Steadfast

by Michelle Hauck

  Enough proof of that came before Rasdid had said many sentences: The Northern soldiers put away their weapons. Their bodies still displayed the wariness of men on the edge, but they listened to their general and showed they wanted to avoid bloodshed. A few of them even edged toward the great capstan wheel, a rotating cylinder fitted with metal push bars, which would open the tonnage of the gates. The soldiers heard reason; it was the priests as always who caused the problem. One or two lowered their weapons at Rasdid’s speech, looking troubled. The other two score held their places before the gates—white Diviners held high.

  Ramiro didn’t need to understand their words to read their faces. Disbelief. Anger. Distrust. They could never believe a general over what their superiors had told them, even when the truth of how they were being using stared them in the face. They couldn’t accept being pawns to start a massacre of an entire city. Or perhaps they just didn’t care. Happy enough to sacrifice themselves for their god.

  The rain came down harder, turning into a downpour. Ramiro had to squint to shield his eyes against the drops and keep his vision. One of the priests began speaking back, arguing. Rasdid’s shoulders slumped.

  Ramiro read defeat in that. So did the mob. The first stone flew. The cries of open the gate resumed. “No bloodshed!” Ramiro shouted to remind them. “Wait!”

  He might as well have been shouting to the wind. More rocks flew. The mob pressed forward, pushing him with them. The priests surged to meet them. Diviners reached out and men dropped. An arrow took a priest in the throat.

  Some of Rasdid’s men used the commotion to turn for the capstan wheel.

  Ramiro seized one Diviner and it burst in a spray of splinters, but he couldn’t stop forty. More citizens died. A priest got too close and the mob grabbed him, crushing him under dozens of angry fists.

  Rasdid was seized and went down, judged unfairly as part of the price of his failure to stop the priests. Ramiro struggled to get to him, but was squeezed out by the press of people. The red Diviner went flying into the far part of the crowd, thrown by someone.

  “No!” Ramiro yelled, only to be ignored. Holy hell. Would the Diviner work to stave off Dal with no one holding it? He didn’t have time to think about it long. As if in answer the foul smell of death and rot carried on the wind. “Oh God.”

  An angry force of hate and malice pressed down over the surging crowd, driving all to their knees, then their bellies with its strength. Ramiro lay on the soggy ground, tangled with a dozen others as everywhere people screamed or sobbed according to their natures. Men and women vainly put their arms over their heads or tucked their faces under something to escape the malevolence—to no avail. Ramiro had been here before, there was no escape.

  Claire.

  He’d been so close. She must be just outside the gates. Arriving with the rain, like a breath of fresh air. Now for this to happen.

  He cowered on wet cobbles, screams of terror ringing in his ears, waiting for the first strike to come and carve into flesh. But it didn’t fall. Dal was obviously absorbed elsewhere. Close but not here—yet. Reducing them to mindless thralls until the monster could take their blood.

  By the saints, he’d refused to be a worm before, he could do so again. His own anger warmed his belly. If they weren’t under direct attack, he could resist. Never would he go down without a fight or lie here like a lamb waiting for the slaughter. He’d made a promise to these people to open the gate. The capstan wheel called to him. If he could only get the gate open, maybe some could escape. Maybe he could get to Claire.

  The hate from Dal was stronger this time. It said all life would fail. The darkness was waiting for all mankind.

  “No,” Ramiro ground out through gritted teeth. He tightened his arms and willed his body to respond, but his muscles trembled and failed when he attempted to stand. The best he could manage was to reach hands and knees. A woman stopped her mindless sobbing long enough to look at him. “Get up,” he urged her. She shook her head and looked away, wailing as the fear took her again.

  It took every ounce of determination to keep going. He inched toward the capstan, his armor clinking against the stones. The wheel stood above him as a guide like Her Beauty had once, seeming as high and distant as the great cathedral. He put one hand in front of the other and dragged his legs to follow. Pushing feebly against the waves of hate.

