Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun

by S. M. Stirling

  He shook his head dolefully. “Not a thing, Grand Constable. I was talking with Mary Liu, and then suddenly I was outside trying to make sure that the men were . . . it sounds bad, doesn’t it? And then you.”

  “Talking?” asked Tiphaine. “You wrote me you drugged her with laudanum. Did she wake up?” She shook the arm a little. “Focus, focus . . . I need you all here. We’re going to be in trouble pretty soon.”

  Stratson turned his face from the door and said, “Scared; I’m right scared of that place. Never liked it. Now it scares me.”

  Tiphaine thought hard for a moment. You can’t muscle this, you have to finesse it.

  “Stratson, listen, what did your mother call you?”

  The wandering, watery brown eyes suddenly stilled. He looked at her intently. “Stanley. It’s been a long time since somebody called me Stanley.”

  Tiphaine frowned. “No wife? No kids? No friends?”

  “I’m the warden. Just never seemed right for me.” He shook his head for a few minutes. “Was going to marry. Nice girl. Had the date all set, planned everything, hotel, judge, invitations . . . all set up for May 10th, 1998. And then the Change happened. I never did find my Mary. And I figured I’d never get that kind of a chance again.”

  He did go crazy after the Change, just in an inconspicuous, relatively functional way like a lot of other people. But it left him vulnerable.

  “Once we’ve got this situation under control, you’re going to take a long vacation and come east with us. POW guard duty is one of the hardest to do well. See some new landscapes. And then I think the Lady Regent might have something long-term for you, a nice little manor not too far from town. You’ve served long and faithfully and it won’t be forgotten.”

  She looked at the man, his jaw hanging slightly. “We on?” she asked, in the vernacular of her childhood.

  He closed his mouth firmly and his eyes gleamed and he nodded. “We’re on, Grand Constable. Let’s take care of this situation.”

  Tiphaine was cat-quiet as they entered, but everything seemed ordinary enough. The tall windows were dark holes, reflections bouncing off them as the rain streaked across them. The wind made the glass bulge and flex unpredictably. Gaslights hissed all around the lower level, their flames more or less steady. Tiphaine grimaced at the smell. Human and cattle feces produced the biogas. Most of the odor burned away, but unless the gas was expensively scrubbed before use enough escaped to make the building unpleasantly smelly. Fen House didn’t rate scrubbers.

  “She didn’t stay drugged, my lady. She came out of the drug trance twice and I forbore to give her more. Medic told me it would kill her. So I strapped her to the bed.”

  Stratson hesitated. “Then she started to talk. Her eyes turned black again. That’s when I . . .” The man turned to her, confusion spreading over his face.

  “Stanley,” she said softly. He blinked and nodded.

  “Dangerous woman. Well, not a woman, I don’t think. But she didn’t stay drugged; and she’s got those black eyes again. I evacuated most of the men. Who could I trust?”

  Tiphaine looked up at the prison tier. “Good question, Stanley.”

  She remembered a long dispatch from Princess Mathilda, detailing a night of chaos in Des Moines, and the Bossman’s most trusted guards turning on him. Of a man ramming his head through a door, and grinning through mutilated ruin. Of another dying when a High Seeker of the CUT told him his belt was a rattlesnake.

  “We’ll just have to trust each other to get through this together,” she said.

  She reached down to tug off her right gauntlet and stopped. The owl talisman . . .

  Am I imagining that? No. No, I’m not.

  She pulled back the gauntlet back on.

  Stay armed and armored, then, girl. You Know Who says so. Yes, my lady!

  “Right. Stanley, you’re my backup. I’m going in there and dealing with this. If my eyes turn black, you fill me with arrows and burn the body until there isn’t even ash . . . and do the same to that creature of the Ascended Masters, too. Got it?”

  The man gave her the kind of look sergeants reserved for recruits and Tiphaine grinned in a way that showed fangs.

  “Let’s get this over with!”

  She snatched the key ring from Stratson and ran lightly up the narrow stairs. The middle cell felt like a looming cave, with two gas flambeaux waving wildly.

  Where’s the draft coming from? she wondered.

  She stuck the key in the lock and turned. The gate opened with a grating shriek.

