“That might’ve hurt if I had any feelings.”
“But here? Because of me? Because of my sacrifices? My travails? My father was elevated.”
“So you think he owes you?”
“Yes! Yes, he owes me. Of course. For all that I’ve done? All I’ve endured? All that I’ve sacrificed? They all owe me. All of them.” Her chest heaved. “Every. Single. One.”
“You’re the keystone holding your whole family together.”
“Family? Nay. The whole kingdom. But such is the duty that falls to women.” She sneered. “And what do we get for our hidden efforts? You men, always trying to tear things down. Apart. Always trying to lord over one another. While we women knit it all back together in dying silence. Bending. Stretching. But never breaking. We’d all be better off without you.”
I shrugged. “Can’t say you’re wrong.”
The Queen-Mother paused, studying me as though noticing me for the first time. “I saw what you did to Sir Gustav.” She slid up next to me, the scent of rose petals enveloping me as she laid her hand upon her dead husband’s casket. “It was … impressive.”
“Two men fight, one’s gotta lose.”
“And here you are,” the Queen-Mother laid a hand on my thigh, “the formidable stranger come to our little-known kingdom, offering succor in time of greatest need.”
“Eh…?” I swallowed. “That wouldn’t be a dagger behind your back?”
“Sir Luther, please.” She craned her neck to look me in the eyes. “Forgive my outburst. Please. Let us be reasonable. Let us be friends once more. We had a falling out, plain and simple.” Her hand slid northward. “Yet, I’m certain that some sort of accord can once again be met.”
…God-forsaken mountains are endless. Like the titan Kronos, they rise about, devouring the sun, the moon, the stars, along with any semblance of hope, salvation, sanity, and one by one…
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 44.
YOU … DID … WHAT?!” Lady Mary stifled a scream. Nearly. “King Eckhardt’s barely in the ground, and here you are—” Lady Mary stuttered in fury, “porking the dowager like a swine in heat.”
Karl guffawed and slapped me on the back. The fact that, for once, Karl was proud filled me with a cold sense of dread.
“Are you insane?” Lady Mary said. “Or just monumentally stupid?”
I shrugged. “Why not both?”
The Schloss was still ours. How long? was another question. King Eventine had the walls and the gate. Guarding it against the scourgers outside and us in. Like Caesar at Alesia. Which in this obscure metaphor meant we were fucked. I set Yolanda down on the table and took a seat by Karl, a ghoulish smirk ripping pink through his rat’s nest of a beard. Stephan was more sedate.
“This mean you’re king, now?” Karl grunted.
“Yeah. Sure.” I pounded the table. “You there! Boy! Bring me my scepter!”
Lady Mary buried her hook-hand an inch deep into the table. “What in heaven’s breadth were you thinking?”
I fingered my lip. “Uh…”
“Brother, I—” Stephan started.
“Rose of Sharon, were you blind to her designs?” Lady Mary strangled out.
“Perhaps it was she overcome by my charms?”
“You have two bite-holes festering in the middle of your imbecilic face.”
“Well, uh … yeah.” I had no witty retort, so I merely did my best to look wounded. It wasn’t hard as she’d so clearly pointed out.
“She’s ensnared you then.” Lady Mary tossed up her hands.
“I don’t recall any oaths.” I stroked my chin. “So no. And what better way to ingratiate myself? Get her guard down? Buy us some time. Get on the inside.”
Karl slapped the table.
“I did this for you,” I told him.
“Brother,” Stephan rubbed the bridge of his nose, “while I don’t approve of your methods, and I’m certain the same could be said of her father and sons, perhaps you’re not wrong. In this, only.” He held a hand up to Lady Mary. “Perhaps it might buy us some time.”
“Or our caskets.” Lady Mary crossed her arms.
“I’m fair sure those were bought the moment we set foot in Haeskenburg,” I said. Which, admittedly, was little to no comfort. “But fair enough. We keep our guard high. Stay in the new king’s good graces.”
“And the Queen’s…” Karl smirked.
“The Queen-Mother’s,” I clarified. “The question is, when do we allow them back in?”
