PROLOGUE
It feels like such a long time ago now, and yet it was only ten years. But these things are always relative; it is, after all, half my life.
In the days that followed I often wondered what would have happened if I had not led Selene to the cave; if I hadn’t shown her what I knew to be true, and if I hadn’t let that truth inspire me in the way it did. What would have become of her and what would have become of me? Would the events set in motion that day have flowed in a different and less obstructed line? Would we have lived normal and accustomed lives, going about our daily business, living and growing old and dying in the normal run of things? Would we have grown old together?
It is pointless to ask.
There are some who are content to let fate guide their actions and explain their failures, but I have never been one of them. Despite everything, even now, at some point I know I made a choice and everything that followed was a result of that choice. In the end, whether it was the right one or the wrong one is not for me to say. I only made it, and once a thing has happened, it could not have happened in any other way. Your only choice then is to accept the consequences no matter what they are. Long or short, that is the only real lesson life holds for anyone.
PART ONE
THE TOWER OF THE MOON
1
The cave was high above the bluff, an easy climb for me. It was one I had made a few times already, but Selene was wary of the fall. The sea cracked against the rocks below us. Specks of foam flew up like sparks from an anvil, bright in the morning sun. The sea beyond the shore was the sluggish grey water of Shyish, but up here against the Obsidian Coast it had a dark and sullen fury. The sky above was uncluttered, a soft and dazzling teal, and last night’s moon was only a pale ghost against the wastes of blue. It was a warm day, heavy and humid. It is rare that it gets so warm in Shyish. I took it for a good omen.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ I told her. I could see the shadowed mouth of the cave about thirty feet above us. ‘Just put your hands and your feet where I do and take it slowly.’
I reached for a handhold on the smooth, black stone, the edge of the basalt cutting into my fingers, but not sharp enough to draw blood. The bundle was heavy against my back, the light tunic tight against my shoulders, but I swung out from the bluff onto the cliff face and scrabbled my feet to a lip of rock.
‘Don’t rely on the gravewort roots to take your weight,’ I called to her. ‘They won’t. And whatever you do, don’t look down.’
‘I wouldn’t dare…’ she said.
I glanced back at her, standing there amongst the salt grass, the balmy wind catching at her flaxen hair. Selene was two months older than me. She would turn eleven at the end of the season, but already I had six inches on her and I was light and rangy with it. If the climb was going to be easy for me, then for her it would be more of a struggle. I knew she would rather have fallen to her death than admit defeat, though. Especially against me. We had been best friends our whole lives, but it’s often the success of a friend that stings more than the triumph of an enemy.
She scraped her hair behind her ears, nodded once, lips compressed to a thin hard line. She had that look in her eye, wild and tenacious, that I recognised well. I knew she wouldn’t back down now. As I climbed, turning my attention to the overlapping planes of basalt in front of me, the purple froth of the gravewort flowers bursting from the stone, I began to worry that I’d made a mistake and she wouldn’t be able to manage. But then I could hear her breathing below me, slow and regular, grunting as she reached up and pulled. I could hear the pebbles trickling from the rock and falling towards the sea as she pressed her feet to each ledge. Together, inch by inch, we crawled up the face of the cliff in the sultry air, up to where the black mouth of the cave gaped open to admit us.
There was a shelf of salt grass in front of the cave, a shallow half circle no more than three feet across. We rested there for a moment while we caught our breath, examining the little scrapes and cuts we’d picked up from the sharp stone of the cliff face. The seawater bubbled and churned far beneath us. Beyond the bluff, about a mile distant where the coastline bulged out into the water, I could see the three high tiers of Lament, the levels of the city stacked one atop the other: the glaze of white marble, the dusty avenues of the lower quarter, the glint of light catching on the colonnades of the Regent’s Palace at the very top. I could see the Tower of the Moon in the centre of the agora, black as pitch, seeming to absorb the light that streamed onto the city from the cloudless sky. High above the Tower, lifting from its crenellated brim like smuts and ashes rising from a column of smoke, I could see the vultures drift and settle. The reach of their black wings, like unfurled sails. The harsh sound of their morbid cries.
Beside me, Selene glanced warily at the mouth of the cave, shivering in the cool air. The entrance was no taller than we were and about ten feet across from side to side. Not a single beam of light reached into it.
‘What if it’s an entrance to the Underworlds?’ she said. She sat and drew her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, her face as drawn as if a tide of gheists was already pouring from the stone. ‘The Underworlds are sacred – it’s forbidden to trespass into them.’
‘Well, it wasn’t an entrance to the Underworlds yesterday,’ I said, laughing. ‘Or the week before that, so for now I think we’re safe. Come on, I’ll show you.’
