In the House of Five Dragons
3. Firebrand
“In the early days of the kingdom — predating the empire — Carce was a nation of scholars. Before creating VEIL, Carce first created science. It was Carcaen science that reached forth and discovered the strange truth of our worlds.”
— From Our Red History, by Avilla Sallusi
The younger VEIL knight excitedly showed off his new purchase to his superior, the one with the tobacco-stained teeth and breath that stank like an entire field of the stuff. Ortho held out the medal, full of pride. The gold cap on his first finger gleamed even brighter than the polished bronze.
Thainna Vahn scooped up the coins Ortho had thrown at her and tucked them away into a fold of her tabba. No one was paying any attention to the girl who had called herself Senna now. Though briefly alarming, nothing strange had happened. A VEIL knight abusing some dirty street urchin? The knights of Verita et Illumina Lansinos were among the most powerful men in the city, in the whole empire. They had conquered the entire world, after all, and unified it under Emperor Tychon.
Who would dare interfere with men like that?
Still, it wasn’t a good idea to linger. If the older knight was any smarter than Ortho, he might realize that the medal was a forgery. Thainna would get much more than a slap and a kick for that.
She hurried away from Mazrem Square. When she was safely out of sight behind one of the black and white striped columns of a nearby lawery, Thainna stopped to rub her aching jaw. That was going to bruise, if it hadn’t already.
A lecturn and his students were gathered in the shade of the deep colonnade. The teacher’s long tabba was edged in deep emerald green and pinned at the shoulders with silver clasps shaped like laurel leaves. The crowd of children in plain white tabbae clustered around him like a flock of ducklings. Some used writing sticks to take notes on wax-covered boards, but most of them just giggled and chased each other, fighting miniature battles with the sharpened reeds. With a great deal of clapping and whistling, the lecturn finally managed to shush the children.
“Quiet! Quietly now!” the teacher said. He was not an old man, but he tugged at a long, graying beard as he spoke. “Now, who can tell me why last week was so special?”
“Because there were no classes!” answered a young Carcaen boy. Several of his classmates agreed enthusiastically.
Their teacher sighed and clapped until the children fell silent once more. “Hae, but do you know why there were no classes?”
“The Mazrem Festival?” This came quietly from a shy Nianese girl.
“Very good, Ellin. Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Njorn Pass, where Captain Rikard Mazrem traded his life to the Alterra in return for those of his men.”
The children cheered and waved their sticks at that.
“Now, at that time, there was no empire,” the lecturn went on. “Only a scattering of kingdoms, all warring over borders, land, water and anything else. His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Tychon — King Tychon, in those days — had just taken the throne. He wanted to end the constant fighting, to unify the kingdoms into a single great empire. He sent his knights, the Verita et Illumina Lansinos, to do precisely that.”
“The knights have magic blood,” said a boy. He swished his reed through the air. It whistled sharply. “That’s why they have lids on their fingers, so they can bleed without cutting themselves up all the time.”
“VEIL knights do have gold cannulas on their right forefinger, put there by special surgical fosters, so they can bleed as required in their pacts. But it’s not their blood that’s magical. The gods made all things in pairs, in twins. Day and night, life and death, the sun and the moon. And that includes our own world, Terra. We have a twin world.”
“Alterra!” chimed the children in unison.
“Hae, that’s right. But there’s a barrier between our worlds, a sort of veil. Only blood shows through. It glows in Alterra like flame and attracts the attention of the strange creatures that live there. The knights of the Verita et Illumina Lansinos make powerful pacts with the Alterra and write out their terms in blood.”
A Mor woman, older than Thainna by several years but still young and quite pretty, stopped beside a striped column to listen to the lesson. She interrupted the lecturn with a question, something about the politics after the war. He answered her in a rush, quickly before his students lost interest and decided to reenact the battle of Njorn Pass with their sharp writing sticks. Children were never careful enough about blood…
Thainna loved stories of the heroic Rikard Mazrem, but the politics bored her. What did it matter to someone like her? Money was much more important. Let the Lyceum consuls argue about the rest. When the Mor woman thanked the lecturn and turned back toward the busy street, Thainna followed. She held out her hands and put on her saddest expression.
“Spare an acorn?” Thainna asked in a voice she hoped was pitiful. “My brother’s sick and–”
The other woman shrugged apologetically and shook her head.
“Sorry.”
“Is something wrong?” The lecturn scowled at Thainna.
“No, everything’s fine,” the woman answered. She gave Thainna a small smile and then turned away.
