Honor among thieves

Chapter Eighty-Nine

The rocks kept coming, though not as frequently as when the bombardment began. Most of the missiles struck Castle Hill-sticking up above the level of the wall, it made an excellent target-and did little harm. The constant fear of attack might actually have helped Malden a little, since it kept people off the streets.

On top of everything else-starvation, greedy thieves, a horde of barbarians-now he had to worry that the city would be overrun from within, by a mob of zealots.

The cry for blood sacrifice had been taken up all over the city. His thieves and whores seemed mostly immune, but the honest folk of Ness had given themselves over to religious mania. Every day more people claimed that if the proper sacrifices were made at the Godstone, the barbarians would have no choice but to pack up and leave. Conversely, a rumor started making the rounds that failure to appease the Bloodgod would cause the city wall to collapse.

That was not based entirely on conjecture. Malden had heard a rumor when he as a child-grisly stories being a favorite topic of conversation for street urchins-that when Juring Tarness built the wall eight hundred years ago, he had sacrificed his three chief architects to Sadu and mixed their blood with the mortar that held the bricks together. He had thereby made the wall impenetrable to mortal weapons. In eight centuries that theory had never been tested. Now it seemed an article of faith that the shield of blood must be replenished in time of need.

On his daily patrol of the city, Malden started finding the carcasses of animals lying before the Godstone. He knew better than to forbid it-even though the city desperately needed the meat. The common people of Ness, it seemed, would rather starve than risk the eternal punishment of their god. The looming altar had been ritually desecrated back when the Burgraves decided to outlaw the priesthood of Sadu, but it seemed the stone had been rededicated to the Bloodgod. For the first time in centuries it was being used for its original purpose.

The old religion had never died. It had slept for a while, but now was waking up again, and bringing with it all the old madness. Sadu called out for blood, and the people were afraid enough to answer that demand.

He went to Cutbill to ask for advice. “This morning,” Malden said, when he was seated comfortably by the ex-guildmaster’s fire, “a deputation came to me. Five men who said they wished to be ordained as priests of the Bloodgod.”

“Interesting. They think you have the power to bless them now?”

Malden raised his hands in bafflement. “They treated me like a prophet, with much deference. And it’s not as if anyone else has that right. There hasn’t been a true priest of Sadu in how long? A century?”

“Longer than that,” Cutbill told him. “Royal decree outlawed that priesthood three hundred years ago, and the Burgrave of Ness reinforced the ban a few dozen years later. And for good reason.”

Malden nodded. The priests of Sadu had once performed human sacrifices to appease their god. Some of them had not been above kidnapping and murder to make sure of a steady flow of blood-since volunteers had always been hard to come by. It had not been unheard of for one of Sadu’s priests to work as an assassin, taking money from clients and blood from victims. That was the priesthood Prestwicke tried to revive. The men who had come to Malden wanted a slightly more orthodox office to be set up, but still, they wanted the right to sacrifice animals and even humans at the Godstone. “I made them swear they wouldn’t kill anyone. But that wasn’t what they were really after. They said they would need some kind of official position in order to convince the people they truly were agents of the Bloodgod.”

“Official position? So they wanted more than just your blessing. They wanted to be part of your government.”

“They wanted me to put them in charge of distributing foodstuffs.”

“Ah. So they wanted to be the ones to eat first.”

“Everyone’s hungry. I told them as much-that I couldn’t afford preferential treatment for any of my citizens. They seemed offended. I told them I thought the whole point of Sadu-the only reason the poor still worship Him-was that every man was equal in His sight. That we all had to die and be judged, and that no social station made a man less blameworthy than his neighbor. That made them leave in a huff. But they warned me as they went. With or without my sanction, the priesthood will be renewed. And the sacrifices will start again.”

“You can hardly complain about their faith now,” Cutbill told him without sympathy. “Since it was that belief that raised you to the heights of fame in the first place.”

The former guildmaster had a point, of course. Yet it was enough to make Malden wish he’d forced the priest of the Lady to stay in Ness. The Book of the Lady forbade blood sacrifice in no uncertain terms. The laws of Skrae were founded on that book and the practice had been eliminated everywhere in the kingdom. Yet now those laws were ignored-statutes decreed by a dead king, issued from a fortress far away, impossible now to enforce. Malden knew that in the absence of such laws it was just a matter of time before he found one of his citizens at the base of the Godstone, throat slit in just the right manner. The priest of the Lady might at least have preached to the people about why human sacrifice was wrong. Now it felt as if no one remained who held that particular view-no one except himself.

