Chapter Nine This Lady’s Maid Went to Market
CHAPTER NINE
This Lady’s Maid Went to Market
The word spread that the God-Child had come at last. The word was met with much public rejoicing. And much secret fear.
In the land of Eyam, whether in court or Cauldron, sleepy town or crowded market, the Shroud Valley or the Mountain of Truth, all feared the dead that crawled from the abyss.
Whispers rose like steam from a cauldron, soon to reach boiling point.
Was it reality become fantasy, or a dream become a horror?
Public opinion hung in the balance, a sword hung by a single hair.
The world waited to see if the land of terrible miracles would embrace their young god, or turn against the Emperor they had awaited for so long.
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
Maids always woke hours before ladies. How could they not? Bathwater and breakfast must be fetched before it was possible for ladies to rise.
The world might have changed, but Emer didn’t know how to. She left Lia sleeping, and went downstairs to tidy. Compared to the Palace on the Edge, Forge Strike’s home was a hovel. Emer was a lady’s maid and not some scullion, but she couldn’t endure the mess. Life was in enough disorder.
While setting the room to rights, Emer felt her stomach rumble a complaint of emptiness. It seemed wrong that even in a time of unholy chaos, barbarian invasion and the yawning of the dread abyss, she could be hungry.
Ladies’ maids carried money to buy perfumes, cosmetics and little treats at the Day Market outside the palace walls. Emer had a few copper quills jangling in her apron pocket. Yesterday she worried the dead might hear coins chiming as she walked. Today, the sound meant food instead of death.
Even those who lived in hovels must go to market. Even an invaded city still needed to trade. Emer had heard of the Night Market, the dark side of their city’s Day Market. They sold tawdry wares and fenced stolen goods, the whispers said, but everybody needed to eat.
Emer felt terrified to go outside into a changed world among strangers.
So she made herself do it at once. She found a key under a pot in the kitchen, and took it.
Before Emer went out the door into the narrow street, she paused and added a kitchen knife to the contents of her apron’s deep pockets.
The dead hadn’t found her easy prey. Nor would the living.
It was easy enough to find the Night Market, which Emer was relieved to note also operated during daytime hours.
The sounds of bustle, coins jangling and wheels turning, merchants hawking their wares, drifted over the low walls and houses packed together.
Emer had to step over rubble, and a dried stain on the cobblestones, but the streets had been cleared of bodies.
The stalls of the Night Market were shabbier than those of the Day Market.
The few shopfronts had pictures drawn upon them rather than written signs, since Cauldron folk didn’t know their letters.
While the Day Market was surrounded by the golden walls circling the Palace on the Edge, from the Night Market stretched the grey waste of the Graves of the Unloved Dead, all the way out to a sudden drop from the fiery lip of the abyss.
Otherwise, Emer realized with slow-dawning surprise, the markets weren’t so different.
At court they said cosmetics for ladies of the night were different from those of fine ladies – more obvious and cheap – but there were only so many kinds of red in the world for lip salve and cheek rouge.
The animals killed might be skinnier, the fruit and vegetables less fresh, but the rich and poor of the city ate much the same food.
As Emer walked through the crowd, she heard clusters of people gossiping about the latest news from the palace, just as they would at the Day Market.
Much had happened in the palace last night. Emer heard “the Emperor” from a hundred mouths in a hundred tones: awed, doubtful, suspicious and scared. She had always had a talent for eavesdropping. As a servant in the palace, it was a very useful skill.
Time would tell if eavesdropping on the scum of the Cauldron produced similar results.
The prices in the Night Market were set outrageously high. Emer silently called the Cauldron stall-owners thieves, until she made out words in the hum around her.
“Who knows when we’ll next see lamb from Shroud, with raiders outside—”
“Once it’s all gone—”
“We’ve got to have supplies.”
Emer didn’t have much coin to waste. She fell deliberately in step behind two middle-aged women weaving around the stalls with an air of casual expertise. Emer knew enough to value experience. This pair would lead her to the best bargains.
