In the House of Five Dragons
6. Roar
“No greater ally has been known to men as our shadow-twins, the Alterra. No greater friend and no greater mystery. We have put forth our best and boldest to take advantage of the bond between our two worlds and our two peoples. These are the Verita et Illumina Lansinos, the Knights of Truth and Light. VEIL, as they are commonly known. But as the sacrifice of Rikard Mazrem demonstrated, we may never know a more frightening enemy than the Alterra. Any knight who makes a pact with these strange spirits does so at the risk of his very life and soul.”
— From Our Red History, by Avilla Sallusi
Thainna sat beside her brother’s bed for a long time. She brushed the sweat-damp red hair back from his pale face and wanted to cry, but the noise would only wake Thain. He needed his rest. Thain was so thin, like a skeleton covered in a sheet of wax. Weren’t they taking care of him at all?
They were priests of Surma, the fosters uniformed in flowing blue. They bustled through the fostral with arms full of bandages and poultice pots and the shining steel implements of their trade. But none of the fosters’ duties seemed to bring them anywhere near Thain’s bed. Perhaps out of respect for the sick boy, or — more likely, Thainna thought — a desire to avoid his perpetually angry twin. She had a bad reputation among the priests.
The fostral was full of curtained beds that took up the entire eastern wing of Surma’s vast temple. Thain’s cell was one of the smallest, with a single plain white wall and no windows. How long had he been trapped here in this tiny, stuffy cubicle? It was no better than a tomb. No, it was worse — Thain was still alive to realize the horror of his confinement.
Not that Thain looked very alive. The boy’s nails were yellowed like those of a much older man. Years ago, his hair was the same bright red as Thainna’s, but years of sickness had leeched the color and left it as stiff as the bristles of a cheap brush, broken and irregular. Thainna wished she had thought to bring a knife or scissors to even it out.
She combed trembling fingers through Thain’s hair and her fingers came back coated in fine white dust. Plaster from the white walls? The urge to cry returned, tidal in its stinging weight, but her eyes already felt like peeled grapes. Tears would only make it worse. Why didn’t the priests take better care of Thain?
Nothing had been right for five years. Thain had always been sickly, since their mother died giving birth to her twin son and daughter. How many sleepless nights had Thainna spent sitting in the dark, listening to her brother struggle for breath? How many nightmares about one of the fosters coming to tell her that Thain was dead, that he had left her alone…?
Blue tabba stained black by night, the clothes of a foster turning into the uniform of Saerus’ death-priests. The ash-god always came, reaching with claws like scythes, reaping and cutting…
Someone had set Thain up on a pole, like a splinter-man strung up in a wheat field to scare the birds away. Saerus flowed across the ground toward him like blood from a wound. All Thainna could see of the god was a boiling cloud of smoky darkness and the lighting-strike flashes of great metal talons. Thainna screamed and reached for her twin, but something held her back, as easily as a child holding a squirming worm just before he spears it on a barbed hook…
A light touch on her arm made Thainna jerk upright. Her eyes were sticky and blurry. Thainna blinked and rubbed at them until she could see again. Thain was sitting up in his bed.
“You’re awake!” said Thainna.
A smile spread across her brother’s thin, pale lips.
“You’re not,” he said.
“I was sleeping?” Thainna asked, ashamed. After shouting at Aelos for his inattention, she’d gone and fallen asleep when she was supposed to be visiting her brother.
“A little, but it didn’t seem very restful. What’s wrong?”
Thainna just shrugged. She didn’t want to share her nightmares with Thain. His life was hard enough. Instead, Thainna enfolded him in a gentle hug. Even the careful embrace made her brother wince and cough. Thainna released Thain and let him sag back into his blankets. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His veins were stark blue lines under the papery white skin.
“Did Pata come to see you?” Thainna asked and immediately regretted it.
A shadow crossed Thain’s thin face.
“No. Was he supposed to?”
“Um…”
Thainna fell silent again. What else could she say? Nothing new, nothing true. Don’t worry, Pata loves you. He’s just… busy. She had said it so many times that the words were becoming mushy nonsense inside her own head.
Love. Busy. Lousy.
Perhaps she should have told Thain about her nightmare instead. At least he could just dismiss it as nothing important.
Thain toyed with a corner of his rough blanket. “Did you sell the medal?”
Thainna seized on the new topic. “Hae! And got four laurels for it! But it was pretty close. I actually sold it to a VEIL knight.”
Her brother’s eyes widened, suitably impressed at her daring.
“A knight? You minx!” Thain exclaimed and then coughed.
“He hit me at the end, but then he dropped some more money,” Thainna said when Thain could breathe again. “Lucky that he was so thick. Illius put the wrong date on the medal.”
“It was fake, though, not a replica. There isn’t really a right date.”
“Hae, maybe,” Thainna agreed, but she was still annoyed. “But there was a wrong one! Illius put 1248.”
“Hae, Captain Mazrem was trapped in Njorn Pass most of that winter,” Thain said. He frowned, but Thainna sensed that the twist in his lips was for Illius, not her. “There wasn’t anyone around to give out medals. Certainly not the Emperor’s Favor. Illius should have used an earlier date, before Rikard Mazrem left Carce.”
