by Tim Clare
Hagar felt her blood turn cold.
‘This is Agatha,’ said Colstrid. He placed a big paw on the child’s back and eased her into the room, her shuffling woollen bootees making a shh shh noise against the waxed hardwood. ‘Agatha – this is Papa’s friend, Miss Hagar Ingery. I know her from a long, long time ago – years and years before you were born.’
Agatha stared at Hagar, the largeness of her eyes accentuated by mauve crescents under the sockets. She had thin, tangled black hair, rather like a skein of fishing line.
Hagar had known nothing about a child. There were now at least three people alive in the household who had seen her. She could abandon the plan – invent a pretext for her unexpected arrival, sneak away as soon as the opportunity presented itself. But when Colstrid discovered two of his staff had been murdered, she would be the obvious culprit. Even if he did not publicly accuse her, he would never grant her the opportunity to get this close to him again.
Tonti Colstrid had to make way. Hagar had spent years considering her options. Her conclusion had been inescapable: the only way to draw Morgellon out of the safety of his palace was to force an election. It was no cruelty – as Prefect, Colstrid had enjoyed over six decades of sumptuous, circumscribed living. He had lived longer than any normal human. And now, there was a pattern to manifest.
But the cook and the child had seen her. For Colstrid’s death to do its work, his killer had to remain anonymous.
And so they would have to make way also.
Colstrid rubbed his daughter’s shoulder. ‘Will you show Hagar what’s in your jar?’
Agatha padded to the bed and dunked the large jar in Hagar’s lap. Magnified by the thick glass lid, water rippled with pea-sized iridescent blobs. Hagar squinted. Her eyes still ached from the snow-glare.
‘Baby dumpling squid,’ said Agatha, with breathless gravity.
Hagar peered closer. The glass was cold beneath her palms. Should she strike now? She could throw a forearm round the child’s throat, order Colstrid to lie facedown. Then she could shove the child aside, grab the poker, sprint across the room – no, wait, she should make sure she had the poker before she released Agatha – and as Colstrid rose she could bludgeon him to death. Then she could kill Agatha, head downstairs to retrieve her clothes – and find a new coat – and kill the cook. Perhaps it would be better to snap the child’s neck first – witnessing her death might leave Colstrid incapacitated with shock. But then, snapping a neck was so much harder than one was led to believe – trapped in this withered, immature body, Hagar had never possessed much arm strength. Despite all her training she might only administer a sprain.
As her sight adjusted, the little creatures slowly sharpened – tiny rainbow squid with silver feline eyes and little arms like the cilia of an anemone, their freckled mantles warping as they swam through the lid’s fisheye curve. Some spat streams of bubbles, jetting round the jar’s circumference. Others drifted listlessly.
Keeping them in focus was making her nauseous. The clamp jar felt like a granite block pinning her thighs to the bed. She could compose elaborate assassination strategies all she liked – for now, anything that required more than a couple of slow, shambling steps was a fantasy.
‘Some scholars think clouds carry their eggs to the mountaintops,’ said Colstrid. ‘Others think it’s the wind. Some say they are the blood of the mountain spirit. Certain isolated Yotzean sects consider them harbingers of the great unmaking – signs that the barrier between earth and hell is disintegrating.’ He laughed quietly. ‘They appear in streams and pools and ride the snowmelt all the way down to the sea.’
‘They like to swim,’ said Agatha.
Hagar looked up at the child. A precocious intelligence shone in those amber eyes. She had been told Hagar’s full name. She was old enough to remember, to supply a description, an account. Colstrid had other children, by other mothers – more than a dozen, in fact, many of whom had grown up, had children of their own, and died.
‘Agatha,’ said Hagar. Her scratchy, derelict voice sounded strange in the snug and solid lodge. ‘She was a saint.’
‘Do you hear that, Agatha?’ Colstrid folded his arms across his belly. ‘It means you share a name with a very important woman from a distant land, long, long ago. Tell us, Hagar – what were the achievements of this saint?’
‘She had her breasts cut off and they tried to burn her alive because she refused to become a whore. She died in prison.’
