But Marvel pointed at the extra figure in the open carriage, and Michael rounded on him with wide brown eyes. “The outlaw is escaping with them?”
“It would appear that way.”
“But why in heaven’s name are they helping him?” As though the idea of such insubordination exasperated his capacity for understanding.
Marvel walked quickly over the tiled floor, ordering guards in pursuit, but he knew it was too late. He left the room, determined to keep walking until he had walked away from the Cape forever.
This was the moment of his decision, he must seize it.
It was like walking away from a pan of boiling water. Eventually it would dry up, bubble and warp. There would be damage. It would not get better before it got worse. But then, it would be over.
CHAPTER 24
THE LAW OF MERCY
The wives Mr. Capulatio sought were not easy to find in the commotion of the outlaw carnival. John identified at once that it was several different groups, with correspondingly different tents and different booths and different-looking people, milling together now as though assembled for a bazaar or a trading fair. But their faces were odious to behold. Each man, each woman (and there were some women, he was surprised by that—he’d always heard they were not allowed on the carnival circuit) strode about fixed by some purpose of violence, and the wind was drawing up now as the first fires of evening were lit, the torches that lined the long rows and seemed to form the basic organization of the paths. Heads on pikes, everywhere; at every turn John felt he might walk straight into one. He stepped gingerly, his arms held out before him, like he was afraid of walking through a cobweb. How awful that would be, to touch noses with one of those things, his own face pressed up to one of those sunken green snouts.
They had left Mizar with the wagon, in a circle with other wagons. The livery of the Sousa family stood in contrast to the black carnival wagons, painted with skulls and rocketships and other magical things. Mizar looked helpless as he stood there beside it, still in his servant’s jacket. John told him to stay put and stay hidden. You’re an old man now. Do what old men do and take a nap, he’d said, cruelly perhaps. It was difficult for him to ever know how he sounded to Mizar, who only nodded congenially as he always did and at everything, every sight he had ever seen and every command he had ever been given. Then Mizar had crawled up into the wagon and tossed back a swig of water from a canteen hung on his belt. John envied that, the water—Mizar, eternally prepared.
Then John and Tygo were walking with David all over the wretched dirty camp. Past frying whole goats, women in black masks, past buckets and basins and vats of soapy-looking blood. His head swam. John found it was abuzz with motion, small movements and large ones, torch-shadows flickering, men stacking things, men draining things, people pouring from this place to that one in anticipation of some grand signal. Or so it seemed. But how? he’d asked Mr. Capulatio—David—trotting along behind him as they looked for his two wives. He did for an instant wonder if that was a code word—wives. So lost was he here, and Tygo beside him, taking it all in with a face like a docile sheep, but as tense beside John as if he were about to have a tooth extracted. But how? John had asked again. How is it they are so well prepared?
He imagined the scramble inside the palace compound. And he was glad to be out here, though he did wish someone would give him a weapon. A knife. Anything. David had laughed at John’s question. These are carnival men. They’ve been waiting for war since we got here. They barely need to put on their shoes.
Finally they stopped walking, when David was approached by a crone. She was horrifically old, with a hair-form that sagged—perhaps she’d been caught in the rain. She was fat, her face painted as crones often do before executions, with two long ocher smears beneath the eyes and above them. John drew back slightly. The woman whispered to David for a long time, and his expression fell with every passing second, though he was nodding in agreement with whatever unhappy news she bore. Nothing on her face registered emotion. “Ah,” said David. “What I feared.”
“What is it?” asked Tygo. His face was wet with sweat—John had not realized how hot it was in the carnival, with all the fires raging around them. The crone had caught them just as they passed a thicket of Heads on pikes, perhaps fifty of them, propped up almost like a memorial. To what John couldn’t even imagine. The Head closest to him appeared to be a child. But no, he looked closer: it was a man, just shrunken with age and rot, the eyes sewn closed with red string.
David sent the crone away. “She brings me news of my First Wife.” Then he glared. “Appalling news.”
