Lightborn

by Alison Sinclair

  Her first thought was None of them told me—not Mycene, not Telmaine, not Vladimer.

  A shout pulled her attention back to the street, to the small mob of men and women at the archducal palace’s main gates. Their yells had, until now, merely formed part of the overall city racket, but the shout that had drawn her attention had been, “. . . Hold that door!” Several were looking at her; one was pointing; two, then four, then several, began running in her direction. Instinctively responding as a vigilant, she stepped clear of the doorway, pulling the heavy door shut behind her, slid open the small passe-muraille beside the door, and, thrusting her left arm deep into shadow, let the key drop to the tiles on the far side.

  The first man to reach her pushed her aside, and groped briefly and futilely into the shadows, until the pain of the dark made him rear back, dragging out a blanched and nerveless arm. “Why’d you do that?” he screamed at her. He was a handsome youth, for all his glossy white gold curls were gray with dust, his kohl-rimmed eyes reddened, and his skin piebald with bruises. His tunic, gaudy beneath its dust and bloodstains, suggested he was an entertainer. She recognized him then as the male ingenue in an acting troupe whose theater home was close to the tower. The performers often rehearsed late, and slept in the theater. “She threw away the key,” the actor cried to his audience, voice trembling with emotion. “She threw away the key.”

  Floria eased away, not allowing them to encircle her, while two of the heavier men, one of whom was as dusty and tattered as the actor, took turns kicking and shoulder-tackling the door. “Don’t you have any idea what they’ve done?” The actor swung his arm toward the ruined tower.

  Floria followed the gesture, let her eyes widen and glaze with shock, as though she were seeing it for the first time. “Mother of All Things,” she breathed. “The tower? What happened to the tower?”

  Pinning her against the wall, they pelted her with the account of explosions in the night, of slabs of the tower crashing through roofs and crushing out lives and light, of survivors waiting huddled in dusty shelter until dawn, emerging to dig with bloodied fingers for the crushed bodies or quenched residue of loved ones and friends. She assumed the role of an innocent courier, forced by sunset to remain at her destination overnight, only to emerge to meet horror. She gasped; she wept; she cast oblique glances across the group to check whether any one of them might question why a courier went armed like a palace vigilant. Her vest, blessedly, covered the tattoo. Finding nothing more blameworthy about her than ignorance, the most aggressive of the group returned to shouting and pounding on the doors. The others were too absorbed in their own anguish to question hers.

  Begging their leave to go and check on her sister who lived close, so close, to the tower, she escaped them. At the first corner that put a wall between her and them, she started to run.

  The street was Darkborn, a most select neighborhood, given its proximity to the archducal palace, tall row houses describing graceful arcs around manicured gardens. There was horror here, too, muted and subtle horror. Metal glinted dully from an upper step, marking a thin film of ash that trailed down the stairs: residue of a Darkborn immolated on the very threshold of safety. A smudge of ash lingered before an open gate to a servants’ entrance, while the gate itself rocked gently in the breeze. Her foot flashed by a lady’s reticule, fallen in the middle of the pavement. Burned ghosts swirled at her heels, and she could imagine the Darkborn huddled within their windowless walls, uncomprehending. What madness had overtaken whoever had conceived of this?

  Away from the archducal palace, even the Lightborn streets were lightly traveled. There were none of the open Lightborn cabs. A Darkborn carriage had overturned against a railing; the spiked uprights had staved in its sides. The horse lay dead in its traces, shot through the back of its head—a runaway, brought down too late? She did not look inside the carriage, or too closely at the driver’s seat. She shied at the flash of chain armor and polished helmets from an approaching party of city guards or vigilants, the very people who would be holding her warrant. She could not let herself be taken short of the palace vestibule, where she might have a chance of being brought promptly before . . . before Fejelis. The sight of the tower, the urgency of her flight, had driven Isidore’s loss from her mind. She had been homing on the man who had had her service all her adult life, when that man was already gone.

  Because of her.

