Wren the Fox Witch (Europa #3: A Dark Fantasy)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “Sir?”

  “Go door to door, now! Move it! Move out! Go!” Tycho paused at the top of the stair, then looked back at Wren. “We need to get the Duchess to safety, too.”

  “Sure. But where should we take her?”

  Tycho hesitated.

  We shouldn’t take her too far from the palace. If we end up spread out all over the city, we won’t be able to coordinate our forces.

  He smiled.

  “I think I know a place.”

  Tycho and Wren rode their little pony back across the park from the wall to the palace, dashing through the columns of soldiers jogging up the shallow hill side to muster in the First Courtyard.

  Back in the Chamber of Petitions, the atmosphere was strangely calm and quiet as the servants went about their chores and the clerks shuffled their papers, and the politicians argued quietly in the corners.

  Tycho found Lady Nerissa in her office with the gravely pale and sleepy-eyed Salvator and several other senior officers. “Your Grace, we have to evacuate the palace.”

  The Duchess’s face betrayed her worry and fear. “Vlad’s plan failed? The airships are still coming this way?”

  “It’s impossible to be sure, but we can’t wait until the last minute to find out. I’ve already sent our men into the city to evacuate the homes near the waterfront, but we need to get you to safety as well. The palace will be their first target.”

  “Not the most gallant recourse, but probably the most prudent,” Salvator said begrudgingly.

  The Duchess nodded. “Very well. We’ll move to the Cathedral of Saint Sophia. Not even the Turks would dare to destroy that house of God.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Grace, but we can’t take that chance.”

  The woman’s face hardened with resolve. “Major, I won’t simply run away to some country estate and wait for it to be safe enough for me to resume my duties. I have a war to fight.”

  “I know, and I agree,” Tycho said. “Which is why I want to move you to another palace nearby.”

  “What other palace nearby?” The Duchess’s look of confusion blossomed into realization. “Major, that’s an excellent idea.”

  The next half hour was a maelstrom of clerks and papers and maids and orders as the palace staff were all sent away and the entire bureaucratic machinery of Constantia was bundled up into satchels and cases and bags and trunks and simply carried out through the front gates of the Palace of Constantine.

  The train of porters and soldiers and clerks shuffled down the road behind the Cathedral of Saint Sophia led by Lady Nerissa, Salvator, Tycho, and Wren. When they reached the gated entrance on their right, they turned into the estate and crossed the flat lawn of brown grass.

  “What is this place? Have I been here before?” Wren asked. “I thought we were going to another palace.”

  “We are, and you have, although you were probably blindfolded at the time,” Tycho said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “You mean… we’re going back to the prison?”

  “We call it the Sunken Palace now. It’s centuries old, and no one’s certain what it was really for or why it sank, but it’s down there. It’s partly flooded as well, and it’s used as a cistern. And a prison.” Tycho opened the door of the small mausoleum in the center of the field and let the ladies enter ahead of him, and then he followed them down the stairs into the darkness with the stampede of men and papers following behind him.

  Down below, the air was stale and cold and Tycho saw Wren’s breath swirling around her pale lips. He led the way through the makeshift office at the bottom of the stair and headed down the narrow corridor to the first vast chamber. The walkway skirted the edge of the room some ten or twelve feet above the floor, and the level of the water reached nearly to the walkway, so that the rippling surface of the reservoir lapped and splashed gently at their feet. The light of the torches danced on the water, and dripping sounds echoed over and over into the distant shadows.

  Tycho hurried on past two more cisterns that had been grand ball rooms or dining halls for the long-dead lords of Constantia. The major kept his eyes on the walkway.

  Perhaps Constantine himself danced in these halls. Princes and emperors from half the world might have walked here, talking of war and love and religion and politics. Writing history with every gesture and word. And now it’s all one big well full of cold water for people who barely remember that Constantine ever really lived. What a joke.

  Beyond the cisterns stood the hall of small locked rooms guarded by the pale-faced soldiers, who leapt to salute the major as he led the Duchess and her entourage past the cells ever deeper into the ancient palace.

  Finally they came to another large room, one not flooded but still pocked with broken tiles and wide shallow puddles from the water that dripped from overhead. The moldy remains of the ceiling were supported by two rows of thick Hellan columns, which may have been solid marble, or merely granite, beneath the layers of moss and fungus and filth on them. A dozen other doors led out of the room in every direction, but Tycho paused just inside the entrance and said, “We should be safe here.”

  “Where is here?” Wren asked.

  “We’re fifty feet underground, near the edge of the empty field.”

  “Very good,” said the Duchess. “With nothing on the surface, there’s no reason for the airships to bomb this area. Good thinking, major.”

  Tycho nodded. He was too tired and too worried to feel any pride in the compliment.

  Salvator hobbled out into the room and sighed loudly. “Well, if we must, we must.”

  For the next ten minutes, Tycho watched the Duchess direct the clerks and porters and other servants carrying in the machinery of government, hauling chests and desks and tables and an endless supply of paper into the dingy, dark hall. Torches were set and lit, furniture was arranged, and within half an hour the center of the ancient hall resembled a large office ringed in fire light, already bustling with the mundane business of reconciling numbers and reports and issuing new orders. Couriers began jogging out the door, heading for the surface to deliver their new papers to the officers outside.

