by Mike Shel
Auric banged a palm against the cell door, giving Agnes and Kennah a start. “Enough! We’ll look for your goddamned marks and decide if we’ll take those they point to. But when I return, by the golden locks of Lalu, I want answers that make sense! I’ll not be a pawn in some game, Ush’oul!”
The old man appeared unfazed by Auric’s outburst. He closed his eyes and touched the fingernails of a hand to his lips, revealing a pale scar on the palm in the shape of a V. It was a strange gesture. “I will do my best, Auric Manteo,” he said at last. “But know that we are all pawns of someone or something. One measure of wisdom is to know, as we are moved around the board, what the game is about.”
14
Volunteers
Agnes’s father turned away from the barred window. Agnes herself had not laid eyes on the Aerican with the deep voice and unsettling words. Did he call me ‘saint to be?’ she wondered, uncertain if those were really the words spoken. Her heart was uneasy, and it made her ashamed of the pleasure she had taken in Kennah’s discomfort at being addressed as a knight. The look on her father’s face was one of nervous anger. She had experienced the same from him during his frightening, months-long drunken mourning of Lenda and the rest who had died horribly at the hands of hungry corpses in the Barrowlands.
Not all of them died, she reminded herself, suppressing a shudder as the image of her godmother’s grinning, disembodied head appeared in her mind’s eye.
No words from her father’s mouth, including a random string of expletives, would have surprised her at this point, but all he said at last was, “All right, let’s be about it, then.”
Kennah’s jaw dropped open. “Be about it? We should follow the directives of a foreigner who assaults the queen?”
Her father looked up at the tall man, nonplussed. “You have a wiser course of action, Sir Kennah? Please, share it with us. We are deputed by Imperatrix Hanifaxa herself with an absurd task. Why should our preparations be any less absurd?” Kennah frowned and nodded, brows furrowed, tugging at his beard. “I think I saw something on a bit of floor we passed a while back,” Auric continued, turning in the direction Oxula and the boy Ghallo had gone. “Let’s see what it was.”
Kennah walked dutifully behind Auric, bearing his lantern. Agnes paused, then looked in the Aerican’s cell, holding up her own lamp. She was startled to find the man’s wrinkled face close to the bars of the window, wearing a serene smile. She had seen dark-skinned Aericans in the markets on occasion, always at a distance. She had never actually spoken with any. She did her best to meet his eyes without fear. He shook his head and a wave of calm washed over her. It seemed to flow from the man, and it sang, soothing her nerves, washing away her uncertainty. This is how an infant must feel, wrapped in swaddling, in her mother’s arms. She heard him speak to her, though his lips didn’t move, and his compassionate smile was fixed.
Much will be asked of you in the coming days, Agnes, more than is fair. But I have confidence in who you are and what you will do. It may be difficult to trust in the rightness of this overwhelming endeavor, but you must keep faith, even when the faith of others wavers.
“Faith in what?”
In yourself. In the good hearts and abilities of your companions. In the belief that everything will be lost if you do not prevail. Everything.
“Agnes, come!” Her father’s call from around the corner of the dungeon corridor broke the spell holding her, an annoying summons, as though she were a dawdling child. She turned away from Ush’oul’s smile and walked down the corridor, feeling the warmth fade as the distance between them grew. She wanted to go back to it, to feel that sheltered embrace again, but duty pulled her down the poorly lit hall.
When she turned the corner, she found her father on one knee, studying something on the stone floor, Kennah hunched over him. The warden and his jailer-boy were joining them from the opposite direction, Ghallo with a lantern, Oxula with his ledger under a beefy arm. When she caught up with her father and Syraeic brother, she saw what had captured their attention: written in glowing white chalk on the floor, a Djao pictogram. Auric spoke when he saw Agnes had joined them.
“You recognize it?”
“It’s the glyph Helmacht called Subtlety.”
“We could feed all the poor in Cheap End if we had a penny for every mysterious coincidence we’ve come upon in the last few days,” said her father, standing with a grimace and brushing the knee of his trousers. “I gather this is the cell where we’re supposed to find our first volunteer?”
