Chapter 8: EIRA - The Capital's Gates73Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8Nu7DNUmMl
The Citadel stank.
Eira had expected this—she'd been warned, by Rennic and Sersha and every traveller's tale she'd ever heard about the southern capital—but expecting a smell and standing in it were different things. The wind shifted as the cart rolled through the outer gates, and the full weight of the city hit her: human shit and animal shit and smoke and rot and something sweet underneath, like flowers left too long in water, like meat beginning to turn. She'd grown up in a fishing village where the wind smelled of salt and cold and the clean iron of snow. This was something else. This was what people smelled like when they piled themselves on top of each other and forgot what clean was.
Aren pressed his face into her side, his small hands gripping her coat. "It stinks," he said. The words were muffled against the wool, but they were words—the first he'd spoken since the night before, when he'd woken from a nightmare with a scream that had brought Eira to her feet with her knife drawn before she was fully awake.
"Yes," she said. "It stinks."
"Why does it stink?"
"Because there are a lot of people here, and not enough places to put their shit."
Aren considered this. He'd been doing that—considering things. The silence hadn't been empty. It had been full of wheels turning, thoughts forming, a six-year-old mind trying to make sense of a world that had stopped making sense the moment a mountain stepped on his neighbours. "Like when the privy backs up in spring," he said.
"Exactly like that. But bigger."
Rennic, riding beside the cart, let out a short, dry laugh. "You get used to it. After a few years."
"I don't want to be here for a few years," Eira said.
"No one does. That's why they stay."
The gates were massive—two slabs of iron-bound oak, taller than three men, carved with the spiral patterns of the covenant. Eira recognised the spirals. They were the same ones she'd seen on the god-post at Frostwake, on the waystation walls, on the ancient stone doorway that haunted her half-remembered dreams. The covenant's mark. The sign that the gods were watching. The gods weren't watching. The gods were dying. But the gates still stood, and the guards still waved them through with barely a glance at Rennic's sigil, and the city went on as if the world wasn't ending.
Inside the walls, the Citadel opened up like a wound.
The streets were narrow and twisting, packed with bodies and carts and animals. The buildings leaned over them, tall and dark, blocking out the sky. Eira had never seen buildings so tall—three storeys, four, some of them, their upper floors jutting out over the street like the prows of ships. Laundry hung from windows, grey and limp in the still air. Smoke rose from a hundred chimneys and settled over everything in a haze that made her eyes water and her throat ache.
And the people. Gods, the people.
They pressed against the cart as it rolled through the streets—hawkers shouting about salted fish and wool cloth and charms against the plague, their voices hoarse and desperate; priests in grey robes chanting prayers to gods that might already be dead, their eyes hollow and their hands shaking; soldiers in Council livery shoving their way through the crowds with their hands on their swords and their faces set in expressions of permanent disdain. A woman in a doorway lifted her skirts and pissed against the wall, her eyes blank, her bare legs streaked with dirt and old scars. The urine steamed in the cold air, and no one looked twice. A man with a missing hand sat on a corner, his stump wrapped in filthy bandages, holding out a cup that no one filled. His eyes were closed, and his lips were moving, and Eira couldn't tell if he was praying or cursing or both.
She'd seen poverty before. Frostwake had been poor—had gone hungry in bad winters, had buried children who didn't survive the cold, had watched old people give their last memories to the tithe because they had nothing else to offer. But this was different. This was poverty that had been piled on itself for centuries, generation after generation, until it became something else. Something that stank of old sweat and older despair and the quiet, grinding knowledge that nothing would ever get better.
"Keep your hand on your knife," Rennic said, quietly. "And your brother close."
Eira didn't need to be told. Her good hand was already on the obsidian blade at her belt, and Aren was pressed so tightly against her that she could feel his heartbeat through her coat. Her father was riding on the other side of the cart, his hunting knife visible in his lap, his eyes moving constantly across the crowd. He looked like what he was: a man who'd killed things before and would kill again if he had to.
They passed a square where a crowd had gathered. At the centre, on a platform of rough-cut stone, a street preacher stood with his arms raised to the grey sky. He was a thin man, hollow-cheeked and wild-eyed, his grey robes stained with what looked like old blood and fresh sweat. His voice cracked as he screamed, the words echoing off the stone walls.
"The gods are punishing us! The tithes have grown weak! The memories we give are tainted with doubt and fear! The gods hunger for true devotion, and we offer them scraps!" Spittle flew from his lips. The crowd swayed beneath him, their faces grey and empty. "Repent! Repent before the mountains walk and the rivers burn and the sky forgets its own name!"
"He's been at it for weeks," Sersha said, her voice flat. She'd pulled her horse alongside the cart, her scarred face tight with something that might have been disgust. "The temple wardens tried to shut him up, but every time they drag him away, he comes back. The crowds are getting bigger. People want someone to blame."
