Морган Райс
Ruler, Rival, Exile
Ceres seemed to feel the same way.
“The Passage of Monsters it is. Let’s get the sail up!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Ulren, the Second Stone, approached the five-sided tower with the calm determination of a man who had plotted everything that might happen next. Around him, the dust of the city swirled in its usual endless dance, making him want to cough or cover his mouth. Ulren did neither. This was a moment to appear strong.
There were guards on the doors, as there always were. Ostensibly paid by all five Stones, but Irrien’s men in truth. That was why they crossed their pikes in challenge, a small reminder to any lesser Stone of their place.
“Who goes?” one called.
Ulren smiled at that. “The new First Stone of Felldust.”
He had a moment to see the shock in their eyes before his men stepped from the dust, raising their crossbows. He did not have the sheer weight of arms that Irrien did or the cunning spies of Vexa, the wealth of Kas or the noble friends of Borion, but he had enough of each, and now, finally, he had the boldness to use them.
He enjoyed the sight of crossbow bolts feathering the guards’ chests after they’d held him back so many times. It was petty, but this was a moment to give in to pettiness. This was the moment when he got to do everything he’d ever wanted.
He opened the door with his key, stepping inside into the light of the tower. What did it say about the city that the lamp smoke–filled air inside was still better than that outdoors? Still, even that seemed sweet today.
“Be swift,” he said to the men and women who followed. “Strike quickly.”
They spread out, the gleam of their weapons dulled with lamp black. When guards came from one of the corridors, they leapt forward in silence, striking out. Ulren didn’t stop to watch the blood and the death. Right then, none of that mattered.
He set off up the seemingly endless flights of stairs that led to the top chamber. He’d done this so many times now, and each time, it had been in the expectation that he would be there as a lesser thing, second or third or less in a city where the First of Five was the one place that mattered.
That was the cruel joke of the city, in Ulren’s eyes. Everyone fighting to be on top, five working in concert, but everyone knew that the First Stone was the strongest. Ulren had been plotting to be First for so long that he couldn’t remember a time when he’d wanted anything else.
He’d been cautious, even though this should always have been his. He’d built his power, starting with the lands of his family but adding to them, tending his resources the way a gardener might have tended a plant. He’d been so patient, so very patient. He’d worked himself to the very edge of taking the First Stone’s seat.
Then Irrien had come along, and he’d had to be patient again.
Around Ulren, the killings continued as he climbed. Servants in the First Stone’s colors died, cut down by his men. No hesitation, no remorse. Felldust was a land where even an innocent-looking slave might hold a dagger, hoping to advance.
A soldier charged from the shadows, and Ulren grappled with him, looking for leverage.
The man was strong, although maybe that was simply age weighing against him. Ulren found that his body ached now when he’d been in the training ring in his home, and the slave girls who’d once come to him quite willingly now had to hide their looks of disgust and dismay. There were days when he walked into rooms and could barely remember why he’d bothered.
But he’d lost none of his cunning. He turned with the force of the other man’s rush, hooking his foot behind his attacker’s leg and pushing with what strength he had. The soldier stumbled, and then tumbled, going head over heels down the spiral stairs that led up the five-sided tower. Ulren left him for his warriors to finish. It was enough that he hadn’t seemed weak.
“Everything is in place in the rest of the city?” he asked Travlen, the priest who had given up his order to walk beside him.
“Yes, my lord. Your warriors are hitting those of Irrien’s people who remain in the city even as we speak. A number of his business enterprises have offered to come over to your side, while in those that haven’t, I’m told the slaughter has been enough to please the gods themselves.”
Ulren nodded. “That’s good. Accept any who wish to join us, then see who can replace the ones who run them. I have no time for traitors.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Gods,” Ulren said, “will these stairs never end?”
Another man might have considered moving the heart of Felldust’s power once he had control of it, but Ulren knew better than that. In a land such as this, tradition was just one more way of keeping control.
