The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  Something is very wrong. The surety of it hit my gut as if I’d swallowed a burned-out coal. It was the sensation of having just dropped something priceless and fragile out a window, watching it fall sickeningly away in the instant it was too late to recover it.

  Marcello’s head snapped up, and he met my eyes.

  His were the cold green of a dark and ancient forest, all warmth and light gone from them. His mouth curved slightly in a secret, wicked smile.

  The world slipped askew. That’s not Marcello.

  He burst into motion, too fast to follow. His sling fluttered down in the air where he had been, discarded; my fingers clutched at nothing.

  The doge’s first guard fell with a knife in his belly. The second got his pistol half drawn before Marcello’s sword sliced across his throat.

  The doge reached for his heavy necklace of jeweled artifice medallions, his eyes widening, but Marcello slashed a cut across his chest that snapped the chain. Gems in rune-graven settings and twists of golden wire scattered everywhere, skittering across the marble floor.

  The doge staggered back, gasping with pain and shock. Blood spread across the gold brocade of his robes. The impossible, terrible splash of scarlet shocked time back into motion, breath back into my lungs.

  “Stop!” I screamed, and threw myself in front of the doge, even as Zaira jumped on Marcello from behind, grappling for a hold on him.

  He twisted out of her grip, whirled, and threw her against the wall with vicious force. She sank down it, stunned.

  “Marcello!” I cried.

  This was a dream, sent by the Demon of Nightmares. It couldn’t be real. The man before me was Marcello, unquestionably—the way he moved, the way he’d spoken and acted all the way up until he attacked, even his scent; I knew him too well to be wrong. So it had to be reality itself that was wrong, broken like a mirror, and I would wake up any minute.

  He turned to face me. The luminaries cast his features into a harsh map of light and shadow, pulling hard gleams from his narrowed eyes. Behind me, the doge slumped against the wall, his breathing ragged.

  “You must be controlled,” I said quickly, my hands up and empty between us, my heart ready to shatter with each merciless racing beat. I’d already discharged my flare locket against Balos, and it had to absorb a day’s worth of sunlight before it would work again; I had nothing to protect myself with save my dagger and my words. “I know you don’t want to do this. There has to be a way out of his command.”

  Marcello’s rapier tip drooped. A familiar furrow appeared between his brows. My heart spasmed at the sight of it.

  But then he drew his pistol and pointed it straight at me, drawing back the hammer.

  “I’ll shoot through you if I have to, Amalia.” His voice broke on my name, changing from distant and clinical to human and aching. “Step out of the way. Please.”

  “No.” I spread my arms, blocking as much of the doge as possible. I could hear shouting back the way we’d come; all I had to do was stall him until reinforcements arrived. “Marcello, he’s hurt, he’s probably dying, you did what Ruven wanted. Put the pistol down.”

  Behind him, Zaira stirred, lifting a hand to her head. The distant clamor of shouting guards grew louder.

  Marcello’s face twisted in anguish. He raised his pistol, his hand rock-steady despite the horror haunting his eyes.

  “Don’t,” I whispered.

  His finger moved on the trigger.

  The night cracked open with a sound like thunder.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Pain kissed my cheek in a hot, bitter line. An inarticulate cry sounded behind me.

  I whirled in time to see the doge collapse, his bloody robes billowing about him, red blooming on his forehead like a terrible new eye.

  “No!” I reached out toward him, but my hand dropped halfway, trembling. There was no arguing with the blank, flat glazing of his eyes, or the dark wet hole Marcello’s pistol had made.

  Niro da Morante, doge of Raverra and the Serene Empire, was dead. An era was over. And Marcello had murdered him.

  “Hells, now you’ve done it,” Zaira groaned, lurching to her feet.

  Marcello dropped to his knees, the pistol clattering on the floor. “Grace of Mercy, forgive me.”

  More guards came running at last—not from the direction I’d heard shouting, but from the corridor that led to the ducal apartments.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh! His Serenity!”