  Leaving an inexperienced son suspected of his father’s unrighteous deposition, of which, if Telmaine’s account was true—if Tam could verify it—he was far more blameless than Floria herself. She owed Fejelis his exoneration, if nothing more.

  She opened the nearest gate and ducked into the garden, listening for the sound of chain armor marching by. Bound for the archducal palace, perhaps. She gave them time to reach the end of the street, and then slid her head around the gate.

  At least the momentary pause had renewed her wind. She ran another mile, passing the occasional huddle of pedestrians exchanging shocked news, as well as people proceeding on their daily round with an expression of grim purposefulness. Twice, she came on groups conferring over mounds of ash. As she passed the second, one of them, a student artisan by his dress, smeared the ash with his foot. Two of his companions jerked him away. He remonstrated, his voice rising in self-justification.

  She heard the mob around Bolingbroke Station and concourse before she saw it, deep, repeated booms, such as she had heard only from Darkborn factories with heavy machinery, and the dull roar of many voices. Once she reached the approach street itself, she could see the mob itself at the doors, yelling in synchrony with the booming.

  She checked her stride, coming to a halt. Fejelis needed the information she brought, would be at risk without it, but Fejelis had the palace vigilants and his own skills, and the Darkborn inside the station had no defenders, and no means of defense that also kept them safe from the deadly sunlight. If those doors gave, the sun would massacre them to a one, railway workers and shopkeepers, businessmen and students, men, women, and children, none of them dukes and few of them soldiers—Balthasar’s people.

  She knew what Isidore’s orders would have been, and she thought she knew what Fejelis would say. But it was the baying of the mob that evoked an atavistic fury in her. On a day when madness abounded, let this be hers.

  The crowd already almost filled the apron in front of the old station building. Onlookers draped the statues set at two and ten o’clock of the arc, and only the depth of the surrounding water had deterred most from mounting the central fountain. Floria set her foot on the rim of the fountain, jumped to catch the outstretched arm of the centerpiece, and swung herself up. Two of the youths occupying the statue took one look at her revolver and face, and abandoned their places. A shove dislodged the third. The centerpiece, with its wide metal vanes, was an outrage to conservative Darkborn sensibilities and none too beautiful to Lightborn eyes, but good cover and vantage. Stretched along one of those vanes, Floria could see the improvised ram, a metal-capped pole lashed to a carriage chassis. Its six drivers were lining it up for another run at the varnished station doors.

  She thought to be surprised that the city guard were not here already, but feared she knew why. From Balthasar she knew that the old station building descended several levels underground, so even if the doors were breached, the Darkborn might find refuge until the crowd amassed sufficient lights and daring to follow them in. Unlike other places in the city, which might likewise be under siege.

  Perhaps, she thought, she should let them expend their rage on the doors—but even as she had the thought, the ram struck with a yielding note, and the crowd raised a roar of triumph that made her flinch. She steadied her revolver and placed two bullets between the lead two bearers. One recoiled, and the ram missed its next stroke. A new man shouldered in to take his place. Floria shot again, and he leaped back, gripping the shoulder that had been set to the ram: either her bullet, or a sliver, had grazed it. Silence spread raggedly outward, people
looking around, first randomly, then purposefully. She eased herself up on her elbows, revolver held ready, alert for any movement beneath her that might indicate that someone in the crowd was armed with other than the usual weapons of urban troublemakers.

  “Let them be,” she shouted. “They are not your enemies.”

  “Not our enemies! Not our enemies!” shrieked a woman from the crowd. By the layer of dust and wild look of her, she, too, had been all too close to the falling tower. “My brother’s son was crushed in his bed, and his mother’s likely to lose the babe she’s carrying now, from grief.”

  “I am grieved for your grief.” Floria shouted back, “But this would not be justice. This would be murder hot and foul, and I will not see it done.”

  “Who are you to judge?”

  “Floria White Hand of Prince Isidore’s and Prince Fejelis’s Vigilance.” Praying that the warrant had been kept within the Vigilance.

  “Darkborn-lover!” A rock struck the edge of the vane. She did not know who had thrown it, had not seen him or her readying the throw. No, this was not tenable.

