Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods Read online

  Dae Hyo had found himself in many fights over the years, but he’d never before woken up in the middle of one. The tankard he’d half drunk was knocked into his lap and he leapt to his feet with his trousers soaked and his head fogged with beer.

  As fortune would have it, his leap took him into the path of a flying fist and he fell back into his chair, clutching his bruised temple as the man who’d hit him yelled and shook his hand in pain.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Dae Hyo bellowed. ‘That’s no way to wake a man.’

  His attacker wasn’t listening. He’d turned to the man on his left, a lanky, ginger-haired thegn from the Moon Forest, and was busy trying to grind his face into the nearest table. Beyond him, a Maeng warrior was kicking the belly of a downed Ashaneman while his brother drew his knife on another. It was more of a general brawl than a specific grudge, it seemed. There were at least a dozen men involved that Dae Hyo could see and he could think of no reason he shouldn’t join in too, just for the fun of it.

  The nearest man available for a beating was a broad-shouldered Gyo with a squint and fists the size of boulders. Dae Hyo let one brush past his head and then returned one of his own, watching in satisfaction as a bloom of blood burst from the other man’s nose. After that it was hard to keep track. He sweated as he fought and a brief rain shower turned the ground to mud, which soon coated them both. Dae Hyo smiled, though most of the rest looked grim and the knife-wielder was grimacing at a slash in his own side. But what did he expect if he was going to come armed to a friendly little fight?

  Dae Hyo had his hand around the ginger thegn’s neck and his knee in the man’s back when someone shouted ‘Stop!’ in such a loud, high voice that he let go in surprise and his opponent fell into the mud and shit below them.

  The other fighters seemed equally frozen as the shout came again. Fists dropped to sides and they all swivelled to face the source of the noise, which turned out to be a boy not old enough for his balls to have dropped. He stood on a small stage, a woman beside him, the two so alike she could only be his mother. They both shared the high, sharp cheekbones of the people of the far savannah, though his skin had the darker tint of the tribes about it. He smiled at the startled fighters and more broadly around the square, where Dae Hyo saw quite a crowd had gathered.

  ‘Friends,’ the boy said. ‘Will you sit and listen? I promise I ain’t gonna keep you from your fighting long. There’ll be time enough before sundown to beat each other bloody if you choose.’

  ‘It’s Jinn,’ said the man Dae Hyo had been in the process of strangling, as friendly as if they’d just been sharing a beer. ‘Jinn the preacher boy. You’ll want to hear this.’

  Dae Hyo stared at the strange boy a moment longer, then sat in one of the few remaining chairs.

  Jinn nodded across the crowd, seemingly at Dae Hyo himself. ‘Thanks to all for the attention. It ain’t for me, I promise.’

  ‘It’s you what’s talking!’ a woman shouted.

  The boy Jinn laughed. ‘That’s true, I ain’t denying it. But I ain’t come to talk about myself.’

  ‘The moon! The moon!’ other voices yelled from the crowd.

  ‘The moon it is,’ Jinn agreed. ‘I see there’s some here have heard me before. I’ll speak of the moon and plenty else besides. Will you listen? I promise it’s a good tale, one you all need to hear – one that’s for you all.’

  His face was suddenly solemn and the crowd quietened.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jinn said in a soft voice that somehow filled the crowded, muddy square. Dae Hyo looked round to see a good three hundred people watching the preacher. Even those outside the gambling dens and whorehouses had turned their chairs to listen. The air was so still, Dae Hyo could hear the rattle of dice echoing through one window and the low grunts and high yelps of fucking from another.

  ‘Let me tell you all a story,’ the preacher boy said. ‘It’s about the moon, like you guessed, and the sun, and the war they fought many years ago, before the Moon Forest folk, or the Ashane, or any of the tribes came over the sea to these lands. It all happened so long ago that no one but the mages remember, and they told it to me true. For centuries the Ashane and the tribes and the folk of the forest have looked up in the sky at night and all they’ve seen is a dead rock. And that’s all it was for centuries, but it wasn’t always so. The moon was a god once, who was called Yron, and he and his sister the sun, who was called Mizhara, studied the world together, when the world was young.

