by Victor Milán
But to his horror and sick dismay, Karyl shook his top-knotted head.
“I need you back in Tertre Herbeux,” he said. “Especially if, as Laurent suspects, Eric’s up to some perfidy here in Providence. I need you to stay on top of rebuilding your domain, as well as serving as my spymaster once more.”
“But—”
“I am sorry, my friend. Truly. But you can do the job as well from there as here. And now let’s get Little Nell tended to properly and you and I cleaned up. I want you to stay the night here, at least, and help me plot. Which I know is a pastime dear to your heart.”
But I am not dear enough for you to keep next to yours, he thought. Because you’re so occupied with our Lady Brokentree that’s it’s no more time for our friendship you have?
But he nodded and forced a smile. Because even cast aside, anything was better than brooding alone and drinking himself into eventual dissolution at Melchor’s former lair. Which Bergdahl, with all his misplaced zeal, seemed bent on helping him do.
So once more I’ll smile and do what he asks, against all my inclination, Rob thought. And I thought I was the sharp dealer here?
* * *
At the smell of roses and the shimmer of blue-white light on the far wall of the library, Karyl looked up from the book he was reading. It was a compact treatise on war strategy on sea and land by the famed sixth-century Trebizonian Grand Admiral Spyridon of Mykonos, which had been found in the wreckage of a home looted by the Horde in Providence Town and brought by his light-riders to add to his collection. As they did, unasked.
He laid the book on the table beside his chair and rose, picking up the blackwood staff that leaned against it and drawing the blade concealed within.
This time the intruder showed a form of human female size as well as shape, taller than Karyl, still, and attenuated but no longer monstrously tall. Her body was still as much revealed as concealed by shifting veils of light, her features were still beautiful if sharp, with pointed ears, and the smell of attar of roses was already growing overpowering in the room. And she still shone with a blue-white radiance.
“Is that any way to treat your savior, Karyl, dear?” she asked in a voice full of sweet music and malice.
“Is that what you are?”
“I’m Uma, if that’s what you mean.”
“In part.” He had set down the staff-scabbard and held the sword before him with both hands on the long hilt, as if it were a longsword. He kept the tip of the single-edged weapon pointed at her face.
She approached without fear. “Surely you’ve heard the song of how the Queen of Fae caught you, when from the Eye you fell?”
He frowned. He had indeed heard snatches sung to that effect, during the flight from Raguel’s Crusade. He had noticed that it seemed to infuriate his spymaster, Rob, in particular. Though the bard and dinosaur master was liable to take great offense at songs for no other reason than that they were sung badly.
“I have no ear for music. Anyway, it’s just a song. Not even a rumor.”
“It surely is the one, sweet Karyl,” she said, coming close. The rose smell had grown so strong as to seem to fill his nostrils and his throat. “And most assuredly not the other. How did you think you survived falling off a three-hundred-meter precipice with blood spraying from the severed stump of your arm? Did you think you caught yourself with your remaining hand, perhaps on a convenient bush, like a hero from one of your romance tales? Even if you had, dear child, you would have quickly passed out and fallen the rest of your way to your death.”
Horror rose like a tide inside him. He had wondered that, of course. He had largely suppressed the habit, arguing to himself that it was a mystery whose answer was unlikely to benefit him even if he solved it, and so not worth considering.
But he also knew the truth: that thinking too deeply about the question brought in waking bouts of the uncontrollable and unendurable horror that woke him screaming on so many nights. The same visions of laughing faces and exquisite pleasure and excruciating pain.
Faces not dissimilar from the one Uma chose to show him.
He felt as if part of his mind was hunting for escape, like a young compito cornered by a hungry Tröodon. He kept his will focused on keeping the blade in place. Such focus had held his sanity and soul together before. It would have to do so now.
“And where do you think you came by that bauble you hold?”
“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely.
“I did save you, Karyl. I took you in and healed you. And set you free again, on the roads of your world, not far from the Eye Cliffs where I caught you, with the sword to keep you safe.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“Out of the goodness of my nature?” She laughed as if in girlish delight. “Why do you look so skeptical? Do you doubt my benevolence?”
