Tides of the Titans Page 5

  Maybe actual truth was the answer.

  When he reached the palace, however, it was to discover King Icacis in crimson mourning robes and the hallways bristling with spears. Through a red glaze of terror, he managed to elicit the cause.

  While Leaper was sleeping in his secret love nest, Queen Ilik had been murdered.

  FOUR

  IN SHOCK, Leaper stood alone among the gossips of the court in the hall of mirrors, holding the now-useless clock spring loosely in one hand.

  Scalped by a barbarian in her own palace, one of the old women had whispered. Blood all over her bedchamber, still fresh! She’d been unable to tell him much more. Only that the king was carrying chunks of the queen’s hair around in his hands, and it wasn’t right, it wasn’t natural, and why hadn’t that barbarian taken the hair with him, it being all bound up in precious metal and stones like that?

  Leaper understood much, much more.

  He understood that the queen had been killed because of him.

  They are not to be found, Ootesh had warned him all those years ago. And you ought not to look for them, lest you lose your hair for transgressing. By that, of course, I mean lose your life.

  Leaper had ignored the warning. He’d stolen the Old God’s bone and used it. It had amused him to share a secret language with the queen, but somehow, somebody had overheard her speak it. Somehow, news had reached the Crocodile-Riders of Floor, and they’d sent an assassin, an executioner, to take her hair.

  To take her life.

  That was why the killer hadn’t cared about the diamonds.

  Ilik loved them.

  Ilik had loved them.

  “The king will see you now,” a palace servant said, opening the doors to the royal audience chamber. Leaper hadn’t asked to see the king. Confused, he wandered into the cavernous hollow; it was hung with silver lanterns and still smelled, after generations, of sinus-clearing eucalyptus.

  The green dais stood empty. Icacis, king of Airakland, slumped in a corner with his back to the wall, holding something in his huge hands that looked like a dead animal in a silver net.

  Leaper wanted to retch on the rich, green carpet when he realised what it was. He pulled the cloth wrapping from his head, hesitating to approach the hunch-shouldered shape of the king, some part of his mind reminding him that he was supposed to stand lower than Icacis at all times.

  “Come here,” the king rumbled, lifting a tearstained face. His eyes were bloodshot. “Ever has the Lord of Lightning speedily answered my prayers. He’s sent you to find and punish the queen’s killer.”

  The truth that Leaper had arrived by coincidence and had no instructions from the Temple in this matter was on the tip of his tongue. Leaper swallowed it.

  “Yes, Your Highness,” he said, squeezing the clock spring tightly.

  “What’s your name? I’ve seen you before.”

  “One who walks in the grace of Airak is known as Servant Leaper, Your Highness.” The words came woodenly. “If the queen’s killer is to be brought to justice, I must know everything that you know.” If anyone had heard Leaper speaking the language of the Crocodile-Riders, if he was to be rightly blamed for this disaster, it would be best to know at once. “Where’s your vizier? Has he spoken to the servants?”

  “Nobody saw anything. Nobody knows anything.” Icacis raised his hair-filled fist. “All that was left behind was my wife’s hair. Her blood. A knife made from the jawbone of a crocodile, with the teeth still in and covered in more blood.” Leaper suppressed a shudder at the mention of the word “crocodile.” “My vizier, may Airak have mercy on me for my weakness, has taken tribute to the Temple of Ilan.”

  “I see.” If the goddess of justice was to act, no doubt Leaper would soon feel an irresistible urge to confess.

  Nothing.

  He would not confess.

  If Leaper was guilty of bringing vengeful Floorians to the palace of Airakland, this dumb beast, the king, was guilty of keeping her caged here in ignorance and boredom for the better part of her too-short life. Anger flared in Leaper’s chest. It must have shown on his face.

  “Airak have mercy on me,” Icacis said again, desperately, attributing Leaper’s anger to the jealousy of a rival god. “Speak to the servants. Speak to anyone you wish. Take as many of my soldiers as you need.”

  “Indeed,” Leaper said icily, “this insult must be answered. Without your wife to produce heirs, who will inherit the kingdom?”

