TIM LEBBON was born in London and lived in Devon until the age of eight. His first short story was published in 1994 in the indie magazine Psychotrope, and his first novel, Mesmer, appeared three years later, in 1997. Since then he has published over thirty books, including 2009’s The Island and The Map of Moments (with Christopher Golden). His dark fantasy novel, Dusk, which came out in 2007, won the August Derleth Award from the British Fantasy Society, and his novelization of the film 30 Days of Night was a New York Times bestseller. His new novel, Echo City Falls, is due out in 2010. A full-time writer since 2006, he now lives in Goytre, Monmouthshire, with his wife and two children.
Jan Ray Marcellan wished they could just nail the bastard to the Wall. She hated venturing beyond Marcellan Canton and into Course, where the people were rougher, less educated, poorer, harsher, and more likely to aim abuse at a Hanharan priestess. It was outside the norm, and even the complement of thirty Scarlet Blades could not make her feel completely safe. She thought the air smelled different out here, though of course that was a foolish notion. It was simply her discomfort getting the better of her.
But Dal Bamore had to be transported to Gaol Ten prior to his trial, even though his death sentence was a foregone conclusion. And she had chosen to accompany him.
She parted the curtains on the front of her carriage, looking between the driver’s feet and the bobbing heads of the four tusked swine hauling it, and saw Dal Bamore staked naked on his rack. Six Scarlet Blades pulled the rack, Bamore’s heels dragging across the cobbles and leaving bloody streaks, and now that they were outside the wall, the crowds were throwing rotten fruit and stones. The Blades raised their hoods and hunkered down, though few missiles struck them. Marcellan soldiers were greatly feared. Fruit exploded across the condemned man’s body, stones struck with meaty or sharp impacts, and he barely moved his head.
Jan Ray smiled thinly. With everything they had done to Bamore to extract his confession, she’d be surprised if he opened his eyes even when they drove in the first nail. She dropped the curtains back into place and settled into her cushions, sucked on her slash pipe, and sighed.
A scream came from outside, and the thud of something hitting the ground. She froze, fingers touching the curtains again but not quite opening them.
The crowd, blood-hungry, frenzied, Blades on edge, and that’s Bamore out there, Bamore, one of the most dangerous—
The curtain was tugged aside and Jave’s face appeared. Her most trusted Blade captain. And he had fresh blood splashed across his cape.
“Wreckers. Stay here.”
As Jave disappeared and more screams rose up, Jan Ray lay back and wished they’d finished Bamore down in the Dungeons.
She only ever visits the deep dungeons if it’s something important. And right from the very beginning, she’s suspected that they have never tortured anyone as important as Dal Bamore.
He has already been in his cell for three days by the time she goes down to question him. The chief torturer has been instructed to loosen his tongue, but not to risk his life. Anything he says must be taken down—there is a scribe beside the prisoner every moment of the day and night—but he must remain lucid and conscious for whenever the Marcellans decide to question him themselves.
Jan Ray is always eager for this sort of duty. It gets her away from the daily grind of running the city as part of the Council, and the way she spends most of her waking time as a Hanharan priestess is dictated by generations of tradition and protocol. She understands its importance, but sometimes it becomes tiresome.
Down here in the Dungeons, she can be herself, just for a while.
There are no screams as she approaches. No sighs or grunts, no pleas for mercy. She is almost concerned, but when she reaches the door and the Scarlet Blade on guard opens it for her, those concerns evaporate immediately.
Bamore is hanging upside down from the ceiling. He is streaked with blood and feces. Beneath him, there is a large bowl collecting all the fluids that leak from him. She can tell that it has already been emptied over him more than once. A thin gray man sits on a chair some distance away, an open book propped on his knees, a pen in his hand. The pages appear completely blank.
“Trivner,” she says, and the fat man in the corner hauls himself upright. Rolls of flab sway beneath his loose robe.
“Priestess!” he says, bowing low. “An honor to see you down here with us lowlifes.” She can hear the smile in his voice, but forgives him that. He’s their head torturer, and it takes someone of particular skills and tendencies to perform the job competently. He has been employed down here for longer than she has been a priestess, over forty years. Some say he has never seen the sky.
“So tell me what he has to say.”
“Nothing, Priestess,” Trivner says.
Jan Ray raises her eyebrows in surprise. Bamore seems to be looking at her, but she cannot be sure. The light is poor down here, his eyes swollen almost shut.
“Nothing?” she asks, glancing at the thin scribe. He shakes his head.
