The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

  She gasped. “You’re serious.”

  “I am. I’m rapidly running out of non-murdered friends.”

  “Who was he? Someone of import? I mean, I don’t mean he wasn’t important…”

  “I know what you mean. It’s difficult to get your head out of the royal-or-peasant binary, isn’t it? In my part of the world, he was closer to royal. Although, he’d have been more at home dressed as we are now.”

  “A Septal?”

  “Yes, but an important one. Oh hey, is that the island?”

  She squinted.

  “It is,” she said. “Unless there are other islands out here. And no, there aren’t. That was sarcasm.”

  “I know. After three weeks I’ve learned to recognize your sarcasm. It looks like there’s an airship at the top.”

  “So there is,” she said. “That’s unusual.”

  “Is it? I thought there was a dock there.”

  “There is. All the Septals on this ship will be expecting to stay on the island until autumn, but the week of their arrival is generally held aside. Additional visitors are frowned upon. It’s not forbidden; just in bad taste. I wonder who it is.”

  “Can you tell by looking at it?” he asked.

  “Not from here.”

  “One sec. Is anyone looking at us?”

  She turned around, slowly.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” she said.

  “All right.”

  Magly held up one hand as if to shade his eyes from the late morning suns. The hood did a good job of shading the sunlight already, so it was a somewhat unnecessary gesture, but nobody appeared to care.

  He had his voicer in his other hand, between his raised arm and the lip of his hood. He held the device in front of his eye for about five seconds, then brought it down and rubbed the face of it with two fingers.

  “There you go,” he said.

  She looked at the glass of the voicer. He’d captured an image of the distant island, only dramatically magnified.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  “Problem?”

  “Could be. You see that crest?” She pointed to a symbol on the side of the dirigible.

  “Yes. I don’t recognize it.”

  “Possibly because nobody’s used it for a while. It belonged to my father.”

  “I thought you said he was dead.”

  “I did,” she said. “He’s not the one showing the crest. I think Porra’s at Temple Island.”

  Chapter Twenty

  While the statement held for many locations throughout the Middle Kingdoms, it was especially the case that the best way to take in the Great Temple was from the air.

  It was a sprawling, majestic structure whose footprint was, in truth, smaller than that of the major castles. It just didn’t seem that way because it was so much taller, thanks to the Fingers.

  The nine massive spires dominated the rear wall of the Great Temple. The tallest of them—the middle Finger—was twice as tall as any other artificial structure in the kingdoms, and with a large enough circumference that the basket of an airship could fit inside of it comfortably. (The columns were hollow, so whenever Porra looked at them from the air—in one of the aforementioned airships—she always imagined doing exactly that, i.e., landing in the middle Finger.) Unlike the much shorter solo Finger atop Castle Totus—whose passage to the bedrock was hidden between walls—it was easy to follow the nine columns of the Temple from the roof to the foundation because they actually made up the back wall of the cathedral inside.

  Calling it an artificial structure was actually rather controversial. It was generally agreed upon by most that the Fingers weren’t naturally-occurring: No process involving erosion, tectonic activity, and time could produce anything like them, never mind doing it over a dozen times across the planet. Alternatively, if they were the work of ancient Dibble stone crafters (again, worldwide) nobody knew how those theoretical stone crafters had accomplished such a feat. For while it was definitely the case that there was some pre-Collapse technology that had not yet been rediscovered—excluding whatever the House was keeping to itself in the vaults—the idea that those earlier civilizations had been this advanced beggared belief.

  The consensus within the Middle Kingdoms, and no doubt in a fair number of non-kingdom locales, was that the Fingers had been built by the gods. Which was where the debate over the word “artificial” came in. Was not the entire planet sculpted by the gods? And if so, where does one draw the line between “natural” and “artificial?” The difference, perhaps, was that in the former it was possible to infer that certain formations—the Heragen-Abbon mountain range, say, or the great steppes of Unak—could have come into being without having to invoke divinity, while the latter mandated it. Following this reasoning, some argued that “divinely guided” was a better option than “artificial”. Others argued that this phrasing excluded the possibility of non-divine builders, and perhaps everyone should give pre-Collapse societies more credit.

  Porra didn’t even know this was an argument until somewhat recently. She was taught that the Fingers were built by the gods, as was the temple beneath it. Likewise for the nine major castles and their individual Fingers.

  The first she heard of a secondary interpretation was in conversation with Kenson. He was always talking about how the world they grew up understanding was significantly different from the world that actually was, according to the outsiders.

  At the time, it seemed like nothing more than an offshoot of his idiosyncratic fascination with the globally condemned (as they were also taught when growing up) but which in hindsight turned out to be a fatal character flaw.

  Stop it, she thought. You’re doing it again.

  Porra had been expending far too much energy interrogating her life with Kenson Alcon in an effort to pinpoint where things began to head in the wrong direction, as if there’d been a signpost that read this way leads to regicide and they both ignored it.

  It wasn’t healthy and she knew it. Neither was the trip to the Great Temple, but at least she could partly justify that. One of her motives for going there related to Kenson, but the other one—the one she gave to the new king of Totus—was to seek guidance and counsel from High Hat Vilto Alva.