  “No. That is furthest from my thoughts. No!” The king shook his head deliriously. “I’ve known for years that Ilik and I would have no children. My mother sent to Ulellin to find out the fates of my brother and me, to discover what would become of our line. The wind goddess prophesied that when I died without direct descendants, blood of a slave would take my throne.” He shook his head and lowered his fist in a moment of regretful clarity. “You must not repeat what I have just said, except at the request of our god, Servant Leaper.”

  “My lips are sealed, Your Highness,” Leaper said by rote, thinking, Blood of a slave! My mother was a slave. It should have been my children, mine and Ilik’s! “But I don’t believe Ulellin’s prophecies can be trusted absolutely.” How is my heart’s desire supposed to leave me for another now? She’s dead. “Perhaps we think we remember them correctly, when actually we’ve muddled them, reversed them, or heard them wrong.”

  “One who walks in the grace of Ulellin,” a steely woman’s voice interrupted sternly, “will not tolerate the airing of such blasphemies in her presence. Not even, and especially, from the lips of one who serves He of Black and Silver.”

  Leaper bowed to a diminutive woman with blackbean-lustrous skin. She was crowned in polished green glass and clad in fresh, new, spring leaves sewn together with sky-blue silk. Her feet were bare beneath her leaf-gown, but a slave had strewn white ulmo petals in the doorway for her to walk upon.

  “Apologies, Highness,” Leaper said to Queen Ukillin of Ulellinland. “I didn’t realise I was in your presence.”

  He’d never officially met the royal widow of the wind goddess’s realm before, but he had seen her.

  Ilik’s mother.

  Leaper hadn’t heard of the goddesses and gods being called by their designated colours before, but noted the old queen’s declarative fashion choice.

  “Ulellin told one who walks in her grace the name of her youngest daughter’s destined husband, mere moments after that youngest daughter’s birth,” Ukillin went on, crushing petals underfoot as she made her way stiffly towards Icacis and his grisly trophy. “All six of my daughters were matched in like fashion. None of the husbands named by the goddess refused the matches. Ulellin’s prophecies always come true, and that is how I know my youngest daughter is alive.”

  Leaper gasped at the assertion, but the old queen had eyes only for her son-in-law.

  “My heart leaps to believe you, mother-of-my-wife,” King Icacis said, knuckles white around the jewelled coif, “but tell me plainly what it is the wind goddess has prophesied.”

  “Ilik will build palaces,” Ukillin intoned, raising eyes and palms to the ceiling, “with her own two hands.”

  “Were those words also spoken by the side of the birthing bed?” Leaper asked sceptically, thinking, So many years ago, your prophecy is older than mine, and stinks worse!

  But the king and queen ignored him, and Icacis laughed hollowly and led the queen to a side wall of the chamber. Still holding Ilik’s hair in his left hand, he used his right to tear down a painted paperbark hanging; there was a sealed doorway behind it. Leaper stiffened. He should have known it was there.

  “What is this?” Ukillin demanded.

  “I’ll show you,” Icacis answered. “Have your slave help me to open it.”

  “Better yet. Have your pet Servant open it by magic.”

  Leaper glared at her. He stepped up to the blocked door and traced it with his fingertips in an eerie echo of the way he’d contemplated the blocked clockmaker’s workshop in Esh
land. This was no magical regrowing, but a poor imitation of boards, pegs, and dowels. Sap set into the cracks had hardened decades ago, but a focused application of Airak’s power could soften it.

  The aged cement sizzled away under his hand, and the king helped Leaper pull the wooden plug out of place.

  Inside was a child’s playroom. Musty and windowless, it was filled with candle hollows and bright-painted chests. Shelves held colourful, illustrated scrolls, clay blocks wrapped in waxed paper, ground-up paint pigments, clamps, glue pots, and woodcarving tools. Sketches of tree-cradled castles remained, including one of the old Temple of Airak. Leaper had come to Canopy after that Temple was destroyed, but he recognised it from its model, delicately made and jewel-encrusted, which the god Airak kept in his treasure room.

