All morning they climbed through the vast column of light and air inside Intarra’s Spear. Adare’s legs ached after the first ten floors, then throbbed, then burned. Whenever she stopped to catch her breath, they quaked uncontrollably. Her mouth was dry, her throat raw, her hands twisted into claws from so much clutching of the banister. Halfway to the dungeon, she felt as though she might simply collapse, and yet her own struggle was nothing compared with Mailly’s.
In the three days since Adare had last seen the girl, the Weeping Sleep had continued its vicious work. Mailly’s eyes were sunk in their bruised sockets, jaundice stained her skin, and the disease had scraped away all healthy flesh, leaving skin tight around the smooth bone beneath. She didn’t look as though she could stand, let alone climb, and yet climb she did, slowly and with gritted teeth, pausing often to gasp or cough, dropping to her knees whenever she stumbled on the steps, but always rising once more, shaking, fighting, gutting it out, ascending through interminable degrees toward her own horrible death.
Adare’s guards-Sons of Flame in half armor-escorted them, two ahead and two behind. The men could have helped-Mailly was a small woman, small enough that the soldiers might have carried her between them without too much effort-and yet Adare had refused that help. She trusted the Sons as much as she trusted anyone else-which wasn’t much. Mailly wore a deep hood to hide her face, but Adare wasn’t taking chances. Soldiers talked, even loyal soldiers, and the less they had to talk about, the better. Adare had ordered them to take up positions well before and behind, where they could see little and hear less. Of course, that left only Adare herself to help Mailly back onto her feet each time she stumbled.
Gripping the girl’s arm was like holding a brittle stick. Adare could feel the fever blazing beneath her skin. Kegellen had assured her that the Weeping Sleep wasn’t contagious, but there was something about being so close to such sickness, about holding a person who, by the end of the day, would be dead, that made Adare queasy. She’d been forcing the feeling down all morning, guiding the girl by her elbow or shoulder, running a hand over her back when she rested. If Mailly could keep climbing, Adare could keep helping her. Not that helping was the right word.
More like a shepherd leading her sheep to the slaughter, Adare thought grimly. The climb was just one more torture to add to the young woman’s suffering.
Near the end of the morning, when the sun filtered down from above rather than lancing straight through the wall of the Spear, they finally reached the prison, or the start of it, at least. The steel floor was still a dozen flights above, but the landing where they stopped was the last one before the steel walls encircled the staircase, blocking out all light, all access to the cages hanging above. Past this last landing, there would be no room for mistakes.
“Mailly,” Adare began, turning to the girl, touching her lightly on the elbow. “Are you ready? Are you all right?”
For a long time, Mailly just stared out into the bright, limpid column of empty air. Almost close enough to touch, a pair of swallows turned lazily on an unseen breeze, but she didn’t seem to be looking at them. It was hard to tell, with her eyes hidden in the hood, but Mailly didn’t seem to be looking at anything.
“It’s so … light,” she replied finally, quietly. “I’ve never seen so much light.”
“That’s why it is named for Intarra,” Adare replied, unsure what else to say.
Slowly, as though in pain, Mailly shook her head, then turned. Always before, she had tried to avert her gaze around Adare; now she stared straight into her eyes. “And she loves you,” the girl said quietly. “Intarra, I mean. She chose you.”
Adare nodded, mute.
Mailly shook her head again. “I wonder why.”
There was no malice in the words, no doubt or condemnation. Just genuine perplexity. Perplexity and resignation.
“So do I,” Adare replied quietly, her mind sliding back to that moment by the Everburning Well, to the crack of thunder and the lightning’s all-encompassing flash, to the single syllable ringing in her head-Win-a syllable she’d taken for the voice of Intarra herself. It seemed unreal now, like something she had dreamed, or a story she’d found in an old book, a story about someone else. Adare glanced down at her own hands, at the delicate scars burned into the skin. The glabrous whorls reflected the noon light, seemed to burn with it, but what did that mean? Everyone had scars.
“Is it really hers?” Mailly asked, gesturing to the walls of the Spear. “Did Intarra really make this?”
Adare shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. No one knows.”
Mailly turned, her face twisted with pain and confusion. “But you’re her prophet.”
Am I? Adare wondered. The Chronicles of Annur held dozens of accounts of prophets, men and women rabid with their faith. They had always struck her as tragic figures-deluded, often deranged.
“I am,” Adare replied, “but even a prophet cannot comprehend the whole mind of a goddess.”
“Does she speak to you?”
Not since the Well, Adare thought bleakly. Not a single fucking word.
“Yes,” she replied. “Although her messages can be obscure.”
Mailly held her eyes a long time, then nodded. “I’m ready,” she said, sounding stronger than she had all day. “I’m ready to go up.”
* * *
“I am here,” Adare announced, “to see the prisoner.”
For a moment, shocked stillness ruled the chamber. After the brilliance of the Spear itself, the steel room seemed dim, even with the light of a dozen lamps reflecting off the polished walls and ceiling and floor, as though the whole place were buried underground rather than suspended thousands of feet above it. The people, too-the scribes at their tables, pens poised above their records, the guards posted at the doors-seemed subterranean somehow, wide-eyed, startled as troglodytes by her arrival, staring at her burning irises as though they’d never seen the sun.
