Chapter 6 : VAIL - Miriel's Bargain71Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWNYNIMPBlT
Speaker Miriel received him in her private chambers, which was either a gesture of trust or a calculated insult. Vail could never quite tell with her, and that was why he respected her. She was sixty-three years old, a widow three times over, with eyes like chips of flint and a mouth that had forgotten how to smile around the time her second husband died in her bed—not from passion, the rumours said, but from a heart that gave out while he was trying to keep up with a woman twenty years his junior. The rumours also said she'd barely paused before sending for the servants to remove the body, and had remarried within the year. Vail had never confirmed the story. He'd never needed to. The woman who sat before him now, wrapped in furs and old grief, was not someone who let sentiment interfere with necessity.
Her chambers were in the eastern spire of the Citadel, high enough to catch the thin mountain light but far enough from the Council hall that conversations here couldn't be overheard without considerable effort. The room smelled of old books and dried herbs and the faint, animal musk of a woman who no longer bothered with perfume. A fire burned in the hearth, but it was a stingy thing, barely enough to warm the air. Miriel sat in a high-backed chair near the flames, a heavy fur draped across her lap, her gnarled hands wrapped around a cup of something that steamed. Her knuckles were swollen with the joint-ache that came with age, and her fingers trembled slightly as she lifted the cup to her lips. Age was eating her by inches. Vail noted it, filed it, and felt nothing. Or nothing useful.
"Prince Vail," she said. Her voice was dry as old paper. "You look like shit."
"I've been working."
"You've been not sleeping. There's a difference." She gestured at the chair across from her. "Sit. You make the room look untidy when you loom."
Vail sat. He didn't loom—he never loomed, he was careful about that—but Miriel had been calling him a looming presence since he was fifteen and she'd found him in the archives at midnight, reading forbidden texts by candlelight with a lamp that had burned so low it was smoking. She'd covered for him then. She'd told the head archivist he was praying, doing penance for some minor infraction, and the archivist had believed her because Miriel was the kind of woman who was never doubted. Vail had never forgotten it, and she'd never let him forget it.
"I need your vote," he said.
"You always need my vote. The last time you needed my vote, you were trying to stop Aldric from raising the tithe quotas on the outer villages. That failed. Spectacularly, if I recall. You called him a blood-leech in front of the entire Council, and he called you a heretic, and you stormed out before the vote was even tallied."
"This is different."
"It's always different." She sipped her drink. Her hands shook, but her eyes were steady. "Tell me."
Vail leaned forward. The firelight caught his face, and he knew what she saw: a young man with grey eyes and a sharp jaw, too thin from missed meals, too pale from too many nights underground, his hands steady but his eyes carrying something that hadn't been there a week ago. He didn't try to soften his expression. Miriel had no patience for softness. Her first husband had been soft, and he'd died in a border raid while hiding in a grain silo. Her second had been soft, and his heart had given out. Her third had been a soldier, hard as iron, and she'd loved him enough to bury him with full honours and a stone marker that she visited every week.
"The plague isn't a sickness," Vail said. "It's a consciousness. A god so old it predates the covenant. The tithes were never meant to feed the gods—they were meant to keep this thing imprisoned. And the prison is failing."
The silence stretched. Miriel's cup stopped halfway to her lips. A log in the fire shifted, sending up a shower of sparks.
"You have proof?"
"I have fragments. Texts from the sealed archives. Testimony from a god-speaker who spoke a name that hasn't been uttered in five hundred years. And I have a girl from the north who wounded a god with nothing but a knife and a bad memory. She's on her way here now—my riders intercepted her escort. She'll be in the capital by tonight."
"The God-Wounder." Miriel's voice was flat, but something flickered in her eyes. "Aldric's been crowing about her for days. He thinks she's proof that the old ways work—that the tithes are effective, that the gods can be placated if we just give them more."
"She's proof that the old ways are a prison system. The god she wounded didn't die—it fled. It's still out there, walking north, muttering in a voice that isn't its own. The thing inside it tasted her memory and recoiled. That's not a god-sickness. That's a predator encountering something it can't digest."
"And what does the predator want?"
"To wake up. To finish what it started five hundred years ago. To consume every memory that's been fed to the gods since the covenant began." Vail met her eyes. "We've been feeding it for five centuries, Miriel. Every tithe, every ceremony, every memory given to a god. We thought we were buying protection. We were buying time. And the time has run out."
Miriel set down her cup. The clink of clay on wood was very loud in the silence. "What do you need from me?"
"Three things. First, I need three days with the God-Wounder before Aldric gets his hands on her. He'll demand she be brought before the Council the moment he knows she's here. I need you to stall him."
"I can give you two days. Three is pushing it. Aldric's not a fool, whatever else he is. A fool would be easier to manipulate. Aldric is a man who thinks he's the hero of his own story, and those are the most dangerous kind."
"Two days, then. Second, I need you to back a motion to suspend the tithes. Temporarily. Just until we can prove the connection between the ceremonies and the plague's acceleration."