“Well?” said Tygo.
“You’re not my advisor, what does it matter to you?”
“You can’t waste your men on storming the castle. It will do you no good, and it will cost hundreds of lives. Let’s go away, now. Back to Kansas. It’s unsafe here. The lights in the sky—”
“Yes,” said David. “The Return.”
“No,” Tygo hurried. “That word I said, tellochvovin. It means ‘falling death.’”
David vacantly nodded, and John shook his head.
“The lights are meteors! We’ll all die if we stay here,” Tygo shouted.
“The lights are the shuttles.” David glanced toward the grove of Heads on pikes. For a moment he seemed to be considering dashing among them, hiding there perhaps. “I haven’t got time for this. The crone has delivered very disappointing news. Orchid has taken my second wife, my Sigil.” He paused, wrapped his hand around one of the pikes. “This is very worrying to me, actually. She is in my estimation the finest executioner ever to live in this world. She has a way with the blade … O! I see your faces, gentlemen! Damn her injury. It’s not about strength. It is about … well, it is about magic.” He cradled his own head in his hand. “My Orchid, my Prism of Accurate Divination. She was the daughter of our Prophetess Lois, who did bed me as a youth, and who in her great age conceived a child by me! Just like Huldah!” His eyelashes sent lacy shadows over his cheeks in the firelight. “You know, a part of me always believed Huldah’s child was conceived with her own son, Lee.” He laughed, surprised at himself. “I never said that to anyone before. But it’s really the only explanation. O, and Huldah’s age … well, what does ‘old’ really mean? She could have been forty. Or thirty! We will never know her age for sure.” He blinked. “The Prophetess Lois was not really seventy-nine when she died. It was just what we told everyone.”
John eyed Tygo. “What is he talking about?” he whispered.
The streamers on the pikes whipped around in a sudden gust of breeze. Yellows and reds, maroons, illuminated by the fires spluttering. The dark was complete now. It was fully night. Tygo shook his head. “Come with us, David.”
David pulled up one of the pikes, then drove it down again in another place. He seemed not to like this placement either, and repeated the gesture, hissing an incantation beneath his breath, some string of words that John couldn’t catch. Then he spoke louder: “Orchid still believes she is meant to be queen of the Cape.”
“No one is meant to rule here. Damn you, listen to me,” Tygo said. “We should leave. We must.” A plaintive note entered his voice. John had heard it only once before, when Tygo was begging for his life, making his prediction about the ladies’ bleeding.
“We’ll take the Cape. It’s what we came here to do,” David said.
“The Mystagogue needs you alive.”
“I’m a lucky son of a bitch, I was born for this.” He straightened his shoulders. “I won’t die. It’s not possible.”
Tygo opened his mouth again, but suddenly the ground shook with a force that knocked the three of them to their knees. Many of the piked Heads fell over and one landed next to John. He batted it away, even though up close the Head was somewhat less upsetting than he had imagined, just the hardened leather of skin, the smell of sand and sun and a wisp of rot thrown in. No more redolent than a mildewed bedsheet. There were only X’s for eyes to look ba
ck at him. “Are they trying to blow up the wall?” John choked, clamoring to his feet. “It’s ten feet thick, it’s stood for a thousand years.”
David pushed a stack of pikes and Heads off his back. “They will get through.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small thing, a black amber brooch, just a plain piece of polished stone with a pin stuck to the back. It caught the torchlight. John knew these things. They were for executions, though the ones people wore at the Cape were much more finely crafted, often made in the shape of a family’s patron animal. He owned himself one that looked like a guinea hen, passed down from his mother. He’d never worn it.
David pinned it to his shirtfront. “Ah,” he said. “They will be needing me at the front for inspiration.”
He strode away from them then, his hand wandering to his belt in search of a knife. Finding none, he picked one up off the ground, checked it over, wiped the blade between the folds of his shirt, and kept walking.