"There's someone to blame," Eira said. "Just not the people."
Sersha looked at her sharply, but didn't ask.
They took a different route, through narrower streets where the crowds were thinner and the shadows were deeper. Eira kept her eyes moving, cataloguing threats the way her father had taught her. The man in the doorway with the bottle in his hand and the yellow crust around his mouth. The woman on the corner with the hollow eyes and the too-red lips, her dress cut low to show breasts that were bruised and bony. The group of young men loitering near an alley, their hands in their pockets, their gazes following the cart with something that might have been hunger or might have been calculation.
None of them moved. Rennic's presence was a deterrent—the grey wolfskin cloak, the sword at his hip, the scar across his throat that said I've been killed before and I'm still here. Sersha's missing ear said the same thing. Eira's father's hunting knife said it louder.
They turned a corner and came into another square, smaller than the first, and Eira saw the tithe ceremony.
It was a small god—a cairn-warden, one of the stone spirits that guarded crossroads and boundary markers. It stood on a plinth at the centre of the square, a squat, hunched shape of grey rock, its eyes two deep hollows, its mouth a crack that dripped something dark and viscous. A priest in grey robes stood beside it, and a line of people stretched across the square: a mother with a child, an old man with shaking hands, a young soldier with a bandaged arm and a face that was trying very hard to be brave.
"Stop," Eira said. "I want to see this."
Rennic pulled the cart to a halt. "You've seen tithes before."
"Not like this."
She climbed down from the cart, ignoring the protest in her bandaged hand. Aren made to follow, but she pushed him back gently. "Stay with Father. I'll be right back."
She walked to the edge of the crowd. The priest was chanting in the old tongue, the words sliding over each other like stones in a river. The cairn-warden stood motionless, its hollow eyes fixed on nothing. The woman at the front of the line was holding a child—a boy, maybe seven, his face pale and his eyes too wide, his small hands clenched at his sides.
The priest took the boy's hand. The boy didn't resist. He'd been prepared for this, Eira realised. He'd been told it wouldn't hurt, that the god would take his memory and give him protection, that it was an honour to give a piece of yourself to the covenant. He'd been told all the lies that every child was told, and he believed them, because the alternative was too terrible to imagine.
The obsidian blade flashed. The boy's palm welled with blood. The priest pressed the wound against the cairn-warden's stone flank, and the god stirred.
Eira saw it. A flicker of something in those hollow eyes—a twitch, a shudder, a wrongness that made her teeth ache. The boy gasped, his body going rigid, and for a moment his face went slack, empty, as if something had reached inside him and pulled out a piece of his soul. Then it was over. The priest released the boy's hand. The mother pulled him back, wrapping his bleeding palm in a strip of cloth. The boy was crying, silent tears running down his cheeks, and his mother was saying something to him, her voice too low to hear, but her face was tight with something that looked like guilt.
The cairn-warden shuddered again. Its mouth-crack opened wider, and a thin trickle of black ichor ran down its stone chin. No one seemed to notice. No one except Eira.
She turned and walked back to the cart. Her hand was shaking—not from fear, but from rage. The same rage she'd felt when she'd seen Laena's body on the black sand. The same rage she'd felt when the Lament crushed old Arnolf into paste. The same rage that had been building in her chest since her mother died and the world kept taking and taking and never gave anything back.
"Was he crying?" Aren asked, his voice small.
"Yes."
"Why was he crying?"
Eira looked at her brother. His eyes were dark and serious, and he was clutching the edge of the cart with both hands. He'd seen a god crush his neighbours. He'd stopped speaking for days. He'd wet himself every night since the attack. And he was still asking questions. Still trying to understand.
"Because he gave something away," she said. "And he won't get it back."
"Did it hurt?"
"I don't know. Probably."
Aren was quiet for a moment. Then: "I gave something away. At the tithe. Before the Lament came. I gave a memory of chasing snow-hares. It didn't hurt."
"What did it feel like?"
"Like falling asleep. But only for a second." He frowned, the way he did when he was working through a difficult thought. "I don't remember the snow-hares anymore. I remember that I chased them, but I don't remember how it felt. The sun on my face. The way the snow crunched. The way Mother laughed when I fell." His voice cracked on the word Mother. "I don't remember her laughing."
Eira pulled him against her. She could feel him trembling, the way he always trembled now, a fine, constant vibration like a plucked string. "That's what the tithe takes," she said. "The feeling. The best parts. The parts that made it worth remembering."
"That's sad."
"Yes."
"Why do they do it? If it's sad?"
"Because they're told they have to. Because they're told the gods will protect them. Because they're afraid of what will happen if they stop." She looked back at the square, at the cairn-warden weeping black ichor, at the line of people waiting to give pieces of themselves to a dying god. "But the gods aren't protecting anyone anymore. The gods are dying. And the thing that's killing them is feeding on everything we give."