Agatha watched the baby squid, their bright motion reflected in her pupils. She picked at the blond wool on her cuff. Colstrid’s stomach swelled and receded, his smile slowly collapsing. The fire lapped and crackled.
‘Agatha, it’s time you went to bed now.’
Agatha grasped the wire attached to the jar and lifted it from Hagar’s lap. The water inside sloshed violently, shimmering squid zipping in all directions. She shuffled back towards her father.
‘Go and find Jai and ask her to help you with your toilet,’ he said.
‘Where’s Adoleta?’ said Agatha.
‘She’s gone for a stroll with Mr Garn.’
‘Are they looking for pudding squid?’
Colstrid guided his daughter down the staircase. ‘Something like that. Off you go now. You walk the rest of the way on your own. Find Jai and perhaps if you ask her very nicely she’ll sing you one of the rain ghost songs.’
And there was no more protest.
Hagar massaged her thighs, trying to work feeling back into them. Her head was clearing. She felt shivery and feeble, but an ember of vigour had begun to glow in her limbs. She took her teacup from the tray, drank deeply. It was just as Canoness Umbra Prime had always counselled: Wait. No one can parry time.
‘Have some soup!’ cried Colstrid, returning to the room. ‘You must repair yourself! It’s mountain hare, caught fresh this morning.’
Hagar glanced at the viscous yellow-grey broth. It clung to the sides of the bowl like mucus.
‘Forgive me. I don’t eat meat.’
He shook his head. ‘Ah, Hagar. You always were too kind for this world. Born to be a martyr.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We have bread left over from breakfast. I’ll ask the cook to bring you some rolls.’
‘No, no.’ Hagar held up a hand. ‘I’m fine for now.’ She gestured with her cup and took a second swig. She placed it on the tray and refilled it. ‘Is your cook the only other person in the house?’
Colstrid sighed. ‘Yes. It seems Adoleta has gone courting and my bootboy is down in the village at his great-uncle’s funeral until Stolasday. And now you pop up in my lodge like a little cave mushroom! Come now. How did you get in? Is there no one at the gatehouse?’
She spooned honey into her tea. ‘You haven’t told them I’m here?’
‘You mean they don’t know? They are supposed to be keeping me safe from black profiteers and Hilantian assassins. Any number of bandits want to reach me, to take me hostage, to hurt my child – and they let you, a little girl, walk through the gates unchallenged?’
‘People underestimate me.’
‘Is that all it takes?’ He was marching up and down, swinging his arms. ‘This most simple of ruses? Are they such fools that they see no danger in a child? You.’ He thrust a finger at her, brow shiny with sweat. ‘You remember how it was. Soldiers posing as beggars. Old vesperi with firebombs under their gowns. Acid everywhere.’
‘I remember.’
‘Why would they not stop you? Who has trained them thus? Which master do they really serve?’ Colstrid rubbed his palms. He held them to his lips and kissed the Jejunus crest on his signet ring. ‘People have no idea of the burden we carry, you and I. We have the souls of angels, yet we bleed like men. They call us servants. We are the keepers of the flame.’
She sipped her hot, sweet tea. ‘You sound weary, dear brother.’
‘I am tired of the world’s foolishness.’ Colstrid’s waxy chin slumped over his sweater’s thick collar. ‘P
eople forget so fast.’
‘They die, Tonti.’
‘The Hilanta will come again. This time, I think they will kill us all.’ He dragged a stool to the window’s edge and sat, gazing out into the night. ‘So. Why do you come? Your messages are never good. Some new disaster, no doubt.’
‘Yes. Some new disaster.’
His shoulders sank. ‘Always, always more.’
‘It is the way of the world, Tonti.’
Colstrid let out a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob. But he did not laugh, and he did not sob. He stared at the falling snow, his palms on his knees.
‘I wish it were otherwise.’
Hagar set down her teacup and attempted to stand. She placed her feet flat on the floor, braced her palms against the hard mattress and pushed. Her knees buckled. She fell forwards onto her splayed hands. Her vision streamed with tiny white comets. No matter. She had caught herself by surprise, that was all. She rose again, using the bedside table for support. Her legs wobbled. She ground her teeth and took a step.