Thainna rarely had to explain things to her brother, and never more than once. He was the clever one between them, with a quick, deft mind that belied his frail body. Thainna was so proud of her twin. But why couldn’t Thain’s body be as strong as his mind?
“What about the other job, the one with the vase?” he asked in a wheezing voice.
“Nothing worth talking about,” said Thainna. She rubbed her brother’s bony back. “Maybe you should go back to sleep. Are you hungry? I can get you some food.”
“No, I’ll eat later. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’ll just throw up. Please tell me about the job, Thainna. I never get to leave the fostral anymore.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Thainna admitted. “I got an ashmark with orders to sneak into the Everstones and take a vase. Some expensive antique, I guess. Someone had knocked into it during one of the Mazrem Festival parties and so it was on its way out for repairs. I took it from a servant while he was fixing his sandals and left it in a drop-spot for Caelin.”
“Did the man chase you?” asked Thain. He grinned with excitement at his twin’s adventure. There was even a faint flush in his pale cheeks. Thainna wished her story were really that thrilling.
“Hae, but not very far. He was a great big man,” said Thainna. “Like a walrus with legs! He was panting and sweating in no time at all. I guess all the good food in the Everstones weighed him down.”
Thain laughed a little at her description and took one of Thainna’s hands. He gave it a weak squeeze.
“You do good work,” he told her. “Someone will notice it someday. You won’t be a Talon forever.”
Now it was Thainna’s turn to blush. Her cheeks stung, scrubbed raw by tears and now prickled with the rising blush.
“Neither will you, Thain.”
“I haven’t been a real Talon in years, not since I’ve been stuck in the fostral. I wasn’t even much of one before. I was so young. Fourteen years old when I came here…” He gestured at the curtained cell with an impatient flick of his stick-thin fingers.
“When I win the Auction, everything will be so much better,” Thainna promised.
Thain smiled at her. She lingered for a while in hopes of filling her brother’s monotonous time, but before long, Thain was asleep again. She kissed his cheek and left.
Thainna passed a priest dressed in dark blue on her way out of the fostral wing. She caught the man by the arm and was greeted by a familiarly contemptuous sneer. The priest was a tall man, probably about the same age as Thainna’s father, but had weathered the years far better than Aelos Vahn. His monastically close-cut hair was still dark and lustrous.
“Hae?” he asked. “What do you want?”
“My brother’s resting in that cell over there. Number seventeen,” Thainna said, pointing back the direction she had come. “He’s not… I mean, he doesn’t look very good. He’s too thin. Can you take him something to eat?”
“I don’t work the dram halls,” said the priest.
He brushed past Thainna, but she grabbed the corner of his tabba. Frowning, he jerked the cloth free of her grasp.
“So? Can’t you help?” Thainna fought to remain calm, but her voice was rising, just like it always did.
“Ask one of the fosters. That’s their job.”
With that, the priest strode off down the hall.
“They never do anything, either!” Thainna shouted after him.
She stood fuming in the hallway. A young acolyte stood before a tall statue of beautiful, buxom Surma with an ewer of scented oil upturned in her hands, filling and quickly overflowing a marble bowl carved into the shape a seashell. She stared in shock until Thainna turned away and stormed out of the temple.
Thainna didn’t slow until she had run down the blue-and-white steps of the temple and back out into the street. Her heart raced, thumping out a quick, furious drumbeat. Why didn’t anyone care? Surma was supposed to be the goddess of life, of healing… Why didn’t her priests and fosters take better care of a sick boy? It was a sacred duty, wasn’t it?
A Suvestri man pushed past Thainna, wearing a belt of beaten gold over his Carcaen linen tabba. He nodded a curt apology with a bob of his shaven head. Thainna turned to flip him a rude gesture and saw the crowd of beggars filling the colonnade of the temple, ragged ghosts that haunted the blue shadows. They were just as hungry as her or Thain. But they didn’t have the shelter of the fostral or the debatable blessings of employment by the House of Five Dragons.
Thainna turned away. Ignoring them.
Just like the priests ignore Thain.
It wasn’t the same. Right? Thainna had nothing to give the beggars, after all. Surma’s priests and fosters had more, didn’t they? More than enough to share. That was their job… Thainna had her own to worry about.
The sun was still bright gold as a laurel coin. It was high in the sky and cast short, dark shadows across Dormaen. Thainna found a dial and counted the hours. It was still early, not even noon yet. She would have liked to have the afternoon to herself, or at least to work for herself.
Someday, I’ll have something worth giving.
But how long would that take? Whether or not Thainna wanted to admit it, her father was right. After four years of work, she had collected only a few hundred laurels for the Auction. Come winter, she would be bidding all of her money against that of much richer, much more powerful members of the House of Five Dragons. She had only a few months left to earn, wheedle and steal a whole lot more money.
Reluctantly, Thainna decided that her own pursuits would have to wait. Both Aelos and Thain had asked her about the vase job. If Caelin had failed to retrieve the vase, then Thainna could claim success on her half of the job and wash her hands of the rest. If he had made the pickup, it would be nice to know instead of keep wondering.