Then, in a moment, everything tumbled into motion. Scribes were standing, knocking over chairs, bowing low while a wave of stiff salutes ran through the guardsmen. The Sons of Flame had offered to climb ahead, to provide word of her imminent arrival; Adare had refused. She was relying on this surprise and confusion. She wanted the dungeon guards and jailors shocked and off-balance, too busy staring at her to pay much attention to Mailly’s slender figure at her side.
“Your Radiance.” One of the older jailors bowed formally, then stepped forward. Lamplight glinted off his immaculately polished armor, glittered in his dark eyes. Shrewd eyes, Adare concluded grimly. She had been hoping for a fool. “My name is Haram Simit,” the man continued, “and I am the Chief Jailor here. You honor us with your presence.”
“I didn’t come to honor you,” she said brusquely. She had put on her Emperor’s face before entering the chamber, and she used her Emperor’s voice now. “I came to question the spy.”
Simit pursed his lips. “We have a number of spies, Your Radiance.”
“Vasta Dhati. The Manjari. The one who broke into my brother’s study. The one who somehow managed to elude you until just days ago.”
The rebuke was unfair, but she had hoped it might unsettle the Chief Jailor. Simit, however, did not look unsettled. He shook his head slightly.
“The prison staff does not apprehend the criminals, Your Radiance. Our charge is limited to their imprisonment.” He gestured to a set of chairs. “Please. If you and your companion would rest, I will send someone for water and refreshment. The climb is long, even for those who make it often.” The chairs were bare wood, hard and unupholstered. Adare ached to collapse into one, to rest her trembling legs. The last thing she needed, however, was to sit in a ’Kent-kissing chair while Simit scrutinized her further. The sooner they were into the prison and out again, the better. She shook her head.
“As you say, the climb is long. Too much time has been wasted already. We will see the spy now.”
Simit’s lips tightened, and he shifted his gaze to Mailly. “And may I ask, Your Radiance, who is your companion?”
Mailly twitched at her side. Adare reached down and took her by the elbow.
“No,” Adare replied, careful to keep her voice brusque, level. “You may not ask. She has knowledge of the spy that may prove useful-that is all you need to know.”
Simit studied Mailly for two or three heartbeats, as though if he watched her long enough, he might see straight through the fine wool of her hood.
“Forgive me, Your Radiance,” he said at last, “but is this not a matter for the First Shield and his Aedolian Guard?”
“The same so-called guard,” Adare snapped, pouring as much scorn as she could into that last word, “that let the bastard into the Spear in the first place? The same guard that allowed three of their number to be subdued by a single spy? Is that the guard you want me to trust?”
She let the question hang there, cocked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. The other scribes and jailors might have been statues. No one moved. They barely seemed to breathe. There was no way, however, to stop them from watching, and when the whole thing was over, when Adare was gone and the corpse was found, they would remember what they’d seen. They would spend hours pondering Adare’s visit, going over and over all the details, debating the tiny nuances of what she said, the way she held herself. She needed to get out of the chamber soon, get away from all those eyes before she let something slip, or Mailly did. Rushing, on the other hand, was a good way to cause just such a slip, and so she forced herself to stand still, to keep her face aloof, to wait for Simit’s reply.
“Forgive me, Your Radiance,” the man said again, “but I was given to believe your brother declared the Aedolian Guardsmen free of any guilt.”
My brother, Adare reflected grimly, who seems to have disappeared from the palace. Kaden had been seen days earlier, departing through the Ghost’s Gate, but after that … nothing. Kiel had assured both Adare and the council that the First Speaker would be absent only temporarily. Adare was not reassured. She had sent twenty of the Sons into the city to search for her brother; they had returned empty-handed. Kaden’s absence was a vexing and dangerous riddle, but breaking Triste out of the Spear afforded no leisure to consider it further, and so Adare had set the question aside, where it gnawed quietly at a corner of her mind like a rat at a bit of gristle.
“I am not bound by the whimsical declarations of my brother.”
“And yet he is the First Speaker of the council.”
Adare made her voice cold, hard. “And I am the Emperor.” Simit acknowledged that with a shallow bow, but Adare was bulling ahead even before he had a chance to straighten. “This matter is more important than my brother knows, and I will not see the handling of it botched any further.”
Simit bowed lower this time. The man was all respect but no submission. Even as he acquiesced to her demands, she could feel him watching, could see his mind moving behind his eyes. The room wasn’t hot, but Adare was sweating. She could feel it running hot and slick down the skin beneath her robe, glistening on her brow.
It’s a long climb, she reminded herself. Everyone must be dripping with sweat by the time they get here.
Simit glanced at Mailly again. “Your Radiance, if I might just-”
“The Manjari,” Adare said, smashing through the man’s voice with her own, “attacked us here. In the very heart of Annur. You may not find that troubling, but I do, and I will not hand away Annurian advantages to assuage your idle curiosity. I will not have my companion compromised.”
“My scribes and guardsmen are sworn to silence,” Simit protested, “as am I. The truth of what transpires here does not pass beyond that door.” He pointed discreetly at the steel slab behind Adare.