I cuffed her shoulder, hauled myself to my feet. My legs still wobbled after the climb, and I stretched the knots from them.
‘Aren’t you worried about the race?’ she said as I helped her up. ‘There’s only a couple of hours to go, you’re going to be too tired to compete. Dardus is going to leave you in the dust.’
‘No, he won’t,’ I said.
This wasn’t bravado. I had run the race in my head a hundred times already. I knew I was going to win. I couldn’t imagine it otherwise.
‘Well, don’t you seem sure
of yourself,’ Selene said, with a raised eyebrow. ‘He’s a lot bigger than you. And stronger.’
‘But much slower,’ I said. ‘And he doesn’t want it as much as me.’
Selene frowned. She glanced back over her shoulder and looked towards Lament. They would be gathering soon, I knew. Lining the agora with an honour guard of citizens, waiting for the king to cross the desert… I could see the gaudy flags and pennants raised against the propylon at the entrance to the city, the pavements strewn with black petals. My mother would be leaving our house soon, heading down towards the city gates with all the other elders of the council.
‘And why do you want it so much?’ she said.
I felt cold suddenly. The air in the cave reached out a clammy hand and caressed my shoulder, and it made me shiver. I looked into the darkness and felt for the bundle across my back, the rags and the flask of oil, the wooden stick. Quickly I unwrapped it all.
‘Let me show you,’ I said.
I lit the torch and led her into the darkness.
As soon as we were over the threshold the sound of the ocean fell away into a low and placid mutter. The shadows danced back from the torchlight and threw themselves against the walls, cringing from the flame. I could feel Selene following behind me, holding her breath. I could almost hear the hammer of her heart, and after a moment her cold fingers caught my bare arm and squeezed.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. I took her hand. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’
The cave contracted after a dozen feet into a narrower tunnel, only two or three feet wide. You could see where the walls had been knapped back, the ridged extrusions of calcite like the creases in a throat as it descended into the cliff. The stone glistened and sparkled with minerals, but it was perfectly dry.
‘This is where they hid,’ I said, my voice a whisper. ‘When Zothar’s armies came and punished the Jackal Kings. A thousand years ago, Selene, the last royal family took refuge in this cave. And then, at last, they all threw themselves down onto the rocks rather than surrender…’
Selene shuddered and I laughed, although there was little mirth in it.
‘Your grandfather wouldn’t approve, I bet,’ I said, jabbing her softly with my elbow. ‘Sigmarites always want to die in some heroic last stand, I’ve heard. Dying with a prayer on their lips…’
‘He’s not a Sigmarite!’ Selene hissed.
‘Yes, he is. Why else has he got that pendant around his neck?’
I’d seen it once when we were helping the old man clear his yard. He had his shirt off against the sun, the golden hammer hanging from a length of cord, nestling in the wiry grey hair on his chest. I hadn’t said anything, although I was impressed at how bold he was for wearing it, and boldness always makes a grand impression on a young boy. He was the only one I knew who worshipped anyone other than King Zothar. I often wondered what Selene felt about Sigmar, although I could never muster the courage to ask. A person’s gods are best left alone, I’ve always thought. The stuff of souls is a complicated business and we each look for meaning in different ways.
We came to the end of the tunnel, into a narrow chamber where the walls crested to a high point far above us. The air was warmer here, the cold edge smoothed away by a whispering breeze that curled in from some hidden aperture onto the headland. I raised the torch and showed Selene what I had found. I was rewarded with a gasp. Her eyes sparkled in the light of the torch, and I felt the touch of pride that it had been me who had shown it to her.
‘I think this is what they did,’ I said, ‘before they threw themselves from the cliffs. They told the whole story. They wanted us to remember it. They didn’t think that we’d ever forget.’
On the walls in front of us, sketched in black charcoal and ochre dust, was the story of King Zothar and the death of Neophron, his son. It was the tale of the vengeance Zothar had taken on Lament.
The drawings flowed like water, from scene to scene, starting from the left and ringing the cave in one unbroken line. I held the torch up high and traced them with my finger, spelling them out for Selene, although she knew the rudiments of the story as well as I did. Everyone in Lament knew the story; it was part of who we were. Here then was King
Zothar crossing from the lost city of Theres, deep in the desert. Here were the Games of Lament, held every ten years, and here was Neophron competing for the honour of his city.
