by Victor Milán
Part Three
Malicious Intents
Chapter 22
Ángeles Grises, Los; Grey Angels, The; Los Siete, the Seven.…—The Creators’ supernatural servitors: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Remiel, Zerachiel, and Raguel, who are charged with maintaining sacred Equilibrium on Paradise. They possess remarkable powers and mystic weapons, and when they walk out in the world, they often take on a terrifying appearance. They are not humane, and regard all things as straw dogs.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
There are alcoves inside the Imperial Heart, and then there are alcoves, thought Margrethe, Dowager Duchess von Hornberg, as she made her quiet and lonely way through the Imperial apartments in the milky afternoon light that spilled through the tall windows. And this looks to be the right one.
It was a plain oak door that might have led to an adjoining apartment or to a back passageway. The whole place was depressingly plain, as she had feared: a few feather tapestries showing hunts and battles, a few books, a desk with writing materials. The bed looked appropriately lavish in comfort, at least, being duly large and well stacked with fat satin cushions.
The key to open the plain door had cost her as much as a few minutes’ unhindered access to the chambers. But it was only silver, of which she had much, and knew where to get more. It was expensive to buy a place in a game for these stakes; she well knew that.
But after the way of alcoves, it was neither wide nor deep. Yet the spillover light as she opened the door barely sufficed to reveal the outline of a figure sitting stooped on a stool with its back toward her and its hooded head slumped toward its chest.
For a moment, nothing happened. She waited. The figure started then. And rose—and rose. When it stood upright, the peak of its cowl almost brushed the three-meter-high ceiling.
It turned. “You do not belong here,” it announced, in a voice both deep and doomful. Margrethe felt resolutely undoomed. “What do you think you are doing?”
“Well, the Emperor hasn’t invited me here yet,” she said. “But that’s an oversight I’m pretty sure will soon be corrected. In the meantime, you might say I’m looking over the lay of the land. But mostly—I’m looking for you.”
“This is a forbidden place. To enter is to die.”
“One of many rules that do not apply to me.” She squinted up at it. But it was no more than shadow within shadow. “Which one are you?”
“You have been warned.” It raised its right arm.
She skipped back with an alacrity she knew belied her size. She liked being deceptively fast. She liked being deceptive.
“Here, now, lad. None of your Angel games.”
The arm froze while still angled down. The sleeves of the hempen monk’s robe were long and concealed the hands.
“Ah, I’ve got your attention, now, don’t I? You’re not Michael, certainly; he’s too powerful and aloof, or likes to play that way. I know that much. You’ve played your part too long to be Raguel. Raphael? Come on, play along. Don’t make me chant all seven of your names like a child’s catechism.”
“I am Uriel.”
“Well met, Fire of God.”
“How do you know these things?”
“The same way I got here. By knowing whom to ask, and what to ask—and perhaps most important, how to ask. Some questions are best tipped with silver, and others with steel. And others with things that I suspect you can’t touch any more than I. Fear, for one.
“I know many things, and how to find out many more. I’m useful that way. And many more.”
It lowered its head and seemed to study her. “You have an Artifact,” it announced at last.
“I do.” He meant the many-faceted jewel she wore on a chain inside her cream silk gown that appeared to be carved from nothing more noble than a lump of polished hematite. “Did you try some kind of mind-control trick on me? I reckoned you would.”
“You have no conception of what that really is which you wear. It was originally crafted long ago, in a place you could not conceive.”
“True.”
“Where did a creature like you obtain such an item?”
“I know how to get people—and others—what they want. Or what they most desperately do not, depending on circumstances and, often enough, my whim. Mere trade is a vile and vulgar thing. But we more elevated souls still have needs and desires and, accordingly, may make exchanges. Which is another way of telling you that I’m not going to tell you.”
“What do you want?”
“I told you—and, indeed, I’ve shown you. I am useful. You are powerful beyond imagining, and so on and so forth. We can help each other. I have … served the Grey Angels before. And they have helped me.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“I can’t hurt you in any way except to expose your masquerade, carefully built up and maintained for these many months. And as for that, who has more to offer me than you do?”
