At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  “Do you find this place palatable, lady? It must be so different from your own climes,” he blurted.

  She turned on him with the measure of a child, a false but pleasant surprise, and the demurred nod of one pleased to be noticed. “Not so different—but I left when I was very young.” The lady pouted her pretty painted lips. “We are lucky, to have such kindness here. And I, in your lady wife.”

  “Is that so?”

  Ersili pursed herself into something vaguely resembling a smirk. “I have taken Alejandrita into my house for a Lady-in-Waiting. I find her eye for such matters of the cloth too entrancing to ignore. And I suppose it should set the other ladies tongues to wagging.”

  “Fashion is well and good,” Count Ibin added. “My wife should know. She spends too much of her time at market, and too little in church, I think, praying for my debauched soul.”

  “The world could put themselves to such a task, my dear. It would not help.”

  Ersili chuckled. “So long as you gird yourself in the true faith, I have faith Assal will take his mercies on you, Your Highness.”

  “I dare say it did not much aid old Portir.” The count snorted with clear glee, even as his own wife paled. “How is the old bag, anyhow?”

  “He rests quiet until his trial,” Ersili answered swiftly. “It is a source of our own great distress, and we have taken care to make sure his every need is met until that day.”

  But the count quirked a wary eyebrow at his empress-to-be. “And what of the Empress Dowager?”

  The thin line Ersili made of her lips creased into the faintest of smiles. “We love our mother dearly, and wish her swift recovery.”

  Almost lazily, the count then cast about. “Yet I note you are also two knights shy this eve. All know where Bidderick dallies, but where, pray tell, might Darrow have gotten to? The rest of the family is here, after all.”

  Why that had anything to do with anything, Leopold had no knowing. Surely men had to piss. Mayhaps he had stepped outside to rut a maid—they called him the Mummer Knight, not the Chaste Knight. Yet it did seem to vex his wife.

  Ersili left shortly thereafter, after accepting formally a request to take the count’s daughter in as another of her ladies. Tragic as it was, Alejandrita took her arm, and the rest of her ladies took up her train, that all would know who passed through the crowds. They parted for her like waves in the sea, though her eyes graced none but his own, lingering a moment at the door before slipping out to bed.

  Without the shield of his wife, Leopold found himself descended upon first by his brother Rufus, then all the rest. “So,” the man said, as the others would echo, “what lies in our majesty’s nearest future?” It sickened him to think on it.

  By the time his knights waddled him to the door, he felt faint, and his stomach churned with the night’s pleasures. There was a tune in his heart and a world before his eyes—too glittery, for the moment, and much too unstable, but nothing a long night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. He longed to take his wife in hand, but she had gone before him. A whine welled up in his parched throat, until he thought a moment on their bed.

  He giggled, sharp and high, and nearly skipped a step straight into the wall. His knights gathered closer, and they began to ascend.

  At the top of the steps, another figure waited for them, however. They paused only long enough for Leopold to realize the man was someone of import. He squinted in a vague attempt to steady his gaze. It brought a smile to his lips, for though the man was but a shadow, it was a shadow he knew well. A phantom nearly as old as crowned ashes on the wind.

  Another uncle, or close enough. A bastard with his father’s visage, and the greatest sense of the webs that surrounded his corpse. A balding, unassuming figure, he bowed low to his emperor, without mirth.

  “I would have words, Your Majesty. And a gift for your coronation.”

  Their words were short, but to the point. By the end, he felt as though he might stride on air itself, and wrap himself in the fabric of the clouds. The Guard fanned themselves out against the door as he slid into the soothing darkness, rolling head and body to the sounds only he could hear—not in tune to the merriment still raging below. He nearly stumbled over the threshold, but another sight stayed him.

  Upon the bed, his wife, bared wide before the eyes of Assal and man alike. Her hands touched the fullness of her breasts, as yet untouched by time, even as some foreign git, still full in the freshness of youth, ran fingers across the flower of her nethers. Nay. Not any foreign git—a Naran. Forgetting at once the buzzing in his ears, he stirred to the sight. He shed both cloth and sin, and hastened for a taste of heaven.