“I have every trust in your circumspection.” Adare smiled grimly. “Still…”
She let the word hang there, the silence stronger than any threat. After a pause, Simit bowed again. “I will have the prisoner transferred to a standard cell for questioning.”
Adare’s heart bucked like a panicked horse. Everything, the entire plan, depended on meeting Vasta Dhati below, where the steel cages hung in the vast emptiness of the Spear.
“No,” she barked.
Simit’s eyes widened a fraction.
Adare strangled her fear, took a deep breath, and shoved it aside. “I am done with waiting, with incompetence and delay. We will see him now, wherever he is.”
Simit shook his head, then pointed down through the floor. “He is in a cage, Your Radiance. Hanging below us.”
“And you’re telling me you have no way to reach these cages?” she demanded, arching an eyebrow.
“We do,” Simit replied. “A sort of steel basket, but it is not fit for an Emperor. It is precarious.”
“So is sitting on the Unhewn Throne.”
“But the basket will accommodate only two,” Simit said.
“One,” Adare said, pointing to her own chest, then shifting her finger to Mailly. “Two.”
“You wish to see the prisoner alone?” Concern fringed the jailor’s voice, and his eyes were troubled as he met hers.
Adare forced herself to meet that gaze, to nod. “Perhaps I was not very clear earlier. There was a breach in palace security. Until I have the answers I seek, I will believe there is still a breach, and while there is a breach, I will trust no one. Including you.”
Simit studied her. “This is most irregular, Your Radiance.”
“We will see the prisoner now,” Adare said. “We will see him alone. And if there are any more delays, I will see you removed from your post, stripped of your armor and honors, and put out of the palace.”
The man held her gaze a moment, then bowed a final time. “As you say, Your Radiance. If you will follow me…”
Adare let out a long, unsteady breath when the man finally turned. Maybe there had been a more graceful way to handle the jailor, a subtler way, but grace and subtlety carried their own risks, risks she couldn’t afford to take while il Tornja had her son. The blunt force of imperial prerogative wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
It works, she reflected bleakly, provided you’re willing to burn through all normal human bonds.
* * *
Simit’s metal “basket” looked more like some obscure machine of torture than anything meant to carry apples or cotton. Adare and Mailly stood on a slab of cast iron barely wide enough for the two of them, grasping a waist-high metal railing that might have been hammered out on some drunken blacksmith’s forge. The thing was all warped angles and rough edges, a baffling contrast with the clean lines of the rest of the prison.
It’s meant to frighten them, the Chief Jailor had explained, just before he lowered them through an open trapdoor in the steel floor. The journey to the cages below should not be an easy one.
The whole thing hung from wrist-thick chains-obviously strong enough to hold up half a dozen oxen-but Adare felt nauseous all the same as the basket dropped through the floor in a series of jolts and lurches. The chains rattled over the pulleys above, setting the basket swaying. After a moment of dizzying vertigo, Adare closed her eyes. She could feel Mailly beside her. The girl was sobbing silently, trembling inside her robe, the sound muffled by the clanking of the chain. Adare felt her own fear begin to give way, shoved aside by her shame. Things could go awry for them all, horribly awry, but Mailly was the only one who had come to this place to die.
How does it feel, Adare wondered, to know you won’t live to see another sunrise? Soldiers marched to their deaths all the time, of course, and old people lying in their beds could surely hear Ananshael’s quiet steps. Almost no one, however, could foresee with any certainty the actual moment. A soldier might survive a vicious battle. A grandmother with the gray pox might live for five more years. It was that chance of survival, the not knowing for sure, that kept people moving forward, even at the end. That chance had been denied to Mailly. Adare was denying it. She carried inside a small pocket of her robe the poison that would destroy the girl. Mailly knew it, had climbed all the way to the dungeon knowing it.
The basket jolted suddenly to rest, throwing Adare into the twisted railing. She opened her eyes to find a steel cage hanging in space just half a pace away. Like the basket in which she stood, it hung from chains, but when she traced those links back up, she found them fixed in the floor above. There was no raising and lowering of the hanging cells. Prisoners went down in the basket, and usually they didn’t leave until they were dead.
If any of that bothered Vasta Dhati, it didn’t show. The pirate priest sat cross-legged in the center of his cage, his only clothing a single scrap of sailcloth around his loins. The man was more battered than the last time Adare saw him-something had split his scalp just above the eye, and a huge bruise spread like a stain across his shoulder. He didn’t appear to notice; not the wounds nor his new visitors.
“All is well, Your Radiance?”
Adare craned her neck to find Simit leaning out over the open door, staring down at the swaying basket.
“It is. You may leave us now.”
Simit hesitated. “Call out loudly-very loudly-when you are ready to ascend.” His head disappeared, and then, moments later, the trapdoor above slammed shut. Adare ignored her roiling stomach and the recriminations of her mind, turning back to face the priest.
“Are you all right?” she murmured. The sight of his wounds had filled her with sudden foreboding, and despite his earlier assurances, the whole thing suddenly seemed impossible. How could he keep track of the cloth for three days, through arrest and transport, beatings and interrogation? Could he eat, with that silk rope snaking down his throat? Could he sleep? “Do you have it?” she demanded, suddenly convinced she should have found a way to carry the rope herself, whatever the added risk.