  They froze, horror on their faces. Not one of us could take the moment back, no matter how desperately we strained to roll time in reverse like a great stone wheel. It was done, we had all failed, and the doge was dead.

  And I was a Cornaro. Which meant I had to take up this awful moment in my hands and command it.

  I drew in a shuddering breath. “Captain Verdi is under the effects of Lord Ruven’s control potion. Seize and disarm him, but don’t hurt him,” I ordered.

  Marcello looked so broken, kneeling there, his hands raised to his face. All I wanted was to drop down beside him and hold him. To tell him it wasn’t his fault, and it would be all right. But he was still controlled, and I didn’t know what more Ruven might compel him to do.

  The shaken guards seemed glad for orders. Marcello didn’t resist as they took his knife away, checked him for other weapons, and raised him up between them with a firm grip on his arms. He stared down at the floor, moving with the numb looseness of a man still dreaming. The black waves of his hair hung in his face.

  Oh, Marcello. I’m so sorry. My throat ached for him.

  But then his head lifted suddenly. “Amalia,” he gasped. “Hurry. He’s going after the Council, too.”

  A thousand shards of ice pierced my heart. My mother.

  That shouting we’d heard hadn’t been guards running to help the doge. The palace was under attack.

  All logic left my mind in one blank instant, and I started running toward the Map Room.

  Zaira caught up to me swiftly and growled as we ran, “I’ve had enough of this. Release me.”

  “Exsolvo,” I panted grimly, trying not to think about what a fire warlock could do to the Imperial Palace.

  We whipped past the Thinking Room, and my heel skidded on a puddle of water. A damp, dripping trail led from the long line of windows, as if something had crawled out of the canal itself.

  The first body came almost immediately after, sprawled in her blood in the blue and gold uniform of the imperial guard. I leaped over her without pausing, then sidestepped another, fear clawing inside me like a terrible beast shredding its way through my rib cage from within.

  The trail of water led past three more dead guards, picking up smears of blood. Zaira swore, with feeling, but I couldn’t speak. Not my mother. Not my mother. I refused to let this nightmare end that way.

  The door to the Map Room stood ajar, one final dead guard crumpled before it, his throat slashed open by something that couldn’t have been human.

  “Wait,” Zaira called, “you’re not even armed, don’t—”

  I drew my dagger without slowing, threw the door open, and burst through.

  Broken, still bodies lay strewn across the floor. For an instant, my chest seemed ready to tear in half like wet paper.

  But the bodies had sharklike faces, curving talons, and skin that shone like a beetle’s armor—human chimeras, sickeningly unnatural even in death. As I stood frozen in the doorway, Ciardha smoothly pulled her daggers out of the last of them, letting the body drop to the floor with the rest.

  Most of the Council of Nine pressed against the back wall, as far away from Ciardha as possible, staring at her as if she were the Demon of Death. Old Lord Errardi sat on the floor, clutching a wounded arm; Lord Caulin appeared to be treating him, despite the slash marks of claws across his own face. The Marquise of Palova stood protectively in front of them, reloading her pistol.

  My mother leaned against the wall, her face pale, arm clamped against her side. A dark
stain marked the emerald green velvet of her bodice.

  “Mamma!” I cried, like a child, and ran to her. The lines of pain on her face were like cracks in the world. She should have been safe—here, in the most secure room in the most secure building in the Empire, protected by the best bodyguard in Eruvia—but that was blood spreading slowly from beneath her arm.

  “Amalia, what are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice rough with pain. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. But you’re hurt!”

  “Excuse me, Lady Amalia.” Ciardha spared me a quick, graceful nod as she stepped up to La Contessa’s side; I gave way, shocked to spy a bloody tear in Ciardha’s own sleeve. I’d never seen her so much as scratched before. Worry tightened her usually imperturbable face as she flipped open one of the discreet pouches on her hips and began pulling out tiny vials and handing them to my mother, murmuring the purpose of each. “To stop the bleeding. For the pain. In case of poison. To prevent infection. To keep you alert.” My mother downed each as she received it with the grim efficiency of someone who has, at some time I could not begin to imagine, done this before.

