SO TAL WAS back in his old guest room. All that could be seen at the windows now was a thicket of towers and bridges, grown up around the Citadel like a hedge of thorns. A thin grey light filtered through. The bedclothes were dappled with mildew, and the woodwork had swollen with the damp.
He had been here for several days. He had seen nobody but a silent Thousand Eye guard who brought him bread and water.
He had never felt more alone. He lay back on the cold bed, picking at his nails and staring at the patches of mould on the ceiling.
Someone had taken the poisoned knife while he was unconscious, of course. There was nothing in the room that could serve as a weapon, no sharp edges, nothing breakable except himself.
He tried to think of nothing at all, and could only think of how badly he had failed Tsereg.
He had wanted to keep them out of this, and he’d failed completely, as always, and was he really any better than Sethennai, since he’d just gone ahead and let that happen?
A key turned in the lock, and Tal felt a kind of sickly mixture of satisfaction and fear and fury. He had been certain that Sethennai wouldn’t be able to resist coming to look at him.
It wasn’t Sethennai who entered, but the First Commander of the Thousand Eyes. Tal had rarely seen someone so openly, viciously miserable. She moved as though every instant was another pane of glass she had kick through.
“Hard day at the office?” said Tal, without moving.
“Listen to me, Talasseres Charossa,” said Cherenthisse. “The child is alive, imprisoned in the aerial vault. I know the two of you were planning something, and I don’t care what it is. I’m not going to stop you.”
“What?” said Tal. He hadn’t heard anything she said beyond the child is alive. The wave of relief that swept over him was immediately followed by a much larger wave of anxiety and concern. Alive could mean so many things. “Imprisoned in the what? Can you get me to them? Can you help me get them out?”
“No. The Thousand Eyes will not take your side. But we will not get in your way. We have made our choice.”
Tal knew he was supposed to be grateful and accept this, but that had never been his strong suit.
“That’s your choice?” he said. “To do nothing? For him? What do you think is going to happen? You think he’s ever going to ask what you think of anything? Ask you how you’re doing?”
Cherenthisse bared her teeth at him.
“You can tell yourself whatever you want,” he said. “Tell yourself you’re making some noble sacrifice or whatever. Loyalty ever undimmed, that’s your thing, right? Yeah, mine too. You’re never ever going to get what you want. I loved him for years. I would have done anything for him. You think it won me any credit in the end?”
Even later on, all through those years in the wilderness, Tal had been glad that at least he’d known this great love, that there had been something in his small, shitty failure of a life that had felt exalted, even if it had hurt, that for some years he’d had this purpose.
Cherenthisse was still hissing at him. Just because you could get used to the yearning, just because you could nurse it, a wavering flame that had to be protected from the wind even as it burnt you, it didn’t make it mean anything.
If you want to work at my side, kill him. Tal’s heart was the biggest traitor of them all, and up until that moment, he had still believed that maybe he had mattered.
“When I was younger, if Sethennai had decided to burn my homeland to the ground, I would have helped him light the pyre. And I probably would have felt good about it, for a bit, all maybe this time I’ve done enough to prove myself. But it would never have worked. I never meant anything to him at all. Maybe your God-Empress was different, I don’t know.”
“Yes,” she said. “My God-Empress was very different.”
Tal wasn’t sure he believed that. He hadn’t seen much of the God-Empress, but he’d lived in the world she’d made.
“We could all be free, you know,” said Tal. “If you get me the knife—”
Cherenthisse raised a hand sharply. “No. Do not tell me. If I do not know, I cannot stop you.”
Tal didn’t question that. He understood, he thought. Sometimes you had to trick yourself into doing things.
“Guess you won’t tell me how to get in the vault, then,” said Tal.
“You cannot. It is a part of the earthly mansion. Belthandros watches over it night and day.”
“Yeah, but,” said Tal, “suppose he looked away. How do we get in?”
“It is impossible,” she said, then grimaced, as though the next part caused her physical pain to utter. “Although I am certain Shuthmili gained access before. At least once.”
“What, you two were friends? I didn’t—”
“No,” said Cherenthisse. “I disliked her with every fibre of my body. She is cold, arrogant, and condescending; she cares nothing for anything of importance; and she thinks I am stupid.”
“Oh,” said Tal, “so you were colleagues.”
“Unfortunately. But I believe she knows how to get into the vault.”
“She’s … gone, though,” said Tal. He had no idea what had happened to Shuthmili after the Midsummer duel, or to Csorwe’s body.
“Yes,” said Cherenthisse, her face white and still as a marble statue, her gaze fixed in the middle distance. “If only there were some way to reach her.”