Kennah held his lantern up to the barred window in the door adjacent to the Djao pictogram and peered inside. His assessment surprised Agnes. “Oh, fuck me sideways.”
“I’d rather not, Sir Kennah,” answered her father, nudging the bigger man aside and looking in for himself. “But…I begin to understand your vexation.”
Oxula was leafing through his ledger. “Hasn’t been here but a few days, sir. Petty larceny, if memory serves…yeah, here he is…caught w’some jewelry belongin’ to a merchant’s wife. Bloody mummers’re a pestilence. Name of—”
“Chalca!” exclaimed Agnes, bumping her father aside and standing on her toes to look inside the cell window. Sure enough, the dark-haired actor sat against the wall opposite the door, both eyes blackened, his fine clothes torn and muddied. Unshaven for the days he must have languished, stubble poked through the remnants of cosmetics. He squinted back at Agnes and spoke in his polished tenor.
“I recognize the voice, but I’m not sure who you are, or who would visit me in this awful place.”
“It’s Agnes Manteo, you silly thief,” she answered, feeling a grin on her face. “What landed you here?”
Chalca’s dark face brightened and he made to stand, though he was slow and held his ribs as he did so. He approached the door as he spoke. “I can’t prove it, but I think Baucus lifted the bauble himself and planted it on my person, then alerted the city watch. Scylla tried to charm the constables who came to arrest me and got herself badly beaten for her trouble. As did I when I protested their treatment of her. How did you discover I was down here?”
“Ya know this lowlife?” asked Oxula.
“I do,” said Agnes, “and he is no lowlife. Let him out, please.”
“Now, hold on a sweet minute, m’lady,” the warden protested, a fat finger poking at his ledger. “This one is sentenced to amputation at the left wrist on th’morrow!”
“Then I’m happy to foil your plans for mutilation.”
“Warden,” said her father, his tone conciliatory, “our charter puts no limitation on whom we may remove from these dungeons, whether sentence is passed or not. Is that not your reading as well?”
The ugly man glared at her father with his one scowling eye, working his lips for a moment before his surrender. “Aye.”
“Then mark him down as the first of the three.”
“What’s this?” asked Chalca, a look of hope on his disheveled face.
“We’re getting you out of here, Chalca,” said Agnes, filled with joy at the prospect of saving the actor from dismemberment.
“Wait, wait!” grumbled Kennah, putting a rough hand on Agnes’s shoulder. “I’m not so small a man as to want this molly’s hand lopped off, but what good is he to us in our mission? We’re to take him along just because the glyph is here?”
“What glyph?” asked the warden, rubbing at his empty socket with a grimy fist.
“Son,” said Auric to Chalca, whose face was now pressed hopefully against the bars of the cell window, “we know you can pick a pocket. I assume you can pick a lock?”
“I can, Sir Auric,” he replied, eyes bright.
“And move about with speed and stealth, scale a wall? You’re something of an acrobat as well?”
“I can, and I am.”
“Sir Auric,” interrupted Kennah, “he’d tell you he could propel himself from B
oudun to Bannerbraeke by means of flatulence if it got him out of this cage! He’s a thief! How could we ever trust him?”
Agnes’s father ignored Kennah. “What about mechanical devices, lad? Do you possess an understanding of them?”
“I’m pretty handy with such things, Sir Auric. We frequently need to construct devices for our productions: winches to make it appear a player can fly, contraptions to change scenery quickly, rigging a trapdoor. I’ve had to educate myself about the workings of gears and pulleys and—”
“Saint Muraida, grant me patience!” growled Kennah.
“I can also draw a fair likeness, sketch out dimensions. I’m a decent cook and can mend clothing…”
Auric held up a hand to the man. “That’ll do, Chalca. Admit it, Kennah. He’ll make a passable versatilis, something our number lacks. Subtlety.” Her father pointed at the Djao hieroglyph on the floor. His condescending tone didn’t annoy Agnes now as it often did. She touched the hand Kennah still rested on her shoulder.
“Sir Kennah,” she said, “from now on, you should address this molly as Brother Chalca.”
