by Victor Milán
There was more he might have said, of course. It tickled the tip of his virtual tongue. Beasts who came from chaos and lived to spread it without love or allegiance for one another or any other thing, the Fae still almost all shared exactly that aim: to return the whole world to the state from which the Creators had remade it.
But I’m supposed to be the diplomatic one, Uriel thought. And I’m not about to repeat Raguel’s screw-up by bringing up Gabriel’s tormentors again.
“As you so kindly remind us,” Aphrodite told Gabriel, “we all have tasks we were created for. Mine is to preserve and maintain Paradise and all its creatures; I have no wish to see anyone destroyed.”
For a moment, eyes glared into one another, sea-green and the brilliant unforgiving blue of sky momentarily left bare by a rip in the world’s daytime raiment, clouds.
“Do you grieve for an ant crushed by a Thunder-titan, then?” Gabriel asked with a sneer. But her tone was quieter than before. If not notably softened.
“Yes.”
“Well,” Gabriel said. “I’ve done what I came to do: serve notice that I don’t intend to placidly wait my turn to set things right in the world we guard.”
“And I give notice,” Aphrodite said, quite genially, “that I will stop you.”
“Wait,” said Uriel plaintively. “What about me? We all agreed on it in advance. You Purificationists had your shot. Now we Fundamentalists get to do it our way. My way. It’s the work I’ve focused on for billions of cycles! You can’t just trample on that!”
Again, Gabriel smiled.
“Just watch me, Fire of God.”
* * *
“Your Highness, may we have a word with you?” the man in the tall black hat said in a voice like warm olive oil. And a dense Griego accent.
Montserrat Angelina Proserpina Telar de los Ángeles Delgao Llobregat stopped in the middle of the corridor. It was dim, lit by nothing more than palm-oil lamps in periodic niches along the stone wall.
Are you talking to me? she wondered. While she was technically a Princess, she was the Imperial Infanta, meaning not scion of her father’s line. Alteza was an honorific more commonly addressed to her older sister, Melodía. At least by nobles, which Montse reckoned these emissaries from the Basileus Nikephoros of Trebizon must be.
Silver Mistral, Montse’s pet ferret, hopped sideways as if to block the progress of the trio of outlanders who had appeared in the door that led from the passage to an ancillary dining hall in the Firefly Palace’s sprawling keep. She bristled her silver coat and black tail, beeping a warning at them not to come any closer. They ignored her, though the woman gave her a brief, uneasy flick of her heavily kohl-rimmed black eyes.
“May I help you, Señoras y Señoras?” asked Claudia. The tall woman with the grey skeins in her long dark hair was a senior Palace servant and Montse’s friend. Montse had slipped her handlers to trail after her as she went about her morning duties, as she liked to do. “These are servant hallways. No places for noble folk such as yourselves.”
The shorter of the two men was the first to speak. Unlike the rest of the male Trebs, his face was clean-shaven. His jaw was as square as a door. He looked to Montse as if he ground his teeth a lot.
“Her Highness is here,” he observed in a reasonable tone. His Spañol was good, despite the accent.
“The Infanta lives in the Palace, my lord, and goes where she will.”
As if by chance, Claudia had placed herself between Montse and the interlopers. Though more puzzled by their appearance than anything else, Montse hurried to scoop up Mistral and huddle the creature against the front of her linen smock—white that morning, grubby already. Making sure to support her long-backed friend’s hindquarters with one cupped hand, of course. She didn’t want to injure the ferret.
“We have resided here for months as we pressed the Emperor for answers to our suit,” the noblewoman among the three said, with haughtiness unusual even for a grandeza. Montse decided she didn’t like her. “Thus we live here, too. And as noble priests of Trebizon and emissaries of the Basileus, we go where we want as well.”
“Not in El Palacio de las Luciérnagas,” Claudia said, putting a touch of steel in her voice. “Here, allow me to call the Prince’s guards. They can escort you to more … congenial surroundings.”
“Please,” the clean-shaven man said. “Our business is with the child.”
“No,” Claudia said.
Things got terrible with a speed that almost choked Montserrat.
