Wonderblood
Page 29
Marvel blinked. “Not here.”
“We’ll have to make a run for it, then,” he replied. “There’s no other way.” He pushed his shoulder against the door. But he stopped and turned, his brow furrowing. His ill-fitting uniform was pasted to his body by sweat on his chest. “I’ll take you back to Kansas. But when we get there, you have to do a certain thing for me.”
“What?”
“Something that requires powerful magic.”
Marvel almost asked, What? again, but a crash echoed from the other side of the tower, and he nodded, wiping nervous sweat from his forehead. “If you get us to Kansas alive, I’ll do anything for you.”
* * *
Then they were in the fray. The clanging pandemonium. They had only to cover a short distance before they could escape through a cart-gate behind Endeavour Tower. Marvel prayed under his breath.
They drew closer, closer, sliding along the compound wall, their feet wet from seawater that had flowed in when the water-gate exploded. Carnival men surrounded the small service gate—they must wait for a distraction. They hid for a long time behind the same cistern that had shielded the outlaw king only hours before. Marvel was astounded at the disarray of the courtyard. How had the outlaws destroyed things so quickly? They had even set up a wooden plank bridge where the water-gate had been and were wheeling in more exploding barrels.
No one noticed Marvel and Juniper.
While they waited for a distraction, Marvel became aware of a wagon, at first far from them, then nearer, until he craned his neck and realized that it too was making for the cart-gate. Barreling over men as it surged forward. He saw one of Alyson’s handmaidens in the front, and his heart sank. Michael and Alyson were surely inside. Marvel watched in slow horror as a carnival man threw a burning stick at the horses. They reared up and the wagon toppled.
Marvel nearly stepped out from behind the cistern. His mouth opened. He took a breath as though he meant to speak, and improbably Juniper heard it, for he turned to Marvel with wide eyes. Marvel opened his bag, fingered one of his vials. It would be easy to throw another potion, to cause a momentary distraction. But then the outlaws would surely come toward them.
There was no stopping what would happen. Whatever would be, would be. And yet Marvel did love them—both. He loved them as he ever had—flawed and lost, his only child and her husband, his friend. A painful spasm overcame him as he thought, In my way I created this. All of it. The thought did not ease his guilt.
He watched the outlaws yank them from the upended wagon, along with their servants. He watched them throw his daughter and Michael to the ground, their faces now in several inches of water. The scene grew harder to see as men crowded around them.
His daughter screamed. There was a scuffle, a wallowing of people, a splashing of bodies atop one another, slipping past one another. Then there was another awful scream, much more terrible than the scream of fright moments before, and Marvel sealed shut his eyes but of course that did nothing—still he heard his daughter screaming. When he opened one eye, he saw one of the outlaws stepping away from her body, her neck half severed by an axe, certainly a death blow. Then another uncontrolled howl, this time Michael, who crouched over her body like a demon and held her to his great wide chest, her head lolling to the side grossly, and Marvel gagged, he couldn’t help himself, her hair down her back wetted on the ends now with her own blood.
Marvel and Juniper were invisible now that the greatest prize had been captured. Juniper dragged him forward, toward the gate. Did he know Alyson was Marvel’s daughter? Marvel felt demented. He ran with Juniper not thirty feet from where Michael was lying in the cold, shallow water, half his body above it and half his body below. He held Alyson still.
Marvel slid with Juniper through the cart-gate, onto the plain, into the night, away from the torchlights and the smoke and the guards in their masks and the carnival men with bloody smeared faces and their piked Heads. Juniper led them through it all as though he had done it a hundred times before. Marvel took one measured breath. It was over. He could have done nothing, in the end—what would his poison have done, besides prolong the inevitable? They would still have been killed. He told himself that. He must believe it.
Juniper walked just in front of him now, his own Head swinging from the canvas sacks on his belt with every step he took. That’s the only one I ever made. He had stolen a torch and lit it once they were far enough into the forest.
Suddenly, watching the guard’s dim form, Marvel felt a cold dread seep into him.
The Head. He had forgotten about that. Only magicians made Heads.
