by M. A. Ray
Vandis rinsed stray suds flecked with stubble from his cheeks and jaw. “On the bed’s fine.” He ran a hand over his face, checking that he hadn’t missed any spots. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jimmy pass back into the office, but his attention was on the mirror in front of him. It didn’t ripple and waver like mirrors made After—it had been manufactured with magical assistance—but the silver backing had greened with age, so his reflection had something of an underwater look. He patted his skin dry with a linen towel.
When did I get so much gray in my hair? He’d actually remembered to get someone in to trim it for the audience this afternoon, but now that it was shorter, it looked grayer. The hair on his chest and belly had grayed, too, but at least age didn’t weigh too heavily on his skin. He hadn’t sagged much, if at all, and his muscles weren’t old-man stringy—yet. He flexed his chest and arms, giving himself a thoughtful appraisal. Not bad.
Not so old, My own, She said, and then… She didn’t do it to him often, years since the last time, but it was as if a warm hand stroked from the base of his skull to his tailbone, and the sensation glimmered out along every nerve. He swayed and caught himself on the dressing table before his legs went to jam. She didn’t do it often, but when She did, it knocked him sideways. So little had ever made Vandis hard. All that was fine for other people, he was sure, but it seemed like such a waste of time. Even when he was young, he hadn’t bothered with touching himself.
When She did that, he burned. Vandis stepped closer to the table, steadying himself. I’m about to dress up like a trained pig and—and—
“Oh.”
He bowed his head, trembling in every limb. Little touches of heat dotted his spine, and each one radiated warmth, pleasure. Lower, lower, and the breeze brushed in through the open window, bringing musky incense to his nose, caressing the nape of his neck and the bare skin of his back with cool fingers. The candles on his dressing table guttered and leapt with the bonfire leaping in his chest.
Her power kissed the small of his back. Pleasure spiked so high it edged into pain, and he slid a bare foot back over the carpet to brace himself, groaning, head bent before Her, down between his arms. She seared along his nerves now, enveloped him head to toe, and his groin beat a hammering pulse. My Lady, he thought, maybe said. “My Lady…”
My own…
As always when She took him this way, he felt as if he’d die of it. And when She receded, leaving him panting, all his flesh glowed like the heart of an ember.
He straightened and massaged his neck. His hand slithered on sweaty skin.
“All right, Vandis?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah,” he said, blinking hard. “Fine.” He returned to the table and shakily washed face and neck.
“Three more bits!” Jimmy laid the formal Jackass Suit on the bed and bustled out again. While he was gone, Vandis got down the front of his breeches with the wet washcloth, shivering and wincing at the cold touch in an overheated, oversensitive area. He folded the cloth carefully over the evidence, laid it in his laundry hamper, and stripped to the skin.
He was pulling on fresh smallclothes when Jimmy came back with the last of it. The clothing had been airing since before the Crown Prince’s visit, but it still smelled faintly of the camphor it’d been packed with. Vandis settled the puffy shirt on his shoulders and buttoned it down the front. His legs looked like thick white sausages in the silk stockings, and even worse when he added the blousy satin breeches, loudly striped in blue and green. The arming doublet matched. I look like a fucking idiot, he thought.
You look well in it, She said, and he flushed. He found the soft boots just as bad as the rest of it, but sensible footwear was impossible to find in dark-brown kidskin. He would’ve liked to wear his usual boots; they were tough enough to withstand anything in his path, bar a caltrop, and broken to his feet, but they didn’t fit under the shiny, superfluous armoring for his calves. He pulled on the kidskin gloves and faced Jimmy.
“Ready?” Jimmy said brightly, and Vandis suppressed a sigh.
It took an hour and a half to get it all on straight: the silvered, enameled cuirass, plus the pauldrons and vambraces on his shoulders and arms, the poleyns and greaves for his legs, and the sabatons on his feet. He settled the pointless morion, with its openwork comb and cheek guards, onto his head while Jimmy fetched the ultimate indignity. The cape—fair fucking winds, the cape. It attached to the cuirass at his neck and shoulders and spilled down around his ankles, a hideous waterfall of weft-faced wool. As if it weren’t enough that the front face of the cuirass had been richly decorated with the white oak and the Golden Road, the cape carried a stylized image of the World Tree with the world spread out beneath it.
