by Sarah Remy
Baldebert took a step back, fingers hovering near his dirk. The sapphires in the ornament on his shirt sparkled in the gloom. The spell tied to the brooch would hide Baldebert from unfriendly eyes if he so wished, but Mal did not need to see the man to know where he stood. The pulse of Baldebert’s life was beacon enough.
“If I meant to do you ill,” said Mal. “There are more convenient ways and means in Wilhaiim. Ground Curcas nut in your tea, for example, and you’d be dead of purging—just like your mother. Viper’s Blossom applied to the inside of your boots to bring on a fatal palsy. Or mayhap I’d slit your throat on Whore’s Street and tip you into the Maiden. Of a certain I wouldn’t resort to skullduggery and pincers.”
“I’m a difficult person to kill,” Baldebert cautioned. “Even for the likes of you. But if you didn’t intend my murder, why the wild goose chase, why bring me out this way? Holder isn’t here. You never really thought he was.”
Mal pointed overhead, drawing Baldebert’s attention to the rafters. “The theist sigils there and there, over the doors. I noticed them when last I was here. It’s the same blessing as was cast on Bone Cave, and by the same priest. That’s our late Masterhealer’s work.”
Baldebert was a quick study. He slapped a hand over the sapphire brooch as if he thought to keep it from bursting into flame.
“You sent me in here expecting the pin on my front to catch fire exactly as the last one did!”
“I sent you in here trusting I’d improved upon the old spell, and I was right. Where the old could not withstand the temple’s interference, the new does. Renault will be most pleased. His anonymity is once again assured.”
Baldebert strode forward, exasperated. “You had no need of me. You might have tested it on your own, magus.”
“On the contrary.” Mal smiled faintly. Hefting the pincers, he grabbed the bucket of water from under the table, and marched past Baldebert, deeper into the building. “To conduct the experiment to my satisfaction, I needed to stick as close to the original variables as possible. You were wearing the first brooch when it failed; it seemed prudent to have you on hand when I tried the second.”
Only three stalls remained within Holder’s barn and those had been changed, the box walls built up high as the loft floor. Tall, sturdy doors had been added where once horses would have looked out onto the aisle. There were bars of iron across each of the doors, with chains and thick-shanked locks to hold them in place. Theist sigils decorated both lock and iron bar, but that temple magic was cold and harmless now, long used up.
Mal approached the first stall. Setting the bucket by his feet, he squatted, and examined the complicated lock. “Furthermore,” he told Baldebert, “if my suspicions are correct—and they usually are—I expect you’ll want to see what Holder’s been keeping in his barn. A practical man like you, Admiral—why, I do believe you’ll be happily surprised.”
“I’m a realistic man,” retorted Baldebert. “You’ll never cut through the locks, even with those pincers. The shanks are wide as my thumb.”
“Nay, not the locks,” Mal agreed. “But the chain’s another matter.” He handed the pincers to Baldebert. “I imagine you’ve done your share of lock cutting, pirate prince.”
Baldebert didn’t deign to reply. Humming, he inspected the chain link by link until he chose one seemingly at random. “Here, if anywhere,” he decided, running a thumbnail over a depression in the metal. “The seam shows promise. Even so, it would take a great deal of force to crack it. This is no clinker on a ship’s catch. Whatever your man’s stowed, he means to keep it safe.”
“Work the cutter,” Mal ordered, smiling faintly. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
Baldebert complied, aligning the jaws of the pincers against the seam in the link. He gripped the handles with both hands. “Go on, then.”
Mal set two fingers on the chain link. He spoke the basic cant he preferred for kindling flames in a cold hearth or striking fire to a candlewick but embellished the spell with word and intent, directing incandescence through the tips of his fingers and into iron. The metal began to warm. Mal’s fingers did not, though heat pulsed in heady bursts from his pores.
“‘Ware the sparks,” said Baldebert. “Recall we’re in a barn beneath a bloody hay loft. Catch the walls and it will be our funeral pyre.”
For two heartbeats Mal smelled burned flesh within the perfume of hot metal, heard the phantom screams of the murdered magus. The chains lashing the necromancer to his post were similar enough to those on the stall doors that they might have been made by the same hand—in fact, they most certainly were, and forged on the anvil behind the barn.