As the women eyed bruises on fruit and thumbs on weighing scales, they discussed religion.
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised about the Emperor, Flower.
You’re always going to sunrise meditations on the balconies, saying you look into the abyss and its lord looks back at you.
The Emperor’s time is nigh, you told me last week.
You said he was coming and he’s come. You might as well be surprised by the milkman. ”
The woman called Flower didn’t have a marked resemblance to anything in the floral line. Her face had the dull, greyish pallor of land from which nothing grew. She looked as scared as Emer felt.
“The milkman brings milk, not the walking dead,” Flower hissed.
From the cradle to the restless grave, every soul in Eyam lived with that fear.
Ghouls had been driven into the abyss long ago, but sometimes they found a way out.
And if some poor soul died without anyone knowing, or if they were too poor to afford an enchanted headstone to hold their body down in Eyam’s rich strange earth, new ghouls rose.
From the cradle to the restless grave, every soul in Eyam learned the lesson: There are monsters outside. Monsters are always hungry.
Everybody needed to eat. Even the dead.
When Emer went with her lady to the capital, the palace staff had drills for when the dead attacked. The rules were simple: never invite the dead in. If you saw the dead from a distance, run and alert the guards. If you saw the dead up close… good luck, the ghouls were going to eat you.
There were no rules for when the dead didn’t attack. Now ghouls walked the streets of the city, doing the bidding of the Emperor. Emer, Flower and her friend watched a dead woman lurch by, dust-grey head down, dragging a piece of masonry.
Half of Emer wanted to run screaming. The other half felt unexpected pity. She had never seen a ghoul with its head down before. It reminded her of how servants shuffled after a long day of service, of hauling baths or trays, cleaning messes you hadn’t made or cooking food you would never eat.
Imagine having to serve, even after death.
As the ghoul moved past, they all gave a sigh of relief.
Flower spoke louder in the ghoul’s wake. It made Emer think of Lady Rae, who laughed the loudest and acted the most outrageously when she was scared. Some people thought that if their act convinced others, they would one day believe in themselves.
“Now the Emperor’s here, everything will be better,” Flower trumpeted. “The virtuous will be rewarded, and the sinful eaten. See how even the dead love and serve him?”
Loving someone and serving them were two different things. Clearly, Flower had never been a maid.
“I know a secret about the Emperor,” whispered Flower’s friend.
Emer didn’t want to care. Against her will, her back tensed and her ears strained to catch every word.
“My cousin’s friend gambles with this pickpocket – my cousin’s friend isn’t the brightest spark who ever flew up from the abyss – who claims he knows the Emperor.
That they were trained up together as boys by a guild. ”
Trained up by a guild as the guild’s pet thieves and murderers, Emer’s mind filled in. Guild merchants had a lot of money, and wished to keep it that way. She had always wondered where Key learned his fighting skills.
“An indentured child?” Flower asked.
The poorest of the poor. A child sold by their own family, or one of the orphans left at the edge of the dread ravine, destined to either fall in or get picked up and made use of.
Emer was an abyss foundling herself. She dreaded to think what might have befallen her if Lady Katalina Domitia had not found her and decided to raise a perfect maid for her daughter. Emer had believed she and Key were both abyss foundlings.
Flower’s friend continued. “This pickpocket is seeing one of the palace assassins – you know how common interests bring people together. While he was in the palace checking if his lover survived the night, he caught a glimpse of the Emperor’s actual face and recognized him!”
The last time Emer saw Key, she saw his throat cut. She wondered what he looked like now.
“Inspiring,” breathed Flower. “Makes you think. What if a god were one of us? Imagine a god walking among the humble…”
Flower’s friend made a face. “I don’t know if we’re that humble.”
“Speak for yourself; I’m extremely humble. Probably the most humble person who ever lived,” Flower snapped. “In his infinite mercy and wisdom, the Emperor sought to understand his lowly subjects, and show his love by suffering alongside us.”
There was a pause. Emer contemplated Key’s infinite mercy and wisdom.