“The Fae are notorious, but not for that.”
“Do you think us all evil, then?”
“I think you are … other. As different from me and anyone I know as I am from one of the rocks that fall from the sky. And I believe that your motivations are unknowable.”
“You’re not wrong. I am that different from you—and from my fellow beings of lights. Especially that witch Aphrodite. And our common foe, the Grey Destroyers.”
“Come no closer,” he said. The feel of the blackwood sword-hilt in his hand was all that kept him from flying into a million pieces.
“Do you think that toy can hurt me?”
“Can it?”
She laughed. “I am no common Faerie. I could touch you. It would feel like the touch of a human woman. But immeasurably more pleasurable, of course.”
“Or painful.”
“That too.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Would gratitude be too much to ask? Never mind. Your human thanks are as paltry as your lives. Rather, I want to offer you more.”
“What?” I didn’t think I could feel any more frightened, he noted with curious detachment. I was wrong.
“Alliance. I spoke of our common enemy. Do you think they’ll rest, now that your pet has so summarily disposed of Raguel’s Paradisiacal form and ended his Crusade in unprecedented humiliation? Do you think they like you better now?”
“No.”
“Remember: I healed you.”
“Except for my hand.”
“You humans! You call us capricious. But I give you a miracle, and instead of showing gratitude, you cavil.”
She extended a hand: long, slender, so long and tapering in the nails to remind him of a raptor claw, glowing gently blue-white.
“Join me, Karyl. I am your only hope.”
With a raw caw of rage, he slashed at the hand. She exploded into glittering shards an instant before the blade touched her simulacrum flesh, like a lantern dashed on flagstones. They slashed the skin of his hands and face like tiny knives, stinging like hornets.
The pain transformed into near-orgasmic ecstasy. The tiny slashes healed, leaving droplets of blood. He slumped to the maroon tiled floor amid a dwindling smell of roses and a fading ghost of laughter.
Chapter 29
Torre, Tower—One of the ruling families of the five Kingdoms which make up the Empire of Nuevaropa, plus the symbolic Torre Menor, or Lesser Tower, which represents the recognized Nuevaropan minorities in the Diet, and Torre Delgao, the family from which the Emperor or Empress is always Elected.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
Gazing down at her hands as she intertwined the fingers on the writing-desk surface like nervous snakes, Melodía sighed.
Glancing up to where La Madrota sat cross-legged on her bed in the gloom of her hidden nighttime room, she realized she was going to receive neither sympathy nor slack from that quarter. No matter how brutal it had been to tell the tale of the events leading up to her arrest, imprisonment, rape, and escape, in her own words, just now.
“I thought you knew everything,” she said
accusingly.
“I never said that,” Rosamaría said. “I said that it would save time and breath to presume I knew everything about you. And to save the expostulation you’re inhaling for, the point of this inquisition is to examine your own perceptions, then and now. Would you say your evaluations of events around you have been changed by what was done to you?”
She drew in a shuddering breath. “Oh, yes.”
“Good. Would you say, for the better?”
“No!”
Would you say your assessments have grown more realistic?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Now I want you to describe, as best you can, the mistakes you made that allowed all of that to happen.”
“You’re not going to tell me it was my own fault, and not—not his?” Having spoken his name repeatedly, in a fashion so matter-of-fact as to surprise her while she was doing it, during her narrative, she now found herself unwilling to taste it in her mouth again. She felt afraid that La Madrota would take her to task for the sudden circumlocution.
“By no means. We are not instructing the Duke of Hornberg here today. Nor, sadly, dispensing him justice—and, young lady, let me assure you, as the lifelong keeper and guardian of the Torre’s honor and welfare, only you on all of Paradise can possibly long for that reckoning more than I. He committed crimes. You did things, or did not do them, that rendered you vulnerable to his attacks. That doesn’t make you culpable; it only makes you a doomed fool if you choose not to face them and learn from them.”
