Birds of Prophecy (The Dashkova Memoirs Book 3)

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  I suspected that Ben would know the author upon reading, though I had not attached my name. Instead I had signed it as Humble Justice, which was a play on the old name of Silence Dogood, which was Ben's alter-ego in the early days of his printing career.

  To avoid the prying gaze of the Women's Brigade Against Tyranny, whose spies watched my doorway for signs of egress, I flew out early in the morning during the dawn's preternatural light and found an unattended rooftop near the Bone House to leave my cauldron.

  The streets held a restful silence, and even the wind felt cautious in its displays. Only birdsong seemed to defy the mood, cheerily announcing the day.

  Autumn had come early to Philadelphia. The drought brought ochre colors to the edges of the trees. Some might have seen them as bright gifts to the eyes, but I saw them as premature death.

  The Bone House meditated in an unearthly quiet. The construction of the house left me curious to its designer. The tall sloping roof made of fitted boards ran counter to the surrounding buildings crafted in the local Philadelphian style. It seemed made for heavy winters of thick, wet snow that could crush a house if allowed to build up.

  Rowan greeted me before my hand touched the door, welcoming me inside. In her light blue blouse and stark white doctor's apron, she oozed confidence.

  "Katerina, you honor me by returning. I thought I might have run you off after last time." She searched my face, ruby lips deepening in a smile. "By your dress I assume you mean to stay and help, though I can't imagine you'll have need of that—" She nodded towards the pistol on my hip.

  "Due to my origins, my welcome in the city has been revoked, so I have need of protection," I said, leaving out the truth about the Empty Men.

  She laughed, a musical trill that warmed my heart. "I suppose I shouldn't question it, I have Harvest to guard my person."

  "Is he—?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "Or is that too presumptuous a question?"

  Rowan put a warm hand on my elbow. "Not at all. But no, he does not share my bed. Rather he's been my guardian for a long time. I trust him implicitly." She curled her arm around mine and squeezed me close, her face lighting up despite the faint worry lines. "I am truly glad you returned. I know we have only just met, but I have a deep fondness for you already. I know we are meant to be lifelong friends."

  The genuineness of her admission was a balm to my skittish heart. The last few months in Philadelphia had been trying, if I were being an honest woman, which I was, to a fault.

  "You speak of your prophecy," I said, feeling ungrateful for bringing it up.

  "Nay." She shook her head earnestly. "Though we have much to learn of each other, I already feel a kinship. As if we have known each other before."

  "Very well," I said, and upon seeing a nearly imperceptible flinch, "I do enjoy your company. The city has been unkind thus far and I would enjoy hearing the tales of your adventures."

  I felt the fool for my inelegant words, equating our nascent friendship more to the unkindness of others than the affection she showed me.

  Desperate to have her keen gaze off me, I spoke without thinking. "Since you are acquainted with prophecy, have you heard of the Gamayun?"

  Rowan recoiled as if slapped, her fingers digging into my flesh.

  "What? Where have you heard this?"

  Her cross demeanor left me nearly speechless. I spit out lies almost as fast as they spooled onto my tongue.

  "I...my friend, the Warden, Simon Snyder, he asked me about them," I said, nearly tripping over my words. "He...said they had something to do with a murder."

  An ocean of emotions roiled to the surface on Rowan's pale face. They crashed together so violently I could not make sense of their intention, knowing they served many masters.

  "What are they?" I asked, hopeful.

  "Death incarnate," she said. "To hear them is to die, because all roads from the Gamayun lead to death."

  "You fear them?"

  She gave me a scathing glance. "Without question. Their words would turn your life into a nearly unsolvable puzzle with only one possible ending."

  I sensed a deeper history etched into her brow. "You've spoken to them."

  Rowan refused to make eye contact, and her teeth ground together. "I have."

  "But you're alive."

  "I said nearly." Her gaze found me, cold and remote, like a windblown tundra.

  "So there's a way."