Oxula was not about to open Chalca’s cell right there for them, insisting that the prisoner be appropriately processed according to Jailers’ Guild procedures. They could retrieve him tomorrow morning. After her father secured the warden’s promise that no harm would come to Chalca in the meantime, they resumed their search, retracing their steps to the old man’s cell and continuing deeper into that wing of the dungeon. They scanned the doors, walls, and floor for more of the phosphorescent markings somehow inscribed by the imprisoned old man. After exhausting that hall, they returned to the original room and went down another before locating the next sigil. It was the one Helmacht had called Terrible Purpose, written in the same glowing chalk, this time on a cell door.
Agnes stepped to the window and strained her neck to look in, a strange sense of foreboding in her heart. Sitting at the center of the cell, straw carefully cleared away in a rough circle about the man, was a gaunt figure clad in tattered shirt and trousers of rough homespun, legs crossed and forearms resting on his knees. His head, shaved by an unsteady hand, still had tufts of hair and scabs where the blade had bitten into his scalp. His hands were encased in a cluster of black pieces of strangely-shaped dark metal, held together by a web of thin wires. Agnes could see the tremor in both hands, like those of an aged man.
“Who is this person?” she asked.
Oxula opened his book and rifled through the pages as he spoke. “He’s been here for about five months, m’lady,” the warden answered. “But you won’t be wantin’ him, surely. He’s a traitor an’ a witch. Our truth-speaker’s been at ‘im two dozen times, can’t get nothin’ outta him but a name.”
The man looked up at that moment, his watery gray eyes haunted, crazy, meeting Agnes’s. She jerked back, as though the prisoner had swung a blade at her. He had a wild and weary face with narrow features, but the flesh was bruised and swollen, no doubt from the tender attentions of the priest of Tolwe who had questioned him so many times.
“What’s his name?” asked her father.
“Calls himself Qeelb,” Oxula responded, drawing out the name as though it was a distasteful thing. “Only thing we’ve gotten from ‘im.”
“An Azkayan?” Kennah inquired from behind them. “That sounds Azkayan.”
“He doesn’t have the look of one,” said Agnes, meeting the man’s eyes now with a force of will. It was then that she noticed it: flesh swollen around a dark opal, set in his forehead and shot through with fissures, as though the gem had been shattered and reassembled bit by bit. “Belu protect us,” she whispered. “He’s broken.”
“What?” Her father made to take her place before the window, but Agnes stood her ground.
“His gem is cracked…his Royal Binding has been broken.” Agnes had heard of such things, that the pirates prowling the western Cradle Sea were employing sorcerers whose bindings they had somehow sundered. The jewels were what prevented unchecked exercise of a sorcerer’s gifts. “Was he serving with pirates?”
“Worse,” said Oxula. “He was servin’ aboard an Azkayan warship, captured just sou’ o’ th’ Pillar isles. Thrown hisself in with the easterners, he did. Royal College won’t claim ‘im. No word from Aelbrinth’s Spire. They’re s’posed t’send someone to name ‘im, but the Spire’s not known for actin’ quick on others’ orders.”
“How did you come to serve with the Azkayans, sir?” Agnes said, addressing the man whose eyes were still locked on her. “How was your Royal Binding broken?”
“It’s no use, m’lady,” Oxula interjected. “Mella’s knives an’ hammers ain’t got us mor’n that Azkay name. She was at ‘im not a day ago.”
“Expedition of Discovery,” whispered the man through cracked lips, teeth red with blood.
“What was that?” Auric asked, sidling up to the window. This time Agnes allowed her father to share the little barred portal.
“I was a naval sorcerer aboard the Pride of Chaeres, Willem Shigway, captain. Sailed south at the queen’s command.”
“He ain’t spoke b’fore, now he’s speakin’ nonsense,” said Oxula behind them. “Voyage o’ Discovery sailed outta Boudun Harbor mor’n fifty years ago! Man ain’t past forty hisself!”
“He has a valid point, sir,” said Agnes’s father. “You’d have to be in your eighties at least if you set sail when you say you did. And though you look like you’ve been through all hell, you can’t be more than thirty-five, I’d guess.”
