A Dark Sacrifice Read online

  Whatever the cause, the weather grew worse. A great wind came skirling through the mouth of the pass, hurling sleet and snow into their faces. For Sindérian, swaddled in a borrowed blanket over her cloak, there were times when the men and horses just ahead of her appeared as nothing more than bulky grey shadows. Then lightning flared and a barrage of thunder rolled down the mountainside, setting the horses dancing and fighting at their bits. She felt the shock of it carried on the air even before she heard it.

  Not a natural storm, she decided, every hair on her head tingling. Far from any ordinary clash of the elements, she believed she could sense a conscious intention behind every last snowflake and freakish turn of weather. But the tempest soon passed, all but the shrilling wind and a light fall of snow. In the woods to either side of the road, icy pine needles rattled in the blast, and the horses were so dashed and buffeted by the gale, which seemed to come at them from every direction at once, they could make little progress.

  The sun dipped toward the horizon; a slip of dirty yellow moon came up. Though no one wished to stop any longer than necessary in such miserable conditions, it was obvious that the horses could not go on forever. When the King finally called for a halt, the riders began to set up camps under the trees and to search the area for pinecones and seasoned wood. A hundred communal fires sprang up in the shadows, snapping and sputtering, struggling to stay alive in the falling snow. Soon, a hundred tin kettles were hard at work boiling up water for soup or comfrey-root tea.

  Finding a place near one of the fires, Sindérian settled down with her back to a fallen log and her legs drawn up to her chest inside the blanket and cloak. After a while her teeth stopped chattering. The horses made a kind of wall screening their riders from the wind, and a layer of dead pine needles made a damp cushion that was better at least than sitting on the ground. Just outside the circle of firelight, Faolein landed on a snowy branch overhead, where he fluffed himself up and drew in his head until he was nothing but a round ball of feathers.

  It seemed to Sindérian that she must have dozed off for a time, because the next thing she knew a dim light was sifting through the branches, and she was surrounded by the groans and faint curses of men heaving themselves up off the ground, brushing themselves off, and gathering up their things.

  She lifted her head from where it had been pillowed on her knees and rose stiffly to her feet. Stamping her boots in order to bring life back to her frozen limbs, she looked to the left and right, wondering what had become of her father during the night. The sparrowhawk was nowhere in sight. When she cast her thought out in search of him, she made only a tenuous contact. He seemed to be well but far away, higher up where the air was more rarified.

  Reassured by the thought that it would hardly be possible for him to lose her so long as she travelled with such a vast host, she headed out of the trees, with both her horses following behind on a leading rein. When she reached the road it was to walk out into a sleety sort of drizzling rain.

  All around her riders were mounting up, getting ready to ride. So it seemed that she had somehow slept through breakfast—or perhaps there had been no breakfast at all. She adjusted the hood of her cloak and took the bay gelding by the bridle. As she swung up into the saddle, a cloud bank to the east parted, and sunlight erupted like a fountain of gold above the peaks.

  By noon, the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue and the weather had turned distinctly sultry. Ice and snow melted into slush, the way grew slippery, and the entire line slowed to a walk.

  Long before evening, everyone was mired in a river of mud. The footing had become so treacherous, it was necessary to dismount and wade through the muck, leading the horses. Toiling along with a hand on each bridle, Sindérian tried to avoid the places where the mire was deepest, but her skirts were already soaked with muddy water halfway to her knees.

  But at least, she reflected sourly, she had the satisfaction of knowing that Prince Ruan, trudging along immediately ahead of her, looked scarcely better off. If he walked with a lighter step than anyone else, if he rarely struggled to keep his footing, the horses he led still saw to it that he was splashed with his fair share of the mud. His hair hung down in damp strands like tarnished silver, and when he looked back to see how she was faring, she saw he had a long streak of mud on one side of his face.

  By the time that Faolein returned, landing so softly on the black mare’s saddle that she never heard him, Sindérian was so intent on finding the best footing for herself and the horses that she failed to even notice his presence until his voice spoke inside her head. Then she glanced up with a scowl, to meet the sparrowhawk’s inscrutable golden stare.

