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  To the Dead City

  The First Book of the Glyst Saga

  Alex Bentley

  To the Dead City

  Copyright Alex Bentley 2021

  Chapter One

  Seven Cuts and Seven Cups

  As we move deeper into the Freewood, I think of how I will never be like my father. Not because he is a man and I am a girl—even though I have received the Seven Cuts and filled the Seven Cups—but because he is fearless and I am afraid. I have been afraid every day for the last three of my sixteen years. But my father doesn’t know this. Nobody knows. I hide my fear, burying it as a crow buries its food.

  “Alys,” my father whispers. “Look. There.” With a massive hand, he points at the highest branches of an oak, a furlong from where we’ve been squatting patiently for the last hour. The tree is tall and strong but, like everything that grows in the Freewood, it has an air of sickness to it, as if something is amiss beneath the bark. The Tanwood, on the other side of the river, is lush and abundant, the trees that grow there sturdy, the animals caught there clad in sweet, tender flesh. The animals in the Freewood are tough, stringy and flavourless. Like the welpa up there in the sick oak tree, the one that my father is pointing at as if it’s a miracle.

  “I see it,” I tell him, and nock an arrow.

  He shakes his head, then smiles.

  “Next time,” he says.

  I understand. We are in need of food, and my aim is not as true as his. I lower my bow but keep the arrow nocked.

  My father slides an arrow from the quiver on his back. The quiver is made from the grey, matted skins of several welpa, stitched together with thick, woollen thread. He nocks the arrow and draws. The quiver is shoddy, but the bow is strong and fine. My father made it himself when he was my age. He aims. He waits. He waits. Waits. Then he releases the string.

  The welpa throws back its head and opens its long, black muzzle to signal its distress or to warn its kin, but no sound emerges. Its spindly limbs wilt and it drops to the forest floor with a thud-rustle, autumn leaves rising in something like a circle around the dead creature, then settling again.

  “Bag it,” says my father, nocking another arrow.

  The welpa is dead, my father knows this. But he also knows that the scavengers in the Freewood are swift and dangerous.

  I slide the arrow back into my quiver and shoulder the bow. Running in a half-crouch and keeping wide of my father’s line of sight, I race toward the lifeless welpa. I am not fearless like my father, but I am faster than him. I am faster than anyone in Gafol. The Jarl of Gafol says this is because I filled the Seven Cups and have less blood now, lightening my load, but I was the fastest long before the cuts. I used to think the Jarl was wise. Now I am certain he is a fool. A selfish, lazy fool. The Seven Cuts are symbolic, they don’t actually do anything. Unless you count almost killing you as doing something.

  I don’t know if you have the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups in your part of Abegan. It is a cruel and needless ceremony, one that I now think is not intended to transform but kill, to remove an embarrassing problem.

  When a husband and wife have only one child, and that child is a girl, life is hard. For example, a girl cannot accompany her father when he hunts in the Freewood and bag his game. That is the duty of the son. If my father had to bag his own game, he wouldn’t be able to keep watch for slite and nef and other things with teeth and claws, and he would be vulnerable. A hunter without a son in the Freewood will find his death. Even a hunter as proficient as my father. A man without a son cannot bequeath his sword and must fight in every conflict regardless of infirmity. When a man without a son dies, everything he owns becomes the property of the Jarl, even the man’s wife. The prospect of this weighs heavily on the sonless man, and he dies prematurely, bringing to pass that which he dreaded all the sooner. It is a wretched thing to be a man without a son.

  I could tell you in the most academic terms about the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups. I could give you an entirely dispassionate account, but I feel that would miss the point. The point of the ceremony is pain and degradation.

