Havemercy (56 page)

“I know,” he said, voice heavy and warm. I could practically hear the drowsiness in his voice rising up to claim him. “I will. It’s just—We were so busy.”

“And we’ve accomplished something quite unheard of,” I reassured him. “You’ve not even been in Thremedon a quarter of the year and already you’re saving the city.”

He made a self-deprecating noise in his throat, but didn’t protest any louder than that, and so I knew he was likely settling to sleep. Despite the unforgiving architecture of the couch, and the entrenched stiffness in my joints, I thought that I could be quite pleased to lie here and enjoy Hal’s repose.

Then the door opened. The Provost wasn’t a man prone to kicking down doors—as, after all, he had people to do that for him—and only directly involved himself in matters that required a touch of finesse, or those that were critically important to the security of the city. This—judging by what Hal had told me—had to be the latter.

“Margrave Royston,” he said, sounding decidedly more flustered than he had the last time we’d spoken. “By decree of His Majesty the Esar, I am to inform you that your company is to be deployed within the hour, and he expects you to be punctual.”

For a moment, I had to admit I was dumbfounded. Against me, Hal stirred, then sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes with a sheer stubbornness he rarely displayed.

I felt sure that the groaning in my muscles wasn’t only in my head. As I sat up, it seemed impossible that the sound wasn’t loud enough to echo off the Esar’s outlandishly decorated walls.

“Talk sense, Dmitri,” I said, perhaps more curt than one could afford to be with the Provost of the city, but then I’d never had much good common sense to speak of.

The Provost folded his arms as though he were dealing with an obstinate child, and when he spoke again his voice had lost its gilded edge. “The army’s moving out. Today. The Ke-Han city’s in flames over there, and no one knows what’s happened to the dragons, but we’ve got to leave now if we want to get there in time enough to make a difference. If we want to hit them hard enough that maybe this time they really won’t get back up again. And,” he added, after a pause, “we’ve got to get the dragons out.”

“No,” said Hal. He spoke quietly, as if he’d only been thinking it and hadn’t really meant to utter it aloud. “You can’t—You’ve only just got well again. What if—No.”

“Hal,” I said. “Everyone who’s well again will be heading out to fight. I cannot linger.”

His eyes were more gray than blue as he considered this, then he leaned up to kiss me with a suddenness that made something in my chest burst open like the seedpods William had collected in the country. I took his face in mine and—though this wasn’t to be any kind of a farewell—took my leave from a loved one the way countless soldiers had throughout history. Hal murmured in surprise, at my sudden capitulation no doubt, and he lifted his fingers to touch my throat.

We were interrupted by the sound of the Provost scuffing his boots uncomfortably against the carpet, and Hal pulled away with his cheeks burning fiercely. I myself felt no remorse over our actions. It was as though all the most sensible parts of me had been burned out by the fever.

I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.

“Well,” I said. “It would seem you’ve made your informed decision.”

“I don’t want you to go,” said Hal, and even though he couldn’t bring himself to smile, his expression was lit with a fire that flared beneath his evident exhaustion.

“I must,” I said, feeling suddenly wretched that there was no real comfort that I could offer him.

“If I’ve heard correctly,” said the Provost suddenly, buoyed by impatience or discomfort or both, “there isn’t much left of the lapis city. Not to say that them as are there won’t be fighting hard as first-time convicts, but,” he paused, as though examining the wisdom of his reassurance, then seemed to think the better of it. “Well, you never know.”

I felt an odd sense of gratitude at the effort he’d made, however misplaced. The city had indeed been turned on its head if I was feeling a grudging sort of appreciation for the Provost. I nodded and stood.

“Go to the house,” I said, in a tone that I hoped conveyed something beyond simple concern. “Sleep. If I find you looking this tired when I return, I shall be very cross.”

He stood then and put his arms about me so tightly that I thought my ribs would surely crack under the strain. “When you return, then,” he said, voice echoing with none of the tremor that shook his thin frame. “You’ll have to wake me up.”

“Of course,” I said, then, “Hal, I have to go.”

He released me, rubbing his sleeve over his eyes in a habit that he had not yet outgrown from either his childhood or his time in the country.