But he followed because he did not know what else to do.
The world beyond was dark, and they had a long way to go.
CHAPTER 27
FORTUNE
The dawn birds cheered when David mounted the giant stage inside the palace compound, crying out their morning songs, though the sun had yet to break the horizon. A song of wild anticipation, the new day, the new day.
John stood below the stage, far enough away to be out of reach of the blood, though he was still soaked head to toe with blood from the battle. His hands as he studied them; the blood had dried in the lines, forming broken trails, like a map someone had drawn and erased. Tygo had had the sense to wash. John looked over at his ear-holes, the wet hair slick on the sides of his head, and then back to the stage.
Michael was dragged up on the shell-shaped stage by two of David’s men. John had never seen him look so confused. David bent and whispered something to him, and Michael seemed to agree, his body arranged tightly now in anticipation of his death. He wore wet and dirty clothes: no time to spare, John thought, when there is a new king to be made.
Michael was so unsteady on his feet that John wondered if he’d somehow gotten hold of one of the Hierophant’s unctions; that would have been a mercy. John did believe he deserved mercy. He moved as if sleepwalking, over to the block, and there placed his head on the smooth blackness. A wide silence opened over the crowd.
David called out, in a startlingly hoarse voice. “I am the True King. I have taken my seat at the most holy place in the world, where man did once take flight and where he did leave the world and enter Heaven. Today we depose a false king, from an unrighteous line of false kings. Today we are set right, cosmically. With this act, we enter an age of mercy. Wonderblood, the rinsing of the world in blood for one Eon, is over.” He paused. “After this, there will be no more beheadings. After this, the world is healed and we await the imminent Return.”
Michael looked up from the block. He had no one to look at. John hoped that he could see him there, watching.
Then he realized Michael would think him a traitor, and felt sad.
“How does it feel to be last?” David asked Michael loudly. “That is a fate any king would wish for. That his death might stay the hand of bloodletting and set free the earth from pain. Rejoice, King Michael.”
Michael whispered, but David called out the words for everyone to hear. “He says: I have been first and I have been last. I have lived the sort of life that any man would want to live.” David clutched his sword approvingly. “Those are good last words. I will give you the easiest death. Mercy,” he said again, this time speaking it over everyone in the crowd. An attendant gave him an ax. He had put down the sword.
John didn’t watch the beheading. He heard the thud of the head as it rolled onto the stage. The crowd yelled. When he looked back, Michael’s body emptied its blood out onto the ground, for some time, gushing and gushing, and David leaned on the ax handle and gazed into the distance.
John turned to Tygo. He had decided he would travel with Tygo to Kansas. They would meet the Mystagogue together. They would tell him what they had seen. “We should go,” he said.
“We have to get David to come back with us.”
“He’s a lunatic. The True King is a lunatic. We must leave him.”
Then he saw David pike Michael’s head. He thought he
would have been sick, but instead he watched it all. The head. The people. The stage. The sky.
* * *
John D. Sousa stood with Mizar and Tygo before his carriage, full again of all the uncertainty that had plagued him for his entire life. He was, after all, descended from a line of Chief Orbital Doctors and Astronomers and courtiers and fools. He had lived his life inside the geometry of his astrological charts. Now he had no guide except Tygo, who was only a man, fickle and lying, and yet John was prepared to follow him onto a dangerous plain where they would surely die.
What if, what if, what if? It occurred to John as he watched Mizar packing the carriage with bundles of food, a few weapons—gifts from the carnival men—that he was finished with horoscopes. But as he checked the wagon over with Tygo and Mizar, he could not help but wish he had some map for what was about to happen. But John knew that believing in Tygo’s vision of the world to come was also him taking ownership of his own. There would be no shuttles. At least not now. The True King would not be returning to Kansas with them.
If only he had a few of his instruments. It would have been nice to bring them along. But going back to Urania would be madness in the commotion, especially driving a cart with a Cape insignia. Outlaws marauded everywhere, looting. His precious instruments had probably already been dismantled for their metal. He sighed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Tygo. He chewed on a piece of tough meat while he strapped down a few pikes. John noticed he avoided the pile of Heads the carnival men had given them, stepping gingerly around them every time he walked past.
