Wonderblood

by Julia Whicker

  The young guard’s mount was an exceptionally fine roan-colored horse. The guard was reaching forward to swing the gate open himself when John called, “Ho! Not so fast! It’s locked!” But the gate opened anyway, leaving John to sputter impotent protest to no one in particular.

  The guard stood in the open gateway holding his horse’s reins, a smile on his lips. “Lord Astronomer?” He made a small bow.

  John cleared his throat. “Who are you? Where is my rider?” He narrowed his eyes. “Is that one of the Hierophant’s horses?”

  “I was sent by His Majesty Marvel Parsons to collect the prisoner you’re interviewing.” The man’s accent was thick and hard to place.

  “I hardly think so,” John huffed. “Where is my man? I sent him with a specific question and I require a specific answer. I cannot release the prisoner to you until I have it, it’s impossible.”

  “Well, the Hierophant outranks you,” he replied blithely. “Sir.”

  “That’s preposterous.” Like most courtiers of his status, John had discovered that the best way to communicate with the lower classes was with a certain blustering indignation—it relieved them all of the apprehension that friendliness might be possible. “What is your name?”

  “Juniper.”

  “That’s a woman’s name.”

  Another sanguine smile. “I’ve never heard that before. Where is the prisoner Tygo?”

  “He’s here,” came Mizar’s chirp from behind John. He scuffed toward them across the scrubby courtyard, around the reflecting pond with John’s expensive fish, leading the prisoner by a short chain. The prisoner—Tygo—by now had been shorn of his leg-cuffs, given new clothes, and chained again at the hands with a set of much more functional manacles. The clothes seemed to greatly displease him (they were Mizar’s and therefore ugly, being brown and far too long and also too tight in the upper arms and legs). Mizar handed John the prisoner’s short chain and hurried over to open the gate wider.

  Tygo nodded his head upward at the young guard. The other man did the same.

  “If the Hierophant outranks me, it’s only because of tradition. Michael has privileged my work for twenty years and more.” John sniffed. “You would be too young to know that.” John did not add that, in his view, Marvel Parsons was the upstart poisoner with the delicate hand who, thirty-two years before, during the reign of Michael’s father Leander, had murdered John’s own parents along with their entire retinue of dinner guests. They had numbered fourteen that dreadful evening, all dead before dessert. John had been good that day, and so was permitted to eat with Mizar in the kitchen with the servants, which had been a treat until it wasn’t, when he realized how undignified it was. There was never proof of the Hierophant’s hand in the affair, of course. Only the most cursory of inquiries had followed the deaths. No one was ever formally accused. But ever since John had been of an age to reason, he had suspected Marvel Whiteside Parsons. There was an air of menace around that man, a kind of radical but rational willingness to play the game to its logical end. In fact John somewhat admired the derring-do such drastic action had required. He’d never been overfond of his family anyway. “You can’t take him now,” he repeated.

  “But I must.”

  “Does the Hierophant not look up?” John was flabbergasted. He pointed to the sky. “What traitor’s interrogation could be worth more than discovering what that is? I have removed Tygo for the very immediate reason that he claims to be a visionary who predicted this light. You go straight back and tell your master that I simply refuse. He can come here himself if he disagrees.”

  Despite scrying with his magic bowls and all the evenings spent in rapt meditation, willing his body to open like a night-flower to the celestial plan, despite locating himself at the navel of the world that connected the earth magically to the heavens, despite how endlessly he gave of himself, there had always been something broken about John’s faith. Some enormous failure of will. Something faltering about his belief. He did not know if that was the cause of his failure but he suspected it. How could he release a man who might be the genuine article?

  Juniper’s horse stomped the ground. Tygo looked at him pleadingly. John felt a dizzy alarm, as though the two of them—Tygo and himself—were about to embark on a journey for which they were not prepared. Tygo straightened his coat. They looked up into the vast sky overhead and the diffuse late afternoon sunlight throbbing beneath the gauze of clouds, and yet the comet beyond was brighter yet and more mysterious still, and choked John with a presentiment of danger beyond the physical. He could not explain it.