At once terrified of their surroundings, John and Tygo scurried after him. In this place everything blinked in and out of shadow and every eye seemed alight with madness. David was hard to catch—he so quickly blended into the crowd. A mile away in the distance and to John’s right, he could just see the metallic castle within the compound walls. The high outer wall, encrusted with broken glass, reflected the torches of the approaching carnival men. Shanties and booths and huts and people appeared in increasing numbers, clotting as they went closer to the wall. He passed sheep and goats, spindle-legged and black with curved vicious horns and daemonic eyes and hooves that could kill a man with one kick. Farther down the path they met men on horses, magicians with their girdles of chalky severed heads and intoxicated eyes. Carts with wood for fires, a man with a musket, a barking dog.
The fighting had begun. David was lost in the crowd.
* * *
The battle raged on unchecked around them, people circulating like blood. Standing, falling, crying out at the moment of their own deaths. For the longest time, John just watched, until a huge man came at him with a club studded with spikes. He was confused momentarily, because it was a palace guard and John was obviously himself, a court official, an important courtier. Whyever would this guard run at him, with such a look of bloodlust in his eyes? But that was exactly why: it was a lust, John thought, the idea coming to him wildly as he dodged the blow. Some instinct kicked in, a kind of levity raised him out of his body. He saw himself narrowly avoid the clubbing. He saw himself turn, and take up a pike from a man who had fallen dead beside him. Then, he saw himself thrust it deep between the guard’s shoulders.
The passion ran past the moment of doing it, and after the man had fallen, John stood there, panting. Tygo shrugged a little, as if to say, It was that or die yourself, and then John pulled the pike from the still-breathing man. He did not look back because he did not want to see a thing he could never unsee.
After that, he found himself a part of the battle, not as a believer fighting for the truth, because in the moment of the fight all ideology, old and new, vanished. He fought as a person who wanted simply to keep on being alive.
He received a bash to the head. A slash across the back of his thigh. All that mattered was that he would live. It was within his power to keep himself living. He vacillated between hiding behind wagons and ungracefully striking out when he gathered the courage. Beside him, Tygo kept slashing forward: the momentum of activity was enough. He had learned to fight somewhere—at least much better than John ever had. He watched the other man drop his pike for a knife as the opportunity presented itself, and then the knife for a sword, so John did the same, fumbling with the heavier and heavier weapons. Every so often he caught a glimpse of David far up ahead, smiling as he cut people down. Once he stood tall and met John’s eyes, a head dangling by its hair from his fist. He looked different on this battlefield, and certainly different from how John had imagined a True King might look—and yet, David seemed to have been born for this, exactly.
John stopped to rest. Many hours into the battle, there were fewer people. The outlaws had breached the compound wall. They streamed inside. The fighting continued there. The screams grew farther away. John sat down in a pile of canvas—it had once been a tent. Tygo had gone for water.
Then he saw her through a maze of toppled stones. She wore a plumed helmet now, with the short ends of her hair sticking out. She’d cut her dress off at the knee so she could run. Overhead those two amazing lights shone their alarm down on them all, like an awful being waiting for them to die. Behind them their arcs of light. John felt he was looking into a dream. She did not seem afraid of any living being. Handless, covered in blood. Yes, smiling. Just like David. She was smiling at him now, she saw him. John’s heart leapt into his throat.
A young girl in white stood behind her, her wrists chained together, fastened to a metal collar around her neck.
Orchid nodded to him. She had noticed him walking toward her before he’d noticed her.
When he reached her he could not speak. He’d gone to her like she’d summoned him. She touched his shirt. Behind them something caught fire. A sound like wings beating as it went up in flames. Neither of them looked. The heat coming off it made John’s left side redden. She didn’t seem to notice. “The man who needs proof,” she hissed. “You must have found something undeniable, to have left your friendly palace for this filth pit.”
The girl lurched from behind her, screaming. “Help me! She’s going to kill me!”
