Half a War

The Killer

The dead men lay in heaps before the doors. Priests of the One God, Raith reckoned, from their robes with the seven-rayed sun stitched on, each with the back of their heads neatly split. Blood curled from under the bodies, making dark streaks down the white marble steps, turned pink by the flitting drizzle.

Maybe they’d been hoping for mercy. It was well known the Breaker of Swords preferred to take slaves than make corpses. Why kill what you can sell, after all? But it seemed Gorm was in the mood for destruction, that day.

Raith sniffed through his broken nose, splinters crunching as he stepped over the shattered doors and into the High King’s great temple.

The roof was half-finished, bare rafters showing against the white sky, rain pattering on a mosaic floor half-finished too. There were long benches, perhaps where the faithful had sat to pray, but there were no faithful here now, only the warriors of Vansterland, drinking, and laughing, and breaking.

One sat on a bench, boots up on another, a gilded hanging wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, face tipped back, mouth open and tongue stretched out to catch the rain. Raith walked past him, between great pillars tall and slender as the trunks of trees, neck aching from looking up to the fine stonework high above.

A body was laid on a table in the middle of the vast chamber, swathed in a robe of red and gold that spilled across the floor, a jewelled sword clutched in hands withered to white claws. Soryorn stood beside him, frowning down.

‘He is small,’ said the standard-bearer, who seemed to have lost his standard somewhere. ‘For a High King.’

‘This is him?’ muttered Raith, staring in disbelief at that pinched-in face. ‘The greatest of men, between gods and kings?’ He looked more like an old flesh-dealer than the ruler of the Shattered Sea.

‘He’s been dead for days.’ Soryorn jerked the sword from the High King’s lifeless hands leaving one flopping off the table. He set the blade on the floor and took out a chisel, meaning to strike off the jewel-studded pommel. Then he paused. ‘Have you got a hammer?’

‘I’ve got nothing,’ said Raith, and he meant it.

The high walls at the far end of the hall had been painted in pink and blue and gold, scenes of winged women he couldn’t make a start at understanding, the work of hours and days and weeks. Gorm’s warriors chuckled as they practised their aim with throwing axes, smashing the plaster away, scattering it across the floor. Men Raith had laughed with once, as they watched farms burn up near the border. They hardly spared him a glance now.

At the back of the temple was a marble dais, and on the dais a great block of black stone. Grom-gil-Gorm stood with his fists upon it, frowning up towards a high window filled with chips of coloured glass to make a scene, a figure with the sun behind handing something down to a bearded man.

‘Beautiful,’ murmured Raith, admiring the way Mother Sun caught the glass and cast strange colours across the floor, across the block of stone and the candles, the cup of gold, the wine jug that stood upon it.

Gorm looked sideways. ‘I remember when the only things beautiful to you were blood and glory.’

Raith could hardly deny it. ‘I reckon folk can change, my king.’

‘Rarely for the better. What happened to your face?’

‘Said the wrong thing to a woman.’

‘Her counter-argument was impressive.’

‘Aye.’ Raith winced as he touched one finger to his throbbing nose. ‘Thorn Bathu is quite the debater.’

‘Ha! You cannot say you were not warned about her.’

‘I fear I’m prone to recklessness, my king.’

‘The line between boldness and folly is a hard one even for the wise to find.’ Gorm toyed thoughtfully with one of the pommels strung around his neck, and Raith wondered what dead man’s sword it had balanced. ‘I have been puzzling over this window, but I cannot fathom what story it tells.’

‘The High King given his chair by this One God, I reckon.’

‘You’re right!’ Gorm snapped his fingers. ‘But it is all a pretty lie. I once met the man who carved that chair, and he was not a god but a slave from Sagenmark with the most awful breath. I never thought it fine craftsmanship and my opinion has not changed. Too fussy. I will have a new one made, I think.’

Raith raised his brows. ‘A new one, my king?’

‘I shall soon sit enthroned in the Hall of Whispers as High King over the whole Shattered Sea.’ Gorm peered sideways, mouth pressed into a smug little smile. ‘No man was ever favoured with greater enemies than I. The three brothers Uthrik, Odem and Uthil. The deep-cunning Queen Laithlin. Bright Yilling. Grandmother Wexen. The High King himself. I have prevailed over them all. By strength and cunning and weaponluck. By the favour of Mother War and the treachery of Father Yarvi.’

