Brimstone and Lily (Legacy Stone Adventures)

by Terry Kroenung

  “Sorry,” I said with a snide smile, “I’ll try to get attacked by a giant Porterhouse steak next time.”

  “Oh, don’t tease me. You’ll just break my heart.”

  I planned another snappy comeback, but froze when I saw all eight remaining Reb troopers staring, mouths hanging open. After turning around to see who they were looking at, I realized it was me. It felt like I had two heads, or a beard, or tattoos. Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up and see the amazin’ warrior girl! Only two bits. No women or small children, please. It must’ve been something to them, laying eyes on the true Stone-Warden. Pretty hard for them to take, watching a twelve year-old tomboy slay the monster that’d humbled them, and with a magick guillotine that appeared from thin air, no less. Especially a girl looking as rough as I did, all crusted with blood, bruised, filthy, clothes crude-mended from raven claws. Their legends had led them to expect Lancelot in golden armor.

  Tyrell stepped forward, a knot on his forehead. “You are the one. That’s Morphageus, the sword they told us of.”

  I looked at the sword for a moment, then melted it back into a cup and hung it on my belt. “Yeah. If you didn’t think so, why’ve you been helpin’ me all this time?”

  “We do as the Coterie Redempteur orders us. They said you were the Stone-Warden and to guard you, so we did. Until now I had my doubts that their intelligence had been good.”

  Hands on my hips, I gave him a stern look that didn’t match how I felt inside. “Well, this girl’s intelligence is no good at all. I’ve spent a week runnin’, hidin’, and barely keepin’ my life and my sanity intact. I need to know what’s going on and you’re gonna tell me.”

  The Reb captain nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s get Boggs buried and then I’ll tell you all that I know.”

  Turned out it wasn’t just Boggs that needed burying. As I shuffled past the dead tick the air crackled again and the headless thing faded away. In its place was a man’s body, face-down. I yipped and jumped half a mile. After a sheepish look around I mastered my queasy tummy and took a look.

  The dead man looked to have been young, under thirty. All he wore was a pair of blue 18th century pants. His neck, wrists, and ankles were bruised and cut. All across his broad back ran long livid red stripes. Black burns scarred his feet and hands. Somebody treated you even more horrible than I just did.

  “Tortured,” Romulus said. He’d retrieved his knife from the head, which lay several paces off. “They does that. Then they offers you freedom if you does a mission for ‘em.”

  My eyebrows went up. “By makin’ him a horse tick in a war zone? Some freedom.”

  “They also like to hold your family hostage and threaten them with the same hospitality,” Tyrell said.

  “Ah.” I looked at Romulus. “Anybody we know?” I had no interest at all in looking at that head for myself.

  “No. Looks to be a Gaulle, from the style of clothes. Could be anybody.”

  I thought of Eddie, maybe stuck in the same prison where this poor fellow had come from. “He’s not, though. Probably had a wife, kids. Tryin’ to keep ‘em safe.”

  Tyrell nodded. “A warrior, then. That we can honor.” He turned to his sturdy long-bearded sergeant-major. “Bury them together. Say all the right words. Mark the grave well. Be quick, we can’t stay here long.”

  “Yes, sir,” the other trooper said with a salute. He pointed at Romulus. “Come dig, boy.”

  Before I could give him what for, Tyrell did it for me. The sergeant-major found his neck in a savage grip from his own commander. “He’s not your boy, understand? This here’s a Marshal of the Equity, not some runaway field hand. Treat him with the respect he deserves or you’ll be digging the grave by yourself. With your bare hands.”

  Gulping and rubbing his throat, the trooper croaked out a “Yes, sir” and moved away. Romulus stared at Tyrell as if he’d just seen a volcano sprout up in the woods.

  “I only treated you awful for show, on the road,” the Reb captain said. “Part of the job. I couldn’t be sure who might be spying on us at any moment.” He looked down at the unknown dead man. “Looks like I was right. And for what it’s worth, I didn’t turn you in to the Provost-Marshal. Some civilian did. At least, he looked like a civilian. Just bad luck, that.”