If he was going to fight religion, he decided, he would need help from the occult. As soon as his duties allowed it, he headed down to the Isle of Horses. Coruth had promised him all kinds of assistance, but since the siege began, the witch hadn’t so much as showed herself in the city. He borrowed a boat at the Ditchside Stair in Eastpool (the Lord Mayor didn’t have to pay a security deposit) and rowed himself over to the forbidding island just as the sun hit the top of the wall.

Climbing up onto the withered grass on the isle’s shore, he braced himself for another attack by phantom horses. It didn’t come. There was a light burning in Coruth’s shack but no one approached him or welcomed him. He started walking slowly toward the door, expecting some nasty surprise, when he heard a shriek from within.

It sounded like Cythera. He broke into a run.

Coruth met him at the door. She shoved it open with one skeletal hand and beckoned him to follow her. “You’re late,” she said, as if they’d had an appointment.

Malden had no time to wonder what she meant. He was too busy being horrified. Cythera lay on a pallet in the front room, naked save for a sheet that covered only one leg. It looked like she’d thrown it off her in the convulsions of some terrifying dream. Her skin was pale and clammy and slick with some foul-smelling unguent. Her eyes were wide-open, but when she blinked he saw that arcane symbols had been painted on her eyelids.

“The Guardian of the Gate!” she screamed. “He sees right through me! He judges me!”

Malden was about to demand what was going on, then stopped himself. He knew. This was Cythera’s initiation. The ceremony that would transform her into a witch. He knew there were rules about such things-ironclad laws that no man dared break. If he spoke at the wrong time, the consequences could be dire.

Coruth stared at him with one bloodshot eye. The old witch looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Normally she stood tall and erect, but now she was as stooped and grotesque as-well, as a witch in an old woodblock illustration. Had she sprouted a wart on her nose and clutched a broom, she might have been a caricature of her profession.

“Here,” she said, and shoved a dagger at him. He took it, for the same reason he’d kept silent so far. The weapon was a thin-bladed knife wholly without ornament, and seemed unfit for ceremonial purposes. Its point looked very sharp.

“What do I do with it?” Malden asked.

“Put the point here,” Coruth said, tapping a point just left of Cythera’s sternum. “If I give you the signal, drive it straight into her heart.”

“I can’t do that,” Malden said. “Not-Not to her.”

“Worried about losing your swiving partner?” Coruth said, and her mouth curled into a wicked smile. “All good things should come to an end, boy. Only true evil is eternal. It’s got no bottom.”

Malden didn’t know what to make of that. “My love for her is true.”

“Every boy in the history of fucking has said as much. And they were all honest, at least at the moment they said it. You think I don’t understand love? You think I never had a leman? I had to give all that up to become a witch, and I did it, because Skrae needed me. Cythera will make the same sacrifice, because the times require it.”

“Surely there’s another way-she could renounce magic and-”

“Stop your blathering, boy. Time is tight. Put the point where I showed you.”

“I can’t kill her!”

“Unless she’s a bigger fool than I think, you won’t have to,” Coruth told him. “Now do as you’re told! Much more than you know depends on it.”

Malden bit his lips for a moment, but in the end he did as he was asked. He made sure to touch the point so lightly to Cythera’s skin that she would barely feel it.

Not that she was likely to feel much. Her eyes were unfocused and her pupils changed size rapidly as he watched. Cythera was looking at things invisible, perhaps things very, very far away.

Occasionally she struggled, as if trying to break the grasp of some unseen monster. Occasionally she cried out. Sweat ran in thick rivulets into her hair though she shivered with cold.

“I see the old man with the lantern,” she reported at one point. “His light shines on a forest. He is so very lonely-he wants a kiss.”

Malden glanced up at Coruth. The old witch shook her head.

“No, I understand now,” Cythera said. Malden had a feeling she wasn’t talking to anyone in the room. “His vigil can’t be interrupted. I’ll go down to those woods, in case he tries to follow me- Oh. Oh! The trees are-the trees are alive. They’re so… alive.”

“Where is she?” Malden whispered.

“It’s not so much a place,” Coruth told him. “It’s a path between two places. It only exists in a relational sense.”

“Ah,” Malden said, as if that explained everything.