“Very well. Do you want all of them?”
La Madrota laughed: a surprisingly hardy sound for one so seemingly shrunken.
“You are years from coming close to seeing most of them,” she said. “It’s almost certain you’ll never see all. We aren’t aiming at perfection here. That’s not attainable by any of us mortals, walking the surface of this world. And yes, I’m as mortal as you. I’ve merely managed to defer proving it beyond doubt. No. Sketch the picture as you see it, in a few broad strokes.”
“Very well. I was … outspoken in my opposition to my father’s idea of expanding his war upon his own subjects. That exposed me to the suspicions of others that I might prove disloyal in other ways. I suppose that I relied on my position as the Emperor’s daughter and heir to his duchy to protect me. Instead, it made me a target, didn’t it?”
“It did. Go on.”
“I made no moves to secure my … safety? Is that the word? It’ll have to do, I guess. Or my position. Because it never occurred to me I might need to.”
An unease in her mind interrupted her flow of words. She glanced down at her hands, now still, and then up at the ancient woman.
“That was my real mistake, wasn’t it? Never thinking I’d need to protect myself, in my longtime home, surrounded by my family, and, and friends?”
“Perceptive. You have learned.”
But saying the word familia had undone her. “My family—my sister. Montse. She didn’t do anything, did she? Not to help those evil monsters kidnap her?”
“Not except be born into the family at a time in which its foes needed a convenient target. For reasons which I am convinced we know little about.”
Melodía ran her hands back through her hair. She saw tears puddling on the desktop, by the light of the turned-down lamp that rested nearby. She wasn’t aware of having started crying.
Now that she was, she found herself overcome for several minutes, able to do nothing but repeat, “Montse, Montse, my poor darling sister,” over and over.
In the gloom, the dark figure of her ancestor sat patiently.
Regaining some measure of control, Melodía looked up at her in desperation. “How do we get her back? Surely you have a plan. You’ve got to.”
“I doubt that we can,” Rosamaría Delgao said calmly. “She is lost to us. The best we can do now is hope and pray that she finds her way safely back to us on some day not too distant. The likelihood of which I deem to be high, for what that’s worth. But her fate lies beyond our hands to control or even affect.”
For a moment Melodía was too stunned to ask or even to breathe or blink.
“You can’t mean that!” she said, when the need for air overcame her shock. “You can’t be that cold-blooded. She’s your granddaughter, however many times great. Your flesh. Your blood. How can you … let her go so casually?”
“It is not casually. I let her go because I must.”
“I see,” Melodía said in growing anger. “She’s too distant from you, from your, your own offspring. Isn’t she? You don’t love her. She’s not real to you!”
“I do love her. I love you. I love your father. I love myself, for that matter, despite so many of the things I’ve done; call it a vanity necessary to preserve myself to serve the family. And I would sacrifice any of us without hesitation to protect our family, or even enhance its position. Without hesitation. And unless it were myself, in which case neither would be germane, I’d eat heartily afterward and sleep soundly.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I am, literally, deadly serious.” She leaned forward, and her eyes caught points of pale blue light like obsidian facets. “Do you think it’s anything I haven’t done before? A hundred times? Do you think I haven’t sacrificed the fruit of my own loins to keep the Tower standing and strengthen its foundations.”
Her vehemence struck Melodía like a slap in the face—the more so because she did not raise her soft, dry voice.
“I mourn each and every loss. The deaths I could not avert. The deaths I allowed. The deaths I caused. But none of them matter. Only the family matters.”
Melodía felt as if she were choking, though the hidden windows were open to allow the cool, clean mountain air into the chamber.
“I can’t imagine how lonely you are,” she said at length.
The dark features, which for the most part might as well have belonged to an idol carved of blackwood, twitched briefly into something resembling a smile.
“You are learning, my daughter. My beloved daughter.”
Melodía sat up, spear-shaft straight once more.
“Now. Continue your account of your missteps in La Merced. And then we’ll move on to examining your experiences leading up to the outbreak of Raguel’s Crusade in Providence.”