  Maybe. But I’m thinkin’ we don’t have bad luck. Somebody else had wanted Romulus out of the way. Them masked fellers, I expect.

  By way of accepting the apology, Romulus answered, “I thinks I’ll go help bury your man, if it’s all the same to you.” The two exchanged a look of understanding, then the big Marshal went off toward the sergeant-major.

  “Fortunate to have him,” Tyrell told me as we walked toward a flat boulder that looked to make a good bench.

  “Don’t I know it,” I agreed. “But I doubt fortune had any more to do with it than meetin’ up with you did.”

  “I expect you’re right there.” We sat on the rock, our faces dappled by morning sunlight making its way through the leaves of the trees. My witched senses took in the smell of pine needles and salt air. Ocean waves were audible, though the beach probably lay farther away than it sounded to me. I wanted to believe that resting on Roberta’s ship would be better than my past week on land had been.

  “So, I’ll tell you what I know and you do the same?”

  “Agreed, unless there’s something that the Redeemers have to keep secret, to preserve our safety.”

  “OK. Start with lettin’ me in on just who these Redeemers are.”

  Tyrell took off his kepi to shake out his long dark hair and let the breeze air it out. “You know about the Honourable Merchantry?”

  “Some. My friends’ve been droppin’ nuggets here and there, in between all the panic and screamin’ and death.”

  “We heard about that first night. It’s amazing you survived it, being thrown into an existence you knew nothing about.”

  “Well, I had help.”

  “Nevertheless, to have intuitively grasped how to use Morphageus, how to make decisions in the heat of battle, and how to fight Venoma…and at your age. Remarkable.”

  I ate a piece of salt pork from my haversack. Any other time it would’ve tasted like shoe leather, but now it was ambrosia. “Everybody keeps goin’ on about me bein’ a kid, like it’s somethin’ odd.”

  “It is. In the past Stone-Wardens were always adult warriors or sages. Never children. Most children wouldn’t possess the maturity of mind, body, and soul that you have. It takes much presence to even communicate with the sword, let alone use it properly. The average person your age would be dead by now.”

  “So what happened, then? Why me and why now?”

  He unbuttoned his jacket and peeled it off, then hung it on a low tree branch. “It’ll make more sense if we go back to the Merchantry. They’ve been around for a couple hundred years, in that form. Before that there were loose associations of groups that tried to manage things for their own benefit. In a local way, for the most part. No one ever managed to truly control the whole world, though the Romans came the closest, and they didn’t resort to magick. It was just in the early 1600’s that enough of the most powerful mages got together, agreed to ignore their grievances with one another, and combine their abilities. They pretended to be a trading company. Much of what they did was even legitimate business. Still is. But deep down, they wanted more.

  “At first they hardly needed magick. Historical forces in Europa were such that mere ruthless political manipulation and cunning employment of bribery, extortion, and assassination served their ends. They played Catholic against Protestant, Christian against Muslim, Conservative against Radical, black against white against yellow against red. Whatever would keep enough tension and conflict going to enable them to get what they wanted.”

  The pork sat in my gullet like a lump of tar. I washed it down with half a canteen of water. “And what did they want? What was the point of it all?”

  “The same thing they want now. The same thing all selfis
h, greedy men want. Money and power. Oh, some of them claimed then and now that they actually wanted to make the world a better place some day, but that they needed total control to make it happen. Others said they were interested in ultimate knowledge. But it’s all the same in the end. They don’t want to answer to anyone and they don’t want to share anything. There’s never enough for them. It’s that simple.”

  “How did it change? When did the magick come into it?”

