Between Y’Homa and the half moon of enthroned figures was something else unexpected, here in the heart of heaven—a Gate stretched across the top of the ziggurat. It was far smaller than any of those on the Star, no more than a dozen yards across, but a Gate nonetheless. Unlike those vast pits on the continent that hungrily sucked in anything and everything that passed above them, this miniature hellmouth was crisscrossed with thin bridges of gleaming white bone.
“I am Pope Y’Homa III, Mother of Midnight, Shepherdess of the Lost,” she announced when none of the figures acknowledged her arrival with more than an ugly stare. “I have returned home.”
An enormous fat man swaddled in a toga of shimmering white sequins nearly toppled out of his throne with laughter. None of the others reacted as the braying guffaws of their confederate echoed out across the expanse, the vein-mapped roof emitting a pale green glow. Y’Homa’s hands clenched into fists, any lingering uncertainty and the ensuing fear she might have felt at the unexpected aspect of this place banished as her heart swelled with hateful malice at this grotesque abomination who dared laugh at her, here at the end of her many ordeals.
“Silence!” she shouted at the thing, but to her dismay her voice sounded small and tinny in the great space, and the bloated man laughed all the harder. Another test. She must be virtuous, she must be proud as well as wroth. “Be still, oh interloper in my throne room, before I cast you out! Before I cast you all out!”
At this several of the gaunter figures began snickering as well, but then a long-haired woman in a sparkling ivory gown raised a bony palm and the rest quieted down. Then she slowly turned her hand, beckoning Y’Homa to approach. She took a step to walk around the edge of the Gate when the forgotten cherub on her back tightened its eight furry arms around her chest and queasy stomach, the yoke at her throat tugging her to the side … toward one of the bridges that spanned the Gate, bridges crafted of impossibly long and thick spinal columns.
The Black Pope did not balk for an instant, aborting her doubts before they could fully form. The bone ridges felt sharp and damp beneath her bare feet as she stepped onto the bridge, but it was sticky instead of slick, and wide enough for a woman of her small stature to walk without fear. She was almost halfway across when she noticed the design mapped out by the overlapping bridges, a white pentagram straddling the black Gate, and she took succor in the holy sigil.
When she looked back up she saw that five of the ancient figures had risen from their seats and were fanning out around the Gate, each taking a position at a point of the pentagram. None of the thrones they had vacated were the blazing chair Y’Homa had dreamed of occupying. Instead of divine flames, blinking eyes and winking orifices adorned the thrones that sprouted like toadstools from the meaty plateau. Frail was Y’Homa’s heart, fluttering all over again as her mind struggled harder than ever to incorporate this bizarre place and the obvious ceremony she found herself in the middle of with all her preexisting beliefs.
She must have faith. When Pope Shanatu had summoned her to Diadem she was but Jirella Martigore, a naïve girl who knew nothing of the numinous nor the true nature of the world, a fool who didn’t even know that anathemas were real or that the Star was in spiritual crisis. The ordeal she had undergone to sacrifice her former self and become the Black Pope had also been an overwhelming, horrifying ritual, and in the moment it had not seemed as if she could possibly survive it … Yet she had, because the Fallen Mother willed it, just as she willed this. The Fallen Mother had called Y’Homa—
“Home,” croaked the woman who had beckoned her forward, standing at the end of Y’Homa’s bridge, both hair and gown dancing with white light. Could this be … Her? And if so, why in the name of the faith was she speaking High Immaculate instead of Crimson? “You are home, yes … but who are you? What claim have you to our kingdom?”
“I am the Black Pope,” said Y’Homa, taking another step forward. Before she had been studiously keeping her eyes on the narrow path as she crossed but now she trusted in the Allmother, fixing her eyes on the ancient woman. “Ordained by the Fallen Mother to resurrect the Garden of the Star. To pilgrimage here and claim my throne, from whence I shall order the Angelic Brood to punish the iniquitous and call home the faithful.”
“You summoned us!” shrieked a lanky white thing wearing a red-and-gold collar, shaking a thick-ringed finger at Y’Homa as it leaped from its throne and stalked over to stand beside the white-gowned woman. “You made the sacrifice! You brought us back!”