  Tygo’s face, apart from the star tattoos, was very pale. “I’ll go back with him, if that’s what I have to do.”

  “It’s not your decision.” John closed his eyes and opened them again.

  “It’s not yours, either,” said Juniper.

  Tygo said in a pleading voice, “You don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t,” Juniper shook his head.

  John looked between the two of them, bewildered. “Let’s take my carriage, then,” he said slowly. “I will talk to Marvel myself. My god, this is a gigantic waste of time when we may have precious little—”

  Mizar clicked his tongue. “The outlaws on the plain, sir—”

  He whirled around. “This miscreant got here all right, didn’t he? I assume we will be fine.”

  Tygo laughed unhappily. “You should never assume anything.”

  John was already stalking back to the house to put on decent clothes. “I assume things only when blundering idiots force me to.”

  * * *

  From John’s vantage point in his open cart, in the darkening gray and green afternoon, he observed a crowd of carnival people gathering down by the shoreline. Peeking from between the dunes as the mule-drawn carriage bumped along was an impressive collection of booths and tents. There was a raft of some kind down there, some structure being erected a ways out in the water, past the breaking surf. The people milled about like they were waiting for something.

  The outlaw carnival winked in and out of sight. Still, John could hardly believe his eyes; there were so many people by the shore, more than there were palace guards and infantry at the palace, that was certain. The landscape before their own carriage lay bare, exposed and open all the way to the Cape compound, and he suddenly felt they were very stupid to have set out upon this Uland. The guard riding his horse beside them gave him little comfort. If anything his uniform might attract attention.

  Mizar, unflappable, did not slow or hasten the carriage, but muttered gently from the driver’s bench, “They’re building something down there, aren’t they? If it’s for a good purpose I’ll be most surprised.”

  John’s mouth was dry. His heart lurched but he kept his face expressionless. “Surely the palace guards are watching these outlaws.”

  Beside him in the back seat Tygo was kicking the wooden floorboards rhythmically with his heels. John saw in his face a firm determination to distract himself from their immediate task—it seemed he was tapping out some familiar tune, but John could not place it. The noise set his teeth on edge.

  These ill omens will come to naught, he assured himself, they must, all of them. The comet, the prophetic prisoner, the outlaw carnival. All at once he couldn’t imagine the idea that he and this ignominious man might be the only people in the world who could interpret the meaning of these strange occurrences. It seemed dreadful, and yet this was how the world worked, wasn’t it? The world gave you nothing, until that nothing added up over the years in some obscure way to produce something.

  “Speed up, you fool,” he grumbled to Mizar, just so someone would be talking. “Do you think these criminals would not grab us for a ransom?”

  “I have no idea, sir,” said Mizar, and smiled. His knotty hands flicked the reins, and the two mules drawing the wagon roused themselves minimally, protesting with alternating percussive snorts. “You know,” said John to Tygo after a time. “I confess I thought you were
lying before. About predicting the comet.” He considered. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that you have a very dishonest face.”

  “Others have let me know.”

  “But do tell me truly, do you think we will be snatched from the road, here? Can you predict that?” John laughed uneasily. “Because I have a worry we will.”

  Tygo kept his eyes facing forward. “Prediction doesn’t work like that.”

  “How then does it work? I’m curious.”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I told you, I’m a Surgeon. Ask me to pull out your bowel and have it function in a sack beside you for weeks on end and I can do that, I’d like to do it, it gives me joy to do it. But I don’t know how to predict anything. It just happens. I went to sleep, I had a dream, I woke up in a trance and my shaving mirror showed me the comet. It showed me…” He paused, embarrassed. “Well, the angels showed me…”

  John rolled his eyes.

  Tygo said, “The proof is here before your face. The ladies are bleeding. You’ll see. It will be just like I told you.”