  They woke me early. The sun was little more than a nick on the horizon, bleeding a little light onto the fields in the distance, not quite reaching the thatched roofs of the roundhouses of Gafol. They took me, naked, to the Jarl’s hall and strung me up like a hog or a foorstig, feet to the rafters, crown to the earth. And the Jarl cut me seven times with a whetted flint so thin it was almost invisible, and those spectators at the back of the hall might have thought he inflicted those gushing wounds with a stroke of his fingertips. The first cut was from my hairline to the nape of my neck. The noise it made, the passage of that razored flint, was not unlike the sound of a fish being gutted. But it was louder. I could hear that sound in the centre of my skull, the middle of my mind, and, ever since, in my dreams and nightmares. The second cut was to my left wrist, a bloody torc. The third was to the right wrist. The fourth ran down the soft flesh of the inner portion of my upper left arm, ending at the elbow, beginning at the armpit. The fifth reflected the fourth on my right arm. The sixth was deep and long across my belly, as you might have seen on a mother whose child was stubborn at birth. The final cut, the seventh cut, was really two cuts, a seventh and an eighth, but delivered as a single slash across the middle of my thighs. It bothers me, more than it should, that the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups comprises eight cuts. It makes a lie of the whole thing.

  Blood ran into my mouth, up my nose, into my eyes. I had to keep spitting and snorting to stop myself from being suffocated. But a part of me was glad of the blood, because it hid my tears. I did not want the Jarl or the people of Gafol to see my tears; nor my mother and father.

  Seven clay cups were placed beneath me, or so my father told me. I was oblivious by that point. I was cold and hot, terrified and sleepy. I was this, and I was that, all at once. I was aware of applause and hoots. These were the sounds I’d once heard when my mother had told me to accompany my father to the Festival of Seros to make sure he came home unscathed, the sounds the men had made as he’d gulped far too much mead from the horn of a goat.

  Only when the cups were full did the applause and the hooting cease, and only then were my wounds cleaned and bound. I drifted in and out of sleep for I don’t know how many days. I remember the Jarl chanting the Verses of Wealm somewhere high above me, a look on his face that fell somewhere between apology and certainty. Alys is dead, that face cried out. How awful. How expected.

  But I wasn’t dead. My father wouldn’t have to go to war when he was old and infirm. His belongings and his wife would not become the property of the Jarl. And he would have someone to accompany him when he hunted in the Freewood.

  I grab the welpa and push it into the strong, woollen bag my mother made last year. My mother will never be the property of the Jarl. She died three months ago, and that was that. I remember how she screamed when they dragged me to the Ritual. Dragged me, though I’d volunteered. The dragging was part of it, I suppose. She never cried. She shrieked, and she ranted, but she did not sob. She cried a little on the day she died, as the thing deep inside her, the thing that smelled terrible and she told us was made of hot spikes, shifted and grew and stopped her from breathing. The only time I ever saw her cry with abandon was when I won the Five Eagle Feathers as the fastest runner in Gafol when I was just nine years old and still my father’s daughter.

  “Alys!”

  I am pulling the drawstring tight on the bag I watched my mother make when my father cries out. I don’t have to see the slite to know it’s there. The smell is more than sufficient. The smell—like rotted mushrooms and deep earth—and the sound in my father’s voice that I refuse to believe is fear. Alar
m, yes, but not fear.

  The slite rears up on its hind legs so it stands taller than our roundhouse. I glimpse its fishbelly-white flesh through the shaggy blankets of moss and fern that have grown on its pale hide over what must be decades. It’s an old one, and the old ones are clever. It could have snagged the welpa and run, could have stolen our supper. But it waited. For a bigger meal. Its antlers look like deadwood—and that’s just what I’d thought I’d seen as I approached the welpa: a pile of moss-carpeted deadwood—but they are not brittle as deadwood. A slite’s antlers are hard as rock, and sharp. They sharpen them against the Wyrsan Stones that stand at the heart of the Freewood, the stones that some say are the reason for the forest’s sickness and some say are just stones.

  It drops back down onto four legs and charges. In the same instant, an arrow thuds into its rump. My father shouts something, but I don’t hear it over the thunderous snort of the slite. I don’t hear it, but I know what his instruction would be. Leave the welpa. I do just that, and dart left, going instinctively to where the forest is thicker, where there is less room for the slite to manoeuvre, increasing my chances of survival. Leaving the welpa behind has also made it marginally less likely that I’ll die. If I can outrun the thing for long enough, it will be forced to decide: continue to pursue me and potentially eat nothing or return to the place of ambush and a guaranteed meal. Not as tasty and satisfying a meal as me, but better than an empty stomach.