The Trebizon lady slapped Claudia across the face. She was almost as tall, even leaving out the hat, and, as far as Montse could tell from her elaborate layers of robes, as slender as her friend. The unexpected blow snapped Claudia’s head around.
Without hesitation Claudia spun back and punched the noblewoman in the face. She was strong from a lifetime of hard work, and, having grown up on the waterfront of La Merced, the great La Canal seaport sprawled at the foot of the promontory on which the Palace stood, she knew how to hit. The Trebizonesa reeled back against the wall.
She recovered instantly. From somewhere in her outlandish swaddling she snatched out a stiletto and stabbed Claudia beneath the right breast through her white cotton blouse. The servingwoman froze for a moment, then stepped back. But instead of locking up or moaning in pain, much less collapsing from the wound, as a horrified Montse expected her to, Claudia tried to launch another punch at the priestess’s face.
The bearded man grabbed her arm from behind, stopping her swing. He clutched for a hold on her left arm as well.
From the hornface-leather belt she wore to cinch up her long brown skirt and to carry such items as her duties might require, Claudia drew a butcher knife with her free left hand. She plunged it down and back. The bearded man gasped and then squealed as it sank to the handle into his stomach.
He bent over, groaning. But he didn’t let go of Claudia’s wrist. The noblewoman stepped in to stab Claudia again and again like a bird pecking—so fast Montse lost count of the thrusts.
She became aware that she was screaming at them to stop hurting her friend. She had backed against the wall opposite the mouth of the side passage through which the three intruders had entered.
Claudia’s blouse was a sodden red mass. She caught Montse’s eye and mouthed, “Run!” Her teeth were individually outlined in red; Montse knew she’d dream about the sight as long as she managed to stay alive.
Montse saw the life leave her friend’s eyes. Claudia’s head lolled to the side. She sagged. The bearded man, still mewling in agony, released her suddenly dead weight to puddle on the floor in blood and sadness.
The clean-shaven man approached Montse. He held out a big, square hand. “Come with us now, little girl. We won’t hurt you.”
“Like the way you didn’t hurt my friend?” Montse shouted, more in rage than grief. She turned to bolt for a secret passage—the Palace was honeycombed with them—to her left.
Instead, she turned straight into a tall man wearing a slashed-velvet doublet and short pantaloons over leggings, all in black. He gathered her against him, turned her, and pinned her against leanly muscular legs.
From the corner of her eye she saw that the entry to the secret passage, which was disguised as a lamp alcove, stood open. Some servant sold us out! she thought, sickened. One of my friends.
She opened her mouth to scream for help—not a natural action for her, or she’d have started earlier. Her captor clapped a hand over her mouth.
“What have you idiots done?” he demanded “Everything depends on avoiding violence.”
The woman, whose dark robes were almost as blood-soaked as Claudia’s blouse but showed it less, brandished the slim dagger and spat something in her native tongue.
“She’s a valued servant and friend to the little princess, here,” Dragos responded in Spañol. “Her employer, Prince Heriberto, will resent her murder here in his own palace.”
“They were going to resent the girl’s abduction,
anyway,” the beardless man said. “And she was impudent to Lady Paraskeve.”
Montse had witnessed violence before. She’d attended tournaments, never by her own choice. She’d seen men and women injured, even watched an elderly knight die by accident during a recent tourney. But she’d never seen a friend die before. Nor had she experienced violence directed against her.
Being grabbed by a stranger shocked her. It felt like a violation. For a brief spell, it caused her to freeze in panic.
But she recovered fast and bit the muffling hand. Hard.
“Ow,” her captor said, but mildly. “I deserved that, for not expecting it.”
He shifted his hand to keep her quiet but removing her chance to chomp him again. Turning, he shoved her toward one of a pair of human nosehorns, locals by their look and dress, who had emerged from the not-so-secret passage.
“Mind her teeth, Diego. They’re sharp. And she’s fast and feisty.”
Diego’s hand was big enough that Montse’s mouth could get no purchase. She kicked back furiously with a bare heel.