  * *

  The halls of the castle were quiet in this late hour, the merriment done, its spaces occupied by the wraiths of men, walking with spears and blades never meant to be unsheathed.

  There were men that would speak of “real” men—of honor and right and other terms man-made yet indefinable. Men could always put a face to the term, and this face would come to define each to every one persona.

  But if honor were so subjective, how could it be defined as anything but a notion? Poets and wordsmiths gave birth to such illusions, while men were left to wallow in mere reality—a concept that would send most those pretty pens scurrying back to their pretty puckered holes if it ever brandished an honest tooth at them.

  The reality of honest and upright men was not that they were either honest or upright, but that, often enough, they controlled the means to cast themselves in a considerate light. Fire, after all, burned only where God or man deigned to give it breath.

  And still the people will make their illusions.

  The people, he thought, well, the people are ill-suited to the intricacies of notions. Orthodox men, they’ll say, this empress, she is the devil born, she hounded our mother to the grave with her spells and coaxing looks. Never mind the Mother was a woman nigh seventy years from her first name day, decades older than most women should hope to get. Meanwhile, the Farrens take you aside and say no, no, a devil, no—she is a saint upon the earth, a celestial made flesh. And they’ll fawn and they’ll swoon and they’ll tell you how the Patriarch, far away in his palace in Ravonno, he made the crops fail or a son’s nose grow too big, because all men gain power in the pursuit of wrongs perceived. It is so.

  In his forty years at court, Vollny had not met one man he could be forced to name chivalrous to the fettered confines of his own pauper heart. To their faces, of course, any man could be a knight that asked the pleasure and offered up the coin—but as he said, reality was another matter. Vollny had met liars and thieves and murderers and more than his fair share of whores—and lain with them, oft enough, in the golden bed—many of them men of cloth or steel or even a crown or two, but none virtuous. None that were anything but names whispered on all too fleeting winds.

  More than a few of his whores had paid his way into the graces of these virtuous men’s perfumed homes. It was in this willow way, this shadowed path, that his own mere concept of man had become something else. Not more, perhaps, but less was best. Less a man was less to see, to name and to know and to kill.

  Men of the shadowed path cast aside faith as an end unrealized. Faulty and fragile. They kept to what they saw, and made it their own.

  Yet the fact of man was this: some were inherently larger than others. Years Vollny had lost to the walls of Anscharde’s lords, but never so large a prize in so small a shape had he been tasked.

  A crown was the notion; its taking or its keeping, well, that depended on him.

  He came as a notion, steeled in the arms of grander men—or rather, of a man, gutted and left rotting in the city’s broad canals. Become flesh again, the opaque form took new shape—one could walk amongst them without travail if only he bowed his head and mastered the routine. So long as he passed neither too close nor too far from the sun of men’s eyes, with the purpose of the dead and the dreaming.

  Other rats of the streets had helped him to this po
int, but now—now it was his path alone. The final call had been sent, and that Boyce had not called him off. Now he walked the halls to the door, the gate to a nation. A pair waited, chattering with none of steel’s convictions. He put a smile to his face, and a hand to his own, and moved toward them.

  They scarcely noticed. He made as if to pass them by before one ever began to look, and all that one saw was the pike as it rammed him through the unclasped jaw. The other—too young to know war’s kiss or a woman’s touch, did not even reach for his blade. Wide suns merely stared as Vollny‘s own dagger ushered them into night.

  Yet no clatter went unheard. Not in such a place. The sound preceded the beginning of the race, and he fell upon it as the wild horse first cracked by a rider’s crop. Sturdy doors would not give to boots, but they would answer picks. He took their shape, and brushed the last of his barriers aside.

  Gold awaited him. It was just so, for it was not Cullick’s coin. Not really. It was his coin. Cullick merely held it for a time.

  The crown slept in silken sheets. He bared his blade to cut her free and cast back the illusion.