  If I had not bled into the Seven Cups and lived, my father would be alone now, and he can’t run as fast as me. Nobody can run as fast as me. I have the Five Eagle Feathers hanging above my bed to prove it.

  And even as I speed into the forest, I realise my mistake.

  The slite isn’t following me. If it were following me, I would feel the droplet-heavy clouds of its foetid breath against the back of my neck. I would hear its snorts and the gnashing of its long, black teeth. I risk a glance over my shoulder.

  The slite is charging toward my father.

  My father, knowing he cannot outrun it, looses two arrows before the thing is upon him. Both find their target, but the slite is unimpressed. It twists its head and swipes with its antlers.

  My father throws his bow left and lurches right, hoping the twin movements might confuse the beast. It doesn’t. As I thought, old and therefore clever. The slite’s antlers, sharpened on the Wyrsan Stones, catch my father’s shoulder, but only just, and the strap of his quiver takes the brunt of the damage. The quiver falls, scattering arrows. My father is moving fast now, circling round the beast and drawing his sword. He hacks twice at the slite’s mossy hide before it turns to face him once more. It lashes out with its antlers once more, but he skips back and they miss him by inches.

  I am only a few yards from my father, drawing my knife, when the slite slashes with its antlers and lunges forward in a single undulating motion. I see its eyes, huge, yellow and mad. I see steam and snot erupt from its flaring nostrils. I see its antlers—how could I ever have mistaken them for deadwood?—slash at my father’s chest.

  He spins, facing me now and, for the first time in my life, I see fear in his eyes. His tunic is ragged where the antlers gouged it and glistening red with blood. The sword that had once been his father’s hangs limp in his hand, but he does not drop it.

  “Run!” he yells.

  Chapter 2

  The Stone Has Hit the Lake

  I do as my father tells me. I run. But not in the direction he intended.

  I run toward him.

  The slite rises up on its hind legs, looming over my father like the waves at Brim, the moment before they crash against the cliffs with that tremendous noise that my mother told me was the voice of a drowned god, its name long forgotten, its misery eternal.

  My father turns back to face the beast, lifting his sword. He finds a gap in the slite’s shaggy hide, a glimpse of pale flesh, and rams his sword into its belly. The blade disappears to the hilt. A foul green-black liquid gushes from the wound, and the slite lets out a thick, wet shriek. My father tries to retrieve his sword, but the grip is slick, and he staggers back weaponless.

  The slite, snorting blood now, drops onto all fours and slams its granite skull into my father’s already mutilated chest. My father is lifted from the ground and sent several yards through the air, landing at my feet. His eyes are closed. His mouth, filled with blood, hangs open.

  The slite stalks toward him, toward me, but already its legs are failing, its snorts becoming frequent and shallow. It lists left and crashes onto its side. My father’s sword is expelled from its belly in a fountain of that green-black liquid. The smell is atrocious, as when an animal geds itself at slaughter, and I am ashamed to find it reminds me of my mother’s breath in the days approaching her death.

  I want to go to my father, but I can’t take my eyes off the slite, suddenly certain it will lurch back to its feet and charge at me with its not-deadwood antlers. I run to my father, my knife in my hand, and now that I have reached him, I can do nothing because I am afraid.

  Blood spurts from the slite’s nostrils and I am reminded of the Ritual, of the blood running into my nose. The wound in the slite’s gut gapes, and I am reminded of the Ritual, of the cut across my own belly. The slite’s mad, yellow eyes roll back into its long skull, and I am reminded of the Ritual, of the Seventh Cup filled and my consciousness draining from me, as if my very self had been housed in my veins all along and not in my head as I had always thought.

  I look at the slite and I am reminded of the Ritual.

  But, if I’m being honest, when I look at anything I am reminded of the Ritual. I am always thinking of the Ritual.

