Or so he hoped. He’d wound enough gilded chains around the worthies of the city to keep them to heel, but even he could feel a tension. The odd exploratory tug. This sorry excuse for a war had made everyone fractious. No clear victories, and Crowkisser’s grim little flock pecking at the edges of what little control he had left.
He hung on. For all Hesper’s newly minted guildmasters styled themselves as respectable men of business, they were only a few births and burials down from those pirate captains, and that corsair’s urge for control still stirred their blood. So, he let their pride and hunger run them into traps baited with good deals and firm handshakes. Balanced their urges and egos with ledgers, and threats. Debts due and debts owed. The red columns and the black.
He could feel the squeeze though. If Kisser kept up her current pace, she was going to swallow every wretched little hamlet that still clung to the black crust of the southern border. Something strange was happening there, a swing in the weather vane that didn’t quite add up. Resistance had been fierce to begin with, after the South burnt, and Hesper’s fleet had limped back to port. Terror had quickly turned to fury, and fury had kept the forges lit for a while, even the most callow entrepreneurs among Hesper’s grasping classes realising that to stay atop the pile, there needed to be a pile to climb.
When Crowkisser had taken her victory as a chance to stretch her claws northwards, the little southern towns scattered in her path had fought tooth and nail, panic lending steel to their spines. He’d run men and supplies out for months, until he ran out of men, and the towns ran out of living mouths and able hands.
Now, his scouts were whispering another, shittier story. Crowkisser and her shadow-walking hunting dog rolling up on those towns and being greeted with, if not open arms, then arms open enough for a boot and a gun barrel to be jammed between them. All those little southern villages choosing bowing heads overdigging graves. A pragmatism that was impressive, but deadly to Fallon. For every town that realised that submission to the crow-witch was easier, the wall of free folk around the south crumbled. Every one of them a drop in the bucket, but enough drops, and that bucket would spill dross all over his boots.
The southern towns were just sprats though. The real twist of the knife had been Thell. Years they’d fought for that bastard lump of rock. He still had a hot pain above his hip where little shards of some jade mace ground against the bone, reminding him of his bad decisions. He should’ve known better. Thell had left quicker than a scalded cat when the world burnt, and stones piss on them for that.
Kinghammer and the rest of them tucking themselves away from the world, as if that seclusion wasn’t just a dangerous indulgence. He glances over the map to where the Stump lurked in the mountains. A fat little blot of selfish ink. A new capital for a new age that wanted precisely fuck all to do with the folk who had bled and died for it.
He’d understood it when they wanted to be left to themselves. A whole fledgling nation brutalised by what they’d fought through. Except, they weren’t bloody keeping to themselves anymore.
He takes some chalk and sketches, irritated, down the map. Crowkisser’s fuckery in the south had put the wind up Kinghammer, clearly. Just days later, and all roads north had been sealed. Villages cleared, livestock and people pulled up and into the shadow of the mountain and all of it done with the same clinical economy that had won Thell’s freedom.
Of course, when the scale of what Kisser had done became clear, as names fell like leaves and the prayers of hosts went unanswered, Thell had stepped its operations up a gear. Now, Hesper was squeezed between the hammer and the anvil. All their efforts to keep Crowkisser penned in the south fraying, as the southern villages tired, and great ships like theVolanteslowly sank to the bottom of the sea.
The crow-witch nipping at his arse cheeks, and from the north, Thell sent patrol after patrol of harsh-eyed young warriors, handssweaty on their leaf-bladed spears. Guarding the roads, so they claimed. Turning back every rider that tried to canter towards the mountain.
He scratches his stubble and sighs. Doing a damn sight more than that, he suspected. Thin columns of smoke kissing the Midlands sky. Some of his scouts had seen enough before they were turned homewards, riding back with warnings that Thell was marking its borders with blood and ash. Those tight patrols of lithe young killers alighting in villages which had hosted temples, seeking the god-touched, seeking hosts. Fallon was surprised they had found any worth marking. Most towns with temples had turned quick enough when the south burnt. As the sky split and ran, those poor folk playing host to the gods had felt the full effects, half their body clinging to the earth, and the other half boiling loose and fleeing to the heavens.