“I started with air shards,” Trivner says, and she knows what is coming. Many times she has heard his delighted recitation of the tortures he has performed. It’s like listening to a poet’s expression of love for the one thing in life he can never let go. “Into his knees and elbows, then both shins. The first I slipped only into the flesh, but the last selection I pushed through his bones. They’ll never come out. Any movement is agony.”
“Delightful,” Jan Ray says. “Hurry with this, Trivner. And then perhaps I can get some answers from him where you’ve failed.”
The torturer blusters for a moment, but then breathes deeply, calming himself. Remember who you’re talking to, Jan Ray thinks. His voice becomes more businesslike.
“After the air shards, some more basic forms of persuasion. Fingernails extracted. Cuts filled with powdered swine-horn. Fire ants into every body opening.” Trivner’s confidence seems to falter, and the lilt drops from his voice. “No one ever gets past the fire ants.”
“But still nothing,” Jan Ray muses. Bamore turns slightly on the rope and it creaks, wet from his blood. He coughs and vomits something black.
“Leave me with him, both of you.” Trivner goes to protest but she holds up one hand, eyes closed. He knows better than to argue with a priestess.
“I’ll wait right outside,” Trivner says, as if that will be a comfort.
“By Hanharan’s will, he will tell me what I need to know,” Jan Ray says. But as the fat torturer and the thin scribe leave the stinking chamber, she feels a slight shiver of something she does not quite understand.
Soon, she will know it as fear.
Stay here, Jave had told her. Like talking to a child. He had been her most trusted captain for some years, and they had developed a rapport that bordered on friendship, though any hint of closeness between priestess and soldier was vehemently discouraged. But still she felt a tingle of anger at his brusqueness.
“He’s concerned, you fool,” she murmured, and the sounds from outside grew more startling. Shouted orders and screams of pain; panicked cries from the people who had been lining the street; the whip of arrows and impacts of cruel metal tips on stone, wood, and flesh. They’ve come for him. She shivered and leaned forward, pulling the curtain aside.
She had been involved in trouble like this several times before. Eighteen years ago, when Willem Marcellan was assassinated by a breakaway Watcher sect, she had been at his side in the carriage when the murderer climbed in and stabbed him to death. The killer had been moving across to her when a Blade’s sword pinned him to the carriage floor and gutted him before her. More recently, she and several other Hanharan priests had been trapped in a blood-feud riot between two powerful families from Mino Mont Canton, a skirmish that had resulted in the Marcellan Wall running red with the blood of fourteen executions over the space of three moons. Brutal, shocking, but necessary. So she was no stranger to bloodshed and the shock of violence, and fear was tempered by her faith. The spirit of Hanharan, the originator of Echo City, would welcome her down into the One Echo should she die here today.
But her concern was not for herself.
If they take Bamore and hide him away…
That could not happen. He knew too much—he was too much—and the city was nowhere near ready for him and his kind. If Hanharan chose to smile upon her today, it would never need to be.
It took her a few moments to assess exactly what was happening. The Wreckers must have been waiting among the crowd and in some of the buildings they passed by, because the carriage and its escort appeared to be surrounded. Arrows arced in from several directions, and she could hear the vicious thunk of crossbows being fired. Three Blades were already down, writhing on the ground and flailing for the arrows or bolts piercing them. One of them screamed. How unbecoming, Jan Ray thought. It seemed not even Scarlet Blade training was perfect.
The four tusked swine were also down, their tough hides spiked with many arrows and bolts. Two of them still moved, kicking feebly, the network of ropes and timber supports tethering them to the carriage twisted and useless. The first thing the attackers had done was to make sure they couldn’t move.
The crowd was panicking and trying to retreat from the scene, but others behind them pushed forward to see what was happening. The resultant crush denied them any hope of escape, and she saw very quickly that this ambush must be fought and won here. Gaol Ten was two miles away, but might as well have been twenty.
Buildings lined both sides of the street—taverns, a chocolate shop, a street café where several jugglers cowered in colorful terror among scattered tables and chairs. Some of the upper windows were open, and she saw movement here and there as Wreckers inside aimed and fired at the Blades pinned down in the street below. Over the rooftops to Jan Ray’s right rose the looming mass of the Marcellan Wall, and she so wished she were back behind it now.
But Jave had acted quickly, and their position was far from hopeless. A dozen Blades surrounded Dal Bamore where he bled on his rack, their billowing wire-rich capes pulled before them to divert incoming arrows. Their archers fired back, and she knew that they were the finest in the city. Even as she watched, she heard a scream from the upstairs window of a tavern, and a shadow fell away inside. Several Blades were lowering the wooden shutters around her carriage, striving to lock her in and protect her from danger. Jave was one of them, and he glared angrily when he saw her peering from the carriage window.
