He didn’t doubt it. This small woman continued to surprise him as much as she angered him. His gratitude for saving Estred had altered during the months she was Estred’s nurse, becoming a reluctant interest he did his best to ignore. He hadn’t known she was a shade speaker then, just someone with the gift of making his daughter laugh and see the small pleasures in life. Just a beggar woman with an odd gaze, and yet so much more.
“I was in Domora when Kraelag fell,” he said. “Preparing an account for the empress of all the activities her summer court had engaged in while she ruled from the old capital during winter and spring. Her torturers and executioners were already sharpening their knives and axes in preparation for dealing with Herself’s latest crop of enemies.” Dalvila’s suspicions weren’t unfounded. She was loathed almost as much as she was feared, and she knew that the moment one emotion superseded the other, she breathed on borrowed time. He doubted even she could have imagined the manner of her death.
“Did you know she would kill the physicians who saved her when you fetched Kalun to the palace?” Siora asked the question in a way that told him she dreaded his answer.
Kalun hadn’t died by his hand, but his death was one Gharek felt responsible for and regretted. He’d carried out his task and retrieved the physician to help two others in saving Dalvila’s life after the arrow wound she’d sustained from a Savatar archer had poisoned her. They’d succeeded but at the cost of the empress’sarm. Instead of thanking them for saving her life, she’d punished them for maiming her, and their deaths had been the stuff of nightmares. Gharek had no wish to die and no plans to succumb willingly to that fate, but he understood Zaredis’s fury and his desire to see anyone associated with his brother’s death pay for the crime.
Siora’s expression of dread had only increased with his delayed reply. “No. I knew she would if they didn’t heal her. But her version of healing was different from mine, her expectations unreasonable. Crossing her path always carried great risk. Evil is often stupid as well as cruel, without thought or reason. Most of the time it’s impossible to make sense of it. Dalvila embodied such malice. The draga did the world a favor by getting rid of that particular abomination.”
The dread in her face had vanished and fortunately pity didn’t replace it, only a general sorrow not for him but for Kalun. He didn’t miss the glitter of a savage satisfaction in her eyes. It seemed she too applauded Malachus for doing away with the empress. “I wonder if she ever imagined she’d be eaten.”
“I doubt she ever imagined dying at all. I’m sure she tasted vile.”
Siora sputtered, hiding her laughter behind her hand. He liked the sound of it, remembered the pleasure of hearing it in his house as she entertained Estred. “Did you see it happen?”
He’d turn over a wagonload ofbelshasfor the opportunity to roll back time to just that moment so he might witness the draga bite down on the evilest bitch to ever draw breath. “No. The instant I came to and the steward let me out of the buttery, I packed up Estred and what valuables I could transport and left Domora. You?”
She shook her head. “I saw the draga in the distance. I too had left Domora.”
Fleeing from him, no doubt.
He changed the subject. “Why didn’t the entity bewitch you? You were as close to Midrigar’s walls as I was. And why me? I’m not dead. If it’s an eater of ghosts, it should have no interest in me.”
While her gaze rested on the back of the guard riding ahead of them, her sight had turned inward, lending that unnerving far-horizon look to her expression. “I don’t have an answer for either question. Its reach goes beyond the city, as we saw in the abandoned barn and again in the general’s camp. Every spirit is at risk but not every living person.” She blinked and returned to the world around her. She studied him as if he’d suddenly grown horns. “Have you ever been inside the cursed city’s walls?”
“Fortunately, the empress never assigned me a task that required it.” If she had, Gharek would have found another way to achieve what he needed without going anywhere near Midrigar. He didn’t like visiting the Maesor with its sour sky and unnatural light and the sense of detached otherness. If the scavengers who robbed Midrigar of its artifacts and managed to make it out alive told the truth of what they saw or faced there, it was more than a mass grave. A haven for demons and nightmares, and now for this thing without substance whose hunger threatened to overwhelm Gharek and bend his will to its commands, not once but twice. His skin began to crawl, and he shook off the sensation hard enough to make his horse whuffle a protest.