“I did,” said Y’Homa, resisting the urge to take a bow. If anyone ought to be supplicating themselves it was these angelic servants of the Fallen Mother she had called back to the Star. “And now I have brought all the faithful children of the Burnished Chain here to accept our reward.”
There was a pause while the heavenly host exchanged curious looks and gestures, and then the old woman rasped out a question so unexpected Y’Homa almost fell off the bridge.
“What is a Burnished Chain?”
“The church,” said Y’Homa incredulously. “Her church.”
“Whooooose church?” squealed one of the others who stood around the Gate, this one dressed in membranous grey robes that made it look like a heathen Immaculate.
“Who are you creatures?” Y’Homa demanded, done with whatever riddle or test this was supposed to be. She resumed walking down the bridge to confront the white-haired woman and her gem-collared confederate, her head held higher than ever. “Are you a council of archangels sent to aid in my reign, or devils intent on thwarting it? If you be true children of the Allmother, you shall welcome me properly, now. And if you be agents of the Deceiver, prepare for divine retribution.”
At this the fat one’s laughter returned, louder than ever, and even the old woman smiled sadly … but the figure beside her was not smiling. It strode past the woman in white, advancing onto Y’Homa’s narrow bridge and blocking her path. Its antique costume of black beads shimmered like the Gate beneath their feet. It held its ring-crowded left hand up beside its face, murmuring to itself and clicking the jewelry together as it reached out for her with the naked fingers of its right.
She recoiled, and her foot slipped despite the sticky coating on the bridge of bone. Y’Homa lost her balance, and in that moment when the terror of falling into the Gate overwhelmed her conviction the creature seized her wrist, and revelations blasted her mind.
The Ritual.
The Vex Assembly of Old Jex Toth, witch priests convening atop a pyramid of white stone beneath the naked heavens, the stars overhead flowing into a maelstrom as they carried out their rites. One by one, they sacrificed each other to the First Dark … only for each to rise in turn. The living rendered deathless, the mortal made divine. The ascension of thirteen who would save the Star from itself.
The Betrayal.
A sacrifice so great its ripples were seen across the Star, the yellow sun turned black, the blue sky turned yellow, the howling winds lashing across Jex Toth … and then, nothing. No, not nothing—the Sunken Kingdom had not fallen beneath the waves of the Haunted Sea, but somewhere far, far worse. It had sunk into the First Dark.
The Years Without Light.
The Hunger.
The Despair.
The Bargains.
And then, the Return.
“Yes, Jirella, you have come home … and so have we.” The hated use of her birth name jarred Y’Homa back to the present—ever since she’d assumed the Onyx Pulpit, the only one who had dared address her that way was her uncle … just before she had him crucified.
The voice that used it now was warm as mulled wine and syrupy as snowmead, nothing like the shrieks and rasps of the Vex Assembly who had welcomed her. Yet blinking the blood from her eyes, Y’Homa saw it was the same ring-fingered priest who addressed her. It had caught her hand in its own, holding her in place as she swayed back over the side of the bridge, over the center of the pentagram, over the Tothan Gate. Something had changed in its ancient features, an
d now that she could guess what, she desperately wanted to pull away … but to do so would be to tumble into the very place from whence it had emerged. “Do not despair, sweet child. In their quaint fashion your ancestors captured the essence of our worship, and we are not displeased.”
“She … She waits … Beyond the First Dark …” Y’Homa’s every breath was fire, powerful visions continuing to flash through her shuddering skull, aftershocks of the revelatory earthquake.
“And we shall call her home, just as you called us home,” said Y’Homa’s savior. “First we must anoint the sacrifice, to prepare it for the slaughter. Your fleet will carry out this sacred duty—you shall sail to the Star and warn your kind of our coming. You shall sow the terror and hatred that renders mortal flesh so sweet. You shall speak the ultimate truth you have always aspired to, and then we shall carry out our final work.”
“No.” Y’Homa couldn’t manage any other words, her heart beating so fast she knew it must surely burst. It was like some horrible nightmare, some trick of the Deceiver to deprive her of her reward. “No no no.”