“Are you trying to blackmail me, woman?”
“That’s such an ugly word. Let us say—truthfully, even—that I seek to come to terms whereby we cooperate to our mutual advantage. And given that I’m sure we can, your secret is safe with me, Fray Jerónimo.”
* * *
“I consider this project a failure,” Karyl said to the man he had made Count of Crève Coeur.
“How d’you reckon that?” Laurent, former Knight of Bois de Chanson, slouched at ease on a purple velvet cushion on his gaudy and improbable throne, its gilt flaking in spots to reveal bare wood, well set with red, green, blue, and clear gemstones, all probably paste. In his countly gown of blue, green, and silver silk, he seemed a perfect picture of decadence. But the hand that held a gilded goblet was hard and square, as was the scarred face beneath square-cut, dark-blond bangs. He looked more like a man of action than the sort of self-infatuated grande the place had been designed for.
As he was. With Laurent’s former liege defeated and killed by what was then Karyl’s Army of Providence at the Battle of Hidden Marsh, the new Countess that Karyl had installed in the unlamented Count Guillaume’s place, and pretty much the county’s entire aristocracy swept away by Raguel’s Crusade, Duke Karyl had decided he was the best man available for the job.
“I was hired to spare Providence the horrors of war,” Karyl said. He sat in a smaller, less pretentious chair set facing the Count on his dais in the domed, octagonal throne room. He wore a plain white linen blouse with black trousers and black jackboots with rolled tops. His sword-belt and scabbarded arming-sword he’d hung over its back. “As I hoped I’d done, on the battlefield and in securing the subsequent peace.”
“On terms highly favorable to your employers, the Garden,” said Laurent. Karyl did not feel he read people well—that was another thing he missed about Rob, having him serve as translator of sorts for what other people were feeling—but it seemed clear to him even so that Laurent was amused at the fact, not disapproving.
He shrugged. “They were, as you say, my employers. But I also hoped to spare the people of Crève Coeur a civil war, having seen off most of Guillaume’s viable successors as well as Guillaume. I’ve seen too much devastation—wreaked too much myself—to want it visited on anyone unnecessarily. And yet—”
He shook his head. “Here we sit, with most of the city and much of the countryside lying in rubble, the fields stripped bare, and homes and shops leveled, regardless.”
“Not even you could have known your employers were harboring an actual Grey Angel. Nor that he was grooming them to serve as the spear point for a Grey Angel Crusade. Not even Guilli suspected such a thing, and he was a man both wary as a cat at a Deinonychus synod and long-headed in intrigue, as the Northmen say.” He tipped up his gilded goblet and tossed off the contents. “Even if he didn’t know the difference between his ass and a posthole, in many ways.”
“The Palace seems not to have suffered a lot of the Horde’s insane vandalism,” said Mora Selena,
from the wall by the entryway. She wore a black springer-leather jerkin over a purple silk blouse with black trousers and boots like Karyl’s. Her longsword, Tristeza, rode across her back with its hilt jutting above her right shoulder. Her garments were almost dark enough to let her blend almost completely into the shadows by the wall, except for her olive face, pale despite her nearness to the lamps set flanking the audience-chamber door. “Most places they looted bare of what they needed, and they destroyed the rest for the sheer exhilaration of it, or so it seemed.”
“When Raguel appeared here,” Laurent said, “just before He revealed himself in Providence, Countess Mara and her brave, noble retinue promptly fled. The castellan and servants she left behind bolted the Palace doors and took to the upper stories with crossbows. My former master may have tricked the place out like a whorehouse, but it was still well built to withstand attack. The Hordelings weren’t big on siegecraft, even of a minor kind, and less on patience. They were easily discouraged by stout locked doors and a few quarrels through their pates and went off in search of victims easier to torture and dismember. Like the Countess and company, sadly.”