They reached the highest floor, where servants and slaves cut fruit and carried water, waiting on any whim of the other Stones. Ulren stood there, his warriors spreading out around him.
“Are any here slaves or servants of the First Stone?” he demanded.
Some moved forward. How could they do anything else? Irrien had abandoned them here. Perhaps he wanted them in place when he came back. Perhaps he simply didn’t care. Ulren surveyed the men and women who stood there. He imagined that Irrien would be savoring the fear on their faces right then. He’d spent enough time around the First Stone to know exactly what kind of man his rival was.
Ulren simply didn’t care. “From this moment, you are all my slaves. My men will determine which of you are worth keeping, and which will be given to the temples for sacrifice.”
“But I am a free man,” one of the servants there complained.
Ulren stepped in and stabbed him with a serrated blade, up through the sternum and then out of his back.
“A free man who chose the wrong side. Does anyone else wish to die?”
They knelt instead. Ulren ignored them, stepping over to the great double doors that marked the main entrance to the council chamber. There were other entrances, one for each of the Stones. It was meant to show their independence. It certainly gave them a way to run if it came to it.
He didn’t think that they would run from this, though. Not if he did it properly. Ulren signaled for his people to hang back and wait. There were ways to do these things. It was something that Irrien had never understood, being a barbarian from the dust. It was the one advantage that the Second Stone had over the First, and he intended to make the most of it.
He held out his hand, and one of his servants passed him his dark robes of office. Ulren wrapped them around himself, keeping the hood pushed back as he made his way to the doors. The bloody sword was still in his hand. It was better to be clear about what this was.
He stepped over to one of the high windows there, looking out over the city. The dust made it hard to see anything, but he could imagine what would be happening below. Warriors would be moving through the streets, hunting those Irrien had left behind. Criers would be following them, proclaiming the change. Thugs would be telling merchants whom they now owed their taxes to. The city was shifting beneath that dust, and Ulren had made certain that it would shift his way.
Even so, he was cautious. He’d been ready to take the First Stone’s seat once before. He’d prepared the strongest mercenaries, built up a stock of secrets, only to find an upstart taking the throne before he could get to it.
Who had been the First Stone then? Maxim? Thessa? It was hard to remember, the rulership of the city had shifted so often in those days. The only part that mattered was that Irrien had come in and taken what should have been his. Ulren had survived by accepting that. Now, the First Stone had overreached, and it was time to do more.
He stepped into the room where the Five Stones made their decisions. The others were there already, as he’d hoped they would be. Kas was stroking his trident beard in worry. Vexa was reading through a report. Borion had the bravado of a man who knew that there was trouble.
“What is this?” he asked.
Ulren didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “I have decided to challenge Irrien for his seat.”
He watched the others’ reactions. Kas continued to stroke his beard. Vexa raised an eyebrow. Borion was the one who reacted most, but then, Ulren had expected that. How many challengers had Irrien warned the fop about? How many times had he helped with the other man’s gambling debts?
“Irrien is not here to challenge,” Borion pointed out.
As if there was no precedent for that. Did he think that Ulren hadn’t seen every permutation of the council in his time as one of its Stones?
“Then that should make it easier, shouldn’t it?” Ulren said. He moved forward to take Irrien’s seat.
To his surprise, Borion stepped in front of him, drawing a slender blade.
“And you think you’ll make yourself First Stone?” he said. “An old man who took his position so long ago no one can even remember? Who keeps the Second Stone’s spot mostly because Irrien doesn’t want disruption?”
Ulren moved out into an open section of the floor, stripping off his formal robe and wrapping it loosely over one arm.
“Is that why you think I hold onto it?” he said. “Do you really want to try me, boy?”
“I’ve wanted it for years, but Irrien kept telling me no,” Borion said. He lifted his blade into a duelist’s posture. Ulren smiled at that.