Against all odds, Tal managed to doze a little. He was brought back to reality by a faint creaking of hinges.
Sethennai was leaning in the doorframe, apparently taking in the scene.
All right, motherfucker, thought Tal. I guess it’s time.
“I do wonder a little what you were trying to achieve here,” said Sethennai. Tal knew that tone, half amused, half annoyed, and knew exactly how you were supposed to respond, but didn’t.
“Are you all right?” said Sethennai, approaching the edge of the bed.
Tal curled up defensively, groaning. He hardly needed to exaggerate. “God, leave me alone,” he said, turning his face toward the wall.
“Did Tsereg hurt you?” said Sethennai. Hearing him say their name made Tal want to elbow him in the face as hard as possible.
“What are you doing here?” said Tal, wriggling into a smaller ball and twitching as if in pain.
“I can heal you, if you like,” said Sethennai. Predictable as ever.
“Fuck off,” said Tal, burying his face in his arms.
“Or I can find someone else to do it, if that would be preferable,” he said.
“Why would that be preferable?” said Tal, muffled in his sleeves. “You know I hate it.”
“I don’t understand why,” said Sethennai. “You don’t hate to be touched in general.”
If you were asking his actual opinion, Tal didn’t think it was that strange not to want people meddling with your insides by magic, but he knew he had to judge this carefully. He had to be obstructive enough to convince, but not so sulky that Sethennai got bored. Luckily, he had devoted many years of his life to the study of exactly when Sethennai got bored with him.
“It’s too close,” said Tal. “Why would you heal me? I’m not on your side.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, tipping the mattress in a way that made Tal’s ribs complain. “I don’t want you to suffer.”
“Where is Tsereg?” he said. God, he only had Cherenthisse’s word for it, and if she’d been lying, then he knew worse than nothing and this whole idiot scheme was even more doomed than before. “If you’ve hurt them—”
“No,” said Sethennai. “That’s why you took them away in the first place, isn’t it? I’m sorry that you thought I was capable of something like that.”
“You told them to kill me,” said Tal, gritting his teeth. He’d been prepared for something like this. Sethennai was always quick to forget anything that didn’t fit his current version of events.
Sethennai gave a deep sigh. “Yes,” he said. “For the record—perhaps this won’t make any difference to your feelings—I would not have given Tsereg that choice if I had thought they would choose differently.”
There was something both astonishing and disappointing about this, like finding out how a magic trick worked. Once you saw what he was doing, it was unbelievable that you’d ever been taken in by it. Tal could see he was meant to feel flattered by this and open up sweetly, all ready to prove that he deserved the flattery.
So that was exactly what he did.
Going through the motions of surrender was like slipping on an old shirt. Sethennai asked to heal him again, and he played it out for a minute or two before agreeing, and didn’t even wince at the awful fizzy squirming sensation of the bruises receding.
An offensively short time later, he fell back into the grimy hollow in the mattress, letting his thoughts slide past, as detached as individual beads on a string, and letting Sethennai kiss him. If Sethennai thought there was anything strange about how quickly Tal gave in, it didn’t stop him.
“Are you cold?” he said, in fact, dusting a bit of damp plaster out of Tal’s hair. Tal found himself recalling the mercenary general Psamag telling him quite tenderly that he could leave before they started torturing Csorwe.
“I’m fine,” said Tal, and shivered deliberately.
Possibly the idea of having your good time in a prison cell was damaging to Sethennai’s sense of himself. Tal found himself being led up through the dark and winding corridors of the palace. The corridors moved faster than they did, slithering around one another like a shoal of leeches. At one point Tal’s nose and gums started bleeding. Tal noted the metallic taste quite calmly, and realised he wasn’t afraid at all. Or possibly he’d just got accustomed to wading through a general level of fear in order to get anything done in the day, and hardly felt it anymore.
“Tch,” said Sethennai, when he noticed the nosebleed. “I thought I’d fixed that.” He brushed a hand over the back of Tal’s head, and the bleeding stopped at once.
Tal had managed not to think that much so far about the fact that he was venturing into the lair of a divinity. Had this been a huge mistake? To think that he, Talasseres Charossa, could actually pull this off?
When they got to the room, Tal was careful not to think about anything at all, in case his body language gave something away. Sethennai was being very gentle with him, very attentive, but Tal knew better than to think his mind was completely on the job any more than Tal’s was.
Later on, curled up in the crescent of Sethennai’s body and trying to calm the frantic pattering of his heart, he couldn’t believe the distraction had worked.
Well. Only one way to find out.