  Each soul had a cage at the center of its world. Some were smaller than others, no matter how grand the life beyond.

  Some shifted day-by-day. His blade clattered off iron, and a man rolled free.

  He should have known a trap by its smell. But he certainly knew one by the creak of crossbows.

  All at once the room was an explosion of noise—the clatter of metal and arms, all coming for his neck. They spilled from the hall and from the sitting room beside, shouting orders. There was no man alive that could meet such a horde and ward them with a dagger.

  He twisted, turned, backing, ever backing, as the noose drew tight. There was one thing he could do. Silence—it was the one precious item in the brotherhood of blades.

  The crossbowmen were quicker. Even as the blade touched his throat, the first pin cushioned his shoulder, and the dagger flung wide. He had only a moment to consider where he had done wrong. Then the men were upon him.

  * *

  Sometimes the Maker saw fit to bless his loyal souls. Sometimes it was a meager gift, and others, a bounty.

  Today, Leopold had learned the true meaning of bounty.

  “Blade in hand? Assal be good, man, you let him so close to her?”

  His bastard uncle shrugged. In such close quarters, a man might have mistaken him for a prune. “The spider must be allowed to think it is he that spins the web, lest all our lines unravel before his eyes.”

  I have you. I have you.

  “You are certain he is Cullick’s man?”

  “Majesty, with all due respect—he has his birds, and I have mine. Truth be told, we have his birds as well, and that is half the reason we have him. It is his creature. And if any doubts remain, we have put him to the question. In time, as all men, he will say whatever you would wish him to.”

  Even the thought of torture could not sour Leopold’s mood. With an almost child-like glee, he looked out on the city now called home. It shone at night, but it glittered as a gem by the dawn’s early light.

  The carriage rumbled to the crooks of the cobbles, but no quake could rattle the vision. From the iron gates of the castle, it was little over half a mile to the city’s cathedral, where Ingricus, Archbishop and Royal Confessor of Anscharde, waited to greet them. Dozens of streets crisscrossed and converged across that distance between hundreds of homes and shops, built of a medley of brick, stone, and sturdy wood. Old gargoyles loomed prominent from high towers, occupying the landings some doddering old fools still claimed once housed nests of gryphon.

  Banners hung from end to end across the broad lane of the city’s main avenue, bearing more of those gryphons, and styled in the colors of the crown, or even the blue of the Church. Mark these, he thought on a glance, for these are the men that hid, the men that survived where heathens walked. A firework went off in the street ahead, urging several of their accompanying horses forward with scowls on the riders’ faces, while the children responsible were swallowed in the swelling mass.

  Anscharde was one of the largest cities in all the continent Marindis, and it showed. It lacked, perhaps, the vibrancy of stone and architecture of his southron home, but what it lacked in artistic grace it made up for in the colorful nature of its people.

  There, beside the southron gate—the Plains Gate—one could find even Zuti pirates plastered to their wagons, bellowing out prices of southron diamonds. To the north, along their river port, Karnushian vagabonds swaggered alongside the oldest of the city’s denizens, and the three thousand members of the city guard walked at their strongest, shoulders heaved against the swell, in gangs and bands, the short cloaks and tricorne hats that were their marker whipping in the same water-borne breeze that drowned snickers of the same.

  Between the low, expanded walls of the city’s interior that split the place in twain, Leopold thought that this—all of it—was a damp thing, and smelly, in the fashion of all such wealth of humanities, but it was an old place, swelling with murderers and thieves and even an honest man or two, and these were to be his people. This place—a marker of the country as a whole.

  Win this and all of it is yours, he told himself.

  Along the streets and alleys, the bodies already gathered. Thousands left their morning’s paces, or the gypsies’ and the merchants’ haggling, came on by foot or horse, and dangled from the backs of carts and the sills of windows, to catch a glimpse of the man that would be their lord. Around his train, men of his own chamber fueled the interest with the routines of more southron courts—passing alms and bread and sermons to the fleshy sea, and being sure all praised Emperor Leopold for the honor.