“Ow! My shin!”
The murderous Lady Paraskeve had put away her stiletto. Now she pointed toward Mistral, whose fur bristled and who was hissing furiously and writhing in Montse’s hands. “Take that filthy animal away from her and kill it.”
“No!” Montse tried to yell. But of course she only produced a muffled squeal of outrage.
Helplessness, she found, made her all the madder. But it did no good against Diego’s strength and apparently durable shins.
“No,” the man who had seized Montse said. He was tall, perhaps poor Claudia’s height, slender as the Taliano rapier he wore at his fashionably clad waist, with neatly trimmed grey hair and beard. Montse had seen him at court the last week or so; several women and a couple of men, not all servants, had commented on what a fine figure he cut.
He continued in Griego. Which Montse couldn’t understand a word of.
“You dare to contradict me?” Paraskeve snapped back in Spañol. “Who do you think you are, Dragos?”
“I think I am a specialist hired by your masters to keep you from making a total botch of this,” Dragos said, his voice still level. “At which I’ve failed—which means you need me all the more just to get out of this Palace alive, much less out of the Empire, with your skins still attached. And I think I’m a man who has taken measures—including certain compacts with your masters—to safeguard against treachery on your part.”
“Leave be, Paraskeve,” the clean-shaven man said. “Can you walk, friend Stamatios?”
“I’m fine.” Stamatios gave the lie to his words by the way he sobbed them, hunched over to one side with a hand pressed to his blood-pouring belly. “I can walk.”
Blood drooled from his lips and matted his beard when he spoke. Montse found she didn’t find that horrifying. She wanted him to die.
He took a step. His knees promptly folded. He only kept himself from going to the floor by falling against the dank stone wall.
“We have to leave him,” Dragos said. “You—kill yourself. You’ll slow us down, and we can’t afford that. If we’re caught, not only is Prince Heri likely to forget the Creators’ Law against torture but, worse, our masters will be very vexed with us. And they seldom remember that Law to start with.”
“You can’t—” bearded Stamatios began. Seeing the set of Dragos’s face, he looked to his male comrade. “Please, Akakios. Tell him he can’t—”
Dragos stepped purposefully up to Stamatios as the wounded man pulled himself more or less upright. He brought the heel of his right palm savagely up against the underside of a bearded chin. Stamatios’s jaws clacked together with a sound that made Montse wince despite herself.
The priest jerked. His black eyes shot wide open. Dragos pinned Stamatios against the wall by both arms as his mouth worked frantically, as if trying to take bites of the air. His body shuddered as if trying to shake itself to pieces.
His face turned a shade of forge-heated-iron red Montse had never seen on human skin before. His body shook in a spasm so fierce Montse expected bones to snap, then went as limp as Claudia had.
Dragos let go his arms and stood back. Stamatios plopped onto his face on the stone.
He’s dead, Montse thought. For some reason it shocked her almost more than seeing her friend die. I wanted him that way. I’m glad. Why does it feel so bad?
Nausea welled up from her stomach. She willed herself to puke. It’ll serve this lout right for putting his dirty hand over my mouth! But she sadly failed to vomit.
Dragos turned away from the corpse and straightened the discreetly frilled cuffs of his black silk blouse.
“Those poison teeth your masters insisted you all be tricked out with do have their uses,” he purred to the two surviving emissaries. “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time.”
He nodded to Diego and his companion, who was out of Montse’s line of sight but whose presence she sensed looming nearby.
“Don’t be more afraid than you can help, little princess,” Dragos told her as the hand was removed from her mouth. She sucked in a deep breath to scream—and her vision was obscured by enveloping blackness.
Her heart almost burst from her chest in terror. I’m blind! I can’t breathe! But then she realized a heavy bag had been pulled over her head by the feel of its coarse cloth on her nose.
“We need to deliver you alive and well,” she heard Dragos’s smooth baritone, “if we want to stay that way ourselves. Remember that, as the herbs in that bag help you to peacefully sleep.”
Herbs? she thought. She found it hard to remember what the word meant. Her head spun.
Blackness swallowed her whole.
