, I clothed you, I hid you from your enemies, don’t I own you now? On the other hand, he was glad not to have to deal with his family before he was ready. He pulled on his shoes and stared at himself in the mirror, a clean-shaven and neatly dressed citizen.
Maybe that was how things were going to be for him, now. Just an ordinary person in this new world. Had he imagined what he might do, if the reign of the Empress was ended? No, because he’d never really believed it would happen, or if it did that he would live to see it, he alone of all the rest.
“What do I do now?” he said to the servant. The servant gave him a frightened look and eventually said that sir could return to his room if he wished.
Back in his room, they’d put out tea and pastries, which Tal ate in small bites, wondering when the blow was going to land. Tsereg never stirred. The original doctor was replaced by another. Tal loped back and forth between Tsereg’s room and his own.
He had to climb up on the table to get to the windows, and when he did, he couldn’t see anything out of them, only the turrets of the palace and that warm pink sunset radiance. It had been a long time since he’d had the leisure to be bored, and he’d forgotten how he hated it, especially when it was underscored by the constant thrum of anxiety.
Eventually there was a knock at the door, and Tal answered it, expecting it to be another servant, wondering whether he could ask for something to do—and it was Sethennai.
“Can I come in?” he said.
Tal stepped back into the room to make way for him, his heart blundering up into his throat like a wasp trapped in a bottle.
Sethennai closed the door behind him and stood for a moment, not quite making eye contact, as though—however briefly—tongue-tied.
“It’s come to me that I owe you an apology,” said Sethennai. “If you’ll hear it.”
Tal felt as if the room was shrinking around them, as if he might elbow through the wall if he moved too quickly. “Do you want to sit down?” he said.
They sat at the table, and Sethennai poured Tal a cup of tea, although Tal had been certain the teapot was empty.
“It was a mistake to conceal my identity from you,” said Sethennai. “I wasn’t sure of your motives. If I’d known I could still trust you, I would have chosen differently. I’m sorry for that.”
“Did you trust me?” said Tal. He’d always thought of himself as a bit of a liability. Csorwe was the one who had been trusted. Tal was unreliable.
“Tal!” he said, genuinely taken aback. “Truly. Of course.”
There was another silence. Tal looked down at his hands.
“Listen—” said Sethennai, and Tal heard the whole machine of rhetoric start up and then, abruptly, run down again. “How have you been?” he said.
Later on, Tal would be embarrassed that his resistance lasted only for a moment. It was just so long since he had been able to talk like this, to someone who knew him. He explained about his escape with Oranna and his years wandering the desert. A few near misses with Thousand Eyes, his illness a few years ago, his encounter with Tsereg and the events that had brought them to the Citadel. Put like that, the years felt like nothing, like a small handful of sand trickling away through his fingers.
“I’m sorry to hear you were alone all that time,” said Sethennai.
Tal looked up at him, startled. He hadn’t thought of it like that in a while. It was possible to get so tired you no longer felt sleepy or so parched you no longer wanted water, and so too with isolation.
“I’m used to being by myself,” said Tal, wanting Sethennai to understand that he hadn’t completely lost control of his life. “I don’t mind it—” He realised abruptly that the look on Sethennai’s face was one of terrible sorrow. “Don’t pity me,” he said, irritably, without thinking about it.
“I’m not,” said Sethennai. He smiled with undiminished sadness. “I understand you, I think. Easier to have nothing when you know how quickly the loss becomes unbearable.”
“How is this not pitying me?” said Tal.
Sethennai grinned, the old rueful grin, the real one. Tal hadn’t expected it to hit him with such force, but it really did, inescapably, the same way he thought every year that he wouldn’t be surprised by the spring and still liked it when the leaves came back. Tal blinked.
“If anything I was feeling sorry for myself,” said Sethennai. “I’m functionally immortal. The only way to survive that is not to hold out much hope. Things slip away. It happens. So you know, I try not to get attached—but, god, I’m glad you lived.”
Tal was trying so hard to stay cynical and aggrieved. Cynical and aggrieved were at the core of his being, so this should have been easier than it was.
“But I’m not the same,” said Tal, recalling how he’d looked that morning, not bad but certainly no longer twenty-two.
“Oh, Tal,” he said. “None of us are the same.” He looked down, his smile fading. “I never wanted to treat you badly,” he said. “I want to make it up to you. Is there any way I could?”