  Ask to speak to the King. I have news for him—and not of the best.

  Sindérian’s request was relayed to the King, passing by word of mouth from one person to the next. She knew when it reached the front of the line because someone shouted out an order and all progress stopped. She expected an answer to be relayed back to her, but Ristil himself came striding through the filth, flanked by two of his captains.

  Resting herself against the gelding’s solid flank, she repeated everything her father told her, as quickly as the words passed from his mind into hers.

  I have flown as far as the Old Fortress, said Faolein. There has been a great battle there: a section of the outer wall has been reduced to rubble, the second gate is broken, and the courtyards are filled with bodies.

  “If the Eisenlonders are in possession of the fortress, all of our people will be dead.” King Ristil seemed to age before Sindérian’s eyes; the lines in his face deepened and his shoulders drooped. “The barbarians never take captives and they slay without mercy. My son, my niece, young Skerry—everyone will be dead.”

  “Perhaps not all of them are dead,” she replied after a swift consultation with her father. “When Faolein was there, the Eisenlonders had not reached the innermost courtyards. It’s true that both sides are greatly diminished, and the fighting is sporadic, but someone was defending the third gate.”

  A silence fell as everyone looked to the King to see how he would react. Very pale and set of countenance, he stood staring down at the ground. “We will continue on,” he said at last. “There may only be a handful of our people left, and we may come too late to save even them. But either way—”

  His chin went up and his eyes acquired a steely glint. “Either way, we will still ride there with all speed—if only to bury our dead.”

  10

  The city of Xanthipei in Mirizandi—gorgeous, corrupt, glamourous—baked in the heat, dazzling with light and color, stinking like a midden. If rebellion was also stewing there, Prince Cuillioc had not detected so much as a whiff under the pervading ambiance.

  On the palm-tree-lined streets the usual traffic of sedan chairs, elephants, camels, and sweating pedestrians was no less boisterous than any other day, no less varied and brilliant in its exotic reds, tangerines, yellows, and aquas, even if it did move a little more sedately under the broiling rays of the sun. Parrots molted in silver cages; dancing girls shimmered on open-air stages in the bazaar; brothels and opium dens did their usual brisk business. In short, the people of Xanthipei—so easily and improbably subdued by the Pharaxion invaders—carried on much as always, while Prince Cuillioc, his household of twenty knights and one undersized page, his fighting men billeted throughout the city, and his mob of generally contentious Pharaxion nobles had melded so completely into the Mirazhite way of life, the Prince sometimes wondered who, exactly, had conquered whom.

  So when a woman’s shrieks ripped through the air one day as he attempted to while away the tedium of a hot afternoon, sipping chilled wine in the shade of a fig tree and playing a game of three-sided chaet with two of his knights, he was slow to react. He had drifted so long in the dream of luxury and vice that was the Mirazhite capital, the woman’s first screams produced only a feeble sensation of curiosity. Only when sounds of a vigorous struggle and a babble of angry voices followed was Cuillioc sh
aken from his customary afternoon torpor. Abandoning his shady nook, he set off in the general direction of the commotion, and those of his attendants who were not too sleepy (or too far gone with drink) went straggling after him.

  It was the twenty-first day of a stupendous hot spell in Mirizandi. Day by day, the swamplands adjacent to the city were drying up; in many places they were already more mud than water. Sometimes crocodiles crawled out of the ooze and waddled through the outlying neighborhoods, scattering the people and stampeding the livestock; occasionally, someone or something failed to move fast enough. No one dared to meddle with the creatures, for fear of a powerful cult that held them sacred.