  “Gods, that’s a sight, isn’t it?” the girl to Porra’s left said, regarding the Fingers. The airship was coming around the side of the Great Temple, a maneuver mandated by the winds they were at the partial mercy of. It put them closer to the spires than the pilot was no doubt comfortable with—a sudden change and they’d be rubbing up against the stone—but the closeness afforded the aforementioned spectacular view.

  “It is,” Porra agreed. “You should be honored to witness such a thing up close.”

  “Oh I am, your queenness. It’s a wonder. I about shit myself when we started across the gap, but this is a whole different thing.”

  “Did you now.”

  “Not actually…” The girl had the good sense to recognize that her word-choice had drifted into the too colorful territory again but had no clue how to extricate herself from it, so she just tacked on, a “…my queen,” and looked away.

  Her name was Orean Gustys, and by all rights she should have been three weeks dead by now. The girl was a simple chambermaid, a tiny firebrand with a big mouth and no evidence of basic good sense or manners. This wasn’t terrible—the same could be said about many of the castle staff in varying degrees—but in addition to those other things, Orean Gustys abetted the escape of Battine Alconnot and Damid Magly.

  She denied it, but with the same degree of sincerity with which she reluctantly recognized that using the word “shit” in front of the queen was poor judgment.

  Orean had been brought before King Ho-Tannik two days following the escape. Everyone knew that several members of the castle had to have helped Battine, but nobody stepped forward to either confess or accuse, and so after two days the only person standing in the throne room to accept the wrath of the king for the murder of h
is predecessor was tiny Orean Gustys.

  It was somewhat extraordinary to hear the girl deny complicity—“they forced me, your majesty,” she claimed—while looking proud of herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t realize the stakes at hand; she just didn’t appear to care.

  Before passing judgment, the king asked if any of the assembled royalty would speak for the accused. This was typically a rote portion of the process. If anyone in the kingdom committed crimes worthy of being heard before the king, it was already much too late for anyone aside from the king himself to speak mercy for them. Their fate was already sealed. In Orean’s case, she was a moment from being sentenced to death by hanging and nobody was about to willingly put their own position in jeopardy (by risking the king’s wrath) to vouchsafe the girl.

  Then Porra opened her mouth. Three weeks later, she still didn’t know why.

  “I will speak for her,” she said, prompting a chain of gasps and shocked muttering that carried as well as any other sound in the throne room. “I believe she is not guilty of this crime.”

  Tannik, newly crowned and about to make one of his first official decisions as sovereign, recognized the quandary immediately: Porra, the widow queen, had nothing to lose but he had a great deal to lose if he chose wrong. He could either assert his authority forcefully while simultaneously insulting the memory of his brother in the person of his brother’s bride, or he could take the more diplomatic path at the risk of looking weak.

  “You will swear responsibility for her?” he asked Porra.

  “I will,” she said.

  Amusingly (after the fact) thanks to the acoustics in the throne room, everyone got to hear Orean mutter, “Nita’s blessed tits.” They then all pretended they didn’t hear this.

  That was how Orean Gustys ended up a part of Porra’s staff not long after helping Porra’s sister escape after murdering Porra’s husband.

  It was an odd arrangement.

  “How do you think they keep rain out?” Orean asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of the top. It’s open, yeah? Is it hollow all the way down? How many storms d’you think it takes to fill it up?”

  “I don’t know,” Porra said. “I’m not sure rain gets in.”

  “Well but it’d have to. Put a pipe in your mouth and stand in the rain, you’ll get some in your mouth soon enough. Where’s it go at the bottom? Must be a place in there where they dump out the water or something.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “But that’s nuts. What are they used for?”

  “Orean, are you certain you were raised a Septal?” Porra asked.

  “As much as anyone was, sure.”

  “Nobody knows what the Fingers are for. It’s one of the great mysteries. This is something we were all taught.”

  “I must’ve been pissing around that day. Is ‘where does the rain go’ also one of the great mysteries?”

  “It’s not.”

  “It should be. Her queenliness could ask the High Hat, maybe.”

  The airship docked at the tower at the edge of the temple’s main courtyard. Its base was right near the retaining wall that was built around what was considered the habitable region of the island, which only meant it was the one part of the island where people lived.

  There was another hecter of land surrounding the wall, mostly occupied by trees that went almost all the way to the shoreline in a few places. The rest of the land was rocky bluff. There were a couple of roads—the one notable road led from the front gate to the water dock—but the land otherwise looked mostly untouched. The overall sense, both within the walls and just on the outside of it, was that the temple wasn’t on an island at all.

  When she was a child and taking lessons at the temple, Porra would often get caught up in the idea that the space they occupied was separate from the rest of the world in a real, meaningful way. They were, but she didn’t think of it like being on an island as much as in another plane of existence. Then the winds would shift and she’d pick up the smell of the ocean, and the spell would be broken.

  Porra and her retinue were met at the dock by two severe-looking Septals she didn’t recognize.

  “Queen Porra,” one said, bowing slightly, “I’m Other Kawabir and this is Sister Aul. Highness Alva sends regrets. She’s seeing to the pilgrims at dock.”