  Tiphaine laid a bet with herself. “Lady Mary,” she said, striding over to the cot, shoving the barred door shut. The eyes opened—blue, and filled with anger.

  “Slut! Dyke! He’s dead! You killed him!”

  “How would I have done that?” asked Tiphaine, testing the straps that bound the slight figure to the bed. Thick double-ply cowhide. John Hordle would have trouble breaking them, with no more leverage than that; Tiphaine herself would have been completely helpless.

  “You taught that Princess to hate him!”

  “Nobody ever taught Mathilda good judgment, she was born with it. I always thought her friendship with Odard was stupid, but I certainly never talked with her about it. Who actually killed Odard? Or didn’t you see?”

  “A man. A Saracen.” Mary turned her face away. “He had a club and . . . he was so big and . . . my son killed him but he hit him going down . . . Odard never had a chance.”

  Tears fell out of the blue eyes and ran down the faded checks and ran into her ears. She shook her head, trying to dislodge them. Tiphaine didn’t step closer.

  “A club! Not even a duel with a sword! Or a joust! Just a stupid street melee with pirates in Kalksthorpe. The ravens, the ravens are laughing on the back of the chair! The old man is laughing!”

  Tiphaine tensed. The light wasn’t all that good, but she was pretty sure the eyes were getting darker. As if something bubbled up from within. Like road tar, BD had said. And it stinks even worse, if you know how to smell it.

  “Mathilda kissed him good-bye and said she loved him like a brother. Odard smiled at her and said he was content.”

  Mary’s voice was rising. “Content!” she shrieked. “She was supposed to marry him! And that awful priest from Mount Angel gave him last confession and absolution! He was sealed to the Ascended Masters! I promised them he would be theirs if he wed Mathilda! He did not belong to the Sacrificed God!”

  The eyes . . .

  Tiphaine backed away from the bed, and heard the thick doubled-ply leather straps creaking. She couldn’t have broken those, not from that position. Mary Liu hadn’t lifted anything heavier than a needle or a wineglass for most of her life, but they were creaking, standing harder than iron against the steel buckles.

  Mathilda’s alive, then, and the fellowship intact enough. They must have won that fight, wherever the hell Kalksthorpe is . . . never heard of it . . . Sandra would know. She’ll be so relieved. They could tend to Odard rather than leave him fallen on the field. And it sounds like the little bastard died well. I never trusted him . . .

  “Do you know where this happened?” she asked; the Lady Regent would want to know.

  “Kalksthorpe, if that means anything to you!” The voice coming out of Lady Mary’s throat was thicker and darker, deeper. “On the ocean, the ocean, so cold and gray . . . ships with the heads of dragons . . .”

  The Atlantic. They got that far! Ships with the heads of dragons? What the fuck?

  Then the words turned into a howl. The sound was pain rammed into her ears; it was like barbed hooks thrust through and turning in her head, tearing at her brain. She stumbled back and jammed her hands up under the flare of her sallet to cover her ears. The visor fell down, and her vision suddenly became a narrow slit, like a glowing window on a dark night.

  She wasn’t prepared for the sudden heave and snap as something within forced the small body past its limits. It came up and off the cot, directly at her like a cast-
iron round shot from a catapult. The impact staggered her, even a small person was still a hundred-pound weight and Mary Liu or the thing that wore her was moving fast.

  The lames of the breastplate spread the impact, and she went back into a crouch, grunting as if she’d been hit with a war hammer. Black beat at her vision, a black place where cindered suns collapsed inward upon themselves.

  “Don’t come in!” she shouted, and the sound echoed through the cavern that was Fen House. “Don’t come in! If she wins, shoot her dead and fire the prison!”

  She fought for breath. The chill was gone; hot, heavy darkness crested over her. Then a flash of light, a spear of light, and she was back in the cell. Teeth were reaching for her eyes, wet and yellow. Tiphaine ducked her head and reared back, then butted the brow of her sallet into them. Something cracked, something howled. Arms gripped her with astonishing strength and broken teeth grated on the steel of the bevoir over the throat, squealing and catching on the metal as they chewed at the steel.