  “Magick was always part of it, but in a small way at first. A plan would go a little wrong and a mage would intervene, behind the scenes, to restore the Merchantry’s prospects. That’s how the Thirty Years War lasted so long. Some occasional nudges to save a battle for one side here, kill the right general there. Ruin a peace treaty with a glamoured agent impersonating a head of state. That sort of thing. But once you start to use black magick, it becomes a part of you. It becomes ingrained in your soul. The meanness, the self-centeredness, the enjoyment of becoming infused with so much power by making others suffer…it’s like an opium addiction. After a while those at the top became so twisted inside that they couldn’t stop if they wanted to. In order to get their fill of the suffering that powered their magick they had to cause more chaos, more war, more misery. But to do that required even more use of that same magick to guarantee results. And it required assistance. Allies from the other world.”

  This is startin’ to look like it’s way beyond little Verity’s power to fix. “Demons? Like Venoma?”

  “She’s an example. But not just monsters. At least, not monsters as you’d think of them. The other world calls itself the Obverse. To them, we’re the back side, the dark side, the uncivilized world. It resembles our own in some ways, except that there magick is not a secret, but a part of everyone’s normal life. There are good people there, too, who look much like us. Just as in our world, though, there are ordinary-seeming folks who are capable of sickening cruelties. Some of them compacted with the Merchantry, trading their skills, powers, and special weapons for the opportunity to be placed in positions of trust. They looked human and could be made generals, princes, queens, emperors.”

  “Which would explain some of the crazy nonsensical things that leaders have done in history? Attackin’ people that hadn’t attacked them, massacrin’ their own citizens?”

  “Exactly. So the Merchantry grew more and more influential. It expanded its operations. Its hold on the world became noticeable. Pretending to be a simple trading company was more and more difficult to do. Free governments began to band together to fight it. Its grip began to lessen. The Proprietor and his Governors feared that if their strength diminished enough then their enemies could expose them or even defeat them. That would mean death for the leaders at the hands of the victorious free alliance, or worse than death at the hands of those from the other side. A disappointed demon is a creatively vengeful one.”

  I thought about having a whole army of Venomas, or even worse things, after me. “I can believe it. So the Merchantry tried to use magick to win their war once and for all?”

  Tyrell took off one of his tall boots and the sock that went with it, sunning his red toes. “They did. Twelve years ago they had a stroke of luck. The Grand Mage fell into their hands. It took a mighty combination of dark sorcerers to snare him, but they did it. Now he could no longer help defend the free peoples. With his energy at their command, along with all that the Merchantry and its allies could muster, they wove one potent spell in a web that encompassed the whole wide world. Their intent was to alter time and space itself so that their enemies would never have existed and no one would recall anything other than that the Merchantry was a great boon to mankind. The magick would also create a world of permanent conflict so that they would always have fuel for their dark sorcery and a market for their products.

  “Something went horribly wrong. Part of the spell did work as they intended. Most people everywhere did forget that the Honourable Merchantry of Esteemed Gentlemen had caused so much grief and destruction. Only a few mages and those protected by them still knew the truth. But the time and space portion of the spell became corrupted as they wove it. Instead of making their enemies vanish and making a chaotic world, it sent every nation into a different time, one where there was nonstop suffering. A combination of misery and change. The Affluxion.”

  Affliction…Affluxion. Boy, I’ll bet somebody just about busted their buttons with pride when they invented that. Miz Finch’d make ‘em stand in a corner for tryin’ too hard.

  “Romulus and Ernie told me about this. Bonaparte still rules in Gaulle. It’s the Thirty Years War again in Imperium Sacra.”

  “True, as far as it goes. In Graecia Athenian and Spartan armies slay one another. Catholics and Protestants plot in the Scepter’d Isle. In Iberion the Muslims fight the Christians. But it’s a re-creation, not really a different time.”

  Okay, now I’m getting confused even worse than before. “Huh?”

  The captain smiled and pulled off the other boot. His big toes stuck out of the sock. I wished we hadn’t used up all the thread in Romulus’ housewife. “Hard to follow, isn’t it? I doubt anyone understands how it all works. But what I do know is that though each nation lives a time that has already past, that past is no longer fixed. Things can be changed. It’s like the Merchantry magick remade the old time, rather than bringing that time forward.”