  The queen’s retinue was actually quite small. It consisted of Vexy and Aleiti, Orean Gustys, and a footman named Gills. Vexy and Aleiti were the only proper ladies in tow for this journey; the rest of Porra’s ladies remained at Castle Totus, no doubt looking to ingratiate themselves with a person of greater future influence.

  On hearing that Alva would not be greeting the queen, the two ladies gasped quietly and awaited Porra’s reaction before determining the precise degree of consternation they should subsequently affect. Gills and Orean, meanwhile, shrugged and began unloading the bags.

  “Perfectly understandable,” Porra said. “I’m sure my arrival is an inconvenience. Think nothing of it.”

  The ladies exhaled. So did the Septals, interestingly. Porra thought she probably shouldn’t derive satisfaction from this, but she did; even powerless, she still inspired fear in the people around her.

  All except for Orean Gustys.

  “Hey, does this dock have a lift?” Orean asked. “Excepting the queen here, all of you lot had best offer a hand otherwise, or Gills and me are gonna be all day at this.”

  Everyone held their breath again, but when Porra didn’t do what probably was expected—excoriate the maid for her impertinence—the most remarkable thing happened: Vexy, Aleiti and the two monks stepped into the airship and grabbed two bags apiece.

  It would have been easy to get insulted about the bedding accommodations Porra was provided, except that all of the quarters in the Great Temple were simple and spare.

  The “great” in the Great Temple moniker was largely expressed in the spires of the nine Fingers. The grounds were actually quite small, especially as compared to the sprawling, town-sized campuses in places such as Inimata, Dunn, Punkoah, and even Ghon-Dik.

  The Temple itself was a combined house of worship—with a vast cathedral double the size of the Castle Totus throne room—and educational center. Hardly anybody lived in the building, but everyone on the island spent time studying in one of the rooms.

  The monks bunked in one of the adjacent structures. Porra knew those rooms well, because she stayed in one of them as a child. They were little more than a cot and a cabinet with—if one was very lucky—a window, in a space smaller than one of her closets.

  They didn’t put her there. They put her in quarters intended for visiting royals, down the hall from the High Hat’s personal chambers on the third floor of the temple. It featured a slightly larger cot in a slightly larger room, with a proper closet and two windows.

  Vexy and Aleiti looked prepared to go to war over this injustice.

  “Thank you,” Porra said to a clearly exhausted Other Kawabir as they put down the bags they’d carried all the way to the room.

  “Of course,” they said, nodding.

  The airship dock did not have a lift (the one at Totus did; it was manual, worked by two burly men using a rope and a ball-and-tackle) and so they had to lug all of the many bags Porra traveled with down an interminable set of stairs, across the campus yard and then up the stairs in the temple to the third floor.

  The dock didn’t have a lift the last time Porra visited the temple either, but she had no memory of there being any particular problem transporting their bags on that occasion. But she was with Kenson then, traveling with a much larger retinue—enough no doubt to handle the task without assistance or complaint. And when she visited as a child the question was moot, because she didn’t use an airship to get there; she sailed aboard the Allyra’s Chariot just like all the rest of the children, with no servants and only one bag.

  “My queen,” Vexy said, “this is surely…where we stay, yes? Your room must be…”
>
  “Actually, your room is across the hall,” Sister Aul said. “If you would put those bags down, I’ll be happy to show you. Come on.”

  The two ladies put down their bags with a loud thump and a CLANG that implied this lack of grace had an unfortunate consequence in one of the sacks. Aul led them out.

  “Is it a room for four?” Orean asked. “Or would her queenness prefer Gills and me sleep on the floor in here?”

  “Servants bunk with the monks, Orean,” Porra said. “It’s in another building. I’m sure the Other can show you where to go.”

  “How’re we supposed to be at your call?” the girl asked. “You gonna shout from the window? Dunno if these open.”

  Her impertinent way of speaking was usually embedded with practical questions. Porra was still learning to navigate.

  “Most of my concerns will be attended to by our hosts,” Porra said. “Report to me in the evening, and again in the morning. Your days are your own unless my needs dictate otherwise.”

  “Terrific,” Orean said. She looked very close to asking Porra more questions—probably along the lines of what is there to do here—but didn’t.

  Porra turned back to Other Kawabir. “Please inform me as soon as Highness Alva has availability.”

  “Of course,” they said.

  Through the door on the other side of the room, they all heard Aleiti exclaim, “Not BUNK BEDS!”

  Porra laughed. She couldn’t help herself. As recently as a month ago, she’d have understood Vexy’s complaint as serious indeed. Now all of it seemed so very stupid and inconsequential.

  Orean was perhaps having a greater impact on Porra than the converse.

  “Not the first time that one’s been on top, I wager,” Orean muttered to Gills, as they headed out of the room.

  It took over an hour for the pilgrims to get settled into the barracks. Porra got to watch the entire procession from the window while listening to Aleiti and Vexy gossip in the corner. The event itself was unspectacular; all them were in full robes, as was the case for monks throughout the nine kingdoms, so there was hardly any differentiation to identify. This was especially so when seen from a window on the third floor of the temple.