  The Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups.

  That cruel and pointless endeavour.

  Why couldn’t they have just let me hunt with my father as I was? Why couldn’t they have just let me fight in my father’s place as I was? Why did they have to fill my sleep with nightmares? Why did they have to make me afraid? I was of more use to my father before the Ritual. The process that had made me worthy in the eyes of the Jarl, those eyes through which all his ancestors stared, had made me worthless in my own eyes and useless in reality. Before the Ritual, I was so free of fear, I volunteered to be cut and bled. After, I jumped at shadows and the sight and smell of blood turned my stomach.

  I am suddenly furious. And in my fury, I am unafraid.

  I turn my back on the slite. If it rises, it rises. If it charges, it charges. If I die, I die.

  I kneel at my father’s side. He is still alive. His chest is rising and falling but, like the slite, his breathing is shallow. His eyes are closed, but there is a flickering behind his eyelids.

  One of his arms has fallen across his chest. I lift it so I might better see the wound. I wish I hadn’t. There is bone visible in the mess of blood and muscle. This is a deathwound. On the field of battle, a fallen warrior’s companion would touch the tip of their sword to the wound and say, “Wealm is here. His cold hand touches me. But not as it has touched this man. Blessed be Wealm.” But I say nothing. I don’t feel the cold touch of Wealm. I still feel the fury, and it is as hot as a new-forged blade in the moments before it is quenched. I feel that heat in my chest, in my heart. Then it begins to spread. Down into my gut, up into my skull. It ripples down my arms to my fingertips and, without thinking about it, an act of pure intuition, I sink my suddenly burning fingers into my father’s wound.

  There is a hiss.

  Steam rises from the wound.

  My father’s legs begin to twitch.

  Behind his eyelids, his eyes move with the frantic energy of trapped insects.

  And then I am no longer in the Freewood. I am no longer with my father.

  I am nowhere.

  A vast expanse of blackness stretches out in all directions. I look down at myself and there is no ‘myself’ to see. I try to hold out my hands in front of my eyes. There are no hands to hold out, no eyes with which to see them. There is nothing, just nothing,
and I am part of it. I have fainted, I decide. Or I have gone mad. Or I have gone mad and fainted. Or died and gone to such a place as the mad go when they pass. Perhaps I am deep underwater with the drowned god at Brim. Does it matter? And, anyway, it isn’t so bad. I feel calm. For the first time since the Ritual, I feel calm. I feel like I used to feel in those sweet moments just before I’d drift off to sleep, when I could hear my mother and father talking, and sometimes laughing, as they carried on about their various tasks after I’d been put to bed. It is like a folding-in of the self into a secret, warm place of safety and troublelessness. I would smile if I had a mouth with which to smile and sigh if I had lungs with which to sigh. Is this what it would have been like if I’d succumbed to the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups? Are these the Fields of Wealm? But I have not died in battle—unless the slite crept up on me and ended my life—and, anyway, where are the Great Orchards? Where are the Unrim, those bees the size of horses that the dead ride to the River of Honey? Where is my mother?

  No, these are not the Fields of Wealm. This is nothing. This is Nowhere.

  And that’s fine. I am happy to be Nowhere.

  I lose track of time. Perhaps there is no time here in the Nowhere. What purpose could time have in relation to nothing? Things happen from one moment to the next. When nothing is happening, what use are moments, what even is ‘next’?

  I lose track of time and time loses all meaning.

  And then the Nowhere ripples.

  There is an old turn of phrase that my father would use when discussing the marital strife of another couple: the stone has hit the lake. I remember when we could hear Bloma and Wessim Cropp shouting at each other from four roundhouses away, my father said to my mother, with rather too much satisfaction, “I told you, Alva. I told you, did I not? They were not a fit match, those two. The stone has hit the lake. Sooner than I thought, too.” When I asked my mother about the phrase, she said, “It is one of the old turns, little Alys. It is about the Big Things. The Gods. Your father uses it in a silly way. Because he is a silly man. Sweet and silly.”