Mercy's Trial

by Sever Bronny

  “I’ll snuff the lanterns,” Klines snapped.

  They bolted into action, hurrying to hide behind one of the towering rows of bookshelves, with Augum ending up between Leera and Maxine. One by one, Klines pointed at the lanterns and they snuffed. The room got darker and darker until the only light came from the crack under the door, which Augum kept a close eye on from between a gap in the books. He soon saw shadows and heard muted voices.

  “They’re going to search each room one by one,” Leland reported.

  “Then we’ll be in for a fight,” Maxine said.

  “Can’t we just ’port out of here?” Leera whispered.

  Klines gave a terse shake of her head. “From the hall, yes, but not from within these rooms.”

  Augum’s thoughts buzzed. “Let me try something.” He withdrew the Orb of Hearing from his pocket, wishing Laudine had made it through the tunnel as he could certainly use her dramatic flair for what he wanted to try.

  “How could that possibly help right now?” Maxine spat.

  “Anyone take Drama class by chance?” Augum asked in the darkness, ignoring her.

  “I did,” Haylee whispered from beside Leera. “What’s on your mind, Aug?”

  “You and I are going to have a conversation as if we’re somewhere else.”

  “What? Why?”

  “We’re going to have it near the Orb of Hearing.”

  His plan seemed to dawn on her because she said, “Ooh, yeah, that could work.”

  “But are they listening?” Bridget whispered.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Augum replied, hoping that the emperor’s son had found the other pairing to the Orb of Hearing by then. But as he reached for the silentium silk, he realized he didn’t have the wit to pull off the deceit. If there ever was a time to delegate, this was it. “Lee, you’re spontaneous. Think you can pull this off with Haylee?”

  “I can try.”

  He thrust the wrapped Orb of Hearing into her palm.

  “We need to strategize a moment,” Haylee said. “Come up with a scenario.”

  “Well, you better hurry,” Arthur said, having drifted near Leera. “I don’t think we have much time.”

  “We’re running somewhere,” Leera said. “And, and, and we’re discussing the destination.”

  “Okay, so we’re out of breath.” Haylee snapped her fingers as if to jog her creativity. “We’re out in the wild, it’s windy—”

  Arthur, catching on, started mimicking a whooshing sound.

  “Good, good,” Haylee said. “Just need a destination—”

  The voices grew louder outside the door.

  “Start already,” Maxine hissed.

  “Unwrapping,” Leera whispered. Everyone tensed when the silentium came off. Horribly, the girls froze, gaping at it. Then, “No, we have to get there by morning,” Haylee blurted, panting as if she were exerting herself.

  “How far have we walked already?” Leera asked, voice tinged with uncertainty. Then she added a couple awkward huffing breaths.

  “We’d have to ask how far she ’ported us.”

  Cry began crinkling parchment beneath his robe in a good imitation of snow crunching underfoot.

  “Stop lagging back there, monkeys,” Haylee said into her sleeve, a clever move that made her sound distant and older, like Jez.

  “Ugh, how much further until Semadon?” Leera whined. “I’m freezing. Brrr.” She made an exaggerated shiver.

  They’re starting to get the hang of it, Augum thought. He only hoped someone who could communicate with Katrina was listening on the other end.

  “I teleported us to Summit Pass,” Haylee said into her sleeve. “You should know from studying the map how far we have to go.”

  Leera groaned. “Gods, that means we have at least a few days of travel to go, doesn’t it?”

  “Suck it up, monkey. We prepared for this.”

  They let Arthur’s wind whooshing and Cry’s parchment snow-crunching continue, but Augum realized it felt too staged, too planned.

  “You think Antioc will be okay?” he asked conversationally, elbowing Leera. But in the darkness, Haylee hadn’t seen the prompt and so answered at the same time as Leera.

  “Hopefully—”

  “I have no idea—”

  Augum tried to cover for the awkwardness by saying, “Me too.” The voices got louder once more as the Canterrans neared. Doors slammed out in the hall. Leera and Haylee kept huffing as if trekking, and the parchment snow-crunching continued. Augum, wanting to die at the poorly constructed ruse’s obvious awkwardness, suddenly realized something awful—he didn’t know how to end this.

