The mundane frivolities that lie between! Say that to me again, when the Temple’s burning and the Immish are cutting your throat open with a blunt knife. It’s blood on the streets I’m trying to prevent. Orhan banged the table, perhaps more violently than he’d intended. ‘The crying must be stopped! She must learn. As you keep saying, she’s a child. A child should be controllable.’ He sighed and rubbed his hands through his hair. ‘I know this is difficult. I cannot think what it must be like for her. I do not enjoy this. But I have no other choice. We have no other choice. You must make her learn. Make her understand.’
‘She wakes screaming every night!’ Tolneurn shouted back. ‘Every single night! Refuses to go to bed! Wets herself! She’s a child of five! You cannot make this go on! What do you expect me to do?’ He stared at Orhan. ‘She will go mad soon, Lord Emmereth. She is breaking under this. As any child would. We had to give her keleth seed, the last time, and still she cried and screamed in fear. The medica gives her milk spiked with brandy at night, to try to get her to sleep. So what do you suggest I do, My Lord? Dose her with hatha? Beat her? Promise her a new doll if she can kill a man without crying?’
I don’t know. God’s knives, I don’t know. Hadn’t thought of any of this when he was planning it all. Who would? ‘The High Priestess-that-was—’ he began hesitantly.
‘The High Priestess-that-was had ten years to prepare herself! She was a young woman, not a child. And she was half maddened with it herself. And she—’ Tolneurn broke off, silence falling in the room, the slave shifting in his seat.
‘And she?’
‘She … is dead,’ said Tolneurn.
There was a silence. The slave twitched in his chair.
‘You are the Imperial Presence in the Temple,’ Orhan said. ‘The hand of the Emperor before God. As you say, such things have happened before. There must be ways to manage this. There are women here who are used to dealing with children, are there not? They must be able to do something.’
Tolneurn threw up his hands in despair. ‘I say again, we have tried everything. I say again, she is five years old.’
Orhan rose to his feet. So futile. His anger had come too quickly and now there was nothing he could say. Defeated, as he expected to have been. She’s five years old. But he hadn’t thought … What did he know about children?
‘Your wife is pregnant, I believe,’ Tolneurn said. ‘When you are a father, Lord Emmereth, perhaps you will think on this conversation and on what you are expecting a child to do.’
Orhan thought: I am expecting a child to do what our God bids us. I am expecting a child to uphold the role for which she was born. I am expecting you to sacrifice one child in order that the city will go on untroubled. One child I do not know and have barely seen.
Orhan thought: at least she’s not being burned alive.
Orhan thought: of course it would be different if it was my child.
This whole part of his plan had been a mistake. A disaster, every bit of it. So logical and necessary it had seemed back then. Kill the High Priestess, ensure a child successor weak enough to be controlled. If Great Tanis chose His Beloved through the granting of the red lot, then it was not even impiety, if the red lot was drawn. He’d instructed the old priestess Samnel to place one black lot in the box with the red ones. Great Tanis could have steered the child’s hand, if He truly didn’t want her.
Though he hadn’t told Darath about that detail, for fear he’d reopen his wound with laughing.
You are an Imperial functionary and a man of power, he thought to the image of Tolneurn’s pallid, thin face. I know about you: you rose from comparatively little and your father from even less. You’ve reached dizzy heights, for someone of your background. So there’s blood there under your nails somewhere, blood and betrayal and a blind eye. We both know this is grotesque. But that’s power. The best either of us can do is feel guilty about it. She’s a five-year-old girl. Yes. And how many five-year-old girls die of hunger? Sell themselves for a few coppers? Beg on the streets? What will happen to all these five-year-old girls if the Immish come? Great minds have debated for centuries whether one life ruined is worth half a hundred saved. Far greater minds than yours or mine.
When he left the Temple the rainwater had all but evaporated, leaving dark lines in the cracks between flagstones, muddy detritus in the corners of the streets. The dust was coming back into the air. For a short brief while after a rainstorm everything was clear and brilliant with the sharp bright quality of fresh water. Then the dust came again and the world was softened again, like a woman looking through a gauze veil. I see you through silk and dreaming, some poet had written of Sorlost in the driest years. The dust of silk and dreaming, crumbled stone and dried shit. The dust blown in from the desert, golden as pollen, making the city glitter like a seam of quartz in dry rock. Abrading the skin and the heart.
Chapter Forty-Three
Reneneth. The first and last town in Immish, clinging to the scraps of Imperial trade and the needs of those remaining travellers mad or money-crazed enough to risk the old road. Huge, ruined caravanserai lined its streets, the last remnants of its days as a part of the Sekemleth Empire, in the times long since past when Sorlost had been the centre of all things, Immish a grassland of barbarians desperate for its briefest glance. Its newer buildings clung to the ruins, short squat houses with sloping roofs and small windows, aping some of the old Sorlostian fashions in their courtyard gardens and broken fountains. But colder and damper, built against the cold and the damp, the stonework less elaborate, the colours more muted, the air heavier, dirtier, without the languid murmur of self-pleasuring decay. An empty place. Unkempt. Sorlost had its dreams of splendour, Alborn its new gaudy flush of power. Reneneth sat deaf and dumb and crippled, like a beggar punished for theft.
Tobias left Rate and Thalia with the wagon, hidden in a knot of trees just outside the walls, and went off to investigate, taking the mage’s horse. Thalia sat quietly beside Rate, watching him sharpening his sword. He was tense. She was tense. Guilt burned in her heart.
‘You knew him for a few days. Fucked him a few times,’ said Rate again. ‘You’re better off without him, really you are. Really you are.’
‘He’s going to die,’ said Thalia. ‘Isn’t he?’
Rate didn’t say anything.
‘He saved your life,’ said Thalia.
Rate didn’t say anything. Carried on sharpening and sharpening his sword. Stinking of guilt.
‘What will happen to him?’ asked Thalia.
Rate put down the sword. ‘Look, just stop thinking about him, girl.’
They sat in silence.
‘We’re selling him to a woman called Landra,’ said Rate. ‘Lady Landra Relast, daughter of Denethlen Relast, Lord of Third. Third’s one of the Whites, girl. The White Isles? That place he said he’d make you queen of? Yeah? There. I can’t say I’m thrilled about it, in some ways, to be entirely honest with you. But … you know …’
Relast … Marith’s friend, Thalia remembered, had been called Carin Relast. The friend he’d killed. She shivered. No, she thought. I don’t know. I hope I never do.
‘She’ll kill him,’ said Rate. ‘Seems, um, very keen on seeing him dead. Paying us a great deal for him. Awful lot of money, people keep paying us to see people dead. If only I had that much money I could waste it on paying people to kill people for me …’