The old Carcaen teacher was still glaring at Thainna, so she ducked her head and hurried off down the street. He was hardly a large man — about as imposing as a plucked chicken — but Thainna didn’t want to make trouble. Rikard Mazrem’s statue and its attendant knights were just across the street. If the lecturn raised a fuss, they might come to investigate. Thainna’s face still stung from their last encounter.
The road circling Mazrem Square bustled with activity. Goats and horses drew small two-wheeled chariots that carried important people to important places. The most heavily gilded chariots were lashed to kajjas, huge birds from the deep jungles of Jumaar, with long legs, beady eyes and brilliant feathers that shone like exotic gems. Human bearers carried sedan chairs suspended on poles across their muscled shoulders while their passengers remained gently shaded by parasols under the late summer sun.
The long walk back home to the Rows was going to take most of the afternoon. Thainna set a brisk pace up along North Tychon Road. Ortho’s slap was a small price to pay for the profit she had just made. She would stop by the shop, Thainna decided, and deposit the money. If she were lucky, maybe Pata wouldn’t be there yet. The last thing Thainna felt like doing with her bruised jaw was argue with her father. Again.
The chariots and sedans became fewer as Thainna made her way through Dormaen, though the road became no less crowded. Wagons rolled by, heading toward the city center with their heavy loads of wood, flax and wool. Donkeys brayed sullenly at their drovers and chafed under the barrels and boxes lashed to their backs. Pedestrians walked and ran alongside — and sometimes right in front of — the drovers and wagoneers.
Many were foreigners visiting or living in the empire’s capital city. Some still wore the clothes of their homelands, but most had exchanged them for the traditional Carcaen tabbae. There was no official rule of dress in Dormaen, only practical considerations. The Kaelos Valley that made up most of Carce was a vast, grassy strath bordered on the east by the Mazren River and the ocean on the west. The Carcaen summers were long and hot, making the heavy clothes of places like Nian and Lyncea extremely uncomfortable. All but the proudest provincials were quick to adopt the local dress.
Thainna’s feet hurt. Not for the first time, she wished for one of the chariots or wagons or just the sandals worn by the other pedestrians who shared Tychon Road. The interlocking stones of the road used to be as perfect as snake scales, but after decades of heavy traffic and little care, the roads of Dormaen were cracked and rough… and so were Thainna’s feet.
Earlier that morning, she had wrapped her feet in rags, but the seven-mile walk to Mazrem Square was too much for the tattered old cloth. There was little left now but shredded tangles around her ankles and threads stuck between her blistered toes.
The sun began its slow westward tumble before Thainna passed into the temple district. Enormous temples to the elder Carcaen gods lined the Tychon Road, looming in judgment over the crowds below. It wasn’t Oraday yet, but most of the shrine doors stood open. The sounds of prayers and smell of incense drifted out into the streets.
The temples were as lavish as any Everstone manor, adorned in traditional tall columns and intricately carved friezes. The largest and grandest temples were a pair painted in the same blue as the midday sky — the house of Surma, goddess of life — and the red and black temple of her twin brother, Saerus, the god of death.
Beggars crowded the steps to Surma’s azure temple, their hands outstretched. There were more of them today than the last time Thainna had passed. With the wheat shortage in Erastrasus, there was less food and more fear to go around.
But the beggars left Thainna alone. A skinny Fiori girl clearly had nothing to give. They were wrong, of course, but Thainna didn’t tell them so. Ortho’s gold-edged laurel coins were heavy in her tabba.
When she passed the silver-scrolled temple of the sea goddess, Thainna turned down River Road. Her toes swelled like tiny red sausages. It should have been revolting, but every glance downward only made Thainna unsettlingly hungry. She hurried on.
Smaller avenues split off like the branches of a tree, leading further into the temple district. Some led to the shrines of the lesser gods — Suzukarri, Eru and a hundred others, deities imported from the outlying provinces like exotic fruit. But as Thainna passed a narrow and nameless cross-street, she kept her head down and hurried past. If she was lucky, she would never have to go that way.
From River Road, Thainna followed ever smaller and narrower streets, winding further through Dormaen. The buildings out here were smaller and narrower, too, until they were little more than blocky refuse piles, broken mockeries of real houses. Out here in the Rows, the people were just as worn as their homes. Thainna returned a limp wave from Senna, whose name she had borrowed for the day. Senna resumed sweeping at her pitted gray stoop with a ragged broom that wasn’t much more than a handful of twigs tied to the end of a longer stick. Dust puffed into the air and then fell right back down where it had started.