  Mary abruptly chimed into the conversation. “Gods, Augum, the orb got loose of the silentium!”

  “Uh, what?”

  “The orb is loose! They can hear everything!”

  “Unnameables help us,” he blurted. Leera took her cue and hurriedly rewrapped the orb.

  Just then, the door burst open, revealing multiple robed silhouettes and countless more milling in the hall behind.

  Shoot, we’re too late, Augum thought, readying his hands for battle.

  “Get some light in here, you red-haired barbarian,” snapped a harsh voice Augum recognized as belonging to Prince Gavinius.

  “Y-yes, sir,” the auburn-haired attendant replied, lighting the first lantern by the door by placing a palm underneath it.

  “Hurry up if you don’t want the rack.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rebelliously, the attendant barely picked up his pace. He lit a second lantern and the friends instinctively hunkered, making themselves as small as possible behind the towering bookshelves. But it would only take one man to wander around it and they would be caught, then they’d have to fight their way out of the library, somehow picking up Esha along the way, a daunting prospect.

  When the attendant lit a third lantern, Gavinius strode into the room with his retinue of warlocks. Horrified, Augum saw that someone in his group had left a fur mitt in plain sight on the floor.

  The heir to the Canterran empire looked right at it just as a frantic voice called out from the corridor.

  “What’s that fool hollering about?” the prince barked, staring at the mitt.

  “They’re on the Summit Pass! They’re on the Summit Pass—!” a breathless voice shouted, and the noise in the hall grew as people began to run out.

  Prince Gavinius grunted and nodded at the mitt. “You supposedly sophisticated lot are not as tidy as you pretend to be.” He turned his back and left the room along with the warlocks.

  The group released a massive sigh.

  Augum saw Leland and his ghoul lowering their right hands, which had been raised. “What did you make him think the mitt was?” he asked Leland.

  Leland’s burnt cheek twisted up in a grin. “The soggy end of a broken mop.”

  Ancient

  “We could calculate how much time we have,” Klines said, referencing a map of the kingdom.

  They were in her office, a cozy room filled with tidy bookshelves and a mahogany desk inset with leather. Lanterns shaped like gargoyles sputtered in the four corners and the air faintly smelled of frankincense.

  Klines stabbed Antioc with her index finger. “I don’t know how fast Katrina flies—”

  “Fast,” Augum interrupted. “She got all the way up to Northspear not too long after we ambushed the enemy.”

  Klines studied him with a serious expression before returning her attention to the map, where she dragged her finger upward to the spot labeled Summit Pass. The distance seemed tiny. She dragged the finger back to Antioc, giving it a double tap. “We might only have a few hours.”

  “Shoot, I should have hinted we were closer to Semadon,” Haylee muttered. “Would have bought us more time.”

  Leera rubbed her face with both hands. “Why do I have a feeling this already long day is about to get longer …”

  “Soldiers do what must be done,” Maxine said.

  Leera d
idn’t bother replying.

  Bridget pressed the side of her fist to her mouth in thought. “Except when they find no evidence of us up there in the snow—” She dropped that fist to look around at their faces.

  “—they’ll figure out it was a ruse,” Leera finished for her.

  “And probably come storming right back in here,” Brandon said. He ran both hands, one at a time, through his shaggy hair, glancing at Bridget before looking away. “We’ll have to be out of here by then.”

  “We can no longer wait around for Esha to wake,” Augum said, looking gravely upon Klines.

  “The Dreadnought is in a healing slumber,” Klines replied. “It would be dangerous—”

  “I’m sorry, Secretary Klines,” Augum interrupted, pressing his hands on the desk and leaning forward to make his final point, “but it’s either that or we drag her along to wherever we go next, which will be just as dangerous for her. We know Semadon is a trap, so it’s out of the question. We need Esha’s help and we need it now.”

  Klines looked from face to anxious face and finally surrendered a sigh. “Then let us petition Senior Arcaneologist Ning.”

