Wonderblood

by Julia Whicker

  Mr. Capulatio seemed confused. His attention had flown with the hand as it sailed across the room. He seemed to want to fetch it, to go comfort it. “What?” he asked in a soft voice. Mr. Capulatio’s eyes went from each of their faces to the next, and finally at last to Tygo’s, to whom he nodded with grim pride. “My name is David. Though how you could know it must be a deep magic indeed. Who are you?”

  “No magic,” whispered Tygo. “I saw it. I heard it.”

  One of Mr. Capulatio’s men had drawn a dagger and John saw it in an instant. He leapt up and back from the table, just as the man with the dagger, the blond stocky one, pulled Mr. Capulatio back and behind him, brandishing the weapon in front. The other three men surrounded him as they began backing from the room. The woman did not move.

  The guards surged forward with pikes pointed viciously, but they’d waited too long. Afterward, John would think often about this mystery—why had they waited? Perhaps they were afraid of the four men conjuring more magical weapons from the folds of their robes. Or perhaps they’d hesitated because of some feral strength in Mr. Capulatio’s voice when he said, simply, “Be still.” For John had become still then too, without realizing it, freezing in place just steps from the table.

  Then Marvel Parsons cast his glass bottle and whatever enigmatic liquid it contained at the group of outlaws, and the bottle shattered and exploded upward some concoction of gases and fumes that began immediately to choke them. They fell to their knees. The cloud enveloped them and John could see nothing of them for long seconds—he only heard their choking and gagging as he backed away into a far corner of the great hall, distancing himself as much as possible from whatever had been inside the bottle. The Hierophant and Michael immediately slipped out through a small service doorway located just behind the great table.

  The cloud spread to the main entrance, where even the two guards posted by the door succumbed to it. John realized Tygo had followed him. He was there too, pressed into the corner, listening to the death of the men inside the miasma.

  There was nothing to do but wait. He looked down at the smaller man, pained. “Do you really speak to angels?”

  “Only that one time. With my shaving mirror.”

  “What about tellochvovin?”

  Tygo had a manner of looking entirely calm, even disinterested, when he said surprising things. “I made that up so you would believe me.”

  John only nodded. O. Of course. “Is this the Return?”

  Tygo raised his eyebrows. “No. But we’ll all die if we stay here. That’s the truth. Those lights are meteors. Bound for the Cape. Nothing here will survive when they hit.”

  “There will not be three more appearing soon, to make five, to carry us heavenward?”

  “No.”

  A muted thud: it was his heart sinking. He hadn’t realized how he had hoped. “O.”

  Almost off-handedly, Tygo said after a time, “That man Mr. Capulatio is the True King, though. We should save him.”

  “What?”

  “I saw it in my vision. He is David. He’s needed in Kansas. That’s where I came from.” Now Tygo was shrugging. “I told you some of the truth.”

  John wrinkled his brow, putting his fingertips to his temples. “Why didn’t you just tell me all of this?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me.” Tygo’s face, unmoving, until his mouth twitched downward into a small smile.

  Then they saw the one-handed woman. She was walking toward them around the cloud, just skirting the edge of it. Completely fearless. Her expression made no sense—she was smiling. “You believe in him,” she said to them.

  But before Tygo could move, the four guards advanced on the thinning cloud and began stabbing the four men, until they were covered in blood and motionless, just piles of bloodstained clothing, limbs splayed this way and that. John hoped they were dead before the blows, but he suspected they were probably not. John’s eyes fell on the pile of men, and he saw—at the same time Tygo saw—that David, Mr. Capulatio, the True King—was nowhere.

  The guards turned their pikes toward the woman, but she raised her arms again, so her sleeves again fell and revealed her stump. “I am helpless,” she said. “Just a mutilated captive!”

  They looked to John. “Don’t just stand there, seize her!” he said, although he did not know why. The woman looked dangerous, but not like she would do them immediate harm.

