The Curse of Chalion

Chapter 27

Cazaril put a hand to the pavement, shoving himself to his feet, and pushed back his vest-cloak from his sword hilt. All around him, the others were rising and looking about in alarm.

“Dy Tagille.” Bergon motioned to his Ibran companion. “Go see.”

Dy Tagille nodded and departed at a run.

Dy Cembuer, his right arm still in a sling, clenched and unclenched his left hand, awkwardly freed his sword hilt, and began striding after him. “We should bar the gate.”

Cazaril glanced around the courtyard, and at the tiled archway. Its decorative wrought-iron gate swung wide after dy Tagille. Was there another entrance? “Royesse, Royse, Betriz, you must not get trapped in here.” He ran after dy Cembuer, his heart already pounding. If he could get them out before the—

A frantic page pelted through as dy Cembuer reached the archway. “My lords, help, armed men have broken into the palace!” He looked wildly over his shoulder.

And here they are. Two men, swords out, ran in the page’s track. Dy Cembuer, trying to push the gate shut with his sword in his left hand, barely ducked the first blow. Then Cazaril was upon them. His first swing was wild, and his target parried it with a clang that echoed around the court.

“Get out!” he screamed over his shoulder. “Over the roofs if you have to!” Could Iselle climb in her court dress? He could not look to see if he was obeyed, for his opponent recovered and bore in hard. The bravos, soldiers, whatever they were, wore ordinary street clothes, no identifying colors or badges—the better to infiltrate the city in little groups, mixed in with the festival crowd, no doubt.

Dy Cembuer slashed his man. A heavy return blow landed on his broken arm, and he whitened and fell back with a muffled cry. Another soldier appeared around the corner and ran toward the archway, wearing the Baocian colors of green and black, and for a moment Cazaril’s heart lifted in hope. Until he recognized him as Teidez’s suborned guard captain—growing ever more expert in betrayal, apparently.

The Baocian captain’s lips drew back as he saw Cazaril, and he gripped his sword grimly, moving in beside his comrade. Cazaril had neither breathing space nor a hand free to try to close the gate on them again, and besides, dy Cembuer’s opponent had fallen in the path. Cazaril did not dare fall back. This narrow choke point forced them to come at him one at a time, the best odds he was likely to get today. His hand was growing numb from the ringing blows transmitted up his blade into his hilt, and his gut was cramping. But his every gasping breath bought another stride of running time for Bergon and Iselle and Betriz. One step, two steps, five steps . . . Where was dy Tagille? Nine steps, eleven, fifteen . . . How many men were coming up after these? His blade hacked a piece out of his first attacker’s jaw, and the man reeled back with a bloody cry, but it only left the guard captain with a better angle for attack. The man still wore Dondo’s green ring. It flashed as his sword darted and parried. Forty steps. Fifty . . .

Cazaril fought in an exaltation of terror, so hard-pressed to defend himself that the supernatural dangers of a successful thrust of his own, of the death demon tearing his soul out of his body along with his dying victim’s, scarcely seemed to apply. Cazaril’s world narrowed; he no longer sought to win the day, or this fight, or his life, but merely another stride. Each stride a little victory. Sixty . . . something . . . he was losing count. Begin again. One. Two. Three . . .

I am probably going to die now. Twice was no charm. He howled inside with the waste of it, mad with regret that he could not die enough. His arm was shaking with fatigue. This gate wanted a swordsman, not a secretary, but the royesse’s private holy vigil had included only the few nobles. Was no one coming up behind him in support? Surely even the old servants could grab something and throw it . . . Twenty-two . . .

Could he fall back across the courtyard to the stairs? Was the royal party gone up the stairs yet? He threw a frantic glance backward, a mistake, for he lost his rhythm; with a scree of metal, the captain’s sword snaked his from his tingling grip. His blade clattered across the stone, spinning. The Baocian bore Cazaril violently backward through the archway and knocked him to the pavement. Half a dozen attackers surged through the gate after the captain and spread out across the courtyard; a couple of them, prudent and experienced, kicked him in passing to keep him down. He still didn’t know who they were, but he had no doubt whose they were.