“Inside!” he shouted.
“Have you sent—”
“Of course!” There would already be several pairs of Scarlet Blades infiltrating the surrounding buildings, working their way toward concealed attackers. And there were also several combats occurring in the street, Wreckers clashing swords with Blade soldiers whom they had very little hope of defeating in one-on-one combat, and that confused Jan Ray. Wreckers were far from suicidal. Resorting to this strategy so early in the ambush meant that they were desperate, or…
“Jave, they shouldn’t have come forward so soon,” she said.
He dropped the final wooden shutter, trapping it with one hand just before it cracked into the priestess’s head. “I know that,” he said impatiently. “They’re stalling for something. We’ll be ready.”
“Make sure they don’t get him, Jave,” Jan Ray said, and even she was shocked by the tremor in her voice.
Despite the shouts, screams, and smells of battle, he paused and gave her a questioning stare. “Who is he?” he asked.
“Someone who must be seen to die on the Wall.” She ducked back into the carriage and let him shut her in, and the sudden darkness was terrifying. Closing her eyes, Jan Ray prayed to the spirit of Hanharan, but not for herself. She asked that Dal Bamore be spared so that he could be crucified.
“That’s no way for a man to die,” Jan Ray says, “covered in his own shit and piss.” She pulls a small curved knife from her sleeve and steps toward the hanging man.
“Don’t pity me,” Dal Bamore says. His voice has changed. Last time, as he stood before the Council four days earlier, there had been humor to his tone, and insolence in the way he formed his words. Now he sounds defeated. But she will not let him fool her.
It takes several slices at the rope to cut it through. As the last strands strain and part, she steps back quickly. He falls into the large bowl and tips it over, spilling the disgusting mess across the stone floor. Jan Ray wrinkles her nose in revulsion.
“Look at you,” she says. “The big revolutionary, the idealist, the heathen.”
“I’m no heathen,” he says. He manages to sit up, though his hands are still tied, and she can see that he’s woozy. She wonders how long Trivner has had him hanging upside down. His face is red beneath the streaks of muck. There’s blood all over his body, dried and still running. He appears unabashed at his nakedness, and Jan Ray glances away uncomfortably. From the corner of her eye she sees him shifting one leg aside.
“I’ll have Scrivner cut it off,” she says. “He’s done it to others, many times.”
Bamore chuckles and brings his knees up to rest his chin. He groans, but looks almost contemplative as he stares past her into the shadows.
“Give yourself to Hanharan,” she says. “It’ll make everything easier on you.”
“This is where we have a problem,” he says. He spits blood, closes his eyes, breathing heavily. He’s almost passing out, she thinks. We’ve almost broken him, and—
But he is not broken. Far from it. And as he starts talking, Jan Ray realizes that he has spent these last three days growing stronger.
“And the problem is need. You want me to give myself to Hanharan, because that will satisfy this curious need you Marcellans have to gather everyone to your flock. You need to hear acceptance from my mouth, because the idea that I don’t require Hanharan to make my life worthwhile scares you.”
“No,” Jan Ray says.
“It terrifies you. And I don’t need any of that at all.”
“If it means so little to you, accept Him and have done with it.”
“And then you win.”
“We win anyway. Tomorrow we take you to Gaol Ten. Three days later you go on trial for heresy, for which you will be sentenced to death. You’ll be taken to the Wall, nails hammered into your wrists and ankles. We’ll pierce you with thirteen mepple shoots to attract the lizards, and leave you to die. And after you die you rot, in sight of anyone who cares to look. I’ve heard of people staying up there for thirty days before they decay enough to rip free of the nails and fall.”
“I’ll be dead. It doesn’t matter.”
“If you accept Him, I can arrange for the executioner to stick you with a poisoned knife. You’ll be dead before he descends the ladder.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” He grins at her. It is a grotesque expression, his startling white teeth glaring from a mask of blood and excrement.
Jan Ray turns and walks to the far end of the chamber. Trivner has his tools of torture set out here, an array of metal, stone, leather, paper, wood, bone, and jars containing living creatures, that is in itself enough to give anyone nightmares for life. The tools are exquisitely clean, the insects well-kept, and the thought of someone tending lovingly to such things is horrific. She wonders if Trivner has a wife and children, and hopes not.
“So why you?” she asks, picking up a long, pointed bone. It’s hollow, and dozens of small holes give it barbs.