Tal swallowed. It was an awful power to hold in his hands, and he couldn’t think what to do with it. He tried to remember all the things he’d once wished Sethennai might say to him. They had seemed very important at the time, but most of the time they didn’t count if you asked.
“Do you want me to stay?” said Tal. He’d assumed he was being kept here until someone could figure out what to do with him.
“Do you want to stay?” said Sethennai. Tal couldn’t explain that it wasn’t the same thing at all.
“I don’t know,” said Tal, trying to be honest. “Until Tsereg’s better, at least.”
This broke the moment, somehow. Tal was almost grateful. The weight and pressure of it had become too much. Sethennai rose from the chair and went into the sickroom. Tal followed. Tsereg hadn’t moved since the last time he checked on them.
The extraordinary sunset made both Sethennai and Tsereg into crystal statues, luminous from within. The stillness made even Tsereg’s snub, mundane profile look like something architectural. It made the family resemblance harder to miss. Tal had to lean hard against the doorway.
“I understand if you can’t forgive me for this,” said Sethennai at length. “There might have been another way. I could have looked harder to find it.”
“Can’t you do anything for them?” said Tal.
“I’ve done as much as I can,” said Sethennai. “Even in death, the God-Empress is vindictive. It will take time.”
“I tried so hard to keep them safe,” said Tal.
“They wanted to keep you out of it, too, you know,” said Sethennai. “They were worried you’d get yourself hurt.”
Tal dug his nails into the doorframe. This misery of this just went on and on. It was too much. Looking at Sethennai hurt too. He didn’t trust himself to react to anything.
“You want to make it up to me?” he said, when he could make himself say anything coherent. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”
He did. Tal was left to his own devices. The light outside the windows never changed, orange-pink, like the roses which had bloomed in the palace gardens in the old days, poised on the moment just before the sun sank beneath the horizon. Presumably, elsewhere in the Citadel there were all kinds of consequences of the Empress’ defeat. Tal didn’t leave his quarters. He took a lot of baths and changed into different but identical sets of clean clothes. He sat by Tsereg’s bedside and tried to think of what he wanted to say to them. He walked up and down the corridor and tried to think of what he wanted to say to Sethennai.
Sethennai had cared for him once and cared for him still. If that was true, then the whole story could be different. Some of the things he’d lost might be found again. It might mean he’d survived for a reason.
Tal insisted he wasn’t fooling himself. He knew what kind of person Sethennai was. He’d always known, really. It wasn’t as though Sethennai was the first bad man he’d ever met. But—and he’d always known this too—Tal wasn’t a good enough person to care about that if Sethennai thought he was worth liking and wanted to be forgiven.
After a few days of this, Tal received a note.
Would you join me for dinner?
S
The servant who handed it over waited in the doorway for a response, which was a mercy because it meant Tal couldn’t agonise about it. He nodded once and shut the door.
An invitation to dinner turned out to mean a visit to Sethennai’s private quarters, a new suite of rooms opened up on a mezzanine above the bookshelves in the Glass Archive, and Tal was the only guest. The pink light filtering through the dome of blue-green glass turned everything a dusky violet, and reflected candle flames floated on the lacquered table and the gleaming tiles like the moon on water.
Dinner was lamb casserole with figs. Even from the smell Tal could tell it would be the best thing he had eaten for a long, long time. Sethennai poured him a glass of wine.
“I hope you haven’t been too bored,” said Sethennai, when Tal sat opposite him. “As you can imagine, things have been busy.”
“Always are,” said Tal, with an ease he hadn’t expected. It felt so much like old times.
“Help yourself to rice and things,” said Sethennai. “There’s a lot to do. It’s not just a matter of putting everything back how it was. Sometimes that’s impossible, for one thing.”
“Yeah, I bet,” said Tal, thinking of Ringtown, and of the wounded girl they’d met in the tunnel. “People have got used to it.”
“This is an opportunity,” said Sethennai. “To change things for the better. To make a better world. I had an empire once, Tal. A real one, not this mad dolls’ house. People were happy in Echentyr. Thousands of years of scholarship, peace, stability.”
“You don’t have to give me the hard sell,” said Tal. He took a gulp of wine and peered over the rim of the glass at him.
“Ha. Call it force of habit. I’d forgotten that I don’t have to, with you.”