“O. My instruments. Nothing.”
“That’s a shame, Lord Astronomer. A real shame. Which brings me to a confession.”
“O?”
“I hadn’t thought we’d be together this long, to be honest. It just … it wasn’t in my mind. I’m sorry.”
John shrugged. “Mine either.”
“So I stole your mirror. The black one.”
“What? My chip of the Sky Mirror? Whatever for?”
Tygo blinked. “So I could have another vision.”
“You said your vision that night was false. You said you made up tellochvovin and the rest of that gibberish.”
“I did. But maybe…” He trailed off. “Maybe we could try again.” He kicked at the dirt, embarrassed.
John was amazed. “I told you, I never saw a damn thing in all my life.” But a smile broke over his face as he clutched the chip of mirror, its surface cracked only a bit. He held it up and dusted it off. “How did you keep it safe during the battle?”
“Luck, I guess.” He rolled his eyes. “Magic.”
John laughed, a gush of relief sweeping him from his toes to the top of his head. At least he had this, a small piece of his collection. “How fortunate for you.” He took a breath as Tygo looked away. “And for me.”
At last, they disembarked, Mizar at the reins. John looked up at the sky he had pondered all his life. He could see the palace and the spires for some time. In the sky, those two arcs bending over the Cape, drawing nearer like fish swimming toward a succulent waterplant, their paths exactly like lines one of his compasses might draw, just like that. Except they had been predicted by no one—not him, and not anyone who had come before him as far as he could tell. They were here of their own accord. Even holy perhaps, even if they were not the Return. The cart turned away then, and they went into the wilderness. Beside him, Tygo sat with his eyes closed. Tygo was the failure, now, returning to the Mystagogue without the True King.
John felt calm. Perhaps all moments of peace were like this: just perilous calms between one catastrophe and the next, for eternity. That these quiet periods could last a hundred years, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand—this seemed less interesting to John than those bookends of calamity. The Disease on one side, and on the other, these two lights, whatever they were.
Moments of unaccountable terror and irrevocable change. That was what changed the ordinary into the Sublime. Was that, John wondered, the only real miracle the world could offer men? A reformation of the ordinary, bent as if by magic, by an infinitely mysterious force, indecipherable as fortune?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julia Whicker received her MFA in 2006 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won both the prestigious Capote Fellowship and the Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She’s had her poetry and essays published in the Iowa Review, Word Riot, and The Millions, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A version of the first chapter of Wonderblood was published in the literary journal Unstuck. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map
Chapter 1. The Uncrusher
Chapter 2. Ears
Chapter 3. The Executionatrix
Chapter 4. The Comet
Chapter 5. The Pardoness
Chapter 6. The Angels
Chapter 7. The Third Queen of Cape Canaveral
Chapter 8. The Rider
Chapter 9. Marvel and the Astronomer
Chapter 10. The Carnival
Chapter 11. Queen Alyson
Chapter 12. The Wedding
Chapter 13. Tellochvovin
Chapter 14. The Unicursal Hexagram
Chapter 15. Friendship
Chapter 16. A Headache
Chapter 17. Huldah
Chapter 18. The Game
Chapter 19. The Thunder, Perfect Mind
Chapter 20. The Watchtower of the Universe
Chapter 21. The Pardon
Chapter 22. Faith
Chapter 23. Escape
Chapter 24. The Law of Mercy
Chapter 25. Orchid’s Loss
Chapter 26. The Breach
Chapter 27. Fortune
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
WONDERBLOOD. Copyright © 2018 by Julia Whicker. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover photographs: woman © David & Mytille/Arcangel; paper © Paul Taylor/Getty Images; texture © iStock.com/DenKuvaiev; stars © iStock/Wnjay Wootthisak
Illustrations by Esbee Bernice
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-06606-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7337-7 (ebook)
eISBN 9781466873377
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First Edition: April 2018