Either way, she needed to report back to the House. The older Talons and Flames ranked above Thainna probably had some annoyingly menial, time-consuming task for her by now. If the Erastrasus blight was as bad as everyone said, she would be stealing bread for them before long.
It took most of the afternoon to cross the increasingly cramped and filthy miles from the temple district to the Rows. The air was full of too many sounds and smells, few of them pleasant. Close-leaning houses and shops funneled the summer heat into a poisonous miasma. An emaciated mother cradled her screaming baby in an open window and waved with resignation at a buzzing cloud of black flies.
Thainna stopped in front of a building with fishnets hung in the windows and that stank acridly of unfiltered alcohol. A gaunt Karabosi man lounged in the door, watching the road. His real name was unpronounceable, so he had long ago adopted the name Dorros after the Carcaen lecturn who had first proposed the existence of the Alterran world. This Dorros was no scholar, though. He was a Flame in the House of Five Dragons — a full rank above Talons like Thainna.
Dorros caught sight of Thainna and beckoned her over. Obediently, she followed him through the tangle of nets and into the murky half-dark beyond. The inside of the cheap taphouse was dim and smoky. Things skittered underfoot, leggy things that didn’t invite closer inspection. Dorros ordered a clay cup of something that could probably cure leather. The scarred old bartender looked down at Thainna, but she shook her head. She didn’t want to do this with a muddy head, even if she had any money to throw away on a drink.
Dorros dropped himself onto a bench against one of the soot-blackened walls. Thainna sat beside him, close enough to hear over the shouts, gurgles and snores of other patrons.
“I finished the last job. A vase from the Soveus manor house, out in the Everstones,” she said. Dorros hadn’t given her the job, but the Flame was doubtlessly aware of what the lower ranked Talons were up to. “Did Caelin get it?”
“Caelin?” Dorros snorted and took a long pull off his drink. “I doubt it.”
Panic and bile rose in the back of Thainna’s throat. Did something happen to Caelin? If he hadn’t done his job, no one could blame Thainna for that… right?
Or would the Crest punish Thainna for the failure?
“What happened?” she asked.
Dorros dropped his cup down onto the bench. It bounced once and then tipped over. Dorros swiped the cup away and it rolled off across the floor. Thainna chewed her lip. Dorros was not in a good mood today.
“Caelin has a new job,” he said, voice dropping to a hiss. “The Eyes sent him to Gaius Mazrem with a pocket full of ophellion.”
The words were quiet, but Thainna couldn’t help staring suspiciously around the room. What in the worlds was a Flame doing talking to a Talon like this, much less in a public place? Though Dorros had finished his cup, the reek of alcohol remained strong on his breath. He had been drinking for some time, Thainna realized.
And he was still talking.
“This Crest… He’s going to kill us all,” Dorros said. “Takes our money, our families. He has turned us into assassins and murderers. It wasn’t always like this! You’re too young to remember, child, but your father does.”
“What does that mean?”
Thainna was curious in spite of herself. It was dangerous to sit with Dorros when his tongue was wagging — what if another House agent overheard? — but she could not make herself leave. Thainna had never heard a Flame speaking so openly. Or so bitterly.
“The House, Dormaen… It was better than this. Before I joined, I was just a merchant. I carted wool from Liefport. Aelos kept books for the army. We moved money for people, kept it for those who didn’t want the empire to know how much they had. We shaved our fair share of laurels, too.”
Dorros sighed and rubbed his sunken cheek.
“But we weren’t killers,” he insisted. “Not assassins and bone-breakers. Not until this Crest. Gods, we don’t even know his name! What kind of man won’t even show his face to his own folk?”
“Hae, he’s changed the business,” Thainna answered carefully. “What about Caelin?”
“Caelin got a bloodmark, with orders to split Gaius Mazrem on ophellion. Poor bastard. Caelin, not Lord Mazrem. They took his wife, you know.”
“Milla? But… but isn’t she sick?”
Thainna felt sick, too. The Crest had turned Dormaen into a treacherous place even for the members of his own House. It was not the first time the Crest and his Eyes had taken friends and family to ensure complicity with dubious orders. But things were going to get better soon, Thainna reminded herself.
“It’s the wheat blight in Erastrasus. It’s ruining the investors. All the money-counters are in a panic. And the Crest is taking advantage of it, snatching up everything he can as others loosen their grasp. He’s gambling big and we’re all on the table. It’s all burning away, Aelos.”
“Thainna,” she corrected. “It’s not over yet. The Auction is this winter, and then we’ll have a new Crest. A better one, I promise.”
Dorros leaned back. His head thumped against the wall. The Flame’s eyes closed to red-shot crescents. “Hae, the Auction… You’re young. They’ve never sent you a bloodmark. You’ve never worked for the Crest. Don’t hope too hard, Thainna. I don’t think the Crest will give up the Jade Throne when his time comes.”
“He has to, unless he can outbid everyone else for another term. But that will never happen! Everyone in the House hates him.”
“We’ve never had a Crest like this,” Dorros sighed. “But I would bet laurels that he’s the only kind we’ll ever have again.”
