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The beer had a clean taste, sharp, and I drank too much of it, perhaps to dim the images from Chella’s carriage, playing again and again through my mind, making me feel at once both sullied and hungry for more. Late on in the evening I leaned across Miana and took our son from the crib at her side.
‘Don’t wake him, Jorg!’
‘Oh shush, I’m taking him for a walk. He’ll like it.’ To his credit William, still looking only half-human as new babies are wont to look, lay limp in sleep while I manhandled him to my chest, and seemed impervious to disturbance of any kind. A cold tremor ran through me as I remembered Degran lying in my hands, lifeless, a ragdoll. I bit down on the memory, refusing to let it cripple me each time I held my boy. The death burned out of my touch the day I broke the siege at the Haunt.
‘At least wrap him up warm, take the—’
‘Shush, woman.’ For such a tiny thing she held an endless supply of nagging. ‘Be thankful I’m not leaving him on a hillside like the Spartans.’
I carried him between rank upon rank of the Gilden Guard, all bent over their meat and beer, voices lifted in half a dozen songs. By the main doors, open to vent the stink and heat of the road-ripe hundreds within, I caught sight of Gorgoth, unmistakeable, just outside at the edge of the torchlight. I went out, William clutched to my chest.
‘Gorgoth.’ A name that feels good in the mouth.
‘King Jorg.’ He turned his cat’s eyes on me, his great head turning slowly on a tree-trunk neck. He had a gravitas about him, did Gorgoth, something leonine.
‘Of all the people I know.’ I moved to stand beside him and followed his gaze out into the night. ‘Of all of them, since the Nuban died – it’s your friendship, your respect, I wanted. And you’re the one not to give it. I didn’t want it because you didn’t give it – but I do want it.’ Perhaps the beer spoke for me, but it spoke true.
‘You’re drunk,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be holding a baby.’
‘Answer the question.’
‘It wasn’t a question.’
‘Answer it anyway,’ I said.
‘We can never be friends, Jorg. You have crimes on your soul, blood on your hands, that only God can forgive.’ His voice rolled away from us, deeper and darker than the night.
‘I know it.’ I lifted William closer to my face and breathed him in. ‘You and I know it. The rest of them, they somehow forget, convince themselves it can be swept away, misremembered. Only you and Katherine see the truth. And Makin, though it’s Makin he can’t forgive, not me.’
I passed William to Gorgoth, pressing him forward until the leucrota lifted one massive three-fingered hand to receive him. He stood very still, eyes wider than wide, staring at my son, almost lost in the width of his palm.
‘Men shun me – I have never held a baby,’ he said. ‘They think what corrupted me will pass to their children if I touch them.’
‘And will it?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
We stood, watching the rise and fall of a tiny chest.
‘You’re right not to be a friend to me,’ I said. ‘But will you be a friend to William, as you once were to Gog?’ The boy would need friends. Better men than me.
The slowest nod of that great head. ‘You taught me that. Somehow you taught me what Gog was worth.’ He lifted William close to his face. ‘I will protect him, Jorg of Ancrath. As if he were my own.’
41
Chella’s Story
‘There’s no room at the inn.’ Kai twisted a grin at her. Allenhaure is full. He climbed back into the carriage, slipping off muddy boots.
‘Full of?’
‘King Jorg’s escort,’ Kai said.
‘So have Axtis press on to the next town,’ Chella said.
‘It’s a long haul to Gauss and the guard are always treated well here. Rumbles of discontent I’m hearing, as if there’s real men under all that gilding and those stern expressions.’
‘Not my concern. Let’s be moving.’ Though as she spoke the words it seemed that perhaps it was her concern. She tasted it at first, a wrongness in the air. ‘Wait.’
Kai paused, a boot half-returned to his foot. ‘What?’
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes … ‘Just wait.’ She held up a hand.
Wrongness. A dry sharp sense of wrong, like grit behind her eyeballs. The temperature fell, or perhaps her body just thought it did for her breath didn’t steam.
‘Lichkin.’ Kai felt it too.
‘Hiding himself,’ she said. ‘Thantos.’
‘What does he want?’ Kai’s poise fell away when lichkin drew near. Keres had terrified him. Thantos was worse.
‘It’s a reminder,’ Chella said. Some part of her had been hoping the plan forgotten or changed, a large part, and growing larger as life reclaimed her. She cursed Jorg Ancrath and steeled herself to this new task.
‘Go into town, get a cart and have it loaded with ale casks. We’ll camp in the fields toward the river. The guard can have their revels.’
Kai sniffed. ‘Looks like rain.’
‘Have them build fires. They won’t notice the rain after long.’
‘Ale will do that for you.’ Kai nodded. He couldn’t manage a grin though, not with death stalking so close, scraping every nerve raw.
Chella reached into the purse on her dress-belt. ‘Take this.’ She spilled four heavy pieces of gold into his hand, Brettan bars.
‘What—’ He nudged the small vial of black glass lying amongst the gold in his palm. From the change in his face she could tell he understood.
‘Styx water. One drop per cask.’
* * *
‘What a thing it would be.’ Chella held the goblet before her, making a slow swirl of the ale, the foam all but gone, just islands in a dark and moonlit sea. ‘To fly.’
‘Yes.’ Kai stared into his own dark sea, his own foam scattered islands. Perhaps it reminded him of his drowned land.
A long silence. The soft rain made no sound. Far, in the distance, a muted cheer from Allenhaure, some celebration amongst Jorg’s guard.
‘I almost did.’ Kai set his silver goblet on the table between them. ‘Once.’
‘How can you almost fly?’ Chella shook her head.
‘How can you almost love?’ He looked up at the sky, starless and bible-black. ‘I stood on a lip of rock, held out over the Channel Sea, where the waves pound on white cliffs. And the wind there, it blows so cold and sure, takes the heat from you, wraps your bones. I leaned out into it, nothing but the wind to hold me, and those dark waves slapping and pounding way, way below. And it filled me, like I was made of glass, or ice, or air, and the only thing in my mind was the voice of that east wind, the voice of forever calling me.’
‘But?’
‘But I couldn’t let go. If I had flown I would have flown away from everything I knew. From me.’ He shook his head.
‘And what wouldn’t we give to fly away from being us right now?’ Chella flicked her goblet over and stood as the liquid spilled over the table. All across the field men of the guard lay sprawled as if in sleep, lying, some of them in their gold armour, in the muddy grass. Captain Axtis had ended on his back, half-out of his pavilion, sword in hand, eyes staring at the sky and full of rain. Out of nearly three hundred men only eleven hadn’t at least sipped the Allenhaure ale. The lichkin had found those men in the dark and played his games, first making them silent with the wet tearing of flesh.