  I was dimly aware of commotion in the rest of the room, and of Zaira nearby, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my mother’s strained face. All I wanted was for Ciardha to turn to me and say she would be all right. After everything that had happened tonight, by all the Graces, I wanted this one thing.

  “You should let me tend to the wound, Contessa,” Ciardha said, her voice so low I almost didn’t catch it.

  “If it won’t kill me to wait, I’ll tend to the Empire first,” my mother said, wiping the traces of bitter potion from her mouth.

  “It won’t, Contessa, so long as you’re quick.” Disapproval flattened Ciardha’s voice, but her words sounded like the blessing song of the Graces to me.

  My mother’s eyes flicked back to mine, sharp and assessing. “What’s wrong, Amalia? There’s more bad news; I can see it in your face. Out with it, quick.”

  I stared at my mother, still clutching my dagger, a lump of mingled relief and horror blocking my throat. The room had fallen quiet, with the Council tending to each other’s wounds, and I felt wary and curious eyes on me. They’d been fighting for their lives, watching their guards slaughtered—they could have no idea of anything that had happened outside this room. There was too much awful, heavy truth bottled up inside me to shape words to it.

  Zaira stepped up beside me. “Colonel Vasante has the entire Mews locked up because they all fell under that wretch Ruven’s control and came within a rat’s whisker of sinking this city like a sixth-hand rowboat,” she offered, her harsh voice cutting across the room. “And the doge is dead.”

  Gasps rose from the rest of the Council. Scipio da Morante, the doge’s brother, let out a choked noise.

  My mother went nearly gray. She didn’t make a sound, but I had never before seen shock show so plainly on her face.

  It flickered there a moment; then, like shuttering a window, it was gone.

  “I see,” La Contessa said.

  My mother wasted no more than a second in mourning her friend. Whatever she felt for that one brief instant when emotion had broken through her mask, it was gone now, corked in a bottle and dropped in a dark well to deal with later. She heard my fuller explanation as the rest of the Council gathered around, grim-faced. Scipio da Morante stood unnervingly close to me, devouring every word, his dark eyes bright with unshed tears. Whenever I faltered, Zaira stepped in, supplying the bluntest possible word to continue my dangling sentence.

  Ciardha, meanwhile, gracefully fielded the guards and other palace denizens beginning to arrive at the door in varying states of panic and consternation. By the time I was halfway through my clipped description of the terrible events of the evening, she had guards set up defending the Map Room, pages running to fetch physicians and more guards, and servants removing the dead chimeras. Ruven might have struck at the very heart of the Empire; but with Ciardha at work, if we could no longer be sure of safety, we could at least restore serenity.

  When I finished my account, La Contessa gave a sharp nod, turned to her fellows on the Council, and immediately began issuing commands, her arm still pressed tight against her wounded side.

  “Lord Caulin, would you secure the palace? Marquise, we should reinforce the Mews…” None of them were precisely phrased as orders, but they had the same results, as each person she spoke to sprang into immediate action. Even Lord Caulin, though he hesitated for a bitter second, his face bleeding sluggishly through the alchemical powder dusting it.

  My mother had the magic of seeing immediately what needed to be done, and the sheer sense of her requests made them impossible to quarrel with; the blood staining her side was a rebuke to anyone who might consider refusing her. This was what she was born to do: to take the shattered pieces of the Empire, swiftly gather them up, and begin fitting them calmly and logically back together.

  “What about my brother’s killer?” Scipio demanded, his hands in fists at his sides.

  I sucked in a sharp breath. Marcello. Surely they wouldn’t blame him—he’d been under Ruven’s control.

  La Contessa didn’t so much as glance in my direction, but a subtle shift of her stance warned me to stay quiet. “An excellent point, Scipio,” she said. “Ciardha, make certain the controlled officer is safely quarantined, and begin an investigation into how he was poisoned, not to mention who let those chimeras in through the palace wards.”