  “You knew from the morning of her birth who she would marry,” King Icacis said dully, “so you sent her here when she was still a child. Eight monsoons, she’d seen, and she worshipped Ulellin.”

  “That’s why I sent her,” Ukillin said. “She needed to learn to worship Airak. To feel at home in this wretched place.”

  “She built palaces in this room. My mother discovered them. She had a fondness for gambling, my mother, and had lost a small fortune on the Games in Orinland. Ilik’s beautiful miniatures were exactly what she needed to buy back Airak’s favour.”

  Leaper was horrified to realise that the model in Airak’s treasure room had been made by Ilik. And she never told me.

  “Indeed,” Ukillin said, nostrils flared, arms folded.

  “Ilik was distraught. She withdrew into herself. She didn’t speak for many months. My mother, when she couldn’t encourage the child to resume her work, had the room sealed. Ilik showed no further interest in creation while my mother lived. Some years ago, when she started her clock collection, I thought it a sign she had forgiven me at last for my dead mother’s failings. It was most encouraging to see her tinker with them. But you see, mother-of-my-wife, she has already built palaces with her own two hands. Some remain at the Temple, if you’d care to look upon them.”

  Leaper couldn’t stay in the same room with them—Ilik’s playroom—a moment longer.

  He left the bereft king still gripping Ilik’s sawn-off hair, eyeing the flustered face of the widowed queen in denial, and went to witness whatever there was to witness in the bedchamber.

  Steeling himself, he stepped through the main front entrance to her rooms, an entrance he’d never used openly before.

  For once, the gossips were right. There was blood. Great streaks and clots of it, culminating in the stained sill of the wide, lightning-bolt-shaped window that faced Airak’s charred Temple.

  Leaper leaned over the edge, jaw clenched, to see if anything below could have broken her fall.

  Nothing.

  Back at the side table, he found the gore-splattered crocodile-toothed weapon beside the broken soapstone clock.

  The desire to smash the clock against the floor was powerful.

  I should have been here. To protect her.

  But how, without using my magic to kill? If I had been here and tried to stop the assassin with physical force alone, it’d be me with my windpipe sawn open by a crocodile jawbone. Me thrown out the window.

  At least she would’ve had a chance to run.

  She was innocent. I was the one who stole that speaking-bone.

  Leaper set the replacement spring down on the table.

  She hadn’t been innocent, he realised. Neither had he. She’d gone to her grave without being found out by one who should have ruled her heart.

  It was time for Leaper to face Airak, god of lightning, who should have ruled his.

  FIVE

  THERE WAS no sign of Aforis at the Temple.

  Midday sun in a clear sky blazed over the scorched emergent. Leaper greeted the sentry Skywatchers at the glass gate. They pulled the smooth, silent obsidian mirror back on its green hinges to allow Leaper through.

  They murmured things to him, but he didn’t hear. Whatever expressions they wore for Leaper to read, to learn what punishment to expect after a three-day absence, he didn’t see. Would he have been this excoriated by the death of the god he served?

  No. I wouldn’t. Which means my service is a lie. I don’t deserve the gifts Airak has given me. I’ve always been faking. My whole life in Canopy is a lie.

  His body made automatic turnings in the blue-lit halls. His feet left heavy prints in the black sand underfoot.

  I’m going to leave him. If there is a way to leave his service. Maybe death’s the only way out. Either way, I’m going to go back into darkness where I belong, the darkness where I stole from Floorians and sentenced the queen to death. Anger warred with self-recrimination. And then I’ll make them pay, lawful sentence or not, for moving against a Servant of the lightning god.

  A queue of slaves and citizens waited at the entrance to the god’s open-roofed tribute hall. The hall was where Airak met with mortals and made pronouncements over the future of people’s vulnerable homes, livestock, and crops. Their hands were heaped with goods to gift. Some of the slaves looked bone-weary, as if they’d trudged along for a week or more. Not everyone had access to the potion of the winds. Not everyone could afford to take lodgings.

  Leaper strode past them to the head of the line. More Skywatchers waited there. Their job was to admit worshippers one by one. He expected them to stop him. He expected anything—a sarcastic rebuke, an order to wait in his room for Aforis, a banishment from the Temple—except for what he got, which was the opening of the door and an immediate indication that he should proceed.