“You are speaking to the First Priest of the Sea of Knives,” Dhati replied serenely, raising his eyes. Before Adare could respond, he tipped back his head and, as he had in Kegellen’s home days earlier, vomited the silken rope into his hands. The cord was a slick, twisted mess, but it was there. When it was done, Dhati spat onto the steel floor of his cage. “This is no prison for the First Priest of the Sea of Knives.”
“What about the cage?” Adare asked, eyeing the steel gridwork. Instead of the simple vertical bars she had seen in other prisons, bars ran both horizontally and vertically over the front of the cell. The resultant empty squares were barely larger than the priest’s head, certainly far too narrow for his shoulders, a fact that seemed to bother him not in the slightest.
For a moment he stood still as the steel walls. Then, with no warning, he began to windmill his arms in frenetic circles, all the while breathing in and out so quickly and violently that Adare thought he might snap his ribs. Mailly had pushed back her hood, and was staring at the tiny man, amazement replacing, if only for a moment, the pain that was usually scrawled across her face.
“What is he doing?” she whispered.
Adare grimaced. “Escaping.” She hoped.
Suddenly, Dhati went still again. He closed his eyes, muttered a few words in a language Adare didn’t understand, then stepped forward to the bars. He put an arm through first, an approach that seemed obviously doomed to failure. Before Adare could lose hope, however, the priest let out a deep humph, and the arm seemed to pop free from the body, the shoulder liberated from its socket. The sight was both sickening and fascinating. Adare could do nothing but stare as the man distended his own flesh, twisting his limbs into positions of torture, horror, his body writhing in the impossible postures of nightmare. He didn’t seem to climb through the metal grate so much as pour himself, as though there were no muscle or bone inside his skin, but an amorphous, gelatinous ooze. For a moment Adare thought the man was a leach, but she realized as she stared that there was no kenning involved-only a staggeringly violent subjugation of the flesh. It took a matter of minutes, but when Dhati was finished he stood outside the cage, perching easily on the bars as he retrieved his rope. Then, with an acrobatic flip, he tossed himself up onto the roof of the cell.
Adare shook her head in amazement. “Now what?” she managed, when she finally found her words.
Dhati bared his teeth-a feral expression that might have been a smile. “Knots.”
The First Priest of the Sea of Knives was fully fluent in his knots; his thin fingers flew through the whorls and twists as easily as Adare might write her own name on an empty page. It took him only a matter of moments to tie a series of small, fixed loops into the length of silk-holds for hands and feet, evidently-then just a heartbeat more to attach the end of the silk to one of the bars on his cage. When he finished, he looked up at Adare, then pointed beyond her shoulder.
“I will get the girl.”
Adare turned slowly, warily, shifting her grip on the railing as she moved. She’d managed not to look down, had managed not to look at anything but Dhati and his cage. Now, however, she was forced to confront the full scope of the prison. Dozens of cages hung from the floor above, most at different levels, facing different directions. She had a brief vision of the architect or mathematician responsible for solving that particular problem, for packing in as many cages as possible without offering any one prisoner a clear line of sight to any other.
In a way, the whole place was ludicrous. Holes hacked into the stone would have been cheaper and easier, and no one was likely to escape from a cave built straight into the bedrock.
But then, Adare reflected, staring at the hanging cells, at the light reflecting off the steel, it’s not about ease. Not any more than this tower we decided to occupy. It’s about power.
Anyone who saw the sunlight glinting off the tower-sailors miles out to sea, travelers down the coastal road, visitors to and citizens of Annur itself-knew that it belonged to the Malkeenians. Somehow a single family with blazing eyes had taken the greatest structure in the world for its own, then built a prison inside it, a dungeon so high, the story went, that even if a prisoner managed to leap from his cell, he would die before striking the ground. It was worth a logistical hassle to have the whole world believe a thing like that.
Atop his hanging cage, Vasta Dhati pulled the last of his knots tight, grunted in satisfaction, and then, without even a glance down, leapt the gap between his cell and the hanging basket. The whole thing swayed dangerously as he landed on the railing, but while Adare and Mailly scrambled to hold on, Dhati balanced easily, shading his eyes with a hand as he squinted to the west.
“How long will it take,” Adare asked, “to search the cells?”
The First Priest hissed, then shook his head. “No search. The girl is there.”
He pointed at a cell just twenty or thirty feet distant.
Adare stared at it. The gleaming steel walls stared blankly back. Presumably the cell had an open side, a gridwork of bars like those through which Dhati had just escaped. It had better, she thought. Even Dhati couldn’t drag Triste out through a sheet of solid metal.
“She’s in there? How do you know?”
“You want me to free a leach,” Dhati replied. “To keep the leach safely, she must be drugged. That is the only cage the guards visit, even in the middle of the night.”
I should be grateful, Adare thought. The information was an unexpected windfall, as was the simple fact of the cage’s location. After so much scheming and second-guessing, Triste hung inside a cell just a stone’s throw away. Dhati, as promised, was out of his cage. Improbably, it was all working. I should be grateful, she told herself again, and yet, instead of gratitude, she felt only her heart’s hammering, dread rising in her throat to choke her.