“This is your last chance to live,” Ulren said, although in truth that had passed the moment the other man lifted a blade against him. “Note that Kas and Vexa have more sense than to try this. Put your weapon aside, and take your seat. You should even be able to move up a place.”
“Why move up one when I can kill an old man and move up three?” Borion countered.
He lunged forward, and Ulren had to admit that the boy was fast. Ulren had probably been faster in his youth, but that was a long time ago now. He’d had plenty of time to learn the skills of war, though, and a man who judged the distance right didn’t have to be fast. He swept around his balled up cloak to swirl and tangle with Borion’s sword.
“Is that all you have, old man?” the Fifth Stone demanded. “Tricks?”
Ulren laughed at that, then attacked in the middle of it. Borion was quick enough to jump back, but not without Ulren’s blade scraping across his chest.
“Don’t underestimate tricks, boy,” Ulren said. “A man survives any way he can.”
He stepped back, waiting.
Borion rushed in. Of course he rushed in. The young reacted, they moved in line with their emotions. They didn’t think. Or they didn’t think enough. Borion tried for a measure of cunning, with feints that Ulren had seen a hundred times before. That was the peril of being young: you thought you had invented things that had gotten many men killed before you.
Ulren stepped aside and threw his cloak over the younger man as he passed with his real stroke. Borion flailed at the fabric, trying to clear it, and in that moment, Ulren struck. He moved in close, gripping Borion’s arm so that he couldn’t bring his sword to bear, then started to stab.
He did it methodically, consistently, with the patience that he’d built up in years of fighting. Ulren could see the blood seeping through his cloak as it wrapped around Borion, but he didn’t stop until the other man fell. He’d seen men come back from the worst of injuries. He wasn’t going to risk anything.
He stood there, breathing hard. It had been bad enough climbing all the stairs. Killing a man felt as though his lungs might burst with the effort, but Ulren disguised it. He moved over to Irrien’s seat, positioning himself behind it first.
“Do either of you wish to object?” he asked Kas and Vexa.
“Only to the mess,” Kas said. “But there are slaves for such things, I suppose.”
“Hail the First Stone,” Vexa said, without any particular enthusiasm.
It was a moment of triumph. More than that, it was the moment that Ulren had worked toward for years. Now that it was here, it felt strange to actually sit in the First Stone’s seat, lowering himself down onto the granite of it.
“I have already taken Irrien’s interests,” Ulren said. He waved his hand in Borion’s direction. “But feel free to help yourselves to the boy’s.”
They would. Ulren had no doubt that they would. That was what this city was, after all.
“And, of course, we will need new Fourth and Fifth Stones,” Ulren said.
That should have been their cue to move up a space. Neither did, though. They kept the seats that they’d fought for, leaving the Second Stone’s seat empty. Ulren wasn’t sure he liked that, even if he could understand the fear behind it. They weren’t coming for his new seat, but it was a sign that they didn’t consider this settled, and that they weren’t going to fall into line with the new order.
They were hanging back the way he’d hung back when Irrien had first come to power.
More than that, they were acting as if this wasn’t over.
CHAPTER SIX
Stephania woke to a world filled with agony. The whole universe seemed to have screwed itself up into a ball of pain wrapped up in her stomach. She felt as though she’d been torn to pieces… but then, she had been sliced open.
That thought was enough to make her scream again, and this time there weren’t any priests or warriors there to hear her agony, only the open sky above her, visible through the blur of her tears. They’d dragged her outside somewhere and left her to die.
It took all of her strength to lift her head even enough to look around.
When she did, she quickly wished she hadn’t. Trash surrounded her, as far as the eye could see. There was broken pottery, animal bones, glass and more. All the detritus of city life spread out in a seemingly endless landscape of despair.
The stink hit her in the same moment, fetid and overwhelming, seeming to fill the space around her. The stench of death was mixed in with it too, and Stephania saw the bodies then, simply abandoned as if they were nothing. In the distance, she thought she saw funeral fires, but she doubted they were the elegant pyres of funerals. They would simply be pits, waiting for more and more bodies to consume.