  Ciardha bowed. “It shall be done, Contessa.”

  Scipio seemed satisfied, at least for now. My mother tasked him with attending to the courier lamps and spreading word to other key people and locations of the danger, and he left with a sizable escort and the desperately purposeful stride of a man seeking something to do to help ward off grief.

  In his wake, there was the briefest lull, like an indrawn breath, with no one within my mother’s immediate range to send on another task. She swayed on her feet, ever so slightly; Ciardha touched her shoulder as if merely seeking her attention, subtly steadying her.

  “Now, Contessa, let’s see to your wound,” she said firmly.

  I leaned against the Map Room table, hands trembling. My mother wasn’t going to die. She had taken control of the situation, and my duty was done. I could no longer stave off the memory of Marcello’s eyes utterly bereft of warmth, as if a stranger stared out of them. And the doge sliding down the wall, his eyes glassy and blank, his robes soaked with blood.

  Anxious for any kind of distraction, I turned to Zaira. “Are you all right?” I asked. “You hit that wall hard enough I was worried about whether you’d get up again.”

  Zaira rubbed the back of her head ruefully. “I won’t lie, it hurt. But nothing seems broken, and I’m thinking straight.” She dropped her voice, then, her dark gaze holding mine. “Straight enough to know he shouldn’t have been able to throw me like that. Not with a broken collarbone, anyway.”

  “Ruven must have healed him.” I tried to pretend it was just another magical theory problem, set by one of my cleverer professors. “His command potion makes people temporarily part of his domain, which allows him to use his vivomancy on them from afar. That’s why he was in pain first—his bones knitting so quickly hurt him.”

  “When in the Nine Hells did he manage to get poisoned?” Zaira asked. “He wasn’t there for the toast.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. We need to find out. It’s entirely possible that Ruven’s agent poisoned more than just the toast, and he took a tainted drink right before we left the Mews, for instance. Or he could have gotten poisoned near the end of the fight, if someone figured out a way to put the potion on a blade.”

  But that still didn’t explain the look he’d given me, right before he attacked the doge.

  It had only been there for an instant. He could have been grimacing, not smiling. Or the luminary light cast strange shadows across his face. I must have imagined it.

  “My mother
will be busy restoring order for hours,” I said. “She doesn’t need us. Will you come with me to check on Marcello?”

  Zaira slapped my shoulder, so gently it barely stung. “Of course.”

  Whoever had designed the antechamber to the Room of Judgment had entertained certain assumptions as to the guilt of the accused. The Grace of Majesty glared sternly down from a medallion in the ceiling, and the frescoes on all four walls depicted busy and detailed scenes of torment in the Nine Hells.

  But I had eyes only for Marcello, who sat slumped on one of the bare wooden benches that ringed the walls, his head cradled in his hands. He looked up when we entered, and the Hell in his eyes twisted at my heart far more than any of the painted ones around us.

  I didn’t care, in that moment, that he was still under Ruven’s control, and still dangerous. As he rose to meet us, I threw my arms around him.

  He stiffened, sucking in a little gasp as if I’d hurt him. But then the muscles in his back relaxed under my hands, and his arms went around me, too, with exaggerated care, as if he’d forgotten how to use them.

  “I’m so sorry I had to leave you,” I whispered, as Zaira muttered something to the guard and the door closed on the three of us.

  “No, it was good you left.” His voice came out rough and raw. “You shouldn’t be here now. I’m not safe to be near.”

  “He has a point,” Zaira cut in. “I told the guard I’d keep him from murdering you, but that’s hard to do if you’re cozying up inside his uniform.”

  I spun toward Zaira, blushing. “You never miss a chance, do you?”

  She shrugged from her position near the door. “Who wants to live a life full of missed chances?” Her eyes stayed on Marcello, wary and sharp.

  He settled back down on his bench, still moving with an oddly exaggerated control, as if he had to repress some other movement before shifting each limb. Unease tightened my scalp, and I opened a step or two between us.