Havemercy Read online

  “Go to the house,” I said, in a tone that I hoped conveyed something beyond simple concern. “Sleep. If I find you looking this tired when I return, I shall be very cross.”

  He stood then and put his arms about me so tightly that I thought my ribs would surely crack under the strain. “When you return, then,” he said, voice echoing with none of the tremor that shook his thin frame. “You’ll have to wake me up.”

  “Of course,” I said, then, “Hal, I have to go.”

  He released me, rubbing his sleeve over his eyes in a habit that he had not yet outgrown from either his childhood or his time in the country.

  “Hurry then,” he said, in a tone that made me wish to do anything but leave. “The quicker you’re done with the Ke-Han, the quicker you can come home.”

  I knew that I would never leave if I didn’t manage it that instant. I clenched my hand where it would have reached for one last touch and instead turned away from Hal, striding out the door the Provost held open for me.

  I heard him fall in line behind me, silent as he’d been the day he’d come for our chat at Our Lady of a Thousand Fans, which now seemed a lifetime ago. I was nearly certain he was thinking of that day, as well.

  Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all. He was a hard man to read.

  “There’ve been wagons and the like taking soldiers through the streets all day,” he said. “They’re dropping them off at the foothills and sending everyone through as quick as they come.”

  “Surely it will take more time than we’ve got to cross the mountains,” I said, as he drew even with me. He shook his head.

  “They’re not using the usual routes—You’ll be going straight across. They’re using the tunnels, see? Does fuck-all for the element of surprise, so I guess that’s why they aren’t the preferred option, but with the dragons bringing the city down around them, I guess the Ke-Han have figured out what’s what, and there isn’t any need to attempt to sneak up on them now. What men do they even have left to hit us? It’d be a suicide run, and they know it.”

  It was the most the Provost had ever said to me all in one go that wasn’t a decree read off of a piece of paper.

  “Ah,” I said, and nodded.

  “There’ll be a carriage for you outside,” he went on. “As I understand it, further instructions will be given at the foothills, but from the sound of things it’s not going to be anything more complicated than keep going until either you can’t or they can’t.”

  I quashed the perverse impulse to ask whether the Esar had a preference either way.

  We exited the building, the sudden light threatening to set off a headache in my temples before the shock of it passed and my thoughts cleared. It was still early enough for the skies to be gray, though I knew that if there were any dragons still in the air, it would place them in a dreadfully vulnerable position. If news had returned, then surely so had at least some of the dragons, I told myself, but one could never be entirely certain.

  Palace Walk was eerily empty as we strode down the center of it, without any of the usual gossiping noblesse accompanied by their servants, or those who had business with the Esar marching hopefully up to the palace doors.

  “Will you be joining us on the field?” I asked, with perhaps less kindness in my voice than I’d intended. We weren’t close enough to indulge in the verbal sparring I made a habit of, and I realized it too late. Fortunately, as Dmitri himself had said, I was greatly needed for the war and therefore couldn’t be tossed into jail for insolence.

  He shot me a rueful smile, instead. “Once I’ve finished collecting everyone that’s meant to be there.”

  The hansom waiting out front was all black, which I felt was grimly apt, and the horses waiting tossed their heads as though they were impatient to deliver me to the fiery scene of battle. The Provost stopped short, nodded to the driver, then turned off in another direction completely, presumably to uproot another man from his home to send him off to join our last stand.

  I didn’t wait for the steps to descend but rather opened the small door and hauled myself up and in.

  It wasn’t empty, a fact I barely had time to register and adjust for before I sat on Alcibiades’ lap. He wore an expression of extreme irritation, though his eyebrows shot up when he saw me.

  “If you aren’t the luckiest whoreson this side of the Cobalts,” he snorted, then set to examining the side door as if I wasn’t there at all.

