Father Yarvi only shrugged. ‘There is nothing worth less than the curses of the defeated. If you had stood upon the forbidden ground of Strokom, you would understand. Everything falls.’
He took a sudden step forward, and shoved Grandmother Wexen with his withered hand.
Her eyes went round with shock. Perhaps, however wise we are, however wide the Last Door gapes, the crossing of the threshold always comes as a surprise.
She gave a meaningless squawk as she tumbled over the rail. There was an echoing crash, and a long shriek of horror.
Koll edged forward, swallowing as he peered over the balcony. The fire still burned below, smoke pouring up, the shimmering heat like a weight pressing on his face. The all-powerful First of Ministers lay broken at its edge, her twisted body seeming small from so high up. Everything falls. Mother Adwyn slowly knelt beside her, palm pressed to her purple-stained mouth.
‘So I have kept my oath.’ Father Yarvi frowned at his withered hand as though he could hardly believe what it had done.
‘Yes.’ Skifr tossed her elf-weapon rattling down on the balcony. ‘We both have our vengeance. How does it feel?’
‘I expected more.’
‘Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost.’ Skifr leaned back against the wall, slid down it until she was sitting, cross-legged. ‘A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief.’
‘We must find something new to reach for.’ Father Yarvi planted his shrivelled hand on the rail and leaned over. ‘Mother Adwyn!’
The red-haired minister slowly stood, looking up towards them, the tears on her cheeks glistening in the firelight.
‘Send eagles to the ministers in Yutmark and the Lowlands,’ called Yarvi. ‘Send eagles to the ministers of Inglefold and the Islands. Send eagles to every minister who knelt to Grandmother Wexen.’
Mother Adwyn blinked down at the corpse of her mistress, then up. She wiped her tears on the back of her hand and, it seemed to Koll, adjusted quite smoothly to the new reality. What choice did she have? What choice did any of them have?
‘With what message?’ she asked, giving a stiff little bow.
‘Tell them they kneel to Grandfather Yarvi now.’
The Killer
The dead men lay in heaps before the doors. Priests of the One God, Raith reckoned, from their robes with the seven-rayed sun stitched on, each with the back of their heads neatly split. Blood curled from under the bodies, making dark streaks down the white marble steps, turned pink by the flitting drizzle.
Maybe they’d been hoping for mercy. It was well known the Breaker of Swords preferred to take slaves than make corpses. Why kill what you can sell, after all? But it seemed Gorm was in the mood for destruction, that day.
Raith sniffed through his broken nose, splinters crunching as he stepped over the shattered doors and into the High King’s great temple.
The roof was half-finished, bare rafters showing against the white sky, rain pattering on a mosaic floor half-finished too. There were long benches, perhaps where the faithful had sat to pray, but there were no faithful here now, only the warriors of Vansterland, drinking, and laughing, and breaking.
One sat on a bench, boots up on another, a gilded hanging wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, face tipped back, mouth open and tongue stretched out to catch the rain. Raith walked past him, between great pillars tall and slender as the trunks of trees, neck aching from looking up to the fine stonework high above.
A body was laid on a table in the middle of the vast chamber, swathed in a robe of red and gold that spilled across the floor, a jewelled sword clutched in hands withered to white claws. Soryorn stood beside him, frowning down.
‘He is small,’ said the standard-bearer, who seemed to have lost his standard somewhere. ‘For a High King.’
‘This is him?’ muttered Raith, staring in disbelief at that pinched-in face. ‘The greatest of men, between gods and kings?’ He looked more like an old flesh-dealer than the ruler of the Shattered Sea.
‘He’s been dead for days.’ Soryorn jerked the sword from the High King’s lifeless hands leaving one flopping off the table. He set the blade on the floor and took out a chisel, meaning to strike off the jewel-studded pommel. Then he paused. ‘Have you got a hammer?’
‘I’ve got nothing,’ said Raith, and he meant it.