  One took hold of her. She held John’s eyes with her own horrible ones; they were like holes gored out by an animal. “A long time ago, I had an accident,” she said. “It cost me my ability to bear children. Before my accident, I could see things. Not the future. No one can see the future. But I could see other things. People’s hearts. What drove them. But seeing made me unhappy.” Her cheeks had flushed with the exertion of speaking. “You had a vision,” she said to Tygo. “Of my husband?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There’s a man in Kansas, a kind of high priest. The Mystagogue. I was taken up on charges of Surgery. To work off my debt they made me his servant. That was when I had my vision. He believed me.” Tygo’s face seemed to dissolve and re-form. “The Mystagogue knew my vision to be genuine. So he sent me here. To get David.” He pointed to the dissipating cloud. “To bring him back.”

  “You believe,” she said again, to both of them this time. “Without a text to guide you.”

  In the weird light choked by the fumes of the phlegmatic gases, John wanted to answer yes. But it was not that he believed in that man, her husband. He believed in Tygo. He believed in Tygo’s vision. John pulled at his ill-fitting jeweled collar, finally yanking it off. Without thinking, he dropped it onto the floor.

  Tygo replied, surprise in his voice. “Yes, I guess I do. I didn’t, until I did. And then I had no choice.”

  “What about you?” the woman asked John.

  But Tygo answered for him. “John requires proof.”

  She nodded like the answer satisfied her.

  John muttered, “Shouldn’t you two save your king? He must be unconscious by now, or dead.”

  “What should I do with the woman?” asked the guard.

  “Let her go. What can she do? She’s a cripple.”

  When she was free, the woman remarked, “It is the way of faith that it often feels like despair.”

  * * *

  John and Tygo walked out of the tower and into the courtyard, across a plank bridge that led over the ornamental stream that trickled through the compound. The evening stillness breathtaking. No siege had yet begun. Just a few courtiers strolling the closing market stalls. No murmurs leaking from beyond the walls, none they could hear, anyway. It was unclear, in that moment, what would happen. The strange woman had simply walked away from them.

  They stood in the hushed glare of the sunset—at the very end of the day the sun had broken through again. John watched the sky, feeling the weight of his accumulated failures begin to dissolve. All his life he had suffered to make his work matter, and of course, he had been wrong the entire time. Altogether wrong.

  About all of it.

  But then he thought of the horoscope he’d drawn up a few hours ago, the ascending planet—there was hope there. For his methods. The methods might yet be sound. Perhaps if he directed himself more properly. If he gave up this place, the Cape, its overindulgences. For twenty years he had been laboring under a set of false parameters; his work, yes, all flawed. But perhaps recoverable. It would be difficult, it may take another twenty years. He looked at the stella novae, brighter now in the fading light. Still numbering two. “When is the Return?” he asked no one, but Tygo answered.

  “I don’t know. No one does.”

  John nodded. He motioned to the stella novae. “Tellochvovin. You may have made it up, but it’s true anyway.”

  “There’s not much time,” Tygo said gravely.

  “I see him, I think,” John said, his voice light. “David. Over there. He’s behind that cistern.”<
br />
  “Ah. We should get him, then.”

  John felt calm, even as he stared up into the sky at his own certain death. What was there to do but move forward?

  When Mr. Capulatio saw them, he didn’t run. He coughed, wiped his hands on his pants, and nodded to them both with a restrained elegance. His Adepts, it seemed, had managed to cover him while he ran from the room. John was unamazed. They had seemed wily enough, the group of them. After all, they’d gotten this far. Mr. Capulatio’s slick black hair had fallen from its arrangement. He looked despondent. When greeted with the news that his four henchmen had been brutally struck down, he did curse the Cape and all who dwelled within. As though he had cared for his men in some regard. “What of my wife?”

  “She escaped.”

  He smiled. “Of course she did. She is a miracle.” He then gripped Tygo’s shoulder tightly and thanked him. Tygo said nothing. Very quickly they were able to arrange Tygo’s dress cloak over Mr. Capulatio so that he was mostly hidden.

