“Every t-t-time,” Father Davide said.
She nodded, looking out the open side of pavilion at the quiet bustle of a camp at night.
“People did bad things to me once,” Sauce said after a long pull at her wine. “Cully helped me fuck them up.” She nodded.
“And that made it better?” Father Davide asked without a stutter. “Or is that just a s-s-story you t-t-tell yourself?”
“Isn’t religion a story we tell ourselves?” Sauce asked. “C’mon, Padre. It’s all a story. Yes, it made me feel better, and no, none of those bastards will ever have a chance to fuck with another girl, nor boy. Eh?”
Father Davide drank his wine.
Sauce looked at him. “How’re we going to win this without leaving a trail of blood?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” Father Davide said, with a trace of bitterness Sauce had not heard before. “Sometimes I f-f-feel like the f-fucking court jester.” He took a deep breath, finished his wine, and rose to his feet. “But actions have c-c-c-consequences, my lady, and the k-killing of innocents …”
“The Patriarch?” she asked.
“Granted,” he said. “The m-men standing by the P-P …” He paused and looked away. “Patriarch? The foot soldiers from Firensi?”
She nodded.
“Honestly, my lady, I wasn’t here to d-d-debate the m-morality of our m-methods,” the priest said. “The d-d-duchess is n-not herself, but K-K-Kronmir said something as he d-died. He s-s-said,” and Father Davide paused again.
Sauce had time to wonder to whom priests turned when they were out of faith. Father Davide looked bad.
“He said,” Father Davide’s eyes locked with hers, “That the w-will is not the Necromancer.”
Sauce thought of her interview with the worm that had been in Kronmir. “Ahh,” she said. “I interrogated Kronmir’s worm.”
“You know I’m going to tell you that even the Odine are part of God’s creation,” Father Davide said in one go.
“Of course. From the same time he made mosquitoes and cockroaches, no doubt.” Sauce gave the priest a look, as if to say that her faith gave him a certain license, but he was nearing its limits.
He bowed. “I m-merely relate what K-K-Kronmir s-said. He d-died … with incredible c-courage.”
Sauce had trouble reading the priest in the candlelight. “And he would know, I guess,” she said. “Blessed Saint Michael.”
She called to her new page. “Alissa! I need to change the message.”
She then dictated it all: Kronmir’s death, his last words, and the curiously naive ragings of her captive Odine.
Who had complained bitterly of the perfidy of something it called the Fire.
Chapter Four
Arles—The Red Knight, over central Galle
Gabriel’s layered shields were up now, and mostly held the incredible flash of ops, but despite losses, he loosed back, throwing preset counters down his opponent’s line of thought in the aethereal while Prudentia spun and spun his memory palace, catching, amplifying, shielding …
Another godlike fist of power struck his shields, and his shields held again.
He had time to think about what Mortirmir had said about the accession of powers. He had already turned to flee; his reactions in the aethereal were defensive …
But he was untouched.
He leaned, and Ariosto turned.
There, below him, was a forest, and in the forest there were Titans. Hundreds of them, their size a little distorting until he saw one by a tree.
Umroth.
A whole herd.
Connections were made; more, when he saw the herd draw power in a great indrawn aethereal effect like a breath taken; every one of the four hundred or more not-dead beasts …
A distributed intelligence.
Odine. Rebel Odine, if Kronmir was correct.
He knew the working that Mortirmir had used to free the not-dead at Arles, but he didn’t have it cast, ready at hand, hanging on Prudentia’s arm or around her neck. It was something that would take time and patience to work, and right then he had neither.
And he was taking an utterly unnecessary risk.
Inside his helmet, his lips twitched involuntarily, and Ariosto screamed, pivoted, and struck like the great predator he was. His wings overshadowed one of the Umroth, and the thing, thirty hands high, forty feet long, with four legs like pillars and huge tusks that curved like Mamluks’ scimitars.
The huge thing reared on its hind legs, reaching for the heavens.