The thing frowned, crinkling the leathery skin it had entered five centuries before … five centuries as the Star counted time, but so, so many more in the First Dark, waiting to come home. “You summoned us, Your Grace, and now we shall grant your wish—to cleanse this vile world, to sacrifice the Star.”
“No … you mustn’t …” Y’Homa finally gulped out the words. “You mustn’t warn the world, mustn’t give the sinners time to prepare. Take them unawares, use the army I have brought you—”
“This world died the moment you brought us back.” It smiled at her, black eyes shining like the insects that swarmed all over its scrawny body in imitation of robe and raiment. “The more your kind struggles, the better you taste, and the more you know, the more you struggle. We have no need of your feeble fleet, your soft soldiers—we have been breeding our own legions, our own vessels. You shall go forth and testify to our coming, that will be enough.”
“Let me stay!” Y’Homa wailed, her heart breaking. “Exile the others, but let me stay! I am the Shepherdess of the Lost, Mother of Midnight, and this is my home! I made the sacrifice to summon you, I sacrificed everything, and I was promised a throne! I was promised eternity! I was promised!”
“We promised you nothing,” said the thing, though not unkindly.
“This is my destiny!” To come so close to the divine only to be rebuffed, banished back to her boats … it would not stand. It could not stand. In that moment Y’Homa felt her soul singing with all six of her sacred virtues in tandem, her greed and envy even stronger than her pride and wrath, hungering and lusting for what she knew awaited her, and she was no longer a teenage girl mewling for her reward—she was the most important mortal who had ever lived, demanding her due. “I summoned you, creature, and you are bound to give me what I came here for. Now.”
“Thy wish be done,” said the ancient devil of Jex Toth, and it released Y’Homa’s hand. She hadn’t even realized it was the only thing supporting her until she fell away from the bridge and into the Gate that lay at the heart of the Garden of the Star.
CHAPTER
9
Upon his arrest at the white-gloved hands of Othean’s Samjok-o Guard, the Baron of Cockspar gave a formal declaration of his name, rank, and status as an active Crimson colonel taken hostage by the nefarious Cobalt Company … along with his loyal bodyguard. While that set the Immaculates to chattering among themselves, it didn’t get Domingo an immediate audience with the empress or any of her advisors. It did, however, get him comfortable chambers in the heart of the sprawling Winter Palace, and a rattan wheelchair to roll there in. Such amenities were obvious improvements on drafty, moth-eaten tents and bouncing, splintery cart-beds.
There was a time not so long ago that the notion of allowing a witchborn into his private rooms would have been unthinkable to Domingo. Anathema, even. But after being laid out in the wagon beside Brother Wan and then cuddled up on by Hoartrap the Touch, he was just relieved he didn’t have to share his bed with Captain Choi.
And what ridiculous beds they were, too! Their gilded cage had what looked to be two polished topaz kaldi tables instead of cots, though Domingo’s estimation of the Immaculate beds improved dramatically once he learned hot coals were placed beneath them to keep the stone mattress warm throughout the night. Choi seemed to think the climate unnaturally clement for the season, but to Domingo’s hot southern blood it was still damned chilly after dark, and the combination of heat and firmness against his lame hip made the Lion of Cockspar as comfy as an old tom snoring on a sunny windowsill.
Yet comfort wasn’t always enough to make one comfortable. When he woke one night to use his bedpan and saw the horned silhouette of the moonlit witchborn sitting up in a meditative posture on the other side of the paper screen that divided their room, for example, he found it difficult to relax again. Too close for comfort, too close by far.
Back home in Azgaroth there had been plenty of the freaks—too many, most citizens would agree—but while they weren’t persecuted the way they were in less enlightened parts of the Empire where the Chain was stronger, that didn’t mean the baron invited them into his house. No it did not. Their kind had always been mistrusted if not shunned by the good people of Cockspar for the quite reasonable reason that the things were bloody monsters, albeit ones that played at being pureborn, as he had so keenly put it to Lupitera as they returned from a drama she had dragged him to that was little more than a simpering apologia for the witchborn. His sister-in-law had offered some snide rejoinder about what higher form of life Domingo might be impersonating, though he couldn’t for the life of him recall if she’d compared him to a shrew or a shrike. She’d always had a flair for the one-liners, had Lupitera, having no doubt memorized a catalogue’s worth of them during her misspent youth on the other side of the playhouse stage.