He drained his cup and tossed it to a servant, who caught it cleanly, refilled it from a cut-glass decanter on a sideboard, and brought it back to the Count with a secret smile. Laurent thanked the woman with a nod.
“I don’t blame her, at least,” Karyl said. Mara had just come into Ladyship of a manor, when the consortium of merchants who’d won when Karyl auctioned off the countship left vacant by Guillaume’s winding up with a steel-shod Triceratops horn poked through his belly had selected her to front for them. An amiable woman with the build and the placid demeanor of a barnyard Fatty, she had been selected because she had the most available pretense of birth to go with her complaisant nature. She had managed to enjoy the perquisites of figurehead reign for a matter of mere days before the Grey Angel Crusade flamed up to engulf her and her retainers before they reached the city walls.
“What happened to the wall hangings and paintings, if the Horde didn’t ransack the Palace?” asked Selena. She gestured around the chamber. It was spacious, well supplied with tall, broad, round-topped windows, currently night-black. The marble walls between them and the eight half columns around the dome’s base, though, remained conspicuously blank.
“Guillaume had a taste for pictures of Horrors hunting humans,” Laurent said. “His favorite sport. Also pictures of Deinonychus and other dinosaurs fucking both men and women and not by their consent. For whatever reason, his successor never saw fit to remove them during her brief occupation. But while I’m no soft man, the damned things put me off my food. So I had them stored in the basement. Probably, I’ll auction them off to whoever has the most debased tastes and exalted purse.”
Karyl accepted a cup of pale local wine from a servant in blue-and-green tabard. It wetted his mouth and didn’t taste conspicuously nasty. Which fulfilled his requirements for wine.
Selena pointed upward.
The Count’s laughter followed her gesture and her gaze up the round vault of the ceiling above the throne. It was painted with a likeness of the late Count Guilli, naked except for glory, being borne up into the eternal daytime clouds, presumably to the abode of the Creators Themselves in the Moon Invisible, by a gaggle of winged pink babies, likewise nude. They were creatures that featured nowhere in Church canon yet frequently found their way into religious art. No doubt because they looked a great deal more appealing than Grey Angels in their natural Paradisiacal guise of tall grey corpses dried out midrot—as Karyl had seen for himself at the closest possible range.
“Oh,” Laurent said. “That. It amuses me. Especially since the erstwhile Count’s cock is substantially larger up there than eyewitness accounts by his playmates made it.”
“I wouldn’t want it dangling over my head,” said Selena. She spoke flatly. Laurent cocked his brow quizzically at her. Karyl thought she had a sense of humor but was never sure when she might be showing it.
“You wonder why I haven’t had it painted over?” Laurent said. “I do admire the art of it. And I’m thinking of having my own mug painted in place of Guilli’s.”
“You don’t seem a man for that kind of vanity,” Karyl said.
Laurent grinned. “You don’t think you’re the only one who’s full of surprises, do you?” He gulped more wine. “Ah, well. To business, then. As to how things go here, I have news both good and bad.”
“The good, then,” Karyl said.
“So far dealing with refugees isn’t much of a problem. Especially since news came that the promised Imperial food-aid trains have been dispatched. Meantime, woods-runners from Telar’s Wood in the eastern part of the province have been sharing their provisions with us. Raguel didn’t have much luck recruiting the Free Folk, I gather, and his Horde preferred open fields to dense forests of hardwood and pine, where they could be subjected to the sort of unremitting rolling ambush the foresters specialize in.”
Laurent shook his head. “I never expected to live to see the woods-rats and the farmers and townsfolk acting in perfect harmony. I’m glad I never indulged in Guillaume’s passion for hunting them like bouncers.”
The fact that Laurent hadn’t joined in commiting atrocities against the woods-runners was a significant reason he’d made it home to Crève Coeur alive after Karyl released him on parole. Which he knew as well as Karyl did.
“That is good. And the bad?”