“This is an ill-fated place,” said Baldebert. Mal glanced his way, wondering if he had spoken aloud, but the other man was frowning down at the pincers in his hands and the glowing metal beneath Mal’s fingers, a wrinkle between his yellow eyes. “If your priest meant to cleanse it with his signs and spells . . . aye, well. Someone might want to give it another try.”
The heated iron spread in veins of orange and red along the link. The metal was not so molten as to bulge and drip, but the insides had become dangerously close to flaring.
Mal snatched his hand from metal, breaking the cant. “Now!” he ordered as he reached for the bucket of water.
Baldebert clenched the pincers. Iron grated in protest. Effort bent the wiry man nearly in two, but effort paid off: the overheated link yielded to the pincers, rupturing along the weakened seam, falling to the ground in two refulgent pieces. Mal dashed the pieces with water from the bucket before the smoking metal set the floor alight, splashing Baldebert’s glossy boots in the process.
“Hsst!” Baldebert chided, dancing away from the mess. He set the pincers to the side while Mal pulled lock and chain away from door. Then it was only a matter of pushing the weighty bar free and trying the latch. The door gave readily, opening outward when Mal pulled.
Baldebert coughed. “Oil,” he said. “Gone rancid. And gunpowder? Like one of my cannons in need of a cleaning.” He peered around Mal. “Dark as a tomb. Witch up a light, why don’t you?”
“No need.” As soon as Mal stepped over the threshold soft white light set the narrow space aglow: bone magic roused. Mal didn’t need to glance up at the sliver of bone mortared into the stall’s furthest wall to know it was there. It was timeworn necromancy, the spirit nourishing the magic so depleted Mal could make out only the faintest of impressions. The sliver had once belonged to a femur, the femur of a young woman killed in battle by sidhe. Her bones had guarded Holder’s barn for so long she’d forgotten what it was to be alive; her spirit was so long diminished by the spell she’d never learn what it meant to die. Another year, at most, and she’d be completely devoured. The spell would fail, her light gone out.
“Old Man Mountain take us and save us,” Baldebert breathed, gone stark in the white light. “Ferric soldiers. The king’s iron army.”
“In fragments,” confirmed Mal. Excitement kindled behind his ribs. He stepped further into the makeshift vault, turning in circles to better see Holder’s treasure—shelves of clockwork limbs and clawed, birdlike feet. Rods and pistons and delicate, tensile chains. Four helms set one next to another, visors closed. Breastplates and vambraces decorated all over by a forest of wicked, curving metal thorns. And in one corner, uprooted, jointed clockwork spines tangled with detached iron tailpieces.
Fragments that would, once assembled, make more monstrosities like the one drowsing now in the Bone Cave, waiting only upon Mal’s attention.
“Not quite seven.” Mal frowned as he counted helmets and breastplates again. Armswoman Lane, before he’d used her to charge the first Automata, had bragged of Holder’s seven more.
“Seven?” Baldebert, grown bolder, stalked back and forth in front of the shelves, apprehensive as a cat expecting rain. He reached toward a spiked vambrace three times the size of his own forearm but paused midstretch, cowed. “Seven is too many. I’ve read your histories, Doyle. Even Kh
orit Dard feared the walking machines, and Khorit Dard was a man who adored vile things. These should not be here. The Automata were destroyed alongside their masters.”
“And yet here I am,” replied Mal. “And here they are.” He smiled coldly. “Grab up the pincers, admiral. There are two more doors yet to look behind.”
Chapter 7
“Maggots, m’lady?” Hitch-Step Harry was less than impressed. The old man bent over the shallow bowl Avani held in her hands. He squinted at the clutch of wiggling white larva inside. “Are you sure?”
Harry dwelled on squatters’ row, the makeshift and oft-changing ghetto grown up outside Wilhaiim’s walls. He made a living busking outside the Maiden Gate, on the days he could walk. Today was not one of those days. His twin, a thin woman with worry lines graven deep around her pinched mouth, had sent to the temple for help days prior, but the temple priest had come and gone and Harry was no better for theist prayers and possets.
“The infection’s gone deep.”
Harry propped his foot, bare of shoe and stocking, on a low stool. The small tent he called home was redolent with sickness. Harry had already lost three toes to the gout, but now his entire foot was rebelling, swollen to twice its normal size and beginning to ulcerate in several places on the sole.