* * *
Mostly by touch, and that befuddled by drink and, of course, mind-numbing terror, Rob tried making his way back through a mostly darkened farmhouse to his own quarters. Which were large; having had some experience of the insides of nobles’ dwellings as a hireling dinosaur master, he knew that Séverin Farm was sparsely populated for a ducal palace, as well as underdecorated beyond what would be dictated by its being in the process of being reclaimed from an army of human soldier ants. His straw-in-a-linen-sack pallet on the bare wooden floor wasn’t abundantly comfortable, but it called to him now as if it were already occupied by naked seductresses.
I need sleep, Rob thought. And the forgetfulness it brings. If I can only drink enough to fall asleep. And avoid the nightmares, of course. There’s that thing too.
He found his quarters, fumbled inside, and shut the door. The lights of stars and Eris, the Moon Visible, shone through an open window. Rob had plenty of experience negotiating darkened bedchambers, never you mind how. He was glad the nights were mostly cool up here and not biting at this season. The smell of human shit had not yet been fully scrubbed out of the floor planks. And walls.
He flopped onto the bed, picked up a bottle from the floor beside it, and drank. Whether it started half-empty or half-full, in the tavern philosophers’ noted conundrum, it was soon fully empty.
Did I see what I saw? he thought. And: Is it now my fate to stumble upon hidden, secret horrors?
And third: What could Himself be thinking? Or did my imagination truly get the better of me.
All he knew was that on his way outside to relieve his bladder in the weeds, he had chanced to pass by Karyl’s bedchamber and seen an eeri
e blue light shining through a crack in an indifferently closed door. Which itself was Karyl all over: he didn’t much care if some would-be assassin decided to try his or her luck while he was sleeping. The like had often happened, with the upshot that—well, here he was.
But Karyl seemed neither sleeping nor alone. Rob heard him mutter something in a tone like a sullen child—which was itself not totally unfamiliar to him, who’d dealt with Karyl’s grumps and sulks and nightmares on the road to Providence—and away. But when he heard a soft, sibilant female purr in return, that tweaked his gland of curiosity far more than concern did the gland he assumed to be in charge of self-preservation. After all, he knew full well his friend had arrogant assurance in his skills and reflexes enough never to strike before he was sure his target was a foe.
Ah, now’s my chance to confirm my suspicions as to why Karyl’s got no time for me. Nor did the prospect of seeing the Mora Árbolquebrada nude— boyish figure, negligible teats, and all—fail to pique his interest. I’m just a man, and such that cares for women, so.
He crept to the door with an eye—and ear—to spy.
Then he realized the light’s hue was like nothing his eye had ever seen—except lightning, perhaps. But lightning was gone almost before one had the chance to blink at its brilliance. This was a near-constant radiance, subtly shifting as if to movement. And the voice—Karyl’s self-appointed bodyguard had never a voice like that. Nor any human Rob knew or could imagine. It went up through his scrotum and pierced his bowels with terror like an ice misericordia.
What could I do, he thought, eyeing the bottle, but turn and flee? I’m a man who has kenned the uncanny more than he cares for, as you’d expect for a Traveler, one named touched by the Fae, to boot.
Now he half wished he’d taken that final half step, had seen and known for sure. And half rejoiced that he hadn’t.
What is it you’re into, Karyl, me dear lad? Something less savory than that lady knight’s putatively tender nethers, I’m thinking.
Maybe it was the witch, Aphrodite, who first had hired Rob to return to her the penniless—and tone-deaf—one-handed busker she insisted was none but one of his boyhood idols, Voyvod Karyl the great, whom he himself had seen struck down from behind and swept away by the muddy, bloody river Hassling. And then had hired them both to travel to Providence and train up an army of pacifists to resist their neighbor’s depredations. Rob had doubted her earnest insistence that she was a witch at first, too, if not so bluntly as Karyl. So he was almost as nonplussed when Karyl’s lost hand, which she’d claimed her magic would grow back over time … did.