‘The great warrior is the one who still breathes when the crows feast. The great king is the one who watches the carcasses of his enemies burn.’ How hollow those words rang to Raith now, but Gorm smiled to hear them. Men always smile to hear their own lessons repeated.

‘Yes, Raith, yes! Your brother may have spoken more, but you were always the clever one. The one who truly understood! Just as you said, Skara will be the envy of the world as a queen, and manage my treasury well, and bear me strong children, and speak fair-sounding words that will bring me friends across the sea. As it turns out, you were right not to kill her.’

Raith’s knuckles ached as he bunched his fist. ‘You think so, my king?’ His voice almost croaked away to nothing, he was so sickened with jealousy, sickened with the unfairness of it, but Gorm took it for tearful gratitude.

‘I do, and … I forgive you.’ The Breaker of Swords smiled as though his forgiveness was the best gift a man could have, and certainly a better one than Raith deserved. ‘Mother Scaer likes things that are constant. But I want men about me, not unquestioning slaves. A truly loyal servant must sometimes protect his master from his own rash decisions.’

‘The gods have truly favoured you, my king, and given you more than any man could desire.’ More than any man could deserve. Especially one like this. Raith stared up into that smiling face, scarred by a hundred fights, lit in garish colours from the window. The face of the man he’d once so admired. The face of the man who’d made him what he was.

A killer.

He snatched up the golden cup from the altar. ‘Let me pour a toast to your victory!’ And he tipped the jug so it slopped over, dark wine spattering red as blood-spots on the marble dais. He took the sip the cup-filler takes to make sure the wine’s safe for better lips than his.

There was an echoing crash behind them, bellowed insults, and Gorm turned. Long enough for Raith to slip two fingers into his pouch and feel the cold glass between them.

The High King’s stringy corpse had been knocked from its funeral table and flopped onto the floor while two of Gorm’s warriors fought over his crimson shroud, fine cloth ripping as they dragged it between them like dogs over a bone.

‘There is a song in that, I think,’ muttered Gorm, staring at the naked body of the man who’d ruled the Shattered Sea, sprawled with scant dignity on his unfinished floor. ‘But there will be many songs sung of this day.’

‘Songs of the fall of cities and the death of kings,’ said Raith. He knelt, offering the golden cup to his master. Just as he used to after every duel and battle. After every victory. After every burned farm. After every petty murder. ‘A toast to the new High King!’ he called. ‘Drunk from the cup of the old!’

‘I have missed you, Raith.’ Gorm smiled as he reached for the cup, just as Skara had when she was fitted for her mail, but this time Raith’s hands stayed firm. ‘I have been ungenerous, and we can see what happens to an ungenerous king. You shall return to me, and carry my sword again, and my cup too.’ And Grom-gil-Gorm lifted the drink to his lips.

Raith took a long breath and let it sigh away. ‘That’s all I ever wanted.’

‘Ugh.’ The Breaker of Swords wrinkled his nose. ‘This wine has an ugly flavour.’

‘Everything has an ugly flavour here.’

‘Too true.’ Gorm narrowed his eyes at Raith over the cup’s rim as he took another draught. ‘You have changed a great deal. Your time beside my queen-to-be has taught you much of perception and patience.’

‘Queen Skara has made me see things differently, my king. I should tell her I’m quitting her service to return to my right place. That’d be the proper thing.’

‘The proper thing? I might almost call you house-broken!’ Gorm drained his cup and tossed it rattling on the altar, wiping the stray drips from his beard. ‘Go to the queen, then. She should be ashore by now. We are to be married in the morning, after all. She will be sad, I think, to lose her favourite dog.’ And the Breaker of Swords reached down to scratch roughly at Raith’s head. ‘But I will be happy to have mine back.’

Raith bowed low. ‘Not near so happy as the dog will be, my king.’ And he turned and strutted down from the dais with some of his old swagger, nodding to Soryorn, who was just coming the other way with the High King’s scarred pommel.

‘Shall we burn this place, my king?’ Raith heard the standard-bearer ask.

‘Why burn what you can use?’ said Gorm. ‘A few strokes of the chisel will change these miserable statues into Mother War, and at once we have raised a mighty temple to her! A fitting gift for she that has given her favoured son the whole Shattered Sea …’

Raith stepped out smiling into the night. For once he had no regrets.