“Never,” Lady Mary said.
Karl grunted, “I’m with her.”
“But we must if this ruse is to work,” Stephan said. “If they’re to take you at your word, that you’ll find this killer, then we must allow them in. How can we not without tipping our hand?”
“Rose of Sharon.” Lady Mary rolled her eyes.
“We get Ruth and the kids out,” I said. “Then they can come in.”
“And where are they going to go?” Stephan asked. “Out in the streets? With the Lord-only-knows what set to stalk them? Not to mention the Nazarene and his scourgers? And besides—”
“Ruth can’t take care of herself let alone the children,” Lady Mary said. “She … she’s broken. Gone. I don’t know that she’ll leave even after Abraham’s buried.”
“Yeah. Shit. Look.” I rubbed my jaw. “We burn that bridge when we get to it. And leave her if you have to. But you’re right. We need a show of good faith, yeah? Prove we’re in it for the long haul. So we let them back inside. Just the King and Queen-Mother. The priest, too, if they insist.”
Karl grumbled like thunder on the far horizon.
“No, listen,” I said. “Soon as it’s dark, I’ll slip the wall, make for the Ulysses. Fill in Chadwicke and Avar, then hoof it back.” I dead-eyed Karl. “I’ll need a distraction. And some rope.”
“She’s not seaworthy yet, brother.”
“We’ll make do,” I said. “We have to. We’ll lash together whatever’ll float, make a raft, get across the river. That’ll buy us some space. Time. Then we regroup. Figure something out. Build a better raft. Float downriver. Hell, we’ll swim if we have to. Bottom line? We’re getting the hell out of Husk, and we’re getting out tonight.”
…a last resort, we reenacted the sacraments of Christ, sacraments we had received hundreds, if not thousands of times back in our towns, our villages, our priories.
But these were sacraments of the wild, sacraments of the broken, sacraments of the fallen, sacraments of the damned…
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 45.
THE ULYSSES was a charred husk, still smoking, when I reached her. She sat in dry dock, upon the bank of the Abraxas, timbers lodged against her hull, sticking out like the dead legs of some monstrous insect. I strode slowly up the canal, peering in through the hull, what planking was left all knurled and bent and cracked like the skin of a dragon.
Inside the charred skeleton, someone was sobbing.
I gripped a plank and yanked it clattering free.
The sobbing stopped.
“Chadwicke?” I called into the dead space. “Avar…?”
A sniffled. Then clatter as something toppled.
“S-Sir Luther?” Droned a voice. “It … It’s Avar. Over here.”
Ducking the rudder, I saw him sprawled atop a mound of shattered mast and warped decking. Smoke drizzled up from embers still glowing red. I could taste the char in the air. Avar was covered in it, except round his eyes where tears had washed him clean.
“Who did it?” I asked.
Avar laid a hand against the mast, leaned over and puked. “Oh my good gracious Lord…”
“Good? Gracious? No. Not even close.” The rest seemed in line with the institution of lordship, though. I ducked through a hole in the hull and scrambled up a pile of detritus. “Who did it?”
Avar wiped his nose. “I…I don’t know. A lot of them, though.
”
“A lot of them…” I echoed. “We’re fucked then, yeah?” I sneered. “You get that?”
Avar bobbed his head, blubbering, wiping his tears, smearing them black.
“Then bloody-well start talking.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Fuck your sorry. Who? Was it the Nazarene?”
Avar sobbed into his hands. “I don’t know…”
“From the Schloss?” I asked.
“I-I…”
“Jesus.”
“I…” Avar pointed off somewhere, “was off robbing stock when I smelled the smoke. Didn’t think nothing of it. Not with all the town burning. But it got stronger. Then I heard the screaming so I come running back. Hard. See’d them here, setting fire to her. Hacking with axes.” He bared his white teeth, stark in his char-smeared face, and hurled a shard of wood clattering into the darkness. “And…”
“And what?”
Avar stood, aiming an accusatory finger my way. “I don’t give a hang about your damned ship.”