  I tried to match his annoyance as best I could, but I felt nothing but a curious kind of relief at seeing a familiar face, a companion of mine who’d managed to survive the plague. I hadn’t had a chance to speak with Hal about what had happened to the others after Berhane’s passing, though it wasn’t until I’d seen Alcibiades that I knew I’d feared the worst.

  Next to me—where I’d taken my seat on the bench opposite—someone stirred, though I hadn’t noticed him, a pale cutout in the dark of our carriage. I recognized the fall of his blond hair, though, and the same lazy elegance he’d exhibited while napping during his occasional attendance at meetings of the Basquiat.

  “I told you not to speak until we’d reached the mountains,” said Caius, though he didn’t open his eyes, and he sounded a little dreamy still, as though he were half-asleep.

  “What a warm welcome this is,” I said, pulling aside the little window curtain so that I could watch the city as it passed quickly around us. “I’m quite happy to see the rest of you alive as well.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Caius, with a yawn like a cat’s. “I’m sure it won’t last long.”

  Alcibiades shrugged broad shoulders, though he too was looking out the window now that I’d exposed it. “I’m just looking forward to getting this over with one way or the other,” he said.

  “Soldier’s talk,” Caius retorted. “Any academic will tell you that nothing exists in such extremes except for stories in romans for children.”

  “The same romans that led to Hal’s discovering our cure, do you mean?” I watched the spires of the Basquiat off in the distance and knew I would never be able to look at them again without remembering our confinement.

  Alcibiades snorted again, and Caius merely made a censorious sound in his throat as though he thought he had better things to argue. The coach fell silent as we withdrew into whatever more private thoughts we were each of us entertaining.

  I had never considered myself to be anything like the more patriotic soldiers who would fight and die simply because our Esar told them to. I’d always believed it was the province of the intellectual to scoff at such mindless obedience. I thought that there were better solutions to a conflict than an endless war, despite my Talent’s natural proclivity for it, and though I was a loyal citizen of the realm and did my duty as it was commanded, I’d never been stirred by anything deeper than that. For me, there was only the threat of treason and the desire to do a job well enough that I might return once more to the comforts of the Basquiat and Tabernacle Bar.

  With every bump and sharp swing of the carriage as it turned corners it had never been built to turn, I saw more of the city I’d come to as a haven from my country upbringing. She had taken me in as her own after I’d spent the long years of my childhood feeling as though there mightn’t be any place to which I truly belonged.

  Thremedon was my home, and it held everything I had ever loved or had ever been given cause to love me.

  I thought of Hal, rubbing his eyes with such force he was sure to damage them, forcing himself to stay awake through one more chapter, one more page, until finally he’d solved it. We were all of us fighting in our own ways, and to protect the things we loved seemed to me the best reason I’d ever been given.

  I wondered then if the lapis city would still be burning when we came to it at last, if our forces at the front would still be fighting. It was a scene I both did and did not wish to see, but I felt a supreme and wholly strange gratitude to be living at this time, for whatever horrors it held, whatever tragedy, it was a history I cou
ld call my own.

  ROOK

  As far as I could understand them, the Ke-Han who were holding me prisoner kept asking me why Havemercy wasn’t flying. Despite the barriers between us being able to communicate properly—like how we didn’t speak the same language, and also happened to fucking hate one another on principle alone—my reply of “Fuck you” seemed to come over loud and clear. We understood one another just fine as far as the basics were concerned.

  So at bottom what it shook down to was that they tried a lot of things to get me to talk. But I was better than that.

  “You brought her down,” I told my favorite guard, who must’ve kept requesting sessions for torture with me ’cause the feeling was mutual. He was missing an eye, which he obviously thought made him look real tough. “You fucking solve that problem on your fucking own!”

  He didn’t like taking no for an answer. Not a single one of the Ke- Han sons-of-a did, but I wasn’t yessing anytime soon, and they weren’t getting anything out of me. We were equal parts stubborn; the only problem I saw was that they were the ones holding the whip.