  Leera flashed Augum a tired look. “Shoot, I was really hoping to catch a good night’s sleep before we launched into the next stage.”

  * * *

  After they pleaded their case to Senior Arcaneologist Ning, who was less than impressed with their argument to wake Esha—though she was notoriously grumpy when it came to asking for anything—the famous arcaneologist floated in her chair over to a cabinet on the floor of her towering solar. Far above, the great glass dome was dark, the stars obscured by racing clouds, though parts of the iron structure glinted from the light of a full moon.

  Augum’s procession quietly followed her, gawking about at the towering shelves. There had to be tens of thousands of books in the glass-fronted cabinets, spanning the entire history of Sithesia.

  The two cabinet doors in front of Ning began to open, acting as a unified secret door that revealed an ancient stone room. The floor was flagstone, the high ceiling arched and supported by large cedar trusses. Rows of stone tables held beakers and jars and parchments and books and all sorts of mysterious alchemy equipment. The lower walls were covered with weathered oaken cabinetry stuffed to the brim with scrolls, the upper walls decorated with rotting tapestries. The place smelled of vinegar and mint and medicine. And throughout, lanterns floated freely, the light wavering through gargoyle-motif prisons.

  “Ancient arcanery,” Bridget whispered upon seeing the floating lanterns.

  “I didn’t know such a thing was possible,” Mary added.

  “Quiet,” Ning snapped, the word spoken into their minds telepathically.

  They solemnly walked through the room until they reached a pair of arched black oak doors with ancient bronze lion heads gripping ring handles in their mouths. Ning rotated her chair in midair to face the group.

  “The being you shall meet within has witnessed the span of history. She is the last living Dreadnought. Therefore, you shall show only humility and respect. Pester her not with inane questions, lest I turn you into a rodent.”

  The group exchanged glances. Had her tone, spoken so acidly into their minds, not been so serious, they probably would have found the remark humorous.

  Ning’s chair turned back toward the doors, which opened, hinges creaking. The group solemnly filed inside, stopping just past the entrance, and quietly placed their things at their feet while curiously examining their surroundings.

  The floor was made of particularly old and cracked flagstones, the walls gray castle blocks. In each corner was an iron floor candelabra with a dozen lowly sputtering candles. In the center stood a black oak bedstead with four spiraling posts carved with ivy, surrounded by a silken canopy. A sleeping figure, lying on plush bedding richly decorated in royal blue embroidery, could be seen through the wispy curtains. The bed was lit from above by a floating dragon chandelier not unlike the one in Augum’s stolen castle.

  Large tapestries hung on each of the main three walls. One depicted a necromancer whom Augum recognized as Attyla the Mighty, a man known for soaring speeches and siege warfare, a man who had been defeated by the love and sacrifice of his wife. She had made him lament his deeds so deeply that he renounced necromancy and spent the rest of his shattered life trying to make up for them—or so the legends said. He did, after all, live around twenty-five hundred years prior to The Founding—almost six thousand years ago, somewhere in the bronze age of armor and weaponry, as evidenced by the rather heavy adornments he wore.

  The second tapestry depicted Atrius Arinthian, Augum’s ancestor, smiling serenely and standing beside his wife, the pair wearing the milk-white ornate Arinthian Dreadnought armor that had been permanently locked in the castle vault after the destruction of the ancestral scion.

  The last tapestry depicted a woman Augum did not recognize. She wore a filthy apron, her skin was the deepest ebony, her round face was full of compassion, and her brown eyes were as sorrowful as her thick black hair was disheveled. Stacks of scrolls, an inkwell, and a peacock quill much like the one Bridget possessed towered around her and a long and ornate document with an elaborate crimson seal hovered above.