  Along with the heat, summer brought forth a prodigious burst of growth in the gardens of the Citadel. There was, Cuillioc considered, something vaguely monstrous about all this vegetable exuberance: the immense sulphur-colored lilies under his bedchamber window that scented the air with a cloying perfume; the fast-growing creeper that put forth flowers the color of red-hot iron and swallowed up arbors, pergolas, and colonnades so completely that no evidence of the structures beneath remained; even the feverish haste of lemons, oranges, and apricots, which brought forth starry white blossoms and sun-colored fruits at the same time, and in such unnatural abundance.

  Yet the same heat that made the plants respond so wonderfully had a very different effect on the Prince and his people. The thirty-six men-at-arms who formed his garrison at the Citadel had grown lethargic, putting off their battle armor, wrapping it up in silk, and storing it away in cedar chests to keep it from rusting in the humid climate. Even his troublesome courtiers seemed content to idle away the unbearably hot days in the palace gardens, waited on by deft, silent, ever-smiling Mirazhite servants, and to spend their nights in wine shops and pleasure houses, or in the erratic pursuit of some ultimate experience of voluptuous decadence out on the streets, at the beast shows, or in the rituals of the so-called mystery cults.

  When Cuillioc woke in the mornings with the fumes of wine still in his head, he vowed to do better. He needed, above all, to remember he was a soldier of the Goddess, the sword in her hand, the instrument of her will. Yet somehow the weeks crawled by in a glut of heat, idleness, and stale, stale pleasures, and all of his best intentions amounted to nothing.

  By the time the Prince arrived at the place where the screams had originated, the incident was already over. Nevertheless, it had served to stir up his blood and pique his curiosity, if only a little, and he was inclined to investigate.

  Cuillioc glanced around the sunny courtyard. It seemed unusually crowded for the hottest part of the day. He spotted several of the demure, dark-eyed servants; a handful of men from the garrison; a number of his Pharaxion nobles, sweating in their satins and rich brocades. No one seemed willing to meet his eyes. He finally singled out the one person likely to know what it was all about: the minor lord he had appointed as his palace chamberlain.

  He could, when he chose, be most thoroughly the Empress’s son: glaring out of the same green eyes, staring down the same straight, aristocratic nose. He could draw himself up to his full height, which was by no means paltry, and cause men like the chamberlain to wilt beneath his gaze.

  “Your pardon, Great Prince,” was the quaking response. “I regret the matter came to your attention.” The man wiped his forehead with a bit of silk. “The situation is simply this: three of your men have been keeping women here, slaves from Oméia and Chalézia they purchased from the pleasure houses. Now one of the women is dead and the others are found to be dangerously ill. Of course I had them removed immediately, lest the contagion spread. What you heard was only their protest at being cast out into the streets during the heat of the day. There is no—”

  He was interrupted by the arrival of a grim little procession. The deformed priest Iobhar limped into the courtyard, mumbling prayers and liberally suffusing the air with incense, and two gaunt figures dressed in black sackcloth followed after him, carrying the dead woman in on a litter. Those they passed drew back hastily, crooking their fingers in the ancient sign against misfortune.

  Cuillioc frowned in the fierce southern sunlight. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The acolytes, Maël and Omair, stopped moving at once and put down the litter, but Iobhar, white-faced and ghastly in his crimson robes, continued to hover ghoulishly over the corpse. “This woman died in an advanced state of wickedness,” he intoned portentously. “Therefore, we perform a rite of purification to cleanse the premises.”

  The Prince raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Until the rest of us stop living in an advanced state of wickedness, I don’t see the use.”

  Iobhar bared his yellow teeth, hissing out something under his breath. Three or four courtiers tittered appreciatively until Cuillioc cut the laughter short with a quelling glance, feeling faintly ashamed of himself for having provoked it.

  Still, it was hard to see how the transgressions of a single slave woman—who did not even sin of her own free will—could amount to very much. A foreign slave at that, he noted idly, of a much darker hue than the warm-skinned natives, with a curious undertone to her lips and fingernails, which in death had turned an ugly blue-grey.

  Sudden vertigo overcame him, standing there in the glaring sunlight. He sat down abruptly on a low marble wall encircling a fishpond choked with water weeds. At the sight of all the pale, flabby, perspiring faces gathered around him, Cuillioc felt more and more queasy. Too late, he thought. At the very least too late for any of the men who consorted with those women. He wondered how many might already be ill.