“Ain’t much of a ship any—” I straightened. “Where’s your brother?”
Avar laid his face in his hands. “You blind, Sir Luther?”
I froze. Looked up.
“Ah, shit…” I sighed. “I’m sorry, kid.”
Halfway up the pile of ship-innards, bound to the mast like a figurehead stood a charred corpse, its head geared back, mouth tooled open, black teeth bared, howling endless at the silent night.
Avar’s shoulders trembled beneath my hand.
“I left him,” Avar sobbed.
“You were getting stock.”
“Aye. I was, but…”
“But what?”
“But I lied.” Avar was sobbing hard. “B-But I came back when they had him.” He looked up at me, babbling sins to his priest, looking to confess, to receive absolution. I had none to offer. “Had him trussed to the mast. And they were fixing to burn him. Fixing to burn it all. And I … I did nothing.” He dry heaved. “Just stood there. Just fucking stood there watching. I … I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do nothing. Just watched as they beat the fuck out of him. Cutting on him. Laughing like … like jackals. I coulda done something. Coulda took that axe and, coulda…” He glared at the axe as though it were the source of all his troubles. “But I didn’t.”
“Kid…”
He shrugged off my hand. “Then the screaming, oh Lord, when he burned. And I just watched from that copse of trees back yonder. Just watched the whole damned time. Just watched…”
Char scaled the back of my throat. “If you’d done something, you’d be right here alongside him.”
“I wish I had.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. I’m a coward. A miserable fucking coward.”
“There’s worse things to be, kid.”
“And what’s that?”
I glared up at Chadwicke, shining coal-black in the night, screaming silent, and said nothing.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
The Body and the Blood…
Do this in memory of me…
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 46.
THE SUN BLARED overhead, staving off dawn shivers as we stood upon the acropolis of the Schloss and watched Haeskenburg burn. The Nazarene’d been busy. Chants carried on fell winds reached our ears as tumors of black smoke blistered skyward from all points of the compass.
King Eventine stood hunched in his father’s tattered old mantle, a mite too big on him, drawn around him like the flaccid wings of a long-dead bat. “It’s all rather a bit … complicated.” He licked his pallid lips. “It seems hard to get a handle on let alone explain. I…”
“Go slow,” I said. “Use small words.”
“I-I fear I’m at a loss.” King Eventine turned. “Father Gregorius, w-would you be so good as to…?”
“You are King, Eventine.” Father Gregorius clutched his bible to his heart. “The burden lies now upon your brow.”
“Please. I-I’m not well. I cannot find succor. Warmth.” The King worried at a loose thread dangling from the hem of his mantle. “Brother, please,” with eyes pleading he turned, “you possess the greater understanding.”
“I’m uncertain that’s true,” Prince Palatine sighed.
“Please…”
Sir Alaric scowled from the corner, crumpled against the parapet like a pile of sodden laundry, his eyes glazed, twitching, a bottle of something red and sour clutched to his sunken torso.
“Very … very well.” Prince Palatine grimaced as he adjusted his useless chicken-wing arm against his bent torso. “I shall do my best.” He struggled to lift a tome and place it on the parapet, “Oof… The treatise of our family history, Sir Luther. I completed it.”
“Dull?” I eyeballed the thick, gnarly old tome.
“Unfortunately, no.” Prince Palatine ran a hand through his hair. “Quite the opposite. I fear it has left me with more questions than when I began.”
“My family’s a bloody mess, too,” I said.
“Ours bears a centuries-old blood-sworn curse.”
“Well … I guess you win.”
“Do you believe in curses, Sir Luther?” Prince Palatine’s eyes narrowed.
“Once upon a time, I’d have said no. But lately? My world-view’s broadening.”
“I once believed a man made his own way,” Prince Palatine said, “an amalgam between the sweat on his brow, the thoughts in his mind, and the beliefs in his heart. And I believed God was either on his side or not.”
“And we’re all a bunch of Jobs praying for God’s thumb tipping our side of the scales?”
