“Yes, ten years ago, in Ennishmin. And now they’ve come, finally. But what are they, Elith? What are we talking about here?”
The woman from Ennishmin looked up at her, and in the grimed, careworn damage of her face, something almost crafty, almost malicious, seemed to pass behind her watery bright eyes.
“You won’t stop them, you know,” she said.
“Okay, we won’t stop them.” Archeth nodded along, playing reasonable. “Fair enough. But tell me anyway, just so I know. What are they? What did you summon up?”
Elith’s mouth twisted, hesitant. She seemed to twitch at the end of a rope Archeth couldn’t see.
And then.
“Dwenda,” she enunciated, like someone teaching the word.
And sat back and grinned, a trembling, staring, broken-toothed rictus that Archeth knew she’d need krinzanz to get out of her head that night.
CHAPTER 13
The next morning, he went out to the eastern gate. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but he hadn’t been having many of those since he got back anyway.
The gate was one of the oldest in the city, built a pair of centuries ago along with the great causeway that led to it, back before Trelayne had sprawled as far as the sea, and so serving at the time as the main entrance for visitors. In a blunt, old-fashioned way, it was very beautiful; a fair portion of the city’s rapidly burgeoning trade wealth had once gone to finance the import of glinting, southern-quarried stone and to pay the finest masons in the region to shape and dress it. Twinned arches rose twenty feet over the heads of those entering and leaving Trelayne by the gate, mirror-image ends to a long paved courtyard with crenellated walls and statues of guardian marsh spirits at the corners. When the sun shone on it, the stonework winked and gleamed as if embedded with newly minted gold coins. By night, bandlight turned the currency cool and silver, but the effect was the same. The whole thing was widely acknowledged as one of the architectural wonders of the world.
Pity they have to use it as a torture chamber.
Yeah, well. Got to impress the visitors.
There was grim truth behind the sneer. No one entering Trelayne for the first time by the eastern gate would be left in any doubt about the attitude of the city toward lawbreakers.
He knew as soon as he passed under the inner gateway that there had been no executions recently—there would have been a crowd otherwise. Instead, livestock, carts, and pedestrians all went back and forth unobstructed along the worn center section of the courtyard. Stalls were set up along the side walls; grimy children ran about touting handfuls of cut fruit or sweetmeats. A couple of marsh dwellers had set up a brightly colored fortune-telling blanket in one corner. Elsewhere they were juggling knives or acting out tales from local legend. There was a pressing odor of dung and rancid cooking oil.
Could be worse, Gil.
The cages hung overhead in the sunlight, raised on massive bracketed cranes from the courtyard walls, five to a side. They were onion-shaped and seemed quite delicate at a distance, narrow steel bars billowing down and out from the suspension stalk at the top, curling in at the base and meeting in the central crankspace, where the bleak mechanism of the impaling spike rose back into the body of the cage. As he drew closer, Ringil saw he hadn’t been quite right about the lack of an execution. One of the cages still held the remnants of a human form.
Abruptly his vision scorched across, like muslin drapes on fire. He couldn’t see for the past in his eyes. The memory came on like the glare of a sudden, desert sun.
Jelim, screaming and thrashing as they carried him into the cage in his execution robe. Condemned criminals were sometimes drugged before sentence was carried out, as a mercy or because someone somewhere had put enough coin in the right hands. But not for this crime. Not when an example was to be made.
And Gingren’s hand, clamped shut on his wrist. The mail-and-leather press of his men-at-arms around them both, in case someone in the avid crowd might have heard whispers, might make an unwanted connection with the pale Eskiath youth there on the nobles’ viewing platform and the doomed boy in the cage.
You’ll watch this, my lad. You’ll stand here and you’ll watch every last fucking moment of it, if I have to pinion you myself.
Ringil hadn’t needed pinioning. Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he’d absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he’d gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim’s. He’d known at some deep, cold level that he would cope.
He was wrong. Utterly.
As they held Jelim in place over the lowered spike, as they forced him down and his thrashing abruptly stopped and his eyes flew open, Ringil held out. As the long, gut-deep shriek of denial ripped out of him, as the executioner below the cage began to crank the mechanism and the barbed steel spike rose inch by cog-toothed inch and Jelim shuddered in the grasp of the men who restrained him, as the shrieks began to peel out of him at intervals broken by inhuman sounds like someone trying to inhale thick mud, as Jelim rose slowly to his feet as if at some kind of obscene attention before the crowd, as his shudders went on in rolling sequence, as blood and shit and piss began to drip below and the cage . . .
Ringil came to on the boards of the platform, throat raw with his own vomit, one of the Eskiath men-at-arms slapping his face. They’d cleared a space for him, the rest of the assembled nobility probably not wanting to get his sick on their finery. But no one was looking down at him in disgust.
No one was looking at him at all.
All eyes were pinned on the cage, and the source of the noises that came from within it.
Gingren towered above Ringil, arms folded and crushed to his chest, and held his head up as if his neck were stiff. He did not look down at his son, even when Ringil gagged and the man-at-arms stuck a gloved finger in his throat and twisted his face roughly to the side so he wouldn’t choke.
The noises Jelim was making came to find him on the wind. He passed out all over again.
“Oi! What’s the fucking . . .” The peasant voice died away on the curse, came back conciliatory. “Oh, my apologies your worthiness. Didn’t see you there.”
Ringil shivered back to the present. He’d jammed to a halt in the thoroughfare, was blocking passage. He found he’d closed his eyes without realizing it. He shook his head and stepped sideways, out of the flow of traffic and into the shadow of the cages. The drover who’d sworn at him hurried past behind a brace of donkeys, eyes on the ground, not wanting trouble. Ringil ignored him, forced himself to look upward instead.
The man in the cage hadn’t been dead all that long. There were still no outward signs of decay, and the birds had not yet taken his eyes—something that Ringil knew could sometimes happen even before the last vestiges of life guttered out in the victim. In fact, there was something unpleasantly life-like about this corpse. Aside from the head, now rolled bonelessly sideways and forward on the neck, the man still stood erect to the demand of the steel spike that held him up. At a glance, and but for the stained ankle-length cream-colored execution robe, he might almost have been a soldier on duty caught rolling his neck around to loosen midwatch stiffness. Even the spike, where it emerged through blood-drenched cloth at the man’s right shoulder, might almost have been the pommel of a slung broadsword.
Ringil edged unwillingly a few steps closer so he could see up through the curving bars and into the face. The sun blocked out behind the head, gave it a soft halo. He felt himself grimace as he met the frozen eyes.