  Rowan took my arm in both of her hands, squeezing. She bore down on me with her steely gaze. "You haven't spoken to them, have you? Tell me."

  "No," I said. "It's the concept that intrigues me."

  Rowan grew angry, her lips curling like scorched paper. "Nothing about the Gamayun is intriguing. I shouldn't have indulged your question. Forget them. Forget everything I said about them, and if your friend the Warden is asking about them, I would avoid him, too."

  The word indulge struck me across the face as if I'd been physically hit. It told me Rowan felt she was my superior, much as a king or empress might.

  "But why?" I asked. "What is so bad about hearing them?

  "No," said Rowan, shaking her head defiantly. "No more. Let us speak of happier things."

  "Tell me this and I won't ask again. I'll never bring them up after this," I said. "Appease my curiosity and I'll seal my lips."

  Rowan grabbed me by the shoulders, putting her face close to mine. "Promise me you'll never visit them. Promise me you'll abandon your friend the Warden. If he's seen them, then he's dead, and getting involved will only doom you as well."

  "Why?"

  She pulled away, crossed her arms, and after a second glance, sighed. "Only this and I am finished. I hear a wagon outside, a customer for us to attend. Promise me no more. Promise me you will not try to visit the Gamayun."

  "I promise."

  She searched my eyes, as if she could divine the truth. I was being honest. I wouldn't try to see them again. The first visit had been awful and I'd already heard my fate.

  The world around us seemed to draw in and my flesh grew prickly as Rowan leaned close. Her breath tickled my ear.

  "The Gamayun see all possible futures. They see the multiverse in its infinite glory and seek to destroy it. They know exactly what to say to a mortal to get them to do what they want, but they are always truthful and always right. To hear them is to place yourself in their trap. A trap with only one ending. Death."

  The opening of the door saved me. My expression had turned to one of lip-bending horror the moment I understood what it meant to hear the prophecy. By the time Rowan glanced back to me, I'd steeled my expression, saving me from reproach.

  We fell into the routine that we'd developed the first time. Her patients required healing: herbs, wraps, or other more elaborate fixes involving one of the implements from the wall. I was her assistant, fetching tools, holding arms, and grinding up medicines with a mortar and pestle. This was made more important by the absence of her guardian, Harvest, who was away from the shop on unspecified errands.

  A steady stream of folk came through the door seeking succor for their ailments. We attended them each in due course. The degree of variance between the injuries and Rowan's ability to fix them surprised me. Among the most interesting of problems were: a little boy from a Quaker family who'd gotten a thimble stuck in his nose, a woman who hadn't realized she was pregnant, and some twins who somehow broke each other's noses in a pugilistic disagreement over a woman's fancy.

  We were three-quarters through the day when the incident happened. Rowan was finishing a wrap on a farmer who'd sliced his leg open with a careless scythe, when she sent me into the waiting room to attend to the next patients.

  I'd never seen dirtier children and I was certain it wasn't dirt adhered to their flesh. Black crust smeared across their necks and arms, surrounded by red, angry flesh. The two boys—maybe the age of five or six—scratched at the scabby material, fidgeting like water on a hot pan.

  The mother had similar marks, but sat passively wi
th a drooping head like a cow waiting for the slaughter. She gazed at me with dumb animal eyes. When she spoke, I could barely understand her, as if she had a mouth full of mud.

  "Ma boys 'em sick," she said.

  Then the smell hit me like a steam train, nearly knocking me over. At once, I knew what was on them. The boys had been playing in sewage.

  "Madam," I addressed her, suppressing a gag, "are you beetle-headed? These boys need a bath, a proper one of clean water. You don't need a doctor, you need a mistress of better sense to cuff your head."

  The woman recoiled from my recrimination, curling her arms around her boys as if I were a vicious tiger. The mother pulled them towards the exit, keeping me in her wary gaze.

  Rowan burst through the curtain. "My dear, no, no, no, you mustn't leave. We have much with which we can help you." She gave me a withering glance and nodded me into the back room.

