Marcus pulled again, slicing deep into the meat of the tall priest’s palms, but he couldn’t get the blade free. The shorter priest stumbled back, turned. Coe was near him, a long knife in his hand.
“No!” Marcus said. “Don’t cut him! Don’t get close!”
Marcus planted his boot on the tall priest’s chest and shoved. The blade slid free. White foam mixed with his blood now. The dying man collapsed into the fire pit, but Marcus was already running across the frozen field. The short priest, ahead of him, was shouting a gabble of words he couldn’t follow and pumping his legs. Marcus put his head down and ran. The poisoned sword was long, and poorly balanced for sprinting. The priest opened the distance between them and closed the one to the nearest camp and the soldiers of Antea. A glance showed Marcus half a dozen men in imperial clothes who’d already noticed them, but hadn’t started toward the fray.
That wouldn’t last. And he wasn’t catching up. For every four steps he took, the priest managed five. The cold stung Marcus’s lungs. He fought not to cough. The Antean tents came closer. A couple of men were running out toward them, coming to the rescue of the disease that was killing them. Marcus pushed his awareness of them aside, his gaze on the shifting brown cloak in front of him. Nothing else mattered.
Something flickered to his left, and the priest stumbled. Fell. The hunter’s knife, thrown from God knew how far, protruded from the priest’s thigh like a bone in a bad break. Tiny black bodies skittered across the frozen ground, the chill already slowing them. The priest looked up, his hand raised as if to parry, as Marcus brought down the blade. He sheared through the man’s wrist, sank the point of the green-black sword into his chest. The fumes from the blade wafted up into Marcus’s face, astringent and cutting. The priest cried out once, then blood gushed from his mouth. Blood and other things: the bodies of spiders and the white foam of the poison.
Marcus stepped back, pulling the blade free. The soldiers were crying out in dismay and anger, their voices close. He looked up. Five of them in the first wave. Maybe twenty more behind those. They looked like sticks rattling in too-wide jackets. Scarecrows with the stuffing picked out for nests. They held their swords smartly enough, though.
Marcus lifted the blade, breathing between clenched teeth. He could try outrunning them. Might even manage it, given how near starvation they all were.
“Stop!” Kit’s voice rolled across the frozen earth. “In the name of the goddess and empire, put up your swords!”
The first five didn’t put up their blades, but their charge lost its speed. Marcus took a couple of slow steps back and risked a glance over his shoulder. Kit was a few yards behind him, arms lifted wide, face beaming in a wide grin. He looked joyful. Marcus rolled his eyes.
Actors.
“Do not be alarmed! Put your confusion aside, and rejoice! I have come as your liberator and savior! I am Kitap rol Keshmet, sent by the goddess to free you from the bonds of these false servants. Put up your swords, my friends, and let us be merry! Those who brought false words of the goddess, who kept you from the full truth, who pretended to guide you to victory, have fallen beneath my righteous blade!”
“Fuck is this?” one of the soldiers shouted. The second wave was catching up to the first, surrounding them. There was no running to safety now, but seeing as they hadn’t butchered Marcus or Kit or Coe, there were also ways it could have been worse.
Kit came to Marcus’s side, put a hand on his shoulder. Marcus lowered the point of the blade and tried to seem like Kit’s righteous servant. If it came down to blows now, they were likely all dead anyway.
“Have you not wondered, my friends, why victory has been so slow to come? Have you not wondered why, for all your good work and sacrifice, the goddess has withheld the comforts of home? I bring good news and more than good news. The peace you deserve is upon you! You have been misled by those who would use the gifts of the goddess against her, but she has seen your faith. And she keeps her faith now with you. Put up your swords and rejoice. I am Kitap rol Keshmet, and I have come as the true voice of the goddess to lead you home!”
Marcus knew the trick, knew that Kit was spinning a tale, but he felt the pull of it all the same. Perhaps because it was half-true. These men had been tricked. Had been held in a kind of dream of noble warfare, of honorable slaughter.
Coe snuck through the crowd with the green scabbard, and Marcus put away the blade. The soldiers around them shuffled, uncertain. There was still rage in some of their faces, but confusion was growing in others. And in a few—maybe two, maybe three—something that looked like hope. Or possibly relief.
“I see your doubt, and I forgive it. From so deep a sleep, you must take a moment to wake, yes? So come, my friends!” Kit shouted, waving his arm in a well-practiced arc. “To the tent of the Lord Marshal! Where all shall be made clear!”
A rough shout came up from the soldiers, halfway between cheer and threat. More of the soldiers were streaming in now, coming from camps in all directions. Even a half dozen from the siege towers that Marcus hadn’t known were guarded. They moved as Kit moved, following him toward Jorey Kalliam and confirmation that what Kit said was true. Which, of course, it wasn’t.
“Well,” Coe said, “this is interesting.”
“Not quite how I’d pictured it,” Marcus said. “But I figure it’ll do for now.”
“Should confuse the hell out of Camnipol when the news gets there.”
“Might, might not,” Marcus said. “With any luck, we’ll be the ones to bring it.”
“Then what happens?”
“We defeat the idea of war itself and end this whole thing gracefully. That’s honestly the plan.”
Coe was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, friend. Neither do I.”
Clara
People of high status in the court were, of course, made of the same flesh and bone as anybody else, and hence died as often. The fact of bodily mortality had never been hidden from Clara. By the time she first witnessed someone entering the last days of their life, she was perfectly clear on what was happening. Still it had come as a shock.
Cerria Pintillien had been an aunt on her mother’s side, and Clara had been eight when she died. Her memories of Cerria before the illness were vague. She was a sort of thick-faced presence in the background of Clara’s childhood home. A deep, almost braying laughter, a sense of judgmental intelligence, an image of almost comically wide hips negotiating a stairway. When Cerria contracted her final illness, it presented at first as a kind of beauty. She lost a great deal of the weight that had broadened her body and face, and her skin tightened and took on a strange sheen, like she’d been carved from wax.
Clara remembered vividly the murmurs of admiration among her mother’s friends before the cause of this transformation was known. Those same tendencies—the thinning flesh, the tightening skin—were not, however, an end, but a direction. Cerria continued to shed the bulk of her flesh until her collarbones cast shadows of their own and her hands lost their strength. Her skin grew less supple and took on a yellow tone, like the fat skimmed off cold soup. There had been no praise for her beauty then. Cerria’s last days had been spent in her solarium, sitting in the warmth, the skin stretched across her face like an artifact from a tanner’s shop. A mask fitted upon a skull.