by D. P. Prior
The homunculus gave a polite cough.
“Shut it, Bezaleel.”
“So, you were listening, then.”
She gave him a look that should have burnt him to a crisp, and he lowered his eyes.
The real issue was, if she gave the sword up, what good would she be? She’d just go back to being another humdrum bitch from the arse-end of nowhere, and that wasn’t happening. Not ever.
It hit her like a thunderclap, then. She couldn’t go back anyway, even if she wanted to. She was something now, with or without the sword. At least to Saphra, she was. She might not have felt how a normal mother would, but that didn’t change what Saphra felt for her. What she needed her to be.
Still clutching the sheet over her breasts, she turned to ask—
“I expect you’re wondering where you are,” Bezaleel said.
“No, I’m not.” That was just a bit too obvious. “I’m wondering when you’re going to tell me where my daughter is.”
“Aristodeus has her safe.” The homunculus ambled over to the door. “Once you are dressed, I’ll take you to him. I’m sure you have lots to talk about.” He touched something on the wall, and the room was bathed in stark light.
“See,” he said, pointing at the pile of clothes stacked on the chair. “Not a stain, yet they were spattered red and thick with muck when you arrived. Thank you so much for washing them, Bezaleel,” he threw over his shoulder as the door slid shut behind him. “Don’t mention it,” he answered himself from the other side.
Rhiannon waited until his footsteps had retreated before dropping the sheet.
A line of black stitches puckered the skin on her left arm in a long ridge from shoulder to elbow. She extended her forearm, wincing as the thread pulled. Her fingers still worked, which was something, but her upper arm was a dirty yellow bruise and looked set to get a whole lot worse before it got better.
She remembered very little—the snarling face of a wolf-man, a filthy claw. It was like Oakendale all over again, when the mawgs had come. Only this time there had been no knight in armor to save her, just a useless bastard she used to know, who’d sooner watch his friends die than be anything other than a priest and a drunkard.
The wolf-man savaged her arm; she went down. There had been a flash of violet in the sky, and then nothing. Until the dream.
At least there had been a knight in her dream, though what it meant was too confusing. Was it a warning he’d tried to give her, or did he just want his sword back? If he did, he had another thing coming.
She checked her reflection from every angle in the burnished steel of the walls. Besides the bruising, she was holding up pretty well. She flexed her abs and they popped, and the tie-ins between her shoulders and chest were sharply defined. She smiled at that. Sandau would have loved it, the old perv. He’d always called her his work-in-progress, just because he’d been the first to get her into the gym. It was certainly an improvement. Made her look harder, stronger. Then, with a snort of contempt, she thought how the bald bastard Aristodeus would like it, too. But he could go boil his head, the sleezebag. No amount of champagne was getting her that drunk again. The only thing she’d be giving him was a pair of broken balls if he tried it on.
He was already trying it on, by the looks of the room. Some effort had gone into making it homey: a plush beige carpet; the molded bed with its square-cornered sheets and soft blanket. A large dresser stood against the opposite wall, intricately fashioned from dark wood, with a hinged mirror framed by intertwining vines. An antique, no doubt stolen from the past or pretentiously crafted by some servile lackey.
She bared her teeth for the mirror, gave a smile thick with malice. It shocked her how messed up she looked. How spiteful. But when she softened her expression, the whole edifice crumbled, exposing vulnerabilities she’d never thought to look in the face. Empty, was how her reflection struck her. Empty, lost, and broken. Even her eyes were lifeless, pools of darkness that drank in all the light.
She turned away and set her jaw, then threw on her uniform and fastened the sword belt. She reached for whatever the homunculus had pressed to open the door and paused. There was a panel set into the wall, but it was a lot more complicated than she’d expected. Numbers and letters in green light stood out from its surface. She pressed one at random, and nothing happened. She pressed another, then two, then three in succession. Still nothing.