  “You could have magicked those ladies at any point and this ‘prediction’ will be nothing more than a trick you devised to get yourself released. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  Tygo balled his fists and unballed them. “I told you, I don’t believe in your stupid star-magic. I believe in science, sir, and that’s the end of it. No spells, no magic, no bloodletting, no executions, no rocketships. None of that is for me. I don’t think it works. Science is the first and the last, and whatever else there is in the world has got no business influencing anything important, least of all human lives. So call me a liar, by all means. I’m used to it. Or call me a con-man. But never say I’ve done magic. Nothing insults me more. I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the Law and groveling for my head when I’m caught. I’d slit my throat before I did magic, and maybe I will anyway in the end. Just to get away from you people.” He spread his hands to encompass the Cape and all its environs, and he shook his head. “You’re all morons.”

  A door in John’s chest seemed to crack, and a peculiar light came in. He chuckled again. There was a darting quality to this man, a venomous puppy-snap that was appealing for all its sharpness. John supposed the prisoner was very clever indeed and yet disgusted by his own cleverness, an attribute John himself rather enjoyed, since he felt his own nature to be similar. “My friend, it’s your mouth that’s gotten you condemned, not your fool beliefs. But you do at least acknowledge there were once shuttles, correct? For godsakes, we have abundant proof. It’s not as though we’ve based our Laws on nothing. You can see the launch sites yourself, man. We have people who can trace their ancestors to that time.”

  “Thousand-year-old structures you’ve rebuilt to suit your tastes don’t mean a damn thing to me. Your asinine executions and dumping of poisoned blood have destroyed the better part of this land. And this land is vast, Mr. Astronomer. I can’t begin to tell you the damage your priests have done. We’ll all die of Bent Head thanks to them.” The cart trundled over a bump and Tygo slid ungracefully into the side of the carriage, but righted himself and continued with a rueful smile. “It’s a farce played out with an immensity that staggers the mind. If I hadn’t given my life to opposing your idiotic Laws, I would’ve killed myself decades ago.”

  John nodded. “Is it true that you can heal people?”

  Tygo’s smile faltered. “My mother is a famous Walking Doctor. Or was. Maybe she’s dead now. I wouldn’t know.”

  John raised his eyebrows. “She taught you your Surgery?”

  Tygo did not answer for a long time. Outside their carriage, the slender black scrim-lip of the marsh lapped at grass mere feet from the cart path, and the mules’ hooves sucked up the grasses, and further beyond them a bedraggled pine tree stuck above lowland bushes. John peered at Tygo, who blinked slowly and tugged the hair down over his ear-holes. It was a habit, John noticed. “I came here to find my fortune,” Tygo said with a straight face. “I’m a con-man. I thought I already told you.” He grinned finally. “And. My mother hates me. She never taught me anything.”

  John nodded. “I have always enjoyed liars. I’m not sure why.”

  “They’re much more fun.”

  “So you’re not a Surgeon?”

  “I go around as one. It makes good money. Finally they picked me up for it. Now I’m kicking myself, eh?”

  John realized he was spellbound before this man, lost, almost in the way of a child whose father has journeyed to many unimaginable places. “Why do I disbelieve you?”

  Tygo smiled wider. “Maybe you have trouble trusting people.” He looked away. “I just like to travel. That’s all. This was all a big mistake. Now I could lose my head.”

  John discovered that he was smiling too. “Except your prophecy. That is real.”

  “Well. Yes.”

  They rode the rest of the way to the palace in startled silence, the bloat of friendliness suddenly distending the air between them like a rude noise. This strange comfort struck the astronomer as ill-advised, for what good could friendship do him now, when it had never done him any good before? And as he thought this, his eyes were searching the countryside at the same moment, looking for outlaw riders or carnival men or legions of Law breakers. But no one came, and no one followed them.