  A Northern soldier saw him, one of the few with eyes open, and slithered after on his belly, reaching out to grab Ramiro’s ankle. He had neither the energy nor the desire to shake the man off. To do so would be to lose his concentration and break his will. One hand in front of the other. He pulled them both along.

  Someone else joined their creeping march. Ramiro couldn’t spare them a glance. One hand in front of the other. He passed Rasdid with his head tucked in his knees, hands clamped over his ears, lost in his own demons.

  The metal bars of the capstan loomed over him. So impossibly high.

  All life dies. All life should die.

  “No! I made a promise.” A pledge to the people here and to Claire. He stretched up an arm, hooking his fingers around the bar, clinging as to the edge of a cliff. To lose his grip now would indeed send him tumbling down a dark abyss. He pulled with every ounce of his strength, fighting against the malice. Somehow, he got his other hand there, and managed to get his head even with the bar. Pulling his own weight. Chest high. He slumped over the bar, just hanging on the strong metal and panting as if he’d run from Colina Hermosa to Aveston.

  It seemed ages before he could set his feet and push with his hands locked on the metal. The bar went nowhere. The capstan was meant to be moved by six men, not one. The links of the great chains running from the wheel to the gates were as big as a loaf of bread. The chain much too heavy to move without the capstan and impossible for one man.

  “Come on!” he screamed to the Northern soldier who had hitched a ride. The man had hair almost as fair as Claire’s.

  Claire.

  Her image gave him the strength to yell to the man again.

  “Come on!” The soldier stirred. Inch by inch, the soldier rose, fighting, tears streaming down his face, until, he too, hung from a capstan bar. Together they set their feet and pushed. Muscles corded with effort. It came easier this time with two to fight as if having a task balanced the will of the Leviathan. Their feet slipped and caught on the rain-soaked cobbles. The wheel grated as it moved, but it didn’t turn even a half click with all their straining.

  The soldier slumped again, almost falling. Ramiro caught him, almost falling himself as he struggled to support them both. He managed to get the other man over the second bar, so they both could dangle weakly from the metal, suffering under the mental assault.

  “Help! We need help opening the gates!” He looked for the third crawler, but whoever they’d been they hadn’t made it this far.

  By the saints. I can’t do it.

  Dal called at him to give up. To lie back down in the dirt from whence he came.

  “Help.” The words were weaker this time. The whimper of a beaten man with no one to hear, though his fingers tightened on the bar, bleeding from a thousand scrapes. Heart straining, he pushed against the capstan, alone this time. The Northern soldier’s eyes had rolled back in his head. “I promised,” he whispered.

  “I’ll help,” a voice boomed.

  A third figure joined them at the capstan. A man in a blacksmith vest that left his arms bare, wearing a short cape. Thousands of raindrops glistened on his dark skin as he set his hands on a third bar. “Push.”

  The Northern soldier revived and grasped his own bar. Ramiro ignored the heavy rain that blinded his eyes and heaved. The capstan moved. The chain to the gates tightened and then clicked home on the wheel. They walked in a circle, slowly at first, then gaining speed. More and more of the chain spun onto the wheel and the gates began to shudder. They cracked. They gapped.

  The capstan clicked as the chain filled it, and the gates spread open to bare
the sky.

  They stopped moving, and Ramiro hung on his bar too astonished to do more than gasp. The Northern soldier, crying tears of joy, dropped from the wheel and crawled toward the gate.

  Promise kept,” the third man said. “I used to have armor like that.”

  Ramiro blinked stupidly in the rain as the blacksmith seemed to disappear into a wall of fog. More slowly, Ramiro pulled his hands from the bar, feeling as if they’d become frozen to the metal. The hate beat down, but he refused to bow to the darkness again.

  Staggering with rubbery knees, he stumbled to the gate. All help ended here. From now on, he was on his own. He had to find Claire was his only thought as he tottered outside Aveston into a killing zone.

  Father Telo clung to Sancha and looked around him in wonder. The place where dreamers came. Dreamers. The rarest of the rare chosen of God. More uncommon than prophets or saints and almost never dwelt upon in detail in any scriptures. Yet, here he was, getting to be where dreamers went to see through God’s eyes. A holy place. A most exclusive shrine that no pilgrim could find. For a humble friar to be invited here. He gawked around like a starving street boy suddenly granted access to a buffet.

