‘Like a severed hand?’ Fisk said.
‘Anything human or animal,’ Sapientia agreed. ‘The natural fission process – the antithetical stresses between our universe and the daemon’s – is somewhat mitigated. Somewhat.’
A phrase struck me from William Bless’ Our Infernal War. ‘Sheathed in flesh, the dagger still wars,’ I said.
‘Exactly. But slower.’
‘So, when the devils come over and are stuffed in people, they’re harder to get rid of.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why do we need to get the vigiles?’ I asked.
‘Because,’ she said, pointing to the Grantham woman’s chest, ‘this corpus locus glyph is fresh and bears Beleth’s name. He’ll have to bear a similar mark. He is not a daemon and can’t enter someone from any location.’
I was beginning to understand.
‘He’s got to be right by them when he does it,’ I said. ‘In the same room.’
Sapientia nodded.
‘Beleth is still in Passaseugo,’ she said.
THIRTEEN
5 Kalends, Quintilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis
‘The Embassy,’ Fisk said, eyes widening. ‘My guns!’ he shouted at Drusilla who, after glancing at Sapientia for permission, ran to fetch our weapons.
We barrelled out of the College of Engineers and down the steps at a run. The race through the streets of Passasuego was blurred and blood-spiked. Fisk found the nearest patrolling legionnaire, commanded him to find a cornicen to blow the alarm and fetch mounts from the nearest watch station. Within moments a horn was sounding through the night air. Fisk pulled himself up on the borrowed mount and raced up-mountain toward the Distrito Rosa and the Medieran Embassy. Winfried and I followed along behind as quickly as we could.
By the time we had arrived, Fisk and two vigiles were standing outside the Embassy, smoking cigarettes with sick looks on their faces.
‘Too late,’ Fisk said, looking at me and shaking his head. ‘Beleth killed them all and ran.’
I went inside. Nothing seemed to be amiss until I found the greatroom. The stench of the blood was overwhelming.
The next morning, The Passasuego Gazetá headline read ‘15 Dead At Medieran Embassy including Ambassador’s Family’, and the Icehouse pre-dawn lobby was choked with businessmen taking their coffee and brandies and discussing the imminent and oncoming war. Many of them – especially the gentlemen of apparent Medieran descent, wearing waxed mustachios and suits cut in the Chiban manner, high-waisted and with tapered legs – wondered aloud at Rume’s involvement in the massacre and barely suppressed their outrage.
We checked out early and were tacking out Bess and Fisk’s black when Winfried found us.
‘I’m coming with you.’
Fisk shook his head. ‘Sorry, ma’am. But we’re gonna be moving fast. There’s only one way Beleth can go, east, and you’d just slow us down with your jaunting-hearse.’
‘I’ve left the infernograph with Sapientia. She will safeguard it until I return,’ she said.
Fisk said nothing. He moved to pick up his saddle. Winfried placed herself in front of him. ‘Without the baggage, I can travel on Buquo at least as swiftly as Mr Ilys,’ she said, lifting a hand to indicate me where I stood next to Bess. ‘Forgive me, Mr Ilys, but it is true.’
Now, she might have been right, but my Bess can move fast when she’s of a mind and she never tires. I didn’t much appreciate Winfried’s sentiment.
Fisk stepped around her and slung saddlebags over the black’s rump. He placed the small box that contained the Quotidian in the sack and strapped it down, tight. His sleeping bag and personal effects followed. I loaded Bess with oats. We’d stop at a provisioner as soon as the stores opened.
‘I will come with you,’ Winfried said.
Fisk stopped what he was doing and turned to look at her.
‘Why?’
‘I would see him dead.’
‘I told you, that’s not the plan I have for him.’
‘I would be part of the hunt.’
‘Not your job, ma’am,’ Fisk said.
Something in her cracked, then. The expression on her face was fierce and wounded, all at once. A welter of emotion contorted her features. Then, with monumental effort, she controlled herself and her expression went blank, almost placid.