“Why me what?”
“Why have the Wreckers become organized under you?”
“Have they?” he asks, and for the first time she hears doubt. She remains facing away from him, putting down the hollowed bone in favor of a clawed glove. Each flapping finger is tipped with a razor-sharp hook. She can barely imagine the damage this would do to a human body.
She slips her hand inside and grimaces at the slick, oiled feel.
“Of course they have. And they’re little more than gangsters calling themselves terrorists. The name they choose for themselves says it all. They want anarchy, but for their own ends. They spout secularism, but only if it means they line their pockets, get all the slash they want. They claim to shun false gods—”
“All gods are false,” Bamore says, “and the Wreckers—”
“No!” Jan Ray shouts. She turns and advances on the bloodied man, and as she swings her gloved hand she sees something in his eyes that confuses her. The hooks bite in and she uses her weight to tear them through his skin. He screams—
He screams but he’s laughing at me.
—and the hooks open him across the chest. Blood flows. Dal Bamore falls onto his side, and Jan Ray steps back and drops the glove. She has lowered herself to this out of anger and rage, but also because she has feared this man ever since he stood before the Council and said, If Hanharan is a raindrop, I am the storm; if Hanharan is a fly, I am the spider. Now take me and make me God.
“How can you be a god hanging from that Wall?” she shouts, and his cries fade away into a chuckle.
As he sits up, the wounds across his chest cease bleeding.
“No,” she says, backing away. She starts hammering on the door, screaming for Trivner, feeling her old heart fluttering in her chest like a bird trapped in a clenching. “No!”
Bamore stops laughing, closes his eyes, and grimaces, and the cuts heal, leaving only pale streaks beneath the dried blood flaked across his body.
“Whatever you do, they’ll remember me,” he says. As the door behind her opens and she falls out into the unlit hallway beyond, Jan Ray thinks, There’s no way that can happen.
The last time there was a sorcerer in Echo City was almost four hundred years before.
More screams, more shouts, and being blind was driving her mad. Jan Ray poked at knotholes in the wooden shutters with her ceremonial knife, popping out one knot large enough for her to see through. It afforded her a view of the street ahead of them, the dead tusked swine, the Blades gathered around Bamore’s rack, and the facade of one row of buildings. But she only had eyes for Bamore.
Don’t let him wake, she thought. I had no idea how much to give him, or how little; no inkling of how effective it would be. I was flailing in the dark even before this, and now…
If the Wreckers achieved the unbelievable and managed to take him away, there was no telling what Bamore would do. He had come to them supercilious and aloof, welcoming the tortures because they would allow for a miraculous recovery. But he had not expected what had happened after the torture. If he gained time to let it wear off, then perhaps his air of superiority would transform into a need for revenge. And powerful though the Marcellan family was, sorcery was anathema to them, evil and unknown.
One of the buildings to their left was on fire. Screams originated within, and a flaming shape burst from a window and fell into the street. Two Blades shoved their way past a scatter of café tables and approached, and when they confirmed it was a Wrecker and not one of their own, they retreated and left them to burn. The cries soon bubbled to nothing, but the dying person continued moving for some time.
Her soldiers seemed to have taken control. Though surrounded and besieged, they were fighting with calm determination, archers picking their targets, swordsmen allowing Wrecker attackers to approach them, picking their own places to fight. She could see two dead Blades close to the carriage, and further away were six dead Wreckers.
Several arrows struck the carriage. It was too dark inside to see properly, but moving back from the knothole, she saw the gleam of one arrowhead protruding through the shutter. It was likely that they were using poisoned tips; she would have to be careful.
She widened the knothole with her knife, peeling out slivers of wood to afford a better view. When she looked again, it was just in time to see a dozen Wreckers charge into view from the other direction.
Where did they come from? she thought. She almost shouted a warning, but Jave appeared from where he’d been protecting the carriage, rushing across the street toward the enemy. Four Blades went with him, swords drawn, and clashed with the Wreckers close to where Bamore was being shielded.
Jave’s first sword swipe cut across the throat of one shrieking woman, and a spray of blood misted the air. It won’t be long now, Jan Ray thought. Reinforcements would be on their way—the moment the ambush fell, a messenger bat would have been sent back to the barracks at the gate they’d passed through—and she could already see the fight swinging their way. Besieged they might be, but the Blades were far superior fighters.