  It looked like Aveston, yet not.

  The city of his youth passed in a fog-shrouded blur—a literal blur. Sancha galloped and everything became indistinct and piled atop one another, strangely multiplied, as if instead of one image of an inn, he saw a hundred inns all at the same time and all imposed behind and atop every other structure around them. His own hands on Sancha’s mane fractured into dozens of hands on dozens of manes. He could make no sense of it.

  “By all that’s holy. Fascinating.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Teresa moaned at his back. “It wasn’t like this last time.”

  “You moved slower, I’d guess.” The weird effect hadn’t started until Sancha got in real motion and begun to gallop. Telo took in a deep breath of air without a hint of contaminate. No smoke. No pollens. No sewage or cooking scents. Just pure air. The trembling and weakness of his limbs caused by the drain of his healing had gradually ceased since they’d got here.

  He’d hardly given his healing a second thought; not with so much else to consider and events moving so fast. Though he’d been apparently severely ill, judging by Teresa’s joy at his recovery. He patted Teresa’s hand tucked around his waist. She, too, gripped stronger as if this place fortified them or maybe just weeded out any detrimental influences.

  Teresa had caught him up on everything she thought was pertinent: red Diviners could heal and hold off Dal, Santabe’s escape, the fog was part of the dream world Ramiro entered and allowed them safe travel, and they needed to reach Ramiro at the gates so they could find a way to help. It all seemed small potatoes compared to being here.

  “There’s no rain. Why would that be?” Telo marveled and received a grunt for an answer. He touched his robe with his stub and found the wool quite dry, though they’d only been in the fog a few minutes. He shook his head and took in everything around him, unsure when or how it would end.

  With a jolt apparently. He stretched out his stub to catch a tendril of fog, and the mist vanished. Not just that strand, but all of the fog. Rain lashed at his face. Sancha screamed and crashed to her knees. Telo found himself rolling across cobblestones, luckily, thrown clear. Teresa screeched and came down atop him, driving the air from his lungs. The ropes still bound them together.

  He set up woozily, already getting drenched in the downpour to find Teresa rubbing her head and the mare standing nearby with blood dripping from torn hide on her front legs. Both glowed with a white luminesce halo around their bodies. Telo looked down at himself and saw the same glow. He swiped at the halo and his hand passed right through.

  “What in God’s name.”

  Sancha made a mournful sound.

  “Peace,” Telo said, putting aside the odd phenomenon to push the ropes aside and hold up both arms as he went to Sancha. “Peace, creature.” All animals were God’s creation, but Telo had never had much dealing with any of them. His own two feet had been good enough. His experience with horses was limited.

  “This looks bad.”

  Teresa pushed him out of the way to see. Sancha trembled; despite her odd glow, the flesh around her knees hung in ribbons. She held her left hoof off the ground while her eyes rolled and showed their whites.

  “Oh!” Teresa moaned. “This is terrible! All my fault! Poor Sancha! Ramiro will kill me. What should we do? What happened?”

  “We were thrown back into our world.” Telo looked around, uneasily. “I think.” All the fog had disappeared unless it was part of the halos around them. They’d reached Cathedral Square. Her Beauty stood just behind them, soaring to the heavens, though hard to distinguish due to the gloomy skies. The wind picked up, chilling against Telo’s wet body, and all around the square people lay prostrate on the ground despite the pounding rain, weeping and sniveling, arms locked over their heads.

  Dal.

  Then why didn’t they feel the Leviathan’s presence? Telo had a suspicion it had to do with the glow around their bodies.

  “You said the Diviners and the fog pushed against each other like opposite forces. I think we just ran into our opposite.” Meeting Leviathan’s power had apparently cast them out of the fog. Maybe destroying that realm. Or maybe just forcing them out. Telo looked at the people suffering from the Leviathan’s evil and decided the fog indeed still protected them through the halo in some way and spared them.