  I went out the front rather than listen to Rowan. The mother flinched away as I marched past. Pacing across the cobblestones did nothing for my foul mood.

  After a few minutes, Rowan appeared. I was ready to spar with her, until she spoke, disarming me with one question.

  "You think you're better than them, don't you?"

  I jawed at my answer, but ended up clamping my lips shut.

  "You're not just an old friend of Franklin's, are you?" Rowan asked with her arms crossed. "You came from considerable means, probably wealth. You're used to giving orders. Or at least orders to those you think you're better than."

  This statement proved how little we knew of each other. I had no choice but to confirm her suspicion. "Does that bother you?"

  "No," she said, "it helps me understand you, so that we might learn to be better friends."

  She said it so matter-of-factly, without a trace of animosity, that I felt my shoulders relax.

  I didn't want to reveal my noble background, so I offered an evasive explanation. "I'm used to dealing with competence. In my previous years, I worked with many scientists. That the woman would allow her children to play in the sewers had deeply offended my sense of the common understanding of diseases."

  "I'm in complete agreement," said Rowan with a thoughtful smile, "but you won't get her to change that way." Her eyes creased and she tilted her head, just so. "I gather you held a position of some authority"—she held up a finger—"but, you wish to keep that past a secret. I have secrets of my own. I will respect yours, though I hope in due time I will have earned your trust enough to learn your past, as you will of mine."

  Her guesses had struck true on many accounts. I had spent my life dealing with the upper class and though some of them could be imbeciles when it came to the world at large, they at least understood the game they played, and played accordingly. My interactions with the lower class were strictly within the serfdom. They were used to receiving orders, and I was used to giving them.

  "I will be your attentive student, if you will teach me," I said while miming a curtsey.

  "It would be my pleasure," she said.

  We returned to the interior of the Bone House. I was her busy assistant, though part of me mulled my behavior. For the last two years, I had found Philadelphia to be inhospitable, trying to push me out. But had it been me all along that was the problem?

  Maybe—as much as I hated to admit it—the problem was that I was hostile to the idea of people disagreeing with me, on the supposition that I knew better than they. It wasn't a foreign thought once I considered it. I'd given advice to kings and empresses. I'd ruled over serfs numbering in the tens of thousands. Why anyone would question my advice seemed absurd.

  Unless, either I was delusional, or uncomfortable with the idea that the Enlightenment meant that people didn't always make the best choices, and that the freedom to make bad choices, meant I had to accept their—and my—mistakes.

  This would be a lesson I would fail many times.

  Chapter Ten

  In the dark of my bedroom, buried amid the feather-stuffed blankets with the linen curtains closed tight, I couldn't ignore the words of the prophecy. They rattled around in my head like bone dice in an elbow-shaker’s grip, ready to tumble across the board.

  My knees and arms ached from a week in Rowan's Bone House. She was a generous employer and if I kept working five days a week, I could pay off my debts by the winter solstice. December 22nd. It was two months away, yet I knew it would arrive like an avalanche, building speed as it approached, crushing me when it arrived.

  Using my thumb, I massaged the palm of my hand, gritting my teeth all the while. Constantly grinding medicine with a pestle had worn a knot. I could feel the pea of hard muscle beneath the flesh as I rubbed my thumb back and forth over it.

  The prophecy was like that knot. The only way to get rid of it was to work it out, but it would hurt.

  In the hands of the Master Bender, the staves will become a weapon, while your failure to kill him will unleash rivers of blood.

  Before the Winter Solstice, you must die by the hands of the Architect or the city of love will be destroyed.

  An ancient god will enslave this reality unless you slay the Accidental Killer on the Winter Solstice.

  I thought I had the first prophecy worked out and planned on making a visit to the Master Bender when the sun rose. The late September morning was still wrapped in a blanket of night.

  It was the second and third prophecy that had me wandering through a dizzying maze. How could I be killed on the day before the Winter Solstice, and be alive to stop the Accidental Killer the next day

  Rowan had said the bird-women only told the truth, but they also dispensed it in a way to get their victims to do exactly what they wanted. This meant they conveniently left out important details, or confused them with layered meaning.