Gabriel’s ghiavarina shot lightning, which careened off the thing’s black hermetical shield—the only passive shield he’d ever seen. He coveted it; a shield that was always on …
Ariosto screamed. His talons slammed into the shield.
Leaning out, Gabriel’s weapon sliced through the black shield, and the combined assault of talon and weapon defeated it; it vanished, Ariosto’s talons raked the thing’s head, and Gabriel pulsed three bolts into the stinking carcass of the ancient, not-dead hulk, the third a different hue from the first two, and they were past, rising away as two more of the monsters charged them from the deep, dark spruce forest.
A ripple passed over the herd, almost as if their colour was changing.
The one Gabriel had hit exploded.
“Home,” the Red Knight said.
Behind him, a shapeless black arm reached out of the herd. It grew until it was hundreds of feet high, and then it reached into the east, as if blindly groping for Ariosto.
Gabriel blew it a kiss, and raced farther east into the rain clouds.
Mitla—The Duke of Mitla
Three hundred leagues to the east, the Duke of Mitla drank two cups of wine, spilling some in his haste to get it down. He had to put aside his burning impatience at the tardiness of his allies; he was angry, and his anger frightened his guards and servants. Then he shed his armour. No squire helped him, and as the armour fell to the floor and met the spilled wine, it hissed with heat.
Dressed in Ifriquy’an aesbaestos, he went out into the public square under heavy guard to give alms to the poor on his way to mass. His chamberlain handed him a heavy purse of chain maille, and he went along a line of poor men, putting a solid gold coin in each hand. The coins were hot.
“Pray for me,” he said as he came to each man.
They fawned on him, but they had learned better than to touch him. They took their coins from a slight distance. Which he enjoyed. He hated it when the poor were not appropriately thankful for his largesse, and he basked in their proper admiration.
“Pray for me,” he said, putting a gold coin in a woman’s hand.
“Your bravos killed my man,” she said. If the touch of his fingers burned her, she gave no sign.
He paused. And glared. “Take the coin from her,” he said to his chamberlain.
The woman must have known she would forfeit the coin by making any protest, but she struggled and a pair of soldiers beat her with their scabbarded swords. The gathered crowd watched, silent, as the thugs beat the woman, who was old enough to be anyone’s mother. It wasn’t a severe beating; no bones were broken. It was merely humiliating.
Infuriatingly, the woman smiled throughout her beating.
“You’ll see,” she said through her split lips.
“See what, Mother?” asked one of the soldiers. “You don’t have anything I want to see.” He smacked her again for emphasis and then tugged at his hose to smooth them while his partner rotated his head, reseating his chain maille collar.
The duke moved on, putting coins into hands of fawning men, now well ahead of his escort.
“You missed one,” whispered his chamberlain.
The Duke of Mitla was at the part he always dreaded—the lepers. He tried not to touch them at all, and indeed, he feared them.
But in his hurry to get it done, he’d skipped a man, a sort of huddle of rags with a round, nondescript face.
He held out the coin and the man seized his hand, a s
hocking invasion of his space. And used it to pull himself to his feet.
“Pray for me,” spat the duke in revulsion. The man was a leper. And he had touched the duke. The duke turned away and hurried through the others, avoiding contact as much as he could.
His right hand began to hurt. The duke had a good understanding of the darkness of his own head; he knew that he was manufacturing pain because he feared the leper. He resisted his own urge to look at his hand; he told himself the throbbing was in his mind. But the last of the lepers actually flinched when handed the coin; the horrible man had no lips and no nose, and yet he had the effrontery to pull away from the duke’s coin.
One of the soldiers at the duke’s side gave a low hiss.
The duke’s hand was black, and the black was spreading rapidly up the veins of his arm and under his shirt cuff. The leper shrunk away.
The duke gave a choked scream.
His chamberlain grabbed his shoulders. “Your Grace! We must cut it!”
The duke spun away. “Out of my way!” he bellowed. The pain was incredible. He couldn’t think. Fire played around his lips; his soldiers flinched.
One of the soldiers cut down the nearest leper, and people in the square began to scream.
