managed to shed my heavy coat and tear off my boots, my numb hands fumbling at the laces, fingers stupid and unresponsive.
Crowley would figure me to head downriver, but I ain’t ever been much of a swimmer and didn’t fancy my chances of outrunning him and his boys. Instead I kicked my feet and headed deeper into the depths. The canal was thick with the city’s waste, too opaque to see through even had I been foolish enough to open my eyes, so I had to hope Crowley fell for it. I held my breath as long as I could, then spurted up to the surface for air, lifting the top layer of ice half an inch above the water, then diving back to the bottom. I couldn’t keep this up for long. Already my limbs felt languid and heavy, each movement increasing in difficulty, the willingness of my body to obey my commands diminishing with each passing second.
I came up for air twice more before the cold got to be too much, and then I swam to the west embankment and hauled myself over the side of the canal. For a few seconds I lay prostrate on the dirty cobblestones, willing myself to move, my injured body unsympathetic to my demands. The thought of what would happen if Crowley and his men found me-that is to say the looming threat of torture and death-provided sufficient energy for me to pull myself to my feet.
Another afternoon it wouldn’t have worked-they’d have seen me climbing up out of the water and run me down-but the fog was thick off the bay, walling off anyone unlucky enough to be caught in it and rendering pursuit almost impossible. Crowley had swallowed my deception-in the distance I could hear them yelling to one another, trying to figure out where they’d lost me.
I knew I’d never make it back to the Earl-I didn’t even try. I just turned down a side alley and moved as fast as I could. The wind whirled heavy about my face, and I could feel the peculiar sensation of my hair freezing to my scalp-if I didn’t get out of these wet clothes and in front of a fire soon, the cold would do what Crowley had been unable to-less painfully perhaps, but just as permanent.
The narrow streets twisted and turned, my vision blurring in and out of focus and a terrible ache rising up from my chest. I only had a few blocks to go-I figured it was even money if I’d make it.
My jog became a half jog, then a slow walk, then a sort of awkward stumble.
Another step.
Another.
I climbed the white stone hedges with an appalling lack of dignity, banging my knees as I did so, even those low walls proving difficult to negotiate with my frozen limbs. I tripped over the last one, landing headfirst in front of the tower. I fumbled inside my shirt for Crispin’s Eye, belatedly thinking I might burst the Aerie’s defenses, but my fingers wouldn’t work, and anyway I knew I’d never be able to muster the concentration its powers required. Pulling myself to my feet I banged futilely against the door, my pleas for entry lost amid the wind.
The gargoyle remained silent, a mute witness, as I slumped to the ground.
In high summer of my nineteenth year Rigus came down with war fever. The streets were abuzz with the failure of the Hemdell Conference and the news that our continental allies, Miradin and Nestria, had mobilized to defend their borders against the Dren menace. High Chancellor Aspith had called for an initial commitment of twenty thousand men, then the largest collection of soldiers the Empire had ever assembled. Little did anyone appreciate that this first sacrifice would prove to be no more than kindling for the conflagration that would ravage the continent.
In the years since it ended, I’ve heard a lot of different reasons as to why we went to war. When I first signed up, I was told we were dying to uphold the treaties we had sworn with our comrades in arms-though what conceivable interest I had in ensuring the territorial integrity of the aging Mirad Empire and their degenerate Priest-King, or of helping the Nestrianns avenge the injuries the young Dren commonwealth had done them fifteen years prior was beyond my understanding, then or now. Not that it mattered-the powers that be jettisoned that one pretty quick once our eternal allies capitulated two years into the conflict. After that I started to hear that my presence hundreds of miles from home was needed to protect the Throne’s interests overseas, to stop the Dren from gaining a warm-water port that would allow them to threaten the scattered jewels of our Empire. A professor I knew, a client of mine, once tried to explain that the war was the inevitable by-product of what he called the “expanding role of the oligarchic financial interests.” We were pretty cooked on breath at the time, though, and I was having trouble following him. I’ve heard a lot of explanations-hell, half of Low Town still blames the whole thing on the Islander banking houses and their preternatural influence at court.