“You have the grapples?” Dhati asked impatiently.
Adare started at the question, then nodded. Hidden in her piled hair, masquerading as lacquered pins, were the three hooks the priest had given her days before. In retrospect, she could have simply carried them in her pocket, but there had been no way to be sure that Simit wouldn’t search her, Emperor or no. Her fingers felt numb, clumsy, as she pulled the hooks free, and as she passed the final one to the priest, she felt it slip from her sweat-slick hand, tumbling into the void. Adare could only stare, but Dhati lashed out, viper-quick, snatching it as it fell, then hissing his disapproval as he straightened. It took him only a moment to lock it together with the other two, then to thread the rope through the triple eye of the grapple.
“How…,” Adare began.
Before she could finish the question, he tossed the steel hook. It was a casual motion, almost indifferent. It reminded Adare of the way she herself might toss aside her robe when she undressed for the bath. She watched, amazed, as the silk fluttered out behind the hook, as the enameled steel flashed with the sunlight, then landed with a clank atop the far cell. The sound seemed horribly loud, the kind of thing that would surely bring Simit and his guards running. She stared up at the closed trapdoor for a dozen nervous breaths. The steel panels didn’t move. The Chief Jailor did not appear. Adare let out a long, slow breath, then turned back to the silken cord hanging in a shallow arc between the cells.
“Stay here,” Dhati said. Then, without even a glance down, the priest swung out onto the silk, hanging spiderlike beneath it, suspended from his hands and the backs of his ankles, then moved along its length, nimble and frighteningly fast. He reached Triste’s cell in moments, rolled onto the roof, then tipped his head over the far side. He looked up a moment later, then signaled.
“She’s there,” Adare breathed weakly. “She’s there.”
“And he can get her out?” Mailly asked, her voice faint. “He can get me in?”
Adare kept her eyes fixed on the far cell, but nodded slowly. “You saw how he did it. You’re just as small as Dhati-smaller, actually.”
“But my body,” the girl protested. “It doesn’t move like that.”
“It will,” Adare replied. “He can help you.”
Help, in fact, seemed like entirely the wrong word for what the priest would have to do. He had demonstrated his uncanny ability back in Kegellen’s mansion, his strong, nimble fingers finding a series of points halfway between Adare’s neck and shoulder, then pressing so viciously she thought he would break the skin. She’d cried out in alarm just as her shoulder went slack, then numb, the whole arm dangling stupidly at her side.
“Your soft emperor’s body would not last a day on the Sea of Knives,” the priest had said, gesturing, “but it can be trained to obey.”
Then, before Adare could protest, he popped her shoulder from its socket. Whatever he’d done to relax the muscle also deadened the pain, at least in that moment. The ache came later, when she’d recovered the limb’s use and feeling, a bone-deep sense of the wrong that had been done. Kegellen, of course, had been all apologies and solicitude, but Adare had brushed aside the woman’s concern. “All that matters is that it works, that he can get Triste out, and Mailly in.”
“He’s going to relax your body…,” Adare began. Before she could finish, Mailly collapsed at her side, shaking her head in the slow cadence of terror or regret. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry, Your Radiance. I’m so sorry. But I can’t do it.”
Adare took a deep breath, knelt on the hard iron slab, then draped her arm over Mailly’s shoulders. She could feel the girl’s thin frame shaking, racked with terror and disease.
“It’s not so far,” Adare said, forcing a calm she did not feel into her voice. If Mailly refused her role, the whole thing was finished. They might still escape with Kaden’s leach, but the guards would know within the day-the very next time they descended to force the adamanth on Triste-that she was gone, and Adare had little doubt that Simit would make the obvious connection. Everything hung on Mailly’s cooperation, and yet, it was an awful thing to coax a young girl to her death.
“Dhati will take you over,” Adare said, gesturing.
Even as she spoke, the tiny priest had removed the grapple and tied the far end of the silk to the chains supporting Triste’s cell. With the steel hooks in his teeth, he made his way back hand over hand, swung up atop the basket railing once more, then dropped down next to Mailly.
“Be quicker,” he hissed, lifting her robe over her head. “Speed is safety.”
The girl, still half dazed, raised her arms. She wore only a light linen shift beneath the robe; the cloth had been washed so many times it was nearly sheer, and Adare winced at the gaunt angles of the girl’s body. Once she was in the cell, she would exchange garments with Triste. At least, that had been the plan before Mailly’s courage faltered.
Dhati, oblivious or indifferent to the girl’s terror, tossed the robe aside, then began work on a harness. He had an extra length of silk, one he’d untied from the longer swath, and as Mailly stared at the far cell, he wove it deftly into a kind of saddle around her bare legs. In moments it was finished, tied off to the grapple hook.
“Climb,” Dhati said, leaping up onto the railing once more, taking the long rope in his hands. “Hook over this. I will pull you.”
“Not yet,” Adare protested, pulling the glass bottle from the pocket of her robe. “She has to drink this first.”
“I can’t,” Mailly protested, shifting her gaze from the gap between the cells to the bottle in Adare’s hand. “Oh, Sweet Intarra, no. I can’t.”
