Those words, spoken so quickly and without thought to anything but my own loss. I often wonder, now I am older and wiser, if I had paused and thought about what she was saying, if I had considered the facts behind the words, then would I have reconsidered? Because what I did not see, through the selfish eyes of my youth, was that Queen Adran had only one thing she could hold over my master. It was not her identity as a Death’s Jester—a new disguise is ten a penny to our kind. It was not that an art form would be lost from the world. That would have saddened her—she enjoyed the work—but she was always a cold realist.
No. There was only one thing my master valued highly enough to betray everything she had lived and trained for. I did not see it then, but now I am older I see it as clearly as the nails on my fingers.
Me.
It was me.
Merela Karn, the greatest assassin I ever knew, gave up everything for me. Dead gods help me. I should have run.
For both of us.
I should have run.
Interlude
This is a dream of what was.
He is scared.
He is always scared.
Today he is more scared than he has ever been because today everything changed.
His life, though it is settled and ordered, is not good and it has never been good, but he has never known any other life so he does not know his life is not good. He only exists. Slave-Father is quick with his whip, and the boy fears the whip, but are not all children whipped? And because he is crippled he is always the last to be fed. Always the smallest and hungriest of the slave pack, but is that not right? He is worth the least to Slave-Father so his life is hardest. He will not even make back his investment and maybe they will use him to train the war dogs.
He does not know what an investment is but he knows it is important to be able to make one and that he cannot.
There are other children in the flock, and they share an existence. They play in the same runs, sleep on the same sacks in the same corners. They eat the same meagre food at the same time every day. He is surrounded by people he knows. He knows which ones to avoid and which ones are safe to be around. He knows that if you escape the slavers will let the dogs rip you apart while the other children watch and scream. He even has friends—White-Hair and Blue-Eyes. He is content. There is comfort in routine, comfort in what he knows, comfort in the unchanging cycle of his life and the bars between him and the dogs.
But everything is changing and now he is scared. They are split into boys and girls, and Blue-Eyes cries for him when she is being taken away and loaded into a cart with high wooden sides. He can hear her shouting for him over the excited yapping of the dogs. “Club-Foot! Club-Foot!” Even after Slave-Father screams at her to stop, she carries on until the cart is out of sight.
They never whip the girls or the prettiest boys. He does not know why.
In the boys’ cart he sits with White-Hair but they do not talk. They hold hands.
As the crowded cart sways it makes some of the other boys sick and the air is thick with the sweet smell of vomit and that makes more boys sick and by the time the journey is finished they are all covered in each other’s sick. Men throw barrels of cold water over them. Big men, strange men who pull them from the cart, strip them and give them sacks, with holes cut for heads and arms to wear. He cannot see Slave-Father, and that makes him feel strange, like a flying lizard is trapped inside him with its wings fluttering against his ribcage. He worries because the flying lizards are delicate and their wings break easily. He does not like to hurt things.
He finds his friend, White-Hair, and they grasp hands so tightly it is hard to believe they will ever be separated.
But they are.
One of the big men tears them apart as if they are nothing but straw dolls. He walks away with White-Hair, pulling the small boy along by the top of his arm in a way that is obviously painful.
“Club-Foot! Club-Foot!” White-Hair can barely say his name for crying but the big man does not care. They are not mean, the men. They are not deliberately cruel. They do not want to hurt them but they do not want to not hurt them either. They treat the boys as if they are nothing more than sacks of grain rather than sacks of boy. And one by one they vanish. The children he has grown up with, huddled with in the cold of yearsdeath, starved with in lean times, and fought with constantly for enough to eat. One by one they are gone and he does not know where. He cannot see over the wooden walls.
Maybe they are being eaten. Like the dead are eaten.
Eventually, when the sun is going down and the high walls are throwing a cold shadow over him, it is his turn. A man takes him by the upper arm and drags him along through the dirt. The man smells of sweat. He takes him down a corridor in the high wooden walls. Someone has been sick halfway down it.
From the corridor he is taken out into a place. A place like no other he has ever seen. The low hot sun makes him squint, and he raises a thin arm to shield his eyes. Adults fill his vision, so many adults. More adults than he has fingers and toes. Then he sees the space beyond them. So much space.
He tries to run back to the walls.
The space is huge, impossibly huge. He can see further than he has ever imagined could exist. A never-ending plain of yellow earth and sky the colour of piss. It presses on him, it is a giant hand pushing him to the ground and drowning him in liquid fear, but the man does not care about scared boys, he does not even notice scared boys and he continues to drag him forward. They go up some wooden stairs onto a small platform and he is lifted up onto a small box garlanded with straw dolls. A rope is passed around his middle and they use the rope to hoist him up in the air. That is when he starts to scream, to scream and to kick and to wriggle. A small crowd of people watch as the momentum of his terror causes him to spin round on the rope. He sees that—all around in all directions—the land is flat and dead and like the carcass of an insect left to dry out in the sun. Dust blows in great curling clouds and gets in his eyes so he sees the world through a lens of tears and hurt. Despite the heat all the adults are wrapped in thick woollen cloaks with bright geometric designs on them. A man starts to speak and the words filter through his screaming and shouting.
“Last lot. I know he’s a cripple but as you can see he’s got plenty of fight in him. Bright too, from what I’ve heard.” An angry wind pushes flapping triangles of blanket away from the bodies of those gathered. Members of the crowd start to drift away in ones and twos. “Ten bits, ten bits for a boy? I’ll take ten bits for a boy,” the man sings it out in a deep baritone. When there are no replies he drops a tone. “Eight bits for a boy? Five? Five bits for this boy, five bits for this boy, and we can all go home.” A pause where the wind begins to howl. Small bits of wood and bones from food cartwheel across the dirt between the few woebegone tents. “Come on. Any less than five bits and I’m better off selling him to the swillers as animal feed.” A pause and then the man sings out again: “Three bits. Three bits and I’ll break even. No? Then the swillers’ pigs will eat well tonight.”
“Does he have a name?”
A female voice. He stops squirming and screaming in shock. He did not know girls became adults. And to ask his name? No adult has ever even hinted that they may have a name for him.
“We don’t name goods,” says the man.
“You want three for him?” she shouts.