“Hurry then,” he said, in a tone that made me wish to do anything but leave. “The quicker you’re done with the Ke-Han, the quicker you can come home.”

I knew that I would never leave if I didn’t manage it that instant. I clenched my hand where it would have reached for one last touch and instead turned away from Hal, striding out the door the Provost held open for me.

I heard him fall in line behind me, silent as he’d been the day he’d come for our chat at Our Lady of a Thousand Fans, which now seemed a lifetime ago. I was nearly certain he was thinking of that day, as well.

Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all. He was a hard man to read.

“There’ve been wagons and the like taking soldiers through the streets all day,” he said. “They’re dropping them off at the foothills and sending everyone through as quick as they come.”

“Surely it will take more time than we’ve got to cross the mountains,” I said, as he drew even with me. He shook his head.

“They’re not using the usual routes—You’ll be going straight across. They’re using the tunnels, see? Does fuck-all for the element of surprise, so I guess that’s why they aren’t the preferred option, but with the dragons bringing the city down around them, I guess the Ke-Han have figured out what’s what, and there isn’t any need to attempt to sneak up on them now. What men do they even have left to hit us? It’d be a suicide run, and they know it.”

It was the most the Provost had ever said to me all in one go that wasn’t a decree read off of a piece of paper.

“Ah,” I said, and nodded.

“There’ll be a carriage for you outside,” he went on. “As I understand it, further instructions will be given at the foothills, but from the sound of things it’s not going to be anything more complicated than keep going until either you can’t or they can’t.”

I quashed the perverse impulse to ask whether the Esar had a preference either way.

We exited the building, the sudden light threatening to set off a headache in my temples before the shock of it passed and my thoughts cleared. It was still early enough for the skies to be gray, though I knew that if there were any dragons still in the air, it would place them in a dreadfully vulnerable position. If news had returned, then surely so had at least some of the dragons, I told myself, but one could never be entirely certain.

Palace Walk was eerily empty as we strode down the center of it, without any of the usual gossiping noblesse accompanied by their servants, or those who had business with the Esar marching hopefully up to the palace doors.

“Will you be joining us on the field?” I asked, with perhaps less kindness in my voice than I’d intended. We weren’t close enough to indulge in the verbal sparring I made a habit of, and I realized it too late. Fortunately, as Dmitri himself had said, I was greatly needed for the war and therefore couldn’t be tossed into jail for insolence.

He shot me a rueful smile, instead. “Once I’ve finished collecting everyone that’s meant to be there.”

The hansom waiting out front was all black, which I felt was grimly apt, and the horses waiting tossed their heads as though they were impatient to deliver me to the fiery scene of battle. The Provost stopped short, nodded to the driver, then turned off in another direction completely, presumably to uproot another man from his home to send him off to join our last stand.

I didn’t wait for the steps to descend but rather opened the small door and hauled myself up and in.

It wasn’t empty, a fact I barely had time to register and adjust for before I sat on Alcibiades’ lap. He wore an expression of extreme irritation, though his eyebrows shot up when he saw me.

“If you aren’t the luckiest whoreson this side of the Cobalts,” he snorted, then set to examining the side door as if I wasn’t there at all.

I tried to match his annoyance as best I could, but I felt nothing but a curious kind of relief at seeing a familiar face, a companion of mine who’d managed to survive the plague. I hadn’t had a chance to speak with Hal about what had happened to the others after Berhane’s passing, though it wasn’t until I’d seen Alcibiades that I knew I’d feared the worst.

Next to me—where I’d taken my seat on the bench opposite—someone stirred, though I hadn’t noticed him, a pale cutout in the dark of our carriage. I recognized the fall of his blond hair, though, and the same lazy elegance he’d exhibited while napping during his occasional attendance at meetings of the Basquiat.

“I told you not to speak until we’d reached the mountains,” said Caius, though he didn’t open his eyes, and he sounded a little dreamy still, as though he were half-asleep.

“What a warm welcome this is,” I said, pulling aside the little window curtain so that I could watch the city as it passed quickly around us. “I’m quite happy to see the rest of you alive as well.”