The words were desperate, panicked, but almost inaudible, as though there were no air left in the girl’s lungs for speech.
You have to, Adare wanted to scream. You said you’d do it, and now you have to!
Instead she hauled in a slow breath of her own, then forced herself to meet Mailly’s terrified eyes. “Tell me why you’re afraid.”
Mailly stared at her. “I’m afraid to die.”
“So am I,” Adare replied quietly.
The words just tumbled out, but they weren’t quite the truth. It wasn’t Adare’s own death that terrified her, but her son’s. When she closed her eyes to shut out Mailly’s face, Sanlitun filled her mind, the tiny child with his small hands grasping for her hair, her face. If she failed here, he was gone. Il Tornja would learn she had defied him, and he would kill her son with the indifference of a fisherman hacking the heads from his catch. The simple fact felt like a knife nestled right beside her beating heart. She opened her eyes to Mailly’s tear-streaked face, so different from Sanlitun’s and yet bathed in the same bafflement, twisted by the same helpless need.
And where is her mother?
Living in some squalid hovel, no doubt-a rat-infested basement or a leaking garret in the Perfumed Quarter. Wherever it was, it couldn’t be good, not if Mailly was willing to drink poison to save her from it. Adare imagined the woman for a moment, imagined her in the cramped room as the sun’s last light flamed on the sill, then died. She would be confused about her daughter’s absence at first, then concerned, then sick with worry. Adare couldn’t picture her face, but she could see the hands, skin rough with a lifetime of scrubbing, clenched in the woman’s lap, the knuckles pale, bloodless.
“You don’t have to do it,” Adare said. She glanced down at the bottle in her hand, suddenly tempted to toss it over the railing of the basket, to watch it disappear in the dusty light.
“But the money,” Mailly moaned. “Five thousand suns…”
“I’ll make sure your mother gets it. And your brother.”
“You would do that?” the girl asked, shaking her head in disbelief, then dropping to her knees, clutching at Adare’s legs in gratitude or supplication.
Adare nodded mutely. It was ruined. The whole fucking thing was ruined. She wanted to scream, but screaming wouldn’t do any good. I can delay, she thought, mind racing, tell il Tornja that I need more time. He won’t kill Sanlitun until he knows I’ve turned on him.…
“Why are you crying?” Mailly asked.
Adare stared at the girl, confused, then touched her own face with her fingertips. It was wet, soaked with tears.
“It’s fine,” she said, scrubbing them roughly away. “We need to get out of here.”
From his perch atop the railing, Vasta Dhati frowned.
“You would stop now?”
“Things have changed,” Adare snapped. “Take down the silk. Quickly.”
The Manjari narrowed his eyes. “And my ships? This failure is nothing of my doing.”
“I’m aware of that,” Adare snapped. “You make your own way out, as we arranged before, and you’ll have your ships.”
“A weak people,” Dhati muttered, shaking his head. “What about the leach?” he asked, tossing his bald head toward Triste’s cell.
Adare shook her head. “Leave her.”
“She’s seen me. She could talk.”
“Who would believe her?”
Mailly changed her grip on Adare’s knees. She was still kneeling, but had shifted her gaze from Adare’s face to the far cage.
“Who is she?” she asked, voice weak, as though it had been broken somewhere deep inside her throat.
“It doesn’t matter,” Adare said, reaching down to grab the girl by the elbow, pulling her roughly to her feet. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
Horror propelled her, horror at abandoning the plan, at what it would mean. Despair darkened her vision, pressed down on her heart. If she paused, it seemed, if she hesitated even a moment, it would crush her.
“Put your robe back on,” she said, dragging Mailly toward her. To her shock, the girl pulled away.
“Who is she?” she asked again, voice stronger this time.
Adare met her gaze. “She is a leach. She killed over a hundred people here, in this palace.”
Mailly blanched. “And you want to get her out? Why?”
“We need her.”
“But she’s a leach.”
“She is a weapon,” Adare said wearily.
“But you’re the Emperor,” Mailly protested. “You’re Intarra’s prophet. You have whole armies to fight for you.”
“Those armies,” Adare said tersely, “are losing. We are losing.”
She wasn’t sure whether she meant losing to the Urghul, or to her own kenarang. Of course, there was more than one war, more than one kind of defeat. A woman could lose over and over, could fail in a thousand different ways.
Mailly shook her head. “I didn’t know,” she whispered finally.
“How would you know? It’s all happening in the north, or along the coast, or down in the Waist. Everywhere but here. The whole fucking empire could collapse, and Annur would only notice when there were no more boats, no more wagons piled high with food and supplies.”
“And this leach,” Mailly asked, nodding toward Triste’s cage, “can stop it? Can save Annur?”
“I have no idea,” Adare said. She could feel the long climb up the tower stairs like lead in her legs. She wondered if she would be able to descend from the Spear without collapsing. It didn’t seem to matter. “Maybe not. I had hoped so. Maybe there’s another way.”
Mailly looked at Triste’s cage, tears in her wide eyes, then turned her gaze beyond it, past the hanging cells, through the clear walls of the Spear, out and away, to where Annur lay sprawled thousands of feet below. The towers glittered with their miniature beauty. The canals caught the noon light, throwing it back. From this height, even the slums looked beautiful, a collection of tiny dwellings stripped of the stench, the sobbing, the disease.