  The people around the ram scrambled together another charge. She grimaced, sighted, and shot along the length of the ram as they rushed forward once more, but they barely stalled in their stroke. The crowd roared.

  “Didn’t you look down as you came through these streets?” she screamed. “Darkborn died by the dozens. They did not know, any more than we did.”

  “Someone knew,” and more rocks rattled off the fan, hurled from either side, with shouts of “Darkborn-lover,” and “Sons of Odon,” and “. . . murdered mages.”

  Down the central corridor the six rolling the ram were joined by several more, jostling for position. She screamed, “Next, I shoot to wound!” She heard splashing below her, and someone seized her foot, using his body weight to drag her down. She passed her revolver to her left hand, caught the edge with the stronger right, hung on. Another solid boom with grace note of cracking hinge. Her assailant, scrambling for a higher grip on her leg, or her other ankle, brought his head within kicking distance, and she kicked, bloodying his mouth. With a wordless shout lost in the roar of the crowd she hauled herself higher, switched the revolver to her right hand, and shot twice on either side of the line defined by the ram. The ram faltered in its drive and struck off center. A flung rock split her scalp beneath the hairline; another numbed her right arm. The fountain was all white froth and thrashing limbs, the statue around her vibrating with blows. Something struck the fan beside her arm, harder than any rock: a bullet or a pistol ball. Hands clawed at her drawn-up legs, tearing clothing and skin. Over the edge of the fan she glimpsed flying rocks, flailing arms, and, behind them, the glitter of sunlight on armor, the gleam of polished helmets. For a heartbeat longer, her grip held; then she was torn free and falling into heaving bodies and white, pitching water.

  She regained consciousness slung over the edge of the fountain, turbid, reddish water inches from her face. Someone was supporting her head while she heaved up froth and bile. Something rocked in her peripheral vision; rolling her eyes, she saw a corpse floating facedown, its outspread arms the fish-belly white of exsanguination.

  “Done yet?” a woman’s voice said. She croaked assent. Two people hefted her upright, turned her around, and dumped her on the ground with her back against the fountain. A question and an assurance were exchanged, and others moved off. Her ribs ached, her limbs ached, her stomach ached. She tried to swallow and retched dryly with the scouring of her raw throat. Rubbed her mouth with a sodden red sleeve, then her eyes, squinting around her.

  Slowly, the scene cohered. The mob broke like surf against armored and shield-holding guards. The cart holding the ram was overturned, the ram itself foundered and a hazard more to the mob than the doors. The doors themselves stood at the guards’ backs, unbreached, their polished surfaces—kept that way by the small cadre of Lightborn railway workers—gleaming with reflected sunlight.

  “What exactly,” said Tempe’s voice, “did you think you were doing?”

  Floria rolled her head on the supporting tile of the fountain, blinking away trickling water. The vague throbbing above her eye suggested she had already had a mage’s attention. “The hinges were giving.”

  “We were coming,” Tempe said.

  “How could I know that?” Floria wheezed.

  “If you had surrendered as you were supposed to,” Tempe said, “you would have. Fejelis rescinded the warrant last night. Now everyone is asking each other why you ran if you were innocent.”

  Judiciar to the end, interrogating when Floria was half drowned, bruised, and feeling vilely ill, in no condition to do herself anything but a disservice. “Ask Beaudry why he shot at me,” she croaked.

  “You were running.”

  “I saw him draw. Then I ran. . . . If you can’t hear me speak the truth, and you didn’t see for yourself, ask him.”

  “Can’t do that,” Tempe said, leaning close to say, “Someone put a wood and bone crossbow bolt in Fejelis’s back yesterday. Went right by his talisman, which is enspelled for metal. Residue and a southern crossbow were found on an adjacent balcony. Beaudry’s unaccounted for on search, and he was skilled with the crossbow.”

  “What?” Floria scrambled to her feet, or tried to, finding herself in a dizzied half crouch with one hand on the fountain rim, Tempe’s arm around her waist, gripping bruises. Her reflexes, it seemed to Floria, had already settled on Fejelis, for all her mind was undecided.