In a better part of Dormaen, Senna would still be young enough to wear a bright, summer-thin tabba and make eyes at the men. But life in the Rows left lines across her skin and gray in her black hair. A racking cough made Senna shudder and she spat a gob of dark, seedy-looking phlegm into the gutter.
How long until I’m just like Senna? Thainna wondered. Until I’m too sick and too tired to even leave the Rows anymore?
Not long, she suspected. Thainna’s feet throbbed with every step like a painful second heartbeat. Her jaw ached and was starting to feel stiff.
Which means I have to work even harder now, while I can. Besides, I don’t have years until the Auction. Worrying about anything after that is a waste of time.
This district wasn’t that old — older than Thainna, certainly, but she wasn’t even twenty yet, so that wasn’t saying much. Everything in Dormaen was older than her. The Rows were the poorest part of the city, run down by hard use and infrequent repairs. No one knew where the name came from anymore — certainly not from any kind of orderly city planning. The rutted, shadowed streets twisted and wound together like a nest of filthy snakes.
No, the people who made their homes in the Rows were the real snakes. They were poor, hungry and dirty. Difficult, scrabbling lives made them suspicious, close-mouthed and poisonously dangerous. Most of them would do anything for a meal, for a warm place to sleep. For a pair of shoes.
And among the vipers, live the dragons…
The House of Five Dragons. Anyone who didn’t work for the House lived in fear of it. Or so it had been in her father’s day.
Now even those of us who do work for the House are afraid.
Things were getting worse throughout the Rows, even for agents of the House of Five Dragons. A living in the Rows wasn’t much, but even that was getting hard to scrape together, like trying to carve meat from a carcass long since stripped to bones.
Thainna turned down another narrowing road and again onto a twisting dirt road. A hunch-shouldered man herded some thin, bleating goats through the dust, cursing the beasts wearily and smacking at their bony hindquarters with a long switch. Thainna watched her step around the mangy animals and crossed the street.
One of the few intact buildings of the Rows was a small shop with no sign over the door. Thainna shouldered open the door. A cracked bronze bell clunked tonelessly against the wood.
Just like any other shop in the Rows, this one was lined with empty, dusty shelves. A handful of unraveling reed baskets held hard loaves of rye bread and balls of cheese covered in cracking wax. A middle-aged Carcaen man sat on a stool in the corner. Thin limbs stuck out from under his threadbare tabba like the twigs of Senna’s broom. He dozed in the slanting amber light of the shop’s single window. Thainna sighed in exasperation.
“Pata!” she snapped.
Aelos Vahn startled suddenly awake and jolted upright on his stool, raising his arms as though to ward off a blow. It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable fear. Thainna scowled at her father and put her hands on her hips like she imagined a woman might to properly scold a foolish old man.
“Wake up, Pata! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with Thain today!”
Aelos grunted and rubbed at his eyes. Like everyone who lived in the Rows, he looked much older than the thirty-nine years of life he had endured. His dusky Carcaen skin was leathery enough to make boots out of and deeply lined. Aelos’ hair had been dark in his youth, a deep brown-black like mahogany, but now it was thin at the top and gone quite gray. Aelos’ eyes had the reddened, drooping look of a man who drank more than he should, but less than he wanted to.
He coughed and then squinted at Thainna as though hoping his daughter was just a fading dream.
“You’re back,” Aelos said with a grunt. He lowered his hands and slouched against the wall again. “They sent Hadrian an ashmark this morning, so I’m stuck here for the rest of the day.”
“There are plenty of coin counters! Any one of them could cover for Hadrian. What about Thain?”
“Thain?” Aelos thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “I’ll see him tomorrow.”
“That’s what you said yesterday!” Thainna cried. Fury made her skin feel too tight and seemed to push at the back of her eyes until she was sure they were actually bulging from their sockets.
Aelos shrugged. “Thain’s not going anywhere. He’ll be in that bed all day tomorrow, won’t he?”
“You can’t say things like that, Pata! Thain is sick and he needs his father!”
How could Aelos be so heartless? Thainna’s twin had been so sick for so long, and the occasional visits from his father and sister were the only things he ever had to look forward to. Now Aelos didn’t even want to do that! Not that this sullen resistance was anything new…
“Thain’s been sick since the day he was born,” Aelos said in a flat voice. “If he died tomorrow, I’d have nothing new to tell him.”