‘I have money, Mr Fisk. I have Buquo, who is every bit up to the job of bearing me on this journey at whatever pace you set,’ she said, each word falling from her mouth like a stone. From her jacket, she withdrew Hellfire. ‘I am armed,’ she said, letting it hang. ‘I am not asking.’
Fisk looked at her for a long time and their gazes held. Finally he looked away.
When Winfried was ready, we mounted up and exited the stable. Winfried walked to Buquo, the massive draught horse, and clambered up on his back. He chucked his head and stamped, steaming in the dawn light.
‘Ia-damn you, Shoe,’ Fisk said, spitting. ‘Ia-damn you and your strays.’
We rode out the north gate and took the Talavera Road east, down-mountain. The White River came in and out of view to our right as we descended. We were making good time and Fisk – his legate’s badge openly displayed – questioned every legionnaire we came across regarding Beleth. None had seen him.
We rode into the night, camped late and rose early. After two days we reached the Sundering Rock where the White River and the Big Rill separated.
‘This is the sticking point. Either Beleth went east, on the White, or south, on the Big Rill. Which is it?’ Fisk asked.
‘Either way would lead him toward Ruman legions,’ Winfried offered. ‘To the east is Fort Brust. To the south, New Damnation and Harbour Town beyond.’
I thought about it a while. ‘He’ll want to get off the continent.’
Fisk looked at me, considering. ‘Don’t know who Beleth is working with, now. Could be the Medierans, could be the Tchinee.’
Winfried looked puzzled. ‘But he killed the ambassador and his family!’
‘No Medieran will know that,’ I said. ‘He’s cunning, Beleth is. Fat old Diegal in Mediera will view this as an outrage. Beleth knew that. He’s pushing us toward war.’
‘War brings confusion,’ Fisk said, his voice disgusted.
‘And that means he’ll be able to travel more freely,’ I said.
Winfried, sounding awed, asked, ‘He would have countries move toward death and destruction solely for his own convenience?’
‘He’s cunning,’ I said. ‘And his knowledge is powerful. But Beleth himself is petty. He would murder hundreds if doing so would ensure that he slept in a feather bed, dined well, and smoked fine cigars.’
‘All that’s neither here nor there,’ Fisk said. ‘Which way would he go?’
We fell silent for a little while. Off in the distance, shrouded by pines and gambels, the White River roared, splitting upon the Sundering Rock.
‘Can’t help but think of that day, last winter, when we spotted him fleeing the Cornelian.’
‘And?’
‘He was trucking hard north and west.’
‘So?’
‘North and west was Hot Springs and Passaseugo.’
Winfried turned Buquo so that the horse faced me. ‘You are saying he is direct?’
‘In Hot Springs, he set the boy-daemon to kill us without even knowing for sure if Fisk and I were on his trail. In Passaseugo, he came right to our hotel, bold as brass, and laughed in our faces.’
‘I see where you’re going with this,’ Fisk said.
‘The shortest way to get off continent, away from Occidentalia and the Ruman forces here, is south. To Harbour Town, catch a ship bound for New Mediera in the Gulf of Mageras. There he can wheel and deal with the Medieran governor or admiral. Or he could book some sort of passage to Tchinee, remote as it is.’
‘He doesn’t dick around, that much is true,’ Fisk said, turning his black. ‘You’re right, he’s heading south.’ He kicked his horse into a canter and called
back, ‘We’ll make the ford after the White Falls! From there, south on the shoal plains until Port Caldo.’
It was a good plan. On the plains, we could give the horses their heads.
Winfried, on Buquo, stomped and churned the earth and then took off after Fisk and his black.
Bess looked back at me, showing green teeth. She was not happy with all the cantering going on. She hawed and nipped at my trouser legging.
‘I know, girl,’ I said. ‘I know.’
She hawed again and after some coaxing, I got her to pick up into a canter.
We forded the White River at a crook where the water widened over an area half a mile in width and it was a short half-day’s ride south until the shoal grasses began tugging at our legs. We rode into the evening, until the light gave up entirely, and camped under the wide expanse of sky.