  Tempe wrestled her onto the fountain’s edge. “That sport mage Fejelis contracted lifted in from who knows where, threw everyone off him, and got the bolt out. I don’t know how long Fejelis’ll survive, but he’s fine at the moment. He’s put the entire Prince’s Vigilance out on the street, to protect Darkborn.”

  “What . . . ?”

  “It was quite a scene, they say. Fejelis said he’d be cursed if he’d be remembered in the same breath as Odon the Breaker and threatened to take it to a duel if Captain Lapaxo didn’t obey his orders; Lapaxo vowed to take Fejelis over his knee and spank him if he didn’t keep enough for his own protection. Each of them,” she added with the insight of her asset, “meant every word he said.”

  “Mother of All,” Floria breathed.

  “I expect they’ll be the best of friends hereafter,” Tempe predicted, her tone adding an unspoken, Men.

  “Who’s back at the palace?”

  “Six, under Rupertis. Orlanjis’s vigilants are out here as well, though Helenja refused to let hers go. The mage seems to have vanished; word’s out he’s answering questions from the high masters.”

  “I have to get back there.”

  “I’ll take you. I’ll not be needed until later, when they’re ready to sort and fillet their haul here.” While the armed vigilants held their circle, the guards, expert in this work, were systematically shackling those who had not fled. Behind them, several mages vigilant moved amongst the fallen, ensuring their survival to trial. City taxes at work, Floria thought sourly. She felt at her waist. Revolver, gone. At the bottom of the fountain, she hoped, though there’d be no finding it until the fountain was drained. Two corpses floated in the water, beyond saving. The nearest, she vaguely remembered. Following her gaze, Tempe silently handed her her ankle dagger.

  “Did I—?” She remembered frantically trying to keep one arm, one knife, free of the hands that thrust her deep, and slashing at the black shapes eclipsing the surface.

  “That one, yes.” Tempe handed her her rapier in its soaked sheath. “Given that multiple witnesses truthfully attest he was trying to drown you, I doubt there will be more than a fine to pay. The blood money to the family will come out of city funds. The other seems to have been pushed under in the struggle. We didn’t realize he was down there in time.”

  It was one of the youths she had frightened into retreat. Nineteen, at most, face bruised and blood-filled brown eyes turned blindly up to the sky. His last sight the white underside of foaming wate
r and the shadows of people trampling him under? She looked away from the uncomprehending young face. “There was more than one trying to drown me,” she said.

  “We’ll get descriptions,” Tempe said. “And we’ll need your testimony, too. You’ve me to thank that you’re not joining the haul in the tank. And if you run again, Floria, it will be a vigilant’s warrant on you, understand?”

  She made a sound that she trusted could be interpreted as assent.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me about this box that the rumors keep mentioning.”

  “You’ll have to wait until I speak to Fejelis.” She twisted her neck to look at the other woman. “I’d appreciate having you there; maybe he’ll believe I’m speaking the truth.”

  She pushed herself all the way to her feet, and this time her legs seemed to resign themselves to their task. Tempe beckoned to three trainee vigilants who had, Floria realized, been standing off close enough if they were needed, not close enough to hear what they shouldn’t. They closed in around her; they, it seemed, would be their escort.

  She cleared her throat. “What else has been happening at the palace?”

  Fejelis

  In the vast vestibule of the palace, Fejelis silently handed the crimson ribbons to Captain Rupertis, who did not protest the menial task, but patiently tied them in place around Fejelis’s dusty red sleeves. They would stand out, clean and shiny as they were, distinct from the mourning garb of earlier grief.

  To his hovering secretary, he said, “. . . Has there been any response from the Darkborn?”

  “None, my prince.”

  He disliked that. He disliked that a great deal. In a city in chaos, a palace courier bound for the archducal palace could easily have fallen to a random attack. Even without the possibility of deliberate interception. He said, “. . . I have to know who is in charge over there, and what they plan to do with those responsible for this slaughter.”