But I remember the buildup before the war and the packed lines at the recruitment centers. I remember the chants-“The Dren, the slaves, we’ll lay them in their graves!”-you could hear bellowing out from every bar in the city any time of the day or night. I remember the lightning in the air and the lovers bidding good-bye in the streets, and I can tell you what I think. We went to war because going to war is fun, because there’s something in the human breast that trills at the thought, although perhaps not the reality, of murdering its fellows in vast numbers. Fighting a war ain’t fun-fighting a war is pretty miserable. But starting a war? Hell, starting a war is better than a night floating on Daeva’s honey.
As for me-well, spending your childhood fighting the rats for fresh trash doesn’t do much to inculcate the middle-class virtues of nationalism and xenophobia that make one leap at the thought of killing people you’ve never seen. But a stint in the army beat another day at the docks, or at least that was how I figured it. The recruiter said I’d be back in six months and gave me a sharp suit of leather armor and a kettle cap that didn’t quite fit my skull. There was little in the way of training-I didn’t so much as see a pike till we had disembarked in Nestria.
I signed up with the first wave of recruits, the Lost Children they would euphemistically call us when our casualties during those first terrible months ran three in four and four in five. Most of the boys I went in with wouldn’t live another twelve weeks. Most of them died screaming, a crossbow bolt in the gut or a sharp spray of shrapnel.
But that was all in the future. That summer I walked around Low Town in my crisp uniform, and old men shook my hand and tried to buy me ale, and pretty girls blushed in the street when I passed.
I was never the sociable sort, and I doubted the rest of the men at the docks would weep at my absence, so I didn’t have much in the way of an elaborate farewell. But two days before I was required to take passage to the front, I went to see the only two people living that I figured might conceivably mourn my demise.
When I came in the Crane had his back to me, a fresh breeze filtering through the open window. I knew the guardian had already alerted him to my arrival, but even so I was slow to greet him. “Master,” I said.
His smile was broad but his eyes were sad. “You look like a soldier.”
“One of our side, I hope. Wouldn’t do to get knifed on the transport ship over there.”
He nodded with an unnecessary seriousness. The Crane was not generally concerned with politics, tending like many of his kind toward more esoteric interests. Despite the status conferred upon him as a Sorcerer of the First Rank, he rarely went to court and had little influence. But he was a man of great wisdom, and I think he understood what the rest of us didn’t-that what was about to come wouldn’t be over in time for Midwinter, that once unleashed this beast called war would not prove easy to again cage.
He didn’t say any of this to me, of course-I was going either way. But I could read the concern on his face. “Celia will be off to the academy in the fall. I have a feeling the Aerie will be very cold this winter, without her here. And without your visits, infrequent though they’ve lately become.”
“You’ve decided to send her?”
“The invitation was not styled as a request. The Crown aims to consolidate the nation’s practitioners into its own sphere of influence. No more puttering about in towers on windswept moors. I’m not ecstatic about it but… there’s little enough one old man can do against the future. It’s for the greater good, or so I’m told. It seems a great many things these days are to be sacrificed to that nebulous ideal.” Perhaps realizing his condemnation could apply to my situation as well, he brightened his tone. “Besides, she’s excited about it. It will be a good thing for her to spend more time with people her age-she’s been alone too long with her studies. There are times I worry…” He shook his head, as if wiping away ill thoughts. “I never planned on being a father.”
“You’ve adapted well enough.”
“It isn’t so easy, you know. I think perhaps I treated her too much as an adult. When I realized she had a talent for the Art… Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t take her as an apprentice too early. I was twelve when I went to live with Roan, twice her age and a boy besides. There are things she learned, things she was exposed to…” He shrugged. “It was the only way I knew to raise her.”
I had never heard the Crane so openly speak of his concerns-it was disturbing, and I had enough to worry about already. “She turned out fine, Master. She’s become a fine young woman.”