Stephania knew where she was now, in the garbage area beyond the city, where a thousand middens found themselves emptied, and the poorest of the poor scavenged for what they could find. Normally, the only bodies that ended up there were those of the people who couldn’t afford a grave, or who were there to be lost in death, victims of criminals.
Stephania collapsed back for what seemed like an interminable time, the sky swimming above her in waves. Only strength of will kept her from giving in and succumbing to the blackness that threatened to consume her. She forced herself to raise her head again, ignoring the pain.
There were figures moving over the garbage heaps. They wore ragged clothes and their faces were smeared with dirt. Many of them were little more than children, their feet wrapped with rags against the sharp edges.
“Help… help me,” Stephania called out.
It wasn’t that she had much of a belief in the generosity of others. It was simply that she had no better choice. After everything that had happened to her, there was no way she could survive without help. They’d cut her child from her to sacrifice. They’d stolen him!
As if the thought summoned it, agony shot through the wound in her stomach, and Stephania screamed. Her cry for help hadn’t brought the scavengers, but her scream did. They came stalking over the heaps of broken things as if certain that this was all some kind of trap. They didn’t look like Felldust’s people, though. It seemed that the lowest of the low could survive even a war with nothing changing.
Stephania wished that things had been so stable for her. She’d been so certain that she could control things in the city; that she could wait out the siege and come to an arrangement with Irrien. Now she was lying discarded on a garbage heap, and she barely had the strength to keep breathing.
“She’s alive,” someone said.
Stephania looked up, and the presence of the garbage pickers so close to her took her a little by surprise. Had she blacked out for a moment? They stood around her in a pack, seeming to tower over her even though most would have been smaller than her if she’d been standing. Some were children, some were people twisted by illness or war, missing limbs or bearing scars.
“Help me,” Stephania said.
Maybe they wouldn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Most people didn’t do that, in her experience. Even Thanos had abandoned her eventually. But there were other reasons to help someone. Stephania knew that she was beautiful. Maybe they would want to sell her to a slaver for a profit. Maybe she could find one to seduce while she recovered.
The very fact that she was thinking it told Stephania just how desperate she was right then. It was true though. Give her any kind of chance, for any reason, and she would find a way to take control of the situation.
“I get her slippers,” one of the scavengers said.
“You do? Who says you do?”
There were hands on her then, a seeming horde of them. Every touch was agony, so that Stephania screamed and writhed. Worse, every touch seemed to ignore her completely. They tore at the few scraps of possessions she had left, tearing them from her while ignoring her completely.
She tried to fight, although the truth was that she couldn’t have fought off so many even if she’d been well. As it was, they tore every scrap from her, even though she tried to fight back. She grabbed for a sharpened piece of pottery, swinging it at the nearest of them.
They danced back.
“We can’t leave her like that,” one said.
For a brief moment, Stephania dared to feel hope. Maybe her few scraps of silk were the price for saving her.
“Throw her on one of the pyres,” another said. “No one will know.”
“No,” Stephania begged. “No!”
They grabbed her, ignoring the way she tried to fight as they lifted her. They carried her between them, and it was like being held aloft by a rolling wave of people. Stephania barely had the strength now to turn in their hands, but whichever way she turned, there seemed to be people there ready to hold her.
They carried her across the garbage the way servants might have hefted an old piece of furniture waiting to be demolished. There was no care to it, no gentleness, not even a fundamental acknowledgment that Stephania was alive. To them, she seemed to be nothing more than a thing to be disposed of.
She could see the fire pits ahead now, and that only fueled her struggles. They were big enough that each could have swallowed a house, flames coming up in spurts from them, as bodies broke down in their heat. There were corpses piled near them, each stripped of all valuables, while figures in the rags of the scavengers lifted them and threw them to the flames.