Laurent sighed. “The reason we don’t have a vast number of refugees to deal with. The fact is, the loss of life here was far greater than anybody even feared. It was truly terrible. We find skeletons everywhere we turn, it seems.”
Though corpses didn’t decompose as quickly in the relatively cool and arid foothills of the great Shield Range as they did in the coastal swamps and rain forests, the foraging wildlife—the insects, small mammals, fliers, and dinosaurs—were no less rapacious here.
“It’s as bad everywhere we know of that the Crusade overran,” Karyl said. “Worse, in the eastern sector of Providence. There we can’t find evidence of a single living human soul.”
“In Castaña the Horde carried the dismembered bodies of its victims as provisions and ate from them until the meat rotted from the bones,” Selena said in a hollow voice. “I don’t even know why they bothered. They always had new victims.”
An uncomfortable pause ensued.
“Ah. Aren’t you a cheerful sort, Lady?” Laurent said. “It’s a good thing you’re decorative.”
“She’s deft with that longsword, as well,” Karyl said.
Laurent pulled a mouth beneath his moustache and nodded. “High praise indeed, from the Master who fought a Grey Angel.”
“And lost,” Karyl said.
“But not at once. And that’s more than even any hero out of legend has been able to boast.”
Karyl nodded briskly. Such lines of talk made him uncomfortable. They also struck him as unproductive.
“Another complication,” said Laurent, “is that many of our refugees, whether returnees or folk displaced from elsewhere, are former members of the Horde itself. Perhaps most of them.”
“That’s not causing us too great a problem in Providence,” Karyl said. “The ones who were maddened by the touch of Raguel’s mind suffer mostly some degree of disorientation, but seem to be recovering.”
“Ah, but we find a certain number of ours fall first into confusion, and then into a lassitude in which they display similar indifference to hunger, thirst, or pain to what they did when they ran with the Crusade. Fortunately, instead of resuming their frenzied killing ways they simply decline and die in a matter of days. Sometimes hours.”
“Our investigations indicate that such victims tend to be the ones who required the least compulsion to join Raguel,” Karyl said. “Or none at all.”
The Emperor had decreed that all those survivors of the Horde who could not be demonstrated to have joined of their own free will should receive full pardon,
with more than a little latitude allowed for the fact that many had been faced with a choice of, Join or be eaten alive or torn limb from limb. Karyl had concurred in Felipe’s amnesty. He despised unnecessary slaughter almost as much as he did cruelty.
Those who had joined voluntarily and without coercion—and there were more than a few, disproportionately noble grandes—the Emperor had placed under attainder, with all property and rights forfeit—including the right to life. Any man or woman could kill one such without penalty. For himself, Karyl did not consider slaughtering them unnecessary at all. Merely not top priority.
Laurent nodded. “Small loss. I’m not most comforted by the fact of what these people were up to last month, but we make shift with what we’ve got. A greater problem, now, is the marauders. It seems a lot of Raguel’s surviving knights House-shields find it hard to let go of broadcast pillage and murder. We—”
The color drained from his face, and his green eyes grew wide. His features continued to grow paler, and it took Karyl a moment to register that was because they were lit by a harsh blue-white radiance from somewhere behind Karyl, growing like the light of an approaching forest fire.
The empty goblet fell from Laurent’s fingers. He pointed past Karyl’s left shoulder and began to gibber in mindless horror.
Chapter 23
Horror, Chaser.…—Deinonychus antirrhopus. Nuevaropa’s largest pack-hunting raptor: 3 meters, 70 kilograms. Plumage distinguishes different breeds: scarlet, blue, green, and similar horrors. Smart and wicked, as favored as domestic beasts for hunting and war as wild ones are feared. Some say a deinonychus pack is deadlier than a full-grown Allosaurus.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
My dearest darling Melodía, she read in Princess Fanny of Anglaterra’s fussily precise hand by the white light of a pine-oil lamp. She preferred those to the sea-monster oil or Trebizon ground-oil burners more prevalent in La Merced. All three were fragrant; the pine oil at least smelled nice.