She kicked the door, and it buckled. Grinning and grimacing at the same time, she pounded it with her fists. Each strike left its own dent. She probably could have punched a hole through the flimsy piece of crap had it not slid open with a succession of judders.
Bezaleel stood there, hands raised, brow knitted with either worry or annoyance.
“Peace, peace,” he said. “You only have to call if you need anything. Here.” He indicated the panel. “1, 2, 3.” He tapped some buttons, and the door shuddered shut. “The same to open. They’re all keyed to the same code, otherwise he can’t remember them. The silly fool was once locked in his study for a week. We thought he was in one of those ‘do not disturb’ moods, but he was tearing his hair out—figuratively speaking—and scratching at the door like an animal. Odd how captivity can make a brute of a man, and one so scholarly, too.”
Rhiannon would have liked to have seen that. She flashed a smile at the little man, and he frowned, as if he didn’t know how to take it. “Well,” she said, “I’m dressed.”
“So I see,” the homunculus said. “Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll lead the way.”
***
Aristodeus’s bald head was awash with the flickering glow coming off the screens that wound their way up to the top of the conical chamber. Thousands of pinpricks of light danced within wires snaking all around the spiraling walkways.
He was seated in an armchair, slurping tea with his pinkie raised, while discoursing with his usual condescension, oblivious to Rhiannon’s entrance.
That was nothing to write home about. He didn’t give a damn about her, only what she could do for him. All the training, all the unwelcome attention, had been in his own interests, and that included Saphra. Was it any wonder she could barely bring herself to look at the girl without cringing?
Bezaleel backed out of the chamber with a bow and a flourish. He seemed relieved to be shot of his charge, at least for the time being. Rhiannon could hardly blame him, the way she’d treated him. But shog him, anyway. There was only one person to blame.
She wasn’t ready for a confrontation yet, though. She needed to get her bearings, acclimate to her surroundings. It had been more than four years since she’d been inside Sektis Gandaw’s mountain. It wasn’t somewhere she’d envisaged ever returning to.
So, Aristodeus had got the Perfect Peak’s control room up and running again; though he hadn’t gone so far as to deck it out with kryeh. Instead of the winged women hunched over their work stations, homunculi scurried about all over the place, checking screens, twiddling knobs, tapping away at their gray slate tablets.
There were others in the room, too.
An old man in a priest’s cassock was the only one showing he was listening to the philosopher. He nodded with enthusiasm, eyes bulging over the tops of his spectacles. His ears were so big, he could probably fly with them.
A bluff-looking soldier hovered at his shoulder. He had the most awful comb-over, and a face bristling with whiskers. He wore the red jacket and white jodhpurs of the Elect dragoons. Which begged the question: what the shog was he doing here? The dragoons were supposed to be the latest military innovation against Hagalle’s hordes, but they’d fared no better than anyone else. What could horsemen do against the largest navy the world had ever seen? If the Templum really did have all the secrets of the Ancients locked away in the Aeternam archives, they had made a serious misjudgment. They really ought to have taken the next step, assuming there was one, and ensured their armies were more than a match for anything Sahul could throw at them. Instead, by playing it safe, they’d ceded
Aeterna to Hagalle, and shog only knew what he’d do with all that Ancient lore once he deciphered it.
A scowling savage, brown-skinned and tattooed, prowled around the perimeter, hissing with impatience. His face was a pulpy mess, like it had been a doormat for a stampede. He received the occasional warning wag of a finger from a smart-dressed man with a tonsure and a gut. She was about to pass over him when she did a double take. It was the chef from that shithole of a diner in New Jerusalem. Albert was his name, she was sure of it: the bastard who’d given her a bad dose of the shits as a remedy for a hangover. And wasn’t he something to do with…
Her eyes were drawn to a cloaked figure no bigger than a homunculus, perched on the edge of a bureau. It was him all right: Shadrak, the pallid little scut.