  Teresa had buried her face in Sancha’s side. She mumbled something that sounded like “no, no, no.” Blood appeared on the mare’s legs faster than the rain could wash it away.

  “Poor creature.” Telo reached out to Sancha, trying to calm her, laying an arm around Teresa in the process. He felt useless. He knew not what to do to treat the mare. Had no such training, though he had a feeling no medical knowledge could repair this injury. He had nothing but prayer. Yet no neat, well-taught formula rose to his lips. Instead, there was just a plea from the heart. “Lord, this animal gave aid when we needed it. Give her your comfort now. In your eyes there are no least creatures under the sky, but all beings have worth from small to large, created in your image. Send healing to all in need,” he added, thinking of all in turmoil around them.

  The mare sank to the ground, her neck and her legs outstretched, with a sound between a whicker and a groan. If she wasn’t standing, that meant the extent of the injury was worse than he feared.

  Telo drew back. Guilt and grief built in his heart. He pulled at Teresa. “We’ll have to leave the horse. We should get to the gate. It’s not far.” Sancha shouldn’t be left in this pain, but he had no means to help her—if she could be helped. “We can fetch Ramiro.” The boy would do the task immediately. His horse couldn’t be left to this suffering.

  Teresa turned on him and pushed him away.

  Telo staggered back three steps. “What—” A knife flashed past his ear. Santabe emerged from the pouring rain, a maniacal grin on her face.

  “This time you die,” she said.

  Chapter 40

  Santabe’s backswing caught Telo under the armpit. The knife ripped across his flesh, leaving a line of fire under his arm and another pattern of blood splatter on her white robe. “Always you return”—she swung on him with each sentence, inflicting smaller wounds and backing him away—“again and again. Sticking your nose in. Coming back to meddle. You. You destroyed the Diviners! This was your work.”

  “He wasn’t there.” Teresa stood at his shoulder. “I was. I helped burn them. Threw the oil on them myself.”

  Santabe screamed and ran at them, forcing them to flee before her. In one hand she held the knife and in the other a white Diviner. A red one was thrust through the belt at her waist. “Do you know how rare they are?”

  “Much rarer now,” Telo said and instantly regretted it. Gone was any chance of reaching the soul he’d witnessed deep inside Santabe: the woman who missed the
love of her family and wondered at the marvels of the world. That woman with a spark of reason was replaced with a shrieking maniac.

  “You will pay!” She thrust at them over and over with the knife. They became pinned against the base of a statue at the steps of Her Beauty. Telo glanced up to identify the effigy of Santiago, holding his staff and book.

  Telo looked for an opening to strike back at the woman but she gave him none, working away at them with her knife. Teresa screamed as she dodged a second too late and the knife cut across her shoulder and down toward her heart. She fell. Telo tried to jump on Santabe, but she spun with such quickness, anticipating his move and managing to hold them both off. She spilled out a stream of what sounded like oaths in her language as the rain poured over them and she held him trapped against the statue with Teresa at their feet.

  “Teresa, friend. Are you all right?” Telo pleaded, but Teresa didn’t respond. The white halo around her from the fog that allowed him to find her in the gloom had gone out. His wounds throbbed with a fierce sting, sending blood to pool with the rainwater around his sandals.

  Santabe held the knife up and a slow smile spread over her face. “You meddled for the last time.” She kicked at Teresa, watching him carefully.

  Telo frowned, attempting to organize his scattered mind. Something didn’t add up. The white Diviner could finish them in seconds. Even with the knife, Santabe slashed instead of stabbing. Another pattern of blood on her robe? Santabe had been killing before she encountered them. Why was she here in Cathedral Square and not stopping Ramiro at the gates?

  It all clicked home.

  Telo managed to sneak a glance past Santabe’s shoulder and beyond Sancha’s prone form. People lay torn and broken. Writhing under Dal’s evil influence, they never would have seen Santabe coming. “You. You stabbed them while they lay helpless under Dal’s spell. You murdered them in cold blood. You still want Dal to destroy this city. You are trying to bring him here. You are sick. Insane.”