Colstrid glanced round. ‘Ah. You see? Tea is good for chills.’
‘I will put another log on the fire, if I may.’
He flapped an arm towards the hearth.
Hagar limped round the foot of the bed, approaching the large open fireplace. With every step, walking grew a little easier. The heat of the flames seemed to soak into her stiff muscles. She clenched and unclenched her fingers like the pudding squid’s pulsing arms, imagining she were swimming through the crisp, fragrant air.
Split logs were stacked side-on with artful care, blushing ginger at their hearts, fading through a rich custard yellow to pale vanilla just beneath the bark. Hagar slid one from the top and trudged to the fireplace, halting just in front of the poker. Two wrought-iron firedogs held the burning logs, either one a Celtic cross with a fat point-cut ruby at its centre, sharp red eyes that flared in the dying light of the flames. Words were carved in stone beneath the mantle: DEN VOT ARDO SUN FOCO.
She bent, tossed the log onto the others, felt the glow on her cheeks. As she straightened up, she closed her fingers around the square shaft of the toasting fork.
‘God loves you, you know.’
Colstrid laughed – a throaty, wolfish growl. ‘You can take the girl out of the convent.’
‘I mean it.’ She tested the central prong with her thumb, winced. ‘Do you think He would choose this for you? Decades of suffering? You feel alone. You see the world, forever melting. Everyone you love grows old and dies.’ She began limping towards him. ‘But we’re not alone. We’re loved, Tonti. And God is calling us home.’
‘Did you feel it – when he hurt his wrist, yesterday?’
For a moment, she thought he meant God. Then she realised he was talking about Morgellon.
‘Of course,’ said Hagar, though she had been so ravaged by cold and fatigue that at first she had mistaken the dull, persistent ache for her own. As she rounded the foot of the bed, she picked up a brocaded cushion by its silk tassels.
‘I wonder if Morgellon notices when he hurts himself. When he hurts us. Does he recall what pain is?’
To speak of the Grand-Duc in such familiar terms, even with a fellow servant, was a huge impropriety. Hagar allowed her shoulders to relax. Colstrid trusted her.
‘There are pains and there are pains,’ she said. ‘You’re young. You weren’t here in the days of the Ordo Interminatis.’ For a time, a small group of peers, including Morgellon, had indulged in debauches where they sought out experiences that would kill a mortal – flinging themselves off minarets, mutilating one another with archaic torture equipment, crushing their bodies to paste beneath millstones. Perhaps it woke them, briefly, from their stupors. Morgellon had called it a holy duty. For Hagar, it had meant only agony. ‘We’re fortunate.’
‘Oh ho!’ Colstrid nodded and threaded his fingers and rested his brow upon his knuckles. ‘So we’re told. So the people believe.’
Hagar did not reply, treading with light, slow steps, feeling the thick cotton of her borrowed socks compress between the ball of her foot and the wooden floor. The cushion brushed her calf. She breathed softly, through clenched teeth.
‘The cliques have grown powerful,’ he said. ‘We waited too long. They have learned to cooperate.’
And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Hagar stood with the flames at her back, the three-pronged fork in her fist.
‘They’ve grown strong in the Grand-Duc’s absence. They run Fat Maw. If I try to suppress them now, it will be civil war. They’ll burn the city to the ground sooner than relinquish control. Thousands of innocents will die.’
Even if Colstrid did move against the cliques, after the purge Morgellon would probably have him stripped of his title, in penance. A public trial, an admission of guilt from Colstrid – I was too blood-thirsty, I was driven by careerism – in return for his descendants’ safety and a seemly state execution. Both sides appeased, ambitions pruned. That was what Colstrid feared. The deaths of citizens only mattered inasmuch as they would provide a convenient pretext for his denunciation.
