Page 6 of Fate of the Argosi

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘Just give me a second.’

First lesson you learn in arta forteize is that the body hardly ever tells you to stop. Battered, bloody, starved and parched, it’ll keep on going if you ask it to. The mind, though, the mind is full of warnings about how bad you’ll hurt yourself if you keep following the path you’re on, and the awful things waiting for you just around the next bend.

I closed my eyes a moment, stilled my breath. Arta forteize isn’t about forcing your body or your mind to deny itself. It’s about being patient, breathing in slow and steady as you fill yourself not with calm but with something more potent: trust.

I can do this, I reminded myself, though the voice in my head sounded like Enna’s now.I’m Ferius Parfax, the Path of the Wild Daisy. There’s no darkness in this world so cruel I can’t meet it with a smile on my face and a card up my sleeve.

The words are easy. The trick is infusing them with a truth more potent than your own weakness and fear.

My fingers reached into one of the inside pockets of my waistcoat, slid out the card I was keeping there and held it up to my face. Only then did I open my eyes. One of the guards had been carrying a brass oil lantern that was sideways on the ground now, rolling a little this way, a little that way. From that feeble, flickering light, I gazed one last time at the disharmony card to prepare myself for what came next.

Soul’s Grave was being shut down within days, the guard had said, likely by the same prince whose feud with the warden vizier I’d stoked in my attempt to secure a pardon. What was that next part again?

‘The warden vizier’s got us sacrificing convicts in protest, Six each morning, one for each of his god’s six faces. We ran out yesterday, which means come dawn—’

‘I’m ready,’ I told the smirking, too-clever-by-half face painted on the card. She didn’t say anything back.

I took my first step into the deeper shadows waiting for me. Conch nipped at my heels to hurry up. I took my time though. Fifty yards isn’t far, but six months and seven hundred miles is a long way to go just to bury a dead girl.

4

The Remains

Conch kept squirming between my legs as we walked past the cells that weren’t much more than roughly hewn alcoves in the rock. Iron bars thick as my wrists dug at least a foot into the stone above and below. Most of these doors probably hadn’t been opened since the prisoners had first been shoved inside – not until the guards had started sacrificing them, which explained the rusty debris on the floor directly below the hinges.

There are a lot of different ways to kill a person. Walking those long, winding fifty yards, I reckoned the guards had tried out just about every method they could conceive.

‘Seeds in the sand. You really believe that nonsense, Pappy?’

All those different kinds of killing, but the bodies always left the same: flat on their back in the middle of the cell, palms tied together in prayer with the fingers touching just below their chins. A tiny pile of sand covered each eye in accordance with an old Berabesq funerary injunction for the newly dead:When seeking your place among the heavens, never lose sight of the sand whence you came.

Strange to think the guards had honoured that tradition. They were prisoners as much as the convicts they’d killed on the vizier’s behalf. Guess they’d been right in their ominous prediction about what happened when there were no convicts left to kill.

‘.?.?. six each morning, one for each of his god’s six faces. We ran out yesterday, which means come dawn—’

Conch let out a low, keening sound. Wasn’t like him to be so skittish. He kept pawing at the backs of my legs with his hoofs. When spire goats get scared, their instinct is to climb high as they can.

‘All right, little fella,’ I said, keeping my eyes on the tunnel ahead while I reached down to pick him up. The spire goat hadn’t been looking for my help, it turned out, only my permission. Somehow he managed to scramble up the back of me, those little hoofs of his finding every fold in my trousers till he was perched sideways along the edge of my belt. I felt him leap up to my shoulder and teeter a moment before nestling against my cheek.

‘You’re heavier than you look,’ I told him, trying to accustom myself to the awkward weight. Conch’s nostrils flared like he was taking in a deep breath. ‘Okay, okay. No need to paralyse me again.’

With the goat ensconced on my shoulder, I went on down the passage, one foot in front of the other, bearing witness to the dead. Was this my fault? Would I be painting two dozen more disharmony cards to carry around with me forever?

Forget it, I thought.I’m drawing the line at taking on the debts of butchers and child murderers.Much as I disliked this place and all it represented, every single felon incarcerated here had committed atrocities such as could not be forgiven. All but the one who’d been stupid enough to get arrested for stealing the warden vizier’s prized stallion.

And then I saw her, and all my arta forteize fled.

Behind the bars, a slender figure lay flat on the cold stone floor of her cell. Straw-blonde hair spread out like the rays of the sun around her head. She’d always been about the most sacrilegious person you could ever meet, but now her palms were pressed together beneath her chin, bound with twine. A tiny heap of sand covered each eye.

‘Oh, Arissa.’ I wept.

I’d hoped the guard had lied, that not all the prisoners were dead. But hope is a bright and shiny coin; staring at it won’t buy you spit. And the Way of Water? The one every Argosi follows before any of the others? Sometimes it leads you nowhere but deeper into the desert.

The warden vizier had fulfilled one promise though: on the stone wall opposite Arissa’s cell, framed in gilded tamarisk oak behind ironglass so clear you could read every line of the prince’s elegant calligraphy, was the meaningless pardon I’d bought for Arissa.

Had she been looking up at it when the guards had been killing off the other prisoners, six each day? Had she hoped that when they finally got to her cell, those pretty words in gold and black inks would save her?

I stormed up to the frame bolted to the stone wall. Ironglass is almost unbreakable, but I’d brought a second clay jar with me, meant for getting through the bars of Arissa’s cell. I poured a few drops of the reddish-black syrup on each of the four iron rivets bolting the frame to the wall and stood back to let it do its work. A minute later the frame came crashing down, everything breaking except the ironglass. Careful not to dislodge Conch from my shoulder, I knelt down and retrieved the decree. I turned back to face the dead girl lying cold on the floor behind iron bars that would never again be opened.

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