  CHAPTER 9

  MARVEL AND THE ASTRONOMER

  Following his interview with the Pardoness, Marvel Whiteside Parsons marched to his own chamber at the top of Endeavour Tower, where his window shades remained drawn, even though a wintry dusk was rapidly descending. He must have a moment to think. The cool gloom entered him like a trickle of water down his throat. He breathed a few times.

  As soon as he’d stepped from beneath the shadow of Canaveral Tower, a servant brought him a note bearing the startling news that an outlaw carnival had set up on the plain, just between the palace compound and the shore. King Michael was unconcerned, the note promised. Marvel knew that meant nothing. Michael was always unconcerned—by worldly matters, at any rate. He was the sort of king who would fine the carnival rather than make an example of them for returning to the Cape out of season.

  Marvel, for his part, could not help but suspect their arrival had everything to do with the light in the sky.

  Why else would a carnival come back during the winter season? It was one of the oldest parts of their Law that the land should rest after summer carnivals, so the blood would have time to work its magic in the earth. It had been written by Huldah herself.

  Was Juniper a spy for this outlaw carnival? Had he lied about coming from Kansas? And William Tygo, the earless prisoner from Kansas, why was he really here? No one just came from Kansas to be a Walking Doctor at the Cape. The deathscapes—even with a Walking Doctor’s maps, one wouldn’t risk such a journey without a reason.

  At his desk, an enormous solid wood heirloom from the king’s family, Marvel rifled unread papers absently. There was much to be done. Purpose had been his comfort, always. Even now his instinct was to do something more, to create some motion that would satisfy him.

  But instead he attempted to wait. And think.

  The smart choice would be to leave immediately. It was what he would tell himself to do, if he were his own advisor. There were too many coincidences, too many novel happenings. It must mean something. Leave, he said to himself, just pack your bag and leave now. He’d thought he could use Juniper as a guide in the deathscapes but there was no time now to ascertain the exact nature of his treachery.

  Unless Marvel had him tortured.

  Then, if Juniper truly had come from Kansas, Marvel would bring him along as a guide.

  He sat down. He took a breath.

  But that would be too dangerous. How could he be sure Juniper wouldn’t murder him in the night? Marvel was fifty one, large and healthy, but no one could survive a head bashed to a bloody pulp by a tree limb. Or a throat slitting.

  It was best he go alone. Now.

  But the poison
ous land. He didn’t trust any Walking Doctor’s maps, didn’t trust himself to remember how he had crossed the deathscapes at fourteen—it had been luck, pure and simple, though back then he’d believed it was a divine blessing for killing the Mystagogue. He didn’t trust a carnival man to take him because they often made mistakes in their navigation. Whole carnivals died all the time, it was well known.

  And if Marvel did make it to Kansas, seat of Dread? What then? Where the gruesome cows still lurched on their cloven hooves, eating the dead and the living indiscriminately, where dark monks did dark magic and prayed for the end of the world? Marvel could hardly imagine it.

  Only that morning, he’d assumed he’d soon make the journey alone, but finally doing so was not as easy as planning for it. He had known it would not be, and still he had not imagined he would feel such fear.

  Marvel stared blankly at the desk. It had been Michael’s father Leander’s desk, and many other kings’ before him, and was a thing of great beauty. Marvel had believed for years that he should give it up—he was an ascetic now. It was not his, of course, which lessened his guilt. Hewn from mahogany centuries before, deeply varnished and nearly as wide as it was long, it bore many of his tinctures and oils, and accounts, diagrams for magical rites, Michael’s infernal horoscopes (how the king loved having that silly astronomer, John Sousa, draw up horoscopes for him, a habit Marvel found particularly repellent).

  He picked up a bottle. The liquid could become poison if he wished, with only a few drops from another glass dropper. When, at the tender age of nineteen, he had achieved his first assassination for Leander, he had been very unskilled. He had accidentally killed an entire dinner party, and very nearly also murdered John Sousa, then just a boy. The intended victim had been Sousa’s mother, pregnant by Leander and becoming very shrill about it. John Sousa had hated Marvel ever since, of course. As was his right.