What he did not know was that no pretext was needed. What he did not know was that the truly powerful acted without justification. The paraministers, the aldermen, the doyens and the priests – they would scramble to defend any act of capricious cruelty on the part of Morgellon and the perpetuum. They would invent moral imperatives and legal precedents that supported whatever outrage he set in motion.
Once, she might have attributed such behaviour to fear. But now she understood.
People would support almost any depravity sooner than admit they were powerless.
As she approached his stool, her shadow compressed, shrinking into her. Poor Tonti. His worries were unfounded. He would never live to break up the cliques, thus Morgellon would never offer him up as a scapegoat.
The nape of his neck was milky white, edged with fair, downy hairs. She doubted he had seen real sunshine for months, holed up in his winter retreat. His sweater’s cable-knit collar hung loosely, away from the flesh. Muscle shifted under fluid, buttery skin. She remembered the subtle routes of arteries from her time at the École De La Sagesse Immortels, how they had looked, blue pipes ensconced in a slit trench of fat, how each vein had opened beneath the whetted nib of a lancet. She remembered the sour tang of preservative. The whistle of escaping air.
Patience begets wisdom. Wisdom begets conviction. Conviction begets victory.
‘Hagar.’ As he lowered his head, the nub of his vertebra prominens pushed up from the surrounding meat. ‘I think someone is trying to kill me.’
The central prong of the toasting fork entered his neck cleanly. She drove it deep into the right of his throat and kicked out the legs of his stool. He fell sideways. The handle of the fork hit the floor and he dropped on it with his full weight. The prongs pierced his windpipe, punching out of the left side of his neck.
Hagar kicked him onto his back and pressed the embroidered cushion over his face. She wanted to stop him crying out. She sat on the cushion and his slippers danced against the hardwood. He was already gone – the flapping of his fat hands was all reflex. Ruby-black blood dilated from his throat, a widening circle that made her feel as if the two of them were falling from the sky towards a dark island. She thought perhaps one of the fork tines had severed his spinal cord. A warm wetness soaked into her socks. She could hear blood draining between the floorboards. It made a noise like rain on a carriage roof. Soon a stain would begin materialising on the ceiling below.
Colstrid had stopped moving. Hagar stood, dismounted. Her sopping socks slapped on the boards.
The body lay with the arms splayed, palms turned upwards, and the ankles crossed. Where his shirt and sweater had ridden up there was a band of sweaty pale flesh.
She set the stool upright, sat down and peeled off her socks. They looked like the flattened pelts of freshly skinned winter martens. She walked to the fireplace. She en
joyed the damp tackiness of her bare soles against the floor. She tossed the socks into the flames. They smoked and frothed. She took the heavy iron poker from beside the hearth, hefted its flat head in her palm.
Her heart was beating with a steady intensity and she could hear the tiniest sounds: the crickle of bark combusting in the fire; a lock of hair rustling in the hollow of her ear; breath hissing from her nostrils. She plucked a droplet of blood from her eyelash.
She looked at the glass doors and the balcony and the swirling snow. She could drag the body outside and slide him through a gap in the wooden balustrade. The drifts were very deep this time of year. Brief confusion over whether the Prefect was dead or simply missing might confuse attempts to hunt for his assassin – it might give her anything between an extra hour and an extra day to get away.
But if the body were lost in the valley below, the – already tortuous – process of succession would be delayed. The protocol for declaring a functionally immortal person dead was understandably complicated. Without a corpse, a locum Prefect would be appointed, until the necessary time had elapsed – she thought it might be anything up to fifty years – before the perpetuum declared Tonti officially deceased and began seeking his replacement. The locum would not be granted the full powers of a Prefect (and thus would continue to age), so no official ceremony would be necessary, and Morgellon would remain hidden in his palace.
Meanwhile, Anwen’s daughter Sarai grew steadily older. Hagar had hunted her down in the Avalonian jungle just as Arthur had foreseen, and had taken great pains to keep her survival a secret. Since then, Hagar had done everything she could to protect the child, but for all Sarai’s power, she was no peer. She was subject to ageing, sickness and death. A delay of decades would mean her certain demise, and with it, the demise of hope itself.
