Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Part I: Partings

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part II: Meetings

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Rebecca Levene is an experienced author of fiction and non-fiction and has written scripts for TV and video games, including one voiced by Mickey Rourke. She began her career writing media tie-ins for properties ranging from Doctor Who to the Final Destination movies. More recently, she’s had published two original supernatural thrillers and a short story which the Guardian said, “… combines thwarted ambition and a gallery of fascinating secondary characters to wonderfully readable effect”. She is currently working on the storyline and script for the hit app Zombies, Run! You can follow her on Twitter @BexLevene.

  SMILER’S FAIR

  The Hollow Gods Book I

  Rebecca Levene

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Rebecca Levene 2014

  The right of Rebecca Levene to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 75370 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Muriel Levene

  for everything

  Prologue

  Samadara felt the baby kick and shift, a sudden pressure against her bladder. He was nearly ready to leave her and she had run out of time to save him.

  The room didn’t look like a prison. Her royal husband had been generous when he’d chosen her quarters and her chambers were in the oldest part of Ashfall, its ancient heart. The wooden walls were stained purple-red with grassweed and the tapestries over them showed scenes of the great ocean crossing, the smiling faces of their ancestors looking out from their ships towards the new lands. A thick rug covered the floor, giving her feet a sure grip as it rocked beneath her with the motion of the water. The windows were wide, letting in the weak winter sun and the not-quite-fresh smell of the lake.

  The guards were out of sight outside the door, the door itself unlocked. But the guards were there and they wouldn’t let her leave, not while the baby remained inside her. She’d have her freedom again when her husband had taken his child’s life.

  Athula huddled in the rocking chair opposite, a string of drool connecting her lips to her stained woollen dress. Samadara could see the meat knife at her belt. It was unremarkable and unthreatening, something the guards wouldn’t have thought to question. But if her maid had done as she’d asked, it would be sharp enough for the job.

  ‘Athula,’ she said, and again when the old woman’s eyes blinked open, ‘Athula, it’s time.’

  The wrinkled face was hard to read. Was it pity Samadara saw there? Fear? Or perhaps those were her own feelings.

  ‘Are you sure, my lovely?’ Athula asked.

  Samadara nodded. ‘The babe stirs – he’s eager for freedom. Soon Nayan will have his guards inside the room and there’ll be no saving him.’

  ‘Do you have to save him?’ Athula held up a hand when she would have protested. ‘Babies die every day, my duck. If your little mite comes into the world this way, he might live but an hour. It’s a high price for such a short time.’

  ‘I’ll pay it. Your man’s waiting outside as we arranged?’

  ‘And the guard has no eyes below, I’ve checked it myself. We’re ready, if you mean to go through with it.’

  Samadara nodded. ‘Well then.’

  Her body was ungainly, barely within her command in these last weeks of her pregnancy. She struggled with the front ties of her dress, her swollen fingers clumsy on the ribbons, but she batted Athula’s hands aside when the old woman tried to assist. She wanted her dignity now, or as much of it as her husband had left her. She let the servant help with her slippers, the barrier of her belly hiding even her own feet from her. She felt, more strongly than ever, that her body had been stolen from her, boarded like a river barge by brigands and forced to carry a cargo she had never sought. But though it wasn’t of her choosing, it had become more precious to her than she could have imagined.

  Soon she was in nothing but her underdress. She hitched it over her hips and then sat on the edge of the bed to pull it over her head.

  ‘Here.’ Athula drew a flask from her apron pocket and offered it to Samadara.

  ‘You’re sure this won’t harm the baby?’

  ‘It might, my sweeting. It might. But screaming will harm him more, when the guards hear your cries and come to dash his head against the wall. Drink.’

  The concoction was so sweet it almost gagged her, but she tipped the flask and drank it all. Its effects took only moments, a syrupy lethargy that was perilously pleasant. She nodded at Athula, fighting against her drooping eyelids. She wanted to be awake to see her son, at least once.

  ‘Ready?’ Athula asked.

  She nodded again and her maid drew the knife. The blade was pitted but the edge was keen. Samadara watched as that gnarled hand rested it against the tight skin of her stomach. Her belly button protruded comically in its centre. She remembered the day it had inverted and how she’d thought about this moment and chosen it for her future. ‘Show me where you’ll cut,’ she said, suddenly desperate to delay.

  Athula’s finger was cold as it traced an arc like the Smiler’s wicked grin the length of Samadara’s belly. ‘Here. It must be deep, but not too deep – I don’t want to be injuring the babe, now do I?’

  Her touch tickled and Samadara squirmed away from it. ‘Yes. I see.’