  “Then, if I go to Gaulle, say…the Dauphin might be alive? And Napoleon might be fighting against his army?”

  “Just so. History is not set, because it isn’t true history. It’s an accidental Merchantry imitation. But because they don’t fully understand it themselves, the Proprietor and his lackeys do all that they can to make things happen the way they did the first time. At least, that way they have some control. They can predict events and use them for their profit, especially if the Merchantry manipulated it all the first go-around.”

  “Do things often happen the way they did in history? Are there many changes?”

  “No. Almost every time history repeats itself. Seems the spell tends to make that happen. But it isn’t perfect.”

  My head was starting to hurt. How did people who knew about this not lose their minds? “I was told that another spell makes travelers believe that they haven’t left their own time? Like a big glamour?”

  “Something like that. More likely they just think they’ve traveled and Merchantry visions color their minds with journeys that were never undertaken. The interaction between nations is a tortured thing. That’s why the Merchantry strictly controls travel, or tries to. They’ve spelled each border to keep everyone in. The spell can be countered with strong magick. That means that some people know what’s happened and can tell others. There are also folks who know what’s happened but just refuse to believe it.”

  “And deep water defeats black magic? So the oceans are a free zone?”

  The boots were going back on. “In a way. The Merchantry has fleets of ships patrolling the seas, watching borders and hunting its enemies, but they have to act without magick. It isn’t that deep water defeats magic, it’s that it makes it unpredictable. Pluto’s Bane is as likely to annihilate its user as its intended target. Shape-shifting can result in monsters. So sensible ones don’t risk it.”

  “And they can travel across the sea without ships? I saw Venoma do it in Washington.”

  “But only between a few certain points, located in particularly evil places. Sites of great wrongs done, where the innocent have been abused.”

  I laughed. “Then Washington must be a railway hub for every dark force on earth.”

  Tyrell chuckled with me. “You’ll get no argument from this Reb.”

  “So why me? Was it an accident? Was it supposed to be somebody else?”

  “No, you fit the prophecy. But as our sages understand it, the spell that created the prophecy was to be activated in the time of greatest need. Ideally you would have been allowed to grow up, be trained in the use of the Stone and Mor
phageus. Taught how to employ Songlines and the other Free Arts.”

  “Then I fell in that hole because things’re so bad that I had to get started right away?”

  “I’d say so.

  I got up, stretched, and walked in a circle around the rock. Looking deeper into the woods, I saw odd low mounds, like heaps of trash that had been left for a hundred years. Some people dump their junk anywhere. “Just more of my bad luck, then. What’s your part in all this, then? Who are the Redeemers?”

  Tyrell had his boots back on and had his jacket in his hand. “We’re the good Merchantry soldiers who woke up one day and saw that we were on the wrong side.”

  “Like the Equity?” Nature had come calling again. I had to find a good spot to piddle and those trash piles looked as good as any.

  “No, the Equity have existed for thousands of years. Since the Pharaohs. They fight evil wherever they find it. The Redeemers are only about fifty years old. We started with a group of Gaulle cavalrymen disillusioned with Bonaparte. All of us had believed in ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. Then it went sour and Bonaparte made himself into just another king. When we discovered that his whole existence had been a Merchantry plot, we swore to right the wrongs it had caused.”

  “You say ‘we’ like you were there.”

  The captain paused. “I was. “

  I made a disbelieving blppt with my lips. “Were not!”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You can’t be more’n twenty-five.”

  “Actually…nearer to ninety-five.”

  “You’re pullin’ my leg!”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You just guillotined a giant angry tick with the aid of a shape-shifting sword and an enchanted rock, but my age is hard to believe? You think you’re the only one in the world with magick?”

  Well, he had me there. “Pretty dumb of me, huh? So, grandpa, you’ve been a Rebel for a real long time, then?”

  “Since 1809. Long enough to know that we need to make the Merchantry into something good rather than the scourge it’s become.”