  So they went out of the compound in broad daylight. They took John’s carriage, Mizar driving them to the outskirts of the outlaw carnival, the village of booths and tents and streamers and Heads. Mr. Capulatio rode the entire way with a look on his face that could have extinguished the sun.

  John watched it all with the bland tolerance of one who trusted. This irony struck him only faintly. It was as though he had been wound up all his life, a toy, an automaton, and at last he was slowing down. His true nature had lain just beneath his anxiety all along. It was quietude. It was acceptance. He sat in the carriage, silent, suddenly grateful for every single thing—even for the years of struggle he had endured. As they entered the outlaw carnival, he looked at the unfamiliar world around him, the colorful tents, the basins of blood. His leg itched. He was, for a moment, happy in spite of all of it.

  “My wives,” Mr. Capulatio was saying. “I must find my wives. Before they find each other.”

  CHAPTER 23

  ESCAPE

  Marvel Whiteside Parsons watched Michael pace and complain that he was not born a monk. This was irritating to Marvel. They had escaped down the service corridor and emerged into another grand empty room where the floor was a magnificent mirrored tile. From here they could hear nothing except their own footsteps as they echoed around the space. No fighting. No ringing of metal. This room, a somewhat smaller banqueting hall, was never used. Or it had not been since Leander was king. Marvel went to one of the tall windows and pulled up the hammered metal shade: the golf course. Peaceful evening light, slanting over the ground like a stencil. A golden dog running across the seventh hole. And a man on the grass now with a rolling blade, cutting it shorter.

  Michael could not be still, his steps ricocheting on the cool floor. He was speaking, but Marvel was hardly paying attention. The most important thing in the world seemed to be these few creatures just outside the window, going about their business, unaware of the encroaching danger. He thought of where his daughter might be at this hour. He didn’t know what she did in the afternoons. Probably she smoked and gossiped with her handmaids. Or she might be walking one of her dogs.

  He knew he would never see her again.

  “The Law does sanction war when heresies are manifested bodily. That is this. Clearly. I never saw such a clear case. There is no question,” Michael was saying. “I remember my Law classes. Somewhat. I’m definitely sure we’re justified to send our soldiers against these madmen.”

  “Of course we are.”

  “Have you really scouted their camp?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And do we have twice as many men?”

  Marvel pulled his gaze from the window. Michael stood in the center of the room, like a motherless fawn in a clearing. “Of course we don’t.”

  “How many do we have?” He was nodding as though he’d known this all along.

  “Many less. Half as many. Don’t think about it. We have the advantage of superior weaponry and, of course, our wall.”

  “Yes,” Michael continued to nod. “The wall. It was magicked recently?”

  “Better. It’s been reinforced many times from the inside. The outer layer of glass is less majestic than it once was. But from the inside…” Marvel tried to smile encouragingly. He was trying to figure out how he could escape, alone. He had to leave now, or he would get caught up in the fighting. “It’s impenetrable.”

  Michael went back to pacing. “What did you think of their nonsense about me not being king?”

  “It’s heresy. You said so yourself.” Marvel turned back, impatient.

  Michael had thrown off his bejeweled robe and stood anxiously in his undershirt and the plain pants he’d kept on beneath the robe. He twisted his bracelet on his arm, up past his wrist, apparently seeing how far he could push it up before it cut off his circulation. “Heresy. Yes. And yet … Sousa’s horoscope.” His voice ran off somewhat dejectedly. “It does make me more uneasy now, after this confrontation. What do you think?”

  “Sousa is an abject failure. All these years he has had one job—one job, Michael—and that was to predict the Return. He’s never done it. Why you put any stock in his astrology is baffling to me and always has been.”

  Michael sputtered a laugh. “It’s only … John’s horoscope did show an ascendant planet—and not my own planet. What am I to make of that? When confronted by this new man who claims to be king?” Then, because he couldn’t restrain himself, “It could be that this other man is the king, Marvel. Anything could be.”