* * *
“Young woman, your father is damned!”
Air, forest swells, evening light, and emotions flooded Montserrat’s world as the hood was yanked from her head. She was racked in turns by rage, grief, fear, confusion, and rage again. All battled furiously for the privilege of propelling the first word from her mouth when she at last confronted her captors.
But what popped out was, “What?”
“The Emperor is damned!” the woman who had murdered Claudia shouted, her face mere centimeters from Montse’s. Her face was painted almost white, with rouge spots on the cheeks. They made her pores look huge. “He’s condemned himself! Not only by the unpardonable insult he’s offered our Basileus by refusing to even answer our suit for your sister to wed our Crown Prince, but now he’s thwarted the will of the Creators themselves!”
“What are you on about?” Montse said. She asked the question in Spañol, which was what the woman asked it in. But despite the circumstances, she felt pride in translating an Anglysh phrase she’d read on the fly. She’d read a lot of books and treatises in Anglysh. She loved everything to do with the island Kingdom almost as much as did Prince Heriberto, ruler of the Principality of the Tyrant’s Jaw and landlord of the Firefly Palace.
“She means we’ve just learned that your father’s army has met and defeated the Grey Angel Crusade in western Francia, near County Providence,” the man called Dragos said. “He saw Raguel off quite smartly, it seems, and with the Grey Angel’s passing, the Horde broke apart like a melon dropped on flagstones.”
The murderer turned her white rage-twisted face aside to screech at him, “Blasphemer! To make light of the death of one of the Creator’s own servants!”
“Which of us is the blasphemer, Paraskeve,” Dragos murmured, quite unfazed. “Me, or you for imagining a Grey Angel could be killed so readily?”
Producing a silken kerchief from his sleeve, he dabbed her spittle from his grey beard and the sun-browned skin of his cheek.
Montse had her bearings now. She had been hauled up and unmasked in a clearing in the forest that covered the hills inland from Firefly Palace and the great Channel port of La Merced. Insects buzzed and trilled in the trees around and above and in the fragrant ferns underfoot. A flying squirrel glided from limb to limb b
eyond the madwoman’s right shoulder to take a nosehorn-fly the size of a big man’s thumb in flight.
It’s either the one where we took Melodía and Pilar when Claudia helped me break my sister out of the Palace, she thought, or one a lot like it. Must be a popular stop for people running away from there. A pair of carriages with curtained windows and a gaggle of horses stood at the base of a stand of tall pine trees whose slim yellow boles rose ten meters before branching out.
Then the memory of seeing Claudia brutally killed right in front of her twisted her stomach and clouded her eyes with tears.
“You monsters!” she shrieked. “Prince Harry will have all your heads for this! You killed my friend.”
“Did we?” asked a woman with wild hair and haunted eyes. Montse had seen her with the others in the Palace once or twice. Apparently her kidnappers had rendezvoused with the rest of the Trebizon emissaries.
Montse studied her face. It was less clownishly painted than Paraskeve’s. I have to remember everything, she told herself firmly. It will help me get away. I don’t know how or when it’ll help, but I know I need to do that.
“A nobody, Tasoula,” Paraskeve said. “A servant.”
“She did kill Stamatios,” the leader—Akakios, Montse remembered—said in his deep, rich voice.
“No, that greybeard with you did! And good riddance!”
“Please,” Dragos said. “You make me sound so old. Consider my vanity.”
“And where’s Misti?” Montse yelped, suddenly remembering her other friend who had been with her.
“Safe,” said Dragos. He held up a hemp sack that was squirming and kicking. “She bites, so we had to bag her, too. Like you, she has very sharp teeth.”
Montse reached out, surprised to discover her hands weren’t bound. She took the bag carefully, near the top. She could hear Silver Mistral chittering in muffled rage. She opened the drawstring, reached in carefully, and, as luck had it, found the soft-furred nape of Misti’s neck before the ferret sank those teeth into her. She pinched loose skin, gently yet firmly, and lifted her friend out of the bag. Misti’s struggles stopped at once and she relaxed, as ferrets did when you picked them up that way.