seemed to blur together into a single vagueness.
“I did not expect to see you today, and certainly not so early.” His smile was a little sad. He looked thinner than the last time she’d seen him. “Don’t you have your lessons in the morning?
“Don’t tease. You heard the bells—how could you not hear them?”
“Ah, yes. I did notice something ringing...”
She scowled. She didn’t like him saying foolish things and pretending he was serious about them, treating her like a child who needed to be amused. She wondered if he had done that with his own daughter, the one he spoke of so sadly, the one he so clearly missed. (He didn’t speak about his son very much, though, she couldn’t help noticing.) “Enough. I have to hurry back to my family. What of you, Your Majesty?”
“A formal title. Now I
She was about to deny it, but suddenly felt warmth in her face. She was terrified she might cry in front of this man who, for all their friendly conversations, was a stranger, a foreigner. “A little,” she admitted. “Aren’t you?”
For a moment something showed through his mask of charming manners—a deep, bleak wretchedness. “My fate is entirely in the hands of the gods.” A moment later he had regained his composure and it was as if the mask had never slipped.
“Who can say?” Olin shrugged. “But Hierosol has stood for a long time. Many kings have tried to pull it down and failed —many autarchs, for that matter. A hundred years ago Lepthis...” He paused, then frowned. “Forgive me, but I cannot remember which Lepthis, the third or fourth. They called this one ‘the Cruel,’ as if that was enough to mark one Lepthis from another, let alone one autarch from the rest of the bloody-handed crew. In any case, this autarch swore he would shatter this city’s walls with his cannon, which were the mightiest guns in the world. Do you know about that?”
“A little.” She took a shaky breath. Olin had seemed genuinely upset to have frightened her, and now she could not help wondering who was making whom feel better. “He failed, didn’t he?”
Olin laughed. “Evidently, for we are speaking Hierosoline and you see no temple of fiery Nushash or black Surigali here on Citadel Hill, do you? Lepthis the Cruel swore to destroy the temples of all the false gods, as he called them, and put all Hierosol’s inhabitants to the sword. He pounded the walls with cannonfire for a year but could not even nick them. The flies and mosquitoes bit and bit down in the valley below the northern walls, and the Xixians died there in droves of fevers and plagues. Thousands more died of fiery missiles from inside the citadel. At last his men demanded he let them go back to Xis, but Lepthis would not hear of such a compromise to his honor. So his men killed him and made his heir the autarch instead, then they all sailed back to the shores of Xand.”
“His own men killed him?”
“His own men. Ultimately, even the most bloody-minded troops will not fight when they are hungry and exhausted, or when they understand their deaths will be for nothing except to glorify their commander.”
She stared out at the expanse of blue-green water in the strait, then looked south toward the place where she knew the great city of Xis must lie somewhere beyond the mists, its long walls hot and dry and white as bones bleaching in the desert sun. “Do you think that will happen this time? That we will have to live through a siege of a year—or even more?”
“I do not think it will be so bad,” Olin said. “I suspect that the present autarch mainly wants to keep Hierosol’s fleet occupied and her defenders busy so that he can turn his attentions on other, less well-defended targets—perhaps the Sessian Islands, which still hold out against him.”
For the first time since the bells had begun to ring Pelaya felt a little looseness in her chest, which had felt so tight she feared breathing too deeply. Both her father and Olin said that all would be well. They were grown men, noble and educated men: they knew about such things. “I hope...” she began, then stopped. Without thinking, she raised her hand to shade her eyes then realized that the sun was behind her. It was only the low-lying mist causing that glare on the water, making it so hard to see out into the southern strait.
“Pelaya? What is it?”
She realized after a moment that she was praying to the Three, mumbling words she had known since childhood but which had never seemed as desperately important as they did now. “Look,” she said.
King Olin moved up to the wall and stood beside her, staring out across the strait toward the Finger. “I see nothing. Your eyes are young and strong...” “No, not there. Toward the ocean.”
He turned, following her finger, and even as he did the bells began to ring again, all across Citadel Hill, loud as the gods clanging spears against their battle-shields.
As it rolled toward them out of the southeast, the great, lowlying blanket of spiky shadow seemed to Pelaya an immense thicket of trees and clouds—as though somehow an entire forest had torn free of the shore and floated out into the middle of Kulloan Strait and was now drifting toward the walls of Hierosol. It was only when she could see the shapes more clearly that she realized they were ships. It took several moments more before she understood that this was the autarch’s fleet, hundreds upon hundreds of warships—thousands, perhaps, a snowstorm of white sailcloth bearing down upon Hierosol out of the fog.
“Siveda of the White Star preserve us,” said Pelaya quietly. Her own name had become a horrid jest—the ocean was now the city’s worst enemy. “Three Brothers preserve us. Zoria and all Heaven preserve us.” So many ships filled the strait that surely the gods themselves, looking down, would not be able to see water between them. “May Heaven save us.”
“Amen, child,” said Olin Eddon in a stunned whisper. “If Heaven is still watching.”
The streets were full of murmuring crowds as Daikonas Vo reached his rooming house, a dilapidated place near the Theogonian Gate, just inside the city’s ancient walls and just beneath the ramshackle hillside cemetery which had once been the estate of a wealthy family. The narrow street was not in the least fashionable now, but that didn’t bother Vo, and in all other ways a house full of transients suited him excellently.
Most of the people seemed to be heading for the nearest Trigonate temple or across the city toward Three Brothers and the citadel. When he had passed through Fountain Square on his way back from the stronghold, hundreds of citizens had already gathered outside the citadel gates, staring anxiously at the lightening sky as though the clamor of bells would be explained by heaven itself.
Many of them had guessed the cause of the alarm, and shouts and curses directed toward the Autarch of Xis were mixed with some harsh words about their own so-called protector, Ludis Drakava.
Vo, of course, was pleased. He had thought the invasion still months away, and had been creating and examining plan after plan for smuggling the girl out of the city. He had experienced a few bad moments when she seemed to attract the attention of one of the noble prisoners in the citadel, Olin Eddon, the king of Southmarch, but to Vo’s relief whatever flash of interest had provoked the northerner seemed to have died away. He had been aghast at the idea that the Marchlander might plan to make the girl his mistress: nothing would make his task harder than having to smuggle her out of Drakava’s own palace under the noses of Drakava’s own guards. But instead, she was still in Kossope House and still unprotected as far as he could tell.
He would be able to sneak her out of Hierosol now in the confusion of the autarch’s attack. Easier still, if the triumph of the invaders was quick, he would be able to walk out of the city with Autarch Sulepis’ safe-conduct in his hand and approach the Living God-on-Earth in high honor, to hand over the prisoner and receive his reward—and, he hoped, to have the noxious thing inside him removed. Daikonas Vo was not so naA?ve as to feel certain that would happen—after all, why should the autarch take him off the leash precisely when he had proved helpful? But the Golden One was notoriously whimsical, so perhaps if Vo pleased him he would do just as he had promised.
Just now, Daikonas Vo couldn’t imagine needing more from life than to serve a powerful patron like autarch Sulepis, but he was no fool: he could imagine a time might come when he might wish to be free from this living god. Vo decided that if the autarch didn’t immediately remove the invader from inside his body, he should find his own way to loose himself from his master’s fatal control, just to be on the safe side.
He reached the inn by the Theogonian Gate. Most of the patrons seemed to be out, summoned from their