He seemed to sense her watching, and flashed her a look of his pink eyes. He acknowledged her with his middle finger and a curl of his top lip, then went back to scanning the room, like he was expecting some invisible assassin to strike at any moment, the paranoid prick. Irony was, he was the one most likely to be doing the killing, not anyone else. He rubbed his clipped beard, then made a show of looking interested in Aristodeus’s lecture.
There was another homunculus type seated on a footstool that went with Aristodeus’s armchair. She’d not seen him at first. He wore a feathered cloak like Hunstman’s that blended near-perfectly with the background. Couldn’t say the same for his face, though, which looked like sun-scorched leather. He had a hooked nose and the sort of black beady eyes she’d come to expect from a homunculus. Not at all like Shadrak’s. Either the assassin was some kind of defect of the race, or, as she liked to believe, he was just a stunted human who looked like he had a bad case of consumption; that, and he’d given himself permanently bloodshot eyes from ogling too many kiddies.
On the far side of the chamber, a stout figure stood brooding over a long crystal casket. She knew it was Nameless straight away from the black great helm and the well-used battle axe resting on his shoulder. One of its twin blades looked melted. Could have been the blacksmith was pissed, she supposed. Banded iron gauntlets made his hands seem too big for his arms—and they were by no means small. If anything, the dwarf was more heavily muscled than when they’d last met. If she’d been working out, he must have been taming some serious iron.
She quelled her initial hope he’d turn and see her. For some reason, she thought he’d be disappointed: disappointed with what she’d become. It was nonsense, of course. She can’t have looked much different to the last time they’d been here together, in this very room. But the difference was on the inside; she was starting to see that now, and people like Nameless—people with that earthy quality; real people, good—they could smell change a mile off.
She curled her fingers around the hilt of the black sword. The throbbing pulse it sent up her forearm had the feel of laughter, and a voice that was not quite a voice prodded her to go look in the casket Nameless was rapt by. She took half a step toward it, then stalled. What was the point? She’d seen it last time she was here, when it was suspended in midair in Aristodeus’s office.
Something about how Nameless was fixated on it worried her. An inaudible whisper told her not to be so stupid. She felt the tug of the sword at her hip; felt inclined to follow its lead, but she couldn’t shake off Callixus’s parting words to her. More and more, they had the ring of a warning.
She wrenched her gaze away, looked up at the apex of the conical chamber, remembering how the walls had once descended into the floor, revealing the chaos of the Unweaving out on the bone-dust of the Dead Lands. So much had happened back then, in such a short space of time: She’d challenged Gandaw at Aristodeus’s bidding, and she’d failed. Shader had almost failed, too, when he arrived. Would have done, if not for Nameless. If not for her, as well, in her own small way. They’d all played their part. The only question was, their part of what?
Aristodeus was blathering on about lovers and skulls, the black stain at the heart of Verusia. “… counselor to Ipsissimi, the conscience of Nousia. The list goes on. A name once lauded in every corner of the known world, and now everywhere reviled. Even here on Aethir.”
The priest with the big ears shrugged one shoulder and let out a sigh. “Yes, yes. Sad, really, when you think about it.”
“Way of the world, Eminence,” the dragoon said. “Assuming any of it’s true.”
“Oh?” Aristodeus said, setting his teacup back on the saucer with a chink and holding it out for a homunculus to take. “And you have reason to believe it’s not?”
The dragoon gave a double cough and started fiddling with his mustache. “Wouldn’t put it past that blackguard Hagalle to muddy the Templum’s name, sully the reputation of the luminaries. Kick a man when he’s down, wot. Downright scandalous, if you ask me, to insinuate such a thing.”
Aristodeus leaned forward, with that “checkmate” look in his eyes. “It’s historical fact, Galen. Even your own scripture scholars admit to Blightey’s influence in the compilation of the Liber.”
Galen took in the old priest with a glance. “Being a scholar of scripture doesn’t make you right. Templum’s always had its share of heretics, wot. That’s why we have the Magisterium, to sort the wheat from the chaff.”