But then something began to change. The Wreckers engaged by Jave and the others stepped back slightly, swords held before them, and something about their faces was different. It took Jan Ray a moment to discern just what it was, and she squinted through the knothole, wondering whether her poor view was distorting her vision. But no. One Wrecker screamed as his head began to shake, and before he even drew a breath for another shout, he was raving. He leapt forward onto an outstretched sword, his own slashing at the air, other hand clawing for the Blade he’d gone for…and then he grabbed the sword piercing his stomach and pulled himself closer.
The Blade stepped back, forgetting for a moment that she was drawing the impaled man with her. In that moment of confusion, the bleeding, screaming man fisted her across the face. Her head flipped around, and he swung his other hand and buried his sword in her skull.
Other Wreckers had charged, shifting from angry to raving, and they swept across the Scarlet Blades. Blood splashed, but wounds seemed not to hinder them. Blades parried and fought bravely, but they were not used to enemies with slashed throats coming at them still, screams faded but rage just as rich.
“Jave,” Jan Ray said, partly in fear for her captain, partly terror at what she realized had happened. Whatever blasphemous sorceries Dal Bamore had been practicing were employed here to rescue him from certain death.
Jave fell back and hacked at a man slashing at his arms and face. He kicked the man from him, stood, and stabbed him, again and again until he seemed to die at last. Glancing at the carriage, he shouted some order that Jan Ray could not hear, then pointed. Sending them back to protect me! she realized, and six soldiers from around Bamore moved past the dead swine to surround the carriage.
“No!” she cried, because this could not be allowed. “No! Protect Bamore, save the prisoner! He cannot be taken!” But whether the soldiers failed to hear, or chose to obey their captain’s orders over her own, they remained close, leaving Bamore protected only by four remaining Blades.
More fell, bodies lay strewn across the street. And she saw something terrible. The Blades who had been cut or clawed down were almost all dead, yet some of the Wreckers that lay there still moved, hauling themselves toward the soldiers even if limbs were missing, guts trailing…and, in one case, a head was severed.
Sorcery, Jan Ray thought. Sorcery, on the streets of Echo City!
She reached out and opened the carriage door, lifting a wooden shutter aside. She had to speak to Jave. The most important person here now was their prisoner, and if she lost her own life preventing him from being rescued by the Wreckers, so be it.
A soldier glanced back and saw her, and his eyes went wide.
Something struck her in the shoulder, something else fell on her and crushed her to the ground.
She saw red.
Jan Ray has to go deep. With the blood of the tortured man still on her hands, she leaves the dungeon levels, heading first up a slowly curving staircase with over a hundred steps that leads eventually to a lush courtyard deep in Hanharan Heights. She passes huge oxomanlia bushes, waving away tame red sparrows that flutter around her head in case she has seed for them, and everything here is beautiful, brought into being by Hanharan countless years ago and uncorrupted by the stain of sorcery. That’s what makes her most upset: not the fear of what Bamore could mean but the sadness at what his talents might bring. Echo City is miraculous and amazing enough without a monster like him using magic to twist its many meanings.
An aide approaches and she waves him away, not even catching his eyes. And now he knows that something is amiss, she thinks, but that does not matter. She should go to the Council with this, but that does not matter either—they would brood and muse, discuss options and argue alternatives, and all the while he would be down in the Dungeons deciding when to escape.
One chance, she thinks. There’s only one, and it all hinges on whether he knows of it or not. Dal Bamore has the talent, but he looks young. Where he had acquired it she cannot tell, and she knows for sure he will never reveal the source to her. So she must use his ego against him. He welcomed capture and torture, and now he plans the miraculous escape and recovery that will draw the wonder of the masses. She has to ensure the escape fails, and that he dies up on the Wall.
In the corner of the courtyard, she unlocks a heavy wooden door with a key around her neck. Every priest or priestess carries such a key, but none of them has yet found cause to use it. Being the first gives her a flush of pride.
“In Hanharan I find my strength,” she says as she closes the door behind her. There is a rack of oil lamps fixed to the wall and she lights one, watching shadows scamper out of sight. Spiders and ghourt lizards. They’ll leave her alone if she shows no fear. She draws in a deep breath and starts down. “In you I seek my truth, and to you I promise my best. In your words I hear the history of Echo City, and I vow to listen, adding my own life to the history you impart.”
The staircase curves onto landings, doors lure her in, tunnels are swallowed in darkness. Eventually she crosses a street of the most recent Echo, built upon several hundred years before and preserved down here like a painting of older times. What she sees of the buildings’ facades resembles those above, except deserted. There are shadows that move the wrong way, and whispers, but she recites the route aloud, remembering which way to go, feeling the importance of what she is doing pressing heavily upon her like the weight of the city itself. She has no wish to see or hear phantoms.