  And soon, every one of these people would know Cullick and the Mother Whore for the traitors they were. Every one. And then, soon enough, the Empire.

  What’s more: they would love him for it. Emperor Leopold, second of his name, His Most Divine Grace, they would say, who returned the Empire to its true path and ushered in a new age with a cleansing of the old. Not conqueror, but reformer. Not emperor, but sovereign guide. Father, oh holiest of fathers.

  His name—his family’s names—would ring with the tingle of this victory for a century to come. Hard to imagine it all began with a spider. He could not have kept the grin from his face if he tried.

  “Take care in how you treat this though, Your Majesty.”

  He startled to find his uncle leaned toward him, thin lips pursed tight. “What do you mean?” What was the man about? Was he a devil’s advocate, or merely one of those insufferable wobblers? Leopold frowned at the man. He thought he had marked him better. “We have proof! After today, no rabble will take that whoreson for a leader.”

  “Cullick? No. But the Empress, majesty. I can see it in your eyes. I should not speak out against her, if I were you.

  The audacity! He clenched his fist against his robes and felt the smile falter. “And why ever should that be?” he snapped.

  A hand fell against his thigh, patting his own. He twisted on his wife, but her gentle eyes disarmed him. A word came to grips, then fell away again. She shook her head.

  “He is right, Leo. This is the long game we play. One piece at a time.” She flicked her lashes and turned to the window, and to the crowds beyond.

  The long game. He had to bite that one back. Yes, it was true, but he did not know what the long game was—nor did he see the reason to make a long game of something that might be swiftly done. Procrastination—that had been the death of more men than a headlong charge, by his own experience.

  But an emperor should not have to ask why. True men should already know what he did or did not fathom—be there to answer, regardless, to save a man his grace. His uncle dipped his head in assent to Ersili.

  “Heathen. Heretic. Traitor. Name her as you will, majesty, but many still love her as a mother.”

  “The people are fickle,” Leopold interrupted. “Surely they will love my wife as mother, an
d forget her soon enough? Especially as her treasons come to light.”

  “You are both new—forgive me so—untested and unknown. Your gestures, they come with a certain foreign scent to which they are unfamiliar.” As both their eyes fixed on him, the old man made an apologetic roll of his shoulders, but pressed on. “Time, in all things. A crown sets you as their head, not their father. Too much, too soon, and they and the nobles both are like enough to see you as invader, not as heir.

  “You can use the woman. What is she, after all, but a captive to her coz’s whims? He holds her, and now he forces her son to marry—your own brother! Do you not think this a more palatable dish for the people than to denounce both nobles you’ve never met, mothers and brothers you’ve never seen, and announce war atop it? Do not be a purge, majesty. Be a redeemer.”

  “And so I am!” Leopold snapped. “True believers already despise her. Only heathens—”

  A cluck of his wife’s tongue cut him off. “True believers, yes. But I think there are many of the other, dear Leo. Else your father would not have made the concessions that he did.” His wife’s hand squeezed his, though her voice was hard, purposed. “All manner of men have sympathy for a woman wronged, and children bloodied into motion.”

  Their spymaster smiled—a glimmer of respect, perhaps, for his new empress. “A truth, at that. The people see what they wish to, majesty, and what we wish them to, yes, but the latter is an art unto itself, and not a thing to be rushed. Use her but do not accuse her. Let that one come. Unravel the thread alongside your people, rather than for them, and they shall love you for it.”

  He fumed in silence, in dread thought—the woman, that was who he wanted dead most of all. Cullick was a symptom, but she was the heart of the disease. Cut it out, and it would die. Yet he heard their words; it was a matter of repurposing them. He focused not on the woman, but on the children beneath her. Twisted their faces into his own. He saw them: bloodied, held, ordered to dance to this and that. His heartbeat skipped. No father could tolerate such woe.

  A nation was built on the backs of such sentiment—of fathers and mothers and children.