Aren leaned against her. "I don't want to give any more memories."
"You won't. I won't let anyone take anything from you ever again."
It was a promise she couldn't keep. She knew that. But she made it anyway, because some promises weren't about truth. They were about defiance. They were about looking at a world that took and took and saying no more.
The Prince's keep rose above the rooftops like a blade of black stone.
Rennic led them through the eastern gates, past guards in the Prince's livery—the open hand, the empty palm—and into a maze of stone corridors lit by torches that burned with a faint blue tinge. The air grew colder as they climbed, and the sounds of the city faded, replaced by the echo of their footsteps and the distant murmur of voices behind closed doors.
Eira's father walked beside her, his hand never far from his knife. Aren was asleep in her arms—he'd fallen asleep as the cart climbed the steep streets, his small body finally surrendering to exhaustion—and his weight was a comfort, a reminder of why she was here. Sersha had peeled off to report to someone, and the other rider, Torrin, had vanished into the lower levels. It was just Rennic now, his grey wolfskin cloak sweeping the stone floor, his scarred face unreadable.
"Wait here," he said, stopping outside a door of dark wood bound with iron. "The Prince will see you now."
"Now?" Eira looked down at herself. Her coat was stained with road mud and old blood. Her hair was a greasy tangle. Her bandaged hand was throbbing, and she could smell herself—sweat and smoke and the faint, sour note of her own unwashed body. "I haven't washed. I smell like horse and old piss."
"The Prince doesn't care about that."
"What does he care about?"
Rennic's mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. "You'll find out."
He opened the door.
The room beyond was not what Eira had expected. She'd imagined something grand—tapestries, gold, the trappings of a prince who sat on a Council and had servants and soldiers and a surgeon at his command. Instead, it was a study, plain and functional, lined with shelves of books and scrolls. A fire burned in a stone hearth, and a desk sat in the centre of the room, covered in papers and diagrams and half-written notes. The air smelled of old paper and ink and something sharper—ozone, like the tang before a storm.
The man behind the desk stood as she entered.
He was young—younger than she'd expected, only a few years older than herself. His hair was dark and unkempt, falling across a forehead that was lined with exhaustion. His face was pale, the face of someone who spent too many nights underground and not enough in the sun. His eyes were grey, pale and sharp, and they fixed on her with an intensity that made her want to step back. He was thin, too thin—the bones of his wrists sharp against the sleeves of his plain dark tunic, the hollows of his cheeks deep enough to hold shadows.
His hands were steady on the desk. He'd been writing something when she entered, and the ink was still wet on the page.
"Eira Voss," he said. His voice was calm, measured, the voice of someone who weighed every word before he spoke it. "You made a god bleed. Teach me how."
Eira stared at him. She'd expected questions, demands, a dozen soldiers and priests and councilors. She'd expected to be interrogated, examined, paraded in front of the Council like a trophy. She hadn't expected this—a tired young man in a plain room, asking her to teach him.
"Who are you?" she asked, though she already knew.
"Vail Torrhen. The Prince of Empty Hands. The God-Killer. The heretic." His mouth curved slightly, not quite a smile. "I've been called worse. Sit. Your hand needs treatment, and we have a great deal to discuss."
"How do you know about my hand?"
"Rennic sent word ahead. Liska will be here shortly to look at it." He gestured to a chair across from his desk. "Please. I've been waiting for you for a very long time."
Eira didn't move. Aren stirred in her arms, his face pressing into her shoulder, and she shifted his weight. "Why?" she asked. "Why have you been waiting for me?"
"Because you're the first person in five hundred years to hurt a god and survive. Because the plague is a consciousness, not a sickness, and you're the only proof I have. Because Speaker Aldric wants to use you to justify increasing the tithes, and I want to use you to stop the thing that's eating the gods from the inside out." He met her eyes, and there was something in his gaze that she hadn't expected. Not kindness. Not warmth. Something more dangerous. Conviction. "Is that enough?"
Eira thought about the cairn-warden in the square, the black ichor on its chin, the boy's silent tears. She thought about the Lament walking north, muttering in a voice that wasn't its own. She thought about Laena, dead on the black sand, and the sea lavender in her hands, and the soldier with the ruined jaw who'd died delivering a message that was already being spoken by mad gods and dying patients and old women with blood running from their cunts.
She thought about Aren, silent and trembling, wetting himself in his sleep because he'd seen a mountain crush his neighbours and couldn't find the words to speak about it. She thought about her mother, grey and still on the birthing bed, and the memory she'd fed to the Lament, and the way the god had fled from it. Not killed. Just wounded. Just delayed. The thing inside it was still there. The thing inside all of them was still there.
"It's a start," she said.
She sat down.73Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdmwPTBE55o
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