“I’ll do it,” Mailly said at last. She was crying again, but the shaking was gone.
Adare stared.
“I’m dying anyway,” the girl whispered. “And what good are five thousand suns to my mother and brother if there’s no food to buy? If there are Urghul riding through the streets?”
Hope bloomed in Adare like a sick-sweet flower. She hated herself for it, but she’d hated herself for a lot of things for a long time now. She could live with a little more hatred. She glanced up at the trapdoor twenty feet above. It was still closed. How long had they been hanging in the basket? She’d told Simit that she needed time, but how long would the man wait? Not all day, certainly. Was there still time to make the switch?
“Are you certain about this?” she demanded, gripping the girl by the elbow more firmly than she’d intended.
Mailly flinched, but she nodded, dragging her gaze from Adare’s eyes to the brown bottle in her hands. Kegellen had mixed the ayamaya with strong Breatan spirits. It might dull the poor child’s pain, she had suggested, studying the bottle as she handed it over. Adare didn’t believe that for a moment.
Mailly stared at the glass as though it were a viper, then grabbed for it, clawing at the cork with shaking hands like a drunk desperate to get at whatever was inside. The glass, slick with her tears, half slipped from her grasp. Adare lurched forward, catching it before it could tumble through the basket railing. When she raised her eyes, Mailly was staring at her.
It seemed like there should be something to say. Emperors were always making speeches, after all, extended declamations on patriotism and sacrifice. Generals addressed the men before sending them into battle, and the fate that Mailly faced was at least as awful as an Urghul spear to the stomach. Surely there was something to say, something both comforting and ennobling, but Adare found the words would not come. She was gambling away the girl’s life, and for what? The shadow of a shot at Ran il Tornja. There was no nobility in the sacrifice, only desperation.
Adare studied the bottle in her hands. Then, with a nudge of the thumb, popped free the cork.
Mailly gave a little gasp, like the sound a girl makes when she steps into the ocean for the first swim of late spring-a small sound, almost the start of a laugh. Adare could imagine her standing knee-deep in the waves, eyes wide with the excitement and the cold, ready to dive in, but waiting, maybe, for her friends. Only Mailly had no friends, not here. There was only Vasta Dhati, perched impatiently on the railing, and Adare herself, the woman who had brought her here, not to brave those bright spring waves, but to die alone, her awful pain utterly unwitnessed.
“Mailly…,” Adare began, but before she could think what to say next, the girl seized the bottle in both hands and raised it to her lips, drinking desperately, almost greedily, the brown spirit trickling down her bare neck. Adare stared at the girl’s throat as she swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed again, then suddenly convulsed. Mailly grimaced, lips twisted back, eyes squeezed shut. It seemed for a few heartbeats that she would vomit it all up.
Does it work so fast? Adare wondered. Is the poison so violent?
But after a heartbeat more, Mailly trembled herself free of the liquor’s grip, fixed her eyes on the bottle’s rim, and began drinking again, more slowly this time, but with a quiet determination, pausing between each sip.
“How much?” she gasped when she’d had a third of the bottle.
“No more,” Adare said, reaching out to stop the girl, to take the poison back.
According to Kegellen, a single swig would do the necessary work, but only if Mailly held the liquor down. For a moment the two just stared at each other, both frozen. Mailly’s eyes were wide, as though she’d just now realized what she’d done, was only now understanding that she could not take it back.
But she can, Adare thought grimly, some cold part of her own mind, a part she loathed, working through the logistics of the girl’s death. ’Shael only knows what might happen if she gets sick now. She had a vision of Mailly in Triste’s cage, vomiting but not dying, her skin spared the worst of the coming blisters, her eyes unbloodied by the poison’s violence. The next time the guards descended with the adamanth, they would find her, would know that Triste had escaped somehow, and Simit, with those careful eyes of his, would put the pieces together easily.
“Are you all right?” Adare asked.
Mailly’s mouth moved, framing the shapes of silent words.
“Mailly?”
The girl locked eyes with her. “I’m really going to die.”
Adare nodded gravely. “You are. But you saved your family. Your mother and little brother and…” She hesitated, uncertain how to phrase the rest. “And maybe more. Maybe, in some strange way, all Annur.”
“She’s that important?” Mailly asked, staring at Triste’s cell. “The leach?”
I don’t know, Adare almost said. It was the honest truth. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know why my own general wants her dead. I don’t know what threat she poses or to whom. I have no play in mind, nothing even resembling a plan. All I can do is deny him his demands, and even that might prove pointless.
“Yes,” she said instead. “She’s that important. And so are you. You’re crucial to this whole rescue.”
And then, to her shock, Mailly smiled. “Crucial.” She shook her head ruefully, suddenly even younger than her few years. “Will you tell my brother that?” she asked. “That I was crucial?”
“Of course,” Adare said. “I’ll make sure-”
Before she could finish, a convulsion doubled Mailly over, violent as a fist to the gut. She groaned, then clamped her teeth shut on the sound.
“Is this it?” the girl asked, half straightening, face tight, stitched with pain.