The next day, we came upon shoal auroch and Fisk took one with his carbine and I butchered it for its tongue and liver and tenderloin. The plains were hushed, as if waiting for something. We ate it that night over a driftwood fire on the banks of the Big Rill. Fisk said, after we’d eaten and Winfried was asleep, ‘You see them, today?’
‘The stretchers? Yes. Why didn’t you mention them?’
‘For the same reason you didn’t,’ he said. ‘Didn’t want to scare Winfried.’
‘Doubt she’d have been scared. Alarmed, maybe. But she’s not one for fear.’
He nodded. ‘Maybe I didn’t want to have to explain their behaviour. They’re hanging back for some reason.’ He had his carbine in his lap and fed Hellfire rounds into it one by one.
‘The one out on the hardscrabble. During the ambush,’ I said.
‘Don’t start with that again, Shoe.’
Almost of its own volition, my hand made a chopping motion, cutting him off. ‘You’ve known me more than a decade now. How many Ia-damned times have I lied to you?’
‘A few.’
‘Fisk—’
‘I got your point, Shoe.’
‘It’s hard to take in, pard, but that vaettir was different! It dropped its sword after what it had done to its kin.’
He shook his head but I could see I was getting to him. ‘Hell, Shoe, I thought I understood them. But now …’
‘Damned puzzling thing, how you can know something and then not know it at all.’
Fisk spat. ‘There’s that.’ He thought for a while. ‘Maybe they’re hanging back for another reason. Maybe it has something to do with the hand.’
That puzzled me. ‘How so?’
‘I don’t know, but the same thing that was in me was in Agrippina.’ He shook his head, tossed a small piece of driftwood into the fire. ‘Just a feeling I’ve got.’
‘Ain’t never been one to discount feelings, but that’s a strange one, pard.’
He did not answer immediately, and when he did it was a conversation we’d had thousands of times around thousands of campfires in stretcher territory.
‘I’ll take the first watch. You take the second,’ he said. That’s our normal arrangement. I can see quite well in the small hours of the night when others can’t.
He looked off past the glow of the fire.
‘It’s the Kalends, Fisk. She’ll be writing.’
‘I know,’ he said, opening his hand to look at the scar on his palm.
‘You gonna set up the Quotidian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe I should take the watch.’
‘Get some rest.’
‘Naw. I’ll watch until you’ve done your deal.’
He looked at me, pulled out a Medieran machine-rolled cigarette and tossed it over. Tasted good, the tabac smoke under the stars. And maybe even the possibility of vaettir watching made it taste even better. That’s one of those strange things about living under the open vault of sky in vaettir country: everything tastes better when there’s stretchers about.
Fisk took out the Quotidian, opened it, unlatched the lid. It cleverly unfolded into a flat surface. He laid it down on the levellest bit of dirt near the fire he could find, withdrew the blood-bowl and knife, inkwell and parchment.
On his knees, half illuminated as he was by firelight, for a moment he seemed some sort of augur or priest to a nameless god about to give sacrifice. He raised his knife to open his palm and begin the blooding.
‘Hold on, pard,’ I said, moving to join him. I opened my hand and held it out. ‘You’re stingy with words, pard. But Livia isn’t,’ I said.
He nodded, once, took my hand, and cut it deep, letting the blood flow.
PART II
Foreign Devils
FOURTEEN
Kalends of Sextilius, Eleventh Hour, 2638 Annum
Ex Rume Immortalis, Near the Aethiopicum Shore,
Bay of Aribicum
Dear love,
Your son within me is still well and thriving, though not much has changed. Carnelia constantly opines on the growing size of my stomach and Lupina keeps me stuffed with food. I daresay I’ve gained two stone since we last saw each other and not all of that is baby.
During quiet times in our journeys – we are back on the Malphas and steaming past the dark shores of Æthiopicum – I allow Carnelia to press her head against the taut drum-head of my stomach and listen and feel for young Fiscelion’s martial kicking and gyrations. She squeals and exclaims, touching her cheek in amazement when his tiny foot connects.