“For my bastard of a husband, you came here?” She looked beyond him over the field of dead and dying people. All her features were crowded on her face, the upturned snub of her nose bathed in the light of the fires. “O, but so did I, I suppose. What a fool I’ve been. This will not end well for any of us. I have a feeling.”
“The end,” John gasped at last. “Is coming.”
“O, I know it well.”
“No. The end of the world. Of this world. The Cape.” He felt that he was a carving of a man about to fall from a great height. What would remain when he smashed open? “The lights in the sky. They’re meteors.”
Now she did not speak. Her bandaged stub was dark with watery blood. The girl’s chain was fastened to a thick girdle around Orchid’s stomach.
“She’s going to kill me,” sobbed the young girl. “Please save me.”
“Don’t kill her,” John implored. “Leave. We all must leave.”
“I’m the rightful queen of the Cape. This is my kingdom.”
Then John pulled her close to him, their chests touching. They were each covered in blood and sweat. She let him hold her, even sinking into him. The fire flickered over her helmet. “I cannot kill the stupid girl,” Orchid whispered in his ear. “Wonderblood is over. There is a Law of Mercy now. I cannot … I cannot de-head her as I once would have.”
He did not know what she meant.
She pushed back from him, her face turned up toward him like a heliotrope. “Will you kill her for me?”
The girl met his eyes across the dark. “Her men chained me! She has the key around her neck! Save me!”
“I—I … I can’t execute anyone.”
Orchid pushed him away. “Then what good are you to me?”
“Leave, I said.” He grasped her hand with both of his. “You have to.”
“Not without the sigil. David cannot do a thing without her.”
John looked to the girl, then back to Orchid. “Take her with you, then.”
“No!” the girl screamed again. “Don’t let her take me!”
“Where would I go?” Orchid spat. “Back on the circuit? There are my people. Helping him.” She motioned with her stump toward the fighting, which was now raging inside the compound walls. “All I’ve made of my life is his now.” She pulled on the girl’s chain again, and the girl cried out as her head was jerked down with her arms. “Where is my sword? I cannot even use it, she has cut off my good hand.” There were no tears in the woman’s eyes.
John did not know why he was talking to her, what compulsion drove him, except that now, having been shown the truth, he wanted—needed—to tell someone. “Go to Kansas,” he whispered. “We are. It’s where we should have been this whole time, where the True King will rule. We’ve been wrong this whole time.”
“But the texts—”
“Everyone was wrong.”
“How do you know?”
He gazed at her helplessly. “I just do.”
“David will never leave this place. He has dreamt of the Cape since killing our Prophetess Lois. He was born for this moment.” The woman was backing away from him now. She was singularly the most magnetic person he had ever seen—even handless she throbbed with a power that could not be contained. She pulled off her helmet with her one hand. The feather plume fluttered to the ground, where it soaked through and disappeared in a puddle of mud. The girl sobbed as she was yanked behind Orchid. “You can tell David you killed me,” Orchid sneered. “He’ll probably name a tower after you.”
She walked away, dragging the girl dressed in white. As the women were swallowed up by dark, the girl’s pitiful cries grew quieter, and that most terrible and terminating of words came into John’s mind, over and over and over again. Tellochvovin.
CHAPTER 25
ORCHID’S LOSS
It was not far from the flickering fires and the crash of fighting into a dense dark hell of wilderness, where the dark and the shadows and the smell of winter-wet foliage caused the girl’s panic to rise, even as her eyes struggled to adjust to the deep colors of night. She was cold now, in her thin dress, but she had stopped crying. She could feel the tight trails on her cheeks where the tears had dried.
She followed Orchid through the sticking fronds of low-lying palms. Her feet sucked at the sandy mud. The metal collar around her neck never seemed to warm against her skin. In the distance she could still hear screaming, and every now and then a cheer. She had not noticed the coordinated whoops before—had they been doing that all along? Were the sounds rallying cries from the palace soldiers, or the carnival people? She wondered if Mr. Capulatio was dead.
Wonderblood Page 27