Miriel laughed. It was a dry, humourless sound, like stones rattling in a cup. "Suspend the tithes. The foundation of the covenant for five hundred years. The source of the Council's power, the temples' income, and the gods' goodwill. You want me to vote to suspend it. To stand up in front of Aldric and the other councilors and say, 'Yes, the Prince of Empty Hands, the God-Killer, the man who cuts open memories and drinks what comes out—he has a theory, and I believe him.'"
"I want you to vote to save the world."
"The world doesn't want to be saved. The world wants to keep doing what it's been doing and pretend the cracks aren't spreading." She picked up her cup again, but didn't drink. "I've been on this Council for twenty years. I've seen a dozen crises come and go. Famine, plague, war with the Grey Crown. Every time, someone stands up and says the world is ending. Every time, the world keeps turning. What makes this different?"
"Because this time, the gods are dying too."
That landed. Vail saw it in the tightening of her jaw, the stillness of her hands. Miriel had lost a son to the Elk of Hoarfrost two months ago. The god had walked through the walls of Thornwood Hold and spoken a word that killed everyone who heard it—men, women, children, the livestock in their pens, the birds in their cages. Her son had been stationed there. Her only child, the last living piece of the soldier she'd loved enough to bury with full honours.
"The Elk," she said, and her voice was different now. Quieter. "You think the plague killed my son."
"I know the plague killed your son. And I know it's going to kill more. The Elk wasn't the first god to go mad, and it won't be the last. The Lament attacked its own village last week. Twenty-three dead. The Leviathan of the Deep Roads drowned a fishing fleet. The small gods are twitching and muttering and forgetting their own names. This isn't a crisis, Miriel. This is a collapse."
Miriel stared into the fire. The flames reflected in her eyes, turning them orange, and for a long moment she said nothing. The only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the distant moan of the wind outside the spire.
"My son's last letter reached me the day after he died," she said finally. "He wrote it the night before the Elk came. He said he'd been having dreams. Dreams of a voice that spoke in words he couldn't understand, words that made his teeth ache and his eyes water. He said the other soldiers were having the same dreams. He said the god-post outside the Hold had started weeping black ichor." She looked at Vail. "He said he was afraid. My son was a soldier for fifteen years. He killed his first man when he was seventeen. He wasn't afraid of anything. And he wrote me a letter saying he was afraid."
"May I see it?"
She hesitated. Then she reached into the folds of her robes and pulled out a folded piece of parchment, worn soft from handling. She'd been carrying it against her body, Vail realised. She'd been carrying it for two months, close to her skin, close to her heart. She held it for a moment, her swollen fingers tracing the edges, before passing it to him. Her hand shook as she let it go.
Vail unfolded it carefully. The handwriting was blocky and uneven, the letters of a soldier who'd learned to write late and never well. The ink was smeared in places, as if water had dripped on it. Tears, maybe. Or the black ichor that had been weeping from the god-post.
Mother,
I don't know how to write this. I don't know if it will reach you. The dreams are getting worse. Last night I dreamed of a voice that said "the cold was the first word, and the cold will be the last." I woke up with blood in my mouth and a hard-on that wouldn't go away. The other men are having the same dreams. Torrin pissed himself in his sleep and didn't wake up. He's just lying there, eyes open, muttering in a language I don't understand. The god-post is bleeding black. The priests say it's a sign of the gods' displeasure. I think it's something else. I think it's something older. If this is the last letter I ever write, I want you to know—
The rest was smeared, illegible. A single word was scrawled at the bottom, pressed so hard into the parchment that the quill had torn through in places: YSKA.
Vail stared at the word. The same word the god-speaker had carved into her thighs with her own fingernails. The same word that had been torn from every text in the sealed archives. The name that heard. The name that was listening right now.
"Your son wrote this name," he said, his voice careful. "Did you know what it meant?"
"No." Miriel's voice was barely a whisper. "I showed it to the temple archivists. They said it was gibberish. The ravings of a dying mind. One of them—an old man, a scholar I've known for thirty years—he turned pale when he saw it. He said it was nothing. He said I should burn the letter. He was lying. I've known him for thirty years, and I've never seen him lie before."
"The name is Yska. The First Dreamer. A god that predates the gods. It taught them to consume memory, and then they imprisoned it for fear of its hunger. The covenant was built to keep it locked away. And we've been feeding it ever since."
Miriel was silent for a long moment. Then she leaned forward, and suddenly she didn't look old at all. She looked like a wolf who'd been waiting in the snow. "I want to know what killed my son. I want to know what spoke a word that turned a fortress into a tomb. And I want to kill it."
"Help me suspend the tithes. Give me two days with the God-Wounder. And I'll find out what killed your son. I'll find out how to hurt it. And then I'll show you how to kill it."
Miriel took the letter back. She held it against her chest, her gnarled hands pressing it flat. "You said three things. You've asked for two. What's the third?"
"When the time comes, I may need to leave the capital. Travel north. Follow the trail of the plague to its source. If I do, I need you to hold the Council together. Keep Aldric from doing anything irreversible. Keep the city from tearing itself apart while I'm gone."
"You're asking me to be your regent while you go off to die in the Frostwood."
"I'm asking you to be my ally. The only one I have left."