“There are two paths through the forest, but which is the right one?” Cythera asked. “The path on the left is so straight. It goes right to the end of the forest. It’s paved with gold, with… with power and… fame.”

Coruth leaned close to Cythera’s ear and shouted, “What of the other path?”

“What? Someone… someone is whispering… I- Oh, the path on the right looks so hard. It bends and curls back on itself, and there are so many thorns. I don’t think it even goes where I want to go!”

Malden would have told her to take the easier path, to get out of those woods as quickly as possible, but Coruth silenced him with a glare.

“Choose wisely,” the witch shouted. Then she nodded at Malden.

This was the moment. The moment when she would tell him to stab his lover through the heart. He couldn’t-there was no power in the world, not god or man or witch, that would make him do that.

But then he understood exactly what was at stake. It was like he gained the second sight himself, if only for a moment. Cythera could choose the path of sorcery, the path of demonology and pure will, which way lay madness and deformity and evil, but also great power. Or she could choose the path of the witches-magic that she herself could not control but only influence, magic that came from the world around her. Magic with rules.

If she chose sorcery, he would be asked to kill her on the spot.

And still he knew-he would not do it. Even if she was to become like her father Hazoth, wicked and cruel and utterly without sympathy, he would still rather have her alive.

Coruth disagreed.

Luckily for them all, she chose the path on the right.

Her suffering was terrible. “The thorns tear my skin! My feet are bleeding,” she moaned as she writhed on the pallet. “Where am I headed? I can’t see anything-I’m blind! I’m dying!”

There was more-much more-and Malden could understand none of it. There were trials for Cythera to face, gates for her to pass. She met every trial with fear and pain but passed them all because she’d been trained how.

Eventually her voice trailed away into raving syllables that failed to form words at all. Malden worried that some deadly test had been failed… but Coruth sank back in a chair and closed her eyes. Soon she began to snore.

He threw the dagger on a table and knelt by the pallet, clutching at Cythera’s hands. Her fingers were limp in his and he doubted she could even tell he was there, but still he clung to her. For hours he waited by her side. He understood now that Coruth hadn’t just wanted someone to hold the dagger. She had brought him here-though he thought he’d come of his own will-to comfort Cythera. To comfort himself.

The day wore on. Once, Malden heard a great stone crash into the city, but for the first time he didn’t care where it landed. He had no thought but for his love.

Who was his no more.

Eventually Cythera’s eyes fluttered closed and she slept. She stopped shivering and her body relaxed. Malden pulled the sheet up over her form. It was cold inside Coruth’s shack. It was wintertime.

When she woke, her eyes were bleary and she lacked the strength to even sit up. But she smiled at him and placed one warm hand against his cheek. They began to whisper to each other, saying nothing at all, really. He didn’t ask what had changed, because he already knew. She made no promises, nor did she need to.

They let Coruth sleep.

In time, when Cythera rose from the pallet, she wrapped her arms around herself, hiding her nakedness. Malden rushed to find one of her velvet gowns so she could be clothed, but she shook her head. Instead she took a shapeless robe from a chest in Coruth’s bedchamber. The robe of a witch. She pulled it over her head and lifted the hood over her sweat-greased hair.

When she kissed him, it felt wrong. Like being kissed by a statue, perhaps.

“Marry me,” he begged. Desperation overcame him and it felt just like fatigue. “It can’t be too late. Give this up and marry me.”

She placed a hand on his cheek. She neither smiled nor frowned. “It’s forbidden of a witch,” she told him.

“By whom, damn it? Is there some council of covens I can appeal to? Is there a witch queen somewhere who makes these decrees and tells you all what to do?”

She shook her head. “Hardly. There are so few of us in the world

… no, Malden. We have no laws, only vows that each of us must take. A witch can’t marry because she must remain above worldly concerns, that is all. She has to make decisions on the behalf of other people. She must not be attached to one person-not when so many others depend on her.”

Malden cast about for any way to save what they’d had. To keep the love he’d found, even though he knew it was already gone. “Your mother and Hazoth were lovers,” he pleaded. “There is no rule of celibacy that binds you now, is there?”

“Their union was all about power, not love,” Cythera said. “Nor did my mother consent to it.” Her smile was so sad. “I can’t belong to you, Malden. I can’t belong to anyone, anymore.”

“You never did,” he told her, his voice very small.