The whole skin of the Duke of Mitla seemed to split apart and the duke’s head opened as if cut with a battle-axe.
The man who had been the nondescript bundle of rags grabbed the beaten woman by the hand and hauled her along as if she were a child. The soldiers were killing indiscriminately, but everyone was trying to escape the creature that seemed to be clawing its way out of the duke’s body. Whatever it was, it was turning black. It moved with incredible speed, but it bludgeoned into the wall of the cathedral garden as if blinded, and cannoned into a trio of screaming women.
They were ten paces away, and the nondescript man went into an open house door on the square and out the kitchens into a small garden, where the gate was open. He dragged the woman behind him. His right hand had a burn mark across the palm, and so did hers.
They went through the gate into an alley.
Up the alley to the back of the cathedral.
The bundle of rags shed his rags and his face makeup and became a notary in fine, but difficult to describe, brown and grey wool.
“Sorry they beat you,” he said in unaccented Etruscan.
“Worth it,” the woman spat through her split lip. “Why is he so hot?”
“No idea,” said the man. “I still don’t know what just happened.”
They walked through the back of the crowd in the cathedral; the same crowd whose front had just watched the duke contract some dread disease. They crossed the nave and left by the side chapel door, which was open, and crossed the street into the poorer neighborhoods behind the church school. They walked fast, but that was normal for well-dressed people in this area, and as soon as they entered the stews, they were clear of the press of people flocking to see what had happened. The duke was a very unpopular man, and the series of open doors and gates they’d just passed mapped his unpopularity across the city.
The middle-aged couple walked out the back of the stews and along a line of traveler’s taverns by the city’s Berona gate. There were soldiers there, but there were soldiers everywhere, and the couple went into the second-to-last inn, and emerged with the lady’s face clean, at least; she looked as if she’d been beaten, but that was not so uncommon. Both of them riding good horses. Excellent horses, in fact—Ifriquy’ans.
They rode to the gate with a baggage donkey behind them. By then, there was a rumour that the duke was dead and a demon had emerged from his body and now it was dead, too, and the soldiers were on edge, debating closing the gate.
The couple were patient and meek, a merchant and his wife going to Firensi on business.
“There’s a war in the way, you fool,” growled one of the soldiers.
The merchant bowed. “I have a pass from the duke,” he said. “And one from the Count of Berona.”
The gate captain assessed the cost of two such passes and the magnificent riding horses and became more respectful.
“We should close the gate,” demanded his sergeant.
The gate captain nodded. “No one’s ordered it,” he said, pocketing the golden coin he’d just found stuck to the merchant’s pass with a bit of beeswax. “Let ’em through!”
The merchant and his wife rode slowly out of the city, their horses ambling, and could be seen for half an hour as they made a quarter circuit of the city walls at a glacial pace before turning into the countryside.
A mile south of the city, they turned sharply off the road, onto a farm track that led into a farm yard where two infidels were holding horses.
M’bub Ali emerged from the barn. “Well?” he asked.
Brown shrugged. “A fucking disgrace.”
“Did you get him?” Ali asked.
Brown shook his head. “No idea. The poison didn’t kill him outright; never seen anything like it.”
The woman, Donna Beatrice, raised her face. “I saw,” she said. “There was a daemon from hell inside the duke. He ripped the duke open and came out into the light of the sun, which shriveled him black.”
Brown turned and looked at her. “A word of advice, goodwife. Go far away—Venike, or Rhum. Never mention this again, even to yourself. One of these lads will see you have a change of clothes and a bag of gold.”
“Killed my husband,” the woman said. “Killed my son. I’d have done it for free.” Her head was high, her eyes shining. “I don’t care if they catch me.” But then she seemed to shrink. “I don’t even know what to do now.”
M’bub Ali gave her a slow smile. “No husband, no brother, no sister, no child?” he asked.
She shook her head.
M’bub Ali raised an eyebrow. “You might as well come with us,” he said.
Brown, who mostly disliked people, sighed. “We’re not recruiting,” he said.