Thainna opened her mouth to scream again, but could think of nothing to say. Instead, she kicked the stool where Aelos sat, intent on knocking the spiteful drunkard over. But without shoes, she succeeded only in cracking her blistered toes against the leg of the stool. Thainna howled in pain and jumped away.
“Bloody hell!” she screeched.
After what felt like an eternity of agony, Thainna’s foot could bear her weight again. She finished hopping in clumsy circles and inspected the damage. Her nail was torn and oozing drops of blood. Thainna rubbed at the wound and flicked the tiny red beads at her father.
Aelos leapt back, pale-faced and shaking. Thainna’s blood spattered on the plank floor and quickly soaked away into the cracked wood.
“Thainna!”
It was Aelos’ turn to be angry, though his cry was sharp-edged with fear. Thainna stuck out her tongue. Let him be angry with her. He deserved it, didn’t he?
Father and daughter glared balefully at one another for a long moment.
“I… brought some more money,” Thainna said at last.
“You could have bought some food with it,” Aelos grumbled.
But he withdrew a thick book from behind a stack of baskets. Aelos laid it open on a shelf with a resounding thump and searched for something to write with.
“Idiot girl. Fine. How much do you have today?” he asked.
“Four laurels, seventeen willows and twenty-seven oaks.”
Her father raised an eyebrow. He found a splintering reed and dipped it into an inkwell. Thainna took the coins from the folds of her tabba and dropped them at Aelos’ elbow. He dutifully counted and recorded the money, then scooped it up into a leather pouch that was worn shiny by use. He cinched the bag tightly shut and tucked it into the bottom of another half-empty basket.
“How much do I have now?” asked Thainna. “All together.”
Aelos sighed. He had been about to put the register away, but opened it again. He traced a long column of numbers and muttered to himself as he added them up.
Years ago, when Thainna first started making her regular deposits, Aelos would ask his daughter if she wanted to do the math herself, but she never did. Thainna didn’t share Aelos’ head for sums. Thain did, of course, but that never seemed to make their father proud. If anything, it only annoyed the old man even more.
“Six hundred and twenty-two laurels, forty-eight willows,” Aelos announced at last.
“How much do the others have?”
“More than that,” Aelos answered shortly. “A lot more.”
He thumped the book closed and beetled his brow at Thainna. “This is pointless. You’ve been saving every acorn for years now and you don’t have a fraction of what anyone else will be bidding this winter. You won’t win the Auction, child.”
She would win. ‘Pointless’ was arguing with her father.
“Just make sure it gets into the vault, hae?”
Thainna’s father ignored her. He wasn’t stupid enough to keep any of the money for himself. Not that Aelos Vahn was somehow above thievery, but the money he accepted and recorded belonged to the House of Five Dragons and few were foolish enough to steal from them.
“Tragos wants reports from all the Talons,” Aelos said. “How did your job go last week?”
Thainna bristled, but icy fear swiftly cooled her anger. Tragos was an Eye for the House of Five Dragons, one of the ten who answered directly to the Crest, who watched over the Flames and lowliest Talons.
“I left that vase exactly where I was supposed to,” Thainna said, probably a little too quickly. “It’s not my fault if Caelin hasn’t picked it up yet!”
“They’re asking after all of the Talons, not only you. It’s just routine.”
“I… I know,” Thainna said.
She did, but that didn’t make the fear any less. The Crest of the House was a mysterious and dangerous man. Thainna didn’t want any bad news reaching his ears that had her name connected to it.
“I’m sure Caelin did his job, Thainna. And if he didn’t, that’s not on your head.”
Was Aelos trying to comfort his daughter? He must have been worried, too. It was almost enough to make Thainna forgive him, but then she thought of Thain, all alone in the fostral and waiting for his father to come visit. Her teeth ground together.
The last tatters of daylight barely lit the empty store. Thainna turned to leave, then glanced back at her father. Aelos had dropped himself back onto his stool under the window. She frowned.
“Aren’t you coming home?” Thainna asked.
Aelos leaned against the wall and shut his eyes again.
“Why would I?” he asked. “It’s warmer here and it’s not as if there’s dinner at home. I’ll stay.”
“But…” Thainna could think of no real objections. He was right. “Fine. You’ll go see Thain tomorrow, hae?”
Her father grunted wordlessly and didn’t open his eyes. He did not invite Thainna to remain, either. She waited in the doorway, chewing her swollen lip, but Aelos was already asleep once more. With a sigh, Thainna stepped back out into the streets.