“Hasn’t been this bad for years,” Harry agreed, morose. “Burns like a hot poker between my toes. The good brother wanted to take it off at the ankle, but Gwen wouldn’t let him.”
“Three toes gone and still not cured,” Gwen told Avani. “What’s to say taking the rest of his foot will do any good? Besides, I need him fit. Can’t walk the rabbit traps all on my own, can I?”
“Gwen’s in the cony business,” Harry explained. He seemed unable to look away from the maggots in Avani’s dish. “Makes hats of their skins and stew out of the rest. We do all right, come winter.”
“Summer, not so much.” Gwen shrugged. She sat on a low stool twin to the one Harry used as a footrest, but near the flap of their tent, as close to fresh air as she could get. The tent was one of the largest in the ghetto. Besides the two stools and Harry’s chair, there was room enough for a bedroll and a chamber pot, but not much else.
“We get by,” Gwen continued. “Can yon grubs save my brother’s foot, Lady Avani?”
“Ai, they’re His Majesty’s own best grubs,” Avani replied lightly, stretching the truth just a little. She set the bowl carefully on the floor alongside Harry’s foot. “Used just this past week on a royal friend whose hands were in worse shape than your toes. Lord Malachi keeps clean maggots always on hand, for cases such as yours, Harry.”
As she’d hoped, making the larva royal eased Harry’s nerves. He relaxed back into his tattered chair with a pained sigh, closing his eyes. “His Majesty’s grubs, you say? Aye, well, if they’re good enough for him who sits our throne . . .” He waved permission. “Go ahead. Will they hurt?”
“No more than the wound does already.” Avani sat on her knees on the bare earth floor. Anticipating a lack of hot water, she’d brought a flask of medicinal alcohol with her from the palace, and used it now to sluice her hands. “Maggots, like leeches, are sometimes more useful in healing even than herbs.” She tilted her head at the theist’s posset near Harry’s elbow, the small linen bag empty of all but a few crumbles of dried leaf. “Yarrow will tamp down the fever, but it’s the fever that fights the sepsis.”
Gwen fidgeted near the tent flap. “I hope His Majesty don’t expect payment for his grubs, my lady. We’ve naught to offer since I traded my last bit of silver to Tilly down the road for opion.”
“It helps me sleep,” confessed Harry. “I hain’t been sleeping much. And Gwen doesn’t sleep when I’m up all night.”
Avani bent over the old man’s foot to hide her expression from Gwen. Opion was as dangerous as septic gout. Too much of the black tar—swallowed as a tonic or rubbed in a paste on the gums—could poison a man beyond saving. It was also a scarce and addictive cure, and was meant to be carefully regulated by the theists. But of late it seemed to have found its way out of the temple. Avani knew Harry wasn’t the first on squatter’s row, or for that matter in the city proper, to find relief in an opion stupor.
“Be cautious,” she warned as she turned Harry’s foot gently. “Opion is a western cure and many flatlanders find the dosage tricky.”
“No matter.” Gwen twitched back the tent flap, helpfully letting in more light along with breathable air. “We can’t afford no more, can we, brother?”
Harry grumbled assent. He swallowed convulsively when Avani stirred the grubs with one finger, waking them to movement. She patted his ankle in reassurance, then shifted his foot on the stool until the ulcer on the sole was better exposed. Harry’s grumble turned to groans. He bit hard on his lower lip to keep from crying out.
“Gwen,” said Avani, “come and hold the leg still. If he shifts while I tend the wound I’m like to lose some of the maggots.” Harry shuddered and closed his eyes. Gwen rose and did as Avani asked, leaning hard on Harry’s calf with both hands. She looked down into the now-wriggling contents of Avani’s bowl.
“Them’s a lot of grubs,” she pronounced. “You’ll not get all of them to fit in Harry’s foot.”
“As many as possible.” Gently, Avani picked a white larva between thumb and forefinger. Moving quickly, she began to pack the maggots one by one into the ulcers on Harry’s foot. The sores were deep, most of them no larger than a walnut. It took some doing, but she managed without dropping even one of her tiny charges.