  Don’t try to respond conventionally, something within prompted her. You’re not fighting little Mary Liu. Use your head, and not just as a battering ram.

  She didn’t try to break the hold; instead she turned and rammed herself three steps into the iron bars. Tiphaine weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Her armor was a third again more; and she could throw that weight into the saddle with a flex of her legs. The impact rattled her head but the arms dropped away. Mary leapt across the cell and grabbed at the mesh of welded rebar across the outer window, legs braced with monkey agility. Tendons stood out in her pale soft forearms, and one ripped loose. The steel did too, and she turned and hit the Grand Constable with it.

  Tiphaine could feel the alloy steel of her armor flex under the blow and tasted her own blood. She stepped into the next strike, grabbed the bar on the downswing. The grinning meat-puppet gripped it in both hands and twisted. Tiphaine held on grimly, counter-twisting, pain shooting through her right hand.

  This thing is stronger than a human being has any right to be. But it still only weighs as much as Mary Liu.

  And suddenly the thing was aloft, hoisted by its own grip on the thick iron, over and about . . . and the warrior moved, putting her back, shoulder and arms into the swing. Tiphaine could hear a molten voice roar. Each time it did the world shook and blackness came over her sight. And then a cool soprano would sing out a great bell-like note and she could see again.

  “Glaukopis! Nikephore!” she heard herself shout, and she knew no Greek, and yet knew the meaning of the words: “Gray-Eyed! Victory-Bearer!”

  Swing and momentum and precision. The creature struck dead center in the glass and it shattered behind her, hands still reaching for Tiphaine’s throat. The slender body folded and flew back, into the lintel, and over and out through the shattered window, receding as if she were watching it through the wrong end of a telescope, vanishing down a spiral into infinity.

  Tiphaine turned frantically to the cell’s gate. “Don’t go out, don’t go out, nobody go out or come in here. Let me handle it!”

  She raced down the stairs, jumping sideways off that last ten steps, landing bent-knee and rolling in a clash of plates and using her moving weight to push herself back onto her feet. Stratson opened the rear door by the kitchen and she raced out into the dark waste yard behind Fen House, splashing through puddles ankle deep, fighting for her balance on the soaking sagging marshy growths. Light came from some of the windows.

  Before she could call, more lights came on; Stratson doing just the right thing. She could see a little figure covered in soaking white rags trying to heave itself up on its arms through the downpour. The legs didn’t seem to be moving.

  All right Rudi, you sent us the story on how to deal with this . . .

  The warden staggered out. She turned to him: “There’s a wall around this piece of bog, right?”

  “Yes.” Stratson craned to look at the struggling figure. “What next?”

  She swallowed and answered, her voice as hard as diamonds, the bell chiming in her head and the black held at bay, but heaving and twisting with dreadful strength. Her long sword came out, a fugitive gleam in the rain and darkness.

  “I’m going to dismember the thing. Then we’re going to clean everything. With fire.”

  “Aye, Lady. Whatever the Crown gives you, it isn’t enough and I don’t envy you.”

  Tiphaine could see the figure’s legs begin to move.

  Odd, almost like each is under the control of a different nervous system. Like she’s being puppeted by a swarm of . . . things . . . crawling around inside her.

  She let the thought go and filled her mind with a simple mantra she’d composed over the past few months with Delia’s help.

  Her sword went up. “Io, Io, paean!”

  The creature moved, rolling in the mud. Cut. You know how. Two-handed grip, turn, pivot, loose grip and then hard when it hits!

  Striking at shoulders, elbows, wrists, like butchery in a nightmare abattoir where the flesh under the steel wouldn’t die.

  Then the head lay looking up, dangling from a flap of muscle and skin. The eyes were open and looking at her; Mary’s spiteful, angry, blue eyes.

  Cut.

  The head rolled free. Tiphaine knocked up her visor, went to one knee and set the sword point down, bracing herself on the hilt and dragging in one raw cold breath after another. It was a bad thing to do to a good sword, but it would have to go too. Her body was streaming sweat under the armor, but shivering with chill at the same time. Bits of hair and matter and skin spattered her armor and gauntlets, but the rain was still coming down. She turned her face up to its cleanness, let the water flow into her mouth, spat, did it again.