Coughing, he rolled on his side in time to see dy Jironal, swearing, stride through the gate in the wake of another half dozen men. Dy Cembuer was still down, bent in on himself, teeth clenched in agony. Were Iselle and Bergon safe away? Down a servants’ stair, over the roof tiles? Pray the gods they had not panicked and barricaded themselves in their chambers . . . Dy Jironal headed toward the stairs to the gallery, where a little knot of his men waited to make a concerted rush.

“Martou!” Cazaril bellowed, wrenching over and up onto his knees.

Dy Jironal swung round as though spun on the end of a rope. “You!” At his motion, the Baocian guard captain and another soldier grasped Cazaril by the arms, bending them up behind him, and dragged him to his feet.

“You are too late!” Cazaril called. “She’s wed and bedded, and there’s no way you can undo it now. Chalion owns Ibra at the fairest price ever paid, and all the country celebrates its good fortune. She is the Child of Spring and the delight of the gods. You can’t win against her. Give over! Save your life, and the lives of your men.”

“Wed?” snarled dy Jironal. “Widowed, if needs be. She is a mad traitor and the whore of Ibra and accursed, and I’ll not have it!” He whirled again toward the stairs.

“You’re the whore, Martou! You sold Gotorget for Roknari money that I refused, and you sold me to the galleys to stop my mouth!” Cazaril glared around frantically at the hesitating troop. Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven . . . “This liar sells his own men. Follow him, and you risk betrayal the first moment he smells profit!”

Dy Jironal turned again, drawing his sword. “I’ll stop your mouth, you miserable fool! Hold him up.”

Wait, no—

The two men holding Cazaril jerked a little apart, their eyes widening, as dy Jironal began to stride forward, twisting for a mighty two-handed swing. “My lord, it’s murder,” faltered the man holding Cazaril’s left arm. The beheading arc was blocked by Cazaril’s captors, and dy Jironal changed in mid-career to a violent low thrust, lunging forward with all the weight of his fury behind his arm.

The steel pierced silk brocade and skin and muscle and drove through Cazaril’s gut, and Cazaril was nearly jerked off his feet with the force of it.

Sound ceased. The sword was sliding through him as slowly as a pearl dropped in honey, and as painlessly. Dy Jironal’s red face was frozen in a rictus of rage. On either side of Cazaril, his captors bent and leaned away, mouths creeping open on startled cries that never emerged.

With a yowl of triumph that only Cazaril heard, the death demon coursed up the sword blade, leaving it red-hot in its wake, and into dy Jironal’s hand. With a scream of anguish, a black syrup that was Dondo poured after. Crackling blue-white sparks grew around dy Jironal’s sword arm like ivy twining, and then spiraled around his whole body. Slowly, dy Jironal’s head tilted back, and white fire came from his mouth as his soul was uprooted from him. His hair stood on end, and his eyes widened and boiled white. The driven sword still moved with his falling weight, and Cazaril’s flesh sizzled around it. White and black and red whirled together, braided round each other, and flowed away in no direction. Cazaril’s perception was drawn into the twisting cyclone’s wake, up out of his body like a rising column of smoke. Three deaths and a demon all bound together. They flowed into a blue Presence . . .

Cazaril’s mind exploded.

He opened outward, and outward, and outward still, till all the world lay below him as if seen from a high mountain. But not the realm of matter. This was a landscape of soul-stuff; colors he could not name, of a shattering brilliance, bore him up upon a glorious turbulence. He could hear all the minds of the world whispering, a sighing like wind in a forest—if one could but distinguish, simultaneously and separately, the song of each leaf. And all the world’s cries of pain and woe. And shame and joy. And hope and despair and aspiration . . . A thousand thousand moments from a thousand thousand lives poured through his distending spirit.

From the surface below him, little bubbles of soul-color were boiling up one by one and floating into a turning dance, hundreds, thousands, like great raindrops falling upward . . . It is the dying, pouring in through the rents of the worlds into this place. Souls gestated by matter in the world, dying into this strange new birth. Too much, too much, too much . . . His mind could not hold it all, and the visions burst from him like water falling through his fingers.