  Inside, blinding light. A crackling assault on his ears. An ordinary citizen would have scrambled for the exit. Leaper’s stride never faltered.

  Airak stood alone, arms raised, in the centre of the room. A tall, hairy, broad-shouldered man, he was wrapped from chest to knees in black silk. He was barefoot. The left half of his body was black-skinned. The right half was unnaturally white. His outstretched fingers reached marginally higher than the branching silver headdress that he wore.

  A continuous stream of lightning connected his palms to a clear glass globe. It was as wide as his arm-span and hovered three body lengths above his head.

  It was a work in progress. Magic speared through Leaper’s awareness; he smelled the sinter, sweat, and salt seeped into the fragrant wood floor, sensed the charge flickering over the silk and metal of the headdress, over the god’s curly, fireproof locks.

  “Holy One,” Leaper said.

  Heat radiated from the glass globe. It compressed and revolved, warped and changed form, until it was shaped like a round shield, or a mango stone, thicker in the middle and dangerously thin at the edges.

  Leaper knelt at Airak’s back. He lowered his head in deference, but he could still see the god’s feet, one white and one black.

  The feet turned. Leaper sensed the hovering glass object turning, too.

  “Eyes up, Servant Leaper,” Airak said. “Arms up.”

  Leaper obeyed. The glass object floated down towards him. It landed, flattened side down, across his outstretched forearms, burning his skin with a horrible hiss and, a moment later, searing agony.

  “My arms, Holy One,” Leaper gasped.

  “Oh, can you feel them?” Airak asked, his power still bearing most of the weight of the transparent shield. “Do they trouble you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Is the pain of the body greater than the pain of your loss?”

  Leaper wanted to laugh and cry at once. So Airak had known. Of course he had known.

  “Mercy, Holy One. Please.”

  He was trapped, kneeling. All he could do was continue to slowly smoulder and stare upwards, confused, into Airak’s face.

  “The spark is in you,” Airak said, and Leaper thought he meant the lightning; then he realised his master meant the spark of life. “You move and speak. Sing and steal. Prepare yourself to abandon me for the arms of Queen Ilik.” Leaper opene
d his mouth to explain himself, but no words came out. “I knew. Aforis knew. And now you want to live.”

  “Where is Aforis?” The thought, and the words, formed with difficulty around the distraction of the searing surface of the glass sticking to his charred skin. Leaper would have liked to say farewell to his mentor. Instead, he was going to be melted down into glue while his god interrogated him.

  “Not here. Looking for you.”

  “Looking for me?” The sensation of hot nails was fading. Maybe the damage was too severe for him to feel anymore. He didn’t dare look away from Airak. “Where?”

  “In Audblayinland.” The god loomed like a harrier over a trapped snake. “Perhaps he thought you’d seek confirmation of Ilik’s rebirth. Perhaps he thought you’d seek your fathers. They’re greater hunters and trackers than you are. They could help with the search for the queen’s killer. Aforis knew of your obsession with her. He would have forced you to desist. It was I who forbade him from doing so. I allowed it to continue.”

  “But why?”

  “Lightning blazes bright and is gone.” Airak’s dark eye flashed. “Blackness is left behind. All my best Servants have lost the thing they loved most. It gives them greater mastery.”

  Leaper gaped, suddenly suspicious and angry.

  “How could you know that I’d lose her? Did you…? Was it you who killed her?”

  “No.” Airak lifted his chin. “I’ll help you find her killer if you choose to live. If you choose to die, I’ll help you with that, too. So, I’ll ask you again, is the pain of the body greater than the pain of your loss? Do you still care for your mortal form, with its scars, with its memories, or would you rather death by the will of Atwith and rebirth from your sister Audblayin this day?”

  Leaper’s despairing thoughts about wanting to die evaporated. His arms really hurt. The idea of being reborn was not remotely tempting, not when he considered the full implications: All of Ilik’s secrets, all the things he knew about her that nobody else knew, would be erased if both were to be reborn in the same day. She would be twice as dead.