‘Mercy?’ Yarvi barked out a laugh. ‘You hoped you could make me bite for you, rather than against.’
‘Perhaps.’ Grandmother Wexen looked with disgust at the elf-weapon Skifr cradled in her arms. ‘But I never dreamed you would resort to this. To break the deepest laws of our Ministry? To risk the world for your ambitions?’
‘You know the saying. Let Father Peace shed tears over the methods. Mother War smiles upon results.’
‘I know the saying, but it belongs in the mouths of murderers, not ministers. You are poison.’
‘Let us not pretend only one of us stands in the shadows.’ Father Yarvi’s eyes glittered with reflected fire as he eased forward. ‘I am the poison you mixed with your own schemes. The poison you brewed when you ordered my father and brother killed. The poison you never supposed you would drink yourself.’
Grandmother Wexen’s shoulders sagged. ‘I am not without regrets. That is all power leaves you, in the end. But Laithlin’s arrogance would have dragged us into Mother War’s embrace sooner or later. I tried to steer us clear of the rocks. I tried to choose the lesser evil and the greater good. But you demanded chaos.’
The First of Ministers ripped a paper from the chain around her neck and flung it at Yarvi so it floated down between them. ‘I curse you, traitor.’ She raised her hand, and tattooed upon her palm Koll saw circles within circles of tiny letters. ‘I curse you in the name of the One God and the many.’ Her voice rang out, echoing in the towering space of the Hall of Whispers. ‘All that you love shall betray you! All that you make shall rot! All that you build shall fall!’
Father Yarvi only shrugged. ‘There is nothing worth less than the curses of the defeated. If you had stood upon the forbidden ground of Strokom, you would understand. Everything falls.’
He took a sudden step forward, and shoved Grandmother Wexen with his withered hand.
Her eyes went round with shock. Perhaps, however wise we are, however wide the Last Door gapes, the crossing of the threshold always comes as a surprise.
She gave a meaningless squawk as she tumbled over the rail. There was an echoing crash, and a long shriek of horror.
Koll edged forward, swallowing as he peered over the balcony. The fire still burned below, smoke pouring up, the shimmering heat like a weight pressing on his face. The all-powerful First of Ministers lay broken at its edge, her twisted body seeming small from so high up. Everything falls. Mother Adwyn slowly knelt beside her, palm pressed to her purple-stained mouth.
‘So I have kept my oath.’ Father Yarvi frowned at his withered hand as though he could hardly believe what it had done.
‘Yes.’ Skifr tossed her elf-weapon rattling down on the balcony. ‘We both have our vengeance. How does it feel?’
‘I expected more.’
‘Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost.’ Skifr leaned back against the wall, slid down it until she was sitting, cross-legged. ‘A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief.’
‘We must find something new to reach for.’ Father Yarvi planted his shrivelled hand on the rail and leaned over. ‘Mother Adwyn!’
The red-haired minister slowly stood, looking up towards them, the tears on her cheeks glistening in the firelight.
‘Send eagles to the ministers in Yutmark and the Lowlands,’ called Yarvi. ‘Send eagles to the ministers of Inglefold and the Islands. Send eagles to every minister who knelt to Grandmother Wexen.’
Mother Adwyn blinked down at the corpse of her mistress, then up. She wiped her tears on the back of her hand and, it seemed to Koll, adjusted quite smoothly to the new reality. What choice did she have? What choice did any of them have?
‘With what message?’ she asked, giving a stiff little bow.
‘Tell them they kneel to Grandfather Yarvi now.’
The Killer
The dead men lay in heaps before the doors. Priests of the One God, Raith reckoned, from their robes with the seven-rayed sun stitched on, each with the back of their heads neatly split. Blood curled from under the bodies, making dark streaks down the white marble steps, turned pink by the flitting drizzle.
Maybe they’d been hoping for mercy. It was well known the Breaker of Swords preferred to take slaves than make corpses. Why kill what you can sell, after all? But it seemed Gorm was in the mood for destruction, that day.
Raith sniffed through his broken nose, splinters crunching as he stepped over the shattered doors and into the High King’s great temple.
The roof was half-finished, bare rafters showing against the white sky, rain pattering on a mosaic floor half-finished too. There were long benches, perhaps where the faithful had sat to pray, but there were no faithful here now, only the warriors of Vansterland, drinking, and laughing, and breaking.
One sat on a bench, boots up on another, a gilded hanging wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, face tipped back, mouth open and tongue stretched out to catch the rain. Raith walked past him, between great pillars tall and slender as the trunks of trees, neck aching from looking up to the fine stonework high above.
A body was laid on a table in the middle of the vast chamber, swathed in a robe of red and gold that spilled across the floor, a jewelled sword clutched in hands withered to white claws. Soryorn stood beside him, frowning down.
‘He is small,’ said the standard-bearer, who seemed to have lost his standard somewhere. ‘For a High King.’
‘This is him?’ muttered Raith, staring in disbelief at that pinched-in face. ‘The greatest of men, between gods and kings?’ He looked more like an old flesh-dealer than the ruler of the Shattered Sea.
‘He’s been dead for days.’ Soryorn jerked the sword from the High King’s lifeless hands leaving one flopping off the table. He set the blade on the floor and took out a chisel, meaning to strike off the jewel-studded pommel. Then he paused. ‘Have you got a hammer?’
‘I’ve got nothing,’ said Raith, and he meant it.
The high walls at the far end of the hall had been painted in pink and blue and gold, scenes of winged women he couldn’t make a start at understanding, the work of hours and days and weeks. Gorm’s warriors chuckled as they practised their aim with throwing axes, smashing the plaster away, scattering it across the floor. Men Raith had laughed with once, as they watched farms burn up near the border. They hardly spared him a glance now.
At the back of the temple was a marble dais, and on the dais a great block of black stone. Grom-gil-Gorm stood with his fists upon it, frowning up towards a high window filled with chips of coloured glass to make a scene, a figure with the sun behind handing something down to a bearded man.
‘Beautiful,’ murmured Raith, admiring the way Mother Sun caught the glass and cast strange colours across the floor, across the block of stone and the candles, the cup of gold, the wine jug that stood upon it.
Gorm looked sideways. ‘I remember when the only things beautiful to you were blood and glory.’
Raith could hardly deny it. ‘I reckon folk can change, my king.’
‘Rarely for the better. What happened to your face?’
‘Said the wrong thing to a woman.’
‘Her counter-argument was impressive.’
‘Aye.’ Raith winced as he touched one finger to his throbbing nose. ‘Thorn Bathu is quite the debater.’
‘Ha! You cannot say you were not warned about her.’
‘I fear I’m prone to recklessness, my king.’
‘The line between boldness and folly is a hard one even for the wise to find.’ Gorm toyed thoughtfully with one of the pommels strung around his neck, and Raith wondered what dead man’s sword it had balanced. ‘I have been puzzling over this window, but I cannot fathom what story it tells.’