He’d once thought of the Lady of Spring as a sort of pleasant, gentle young woman, in his vague and youthful conceptualizations. The divines and Ordol had honed it scarcely further than to a mental picture of a nice immortal lady. This overwhelming Mind listened to every cry or song in the world at once. She watched the souls spiral up in all their terrible complex beauty with the delight of a gardener inhaling the scent of Her flowers. And now this Mind turned Her attention fully upon Cazaril.

Cazaril melted, and was cupped in Her hands. He thought She drank him, siphoning him out of the violent concatenation of the dy Jironal brothers and the demon, who shot away elsewhere. He was blown from Her lips again, back down in a tightening spiral through the great slash in the world that was his death, and once again into his body. Dy Jironal’s sword blade was just emerging from his back. Blood bloomed around the metal point like a rose.

And now to work, the Lady whispered. Open to me, sweet Cazaril.

Can I watch? he asked tremulously.

Whatever you can bear, is permitted.

He sank back in a languid ease, as the goddess flowed through him into the world. His lips curved up in a smile, or started to; his fleshly body was as sluggish as those of the men around him in the courtyard. He seemed to be sinking to his knees. Dy Jironal’s corpse had not yet finished falling to the pavement, although his dead hand had spasmed from his sword hilt. Dy Cembuer was lifting himself upon his good arm, his mouth opening upon a cry that was going to eventually become, Cazaril! Some men were throwing themselves prone. Some were starting to run.

The goddess drew the curse of Chalion like thick black wool into Her hands. Lifting it from Iselle and Bergon, somewhere in the streets of Taryoon. From Ista in Valenda. From Sara in Cardegoss. From all the land of Chalion, mountain to mountain, river to plain. Cazaril could not sense Orico in the dark fog. The Lady spun it out again through Cazaril. As it twisted through him into the other realm, its darkness fell away, and then he wasn’t sure if it was a thread or a stream of bright clean water, or wine, or something even more wonderful.

Another Presence, solemn and gray, waited there, and took it up. And took it in. And sighed in something like relief, or completion, or balance. I think it was the blood of a god. Spilled, soiled, drawn up again, cleaned, and returned at last . . .

I don’t understand. Was Ista mistaken? Did I miscount my deaths?

The goddess laughed. Think it through . . .

Then the vast blue Presence poured out of the world through him like a river thundering over a waterfall. The beauty of a triumphal music he knew he would never quite remember, till he came to Her realm again, cracked his heart. The great rent drew closed. Healed. Sealed.

And, abruptly as that, it all was gone.

The crack of the stone pavement hitting his knees was his first returning sensation. Desperately, he held himself upright, sitting on his heels, so as not to wrench the sword blade around in his flesh. The hilt and a handspan of bright blade hung below his downward-turning gaze, driven at a crooked upward angle into his stomach just below and to the left of his navel. The point seemed to come out somewhere to the right of his spine, and higher. Now came the pain. As he drew his first shuddering breath, the weapon bobbed a trifle. The stink of cauterized flesh assailed his nostrils, mixed with a celestial perfume like spring flowers. He trembled with shock and cold. He tried to hold very still.

He had a distressing urge to giggle. That would hurt. More . . .

Not all the scorched-meat smell was from him. Dy Jironal lay before him. Cazaril had seen corpses burned from the outside in—never before from the inside out. The chancellor’s hair and clothes smoked a little, but then went out without catching to flame.

Cazaril’s attention was arrested by a pebble that lay on the pavement near his knee. It was so dense. So persistent. The gods could not lift so much as a feather, but he, a mere human, might pick up this ancient unchanging object and place it wherever he wished, even into his pocket. He wondered why he had never appreciated the stubborn fidelity of matter. A dried leaf lay nearby, even more stunning in its complexity. Matter invented so many forms, and then went on to generate beauty beyond itself, minds and souls rising up out of it like melody from an instrument . . . matter was an amazement to the gods. Matter remembered itself so very clearly. He could not think why he had failed to notice it before. His own shaking hand was a miracle, as was the fine metal sword in his belly, and the orange trees in the tubs—one was tipped over now, wonderfully fractured and spilling—and the tubs, and the birdsong starting in the morning, and the water—water! Five gods, water!—in the fountain, and the morning light filtering into the sky . . .