  There was no sound except the old woman’s harsh breathing as she pressed the blade more firmly against Samadara’s skin. The cut stung immediately and blood gathered into droplets along its length.

  ‘Finish it,’ Samadara said.

  Athula grunted, clamped her hand across Samadara’s mouth and slashed the knife across her from hip to h
ip. Even with the sorghum juice inside her, the pain was deeper than she could have guessed and she screamed, her maid’s hand muffling the sound to a desperate whimper.

  For a moment the cut was just a red line on her stomach. She watched with wet, shocked eyes as the line widened and then split, and the fat that lay beneath gleamed greasily for a moment before blood coated and hid it.

  Athula smiled at her, perhaps encouragingly. Her broken teeth looked like old bones as she pressed her fingers against the gaping wound. The brown of her hand and the brown of Samadara’s stomach blurred together as tears misted her eyes and she realised that she was close to passing out.

  Athula’s fingers clawed into the raw wound and pulled. Samadara tried to scream again and felt the horrible ripping as something tore. When she looked down, though, she saw that it had only been her skin. The cut was deep, but not deep enough. The welling blood was already beginning to clot and her babe still curled inside her, under a sentence of death.

  She forced her eyes to remain open as Athula slashed the knife again, deep and hard. She was expecting the pain but it was less this time. Her mind seemed to overlook it, floating above her own body.

  Her belly folded open and back. It looked like the flowers Lord Rajvir of Delta’s Strength had once sent her husband, the ones that smelled like rotted meat and trapped flies in their sticky petals. An evil mix of blood and darker fluids seeped from her stomach until Athula slashed the knife a third time and there was a gush of water, washing it all temporarily clean. And there he was, her son, his dark hair stringy and sparse.

  The baby’s head poked grotesquely from her mutilated stomach. Her fingers tingled with fading sensation as she ran them over his soft scalp. She could see his little mouth, pursed like a rosebud. There was a smear of something over it and she realised that he wasn’t breathing and that this might all have been for nothing. ‘Help him,’ she gasped. ‘Please, Athula. Save him.’

  Athula nodded, but her fingers fumbled against the slick blood coating Samadara’s son and his face grew bluer with every second.

  ‘Hurry, please. He’s dying.’

  ‘These old bones have lost their strength, my duck.’ But Athula’s grip tightened, and then she was lifting the babe clear of the wreckage of Samadara’s body and wiping his face clean with expert fingers

  Samadara smiled to see his mouth open in a sudden, shocked gasp as he drew air into his body. Then his eyes blinked open and she was the one who gasped. His irises were silver, the unlucky colour of the moon, the pupils a vertical crescent within them that swelled into a dark sphere as her son looked at his mother for the first and last time.

  ‘He has the mark of evil,’ she whispered. ‘The prophecy was true.’

  Athula walked the spiral corridors of the palace. She swayed with its gentle rocking and winced as the strain of staying upright set her knees to aching. The purple-red of the walls reminded her of her mistress’s body, spilling its insides out on to the bed. Her hands were still damp from washing the gore away and every time she passed a guard, she felt the sluggish beat of her heart quicken. But the alarm had not been raised and shouldn’t be for another hour; the guards only checked in on Samadara twice a night.

  She thought of the woman she’d left behind, broken on bloody sheets. The death grieved her, of course it did, but the pain was a dull one. She’d done her mourning already, back when Samadara had first spoken of her plan. For the last few weeks when she’d looked at her mistress she’d seen a woman already dead.

  The babe was what mattered now and he was safe, lowered in a basket to her son waiting below. They were to meet in the fallow barley fields beyond the rookery and then away, to the mountains and out of Ashanesland entirely. The heavy bag of gold wheels hidden beneath her dress would keep them as they raised King Nayan’s stolen son.

  The spiral corridor opened into a broader one and to her left she saw the open space of the wheel room. The Oak Wheel sat at its head, the symbol of her sovereign’s power. She hurried past as quickly as she could, dropping her eyes from the carrion riders who slouched on guard outside the double doors.

  The sanctuary was next, and she lingered there a moment to stare at the prow gods of the nation. She might offer a prayer for her success, but which of them would help her now? Lord Lust concerned himself with the making of babies, not their raising, and the Crooked Man healed the sick, not the newborn. There was the Fierce Child, perhaps, but he cared only for his beasts, and neither the Lady nor the Smiler had time for the life of one small child. Well, in some things the gods could help a woman, in all else a woman must help herself.

  She sighed and shuffled on, through the painted library and the great dining hall lined with portraits of the little babe’s illustrious ancestors. Then there was daylight ahead and she was through the gates and at the foot of the bridge.