Adare nodded helplessly.
“So fast,” Mailly marveled.
“Now,” Dhati said. “We go.”
The priest reached down, and, with surprising strength, hoisted the girl up onto the railing, held her there as she seized the chain, then tossed the hook from her harness over the silken rope.
“Go,” he said again, gesturing.
Mailly stared down, swallowed a sob, and tightened her grip.
“Let go,” the priest said again.
“Wait,” Adare said.
The two looked down at her, the priest impatient and disdainful, Mailly with her tear-streaked, terror-blighted eyes, and Adare realized she had nothing to say. She had brought the girl here to see her dead, to leave her behind, and the time had come for leaving. Dhati watched her a moment longer, then hissed his irritation, shoved Mailly squarely in the chest, and they were both over the edge of the railing, the girl dangling from her makeshift harness, the priest hanging from his hands, his knees locked around her waist as he pulled her out over the abyss.
Adare started, half stretched a hand toward Mailly, some stupid, human effort to touch her, as though that touch could bring any comfort. They were already away, though, Dhati’s hands moving fast, his wiry arms drawing them toward Triste’s cage.
Thank you, Adare realized. That was what I should have said. Just thank you.
She opened her mouth to call to the girl, but they were too far, the risk of raising her voice too great. Mailly’s gaze was fixed on her, her eyes wide, as though she were waiting for something, but Adare forced her own mouth closed, painfully aware of Simit waiting, just a few paces away through the steel ceiling above.
It’s over, she told herself. The whole thing is long past words, anyway.
She wanted to turn away, to shut her eyes, but she held Mailly’s terrified gaze until they reached the far cage and Dhati lifted her clear of the silk, guiding her onto the roof of the cell, where he paused, running his strong hands over her skin, driving his fingertips into the wasted flesh in just the right places to make the girl go numb, limp. Then, with a savage tug, he jerked her arm from the socket and lowered her over the side.
For what felt like forever, Adare stood alone in the basket, bathed in the afternoon light, strangled by her own emotion. It’s taking too long, a part of her thought, but the part of her that could still feel fear seemed wrung out, too exhausted to respond. There was only a cold, broken feeling, like a shattered knife lodged in her chest, driving deeper each time that her heart beat.
When the pirate priest finally emerged, dragging a different woman up into the light, Adare barely noticed. It was the leach, Triste, the one they had come for. They were so close to the very end of the whole insane plan. It was going to work. Adare discovered that she didn’t care. All she could think of, as Dhati hauled this other creature back across the silken cord, was Mailly alone in that cell, suspended in the air so many thousands of feet above everyone in the world who loved her, shaking as the poison raked its sharp claws through her flesh.
“Here,” Dhati said, jolting Adare from her thoughts as he deposited the leach unceremoniously inside the basket. “Remember. Three ships when I escape.”
Adare stared at the woman before her. Triste and Mailly were roughly the same age, close enough to the same size and build that, after the poison’s ravages, the guards wouldn’t notice the difference. The similarity, however, ended with those basic dimensions.
Mailly was pretty, if strangely pale. Triste was … perfect. Adare could arrive at no other word. Violence had scribbled scars across her skin. Red weals marred her face and arms. Something that looked like a burn spread across the flesh of her left hand. Her black hair was utterly unkempt, matted to her scalp as though she’d long ago gone mad. None of that mattered.
She’s too beautiful. That was Adare’s first thought. It seemed wrong, somehow, impossible.
“You have his eyes,” Triste said. Her voice was quiet, drugged, but bright enough to slice through Adare’s thoughts.
Adare was used to power. She was the daughter of an emperor, the sister of princes, the one-time consort of a Csestriim, and the protege of one of the Atmani. As she locked gazes with the young woman, however, as she stared into those hooded violet eyes, something inside her quailed. For half a heartbeat she wanted to bow, to grovel, to leap from the basket if that was what it took to escape that gaze. It went through her like a knife, and then it was gone, leaving her knees weak and her mind reeling.
“Kaden’s eyes,” Triste said again. “You have them.”
Adare steadied herself on the railing, straightened her spine, filled her voice with all the iron she could muster. “You will find I’m nothing like Kaden.”
Triste started to reply, then shook her head as though the effort were too much, as though the whole enterprise of speech was pointless.
“You’re breaking me out. Why?”
“I need you,” Adare replied.
“For what?”
“I’ll explain later.”
Triste shrugged, as though the answer didn’t really matter, as though the whole escape were no more amazing than the arrival of the evening meal. The drugs, Adare realized. She’s drugged almost thoughtless.
“Put this on,” she said, holding up the hooded robe that Mailly had worn into the tower.
Triste studied it, then slipped it over her head. The gesture was casual, indifferent, but there was a grace to it that would make most women ache with jealousy.
“Who was she?” the leach asked, tugging the fabric into place.
“Someone who agreed to die in your place.”
“Why?”
Adare opened her mouth, but found she lacked the language to respond. The truth was too large for words, too necessary and too cruel. What finally came out, when she managed to speak, was the barest brutal shadow of that truth, a shadow that settled down on Adare’s heart like a cold winter sickness.
“Because I fucking paid her.”