Crownbreaker by Sebastien de Castell

Author:Sebastien de Castell [de Castell, Sebastien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780316525954
Amazon: 0316525952
Goodreads: 43885060
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2019-10-16T23:00:00+00:00

35

The Capital

One of the virtues of travelling with an army is that it makes it vastly easier to push your way into all kinds of places that might otherwise prove inaccessible, such as, for example, a city so bursting with people that it made the overcrowded capital of Darome look like a ghost town.

‘Under God’s loving eye,’ Quadan Keliesh swore as he gazed at the sweating, churning city. The Berabesq language suffers from a notable lack of profanity. ‘I do not know whether to find this magnificent or maddening.’

‘Haven’t you been here before?’ I asked.

He shook his head vigorously. ‘As Vizier Pheybas instructs, the comforts of the hearth are bars that cage the soul of the true penitent.’

Makhan Mebab was actually two cities, one encircling the other. Makhan, which meant ‘glorious’, was a tiny walled district of gleaming spires overlooking temples and palaces. Surrounding it was Mebab, which can mean either ‘worshipful’ or ‘kneeling’, depending on your translation. Here glittering streets of a white stone that sparkled in the sun were paved in perfect geometric patterns that made you wonder if perhaps the city really had been designed by a god. It certainly wasn’t designed for people.

‘This place stinks,’ Reichis sneered, his mouth hanging open so he wouldn’t have to breathe through his nostrils.

Large as Mebab was, it had been built to hold thirty thousand souls, but now had swollen to accommodate as many as a million. Clerics in white and gold robes led their own armies of lurching, limping men and women in rags in their wake, penitents in search of miracles. Wealthy merchants and artisans had squads of armoured guards holding the line to keep beggars and other undesirables from their establishments. The less well-to-do were forced to stand sentinel in front of their own shops or rely on their families. I saw more than one boy or girl aged barely ten hovering by a small market stall with a club in their hands and a nervous look in their eyes.

Yet even through the stench of sweat and too many bodies, there was a vivid excitement in the air, almost a glow about these armies of soldiers and pilgrims, fuelled by faith that here, in this place, they would see that which no one before them had ever seen: their god.

Keliesh shared that joyous anticipation, though I noted he’d balanced hope and optimism with a dozen soldiers at his back. The rest he’d left encamped outside the city with the other armies. Merchants and other wealthier citizens, seeing his red quadan’s cloak, shouted at him as we passed, demanding to know why the city was filling with riff-raff.

‘It is as Vizier Calipho warns,’ the commander said to me as we walked. ‘“Some gaze upon God and yet still see only their own face, and so are filled with misery instead of ecstasy.”’

‘You ever read Vizier Sipha?’ Ferius asked.

Keliesh, usually delighted to compare religious theologies, frowned. ‘The rantings of a female vizier, unordained by the great councils, are not considered law within the canons of our faith.

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