“Yes, or something akin to that,” Prince Palatine said. “A childish idea perhaps, I know. But now…” He rubbed his forehead with a trembling hand. “I think we have each one of us suspected some modicum of the tale I am about to tell, but…”
“Easier to let sleeping dogs die,” I said.
King Eventine wouldn’t meet my eye.
Sir Alaric winced, took a swig, offered a look more sour than his wine.
“The story starts long centuries past,” Prince Palatine began, “two hundred seventeen years, according to my forefather’s journals. Some nine generations.
“Its initial author was Prince Ulrich, our great grandfather to the Nth degree. As a young knight, he traveled south for seasoning.” He grimaced. “To the Terra Borza. The old country. Older than Nod. ‘The land beyond the forests.’ It’s said to be all vast craggy mountains rising so high and perilous you feel they’re poised to crash over you like waves amid a channel storm. The Carpathians, they’re called. Have you seen them in your far travels?”
I shook my head. “Heard enough to steer clear.”
“Well, it’s a wild land, as they say, full of beasts and bandits and barbarians and other things, worse thing, things that slink and shun the light of the day. The King of Hungary had tasked the Teutonic Knighthood with taming this country. Granting it a measure of civility. Shedding a Godly light into the dark crevices where paganism and darker practices festered.”
“Like asking a bear to teach a wolf civility,” I muttered.
“As the treatise tells, Prince Ulrich joined an arm of the Teutonic army that campaigned deeper than any others before had dared. One hundred holy knights of no small repute. Some stately elder knight commanded the retinue. A lodge hochmeister he was, and he took it upon himself to educate these wayward folk. To drive them to their knees before God.
“And in so doing, he took young Prince Ulrich under his wing. Like a spear, they drove into the heart of the mountains, placating backward folk, educating, eradicating, cauterizing paganistic dogma. All for the glory of God. It was what these men were born to do, lived to do, and they did it well. But within the heart of those far mountains, in some dark distant valley, these knights encountered a clan-holt that was different.”
“A plac
e bereft of the blessings and ministrations of our Lord and Savior.” Father Gregorius, crossed himself. “Worshipers of things unclean. Things that slunk beneath the earth before even Cain had committed his original sin.”
“They worshiped a god who dwelt in the cracks beneath the mountains,” Prince Palatine said. “What it was is not written. Lost to the passage of time. What was written was only that this underworld god was a blight upon this world and that it could be sated only through sacrifices of blood.
“It seems these mountain folk were baffled by this retinue of Godly warriors marching into their midst, so taciturn and staid, proclaiming what they deemed nonsense, forcing them to adhere to tenets they little could fathom.”
“And the clan-holt folk all changed their minds, yeah?” I said. “Bent the knee? Kissed the cross? Accepted the Lord God Almighty?” I wiped my hands together. “End of story?”
“No, Sir Luther.” Prince Palatine fixed me an eye. “It seems, rather … the opposite. Do you know how they educated backward folk in days of yore?”
“Sure. Same way they do now,” I deadpanned Father Gregorius’s way. “Fire and brimstone. Hammer and axe. The new way’s the old. What you can’t break, you bend, you batter, you burn.”
“Or all three.” Sir Alaric tipped back his bottle.
“Yeah.”
“Now, see here—” Father Gregorius puffed himself up.
“Fuck off.” I turned back to Prince Palatine. “So the story has no happy ending? No shit. Tell me one that does and I’ll call it a lie. What of it?”
“That’s just it, Sir Luther. I fear this tale lies bereft of an ending for we stand yet in the midst of its telling.”
“Jesus.” We had to get the hell out of here. “And what act are we in?”
“The final, perhaps,” Prince Palatine said quietly, turning to all present, “but only if we, as one, possess the will, the fortitude, the clarity of purpose to do what needs be done.”
“The prologue, then?” I deadpanned.
King Eventine turned green.
I thought he was going to puke over the parapet, but he mastered it, manfully, cheeks bulging, wincing, and swallowed. Gulp. A true leader cut from the very cloth of Arthur himself. “Go on then, kid, let’s start the damned finale.”
The Last Benediction in Steel Page 27