The Malphas steamed into the port at Ostia on 13 Kalends, the twentieth day of Quinitilius, and only three days before Ia Terminalia. We had been almost thirteen full days at sea, which seemed an amazing speed, even to my father, who was extraordinarily pleased. ‘Mithras’ swollen nutsack!’ he said. (I shall not spare your delicate sensibilities, my love.) ‘We’ve crossed the Occidens in half the time it would take to sail!’ The captain, Juvenus, explained as we prepared to disembark that the shipwrights at the College of Engineers in Ostia had made some improvements on the design of the ship, making it lighter and stronger all at once. But mostly it was the two daemons bound in the Malphas’ belly. The first, Malphas himself, was an incendiary arch-daemon of incalculable ferocity and strength. The fiery energy he poured forth was solely dedicated to the turning of the ship’s great screws. The other daemon – one that no one seems to mention, though I have heard the ship’s mess-cook calling his ovens affectionately as Captain Caiodé, a strange name for an oven to be sure – remained unheralded, though as passengers we reaped the benefits of his infernal presence with far more immediacy: hot water for our ablutions, hot meals at the Captain’s table, staterooms warmed against the damp chill of the ocean swells. And of course the ship is thrice damned, the last for the sailors lost to sea and war. The Malphas is a warship, after all, albeit a small one.
Moments after making dock in the shipyard in Ostia, Mister Tenebrae – who, by the way, is quite an exceptional man and who has become very close to Secundus – had arranged for carriages to take us right away back to Father’s villae on the Cælian, so to be nearer Tamberlaine’s palace for Terminalia. I, personally, had grown quite comfortable on the Malphas, and would have preferred to remain there.
Here I will be honest with you, my love.
I swore once to never set foot in Rume again. Part of that was a rebellion against my father and the society that would treat me as chattel; part of that was a fear of the vicious rumours Metellus spread about me to justify his divorce. I was afraid. It is something I rarely feel; I care not what others do and very rarely have physical fear for my own integument of skin. But Rume, for all its history and formalized society, its collegiums and forum, its aediles and vigiles, its laws and libraries, is in its own way as wild and lawless as the Hardscrabble Territories. Power is law, and men – and women too – scrabble just as hard to get it here as they do in New Damnation.
I felt very protective of our child, and fearful of his safety as we climbed aboard the carriages, Secundus gallantly offering his arm, and caromed up the Ostian Way, the Tever River winking muddy bro
wn on our left and the hulking stonework arches of the Ostian aqueduct passing silently on our right. It was a journey of only two hours and the rocking of the horse-drawn carriage made me drowsy. Tenebrae said, ‘The sailors tell me that a swaying carriage ride might make one sick after a long sea voyage.’ He smiled, flashing well-formed white teeth first at me, then at Secundus. Carnelia moaned. ‘Yet, it is the best thing to end the unsteady sensation one can have after disembarking.’
‘Where will you go, now that we have returned? We are no longer your charges,’ I said.
‘We shall see,’ he said, unworried and quite pleased with the world. ‘I am at his Imperial Majesty’s disposal and he will do with me what he will.’
Father, who had been dozing fitfully, snorted and began brushing his mustachios vigorously. ‘I’m quite chomping to show off my new leg.’
‘Or lack of it,’ Secundus said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Here now, lad, don’t be your sister’s mouthpiece when she’s out of commission,’ Father said. ‘And all of Rume will want to see my mounted vaettir!’ He crowed. ‘I could charge for viewing!’
‘About that, Father,’ I said, coughing delicately.
‘What?’ Father dislikes being interrupted when excited.
‘My sister and I have decided on the only appropriate gift for Tamberlaine.’
‘This is good news, then, child! Don’t keep me waiting.’
‘Your vaettir,’ I said.
It is an amazing thing to see a patrician’s world crumble. And Father has never been one to keep his emotions tamped down hard in his chest. His face, first stunned, became calcified in an expression caught somewhere between shock and misery.
‘No—’ he said, his eyes shifting in his sockets as if looking for some lifeline or exit from this personal catastrophe.
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