“Hate” wasn’t a strong enough word. Vandis put his back to the mirror. If he stepped onto a battlefield in all this, he’d be dead in ten heartbeats flat. There weren’t even any damned cuisses. It was ugly, unwieldy, and worse than useless, because it hampered every move he needed to make while airborne. It looks well, She insisted.
Only for You. He swallowed his frustration, spread his arms, and asked Jimmy, “How am I doing?”
“You’re aces, Vandis.” Jimmy beamed.
“Thanks for the help,” Vandis managed not to grumble. He opened the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and took out the Staff of Office, another awkward, heavy piece of metal garbage, for all it was fashioned like an oak limb and set with fat sapphires. It had had powers Before, Hieronymus had explained to him when he took the Headship, powers of wind and lightning, but when Vandis handled it, he held a staff of silvered bronze that gave his fingers a prickly pins-and-needles feeling. He took a deep breath and shuffled his shoulders, reaching for the comfort She’d given him. His back itched like crazy, and it’d be hours before he could scratch.
Adeon and Pearl awaited him at the bottom of the stairs, wearing their best. At least he wasn’t the only one feeling awkward. Adeon never seemed to, but Pearl in a dress never did look right, and scuffed boot toes peeked out from beneath her maroon skirts. She wore her sword.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said when he reached them.
“Let’s,” Pearl said fervently, following him through the mess hall. Adeon strode after, laughing. Vandis paused to scan the chapel and street before he stepped out the front door. There were plenty of people passing by dressed in black, but more than one church required black, and it was a popular color among the laity.
I look like a target. Nothing for it, though. He doubted the Aurelians would put a crossbow bolt in the back of his neck—not their style—but he didn’t know for certain, and his hackles rose the moment he stepped into the aisle. He still felt watched, and now he couldn’t see properly. The helm obstructed his peripheral vision, and the cheek guards didn’t fold up like they would’ve on a piece of actual equipment.
“Try to look collected for whoever’s watching us,” Pearl said when they were a little way down the street.
“Glad I’m not the only one who noticed,” Vandis said.
On the right, Adeon shook back his silvery hair. “It’s a good thing we came. Relax. You’re in excellent hands, if I do say so myself.”
“Where is he, can you tell?”
“It’s more than one,” said the tulon. “There are a thousand eyes on you, for all I know.”
Vandis scowled. “Let’s get to the lift, then.” He didn’t like the idea of being cornered halfway up the falls, but it would limit the number of people in his immediate vicinity who might want him dead, and they’d be just as easy to corner on the stairs.
When they left Temple Row for the busier mercantile section of Old Town, greetings flew Vandis’s way, which he liked, and requests for blessings, which he didn’t care for. More people recognized the vestments than recognized Vandis himself, and, for whatever reason, jumped at the chance to have a real, live pontiff kiss their babies. When he was dolled up like this, he pecked three soft, slimy cheeks for every block he walked, bare minimum; and since
it was a nice day, he’d kissed a hundred by the time they got to the river. He, Pearl, and Adeon bought chits for the lift and entered the roped-off waiting area at the base of the falls.
The shell of the dead volcano loomed above. Under the roaring of the Ennis, the crater’s lip had worn away, but it still curved gently in all around, hugging crowded Old Town, with its temples and markets and houses, like a loving mother. There were two pedestrian lifts—four platforms—on this side of the river, and two freight lifts, with four larger platforms, on the other. They worked on a massive system of ox-drawn pulleys and heavy chains, and counterweighed each other. All around the bustling river, bay, and falls, hundreds of roofs clogged the crater, different styles, peaks and flat-tops, tiled in many colors of slate: dark gray, yellow, red, mottled. The City Redwood cast a gigantic shadow over the inlet at this time of day, and the ships moved in and out of the noontide dim.
Vandis looked without really seeing the wonder of it. Not today. His mind was in a thousand places at once: on the audience to come, on Dingus and Kessa, on the stacks of papers, on what the Lady had done to him. Now that he’d stopped trembling, his limbs felt looser, more relaxed—even considering his nervous tension. He shuffled his shoulders again, trying to scratch the long scab on his back.