  The 500-foot-long wooden span perched on top of the chains that linked the floating palace to the lakeshore. They were near the rookery now, as chance would have it, so she’d have to walk through the home of the carrion riders to reach freedom.

  It did look a terrible long way. The inner bridge was shorter, but it led only to the island in the lake’s centre and the pleasure gardens that covered its conical peak. As a lass she’d often climbed its slopes to pick wild flowers with her swains.

  The guards watched her incuriously as she began crossing the outer bridge. The musky odour of the mammoths reached her, the six hairy giants labouring in their traces to pull the weight of Ashfall along. The chains creaked and wavelets slapped against them as they moved, dragging the palace on its endless circuit of the lake. The walk was slow on her weak legs, but soon enough the shore came into sharper focus.

  She turned for one last look at her home. Its wooden spires rose above the platform on which it floated, the paint that had once brightened them flaking and dull, as worn as her body. The pictures of lilies had decayed into leprous white splotches and the figures she remembered as proud guardsmen were faded to shades of themselves. They’d paint Ashfall again soon, as they’d last done in her twenty-third year, but she wouldn’t be there to see it.

  The mammoth-masters smiled at her as she passed, touching their fingers to their foreheads. She smiled back and walked on. If all had gone to plan, her son was waiting for her. She looked for him, but the lake was littered with the craft of the landborn and it was hard to pick out his little skiff among them.

  As she walked through the rookery, the cries of the carrion mounts sounded like warnings of ill-fortune, but when she finally reached the fields beyond, her son was there. The babe was tucked in a sling across his chest and her gut clenched as she thought of how many people must have seen him. They’d be certain to remember Janaka, who’d fathered no child but was carrying one on the very day the King’s cursed son was stolen from his mother’s womb.

  It was too late now for such fears. She took Janaka’s hand and they walked together, along the bank of the river that gushed seaward from the lake.

  ‘He lives, then?’ She nodded at the bundle in her son’s arms.

  ‘He breathes. I gave him a drop of sorghum juice. I couldn’t have him cry out when I was on the boat.’

  ‘He seemed sickly to me. Too long without air, I’ve seen it before. Jamula’s lad never spoke more than five words, never grew in his mind more than a three-year-old, and he was blue at birth just like this one.’

  ‘I doubt he’ll live,’ Janaka said. ‘Even without the King’s men after him.’

  Athula nodded and was surprised to find that they’d both stopped on the riverbank. The lively water rushed past beneath their feet. The purse felt heavy between her breasts, her skin warming the gold inside. She drew it out to show her son, and his eyes glittered as bright as the coins.

  Janaka dropped to his knees and plucked a rounded rock from the mud, then another. ‘It’s hardly killing,’ he said. ‘The child was never meant to live.’

  She stared at the bundle in his arms as he fixed the heav
y rocks inside the swaddling clothes. It didn’t even really look like a baby. She’d only had one brief glimpse of the boy’s face and his strange eyes. Samadara was dead, and the child did have the mark of misfortune on him.

  ‘Well, Mama?’ Janaka asked. He was looking for her to take responsibility, and so she should. That was what a mother did for her son. It was what Samadara had done for hers, but Samadara was gone. This babe had killed her: he might as well have held the knife himself. Athula found that it was easy to hate him when she remembered her mistress’s mutilated, lifeless body.

  She nodded. ‘He’s sickly – he’ll never live. Better to end it quick.’

  She turned as the water swallowed the small, silent bundle and followed her son when he walked away.

  PART I

  Partings

  1

  If there had been just one thief, Krish might have tried running. But the moment he noticed the man ahead, lounging against a rock with his knife drawn and a stony look on his face, he heard the crunch of boots in shale behind him and turned to see the second.

  The headman’s donkey, hired for the journey, raised his shaggy muzzle and brayed. Krish would have liked to do the same. He’d come all this way, three days down the mountain, along high, narrow tracks and through snowdrifts, and he hadn’t lost a single one of the hides and herbs and bone carvings his da had sent him to sell. And now this.

  ‘Going to Frogsing Village?’ asked the man in front, while the man behind sidled closer.

  Krish nodded, lowering his head but not his eyes.

  ‘Trading?’

  ‘Hides.’ Krish saw no need to mention the other things, perhaps too small for the thieves to spot in the donkey’s saddlebags.

  There was a moist hawking sound as the man behind spat. Krish realised his face was still pimpled and that he was no older than Krish; but they both outweighed him, and the second youth held an axe with loose strength. ‘We’ve no use for hides,’ he said. His voice was thick, as if his tongue was too large for his mouth. ‘It’s coin we want.’