Several times her oil lamp almost goes out when a sudden breeze whistles in from the darkness, and she tries to ignore the smells.
Reaching the hidden place, she uses her key again to unlock another heavy wooden door.
Inside, the room is small and sparse. Its corners and junctions are blurred by dust and sand-spider structures. There is a table at one end, upon which sit several books, and three shelves on the left wall that hold two storage jars each. Dust on the floor is thick and undisturbed, and the books appear to have settled into place. No one has been here for a very long time.
There is a mummified corpse curled beneath the table, wrapped in heavy chains.
She feels a flush of terror, and for a moment she cannot believe in this place. What it contains goes against everything she holds true: the last sorcerer, trapped down here with the things that put him down…
“I only hope it’s still here,” she says, reaching for a jar.
“The torture’s over,” she says later, holding the back of Bamore’s head and offering him the mug. “I’ve consulted with the Council. Your lack of confession means that you’ll be sent to trial, and you’ll be crucified in three days.”
“Won’t that depend upon the verdict?”
“The verdict is a formality.”
“So predictable,” he says, trying to grin through his broken face. “But I won’t die up there.” Why he has not chosen to mend the damage as he healed those cuts she does not know. Perhaps it’s a sort of perverted vanity. Or, more likely, he wants people to see what has been done to him.
“Drink, in the name of Hanharan. He will watch over your final days.”
“Your god?” Bamore sips, swallows, sighs. He has not been given a drink in days. “Hanharan can suck my cock.” He stares up at her, his one good eye twinkling as he awaits her reaction to such blasphemy.
But she only smiles, and, behind his ruined face, Dal Bamore’s smugness turns to confusion.
Jan Ray tried not to scream. It felt as if her whole shoulder and arm had been dipped in molten metal and then solidified, locking all the pain inside. She kept her eyes open, because she needed to see, and when she lifted the knife still in her hand, someone pressed down on her wound.
“Priestess!” a voice hissed. It was a Scarlet Blade, splayed across her body to protect her from any more woundings. But the fool was young, and scared, and with every movement he nudged the bolt protruding from her shoulder.
“Get…off…” she managed, and then the soldier was lifted away from her. Jave’s face came close, and he even smiled.
“Jan Ray, I’ll give you a sword if you’re so eager to fight.” He helped her sit up, glancing around all the time, watching for danger.
She grimaced through the agony, then looked around. The raving Wreckers had been cut down, and there were three Blades hacking at their still-twitching bodies. They appeared shocked and terrified, but beneath that was a professionalism that shone through. They’d have a story for their barracks tonight, that was for sure.
“What are you doing out?” Jave said.
“Going for Bamore. He can’t be taken by them, Jave.”
“I’m ready to slit his throat myself,” the tall captain said.
“No!” She stood, holding on to his arm and blinking away dizziness. More arrows flickered in, their energy expended in Blades’ robes. Blood soaked the street, filling the spaces between cobbles. The crowds had drawn back now, but further along the street, close to a fountain, she could still see a few curious onlookers. She knew what some people thought of the Blades, and she hated the smiles she saw.
“Is he still alive?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.
“My Blades have him surrounded,” Jave replied, nodding along the road. “I don’t think an errant arrow has killed him yet.”
“It can’t. And neither can your blade. Jave, I have a secret, and if I speak it to you, you’ll be only the second person to know.” She let go of his arm and leaned against the carriage.
“You!” Jave said, nodding at the two Blades who had been guarding her. “Help them protect the prisoner.” They left Jave and Jan Ray alone.
“Bamore is a sorcerer,” Jan Ray said. Jave smiled.
“A sorcerer? What, like magic?”
“Magic,” she said. She nodded at the quivering body parts strewn across the street, all that remained of those strange, raving Wreckers. One severed head seemed to tilt this way and that, and she saw the moist pinkness of its tongue licking its lips. “They’re his.”
“I’ve seen worse on bad slash,” he said.
“Really?”
Jave frowned, and she knew that he believed. Any other soldier would think me a fool, she thought.
“So let me kill him.”
“He has to die on the Wall!” she said. “Anything else—anything unseen—and he’ll become a martyr, and they’ll follow him as a god. There’s one chance to rid ourselves of him, and I’ve taken it.”
Someone shouted, a man charged from the shadows beneath a shop awning, and his sword met a Blade’s. He was a Wrecker, tattoos and heavy piercings giving him a threatening countenance, but he looked terrified. He seemed to be looking past the soldier as he fought, striving to see his master. The Blade gutted him in the street, stepping back to avoid getting more blood on his boots.