  And the Ke-Han were pretty imaginative. They kept me like a rat in the dark, starving me, dripping water somewhere just to drive me wild. No matter what they did, though, I wasn’t spilling anything. I knew that if they had any of the other boys, they’d be doing the same thing: just taking what was being laid down and suffering in private when no one could see them silently screaming.

  It was kind of a bitter thing to hope, and one that made my stomach turn jack-flips inside of me, but I was praying at that point to anyone who’d listen that Have was in pieces somewhere. She’d’ve preferred it, rather than give these whoresons something to use. But even as I tried to think of her being gone for good, I also realized what a fucking genius she’d been—seeing through me and Thom and sensing we were of the same blood.

  Worst of all, I didn’t know if it’d work or not. Could be I’d sit here in this hole in the ground with the rats eating my toes or whatever the fuck it was they thought they were doing, with my girl destroyed, while meanwhile the Ke-Han rallied their forces and burned every last building in Thremedon to the ground, just as a thank-you. So that was pretty bad, even worse than the nightly visits from my one-eyed friend.

  I don’t know how long it went on. Like I said, I lost track of time, and I’d have better luck asking the rats than my captors.

  And then one day—no fucking warning or nothing—this trapdoor above my head opened up, which wasn’t the usual route they took when they were coming to visit me special and ask me their questions again, and I was hauled out into the sunlight, people talking in the Ke- Han babble all around me and the sun so bright I had to close my eyes against it. I was shivering, this close to puking all over someone, and what I really wanted to do was spit on somebody—only I didn’t think I had any saliva left in my entire mouth, so that little show of defiance was out of the question.

  I was shaking too much to be mad.

  They wrapped a blindfold around my face—which I should’ve thanked them for, ’cause at least I didn’t have to deal with the sun directly—and shoved me along some path that felt like I was walking on shards of glass the entire time. I figured it for rubble, but it could have been some brand-new kind of torture for all I knew. I was close to throwing myself down on it and hoping I hit something particularly sharp by the time they finally let me stop, and by then I was walking on something smoother but too hot, like sand under the sun at noontime.

  They’d taken my boots at some point, probably days ago, so the whole ordeal was a real pisser.

  I stood there for a little while, Ke-Hans whispering close by and some not so close by, and as far as disorienting me completely went, this was a pretty good trick. Finally, I felt someone’s fingers at the back of my head, and when they took off the blindfold and I got a chance to get my bearings, I realized I was standing in what used to be the magicians’ dome. I was surrounded by a group of men and women, all of them Ke-Han, and most of them looking pretty much the way I felt, all shelled out with no home anymore.

  For some reason, they’d all gathered together like a bunch of toys in the torn-up shell of the dome. If this was some ritual killing, I just wanted them to get it over with.

  In front of me was a man who dressed so fine and held himself so straight I knew who he was without even needing to be introduced. No matter what a man was, Volstovic or Ke-Han or Arlemagne or anything, there was no mistaking royalty.

  I’d come pretty far in life for the Ke-Han warlord himself to be requesting an audience with me.

  I probably should have bowed or something, but if I’d tried it I’d’ve gone completely off-balance, what with my hands being tied behind my back, and the rest of me being dizzy in the first place.

  The warlord had his hands folded behind his back and for a long time he didn’t even acknowledge me; he was just surveying the damage, drinking it all in, like some sort of sick game he was playing with himself. When he turned around, there was a cat’s kind of anger in his eyes, wild and fierce and narrow. I lifted up my chin. It was the only show of defiance I had left.

  “You wear your hair the way we wear ours,” he told me, and though his accent was rough and his words stilted, at least it was a language I fucking recognized.

  “Yeah?” I asked. I was dizzy and half out of my mind; there was blood under my fingernails, and this cut Have’d scored across my chest when her wing snapped was festering. I could smell it, rotten and sick, especially in open air. “Looks better on me, though.”