  Marvel Whiteside Parsons knew that Michael was not the True King. Apparently Sousa knew it too. Tygo knew it and even that outlaw Pretender knew it. Marvel felt a sudden anger form a molten ball in his stomach. If only he had left earlier! His dithering, his endless coming and going, such weakness he had shown. Now was the worst time to leave. Michael would be lost without him and yet if Marvel himself wanted to live—if he wanted to spend his last days in Kansas, serving the religion of Huldah, his ancestor—he must go. He shook Michael slightly, only slightly, and looked into his greenish eyes. “John’s horoscope is nothing. You are the king.”

  “But how will I know if I am?”

  Marvel tried not show his frustration but couldn’t help it. “Knowing!” he choked. “How does one know anything? You are, Michael. King. Because you are here, right now, and your people within these walls look to you, and on top of that a large majority of this great land honors your authority. That gives you kingship.” But even as he spoke he could see Michael’s doubt giving way to crisis—and Marvel Whiteside Parsons knew that feeling well: he had left his own kingdom, his own chance to be king, in search of this thing that so moved Michael now. Where was the truth, and how does one find it?

  The Pardoness had said truth finds everyone eventually.

  He peered at Michael. His outburst had been unkind, and yet Michael did not look upset. “I know I am a good king,” Michael muttered. “The True King, what is that? Some sort of Kansas nonsense?”

  “Yes,” said Marvel. “Just something someone made up. It’s meaningless.”

  At the window again, Marvel could not help but watch each oblivious person tottering about their work, going from tower to tower, through the small streets and around corners. Each one following a course he set for himself, as well as one set for him by others. He heard Michael breathing at his back, more calmly now.

  In due time Michael was standing at his side, coherent. Marvel had called for writing implements and they drafted a Summons requiring all men within the compound to present themselves at once for war. Boys, too, older than fourteen, though no one would ask their ages before sending them into battle. Marvel could not quite guess how the battle would unfold, though he was unsurprised to learn from a messenger that Mr. Capulatio had escaped the melee. How remained a mystery. But the guards were certain he was still in the compound. No one had seen him leave. How could he escape, after all? There was no escape.

  Marvel kept his doubts to himse
lf.

  As the Summons was being read from every balcony, in every lane and every path within the compound, Marvel and Michael still stood in the abandoned great room, alone again. It had been very speedy, all of it. The others had come and gone, a parade of guards in masks trotting before them, ready to be ordered here and there. The master of the stables. The master of the canons. There was some talk of preparing oil to disperse through the outlaw camp, which could then be set on fire if it came to that. Michael had thought of that—but he wanted to use it as a last resort. There was a goodness in the man that no amount of pragmatism could put down. Marvel did admire that, in a way; it made things difficult, but he could not deny the grace of it.

  He once again turned his gaze outside, through the window glass, which was very old and had sunk somewhat, pooling at the bottoms of the panes in graduated ripples. His attention was drawn by a general clamor and uproar as word of the Summons spread.

  But Marvel felt compelled to look also because he was looking for something.

  He knew the grounds so well. They had changed little since Leander was king, except for the golf course. A silly notion compelled him to keep looking down again and then he saw, with his own eyes, John Sousa the Chief Orbital Doctor mounting his carriage in the courtyard. Climbing in behind John was Tygo and another figure, this one taller and draped in a ceremonial robe. John’s manservant was already in the front seat of the wagon.

  It was the leader of the outlaws, David. A wire seemed to pull taut within Marvel, a blaze of recognition. Tygo had been sent to find that man; well, he had found him, and now he was rescuing him. Whoever David was, he was wanted badly enough by the Mystagogue that he had sent two men over the deathscapes to fetch him. Marvel did not know if that portended good or evil, but his heart leapt in his chest as he gripped the window ledge.

  Nudging Michael, he motioned to John’s wagon, which was just now pulling around out of sight, toward the door they used for larger cargo. Michael shrugged. “He’s not expected to fight, he’s imperative to the crown.”