Stephania could feel the heat of the pit from here as they carried her toward it. It was like standing in front of a blacksmith’s forge, or having the fire of an alchemist’s burner skimming across every inch of her skin.
She didn’t want to think about how much worse it would be if they threw her in there. When they threw her in there.
It was impossible not to think about it. Stephania had seen people burn before, in the middle of battles, or when she’d had them tortured. She knew the smells of burning hair and skin, and just the memory of those told her what her future would involve.
“Please,” Stephania begged. “You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I can give you!”
“Doesn’t look like you have much from here,” one of them said.
They lifted her higher above their heads, ready to fling her down into the pit. Stephania screamed even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. From there, she could see into the deep, white-hot heat of the pit’s heart, where corpses were slowly turning to gray ash and charcoal.
They pulled Stephania back to throw her, and she knew then that she was going to die.
She found herself thinking of Thanos, despite herself. Part of it was hatred, because if it hadn’t been for him, then she wouldn’t have ended up here. That hatred had her thinking of Ceres too, and everything the pair of them had done to her.
Part of it was more than that. She missed him even now, even after everything he’d done, choosing Ceres. She wanted him to come running to the rescue. She wanted him to be there so that she could throw her arms around him.
The strangest part was that she even felt a flash of guilt. So many people had died because of her.
“You there, what are you doing?” a voice called.
For a moment, just a moment, Stephania thought that Thanos had come for her, which just went to show how much blood she’d lost when she saw who was really approaching over the mounds of broken and discarded things.
A woman who had to be in her sixties was approaching, wearing robes that had probably been a healer’s white once. She held a stick, waving it the way a knight might have wielded a sword.
“Leave her be, all of you!” the woman snapped.
Stephania expected the crowd around her to descend on the old woman the way they had on her, to lift her alongside Stephania and throw her into the flames.
Instead, they started to back away. They even set Stephania down in among the corpses by the edge of the pit. She tried to swallow her horror at that, because at least she wasn’t being thrown into the flames.
“But we found her,” one of the children said.
“And that means you get to kill her?” the old woman demanded. “Go on, get away, all of you.”
To Stephania’s surprise, they did. A few around the edges scrambled away first, then a few more, and quickly, Stephania found herself alone with the old woman, who watched while they left with a faint look of disapproval.
“You have to forgive them,” she said, standing over Stephania. “Living out here, they seem to think that taking all they can is the only way to live. I suppose, for most of them, it is.”
“Thank you,” Stephania managed.
The other woman seemed to ignore her words, squatting beside her and eyeing her critically.
“Let’s see… a huge wound to the stomach, signs of pregnancy, massive blood loss… oh dear, you have had a bad time of things, haven’t you?”
If Stephania had still had any strength, she might have hit the other woman then, rescue or no rescue.
“And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better, dear,” the woman said. She started to pull things out of her robes: cloth, water, thread.
“How did you… get rid of them?” Stephania asked.
“Oh, they come to me when they need help. They wouldn’t want to ruin that. Don’t worry about them right now. You have better things to worry about. I’m sorry, this will hurt.”
The other woman did something, and Stephania screamed in fresh agony.
“It’s astonishing that you survived what happened. What was it? A husband who found out the child wasn’t his? A rival?”
“Felldust,” Stephania managed, in between panting screams.
Something darkened in the other woman’s expression. “Yes, I’ve seen what they can do. Don’t worry. I will help you.”
She did something else that made Stephania cry out.
“Now,” the healer said, “I think it’s probably best if you sleep a while. Here, drink this.”
Stephania tried to shake her head, because sleeping meant losing control, but the other woman pushed a water skin into her mouth, forcing bitter-tasting liquid down her throat. Stephania could taste the sedative in it, a cheap thing, but a powerful one. It wasn’t long before the sky above her started to swim again.
The last thing she felt was surprisingly strong hands clamping around her wrists as the healer started to drag her across the waste ground.