“Lord Cazaril?” came a faint voice from his elbow.

He glanced aside to find that dy Cembuer had crept up to him.

“What was that?” Dy Cembuer sounded very close to tears.

“Some miracles.” Too many in one place at one time. He was overwhelmed with miracles. They filled his eyes in every direction.

Speaking was a mistake, for the vibration stirred the pain in his gut. Though he could speak; the sword did not appear to have pierced his lung. He imagined how much it would hurt to cough blood, just now. Gut wound, then. I will be dead again in three days. He could smell a faint scent of shit, mixed with the scorched meat and the goddess’s perfume. And sobbing . . . no, wait, the deadly fecal smell was not coming from him, yet. The Baocian captain was curled up in a tight ball on his side a little way off, his arms locked around his head, weeping. He did not seem to have any wound. Ah. Yes. He had been the nearest living witness. The goddess must have brushed against him, in Her passage.

Cazaril risked another breath. “What did you see?” he asked dy Cembuer.

“That man—was that dy Jironal?”

Cazaril nodded, a tiny careful nod.

“When he stabbed you, there was a hellish crack, and he burst into blue fire. He is . . . what did . . . did the gods strike him down?”

“Not exactly. It was . . . a little more complicated than that . . .” It seemed strangely quiet in the courtyard. Cazaril risked turning his head. About half of the bravos, and a few servants of Iselle’s household, were laid flat on the ground. Some were mumbling rapidly under their breaths; others were crying like the Baocian captain. The rest had vanished.

Cazaril thought he could see now why a man had to lay down his life three times to do this. And here he’d imagined the gods were being arbitrary and difficult for the sake of some arcane punishment. He’d needed the first two deaths just for the practice. The first, to learn how to accept death in the body—his flogging on the galley, that had been. He had not miscounted—that death had not been for the House of Chalion at the time. But it had become so, with Iselle’s marriage to Bergon and its consummation; the joining of two into one, that had shared the curse so horrifyingly between them, had apparently also portioned out this sacrifice. Bergon’s secret dowry, eh. Cazaril hoped he might live long enough to tell him, and that the royse would be pleased. His second acceptance, of death of the soul, had been in the lonely company of crows in Fonsa’s tower. So that when he came at last to this one, he could offer the goddess a smooth and steady partnering . . . humbling parallels involving the training of mules offered themselves to his mind.

Footsteps sounded. Cazaril glanced up to see dy Tagille, winded and disheveled but with his sword sheathed, running into the courtyard. He dashed up to them and stopped abruptly. “Bastard’s hell.” He glanced aside at his Ibran comrade. “Are you all right, dy Cembuer?”

“Sons of bitches broke my arm again. He’s the scary one. What’s happening out there?”

“Dy Baocia rallied his men, and has driven the invaders out of the palace. It’s all very confused right now, but the rest of them seem to be running through town trying to get to the temple.”

“To assail it?” dy Cembuer asked in alarm. He tried to struggle to his feet again.

“No. To surrender to armed men who will not try to tear them limb from limb. It seems every citizen of Taryoon has taken to the streets after them. The women are the worst. Bastard’s hell,” he repeated, staring at dy Jironal’s smoking corpse, “some Chalionese soldier was screaming and babbling that he’d seen dy Jironal struck by lightning from a clear blue sky for the sacrilege of offering battle on the Daughter’s Day. And I scarcely believed him.”

“I saw it, too,” said dy Cembuer. “There was a horrible noise. He didn’t even have time to cry out.”

Dy Tagille dragged the corpse a little way off and knelt in front of Cazaril, staring fearfully at his skewered stomach and then into his face. “Lord Cazaril, we must try to draw this sword from you. Best we do it at once.”

“No . . . wait . . .” Cazaril had once seen a man plugged with a crossbow bolt live for half an hour, until the bolt was drawn out; his blood had gushed forth then, and he’d died. “I want to see Lady Betriz first.”

“My lord, you cannot sit there with a sword stuck through you!”

“Well,” said Cazaril reasonably, “I surely cannot move . . .” Trying to talk made him pant. Not good. He was shivering and very cold. But the throbbing pain was not as devastating as he’d expected, probably because he’d managed to hold so still. As long as he held very still, it wasn’t much worse than Dondo’s clawings.