“The Azkayans possess awful magicks, unknown in the west,” answered the man, eyes fixed now on Auric. “Through their necromancy my soul spent many years trapped in an ensorcelled jar made of jade while my body was preserved in an alchemical vat. They finally reunited them four years ago.”
“So why not tell the truth-speaker your tale? Why speak with us now?”
The man drew in and exhaled several silent breaths. Agnes was grateful his eyes were now on her father but couldn’t tear herself away from the window. Finally, the wretch spoke again. “Your god of truth cares no more for the truth than a lion does for its prey’s protestations.”
“My god of truth,” said Auric, and she heard what felt to her like a sort of false indignation in his tone. “You don’t revere the gods of our empire any longer?”
“None. May they all rot in the deepest of the Yellow Hells.”
Kennah gasped behind them. “Traitor and blasphemer!” he exclaimed.
The man ignored Kennah’s outrage and continued. “Whatever I might say to a truth-speaker, the end will be the same: they’ll hand me over to the Royal College, maybe those sly bastards at the Spire, and their butchers will crack open my skull to figure out how it was done.”
“Breaking your binding,” said Agnes.
“Yes.”
“They would treat one of their own so?”
“They would a traitor, certainly,” answered her father.
The man wrinkled his brow, though with the bruising on his face it caused him obvious pain. “If your sword was knocked from your grasp in battle,” he said, “and the enemy picked it up and skewered you with it, would you accuse the blade of treachery?”
“Then you are no more than an instrument?” Auric asked.
The man’s face darkened. “I am a tool,” he said. “I am a tool with a terrible purpose, sir.”
Agnes and her father looked at one another, then back to the ground where the Djao pictogram was inscribed.
“And what is that purpose?” asked Agnes, turning back to the cell window.
“To tear down the foundations of the world.”
“Saints preserve us,” whispered Kennah. “I trust that answer will cure you of considering this man as a companion.”
“You call yourself Qeelb now,” said Agnes, ignoring Kennah and the icy shiver the man’s
words summoned. “What is your real name?”
“Qeelb is the name the Azkayans gave me, after they broke me and forced me aboard one of their ships. The name Qeelb is as real to me now as any other might ever have been.”
“Sir Auric,” said Kennah, working hard to control his voice. “Please tell me you’re not entertaining the idea of this man in our party.”
“Kennah,” said her father, still looking at Qeelb in his cell, “we may have no choice.”
“No choice? Balls of the war god, why not? We aren’t under some compulsion to choose whoever the Aerican wants us to choose, are we? The man in that cell is a broken sorcerer and a cursed atheist, sworn to destroy the world! He isn’t bound by the oaths or spells that prevent a wielder of sorcery from doing whatever the fuck he wants with that power! That loony fucker could shatter our bones, or summon up a gaggle of demons to—”
“Oxula, sir,” interrupted Auric. “We need another moment of privacy, please.”
“He ain’t wrong, ya know,” said the warden, taking Ghallo by the shoulder again and walking away. “Only thing that prevents ‘im doin’ so is those witch-braces on his hands.”
Her father waited until warden and jailer boy were out of earshot. When he did speak it was in a quiet voice, one that the prisoner in the cell couldn’t hear. “Kennah, I know this all seems insane—”
“Goddamned right it does!”
“But consider our task. In a sense, we will be acting against the Crown. Any sorcerer bound by the Royal College or the Spire cannot willingly act against our sovereign. This man has no such shackles on him.”
“And he has no shackles keeping him from melting our eyes out of their sockets!”
“Kennah,” said Agnes gently, “it makes some sense.”
“‘Sense’ ain’t the word I’da use!” Agnes could hear the Aulkirk back-alley orphan accent Kennah had tried to lose breaking through.
“It’s all happening as though someone planned it,” she said in a soothing tone. “We meet Chalca on the road here, then find him in a cell marked with one of three Djao hieroglyphs we can identify, and he’ll make a good versatilis for us, yes?” Kennah glared at her but didn’t disagree. “And now this unshackled sorcerer, in a cell marked with the Terrible Purpose glyph, who uses those very words to describe himself. You must see this is somehow…ordained.”