‘Look,’ I said. I pointed to the Tower of the Moon and the figure of Neophron falling to his death. ‘This is where he dies… He would have won if his hand hadn’t slipped at the top. He was almost there…’
My hand lingered on the fated boy, the sorrow so perfectly sketched onto his face by that forgotten artist a millennium ago. Falling, falling back into the empty air, hands grasping for the stone that had betrayed him, and the whole city standing below to watch…
Selene took the torch from my hand and crossed to the other side of the chamber, running her fingers underneath the images of Zothar’s journey to the Underworlds, where he demanded of the powers that dwelled there that Neophron’s soul be returned to him. Even now, after having gazed on it half a dozen times already, I couldn’t look at this picture too closely. Whoever had drawn it all those centuries ago had been too awed or horrified to render it with any precision, and it stood there in front of King Zothar as no more than a blurred shadow, the suggestion of deep, malicious eyes, a skeletal grin. It was a figure from a nightmare. Once again, I wondered at King Zothar’s courage, or the depths of his grief. Surely nothing less would have compelled him on such a journey.
‘This is wonderful,’ Selene said after a moment. She gazed up at the pictures, and it might just have been the torchlight, but I almost thought she had a tear in her eye. ‘Who would have thought all this was here… You should tell someone. You should tell your mother, she can let the other elders know.’
‘Why?’ I said. I felt a surge of resentment at the suggestion. I didn’t want anyone else to know, although at the time I couldn’t have said why. I had shared it with Selene because she was my best friend, but if no one else had been bold enough to climb up here in all the years since then why should they deserve to know about it too? This was our secret, I thought. I looked again at the picture of Neophron, his doomed climb up the Tower of the Moon. As gestural as the drawing might have been, I still recognised something of myself in him. It was the one image my eye was drawn to most, no matter where in the cave I stood.
‘It’s our heritage,’ Selene said. ‘This is where it all started.’
She paused beside me, both of us gazing on the picture of Zothar’s son. In the flames of the torch the image danced and flickered, and for a moment the light gave movement to the form. It was as if he was falling anew, tumbling endlessly from the Tower and plunging forever towards his death on the unforgiving flagstones below.
‘I wonder why they did it?’ she said. ‘Why paint it on the walls like this, up here where no one would ever see it.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe…’
‘What?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t for anyone else. Maybe it was just for them.’
‘But then why do it if they were just going to die?’
She looked to the cave mouth at the other end of the narrow passage; the low half-moon of the open air, blazing in that darkness. I knew she was imagining the twin monarchs of Lament’s last kings, their names now lost to all memory. Choosing to die, throwing themselves from the lip of the cave onto the rocks below.
‘So they could leave something of themselves behind,’ I said. ‘A reason, an explanation.’
The oily rags dripped and burned, the flames guttering around them. The pictures on the cave walls were dropping back into the shadows.
‘Who were they, do you think? The Jackal Kings?’ she asked.
‘Nobody knows,’ I told her. ‘Tyrants, monsters… their names are gone forever. King Zothar saw to that.’
‘We should be getting back,’ Selene said after a moment. ‘You don’t want to be late, or they’ll just start without you.’
‘I won’t be.’
She took my hand suddenly and when I looked at her I saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were red and t
ears had tracked a gleaming line down her cheeks.
‘Don’t win,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t do your best, please, Lycus.’
‘I have to,’ I told her. I looked away; embarrassed or ashamed, I couldn’t say. I thought of Neophron falling from the Tower. That wouldn’t be me. I would reach the top, and I would win. I knew it. ‘Someone has to, and it may as well be me.’
She nodded, turned away, raised the back of her wrist to her eyes and wiped them dry. When she turned back, she gave me a faint smile, although it was the kind of smile a mother might give to a sick child; commiserating and sympathetic, and masking her true fear.
‘Come on then,’ I said, heading back into the narrow passage. I tried to make my voice sound cheerful and unconcerned. ‘This will be a day to remember, won’t it? The day Lycus won the Games!’
2
There is something chastening about the sick, Astraea thought, as she carried away the thin gruel of his vomit. They lie on the very edge of mortality, just a breath away from being no more than bones and memories. A sack of faltering skin and the spirit trapped inside it…
She passed through the narrow doorway that led into the sun-struck rectangle of the back yard and tipped the bowl into the drain. There was a bucket of water by the pump in the corner of the yard, a wooden ladle beside it. She cleaned out the bowl and stood there on the step for a moment, looking out over the baked, whitewashed clay of the wall towards the lower tiers of the city. She could see the flags hanging from the windows above the Grand Avenue, the petals scattered on the roads, the hanging baskets in the agora. A breath of sea-wind drew in from the coast and lifted the fringes of the pennants. If she squinted, she could almost see the plumes of purple dust rising from the desert a dozen miles away. The sunlight fell like a hammer on Lament, stoking a cool, clear glow from the white marble of the city. Mansions, manses and the pediments of humbler dwellings all shone under the sun’s attention.