Tal didn’t know how to answer. His great weakness with Sethennai was that he never had a smart reply. Even when he tried to think of them in advance, he never had the chance to use them. The conversation moved on to other things. There weren’t many harmless topics available, but they talked about the food and the wine and the palace, until eventually—without warning—Sethennai said:
“You said the other day that you wanted to be left alone. Is that still true?”
Tal had come to dinner with every intention of telling Sethennai that he was leaving as soon as Tsereg was better, and yet. Perhaps it was the wine and perhaps it was the way Sethennai sat in his chair, relaxed at last, crisp shirt collar unbuttoned, or perhaps it was just the knowledge that running away would leave him more alone than ever.
“If it wasn’t,” said Tal. “What would you have in mind?”
Sethennai sipped his drink and set down the glass, seeming to consider his words before he spoke. “There is a place for you here, if you want it.”
“To work for you?” said Tal.
“Is that what you would want?” said Sethennai. He reached for the salt, leaving the question hanging, a small burning sun suspended in midair above the table.
Tal didn’t later recall how he came to end up in Sethennai’s lap, his hands pressed flat against Sethennai’s shoulders, pushing him back into the dining chair as he kissed him. All he remembered was Sethennai’s murmur of surprise, and his own sense of triumph, followed by a flash of horrified embarrassment that perhaps this was not welcome.
“Should I not—” Tal said. He pulled back, suddenly very aware of what he was doing, every point of contact between them, the weight and pressure of all his limbs.
Sethennai grinned and his hands found the small of Tal’s back, running his nails up and down the curvature of his spine, idly and apparently without thought. Tal was so sensitive there that he felt each fingertip even through two layers of clothing, and it knocked every half-formed thought sharply out of his head.
When Tal recovered any presence of mind at all, he thought, Oh, he remembers what I like. He was so torn between whether this was good or whether it hurt or both that he kissed him again, tangling one hand in Sethennai’s hair to hold him in place.
The silence of the Glass Archive wrapped around them, the dark expanse of the bookshelves absorbing every echo, like the night sky itself.
“Do you have a bedroom in this place or what?” said Tal.
“Are you sure?” said Sethennai. He drew back, biting his lip. This was obviously meant to indicate concern, but it made Tal ache.
“I’m too old to do it in a chair,” said Tal, in the flattest possible drawl. Let this mean nothing. Or, better, let him forget about whether things meant things for five fucking minutes.
“No, I mean, are you sure this is really what you want?” said Sethennai.
“What are you talking about,” said Tal. He leant down and kissed him again, hard, digging his nails into his shoulders. It was true. He was fine. If he wanted badly enough for this to be fine, then it could be fine, and he wouldn’t have to leave.
Sethennai brushed the back of his hand against Tal’s cheek and ran his thumb over the curve of Tal’s ear. Tal shivered, trying to focus on how this was nice and not on how it made him feel like he’d been laid open.
“It’s been so long,” said Sethennai. It wasn’t exactly an objection. He sounded persuadable.
“I know,” said Tal without thinking, too far gone even to be embarrassed. “Please.”
He felt Sethennai smile against his mouth. “I forgot how you say that,” he said. “Say it again.”
Tal awoke in the crook of Sethennai’s arm. His whole body ached in a dim, fuzzy kind of way, and he didn’t want to move, except that he was cold. He curled up against Sethennai, trying to absorb some of his body heat without waking him. It was oddly gratifying when Sethennai wrapped a warm arm round his shoulders and pulled him closer.
“You’re awake,” he said, his face pressed to Sethennai’s rib cage.
Sethennai yawned, stretching underneath him. It was like being part of a tectonic disaster. “Sleep well?”
“Mm,” said Tal. Better than he had in years. He couldn’t tell what time it was now. The blue-violet light was soft but disorienting. He closed his eyes, pressing closer, hoping it might make him feel steadier, or more certain of what he had done. He didn’t know how to find his footing. There was still that terrible familiar vacancy, an emptiness without definition. This was supposed to have fixed things. He was supposed to feel better.
It was what he had wanted, wasn’t it? What more could he possibly ask for? Maybe the gnawing sense that something was wrong was just always present, even in the best-case scenario.
“Everything all right?” said Sethennai, absently scratching the back of Tal’s neck. He sounded as if he was about to fall asleep again.