“They still have us pinned down,” Jave said hesitantly.
“Get him in the carriage with me.”
“Are you mad?”
“You dare to talk to a Hanharan priestess like that, soldier?” she asked softly. Jave nodded slowly, and something about his face changed. Did I just spoil something special? she wondered. She could not care.
“Bring the prisoner here!” Jave shouted. The Blades dragged Bamore’s rack a dozen steps to the carriage, skirting around bodies, using the fallen tusked swine as cover. Five archers providing covering fire all the way. Now that the hand-to-hand fighting had died down, the ongoing battle had taken on an almost peaceful air. Arrows whipped at the air, feet scraped on ground muddied with blood, and occasionally someone grunted when an arrow found home. From along the street some people started to cheer, but a Blade fired an arrow their way. Shapes shuffled away and hid.
“I mean it, Jave,” she whispered as she climbed steps into the carriage. “His life is more important than yours, and mine. If he’s killed here, his death will be denied. If they take him, he heals himself of those wounds and becomes a god. Our only hope to rid ourselves of him is public trial and crucifixion.” The carriage’s inside was stuffy, and light slanted across from several places where arrows had struck.
“Get him in,” Jave instructed. A Blade slashed Bamore’s bonds and two of them threw his loose body into the carriage.
Jan Ray pressed herself back into one corner. She saw Jave looking, and knew that he believed.
Then he shut the door and locked the sorcerer in there with her, and the tortured man said, “What have you done to me, bitch?”
He shouts and rages as she turns to leave the torture chamber. She sees him bringing his hands up, forming shapes, whispering strange words, coughing phrases she cannot understand, casting sigils into the floor that glare briefly before fading away. The shapes his hands make remain silhouetted on the wall for a moment, but then they too fade, shriveling to nothing when he had expected them to grow.
“What have you done to me, bitch?” he shouts. She’s surprised that he can even speak that loud; one of Trivner’s favorite tortures is fire ants down the throat.
She slams the cell door behind her, and his shouts become distant. In three days he will be dead. And if all goes to plan, she’ll never have to tell a soul.
They were concentrating on the carriage now. Arrow after arrow struck the wooden shutters enclosing it, and as the timber splintered, so more light came in. Jan Ray was huddled down in one corner away from the raving sorcerer, knife in her hand even though she could never use it, and she was beginning to fear how this would end.
They’re not afraid of hurting him, she thought. They know what he can do—he’s united the Wreckers, after all. They know if an arrow hits him he’ll get better, that his powers will protect him…
But they don’t know what I’ve done to him.
If Bamore did die now, the Wreckers would turn their sorcerer into a god and await his triumphant return. News of his powers would spread, rumors of magic would filter through the city, and Hanharan might not look so appealing with Bamore offering such romantic notions. The only thing that ever kept peace in the city was the Order of Hanharan, and those who preached and policed it.
“I made you normal,” she said. “For long enough to hang on the Wall, at least. You bloody fool, Bamore. You bloody, stupid fool, you think you pluck up a bit of knowledge from some slummy side-street and make yourself a god?”
“Gods don’t make themselves.” He spat, groaned as he rolled onto his side. “Their followers do it for them.”
“How did it happen? The magic, the sorcery…where did you find it?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because your people are going to kill me,” she said.
He watched her with his one good eye, smiling slightly, glancing away, listening to the sounds of battle from outside. The fight was louder again now, closer, and Jan Ray imagined her soldiers surrounding the carriage and holding off a sustained attack. If there were more Wreckers like those ravers…if there was something else they were hiding…
But reinforcements would be with them soon.
“Fair enough,” he said. And Jan Ray thought, It’s always in a madman’s nature to gloat.
“It’s Deathtouch, not magic. Stronger than the older magics. More specific. I bestow death, or take it back. You saw those raving bloody monsters out there? Mine. As for where I found it…” He started laughing. It was a horrible sound, rising from a chest half-flooded with blood and passing through a throat damaged by Trivner’s awful tortures. But Jan Ray thought that even were he fit and whole, Bamore’s laughter would have been dreadful. They’d failed to discover what he had been before he took the name Bamore; now she was glad.
“What?” she asked. “Where?”
“Under your very noses,” he said. “Not all Marcellans are as pure as you wish to imagine.” He pressed his hands together and grunted, trying another Deathtouch spell but failing.
“And without it, you’re just swine shit on my shoe,” she said.