As one lift clanked into motion, an operator unlatched the gate on the other to let the passengers on the bottom file off, and the same at the top. Plenty didn’t like the lifts, either because of the height or because of the shaky dance the platforms did on their way up and down, and chose the staircases cut into the sides of the crater: free, quieter, and relatively dry. The spray from the falls dampened lift passengers. In Dreamport, where the weather stayed chilly and damp almost year-round, this deterred many. Still, the freight side alone generated a profit for the lift company, and the pedestrian waiting areas were crowded even late into the night.
At last, the platform on the bottom emptied and the crowd swept Vandis forward. Only when he heard his name did he realize his bodyguards hadn’t gotten on with him.
“Vandis!” Pearl called, her mouth wide, voice small against the thunder of the falls. “Vandis, get off!”
He’d just started pushing his way toward the gate when it snapped shut.
“Stop!” she screamed at the operators, or at least, he thought she did; the oxen began to walk, and he couldn’t hear her over the noise of the chains. By the time he’d shoved to the side of the platform, they were thirty feet high and rising. Pearl and Adeon stood at the very edge of the waiting area, making frantic gestures for him to jump.
The lift climbed higher. Vandis struggled onto the railing, hampered by his court armor and the Staff of Office. He cursed. His feet kept slipping in their casings of shiny steel and kidskin. When the lift jerked to an unexpected stop halfway up, he nearly toppled over the side, overcompensated, and fell on his ass on the platform. He let another oath fly into the sudden quiet and levered to his feet with the Staff—it might as well do him some good.
“Sir-Vail-the-man-behind-me-has-a-sword-at-my-back-please-do-as-he-says-or-he-will-kill-me-in-front-of-my-daughter…”
The blood drained from his face. When he twisted to look behind him, a middle-aged woman filled his eyes, tearful face, clinging to the hand of a soundlessly weeping little girl about ten or eleven. Men in black hoods clustered behind them, close.
“Why, you motherless sacks—”
The big man behind the hostage, with his hand fisted in the collar of her dress, jerked his chin at Vandis. “Drop the staff.”
Vandis dropped it. It hit the platform with a crack and stayed where it was, too ornate to roll. He wished for a sword at his side, in his hand. “I know your stories,” he said, looking over the poor woman’s shoulder into the monk’s eyes. “I know your Rule. Saint Aurelius was a man of honor. If he saw you hiding behind a woman and her child, he’d spit in your eye.”
One of the others stepped forward. Vandis raised his fists, blocked a blow, but the woman gave a little scream, and he dropped his guard. The monk struck him in the face, knocking the morion askew, and again. The helm skittered away. Once more and he fell to his knees, tasting the blood that ran from his nose and mouth. He pushed up on his hands, thinking at least to die with his pride intact.
A sword rang from the scabbard, and a thin, cold edge rested on the nape of his neck. Vandis froze. Blood dripped from his face and pattered onto the boards. “Hey!” he heard, as if from far away. “That’s Vandis Vail, that is! You can’t do that!”
“You are all commanded to bear witness! Here is the just judgment the Order of Aurelius renders to Vandis Vail of Vick’s Hollow, no respecter of title, office, or authority! He consorts with devils! He worships demons! He spreads discord and discontent wherever he goes, defiling society, corrupting the youth! He urges treason! He foments sedition!”
Not bad, eh? he thought to Her, dizzy. See You in a minute.
Pick it up. The Staff! Pick it up, Vandis, My own.
“Yah!” one of the passengers sneered, cutting into the monk’s diatribe as Vandis looked down at the Staff of Office. The sapphires shimmered oddly against his spattered blood. “Treason, my ass! He got us a tax cut last time they reviewed the codes!”
“That Knights hospital saved my brother’s life!” shouted another, and Vandis laid his hand over the Staff. His fingers curled around it; but the sword lifted, and he braced.
An ugly thud sounded, metal on flesh, and a split heartbeat later the sword fell, clashing on Vandis’s cuirass with a force that almost flattened him. A shock sizzled up his arm; the scent of a storm prickled the inside of his nose. Sparks crackled from the gems set into the Staff.