“You’ll have to keep the foot up.” She shook a roll of fine linen bandage from her sleeve and wrapped Harry’s foot deftly from toes to ankle. “The bandage will keep them in place.”
“How long?” Harry demanded. “I can feel them moving about.” He was green beneath sweat-damped cheeks.
“Until the wounds bleed clean red.” Avani sluiced her hands a final time then climbed to her feet. “A few days. I’ll come back in one.” She looked at Gwen. “No more yarrow. I don’t mind the fever, so long as he stays lucid. Make him drink—water, not alcohol—and eat what the fever lets him keep down. Send for me if there’s a change for the worse.”
“Aye, m’lady.” Gwen retrieved the bowl of maggots from the dirt floor. “We’re in your debt, I’m sure.” She shook her head as she passed the bowl to Avani. “I never thought as I’d be grateful to grubs.”
“They are an unlikely remedy,” Avani agreed, thinking of the desert prisoner lying incoherent in Mal’s bed, her hands packed, wrapped, and splinted, an attendant stationed on each side of the mattress to keep the unconscious woman from harming herself further.
“Goddess willing Harry will be feeling much better in the morning.” She tossed the man a wink but he was staring in queasy fascination at his bandaged foot and didn’t see. Gwen ushered Avani through the tent flap and into the sunlight, bidding her farewell.
The sun was still high in the sky. Most of the unlucky souls who made their home in the ghetto were away for the day, busking or laboring or, as Avani well knew, spending precious coin on a day’s drinking in one of Wilhaiim’s less savory taverns.
The King’s Highway bisected squatters’ row. In daylight hours traffic was heavy. Avani made a point of counting liveried soldiers as she picked her way back toward Wilhaiim’s northernmost gate; since Faolan’s unexpected appearance with word of war looming east of the divide, mounted patrols were more prominent than ever and tempers were running hot. The average villein or tradesman had no way of knowing for certain what manner of threat lurked over the mountains. Coming so soon after the Red Worm’s devastation, whispers of war must seem twice as disturbing, and Renault showed no inclination to address his subjects’ growing unease. Instead, and to Avani’s growing unease, he ignored his council’s call for immediate action in lieu of Baldebert’s promise that the Rani’s ships would arrive in time to avert disaster.
Renault, she worried, was loath to further alarm a kingdom already stirred to
apprehension by his refusal to take a temple-sanctioned wife. But Wilhaiim’s court could count as well as their king, and those few who now knew of Faolan’s report knew also that any ship sailing from Roue would not arrive soon, no matter how fair the weather on the Long Sea. Avani suspected Renault’s hesitation was doing more harm than good.
A group of six Kingsmen thundered by on horseback, splitting just in time to narrowly avoid a tinker and his pony-driven wagon. One of the soldiers kicked out at the wagon’s running boards as he galloped past, shouting imprecations. The tinker made an ugly gesture in response then blushed when he caught Avani looking.
“I didn’t see you there, my lady,” he said by way of excuse, reining his pony. Foot traffic streamed to either side of his cart, making pots and pans stacked in the back rattle. “Or I wouldn’t have—But they’ve grown quarrelsome, lately, His Majesty’s soldiers. Ever since the armswoman was convicted of treason and blasphemy both, and buried without ceremony.”
“Ai, is that so?” Avani awarded the man a friendly smile.
“’Tis the truth. I’ve been stopped twice on the road in that many days, just so they can take a peek in my cart for barrowmen.” Smiling back, he knocked the running board with a fist. “Would you like a ride into the city?”
Avani suppressed a snort. “Ai, man. Me sitting behind your pony won’t stop them checking your wares on the way in.”
“There’re no barrowmen hiding in my cart, mistress.” The tinker, red of head and feisty with it, waved Avani up. “They can look all they like, so long as I’m through in time for supper at Packney’s Tavern. Come and sit. It must be lucky to give a pretty lass such as you a ride.”
He didn’t recognize her, Avani realized. There was no reason he should; she’d eschewed vocent black since Mal’s return, if not completely her role as king’s magus. For her visit outside the city she’d dressed in a gray cotton salwar and her favorite pair of battered boots. She wore Andrew’s ring and her barrow key on a long gold chain, tucked safely beneath her shirt. Kate’s string of rubies she’d left behind in her chambers.