Something struck the carriage. It rocked on its axles, wood creaking and cracking, and another hail of arrows struck the left side, the impacts continuing for some time as if the shooters were reloading again and again.
“They’ll have me soon,” Bamore said. “I’ll be unconscious from your tortures, of course. And once whatever you’ve done to me lifts, I’ll wake, and heal. As a victim of your cruelties, my followers will increase tenfold overnight.”
“You’re going to die on the Wall.”
He groaned and sat up, and she pressed back into the corner. He’s weak, but if he comes at me now…? I’m just an old woman. And she was injured. The bolt in her shoulder seemed to be super-heated, and she feared she might have been poisoned. An insidious infection, perhaps, that would kill her in days, not moments. She would not put such a cruel death past Dal Bamore.
More shouts came from outside, and then a terrible scream, loud and long, that seemed to come from many voices.
“Ahh,” Bamore said, “more of my children.”
Jan Ray heard Jave shouting to his remaining soldiers, and then his voice was snapped off, and the sound of chaos took over. Screams and shouts, the hacking of metal into flesh, and then the door of the carriage was ripped open.
Jave’s face appeared, and for a moment Jan Ray almost went to him, mouth opening to ask if it was over. But then she saw that below his face was nothing, only the spewing, ragged mess of his severed neck.
“Time to leave you, I think,” Bamore said. “But first, I’ll have one of my creations service your dry—”
An arrow struck him in the right cheek. His right eye flushed red, mouth opened, and he raised one hand and pointed at Jan Ray.
A Wrecker climbed into the carriage and glared at the priestess. The man’s throat had been torn out, half of his scalp ripped off, and yet he did not bleed.
Dead, Jan Ray thought. She lifted her knife and pressed it to her own throat.
She does not sleep that night. To defeat a sorcerer she has used magic herself, a remnant from an ancient conflict that the Hanharans have kept in their possession simply because they cannot let it go. She did not perform a spell, but administered it, and yet…
She has betrayed Hanharan, who said that the only magic is in him. She has denied his status as the one true god. Confused, angry, terrified, empowered, Jan Ray cries and smiles her way through the night.
They killed Bamore. The dead man went first, falling on the tortured sorcerer and hacking away with his short sword. Jan Ray watched with her breath held, trying to understand, wondering if they really thought their god could come back from this, refreshed and renewed. Then the dead man fell to the side, and someone else entered the carriage.
It was a tall man, with heavy piercings and tattoos displaying some high rank in the Wrecker gang. He glanced at Jan Ray, looked down at his bloody sword, then took turn hacking at Bamore’s corpse.
The sorcerer was meat. The man took his head and threw it from the carriage.
“Stamp on it!” he shouted. “Crush it, and grind his brains into the dust. There can be nothing left.”
Jan Ray lowered her knife and waited for the man to turn around and kill her. But when he did turn, he merely looked, fascination and disgust mingling in his eyes.
“So you’re a Hanharan Priestess,” he said. “Well…you’re not much to look at. And I thought suicide was forbidden under Hanharan’s word.” The man’s voice was empty, as if he cared about nothing at all.
“You just killed…”
“The man who would be god.” He dragged one foot through Bamore’s grisly remains. “He was a monster. What he did to my brother…what he put our people through, in the name of his damned Deathtouch…” The man shook his head, and Jan Ray wondered whether the other body in the carriage—still now, given itself over to death at last—was someone he had known.
She leaned to one side and looked out into the street. There were no Scarlet Blades left standing. A group of men and women squatted in the middle of the road, blood on their chins and painting their grins, and in their vacant eyes she saw a reflection of the dead man on the floor.
“So you’ll kill me now?” she asked softly.
“He’s dead. That’s all that matters. We couldn’t risk you letting him live. And I…for me it was only revenge.” The man was crying. Tears coursed a path down his tattooed cheeks, and he did nothing to hide them. It was as if Jan Ray were not there at all. “He destroyed us all,” he said. He dropped his sword and climbed from the carriage, slipping in blood and sprawling to the ground. No one came to help. She saw them dispersing, the surviving Wreckers and those raving people who’d finished their fight, and who perhaps now would find some sort of peace in death.
The carriage stank, so she slowly climbed out, wincing at the pain in her shoulder. Under your very noses, Bamore had said when she’d asked him where the Deathtouch had originated. She wondered if she could ever trust another Hanharan ever again.
The street was red, and it grew redder as a flood of Scarlet Blade reinforcements arrived to fight in a battle already lost. Or won. Jan Ray wasn’t quite sure.
It would be some time before she could make up her mind.