“When I couldn’t find a job, the Knights took in my whole family!”
“What’s defiling about that? What’ve the Aurelians ever—”
Vandis rose to his knees, clutching the Staff of Office in a hand gone numb. A blinding light erupted from its end, and the sound of a thunderclap. If he’d used his ears to hear Her, he wouldn’t have caught the huzzah! She shouted. As he blinked the radiance away, he saw an Aurelian topple slowly backward, trailing smoke from mouth, nose, eyes—and the scorched pit in his robes. His executioner curled on the ground, clutching his ears.
The echoes died away.
“The Wayfarer protects him!” someone bellowed. “With Her own hand! You saw it! You all saw it! She gave him magic!”
It was mayhem. The other passengers seized on the gaping Aurelians, dragging them down. Vandis lunged to his feet, grabbed the little girl, and pulled her as far away from the chaos as he could. The mother jerked after, still clinging to her daughter’s hand.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, putting himself between the woman and the crowd. The monk who’d tried to behead him slid away, screeching, as the passengers pulled him in. The woman drew her daughter close, pressed the girl closer, covering her brown head with a hand.
She shook her head wordlessly, gazing at Vandis, and then over his head at the small mob busily kicking the guts out of the monks.
“It’ll be okay,” he said, and she gave him a watery smile.
“I know.”
He smiled back at her through the blood on his face. “Stay here. I’m going to release the emergency brake.” His hand stung with returning circulation, and he flexed it while he edged around the railing to the brake lever. His shoulders felt lighter, and when he glanced back, he saw his cloak in a disordered heap on the boards. His lips stretched in a grim smirk. Before he threw the lever, he leaned back against it for a moment to catch his breath, and when the lift moved again, he relaxed a little. There were a few flaking, black spots on the Staff. He brushed them away with his thumb, but underneath the metal was stained black, and he couldn’t rub the spots off. My Lady…
Yes?
Something niggled at the back of his mind—a memory, a long time ago, or it seemed that way. The stains on the message dome at Elwin’s Ford.
Now you’re thinking.
&nb
sp; But I didn’t—
Nae, you did not.
Oh, fuck. Dingus. Vandis got a sudden, horrid rush of images: what might happen to his soft-spoken Junior if anyone were to find out. He clutched the Staff more tightly. There had to be a way to spin this, make everyone forget about Dingus, make sure nobody ever found out. Is it anyone’s blood? Or just his and mine?
The effect is likely quite specific, She said, with a whiff of affront.
At least there’s that. As if I didn’t have a hundred reasons to worry about him already.
My own, you might want to be worrying over yourself. Nobody knows about Dingus’s blood, but yours?
I—
“Sir Vandis! I’ve had a tumor for years—bless me, please, Sir Vandis!”
Vandis raised one finger. He opened his mouth, but no words came, and he stood there gaping like a particularly stupid trout.
“Bless me, Sir Vandis! I can’t weave half the time with my arthritis!”
What do I do?
Why not bless them?
It won’t do anything!
Oh, My own, again you miss the point. Even if it does nothing, they’ll go away comforted—healed in heart, if not in body.
“Okay,” he said, and laid his hand on the tumor man’s head. “I bless you in the name of my Lady.” He did the same for the woman with arthritis, and then extended his hand over the rest of the people on the lift platform, who’d finished with the Aurelians by now. “You’re all blessed, the Wayfarer blesses you all, and go, and—uh—remember to consider the rights of your fellow travelers on this road of life.”
“We will!” cried Arthritis Woman. Tears sparkled in her eyes, almost lost in the wrinkles around them. “Oh, Sir Vandis, we will!”
Vandis’s mouth worked again. “…good,” he decided. “That’s good.” Mercifully, the lift shuddered to a stop, and the operators rushed to get the gate open. Vandis leapt for it, desperate to escape, only to find the landing clogged with navy-uniformed, gold-braided City Watchmen. He stifled his groan of despair. His face throbbed, his arm felt like a chunk of half-molten metal, and if he didn’t leave the lift right now, he’d be late for a royal audience.