Flower’s friend decided. “I would prefer it if a god showed his love by raining golden coins down upon my head. Lightly down upon my head.”
Flower gave an excited squawk. “Does your cousin’s friend’s gambling pickpocket acquaintance know the Emperor’s name?”
“Well, no,” admitted Flower’s friend. “They weren’t close. He says the Emperor wasn’t close to anybody. Very different from other people.”
“Stands to reason that a god wouldn’t be like other people,” Flower remarked wisely.
The grey colour receded from Flower’s face as she pieced together a story that made sense to her.
Emer supposed it made sense, if you thought about it as a story.
She had heard all the pieces of this story before, in a dozen other stories.
A child with a great destiny born in humble surroundings, growing up to be a great warrior or a king or a god or a swan.
Except Emer had actually met Key. On the first night of their acquaintance he’d butchered multiple assassins and complained about being bored. Key constantly made wild decisions, like worshipping the court’s most notorious scarlet woman or punching the king in the face.
Key was very different from other people. They had that right.
Stories were meant to comfort people, Emer supposed. Stories didn’t have to be true.
The Emperor got dropped in favour of a more important topic as the women Emer stalked approached another stall. “What’s fresh today?”
The fishmonger said, “Fresh is a strong word. You won’t get fresher any time soon, with raiders at the gates. I can tell you what’s the freshest of the lot…”
The women made their fish selection. Discreetly, Emer ordered the same. She fussed over the string on her purchases as conversation turned towards the invaders.
Flower shook her head. “Without the Emperor, infidel Tagar berserkers would have ravished us in our beds.”
“I hear ice raiders wash every day. I hear they’re draped in gold and costly furs that they scatter on the beds of the women who please them,” sighed Flower’s friend. “My Lathe doesn’t wash every day. Or every season.”
Flower and the fishmonger laughed. Emer had seen the people of this city torn apart yesterday, seen survivors terrified and fleeing, seen the city gates fall and the abyss open.
Today, people still needed to buy fish. They wanted to gossip about their friends.
They wanted to talk about the court in the way people discussed characters in stories – so distant they weren’t real, even though you knew enough about them to have opinions.
Despite the horrors, people fell back into living their lives in the same old way.
They wanted to talk about change but remain comfortable.
Surely a true king or a just god would come soon, but tomorrow, not today.
The enemy might be at the gates, but they surely wouldn’t get inside.
No matter who sat the throne, surely those in charge had everything under control.
Flower and her friend bid the fishmonger farewell and strolled on through the Night Market. A call went up from another vendor, offering scarves half price. Flower hurried towards the bargain. She didn’t even notice as she jostled the ghoul woman with her grey head hanging.
The ghoul’s body, sagging like a puppet on lax strings, now tensed. Taut as the moment before a string snapped.
The ghoul whirled and bit out the woman’s throat, as fast as a kitchen dog wolfing down a pat of butter before someone could strike and stop it.
Blood sprayed across the dust, dappling the half-price scarves with scarlet.
Flower’s friend screamed, hand still tucked in the crook of the now-dead woman’s elbow.
Emer dropped her packages on the ground, running forward to seize the living woman by her waist.
The woman screamed and struck out in panic. Emer gritted her teeth and physically hurled her into the crowd. As far as she could throw her, though not far enough for safety. Emer scrabbled for the knife in her apron pocket.
When Emer whirled to confront the dead with her blade in hand, the ghoul was dragging the rock again.
Face blank, even as its jaw still moved to swallow its meal and the body twitched at its feet.
The body that a moment before was Flower, who believed the virtuous would be rewarded and the sinful eaten, once the Emperor came.
Obedience was not love. Monsters were always hungry.
Key had unleashed what he could not control. Emer wondered how long it would take before people realized that as long as the Emperor reigned, so would chaos.
Then Emer bent down and picked up her packages. Everybody needed to eat.
When Forge Strike walked from her forge into the kitchen to find Emer cooking breakfast, a brief look of surprise crossed her face, chased by pleasure. “I could get used to this.”
Emer said: “Don’t.”