Easy enough to find scapegoats when they were stumbling through the streets, hair aflame, jaws loosening with stellar fire.
Not all the hosts had fallen in that first flash though. The divine had left them, of course. Broken, golden things spilling out of the first available hole, and writhing helpless in the streets until their scales and sinew twitched into the space between stars and air.
Without their gods, the hosts were a broken lot. Either in mind, or in body. The land round here had long been a good home for the broken though, and its people had picked up the pieces often enough that a few more wild-eyed mouths were no great hardship.
So some towns had kept their hosts, or husks, or whatever they were now that the gods had fled. Some pulled their weight, and some simply took up an attic cot and wept, singing songs their mothers had sung.
Fallon pours a splash of something fierce, swills it around his teeth. Thell was doing exactly what he would do in their place. He admired Kinghammer for it, the wall-toothed sod. They were hunting hosts. Burning out the god-touched, root and branch. And if every temple set alight took the town along with it, that seemed a price they were willing to pay.
He taps the glass on the centre of the map. A damp circle marking the worst of it. If Thell kept burning southwards, and Crowkisser kept pushing northwards, it didn’t matter how daintily Hesper hiked her skirts, she was getting fucked either way.
There had been other options, briefly. Nothing with enough clout, though. And he knew that for a fact, because he hadn’t been sitting on his hands while Ship and Shroud roamed the coast. He’d sent a skiff to Errant, but she was locked down after the famine, and there was rumour of a strangeness among her rulers. Some feral madness skulking across tile and trellis, blossoming in the bone. Fallon had skipped the details, he was already up to his neck in weird shit.
He’d sought out the Heron Halls as well, sent bird after blasted bird west across the waves, and heard nothing. Perhaps their cities were moving again, the current pushing them further than wings and hollow bones could reach. The best he’d got out of it was a few quiet nights in the aviary, and a sill covered in exotic, redolent excrement.
Birds and skiffs and messengers, a hundred fractured hopes tossed out into the wind. And what had it got him? A few polite lads from the Burners wringing their sooty hands and tugging their caps, muttering that the Forest sought only to weather the storm. Some well-meaning Midlands coin-kissers who had half a brain between them, and barely twice as many swords. A smattering of other soldiers of misfortune. It was embarrassing.
And always, Thell on the horizon. The great chain of mountains that held the new Republic stitching the far hem of the sky on clear days, just close enough to mock him with its distant, cloud-laced seclusion.
Thell’s soldiers were active and lethal, carrying torch and spear through the Midlands, but none of it to help Hesper. Fallon had toyed with going north himself, to rattle Kinghammer’s thick neck and ask what he thought he was playing at.
He sits down heavily, drains the glass. He’d rather stick his fist in a furnace. Hesper had bled enough for Thell, and if theywanted to snap at the fingers of any outstretched hand, let the rock take them. He had some pride still.
At his back the sounds of the city rolled against the towers. The songs of the canal workers, the canary clamour of the markets; the hot ring of forges, and the stench of tanneries. The answer was there for him, rising in his mind with the acrid reek of gunpowder, and the distant flash of blades on the walls.
He had to ask the guilds. Cap in hand. Which meant he needed something in the shape of a cap. And he had it, nestled there in his ledgers of account. Red debts which could be flipped to black, and black debts which could fall to red, with the barest nudge of his pen. The invisible weight hung around the guildmasters of Hesper. Something to trade that he was loath to give. And which hehadto give. Which meant he needed another drink. He moves to fill the glass, then finishes the bottle, orange fire coating the back of his throat.
Was it really such a sacrifice? A few imaginary numbers for the bodies and blood to push Crowkisser into the sea?
The whisky swills around his teeth, acrid, burning, hard to swallow. Midlands grain lighting little fires on his tongue.
Still, it’s not that which chokes him, in the end.
12
