The Tower of Living and Dying

‘You’re welcome.’ A grunt. Grudging. Darath sat down again, leaning back in his chair. Orhan sat again also. The wind banged at the windows again, the open shutters creaking, hiss of sand blowing onto the marble floor. In her desiccation I am entombed in ecstasies of rain. Doesn’t some poet say somewhere that life is like the sand wind, blasting heat teetering on the edge of a storm from which one will never get relief? A house servant came hurrying in to close the shutters, the room dark for a moment before the candles were lit.

‘We hired a troop of sellswords to assassinate the Emperor,’ said Darath. ‘We killed hundreds of people, we killed Tam Rhyl, we almost burned the palace down. We desecrated the Great Temple. We’ve told so many lies I can barely keep up. We did all that because you told me March Verneth was conspiring with the Immish, that the Immish would invade the city, that the world would be over if we didn’t do something. Remember? Remember, Orhan? All those things you told me? “The city’s dying, Darath. The Empire’s a joke. The Immish will come with twenty thousand men and a mage, and we’ll fall in days.” “We’re too weak, the way we are, sitting on our piles of gold pretending nothing exists beyond our walls. We need to be ready. And yes, that does mean blood.” Remember?’ Pause. Cold eyes. ‘And now you’re getting squeamish about March dying?’ Slammed his fist down, hard, on the arm of his chair. ‘I could have died that night, Orhan. Stop claiming morality at me.’

God’s knives, thought Orhan, God’s knives, Darath, what have I done to you?

‘I—’

Darath shouted, ‘Stop bleating “I” like a bloody goat.’

They sat and looked at each other. The wind smashing on the shutters. Flickering candlelight.

A tap on the door, an anxious-faced door keep. Orhan snapped at him, ‘What?’

Poor wretch. Hardly his fault, he’d had to come up this moment, hear this. Terrified fear in the man he’d be punished. Dismissed. ‘Excuse me, My Lord. My Lords. Lady Amdelle is waiting downstairs.’

Celyse. Dear sister. Thank her and curse her for turning up now. Orhan rubbed at his eyes, wiping away tears. Celyse came in in a sweep of satin, rearranging dusty hair.

‘Lord of Living and Dying, it’s horrible out there. My bearers were being blown around like flagpoles and the curtains were almost ripped off. I should have gone back home, sent a note.’ She stopped when she saw Darath and Orhan’s faces. ‘Shall I leave again?’

Darath got up with a crisp, angry smile. ‘No need. I was just leaving myself anyway.’

Her face changed. Recognized Orhan so very much wanted Darath to stay, perhaps. A clever woman, his sister. Even sometimes a kind one. ‘You’ll want to hear this too, Darath. March is sick. Took to his bed this hour past with a fever. Very sudden, it came on.’

Darath said, ‘Do they know what it is?’

‘The rumour among the servants is heat flux.’ Celyse said after a moment, ‘But you two know exactly what it is and so I’ve come to ask you.’

And there’s nothing to say to that. Orhan looked at Darath and Darath looked at Orhan.

They sat and looked at each other. Wind smashing on the shutters. Flickering candlelight.

‘You really think people aren’t going to guess?’

‘It’s heat flux,’ said Darath.

‘You could at least act like you’re surprised.’

‘There’s nothing particularly surprising about a man getting heat flux in this heat.’

‘Does it matter what people think?’ said Orhan. ‘Nothing can be proved.’ Darath shot him a look that was part confusion, part sneer. Why are you pretending you did it, Orhan my love? his face said. Just to be even more superior and make me feel even more ashamed? Orhan made a movement with his lips, turned his head away. Why am I pretending I did it? But in the end which is more shameful: killing someone, or asking my lover to kill someone for me because I’m a better person than him and too good to do it myself?

I’m the thing at the centre of this, he thought. The knife. But I’m only trying to build a better world. Make things safe. Make us good again.

And so does Marian Gyste compare love to the storm that is the soul of those few who suffer damnation. Raging heat and noise and madness, not for them the cool eternity of death. Not for me. God lives in His house of waters; Tam and March are dead and gone and damp rot. We who live: we’re the ones who’ll burn.

‘He got to see one of his daughters married,’ said Darath. ‘It would have been very sad if he’d sickened before that.’

‘Is that supposed to be a consolation?’

‘Oh come on, Celyse. You know how this works. Such things were done once without anyone raising an eyebrow. Them or us. You know that.’

‘Them or us because my brother was stupid enough to start this.’

Orhan said, ‘Them or us because things would have gone to pieces in fire if I hadn’t. Them or us to save Sorlost.’

Celyse opened her mouth, closed it again. Wind smashing against the shutters. Hot dry storm without rain or relief. The sky outside would be so dark now like the death of the sun. Sand clouds black-golden like Darath’s hair.

Celyse laughed. ‘My dear fastidious brother. Even you can’t keep your hands clean any longer. You killed people so you could get power. That’s all you did. Kill people. For power.’

Darath laughed.

A tap on the door and Bil came in, heavy and tired and her scars standing out on her face. The heat still sickened her, she spent long hours floating in the cool bathing chamber where her body blurred into the oily water. The skin on her hands was wrinkled, odd white.

‘News,’ she said. ‘March Verneth is sick. Heat flux, they say, or that Lord Emmereth poisoned him at Leada’s wedding feast.’

Celyse clapped her hands to her mouth.

Chapter Sixteen (#ulink_d414207f-6d29-548d-a242-b7422e3c80f2)

When they had all left, Orhan went to his books, tried to work. The ancient tomes of the Imperial ledgers. Give himself something else to worry about.

Any fool could assassinate someone, if they really put their mind to it, as the history of Irlast so often proved. Making things better. That took effort. That was the work. March Verneth is dying. So what? The weary business of remaking the world, that must still go on. This city is dying, the richest empire the world has ever known, her beggars wear silk and satin, eat rotting scraps off plates of gold. Immish and Chathe and the other great powers laugh at us and do not bother to cover their mouths. Sorlost is a dead man’s dreaming. A useless heap of crumbled rock. Weak and defenceless and worn down. But I, Orhan lied to himself every night in the dark, I am a capable man, a learned man, I can change that.

Several streets had been destroyed in the rioting that had followed the attack on the palace. Fine, lofty shops and town houses, and, behind them, tenement buildings with broken-down walls and ceilings, floors running with human sewage, whole families crammed into single windowless rooms. ‘Tear them all down,’ Orhan had ordered, ‘rebuild them, clean them up.’

‘And the cost, My Lord Nithque?’ Secretary Gallus had asked him.

‘Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.’

‘And the cost of expanding the Imperial army, My Lord Nithque?’

‘Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.’

‘We do not need an expanded army. We do not need to rebuild a few ruined houses. This is Sorlost!’ the Emperor and the Emperor’s High Lords told him curtly, when he suggested any of these things.

The outbreak of deeping fever in Chathe had flared up again. Worse than before. The gates must be closed again to Chathean travellers, trade would suffer, everyone from the hatha addicts in the gutters to the High Lords who refused to fund his army would complain.