  Toward the center of the room was a round table with a square map laid on it with the corners drooping over the edges. Wooden figures of soldiers, marines, horses, archers, and ships were scattered over the map to show the last known positions of every defender in the city. They were scattered very thinly.

  “You see, this would have been an ideal moment for two forward thinking gentlemen to be on a ship sailing away across the placid Sea of Marmara toward the Ionian coast,” Salvator said from his chair. “Have you ever been to Palermo? It’s quite picturesque in the winter. And when spring comes, those two gentlemen might take a leisurely journey up to Rome to seduce foolish young women and kill arrogant young priests. For money, of course.”

  “How are your stitches?” Tycho asked, his eyes never leaving the map.

  “Holding, for the moment. Your common Hellan surgeon is no match for even the lowliest Italian tailor, but I suspect I’m going to survive.”

  Tycho said nothing. He stood by the map, his arms folded, his foot tapping, as he waited for the runners to start bringing fresh reports so the map could be updated and he could offer the Duchess some new idea, some new tactic that might help save Constantia from the airships. But as he stood waiting, his mind was a blank. His eyes traveled up to the young woman in black, to her long red hair cascading around her shoulders in wild tumbling locks, her tall red ears poking up in front of the black scarf that was slipping back over her head, and to her pale white hands with the jangling silver bracelets.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked her. “Can I get you anything?” He frowned as he glanced around the makeshift office in the dank cavern.

  That was stupid. What the hell can I get her? A handful of dirty water?

  “I’m fine.” She flashed a brief, tired smile and came over to stand beside him and look at the map of the city. “Just restless. I don�
��t like standing still, waiting for something to happen to me. I spent a long time with my first teacher, Gudrun, in this one little village, just listening to old stories and learning about herbs. And toward the end, I couldn’t even leave the tower for more than an hour or two. It wasn’t safe. But then when I did leave the tower, it was nothing but running and fighting and arguing and more running. Even after I left Ysland with Omar, it’s been nothing but moving and moving. We sailed across the Sea of Ice in a ship made of steel, and rode through frozen forests on huge shaggy horses, and then crossed the glaciers on sleds pulled by dogs.”

  “It sounds like it was hard. And cold.”

  “It was, but it was wonderful. I saw new places, met strange people. I talked to ghosts hundreds of years old and visited tiny villages in the mountains that can barely survive, but somehow do, generation after generation.” Wren stared up at the shadowy ceiling as she spoke in soft, reverent tones. “And then we reached Vlachia and saw the walking corpses, and fought them, and escaped here, and the war, and Yaga…”

  “Not a moment to rest?”

  “Not a one.” She glanced at him. “I guess I’m starting to like it that way. I don’t like just standing still like this, especially in the dark. Waiting in the dark. It brings back bad memories.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s only for a day or two,” he said. “But at least we’ll be safe from the bombs.”

  “Right, the bombs.” She nodded absently. “If they ever drop any bombs.”

  He sighed. “If. When.”

  Wren looked sharply to her right. “Did you hear that?”

  Tycho turned to peer into the deep shadows at the far end of the hall. He heard people murmuring and papers shuffling and pens scratching, and faintly, he heard water dripping. “What was it?”

  Wren’s ears twitched, jerking left and right in tiny increments. “It was like footsteps. Tapping, but irregular, not like the dripping. And scraping, like boots.”

  Tycho frowned a bit deeper as he started walking through the office space and out beyond the perimeter of torches across the wet tiles toward the dark corners and sealed doors. He heard nothing. Still, he drew his white-handled Mazigh revolver and pointed it at the shadows and stood very still, listening.

  Wren followed a moment later and stood behind him. “I hear it. Scratching.”

  “It could be rats in the walls,” he said quietly.

  “Maybe.”

  One of the sealed doors in front of them banged against its hinges and the deep wooden thump echoed across the room. A dozen clerks looked up from their papers.

  Tycho pointed his gun at the door and took a few more steps forward. “That wasn’t a rat.”

  “What else could be down here?” she asked. “Are there other parts of this palace used for other things? Could other people be down here for shelter too?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  But probably not.

  Tycho waved to two of the soldiers to follow him and they crossed the room through cold puddles and over crackling, uneven tiles to the door that had banged. It was a double door hung in a thick frame of carved pillars crowned with stone leaves and flowers.

  “Hello?” he called.

  The doors banged, and banged again. Something heavy was striking the wood panels, and the doors shook on their hinges, rattling against the old iron locks that held them together. They banged a third time and the left door cracked apart a bit, splintering just enough to reveal a sliver of darkness on the far side.

  And from that darkness a pale blue hand clawed into the light.

  “Guards! Get over here!” Tycho grabbed Wren’s hand and pointed his gun at the door.

  I have six bullets. I can kill six of them, at most. Six, and then we’re all dead.

  He squeezed Wren’s hand and grimaced.

  Palermo is sounding very nice right about now.