Tal mumbled assent. It was fine. He was fine. He just had to stop thinking so much. He’d managed not to fret about Tsereg for a few hours, but the tightness in his chest was back with a vengeance now, and he kept seeing Keleiros Lenarai, too, on hands and knees, with blood pouring from his mouth and an expression of dull, paralysed terror on his face.
Tal could ask what had happened to him. Sethennai might say who? or he might say he’s recovering with his family and I’ve sent the best doctors to attend him or he might say I’m sorry to say he didn’t make it. Tal didn’t think he could handle any of those options, so he didn’t ask. He knew exactly what he was getting into here. He had his eyes open.
That being the case, he didn’t know why he felt sick. It was dread, or guilt, or something, but he was sure it would go away. He remembered that marble stuck in his throat. If he was going to stay here, Tsereg would stay too—safe, with everything they wanted, and that was worth bearing in mind too, probably—and it would all come out in the end. Maybe he had to say something.
Sethennai had trusted him. He didn’t want to lie, not even by omission, and if he put it off, he might never say anything. Maybe he had to say something now.
“Tsereg is your child,” he said, just like that. He didn’t move. If he sat up, he would have to see Sethennai’s expression. “Yours and Oranna’s.”
Sethennai went very still. If Tal had expected some kind of relief, it didn’t come. The hairs rose on the back of his neck. He was still held securely in the loop of Sethennai’s arm, bare skin to bare skin, and nothing changed, and still it was as though Sethennai had turned to stone around him.
“What makes you think that?” said Sethennai.
“It’s obvious,” said Tal.
Sethennai sat up, leaning over Tal. The mattress tipped Tal flat, and he had no choice but to look up into Sethennai’s face. The expression he saw there was so unfamiliar that it was like looking into the eyes of an alien creature.
Sethennai hadn’t expected this. He was startled.
Then shock passed, and he gazed down at Tal: curiosity without the thinnest veil of tenderness. Tal was already naked and sprawled on his back, and he hadn’t thought it was possible to feel more exposed than that, but it turned out he’d been wrong.
“I’m not making it up,” said Tal.
“No, why would you?” said Sethennai, drawing back. He reached for a shirt, and his expression clouded beyond Tal’s ability to decipher. He got out of bed, pulled on the shirt and a loose robe, and moved from his desk to the dresser and back, somewhat at random. Tal lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. The smooth glass of the dome made him feel like a beetle trapped under a bowl.
“Are you sure?” said Sethennai. “It’s extremely rare for mages to conceive, let alone bear a living child.”
Tal told him as much as he knew, and Sethennai listened, his expression grave, his fingers drumming on his thigh.
“How old are they? Twelve or thirteen? Oh, I see—well … technically it’s possible, I suppose,” said Sethennai. “Although Oranna, the last time we—huh.” He sat up straight, looking at nothing. Tal had never seen him like this before. “That night, in the temple, her hand was injured. I wondered then why she hid it from me.”
Tal didn’t understand. He wished he could see where his clothes had gone. By now he was very cold, not just because the room was huge and draughty and the sheets were thin. The last time he had seen Sethennai like this had been back in the day, when they’d got a lead on the location of the Reliquary.
Sethennai sat down at his desk, pinching the bridge of his nose between his eyes. “Of course it isn’t over,” he said, softly. “There is no rest.”
“Sir?” said Tal, and realised what he’d said with an instant flip backward into a black pool of self-hatred. Sethennai at least didn’t seem to notice. He was staring down at something on his desk, shaking his head slightly. Tal followed his gaze and saw the iron scrying-bowl from the House of Silence archive, looking rather dull and crude among Sethennai’s other possessions.
“Does Tsereg know?” said Sethennai abruptly.
“That you’re their father?” said Tal. “I’m not sure.”
“No, do they know what they are?”
“What, a mage?” said Tal. “Er, I think so.”
That wasn’t the right guess either. One corner of Sethennai’s mouth jerked up in a parody of a smile, and he returned to his thoughts, resting his chin on his folded hands. He looked like the silhouette of a mountain when the sun was behind it.
The silence crackled. Tal found he couldn’t bear to look at Sethennai, so he searched around the edges of the bed for his clothes, eventually finding at least the shirt and leggings. He put them on, and when he glanced back Sethennai still hadn’t moved.