  On the other side of the courtyard, the chamberlain was conducting a low-voiced conversation with two of the servants. The Prince summoned him back with a peremptory gesture. “I wish to know more about whatever it was that killed this woman. It might be anything: a plague, a murrain, a putrid fever. We know nothing of diseases that breed in this climate!”

  “I promise you, Great Prince, you have no need for concern,” the chamberlain answered hastily. “The servants have just been telling me they recognize the symptoms, and it is a slave’s disease only. They say many are afflicted during the summer months, and most of those die, but it never touches the free citizens, not even those of the lowest class.”

  Dabbling his fingers in the tepid water, Cuillioc caught a glimpse of something stirring below in the dark tangle of roots and stems. He leaned a little closer. Beneath a scum of dead insects floating on the surface, he spied three great carp, their armored scales gleaming bright orange, deepest indigo, and bloody crimson. In the ceaseless motion of their spotted fins and gossamer tails they appeared to be fanning themselves. Yet even the fish, he observed wryly, could obtain no relief. They were as glassy-eyed and enervated by the heat as he was.

  Glancing up from the carp pond, he met the enigmatic gaze of the furiádh priest. “You are older than I by half a century, Iobhar, and you’ve seen more of the world. Have you ever heard of a disease like this one—so particular about who it strikes down?”

  “I have not,” answered Iobhar, bowing his white head in elaborate humility. “It’s true that whenever there is an epidemic in a great city like our own Apharos, the ill-fed, the unwashed, and the ill-housed suffer the soonest, suffer the longest. But once any disease takes hold in the city, men and women of the highest rank are no more likely to be spared than anyone else. I find it difficult to imagine how it could be any different here.”

  “That is what I thought, too.” With a languid gesture, Cuillioc motioned to one of his knights. “Find me a doctor of physick, Gerig. Discover, if you can, who is the finest physican in all Xanthipei, and bring him here to the palace to speak with me.”

  With the excitement apparently over, the Prince returned to his shady spot under the fig tree and sat down again by the ivory game board. Studying the position of his playing pieces, he reached out absently for the silver cup he had left behind earlier. Finding the goblet almost empty, he put it aside with a grimace of disgust.

&
nbsp; What business had he addling his wits for weeks on end with the strong southern wines, he asked himself sternly. Then he remembered a cooling drink they made here called julla, which seemed to be nothing more than rose petals and lemon juice added to cold water, and he thought that a man of sense might choose that beverage instead. He signaled to his page, the nameless urchin he had snatched from the galleys almost on a whim.

  But by the time the boy stood before him, half sheepish and half defiant, Cuillioc had already changed his mind. He found himself wondering: was the water here safe? And he was suddenly appalled by his own negligence, for that was a question he should have asked weeks ago. If the usual conditions of war hardly applied here, that was still no excuse for such abominable carelessness.

  “You have been in the kitchens,” he said to the boy. “Where do the cooks get the water they use in preparing our food? Are there cisterns in the palace? Are there wells?”

  The urchin answered with a shake and then a nod of his head. He never spoke when he could avoid it; he was that wary of losing his place and being sent back to the galleys. When he did speak, it was only to parrot those things he heard in his capacity as the Prince’s spy. Of his own past, of his present doings, he said not a word, and no amount of kindness could win his confidence—nor could any amount of scrubbing or feeding, apparently, make him more pleasing to look at. He was as unlovely in the wrinkled silks of his newfound prosperity as he had ever been in the direst extremes of poverty. Yet, oddly, Cuillioc trusted him, if only because the boy’s best interests were so intimately linked with his own.

  When the boy remained silent, one of the Prince’s opponents spoke up from across the chaet board. “I’ve seen the servants soak leaves of some foul-smelling herb in their water before they drink it. If it tastes as bad as it smells—” He shuddered dramatically.