A faint haze of dust arose from the streets as the people began to gather. Astraea could see crowds forming on the other side of the plaza, where the dais had been raised. Everywhere, the rising twist of smoke from cook fires and ovens, the smell in the air of baking bread and roasted meat, of herbs and spices saved over the long decade for just this day. A ring of spectators surrounded the Tower of the Moon on the eastern side of the agora, the tall finger of black stone pointing crookedly at the azure sky. The vultures lit and settled on it, planing smoothly into the air, and wheeling around to take roost again. She could hear them calling, their grumbling croak, almost as if they knew…
A sliver of ice passed through her. It was nearly time.
She could hear Cleon coughing in his room behind her, on the cooler side of the manse. Astraea knocked the drops of water from the bowl against the doorframe, watched them spatter on the parched ground and instantly fade. It would be even hotter by noon. Who had ever known a hotter day than this in Shyish? It was unprecedented.
Cleon, her husband, seemed even more diminished than when she’d left him a few moments before. He lay there on the bed under a thin cotton sheet, as narrow and brittle as a bundle of sticks. She could see the outline of his skull, the cheeks sunken, the hollows of his eyes as dark as a hole in the ground. His skin was like wax, grey and glassy, his hands as twisted as tree roots. The dry-lung was heavy in him. His mouth was open as he gasped for air and she could see his black, receding gums. The room was wide and uncluttered, fresh with the scent of the sea from its coast-facing window, but still it stank with the smell of his breath. There would be no shifting the disease, nothing that pharmacy or prayer could accomplish. Only time would ease him of his suffering now.
Astraea crossed the room and opened the window another inch. She replaced the bowl by his bedside and leaned in to kiss his burning forehead. His hair was lank and the pillow was damp beneath him.
‘Kalista will be in later to look in on you,’ she said. ‘I have to go, it’s almost time…’
A spasm of pain shot through him, fastening his eyes. He nodded, sucked in a sip of air. When the pain had passed, he opened his eyes and stared up at her.
‘I wish I could see it,’ he wheezed. ‘See the king again and his honour guard… See Lycus running in the Contest…’
She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll tell you all about it, I promise,’ she whispered. She smoothed his hair back, felt the tears prickle against her eyes. ‘You’ll be proud of our son, I know it.’
Cleon tried to laugh, but it broke apart into a hacking cough. Quickly Astraea brought the bowl to his chin and held it there as he dribbled up a string of bloody spit. There was a film of grease against his skin. She wanted to scream, wanted to dash the bowl to pieces against the marble floor. Wanted to take Cleon’s throat between her hands and choke the life away, for all that she loved him. More than anything, she wanted to take Lycus and run, run for as long as their legs could bear them, until the desert had hidden them both away. It was an honour, she knew, the greatest Lament could offer.
As an elder of the city her heart would burst with pride to see him win the race. As a mother, she knew it would kill her.
She brought Cleon’s hand to her mouth and kissed it.
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said, ‘when I get back.’
‘Duty calls…’ Cleon smiled.
‘Always. Now rest, my darling.’ She offered him the consoling lie. ‘Rest and get better.’
She took her diadem wreath from the stand in the hall and passed into the baking streets, affixing it to her lacquered hair with a length of purple ribbon. The wreath, with its woven strands of acacia and willow, its garland of grave-beams and Hysh-flowers, felt heavy on her crown. She was dressed in a peplos of banded purple silk, a russet cloak thrown over one shoulder, the other bare. Her sandalled feet scuffed lightly on the marble pavement. As an elder of Lament, the ordinary citizens that she passed paid her respectful obeisance. Astraea inclined her head at each in turn, acknowledging the formalities even as she felt the dread spike and flutter in her stomach. She moved onto the thoroughfare that curved down towards the agora, passing from the cooler streets in the higher tier of the city, with their lines of shading trees, their high stone walls and sheltered squares. She glanced back over her shoulder. At the very apex of the city, high above her, she could see the Regent’s Palace; a long, rectilinear precinct ringed by the high pillars of a gleaming portico, the entablatures carved with scenes from Lament’s ancient and near-forgotten past. The palace roof was a high, wide dome of shining marble, gilded at its crown with panels of tarnished gold. It was visible from every part of the city, from miles outside it, the shining symbol of old Lament’s power and influence.
It had once been the court of the Jackal Kings, she knew, but no kings had lived there now for a thousand years. The palace was empty, waiting for the regent to take up his position. Waiting for Neophron to come again, and to reign in King Zothar’s stead…
The crowds began to thicken the closer she came to the agora, the open square at the centre of the city with its decorative ponds and marble benches, the rectangles of sculpted grass, the twisted beams of its coppiced woe trees. People jostled her as they passed, grown men and women hurrying to get a good position in front of the dais that had been set up against the plaza’s northern side. Astraea’s hands plucked nervously at each other as she walked. ...
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