Rodrik Barther (3)

The sky over Esmartin was no different from Siltrein’s. Still overcast, still hazy, still ominous.

Only the people living beneath that same sky were different. As we set foot inside the city, the eyes that followed us held a hatred gone well past hostility.

From somewhere came the sound of whispering. Not one resident had come out onto the street, and even those who put their heads out of a window drew back the moment our eyes met, so the voice belonged to a soldier on our side rather than to anyone from Esmartin.

“Can’t see a thing.”

The hour when the sun had gone down entirely.

Just before night came on, Esmartin lay sunk in a dark bluish light and was slowly losing its color, as though the city itself refused to welcome intruders.

All at once someone at the head of the column stepped out. A mercenary, by the look of it, though the face was not visible.

“I’ll get us a light from that house over there, so wait a moment, if you would.”

The one who had spoken knocked at the door of a nearby building. A good long while passed there, and no answer came from inside.

The short span of waiting for a firmly shut door to open.

Had that interval always been this long? Had I dozed off for a moment?

About the time such thoughts were slowly beginning to poke their heads up.

An elderly person appeared outside, and light leaked through the gap of the opened door.

Only a moment after the soldier followed inside, just as my eyes were growing used to the dark—

— CRASH!

—the sound of something breaking reached us. At the same moment a single figure sprang into the building, and the face the faint light caught in passing was Rodrik’s.

A few bustling noises followed, and just as I was wondering whether there was a commotion, it went quiet again. We waited longer, and the only one who came out was Rodrik, holding a torch. I left the rear of the column and walked up to meet him.

“What is it.”

“…The soldier who went inside was attacked.”

Rodrik offered no explanation of why the attacked soldier was not coming out, or of what had become of the elderly person who had done it. The hostility Esmartin’s residents bore us had reached its extreme.

“One of our own has been struck down by a resident! From this hour every face we do not know is to be counted a potential enemy! We stand in the very middle of the enemy, and the war is not yet over! All of you, do not let your guard down!”

Rodrik led the soldiers off toward the wall. By rights we would have marched on the castle that day and purged the city’s master, but he seemed to have weighed the state of the soldiers and judged that we should rest a while.

Inside the wall, the barracks still held the whole lived-in feel of the Esmartin army, who as lately as yesterday had been eating and sleeping there.

A little time passed before Rodrik, who had gone off to light a lamp, called me aside. The one he had touched the flame to was warming the barracks corridor.

“I need to go somewhere for a while.”

The lamp hanging on the wall swayed, and Rodrik’s shadow wavered along with it.

“Is it the woman?”

The woman who set Rodrik moving.

I had heard nothing in detail, but the odds were high he had left her behind in Esmartin when he came away. It would be a lie to say he had not been worried.

“That’s right. I did hide her somewhere safe, but the situation isn’t looking ordinary.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“And the soldiers?”
“Unless several hundred residents come at them all at once, they can’t be much of a threat. Besides, it doesn’t look as though my being here does any good.”

Word must have got round in the meantime; most of the soldiers would not so much as meet my eyes. I could hardly blame them for not wanting to be tangled up with an unholy thing.

“And if you mean to protect someone, isn’t two better than one?”

In Siltrein, Lilian is waiting.

Not knowing whether she was safe had my insides burning away, and I could hardly go on ignoring Rodrik, who must have felt much the same.

“…”

The shadows were deep. He kept his silence, and his expression gave no clue whether he was deliberating or thinking about something else entirely.

Wind that sounded like the cry of an animal brushed past the barracks a few times, and beneath the spreading lamplight the shadow cast over Rodrik’s face trembled faintly.

He nodded, and left the corridor without a word of complaint.

The night air was cold. My face still burned; the heat in it had not yet gone out. On the streets of Esmartin, over and above the raw dry feel of the season, a chill had settled into the air.

Neither Rodrik, walking on ahead, nor I, following behind, said a word. Part of it was that there was no need. Part of it was that the deeper into the city we walked, the harder the sight of the streets made it to say anything at all.

The sight, I mean, of a place swept up by a flooded river and razed to nothing.

Rodrik and I were walking through the middle of a catastrophe that had come out of a disaster no one but the two of us had raised.

A flood attack that used the swollen river to hammer Esmartin.

There was no simple way to cope with a thing like that, and there is even less of a way to clear it away. Only then did I understand what a mad thing it was to set foot in these dark streets. To the people here we were, quite literally, the bastards who had taken their whole lives and shoved them into the gutter.

Not a soul showed along the road, and still, whichever way I turned, I felt eyes on me, staring as if they meant to bore straight through me.

Esmartin is dry straw. Straw that, given the smallest occasion, the faintest ember, would blaze up at any moment and swallow everything.

“…I don’t like the feel of this.”

Rodrik felt the same thing, and his pace quickened.

Esmartin was not on Siltrein’s scale, but neither was it a city anyone could walk end to end in a single go. By the feel of it the walking went on until deep into the small hours, and as the night wore on the streets climbed higher.