  Chapter 22. Stamballa

  Omar stood on the banks of the Bosporus and gazed up at the beautiful towers of the Mazdan temples beyond the tiled roofs of the ancient villas and mansions and princely estates of Stamballa. It was late in the morning, nearly noon, and the droning of the approaching airships reverberated across the pale winter sky.

  “We’re certain the entire district is empty?” Omar asked.

  I can’t believe I’m about to be a party to this.

  “My scouts have been to the top of the hill,” Vlad said. “Half a league or so from the water. The houses are all empty.”

  Omar nodded grimly. “Then I suppose we should get started. Those airships will be overhead in just a few minutes.” He paced up the cobblestone lane to the first house and plunged his seireiken into the joint between the top of the wall and the bottom of the roof. The stones began to glow a dull red and the old timbers of the house burst into flame.

  As he stood there, making certain the house was well and truly on fire, Omar noticed the dim shade of Ito Daisuke standing beside him. “Yes?”

  “This is your side of the border, isn’t it? Imperial soil?”

  Omar sighed. “Yes.”

  “And you’re setting fire to this city to save that other city?”

  Omar stifled a glare. “Yes.”

  “Ah.” The dead samurai paced along the front of the house, looking up at the burning roof.

  Omar pulled his seireiken free, walked to the next house, and plunged the blade up into the roof. A second fire crackled to life.

  “I know you said you would help the Hellans with their little witch problem, with the walking dead and such,” Daisuke said. “And I respect that. But that task appears to be complete. Koschei is free, Yaga is under control, and the army of corpses was defeated.”

  “So?”

  “So why are you now helping the Hellans to fight the Turks?” The samurai gestured to the street around them as the Constantian marines and Vlachian archers strode by, tossing torches onto roofs and kicking in doors to ransack the abandoned houses. “This has nothing to do with you, or your promise. This is barely even warfare. This is simple barbarism, and you appear to be on the wrong side of it.”

  “If the airships bomb Constantia, thousands of innocent people will die. But if they bomb us here, only a few soldiers will be in danger.” Omar moved on up the street.

  “This is about saving lives?” The samurai frowned. “You’ve spent the last forty-five centuries searching for arcane knowledge to overcome death, to transcend humanity, and to meet the Divine face to face.”

  “Your point?”

  “Your confrontation with the witches and the corpses might have advanced your knowledge, and helped your search for truth. It didn’t, but it might have. But this little enterprise?” Daisuke paused. “It profits you nothing.”

  Omar pulled his sword free and continued up the lane. The burning roofs behind him crackled merrily as the flames danced higher, and the beams inside began to snap and buckle. “I suppose not. But it’ll make the world a slightly better place. Less dying, and so on.”

  “Perhaps.” Daisuke nodded. “Except for the people who live in this neighborhood. They’ll be homeless.”

  Omar sighed. “Except for them, I suppose.” He continued up the lane, occasionally cutting through alleyways parallel to the water, and always poking his blazing seireiken up into the eaves of the little fishermen’s houses, setting fire to the district and hoping the smoke would catch the eyes of the airship pilots and bombardiers.

  The ghost of Ito Daisuke appeared again, and behind him ten thousand other dead faces hovered in the distance. Omar sighed. “What?”

  “When this is over and you finally returned to Alexandria, what then?” Daisuke paced along the street, his shadowy wooden geta sandals clacking silently on the cobblestones.

  “I don’t know.” Omar smiled. “I really don’t.”

  A sudden outbreak of men shouting and boots pounding drew Omar’s gaze up the hill where he saw the marines and Vlachians running across an intersection.

  “Hm.” He sheathed his brig
ht sun-steel blade and jogged up the road, and cut across two lanes to find the Hellans arrayed in a loose formation across a narrow street with Vlad at their center. Above and beyond them, Omar saw another company of men forming, this one dressed in blue uniforms and light armor, with Numidian rifles in their hands.

  Damn. Just what we wanted to avoid.

  Prince Vlad held his own seireiken high over his head and shouted, “Radu! Where are you, Radu?”

  Omar sagged and slouched and wished Wren was there to share an exasperated look with him.

  What the hell is that fool thinking?

  “Radu!” the prince cried.

  The Eranian troops continued to trickle into the street and the long rifles in their hands were leveled at the ragged band of Hellans and Vlachians with their varied assortment of knives, pistols, swords, and bows.

  Omar faded back against the wall of a house.

  This is not going to end well.

  He slipped around the corner onto a side street, out of the field of fire, took several backward paces to be sure no one had noticed him leaving, and then turned and nearly ran face-first into a very broad and hairy chest. Koschei looked down at him, confused.

  “Grigori! What is happening?”

  Omar glanced over his shoulder. “I think Vlad is about to have a pissing contest with his little brother, and lose.”

  “Ha! This should be fun. We watch them fight and we get to kill all these stupid little Turks too, eh? Oh, so sorry, Grigori. I forget sometimes that these are your people. You don’t have to help me kill them, I can do this alone.” The hulking Rus warrior frowned at the crowd of soldiers at the end of the street, wavering as though uncertain whether he wanted to join them. Then he looked back down and said, “But I think they’ll have to do without us for now. Vlad is a man, and he can die like one if he likes. There is other business for you and me.”