“I knew something wasn’t right,” Sethennai muttered.
None of this fell anywhere in the region of the reaction Tal had expected. He could imagine Sethennai being unhappy not to have known about Tsereg—regretful that he’d exposed his child to danger—melancholy that Oranna was dead or angry that she’d apparently deceived him—but Tal realised he’d assumed Sethennai would eventually settle down to pleased pride. The man was always so satisfied with his achievements.
But even indifference or displeasure would have been better than this, whatever it was. This cold focus. The same chilly analysis Sethennai applied, in general, to threats.
Do they know what they are? Tal rubbed his forehead with his thumbs, trying to banish the wine headache that was creeping in, and the dread that crept in after it. He couldn’t quite pin down why, and then he remembered—the lake in the dark wood, and the serpent, and what the serpent had shown them.
He’s been killing the other fragments, and he’s been eating them.
That had been the purpose of all this. With the death of the God-Empress, Sethennai had thought he was the last. And now he’d found out he was wrong.
In the quiet room in the guest wing, Tsereg slept on, defenceless. Tal wondered whether Sethennai was struggling with the thought of killing his own child, or whether he was just thinking about how to do it.
Tal made himself stretch and yawn. “I’m going to go and take a bath,” he said. Long practice kept the tremble out of his voice. “If you don’t mind. Seems like you’ve got stuff to be getting on with.”
Sethennai nodded without looking round at him, then turned abruptly, just as Tal reached the door, making him jump. “Tal,” he said. “I meant what I said last night. There would be a place here for you.”
Tal smiled. “Yeah. Thank you. I’ll think about it.”
Tsereg didn’t stir as Tal lifted them out of bed, wrapped them carefully in a blanket, and carried them out of the guest wing. They didn’t make a sound the whole way, not that it mattered, given that Tal had already strangled the Thousand Eye who’d been guarding their corridor and taken her sword.
He reached the hangar and looked along the row of cutters. There was a large handsome-looking one called Red Kite which he thought he could fly. He bundled Tsereg aboard, opened the hangar doors, and climbed into the pilot’s seat. The Kite slipped its bonds, gliding out into the night.
Tal wasn’t going to fool himself. He’d done enough of that for one night. They didn’t have long. The Thousand Eyes would be after them as soon as Sethennai realised what he’d done. His only thought was to get them away, as far and as fast as he could. That meant a Gate, and the closest was now to the north in Grey Hook, and from there to anywhere that wasn’t here.
Outside the Citadel it was dark, and worse than dark. Tal had known the sugar-pink sunset light had to be a lie, but he as he brought the cutter out from among the turrets and into clear air, he pulled up sharp from pure shock.
Ringtown was gone. Where Tal had expected to see the messy scatter of lights, the dilapidated houses—it was all just gone. Where the town had been, a crown of new towers stretched into the desert, glossy spires tendrilling up into the air or reaching hungrily across the sand. Each one gleamed as if polished, obscenely shiny, and as the light shifted they seemed almost to move, wriggling like a colossal blue-black anemone. Each tower was as tall as the old city walls, or taller. Tal couldn’t understand the scale of it. Thousands of people had lived in Ringtown—tens of thousands of people, almost the entire displaced population of Tlaanthothe—but there was no sign of anybody inside the towers, no windows and no lights.
Tal remembered Belthandros Sethennai standing on the dais inside the Citadel, telling the crowd you’re all safe, and his hands tightened on the wheel of the cutter. How long had he been inside the palace, eating fruit in the bath, while this had been just outside?
He wove the cutter between the forest of spires as fast as he could go without risking a crash. They were even bigger than he had imagined, towering but sleek as eels. Passing close to one, he saw person-sized shapes inside them: skeletal, faintly glowing even through the black glass walls. He swallowed, keeping his eyes fixed on the way ahead. He could feel bad about this later.
It wasn’t over. On the horizon, the earth cracked and another tower sprouted like some hideous fungus. The city was spreading. Was this Sethennai’s doing? Did he even know he was doing it?
Tal clung to the controls as if they were the only certain thing left, and kept flying.
At last, Tsereg’s forehead creased, and they turned over in their blanket cocoon.
“You there, Tal?” they said. Tal had propped them in the copilot’s seat. Their eyes were still half closed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m here.”
“Is it over? Did we win?”
“We won,” he said. “You can go back to sleep.”