“So, you deny Blightey ever really existed?” Aristodeus countered.
“Well—”
“In which case”—the philosopher scented blood in the water—“who was it they launched the whole might of Nousia against in the forests of Verusia not so long ago, in the grand scheme of things? Surely, a man of your zeal and military prowess would have been there, seen firsthand.”
“Well—” Galen stammered, but this time it was the priest who cut him off.
“There were other borders to be maintained, men to train, that sort of thing. But you are quite right: the Liche Lord is real. LaRoche is clear about that in his history, and he should know. He was present when Blightey was burned at the stake.”
“Hah,” Galen said, as if somehow that proved him right. “Nothing to worry about, then. Let’s get on with it. Suit of armor, you say? To go with the giant’s gauntlets.”
“He came back,” Rhiannon said.
“What?”
It was Galen that spoke, but everyone turned to look at her.
Aristodeus’s face was a war of emotions, but he finally settled on a fake smile and a raise of his eyebrow. “Recovered, I take it? Well rested?”
She ignored him and answered Galen instead. “In the song.” Elias had played it on occasion, usually when he’d wanted to scare the living crap out of someone after they’d smoked too much of his weed. Apparently, it was worth it for a laugh. “The Ballad of Jaspar Paris and Renna Cordelia.”
“Oh, please,” Albert said. “Quintus bloody Quincey. His ass of a namesake wrote better verse with his overflowing rectum.”
So, Elias didn’t write that one, after all. Figured. A bard was a collector, he always used to say, not necessarily a composer. In truth, he’d been a bit of both, and never bothered much about citing his sources.
“Not sure I’ve heard that one,” the priest said. “Ludo, my dear,” he added for Rhiannon’s benefit. “Adeptus, if you go in for titles.”
Albert laughed out loud. “I’d be surprised if you had heard it. Quincey’s generally performed as a warm-up in brothels and beer halls.”
“I’ve heard it,” Shadrak grunted.
“Now that I find hard to believe,” Albert said. “Last I heard, brothels had height restrictions.”
Rhiannon would have laughed, if she’d been in the laughing mood. Shadrak didn’t seem to see the funny side, either. His thoughts were as palpable to her as a jagged shard of glass ripping open Albert’s paunch.
With ice in her voice—ice that was reserved for Aristodeus—she said, “I don’t remember much, only that Jaspar Paris is in love with Renna Cordelia, but then some woman lures him away and seduces him. Renna tracks them down, finds them at it, and chops the bitch’s head
off. But it wasn’t out of revenge or anything like that—”
“No,” Aristodeus said, sounding suddenly serious and very, very somber. “It was a purely soteriological act.”
“Shog’s that?” Shadrak asked.
“She came to save him, I assume,” Ludo said. “Though the term is usually reserved for doctrine.”
Aristodeus was irritated by that, but he grinned, as if to say he knew.
“Well, I’m not sure this is a fit subject for an adeptus’s ears,” Galen said. “Nor a lady’s lips.” The glower he shot Rhiannon was riddled with disapproval.
“I want to hear it.” Nameless’s voice reached her from behind. It was muffled by the helm, but there was warmth in it; something she so badly needed to hear. “Out with it, lassie. Don’t be shy on my account. I’ve seen more than my share of beer halls, yet it’s a tale I’m not familiar with. Arx Gravis is somewhat incestuous as regards entertainment. Most other things, too.”
She craned her neck and gave him a grateful smile. Actually, it felt bashful, like she was a shy little girl once more, and he a kindly old grandparent. Not that she’d tell him that. He’d either die laughing or lop her head off for the slight.
She turned back to Ludo, the only other person not radiating contempt or hostility, and recited what she could:
“The maiden Jaspar rode until,
Her head fell on the floor;
Cordelia’s blade now slick and still,
A saving grace no more.