Arles—The Red Knight
“Sauce beat the Patriarch. Kronmir’s dead,” said Bad Tom.
Gabriel got his helmet off. “You bedside manner’s still a little rough.”
“Aye, I liked him.” Tom shrugged. “Loons get kilt. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Aye?”
“Och, aye,” Gabriel said. He was reading the thin parchment in Tom’s fist that had been brought by the messenger, and anger and depression settled on him. He told himself it was a reaction to the fight.
“Jesus,” Gabriel said. “Oh God.”
Tom Lachlan smiled a hard smile. “Ye ken it was a man who did that to him, aye? Nae monster. Nae dragon. Nae worm. Only fuckin’ men.”
Gabriel blinked. He was in the place he went, where all he could see was all the people he’d killed. “Yes, Tom. I take your meaning.”
“Sauce talked to the worm. It never got into Kronmir’s head.”
Gabriel let go a breath.
“That close,” Lachlan said, and suddenly his arms were around Gabriel. “Fuck it, Gabriel. We almost lost it all, and Kronmir, that slippery bastard, held ’em. In his wee head. ’Til he died.” Bad Tom was looking out at the falling darkness. “Mayhap the bravest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Aye, Tom.”
Tom Lachlan shook his head. “Didn’t even like the loon,” he admitted.
Gabriel took a deep breath. “I did,” he said. “Get me Mortirmir, please.”
Mortirmir found Gabriel watching Ariosto eat.
“You found him,” Mortirmir said with satisfaction. “I have him to the inch.”
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “He’s distributed in a whole herd of Umroth.” He described the passive shield.
Mortirmir raised both eyebrows.
“I’ll save the time of saying that’s impossible,” he said. “It’s fascinating.”
Gabriel had out a map. One of Kronmir’s maps.
“He’s dead,” Mortirmir said.
“I know,” Gabriel nodded.
Mortirmir sh
ook his head. “Tancreda was instrumental in winning the battle,” he said. “I wonder what I’d do if they did to Tancreda what they did to Ser Jules.” He frowned.
Gabriel winced. “I also agree with you that we have increased in power. I assume that distributed intelligence is the Necromancer. He couldn’t get through my shields.”
Mortirmir nodded. “I can find the Patriarch,” he said. “Any idea what the Patriarch actually is?”
“We need to finish the Necromancer,” Gabriel said. “And we have some evidence that the Patriarch isn’t the tool of the Necromancer, but serves another will. Or is a new player.”
“I want to find the Patriarch,” Mortirmir said. He glanced at Gabriel. “Ahh. Yes. A third player. Master Smythe never even hinted at such a thing. Kronmir did.”
Gabriel took a deep breath. “I know. Necromancer first.” He looked at Mortirmir. “Kronmir was afraid we’re being played.”
Mortirmir shrugged. “Very well. When?”
“Day after tomorrow,” Gabriel said. “Then we’ll find the Patriarch.”
Mortirmir nodded. “Shorn of his army, I suppose he’s nobody.”
Gabriel smiled. “And if Giselle finds him first, he’ll be very thoroughly nobody,” he said. “But I worry that we have a third player and we know so little.”
Mortirmir pulled at his mustache. “We could have ten more players,” he said. “If they are dragons, they can take men’s shapes. If they are Odine, they can control men. How would we know?” He looked at Gabriel and frowned. “We could even have players who are men. And women. Anything we have learned may be known by others. Dame Julia’s prognostications are not exactly a secret.”
“Christ,” Gabriel muttered.
Mortirmir waved a hand in adolescent dismissiveness. “Never mind. Let’s just kill the ones we can find. Life is complicated enough already.” He raised an eyebrow. “Speaking of which, I’ve unpacked most of Magister Rashidi’s workings.”
“And?” Gabriel knew that he had not unpacked his set of tiles. And he needed to.
“I know how to make a Fell Sword.” Morgon smiled.
“Harmodius …”
“He knows how and chooses not to share.” Mortirmir shrugged.