  ‘See, Mizhara, she wanted to know how things worked, orderly things, and she made up the numbers to describe them: one, two, three, four, five and all the rest. But Yron saw that her numbers were only good for talking about circles and squares. He wanted to know how waves worked, and what was less than nothing and what happened after the end of eternity, so he invented a new type of number to describe all those things.

  ‘While they were busy arguing over that, they looked down on the world below and saw things neither of them could explain, not with all their numbers. There were animals and people, which couldn’t either of them be pinned down that way, and so together Yron and Mizhara devised the runes to explain them. But animals and people ain’t like rocks or waves. They’re alive, and so were the runes. They had the power to make things as well as describe them, and that scared the sun, but the moon loved it. He made new life, and that’s when his sister turned against him, because she only liked order and life is always messy, especially the type he made.’

  ‘The worm men!’ a woman shouted. ‘He made the worm men!’

  ‘He did, it ain’t false,’ Jinn said, and there was a murmur of disgust. ‘He made them as his servants. The worm men loved the living, because Yron made them to understand life. They were ugly-looking, though, and Mizhara hated them for that. She only cared for what was perfect. But nobody’s perfect, not truly. We all got our faults and our scars and the ways in which we’re different from each other.

  ‘When Mizhara said she hated the worm men, she really meant she hated us. Not all people, maybe, but all you gathered here. I ain’t met each individual one of you, but I know this about you: you ain’t come to Smiler’s Fair to be like normal and live a normal life. You want what you ain’t supposed to want, and that’s what Yron understood. Mizhara, though, she couldn’t let folk be as they wanted, only as she ordered them to be. So she and Yron fought a great war, and the sun won and blotted out the moon.’

  This time the silence was complete, and Dae Hyo couldn’t help noticing that the moon itself had risen white in the blue sky, as if summoned by the boy preacher’s words.

  ‘She killed him,’ Jinn said, ‘and his death made his servants crazy and sent them beneath the ground, where they’re a blight on us all to this day. We’re afraid of the shadows, friends. We run into the light and we move. We always move, not because we want, but because that’s what the sun ordered. Wouldn’t you like to bide in one place, just for a while? Don’t you want not to be afraid? Don’t you want to sit in the shade and not feel your heart thumping but only the cool and comfort of it? Don’t you want to be who you are, and not who people say you should be?

  ‘Friends, you can sit in the shade and you can sit still and you can be who you want one day very soon. You can do all those things because the moon ain’t just a dead rock any more. The moon’s god has returned. He’s been born again, right in this very kingdom, and though he was cast out, he’ll come back to claim his inheritance. He’ll change things, but he ain’t gonna do it alone. You’ve gotta change too. You gotta be ready. Some of you here, you feel it in your hearts, you’re the moon’s men and the moon’s women. Yron’s speaking to you, you just gotta listen. Because the moon is rising. And all those who don’t rise with him will fall.’

  When the speech was over, Dae Hyo sat in a daze as the square emptied around him. He’d intended to stay the night in the fair, renting a room in one of the lodging houses or – he’d be honest with himself – in the company of one of the whores. Jinn’s words kept circli
ng round his head, though, and those words told him he had to go.

  Leaving seemed quicker than making his way in, as if the fair couldn’t wait to spit him out now it had sucked all the profit from him. They’d put the place near a sluggish, muddy river and he followed it back up its course for two hours until its waters had grown a little livelier and Smiler’s Fair was lost to sight. Only a smudge of smoke in the sky showed its location. A black cloud of birds circled within it, like a hungry whirlwind.

  Dae Hyo found a good rock to sit on and dropped his pack on the ground beside him. The bottles clinked as it landed: whisky from the Fine Fellows’ quarter and the vodka he’d found an old Yeum woman selling from a stall beside the Menagerie. The stall had smelled of animal shit, but when he’d sampled the drink he’d found it pure and strong as a stallion’s kick. Between them, the bottles had cost him a full third of what he’d earned in the mines since the first frosts fell this winter. It had seemed easy to justify the expense. The work was dangerous, often lethal. A man didn’t go down to face his death without something fortifying inside him.

  Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. That gold he’d spent had a purpose. He had a purpose and he could see that he’d been letting the drink wear away at it, like a river eating out its bank. It was as that boy Jinn had said – he needed to change the way he went about things.

  The water in the stream was bubbling nicely over the rocks. Dae Hyo stared at it for a while, as the sun slipped away and the moon took over lighting up the sky, though it didn’t do such a good job of it. Its reflection wobbled in the water until Dae Hyo threw in a pebble and shattered it entirely.

  It was hard to change, that was the thing. A man grew used to the way he was and the way he went about his business. He knew it worked, or to be fair, that it didn’t fail frequently enough to be a problem. Change was dangerous. He’d already faced one so monumental it had broken his world as completely as the reflection of the moon had shivered into pieces on the surface of the water.

  Dae Hyo flexed his arms and felt the strength in them and he knew the power in his legs. But he patted his belly and felt the wobble of fat that hadn’t been there five years ago. He was more than he had been, and not in a good way. It was the drink, he knew that. He could almost see it sloshing beneath his skin.

  When he kicked his pack, the bottles tinkled. It was a pleasing noise. He savoured it a moment and then opened the ties and drew them out, all seven of them. He didn’t let himself hesitate long before pulling the stoppers and pouring the contents of each into the river. Their smell was soon stolen by the water.

  After that, all that remained was to throw the bottles to float away on the surface. The moon suddenly emerged from behind a cloud, a pretty sphere of silver, and he knew it was a sign. He’d become the warrior he was meant to be. The moon god wanted the world changed, and he was ready to change it.

  Krish decided it would be safest to return to the mountains in the dead hours of the night. He’d sold the goatskins and herbs and carvings for a good price. There was coin rattling in his purse and he couldn’t risk meeting the thieves.

  He travelled by the same path that had brought him to Frogsing village. If the thieves were still waiting, he hoped they’d be doing it on the route he’d shown them on the opposite shoulder of the mountain. The one he’d taken was broad and easy to pick out even in the pale moonlight. His footsteps crunched against the pebbles, far too loudly. There were few other noises. A night bird hooted. Something unseen splashed in a stream and a hunting cat yowled nearer than he would have liked. But there was nothing that sounded like other men.

  Still, he could feel the tension making his back ache as he led the donkey on. When the beast brayed he almost cried out himself. He halted, heart pounding, and stared into the darkness. He could see nothing, and after a few moments the donkey dropped its head and started cropping the grass, unconcerned.

  Krish stroked its warm back to calm himself and then led it round the next bend and onto the escarpment where the thieves had confronted him. His muscles knotted as he walked past the spot where the knife had been waved at him, but no new attack came. He crept to the edge of the path to look down into the valley below.

  Everything was in darkness aside from one blaze of light, a great sprawl of it near the horizon. It was mostly the yellow of flame, but there were stranger blues and purples too. The village men had told him about Smiler’s Fair. They said it was a place of great excitement and awful activities they’d been coy about describing. He wondered if they really knew.

  Some of them had spoken of travelling there and one young man had asked if Krish wanted to join them. He had wanted to. But his ma needed him back in the village and his da would be angry if he was late. This was the only occasion he’d ever left home, and it was time he returned. What would he do in Smiler’s Fair anyway, in a place so big and foreign? He’d be lost. He looked at it a little longer, then turned his back on the light and began the long climb back into the mountains.

  2

  Nethmi felt the muscles in the bird’s back shift beneath her thighs. Its claws dangled beneath them, each talon longer than her hand, while the stench of rotten meat wafted around her with every beat of its great grey wings. Her legs were burning after a full day of riding and she groaned as one wing tipped and they veered towards a narrow pass between jagged peaks. The rider behind her clucked sympathetically, but she wasn’t sure if it was for her discomfort or the carrion mount’s effort.