Rodrik and I left the city center where the river ran and came into a district of gentle ground and low buildings. The rooflines dropped, and yet the surroundings only grew tidier. Away from the river the roads were relatively intact, and it caught the eye how well kept everything was, perhaps because this was a residential quarter where the better-off gathered to live.

“Where is she?”
“A villa owned by the house’s head steward.”

The house of a head steward whose own quarters were elsewhere.

The places in Esmartin that were that safe could be counted on one hand, and this was hardly one anyone would think of, which made it fit for keeping out of Barther eyes.

The hour before any lamp had been lit.

Only a clanking noise filled the dark, quiet street.

“Risha.”
“What did you say?”
“It’s her name. Risha.”

Rodrik had brought the name up out of nowhere, and after that he did nothing but mutter it now and then. Risha, Risha. Whether a future he feared had put him under some hypnosis, or whether a delusion in his head had colored his heart. Over and over, like a madman in the grip of something, he recited a prayer made out of his lover’s name.

Just as each person’s church is a different one.

Rodrik was searching for his vanished god in his own way.

“…”

Rodrik’s steps stopped. Something in me knew at once that the building he was looking at was where Risha would be.

The street was so trim that the front of the place looked no different from the houses around it, but it was still a mansion a commoner could not dream of.

Even leaving out the desolate air of the place, it was enough to make anyone wonder whether the house had been abandoned.

He went into the house in one rush, and there was no telling whether he was running or crawling.

Outer walls with damp and moss clinging in layers, vines run every which way, grown rank and then withered, a chill with no sign of a human hand in it.

Even a little while standing outside is enough to tell. Nothing like a person lives in that place.

Rodrik’s voice, calling for the woman who would not be in this place, reached me muffled by the boundary wall. I waited a long time where I stood, and when he did not come out, I followed him into the house.

Long since Rodrik’s cries had last been heard.

The inside was in a state hardly different from the outside, and he stood motionless in the middle of it.

“If I were you, I think by now I’d be going about turning the city upside down.”

Even at my words Rodrik did not look back.

“I don’t know.”

He only stood there, still, staring hard into empty air.

“I don’t know what I ought to do, or where I ought to go.”

The sky falls.

The first human being to witness it would deny reality.

“I just wish the world would go ahead and be ruined, like this.”

He too was denying the situation in front of him with his whole body. But refusing to accept a thing does not make it a thing that never happened. His sky had already fallen, and now was the time to move.

I drew a breath. Musty air pushed in through the gaps of my helm.

“There’s no sign of a human hand on this building. That means not only that nobody has been living here, but that something has happened to the owner as well. There’d be no reason for the steward to stop keeping the place up just because Risha left it. Were you in steady contact with this head steward?”

Within Erbern, passing word between one city and another is all but impossible. All Rodrik could have done was pray for the wellbeing of the people he had left behind.

“The head steward knows where Risha has gone, and something has come up that leaves no attention to spare for this building. Looks like our next destination is already decided. Where does the head steward live?”

Rodrik, silent until then, did not take long to answer.

In the end, though the sky falls, though a god vanishes.

There is a hole to climb out through.¹

“The inner keep.”

The inner keep of Esmartin. The answer is in that place, where the Barther house’s secrets and its ugliness and the whole truth of everything lie hidden.

Rodrik and I left the disordered building and headed out into the street. Before we knew it the long night had gone, and a new dawn was staining the horizon.

The outer bailey of Esmartin, and its entrance.

Whether someone had pulled them back or they had simply run off, there was no guard to be seen. Though even had there been one, nothing would have changed.

We passed the outer bailey and walked on to the inner keep. We had run all this way with the survival of Erbern staked on it, all to get inside the castle of the viscount’s house. And for the moment to be as hollow as this. Neither Rodrik nor I could have imagined an entry so empty.

With what feeling was he setting his feet down now, a man who had accomplished a long-held wish?

The place was different and the age was different, and still, for some reason, the image of myself sitting on the ashes of the Lucseon church lay over the sight of his back.

The end of a race that had lost its meaning.

That end was lonely and shabby enough to draw a frown.

“Friend.”
“What is it.”
“When this business is finished, go back to Siltrein. We can’t have Esmartin fall after all the trouble of taking it, so I’ll stay on a while with the soldiers and hold off the undead. Friend, you keep Miss Lilian and Siltrein safe until I come back.”
“Is that all right, though?”
“If anything, that’s the way to protect both cities. And the one whose insides are burning worse than mine is you, isn’t it, friend? I’ll come back as soon as this place is settled, so I’d like you to go on ahead and wait.”

In his own fashion it was consideration. At the same time, so long as he did not know what state Siltrein was in, it was also the best judgment he could make.

We did not speak again after that. There was no need, and besides, we could not.

The central tower came into view, taking the dawn, and Rodrik was opening its door.