“Don’t worry,” said Caius, with a yawn like a cat’s. “I’m sure it won’t last long.”

Alcibiades shrugged broad shoulders, though he too was looking out the window now that I’d exposed it. “I’m just looking forward to getting this over with one way or the other,” he said.

“Soldier’s talk,” Caius retorted. “Any academic will tell you that nothing exists in such extremes except for stories in romans for children.”

“The same romans that led to Hal’s discovering our cure, do you mean?” I watched the spires of the Basquiat off in the distance and knew I would never be able to look at them again without remembering our confinement.

Alcibiades snorted again, and Caius merely made a censorious sound in his throat as though he thought he had better things to argue. The coach fell silent as we withdrew into whatever more private thoughts we were each of us entertaining.

I had never considered myself to be anything like the more patriotic soldiers who would fight and die simply because our Esar told them to. I’d always believed it was the province of the intellectual to scoff at such mindless obedience. I thought that there were better solutions to a conflict than an endless war, despite my Talent’s natural proclivity for it, and though I was a loyal citizen of the realm and did my duty as it was commanded, I’d never been stirred by anything deeper than that. For me, there was only the threat of treason and the desire to do a job well enough that I might return once more to the comforts of the Basquiat and Tabernacle Bar.

With every bump and sharp swing of the carriage as it turned corners it had never been built to turn, I saw more of the city I’d come to as a haven from my country upbringing. She had taken me in as her own after I’d spent the long years of my childhood feeling as though there mightn’t be any place to which I truly belonged.

Thremedon was my home, and it held everything I had ever loved or had ever been given cause to love me.

I thought of Hal, rubbing his eyes with such force he was sure to damage them, forcing himself to stay awake through one more chapter, one more page, until finally he’d solved it. We were all of us fighting in our own ways, and to protect the things we loved seemed to me the best reason I’d ever been given.

I wondered then if the lapis city would still be burning when we came to it at last, if our forces at the front would still be fighting. It was a scene I both did and did not wish to see, but I felt a supreme and wholly strange gratitude to be living at this time, for whatever horrors it held, whatever tragedy, it was a history I could call my own.

ROOK

As far as I could understand them, the Ke-Han who were holding me prisoner kept asking me why Havemercy wasn’t flying. Despite the barriers between us being able to communicate properly—like how we didn’t speak the same language, and also happened to fucking hate one another on principle alone—my reply of “Fuck you” seemed to come over loud and clear. We understood one another just fine as far as the basics were concerned.

So at bottom what it shook down to was that they tried a lot of things to get me to talk. But I was better than that.

“You brought her down,” I told my favorite guard, who must’ve kept requesting sessions for torture with me ’cause the feeling was mutual. He was missing an eye, which he obviously thought made him look real tough. “You fucking solve that problem on your fucking own!”

He didn’t like taking no for an answer. Not a single one of the Ke- Han sons-of-a did, but I wasn’t yessing anytime soon, and they weren’t getting anything out of me. We were equal parts stubborn; the only problem I saw was that they were the ones holding the whip.

And the Ke-Han were pretty imaginative. They kept me like a rat in the dark, starving me, dripping water somewhere just to drive me wild. No matter what they did, though, I wasn’t spilling anything. I knew that if they had any of the other boys, they’d be doing the same thing: just taking what was being laid down and suffering in private when no one could see them silently screaming.

It was kind of a bitter thing to hope, and one that made my stomach turn jack-flips inside of me, but I was praying at that point to anyone who’d listen that Have was in pieces somewhere. She’d’ve preferred it, rather than give these whoresons something to use. But even as I tried to think of her being gone for good, I also realized what a fucking genius she’d been—seeing through me and Thom and sensing we were of the same blood.

Worst of all, I didn’t know if it’d work or not. Could be I’d sit here in this hole in the ground with the rats eating my toes or whatever the fuck it was they thought they were doing, with my girl destroyed, while meanwhile the Ke-Han rallied their forces and burned every last building in Thremedon to the ground, just as a thank-you. So that was pretty bad, even worse than the nightly visits from my one-eyed friend.