  She’d wanted to travel by land, but Puneet had insisted that only the birds would be fast enough. So she’d hidden her distress and remained proudly silent as she took to the air above Whitewood and watched the ancient, ossified trees and the half-frozen lake and the winter-brown fields and everything that was her home pass away beneath her. She’d hoped for one last look at Smiler’s Fair, but their route hadn’t overflown it. She saw nothing but sheep on the foothills of the White Heights.

  Then High Water Fastness was beneath her, its squat towers dwarfed by the frothing waters of the falls. And here the true mountains were. There were no more shipforts, only an occasional cluster of tents beneath her, landborn settlements. She spotted wolves too, and once a yellow blur that might have been a mountain lion.

  It was so strange to be back. She’d been born in the Black Heights, and when her mother had died delivering her, her father kept her with him on campaign as he fought to subdue the mountain savages for his king. Nethmi’s earliest memories were of this pure white landscape, the army’s encampment spread like a pox across it and herself seated in her father’s lap beside the fire as he discussed strategy with his lieutenants. Those were happy memories – the best she had. But though she could remember the snow, she’d never remembered the cold. The past had a warm glow to it that the present was sorely lacking.

  This high, the sun still blazed in the blue sky, but dusk had already come to the valleys. The carrion mount’s head dipped and her stomach lurched as it dropped towards the gloomy ground. Minutes later, it landed in a three-foot-high drift and she sighed as she dismounted, then yelped as her muscles seized and she nearly toppled sideways into the snow.

  The carrion rider was too busy fussing with his mount to notice, ruffling its feathers and murmuring softly to it like a lover, but one of the household guard stopped her fall. She nodded her thanks and he blushed to the roots of his brown hair. He looked like he meant to speak until he saw Captain Mahesh watching him and scurried away to attend to his duties. Mahesh was her uncle’s right hand, his eyes and ears on this journey, and he’d not like his men growing close to her. They were all too young to remember her father and the way Whitewood had been run before his death. She believed they’d been chosen for that reason.

  Her own tent was larger than the rest, but it was still a tent. And she would sleep on furs, but there was rocky ground beneath them. She watched as her servants put it all in place, shifting from foot to foot impatiently. It had been like this on campaign all those years ago, but
then her father’s soldiers had competed to make her comfortable, to bring her the choicest treats.

  ‘Whisky, milady?’ one of Mahesh’s men asked, holding out a flask. ‘Helps to ward off the chill.’

  She took the drink and smiled at him, grateful for the small kindness. ‘How much further?’ she asked.

  ‘Five days, milady.’

  Five days until she reached Winter’s Hammer and the beginning of her exile – though no one called it that. She sighed and stooped to enter her tent.

  The next morning dawned even colder. She could feel the icy bite of the air from beneath her sleeping furs, and the thought of rising from them was unbearable.

  ‘Ayesha, a fire please,’ she called.

  Her maid entered quickly and Nethmi guessed she’d been waiting outside. She moved stiffly as she laid the logs in the sooty brazier. ‘Breakfast, milady?’

  ‘Yes, breakfast, and for you too. You look like you need unfreezing.’

  The girl smiled. ‘Aye, ’tis bitter cold out and them carrion riders ain’t no use. All they do is groom them awful birds, which don’t make them smell no better, let me tell you. But you’ve a good heart, Little Blade.’

  Little Blade. Not many people used that name now. Her father’s soldiers had chosen it, when he made her a miniature copy of their own uniforms to wear, complete with a tiny sword. The sword had been blunt, so a six-year-old couldn’t hurt herself with it. Later, when the war had been won and the lordship of Whitewood awarded for the victory, her father had sharpened the blade.

  Ambitious men need fear only failure, he’d told her as he handed her the weapon. Successful men must fear everyone. I’ll be happier knowing we’re both armed. But a sword hadn’t saved him from the snake venom that carried him away in screaming agony only six years later. Oh, they all said it was a terrible accident, the creature somehow escaped from its cage beneath the Fierce Child’s shrine, but Nethmi knew the truth. Puneet had worn a mask of grief no different from the animal masks the landborn wore to honour the Fierce Child on Deep Winter Day. His real face, the real feelings, were hidden beneath.