  Augum spotted someone else in the room with them. Sitting beside the entrance and behind a worn mahogany writing table was none other than Rafael Herzog the Historian—Ning’s husband. He was telekinetically controlling a golden quill, his hands folded in his lap. He seemed to be chronicling their entrance, for he was studying each person in turn and muttering what he observed under his breath, all while the quill scribbled into a fat leather-bound tome. He was a very old man whose head constantly bobbed as if he was agreeing with unspoken thoughts, eyes blinking rapidly with concentration. His ears were tall and gargoyle-like and his nose was veiny and bulbous. He had a long and silver scholar’s beard and his hair was an unruly nest that clung to his liver-spotted scalp like a tired climber grappling on the edge of a cliff. A gnarled walking cane rested against the wall behind him.

  The trio had met him in the war, when he had given them hints on how the Library of Antioc worked. Augum was rather amazed to see him here, for he and his wife did not exactly get along. From his recollection, she had renounced his last name, having tired of him long ago, though he was still a wizened elder historian and chronicler, a man who had even chronicled the Lord of the Legion’s story in person.

  Herzog winked when he looked at Augum to describe him, though the golden quill never ceased its effortless scratching, nor Herzog his muttering. For Augum’s part, he had rarely seen people telekinetically wield a quill as it was an incredibly difficult skill to master.

  “Ignore the old coot,” Ning said, floating over to the large portrait of the ebony woman instead.

  “Ignore yourself, you old badger,” Herzog countered.

  Ning’s chair didn’t even turn in his direction. “Don’t you start with me again, you degenerate donkey drunk. Do your job—you volunteered for it, after all.”

  “Aye, and I don’t know why I did, that I don’t,” Herzog muttered, head bobbing.

  “Because you are a miscreant who likes to stick that fat ugly nose wherever it could fit. Now silence your fool mouth and let me concentrate.”

  Herzog’s head bobbed the other way as he mockingly mouthed, “ ‘Silence your fool mouth and let me concentrate.’ ”

  No one dared to so much as snicker, and Augum did his best not to even allow his thoughts to chuckle. Mercifully, Ning ignored the matter and moved on, hovering higher before the portrait of the ebony woman.

  “Your collective query is a common one,” she went on, “as few know of this woman’s true contributions—arguably the most important contributions in history—to the arcane craft. She was known as Sabella the Midwife, for she began as a midwife. They did not even give her the dignity of her proper title. Later, even as she codified the underlying five precepts of arcane competence, even as Sabella structured and grouped
relevant spells together into the degrees as we know them, and even as she wrote most of the underlying principles of what became known as The Founding—the bedrock of all arcanery and the beginning of the calendar as we know it—she still helped birth the children of the wives and mistresses of the so-called scholarly men around her.”

  She briefly turned the chair to glance over at them. As her husband described what he heard and saw, she continued. “They considered her beneath them, even though had she wanted to she could have bested them in the arena of intellect and might. She was a Master Arcaneologist, a brilliant and humble woman who has never seen an equal. A kind, bold woman who stood firm against the tide of history, changing it through sheer will and compassion.” Ning’s voice wilted. “Yet history has passed her by, ignoring her vital accomplishments.”

  The group exchanged curious looks. Bridget was the only one who did not partake in those looks, for she gazed at the portrait in total awe and even affection, her mouth slightly open, usually straight brows sloped like two sides of a pitched roof.

  Herzog must have caught this, for his quill scratched away as he narrated, “Dragoon Burns seemed particularly enthralled by the portrait of Sabella the Midwife …”

  Bridget straightened, cheeks reddening.

  “No, Dragoon Burns, she was not an Arcaner,” Ning said. “But she would have made a fine one, for she used arcaneology for the benefit of all.”

  By the way Bridget continued to gaze at Sabella, Augum suspected she had found a kindred spirit … and perhaps an answer to some of her own questions about herself. She was breathing quickly, eyes large and unblinking and wet, prompting Leera to gently elbow Augum and flash him a knowing smile. They knew Bridget well enough to guess the same thing—she had found someone to admire more than Rebecca Von Edgeworth, who had been a legendary Arcaner and the only female possessor of a scion out of the original seven receivers.

  “Because her skin was ebony!” Ning abruptly roared into their minds, startling everyone. She turned her chair to face them, her shriveled black apple of a face slightly contorting with rage. “And because she dared to be born a woman!”