“Who knows what the emperor’s sorcerers wrought when they punished the city, or how long it might have slept there and is now awake and starved,” he said.
She didn’t allay their fears. “And it can reach beyond the bewitchments they laid down to keep the darkness behind the walls.”
What if it came back a third time? Siora had rightly accused him of lying when he said he didn’t feel its call in the general’s tent. Not as strong but just as demanding. An abyssal voice not only in his mind but in his soul, broadened by a chorus of the lamenting dead screaming their despair. Had she not knocked him out with the branch and broken the spell binding him to the ghost-eater, he’d be one of those. Had she hit him a little harder, he’d still be a meal for the thing. “Why didn’t you kill me when you stole my horse? And don’t feed me that tired refrain of doing it for Estred.”
“I’m not a murderer.”
He snorted. “I am.”
“You could have killed me too,” she said. “I’m more than willing to apologize to Estred, to make it right between us. But it would be just as easy to kill me and tell her you couldn’t find me. She’s young. She’d grieve, but soon I would fade in her memory, along with the hurt I’ve caused her. So why have you shown me mercy now that you’ve found me?”
The voice within him once more spoke to annoy him.Because she’s more than her betrayal, isn’t she? Something more than Estred’s beggar nurse.
His expression must have looked sinister, for Siora’s eyes widened and she guided her horse away from his. “Because Estred has suffered enough in her short life. She doesn’t need the burden of guilt in thinking she’s the reason you ran away. That, and you’re useful to me at the moment,” he said. “Zaredis was willing to bargain with you, and I’ll work with anyone who’ll help my daughter. Plus, a woman who can hear and speak to ghosts could learn many secrets.”
The front guard’s signal to pick up the pace ended any more opportunity to talk. They urged their horses into a canter, watching as the pale silhouettes in the distance darkened and sharpened to become a series of walls girdling the Empire’s capital. Her graceful towers, built of white stone, gleamed in the sun, protected by a series of fortifications three moats deep and stretching for as far as the eye could see from their vantage point.
Domora had been Kraelag’s fairer, younger, more elegant sister city, its palace the summer home of the emperor and empress when they wished to flee the heat and the stench of Kraelag and its harbor. Domora was the only capital now, and a new emperor sat on the throne. Gharek couldn’t recall which number they were on. Third? Fourth? The Goroza patriarch might last more than the scarce months—and in one case, the few days—his predecessors did before someone assassinated him, especially with the support of General Tovan.
As familiar as he was with her seedy underbelly, Gharek was blind to Domora’s surface splendors. Nothing more than a poxy whore wearing an expensive gown. He’d hoped never to see this place again, but at least he had the benefit of knowing its many secrets. Trying to suss out the weaknesses of an unfamiliar palace in an unfamiliar city might have been a challenge he couldn’t conquer in the time Zaredis had given him.
The main road joined three others leading toward the city’s first set of gates, growing more and more crowded the closer they got. The high walls towering over them were manned by soldiers wearing General Tovan’s coat of arms instead of the one belonging to the Goroza family, the battlements rising and falling with the topography like a giant serpent sunning on a rock.
Once something he generally ignored, Gharek now surveyed the walls with an eye for their destruction. “Zaredis is ambitious. I’m not sure even the Windcry can bring down these walls,” he told Siora in a low voice. Travelers heading for the city hadn’t yet hemmed them in, but the crowds grew ever denser and closer.
She raised her head to peer at the guards and the colossal gates with their heavy barricades built and reinforced to withstand battering rams and stones lobbed by catapults. “A draga did,” she said.
He harrumphed. “A few broken battlements. He was nothing more than a siege engine with wings whose sole purpose was to rescue one woman. Zaredis means to take all of Domora as his. Whoever controls this city controls the wealth of the Krael Empire, or whatever remains after the noble families destroy each other in civil war. One can only hope.”
“Will you not be recognized once we enter?” Her doubtful gaze took in his appearance, nearly as grubby as hers.