“What duke rules here?” I asked.
Ruth smiled, the smallest smear of black blood at the corner of her mouth. “Why you are lost, aren’t you? Duke Gellethar of course!”
In that moment I realized what was missing. The dead baby, the box-child, he would lie in any idle shadow. But not here. These shadows were too full.
The front door banged open and little Jamie charged in. Boys of a certain age seem only to go flat out or not at all. He grazed the doorpost as he passed and lost a coin-sized patch of skin to a loose nail.
He ran up to me, grinning, snot on his upper lip. “Who’re you? Who’re you, mister?” Oblivious to the missing skin where dark muscle glistened like liver.
“So this would be the land of…” I ignored the boy and watched Ruth’s muddy eyes.
“Gelleth of course.” She opened the shutters. “Mount Honas is west of us. On a clear night you can sometimes see the lights.”
Makin may have been the man for maps, but I knew we were five hundred miles and more from Gelleth and the dust I had made of its duke. You would need the eyes of the god of eagles to see Mount Honas from any window in the Cantanlona…and yet Ruth believed what she said.
She turned from the window, the right half of her as scarlet as if she’d been dipped in boiling water.
31
Four years earlier
I stood up sharp enough, beating Makin out of his rocker. “Ladies, my thanks but we have to leave.”
“We?” the mother asked from the kitchen doorway, half-scarlet like her daughter but on the left rather than the right, as if together they might make an untouched woman and a wholly scalded one.
“There’s only you, Jorg,” Ruth said, the side of her face starting to blister and weep. “There’s only ever been you for us.” She spat two teeth-incisors, one upper, one lower-making a slot in her smile.
Makin slipped past me, out into the mist. I backed after him, sword held ready to ward the women off. Ruth’s smile held my gaze and I forgot her child. He clamped himself to my leg, the skin falling off him like wet paper. “Who’re you? Who’re you, mister?”
“Only you, Jorg,” said the mother, her head bald now but for random white tufts. “Since the sun came.” She lifted her hand to the window.
The mist lit with a yellow glow then shrivelled back, drawn across the marsh as if it were a tablecloth whipped away fast enough to leave everything in place.
Out across the marsh it seemed that a second sun rose, too terrible and too bright to look at, too awful to look away from. A Builders’ Sun.
In horrible unison both women started to scream. Ruth’s hair burst into flame. Her mother’s scalp smouldered. I shook Jamie from my leg and he crashed against the wall, pieces of his skin left adhering to my leggings. I backed away from the house. I recognized the screams. I had made the same sounds when Gog burned me. Justice made those screams when Father lit him up.
Once upon a time perhaps I might have thought two women running around on fire was a free show. Rike would laugh that laugh of his even now. Row would bet on which one would fall first. But of late my old tastes had gone sour. I had grown to understand this kind of pain. And whatever enchantments might have staged this show for me, these people had felt real. They had felt kind. A truth ran through this lie and I didn’t like it.
Outside the sun shone, watching us from a midmorning angle, and the screams sounded fainter, farther off.
“The hell?” Red Kent swung his head. “Where’d the mist go?”
“Ain’t that a thing.” Row spat.
The buildings dripped with mud. They looked rotted. The roofs were gone.
“What did you see in there, Makin?” I asked, watching the doorway. No fire. No smoke. It looked dark. As if the sun wasn’t reaching in even though the roof had gone.
He shook his head.
“They’re sinking,” Rike said.
I could see it. Inch by inch each of the houses sunk into the foulness of the marsh. The sound of it put me in mind of sex though nothing had been more distant from my thoughts.
“They’re going back,” Sim said. He kept his distance from the walls.
He had it right. If we were seeing true now the mist had gone, then those buildings sunk long ago and something had made the marsh vomit them up again just for us.
“What happened?” Makin asked, although his face said he’d rather not know.
“They were ghosts,” I said. “Summoned for my benefit.” Some tortured re-enactment of the suffering at Gelleth. People who died because of me. “They can’t hurt us.”
Within minutes the buildings were swallowed and no trace remained above the mud. I scanned the horizon. Nothing but stagnant pools for mile after mile. The retreating mist had cleared more than my sight though. A second veil had been drawn away. A more subtle kind of mist that had been with us since we first scented the marsh. The necromancy tingled in me. We stood on the surface of an ocean and the dead swam below. Something had been overwriting my power, blinding me. Something or someone.
“Show yourself, Chella!” I shouted.
The weight of her necromancy pulled me around to stare at the mire where she rose. She emerged by degrees, black slime sliding from her nakedness, her hair plastered around her shoulders, over the tops of her breasts. Ten yards of dark and treacherous mud stood between us. Row had his bow across his back, the Nuban’s bow lay strapped to Brath’s saddle. Grumlow at least had a dagger in hand. In both hands actually. But he didn’t seem tempted to throw either. Perhaps he just didn’t want to draw her attention to him.
None of us spoke. Not one of us reached for a bow. The necromancer had a magic to work on the living as well as the dead. Or at least a magic to work on men. The mire had tainted the flesh that I remembered so well, leaving it dark but still firm. The slime that ran from her, that dripped and clung, seemed to guide the eye, to gild each dark curve and point.
“Hello, Jorg,” she said.
She used Katherine’s words from the graveyard. Maybe what is spoken in such places is always heard by those who have married Death.
“You remember me.” I wondered how long she had been leading me to this point. I had no doubt now that her creatures had torn down the bridge we hoped to cross.
“I remember you,” she said. “And the marsh remembers you. Marshes have long memories, Jorg, they suck down secrets and hold them close, but in the end, in the end, all things surface.”
I thought of the box at my hip and of the memories it held. “I suppose you’ve come to tell me not to stand against the Prince of Arrow?”
“Why? Do you think I have my hooks in him?”
I shook my head. “I would have smelled you on him.”
“You didn’t smell me here and this place reeks of death,” she said, always moving, slow gyrations and stretches, demanding the eye.
“To be fair, it reeks of so much more beside.”
“The Prince of Arrow has enough defenders, enough champions, he doesn’t need me. In any case, you don’t want to believe everything you read, and the older a book is the less reliable its stories.”
There were written prophecies too? That made me snarl. It was bad enough that every turn of the tarot card and toss of the rune sticks put Arrow on the throne. Now books, my oldest friends, had turned traitor. “So why are we here?” I asked. I knew, but I asked in any case.
“I’m here for you, Jorg,” she said, husky and seductive.
“Come and take me, Chella,” I said. I didn’t lift my sword but I turned it so the reflected light slid across her face. I didn’t ask what it was she wanted. Revenge doesn’t need explanation. “And how are you here?” A mountain had fallen on her in Gelleth and buried her deeper than deep.