  Stratson came to her. “My lady?” he asked.

  He looked more like a horse than ever, his long yellow teeth bared by a grimace that pulled back his lips, his eyes wide opened and staring.

  He looks like he expects the pieces of her to come back together. I’m not surprised.

  “Listen, she gets cremated tonight and everything with her.”

  He nodded, the whites of his eyes showing. “I thought you might, m’lady. Got things going while you were busy.”

  He signaled, and men came forward with barrels of the wood-alcohol mix used for lanterns; others dragged out a hose connected to the biogas plant, and still others made a chain to bring wood from the sheds that kept it more-or-less dry.

  “Should I also . . . burn the room?”

  “Probably. Spit, blood, hair, anything. Don’t touch anything with your bare hands. I’m going to strip when I’m done and we’ll burn even my armor and sword. It’s a good thing my Associate’s dagger is in my saddlebags. I’d burn that too if I’d been wearing it, and it’s a gift from the Lady Regent.”

  The rain came down, but the wind was easing off. The prison guards rigged tarps to cover the soggy yard that sloped down to the swamp. One of them came forward with a torch and looked at her. She nodded curtly.

  Whump! The alcohol caught, and then the wood below it as the heat drove out moisture and the gas played across it like a dragon’s breath. More wood, more barrels of alcohol, blue and red flames soaring up. Men came bearing the contents of the cell, handling them with gingerly reluctance and heavy gloves.

  “What about this?” asked Stratson, showing her the white altar cloth. He grasped one corner and cursed.

  “What!”

  “This!” A needle dangled from the leather gauntlet he wore. Tiphaine pulled the alcohol lamp closer. “Did it touch you?”

  “No; but the whole cloth is run through and through with needles!”

  She frowned down at it. “Put it down on the bed, strip the glove, make sure not to drop the needle and put it on top. The mattress is a bag of cornhusks, right? Over a rope webbing?”

  “Yes.” Stratson did as he was told and eased back as Tiphaine carefully studied the length of cloth draped over the little bed. Needles twinkled in the waving flames.

&nb
sp; “That sewing box of hers, too,” he said. “It was set just so on the little table and it fell over. We caught it in time, but the boxes of pins opened up. Fortunately they all fell in not out, but still . . . When did she have time to set this up?”

  Tiphaine shook her head. “Shovels, oil . . . it’s going to be a long night.”

  Then she looked at the spread of cloth and studied the designs; the odd symbology seemed to make her eyes slide along faster and faster . . .

  She wrenched her gaze away. No, I don’t think I’ll take this along for study.

  “Throw it on. All of it.”

  “Got some priests,” Stratson said. “There’s a hermitage in the woods. They come over and hear confessions and say Mass. Your page had someone run for them, smart kid.”

  Tiphaine realized he had an entourage, standing at a slight distance. Five of them were wearing habits, brown Dominican robes. The one who came forward wore the bright red cincture of the Hounds of God, which she hadn’t seen in many years. Tiphaine bared her teeth, but the man raised a hand, palm-out to her. It was impossible to tell his age, but she thought the lines in his face were those of suffering as much as age.

  “Peace, sister. Peace. After Pope Leo died, we were disbanded by orders of the Lady Regent. Bishop Maxwell tracked us down several years ago. All of us have had training in detecting the enemy’s works. We have stayed disbanded; but at the orders and service of the secular authorities. Thus we do penance.”

  Tiphaine growled. That’s unexpected! Did Sandra know? But, if they are now on the side of the Angels . . . we need a few doughty warriors in the spiritual realm.

  “You’ve got me at a disadvantage, Father . . .”

  “Lucien Blat. I am at your orders. What can we do?”

  Stratson interrupted. “Tell me what will make this safe!” he demanded.

  And Tiphaine found herself sharing a sympathetic glance with a Hound of God. The irony bit.

  “What is . . . who is . . . what can you tell me?”

  Tiphaine looked around and realized the priest hadn’t overheard her conversation. Tersely she explained, and was reassured and oddly disturbed when the priest simply nodded acknowledgement.