Forcing his insubordinate bladder to produce a weak trickle into the porcelain bedpan, he wondered what his sister-in-law might make of him now, a man risking his life to help a witchborn, and an Immaculate one at that? Not that he’d had much choice in the matter, he told himself … but then another part of Domingo piped in, the one that only ever seemed to find its voice in the wee hours. Of course he’d had a choice. He could have told the anathema to take a long march off a short parapet. And if he’d had the courage of his convictions he would have—he’d always firmly believed death was the end of one’s troubles, not the start of fresh ones, and he’d rarely thought twice about ordering countless soldiers to sacrifice themselves, if the cause demanded it. Surely dying with his pride intact would be preferable to entering into a murderous pact with a monster …
And yet when the time had come he hadn’t even hesitated, capitulating as fast as humanly possible when it seemed like the witchborn was going to make good on her threat. Here at the end of life’s long campaign Baron Domingo Hjortt, the Lion of Cockspar, shied away from an honorable death like a spooked gelding from a Gate, despite the fact that he had absolutely nothing left to live for, and hadn’t for quite some time. No spouse nor heir, no regiment nor friends, no queen nor empire, not even the ability to stand upright despite the miraculous recovery of his other wounds, and for all the shit he’d ever talked about the cowardice of every single other person he’d ever met, Domingo had done exactly what his craven son would have: he bought his worthless life at the expense of his last scrap of self-respect.
“That is enough,” he told himself, the warm topaz beneath the bedding now oppressively hot despite the wind coming in from the sea, rattling against the thin outer screens of their room like a hungry animal eager to be let inside. “That’s an order, Colonel.”
His seditious heart seemed poised to ignore his command and press its attack when there came a grunt from the other side of the screen that partitioned his half of the room from that of his ostensible bodyguard. His injured neck had recovered along with the rest of him following the tri
p through the Gate, but he snapped his head around so quickly he nearly strained it anew. Those needly shivers were instantly forgotten as he saw the horned silhouette of Choi slowly topple from her seated posture, falling without another sound into her bedding. Was their plot discovered, had a silent, unseen assassin just cut her down in her midnight prayers? After forfeiting his honor was Domingo about to lose his life anyway, at the hands of a—
The witchborn grunted again, twisting around in her sheets, but it wasn’t an unhappy grunt, and Domingo’s panic turned to embarrassment at overhearing what sounded an awful lot like carnal bliss. Whether she assumed her roommate was asleep and was pleasuring herself or had dozed off in her meditations and was enjoying a wet dream was a question Domingo regretted asking himself as soon as he did, and he promptly buried his head under a pillow. It was just like being back at the Academy in Lemi, right down to the awkward erection the muffled sounds aroused. He hadn’t been troubled by that old pest in quite some time, but taking the matter in hand would offer some comfort, and after his disgraceful behavior comfort was the last thing he deserved.
The last thing either of them deserved, for that matter, and first thing in the morning he’d have a word with the witchborn about making such a racket—biting a pillow was just good practice, damn it, and if randy teenagers in a military school dormitory could learn that, then so could a grown woman, even a monster.
“I … what?” The witchborn set down her bowl of adzuki porridge as if Domingo had casually spit in it.
“You heard me, Captain, do you really want to make this more uncomfortable by having me repeat myself?” Domingo plopped more of the coconut cream into his porridge and stirred it up with his spoon, raising a mouthful and watching it steam. The witchborn had gotten him into his chair and wheeled him over to the room’s single window so they could look out at the sea as they ate breakfast, the salty breeze as bracing as kaldi would have been, if only they’d been brought that instead of thick, nutty tea. “I’m not even asking you to desist, just show a little respect for your neighbor and keep it to a low roar.”
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