Tal slipped warily out of his arms and pulled his shirt back on.
Sethennai just lay there, asleep, as coldly handsome as a statue.
He had changed. Tal remembered him laughing until he choked on his wine; remembered the three of them eating olives on the balcony as the sun set behind the city; remembered a time long ago when they had been caught in a rainstorm in the mountains and Sethennai had lent him his coat. He had never been a particularly kind person, but he had been a person.
And now, in the end, there was nothing vulnerable about that stillness, nothing peaceful left in him at all.
Snakes sleep with their eyes open, thought Tal.
The iron scrying-bowl stood on Sethennai’s desk, only a little way away, in the same place Tal had seen it the last time he did this.
Tal stood before the bowl and realised abruptly that he did not exactly know how to use it. It needed his blood, and according to Tsereg, it would take what it needed. So what did he have to do? If he just put his hand in the bowl?
Whatever happened, he could not cry out. He couldn’t risk Sethennai waking until he had reached Shuthmili.
It might be best to make your peace with dying here, Cherenthisse had said, before she left him.
At least, Tal thought, if he died here in this room, he wouldn’t be thinking of Sethennai.
If his life had to have a point, then Tal knew what the best of him had been, the one thing he’d managed to do half well, something Sethennai knew nothing about and had little to do with. That was clear to him now, with a bright sunlit clarity that cut through some of the panic swirling around him. Whatever happened to him, if he could make sure that Tsereg made it out of this alive, then he had won.
He reached out to touch the surface of the bowl. The moment his fingertips brushed the pitted metal, he felt a sharp and sudden pain in his hand, as though a blade had driven up through his palm. He clenched his fist and bit down on the cuff of his shirt, exhaling hard to stop himself from yelling. He could bear it. Blood welled around his fingers and dripped into the bowl, running into the spiral grooves.
Too slow, thought Tal. At this rate it would take hours to fill the bowl. He forced himself to open his wounded hand, to press his palm down on the surface of the metal.
At first the pain was a hundred times worse, a cold burning, as though the bowl was pushing needles of ice up through his hand. He gritted his teeth, feeling a scream rise in his throat like bile, and swallowed it down.
He pulled his hand back from the metal and blood rushed from a dozen punctures, plinking into the bowl like raindrops into a puddle.
You aren’t supposed to be able to hear your own blood, he thought woozily.
By the time there was a decent pool of blood in the bowl, Tal’s hand was numb. He didn’t look at it in case the sight of it made him nauseous.
How do I know when this thing’s working? he thought, staring at the red puddle in the bowl. Another kind of person would have thought about this ahead of time.
Did he have to say something? Was there some prayer to the Unspoken? The idea of praying to Tsereg was unfathomable.
What was it they had said, when Cweren had died?
“All things that are lost come into my keeping,” Tal whispered, and against all hope, the surface of the blood shivered.
Yes! Right! Let’s see Shuthmili, then, he thought. Come on! He knew what she looked like, at least, that twitchy little face. Show me Shuthmili.
Still nothing. Reflected in his blood, he saw his own anxious eyes, and behind them … shifting clouds of light, nothing definite. Maybe he just didn’t remember well enough how Shuthmili looked. He bit down on his frustration, clenching his bloody hand as though squeezing the last few drops from a lemon wedge.
The one time I could really use Csorwe’s stupid opinion, he thought, and the liquid in the bowl flickered, as if stirred by a breeze.
Tal stepped back, rocking on his heels to try and distract himself from the pain.
“Csorwe?” he mouthed, still not daring to speak aloud. The bowl rippled as though he’d dropped a stone into it. “If you hear this—”
Having to ask for things was Talasseres Charossa’s second least favourite activity. It was bad enough to humiliate yourself and worse that it was the easiest thing in the world for the other person to say no. But then, it was Csorwe, and there was probably nothing Tal could do to make her think worse of him, so. Now was not the time to get tongue-tied.
“If you hear this, Sethennai’s got Tsereg, they’re just a kid, we really need your help,” he said, repeating it a few times to make sure the message got through. “And also, in case I’m dead by the time you get here, no hard feelings, you know?”
Tal swayed on his feet. Here came the woozy numbness he remembered from the last few times he’d lost a lot of blood. At least those times he hadn’t done it to himself.
He leant on the surface of the desk. Even his good hand was now clammy with sweat. The blood had drained away from the bowl as though it had been drunk up. There was no way to tell whether it had worked, whether anybody had received his message.
He bandaged his hand in the sleeve of his shirt to stop the bleeding. All that was left to him now was his very least favourite activity: to wait and see.