  Before the dawn arrived, I pulled out my needle and thread to make a small modification to a burgundy cotton pelisse. I abhorred the style, as the puffy fabric made me feel like an overstuffed sausage, but I needed to hide a few items on my person and the heavy fabric made for an excellent disguise.

  The house was deathly quiet, as Aught had left in the night. I wondered if he’d returned to Ben to report on my activities, but I couldn't know for certain.

  My standard method for leaving the house was to fly the cauldron to a vacant rooftop while the sky was dark, and then light the fires in the steam carriage that I’d hidden nearby. By the time the sky bloomed with the sun, the steam engine was frothy and I could make my way to whatever destination I chose.

  While sitting in the carriage, pondering the many buttons yet unpressed on the dashboard, I watched as a massive flock of sparrows descended upon the grand oaks of the nearby park. The frenzied chirping made an unsettling racket.

  At that moment, the boiler gauge surged into the green. The steam carriage was ready. As I pulled away, I feared the birds—known psychopomps—were an omen. For today, I might have to kill a man.

  I honestly didn't know if I could do it. Kill a man. Except that Rowan had told me that a strong willed person could defeat the prophecy, bend it to their purpose. The prophecy stated that my failure to kill him will unleash rivers of blood. Killing the Master Bender would defeat that prophecy. In the tumultuous early years of Catherine's reign, I had initiated events that had resulted in other's deaths, but never had I done the deed myself. Even those decisions had been made with much consternation, but to not make them would have put myself and Catherine in grave danger.

  The barrel maker was on the south side of the city, in the same area that held the two glass shops. Initially, I hadn't made the connection between Master Bender and a maker of barrels, but the description of “staves” did the trick as they were the pieces of wood that had to be bent into the proper shape. I knew this cooper had to be the right maker because he was the only one who was registered with the government as a master tradesman.

  The barrel making shop was a location of particular industry, and a sharp metallic scent hit my nose as soon as I reached the
area. Black smoke over the buildings was ripped into long streamers by the brisk autumn wind.

  With my hands buried in a muskrat furred muff, I stalked towards the cooper's shop, the pistol on my thigh, beneath my heavy skirt, bouncing against my leg.

  A tall man stood outside sharpening a blade on a piece of leather. His dirty blonde hair sported bits of gray, and the wrinkles around his mouth gave the semblance of a permanent frown.

  He whisked the blade across the strip, the sound cutting through the early air. White mist from the cold morning puffed from his lips at each stroke.

  "Sir, are you the master cooper?" I asked upon approach. "A Mr. Fale O'Dell?"

  His blade never faltered as his gaze lifted. He mumbled something that might have been acknowledgement while his shoulders bristled with annoyance.

  "May I speak to you?" I asked.

  "I can't stop ya," he said.

  He finished sharpening the blade and, in a series of precise movements, folded the knife and placed it into a pocket on his leather apron.

  When I hesitated, he said, "Get on with your questions, I have work to do."

  My plan had been to speak with him and ascertain if he were somehow a danger to the city, which would make using my pistol slightly easier. But quickly I realized my fears were misplaced. He was a craftsman and no more, and the idea that I could kill him in cold blood was an affront to all I stood for.

  "Sir, Mr. O'Dell," I said slowly, searching for what I would say next. "Do you know a Mr. Albert Hold?"

  The spark of recognition that passed across his eyes was unmistakable, but it was the words he spoke next that surprised me.

  "I'm afraid not, Madam."

  The connection was unexpected.

  "He was murdered recently," I said.

  Mr. O'Dell's hand touched the pocket on his leather apron where he'd put his folding knife. My first impressions spun on the axis of his behavior: first the lie about knowing the beheaded man and then the way he touched the knife in his apron.

  "I said I don't know him," he replied, turning his body away. Mr. O'Dell wanted me to leave.