  The warlord smiled, the expression thin and sharp. I wondered for a moment why he didn’t just kill me for my insolence, because it was clear as the mustache on his face that he wanted to, but instead he lifted one hand with his palm facing out and complete silence descended over all of us. There wasn’t even a whisper or the sound of somebody breathing too loud on the air—that’s how quiet everyone was, and just ’cause their warlord had shown them the palm of his hand.

  “It is because of the terms of the treaty,” he said, “that I refrain from killing you.”

  “Treaty,” I said. The sun was getting to be too much. “What fucking treaty?”

  “The one we have just signed,” he replied. “I believe it was an hour ago.”

  With a bow, one that was stiff and curt because bowing to nobodies was something he’d never had to do before, he nodded to his left, and I saw that it wasn’t just the Ke-Han who were gathered around in a circle watching me like I was the main attraction at carnivale. There were a group of people I didn’t recognize but who sure as fuck weren’t Ke-Han standing there, most of them inspecting a pile of scrap metal I could only assume was the last of our girls, but a few must’ve broken away from the rest at my arrival, and at this signal from the warlord, they came forward.

  “Shit,” I said, when they got close enough for me to see. “I know who you are.”

  “Is that so?” the man asked, motioning for the man with him—and he was one I didn’t recognize at all—to untie my hands. I winced the second he touched me and swore in the Old Ramanthe.

  “Yeah,” I said, pain coloring my voice enough so I cursed again to chase it out. “You’re the one they exiled for fucking the Arlemagne prince.”

  “Ah,” said the Mary Margrave, not even blinking. “Indeed, you are correct in that regard. It is thrilling to see you still possessed of all your wits.”

  “Well,” I said. “Some of ’em. Maybe.”

  “You have suffered less than the rest,” the Margrave told me. “None of the others we hoped to find here in confinement is still living.”

  I felt this strange thing happen inside my stomach. I really would’ve been sick, and all over too, except there was nothing for me to get rid of inside my stomach. Instead, I guess I must’ve groaned, or moaned, or something. It sounded real pathetic, even to me, but then I barely heard it.

  “Nobody else?” I asked. “Fucking none of ’em?”

  “Four made
it back to Thremedon,” the Margrave said. “You are the fifth and final survivor—all that remains, I am sad to say, of the Esar’s Dragon Corps.”

  I licked my lips like I thought that would do anything toward making them feel any less dry. “We ain’t th’Esar’s Dragon Corps no more,” I said, sounding just like the real kid from the streets I was.

  If there was a treaty, there wasn’t a war anymore. And if there wasn’t a war, there wasn’t any Dragon Corps; it was simple as that. With only five of us still living, and most of our girls no more than junk metal by now, then there wasn’t anything left of us—literal or figurative, in body or in soul.

  I could smell it about to happen before it did, could feel my vision waver as I lost all feeling in my hands.

  “Airman Rook,” the Margrave said, but if there was anything more he said, I didn’t hear it, seeing as how I blacked out right then and there and didn’t even feel it when I hit the ground.

  When I woke up, I guessed I was somewhere else; in any case I wasn’t standing, and the Margrave wasn’t there. I thought I saw my brother—real this time, and not some dead hallucination—and he called me by two different names, Rook and John both, ’til I didn’t know who I was, and it didn’t really even seem to matter over the hurt rooted deep down like it was a permanent part of me.

  He told me to sleep, and I wanted to tell him he was my fucking little brother, which meant he couldn’t tell me what to do, but then the blackness reached up again with nimble fingers and pulled me down into the quiet where there wasn’t nobody, not even me.

  HAL

  I wasn’t made for this sort of excitement. As much as I enjoyed the stories found within my favorite romans, of daring escapes and heroic battles and discoveries made in the eleventh hour, I found living them a far less attractive proposition than reading about them, and the strain of it had left me ill and exhausted more often than not. I didn’t have the constitution for large, sweeping events; or, at least, that had been what I’d told Royston in the days after his return, when we had time to spare for speaking.