Other men arrived in the courtyard. Babble and noise and cries from the wounded washed between the walls, and tales repeated over and over in rising voices. Cazaril ignored it all, taken up with his pebble again. He wondered where it had come from, how it had arrived there. What it had been before it was a pebble. A rock? A mountain? Where? For how many years? It filled his mind. And if a pebble could fill his mind, what might a mountain do? The gods held mountains in their minds, and all else besides, all at once. Everything, with the same attention he gave to one thing. He had seen that, through the Lady’s eyes. If it had endured for longer than that infinitesimal blink, he thought his soul would have burst. As it was he felt strangely stretched. Had that glimpse been a gift, or just a careless chance?

“Cazaril?”

A trembling voice, the voice he had been waiting for. He looked up. If the pebble was amazing, Betriz’s face was astounding. The structure of her nose alone could have held him entranced for hours. He abandoned the pebble at once for this better entertainment. But water welled up, shimmering, in her brown eyes, and her face was drained of color. That wasn’t right. Worst of all, her dimples had gone into hiding.

“There you are,” he said happily. His voice was a muzzy croak. “Kiss me now.”

She gulped, knelt, shuffled up to him on her knees, and stretched her neck. Her lips were warm. The perfume of her mouth was nothing at all like a goddess’s, but like a human woman’s, and very good withal. His lips were cold, and he pressed them to hers as much to borrow her heat and youth as anything. So. He’d been swimming in miracle every day of his life, and hadn’t even known it.

He eased his head back. “All right.” He did not add, That’s enough, because it wasn’t. “You can draw the sword out now.”

Men moved around him, mostly worried-looking strangers. Betriz rubbed her face, undid the frogs of his tunic, and stood and hovered. Someone gripped his shoulders. A page proffered a folded pad to clap to his wound, and someone else held lengths of bandages ready to wrap his torso.

Cazaril squinted in uncertainty. Betriz was here: therefore, Iselle must be, must be . . . “Iselle? Bergon?”

“I’m here, Lord Caz.” Iselle’s voice came off to his side.

She moved around in front of him, staring at him in extreme dismay. She had shed her heavily embroidered outer robes in her flight, and still seemed a trifle breathless. She had also shed the black cloak of the curse . . . had she not? Yes, he decided. His inner vision was darkening, but he did not mistake this.

“Bergon is with my uncle,” she continued, “helping to clear dy Jironal’s remaining men from the area.” Her voice was firm in its disregard of the tears running down her face.

“The black shadow is lifted,” he told her, “from you and Bergon. From everyone.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you all about it, if I live.”

“Cazaril!”

He grinned briefly at the familiar, exasperated cadences around his name.

“You live, then!” Her voice wavered. “I—I command you!”

Dy Tagille knelt in front of Cazaril.

Cazaril gave him a short nod. “Draw it.”

“Very straight and smoothly, Lord dy Tagille,” Iselle instructed tensely, “so as not to cut him any worse.”

“Aye, my lady.” Dy Tagille licked his lips in apprehension and grasped the sword’s hilt.

“Carefully,” gasped Cazaril, “but not quite so slowly, please . . .”

The blade left him; a warm gush of liquid spurted from the mouth of his wound after it. Cazaril had hoped to pass out, but he only swayed as pads were clapped to him and held hard fore and aft. He stared down expecting to see his lap awash in blood, but no flood of red met his sight; it was a clear liquid, merely tinged with pink. Sword must have lanced my tumor. Which was not, it appeared, and the Bastard fry Rojeras for inflicting that nightmare upon him, stuffed with some grotesque demon fetus after all. He tried not to think, At least not anymore. A murmur of astonishment passed among the ring of watchers as the scent of celestial flowers from this exudation filled the air.

He let himself fall, boneless and unresisting, into his eager helpers’ arms. He did manage to surreptitiously scoop up his pebble before the willing hands bore him off up the stairs to his bedchamber. They were excited and frightened, but he was growing delightfully relaxed. It seemed he was to be fussed over, lovely. When Betriz held his hand, as he was eased into his bed, he gripped hers and did not let go.