Miriel looked at him for a long moment. The fire crackled. Outside, the wind moaned against the spire, a low, lonely sound that could have been a voice if you weren't listening carefully.
"You know what they call you," she said finally. "The other councilors. The priests. The God-Killer. The Prince of Empty Hands. They say you cut open memories and drink what comes out. They say you've got a laboratory full of corpses and a mind full of heresies. They say you'd burn the world to understand it."
"Do you believe them?"
"I believe you'd burn the world to save it. Which is worse." She tucked the letter back into the folds of her robe, against her heart. "I'll give you your two days. I'll stall Aldric. I'll back your motion to suspend the tithes, though it will fail—you know it will fail. The Council won't vote against the covenant. They're too afraid."
"Then I'll make them more afraid of the alternative."
"See that you do." She raised her cup. "And Vail? If you fail—if this is another wild theory that collapses under scrutiny, another crusade that ends in nothing—I'll feed you to the next god that goes mad. Personally."
"I'd expect nothing less."
"Good. Now get out. I'm old, and I'm tired, and looking at you makes me feel older and tireder. And my joints ache when it's going to snow, which means it's going to snow, and I want to be in bed before the storm hits."
Vail stood. At the door, he paused. "Your son's letter. The word at the end. Don't speak it aloud. Don't write it again. It's not safe."
"What is it? A curse?"
"A name. And it's listening."
He left before she could ask more. Behind him, the fire popped, and Miriel's shadow stretched long across the stone wall, and the wind kept moaning against the spire like something that wanted to come in. She sat in her chair for a long time after he'd gone, her hand pressed against the letter beneath her robes, her swollen fingers tracing the outline of her son's last word.
YSKA.
She didn't speak it. But she thought it. And somewhere deep in the darkness, something heard.
Liska was waiting in the corridor, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her expression carefully blank. She'd put on clothes since Vail had last seen her—a rough wool tunic, leather trousers, her hair pulled back in a messy knot. She looked tired. She always looked tired these days.
"Well?" she asked.
"Two days. A vote on the tithes, which will fail. And a promise to feed me to the next god if I'm wrong."
"That's more than you had yesterday." She fell into step beside him. "The ward patients are worse. The physician who took out his earplugs—he's chanting now. Same words as the others. Same rhythm. His eyes are bleeding. Red blood, not black. For now."
"The infection is spreading."
"It's always been spreading. We just didn't know how fast." She glanced at him. "You look like shit, by the way. Worse than usual. When did you last sleep?"
"I don't remember."
"Eat?"
"I had some bread. Yesterday, I think."
"Fuck, Vail." She stopped walking, grabbing his arm. Her grip was strong, her fingers digging into his bicep. "You can't keep doing this. You're not a god. You're a man. Men need sleep. Men need food. Men need to not stare at dead people's memories until their brains rot and their cocks stop working."
"My cock works fine."
"When did you last use it?"
"That's none of your fucking business."
"It is when you're so sleep-starved you're starting to hallucinate. You talked to yourself in the archives last night. Rennic heard you. He said you were having a conversation with someone who wasn't there."
Vail pulled his arm free. "I was thinking aloud."
"You were talking to your mother. Rennic said you called her by name."
The silence stretched. Vail's face revealed nothing, but his hands—those steady hands that never shook—twitched at his sides.
"She's dead," he said. "I know she's dead. I was just... remembering."
"Remembering is one thing. Arguing with a corpse is another." Liska's voice softened, just slightly. "I'm not your enemy, Vail. I'm the only person in this Citadel who gives a shit whether you live or die. So here's the truth: if you don't sleep tonight, I'm going to drug your food. I've done it before—that time you were awake for six days straight and started seeing colours that didn't exist. I'll do it again."
"That was different. I was testing the limits of consciousness deprivation."
"You were trying to kill yourself without admitting it." She started walking again, her boots echoing on the stone. "The God-Wounder arrives tonight. Rennic sent a rider ahead. The girl's hand is infected, and her brother's not speaking—hasn't said a word since the Lament attacked. She sounds like a mess. She also sounds like exactly what you need."
"A mess?"
"Someone who's been through something worse than this and survived. Someone who understands what it costs." Liska paused at a junction in the corridor. "I'm going to check on the god-speaker. The mute. The physicians say she's been writing the same word over and over on the walls of her cell. YSKA. They're scared. They want to sedate her."
"Don't let them. I need to talk to her tonight. After I've met the girl."
"Then get some sleep. Eat something. And for fuck's sake, stop talking to dead people." She turned down the side corridor, her footsteps fading into the darkness.
Vail stood alone in the corridor for a long moment. His hands were steady. They were always steady. But the thing in his chest—the thing he'd been ignoring for two years, for five years, for his whole fucking life—was getting harder to ignore. He could feel it pressing against his ribs, sharp and cold and hungry, a splinter of ice that had lodged there when his mother's tongue turned black and never melted.
The cold was the first word, he thought. And the cold will be the last.
He didn't sleep that night. He sat in his study, drinking brandy that tasted like vinegar, and waited for the girl who'd wounded a god.71Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡn0xvzjvbHF
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